Religion: All about Trafficin Truth
By Uwe Siemon-Netto,UPI Religion Correspondent
GURAT, France, (UPI) -- Sometimes one stumblesacross a booklet that has more to say than a 1,000-page tome.
John R. Polkinghorne's little volume, "Trafficin Truth: Exchanges between Science and Theology," (FortressPress, 54 pages, $6) comes under this rubric. It is so thin andat the same time so elegantly written you can devour it on a relativelyshort flight.
Polkinghorne's topic is very hot. More thanever before since the Enlightenment are scholars of the two disciplinesventuring across the borders of their respective realms.
Nobody is more qualified to discuss thisthan Polkinghorne, the first president of the newly formed InternationalSociety for Science and Religion, and this year's Templeton laureate.
He is an Anglican priest and a former professorof mathematics and physics, and he is the past president of oneof the world's most prestigious academic institutions -- Queen'sCollege, Cambridge, England.
In his booklet, Polkinghorne concludes,"In their efforts to understand the nature of humanity, scienceand theology should stand alongside each other and encourage thegreatest possible degree of exchange across the common border."
He makes it clear that "religious believersmay not be a majority among professional scientists, but we arecertainly pretty numerous."
Polkinghorne uses a lovely image to underscorethe need for science and religion to complement each other:
"We should not condemn ourselves tothinking that we have said all we can say about music when sciencehas enabled us to note that it is vibrations in the air.
"We need to recognize also music'smysterious power to use a pattern of sound in time to speak toour hearts of an everlasting beauty.
"That acknowledgement may well pointus in the direction of the Eternal, whose joy in creation is,I believe, the ground of our creaturely aesthetic experience."
Polkinghorne makes this point while discussingthe old distinctions between the questions scientists and theologiansask. The scientist wants to know: How? The theologian, on theother hand, is interested in the Why?
In the conflict between science's sourceof information -- research -- and theology's source of insight,which is "the record of God's revelatory acts," misunderstandingsby both sides of their very sources act as a kind of a joker.
Take the Genesis narrative in Scripture.To Polkinghorne and much of academic theology, it is not a "divinelydictated scientific textbook," as some Christians contend-- to the detriment of their faith's credibility.
Instead, it is "a profound assertionof the theological truth that everything exists only because ofthe will of God ('And God said, let it be...')," Polkinghornewrites.
Thus according to this British priest andmathematician, the real task of the currently blossoming dialoguebetween science and faith is this:
"Science cannot tell theology how toanswer theological questions, and theology cannot tell sciencehow to answer scientific questions, but the two sets of answerswill have to fit in with each other if they are really describingthe one world of God's creation."
As one example, Polkinghorne discusses evolution'sevident interaction between chance and necessity. "Chanceis the source of novelty," he explains, "but the offeringsof chance are then sifted and preserved in a lawfully regularenvironment.
"Evolving fruitfulness seems to requirea compromise between reliability and change. Too reliable a worldwould be so rigid that nothing really new ever took place; toochangeable a world would be in such a state of flux that nothingwould persist in it."
While some scientists have seized on therole of chance in their rejection of the theological claim ofpurpose, the theologian may ask what "chance" actuallymeans and conclude that it does not signify empty randomness buthistorical particularity.
Polkinghorne reminds his readers that whenDarwin published "The Origin of Species" in 1859, sometheologians of his time welcomed his insights. Writes Polkinghorne,"One of these was Charles Kingsley, who coined a phrase thatperfectly expresses the right theological way to think about Evolution.
"The Creator, Kingsley said, couldno doubt have brought into being a world ready-made, but insteadGod has done something cleverer than that in making a creationthat could 'make itself.'"
Where physics, Polkinghorne's particularfield, is concerned, he asks the powerful question: "Whyis the universe so intelligible and rationally beautiful?"He concludes:
"Theology can provide and intellectuallysatisfying and coherent response. Science is possible, and mathematicsso remarkably effective because the world is a creation and weare creatures made in the image of the Creator.
"Fundamental physics reveals a universeshot through with signs of mind, and it is an attractive understandingthat it is indeed the Mind of God that lies behind that wonderfulcosmic order."