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Title: Belief in God in an Age of Science by John C. Polkinghorne ISBN: 0-300-08003-4 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An amazing intellectual trip - walking on water.
Comment: In this book Polkinghorne tries to show that theology is a rational discipline. The book is intensely honest and filled with intelligent ideas you enjoy thinking about even if at the end you disagree with. Some of them, such as what the Christian dogma of the Fall of Man means within humanity's evolution, took my breath away. The same goes for his proposal on how actually God acts in the world and scientist's model on how He will act to resurrect all souls on the Second Coming. To see a scientist try to make science compatible with religion not to mention Christian mythology is really amazing.
Since Galileo, the Church has been frantically retreating from its claims about nature and about natural theology. Today theology finds itself in the corner and Polkinghorne builds his last line defense on arguments such as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics, the Anthropic Principle and the physicists' subjective search for beautiful theory. These arguments, even though brilliantly constructed, will not convince anybody who is not convinced already, and are, I think, wrong.
Polkinghorne, being a scientist, is too respectful of science for my taste. I would have enjoyed a more aggressive stand, showing, for example, that human agency, not to mention human consciousness, is difficult to reconcile with the scientific view. Also, he devotes exactly one phrase on the spooky phenomenon of uniform mystical experience that cuts through time and religious denominations. He plays by the rules of science and insists on the losing proposition that theology is rational and therefore should be as convincing and taken as seriously as science. Polkinghorne puts a lot of emphasis on the "unity of knowledge" and tries to unify science and theology and to show that these are aspects of the same search for truth. A better strategy would be to have theology engulf science and explain that science forms only a small (not even a very relevant part) of knowledge. After all, how we should manage our spouse and kids, how to understand pain and failure in life, are matters outside of science and much more relevant to our well-being and to our understanding of the world and its meaning. For literally everybody, this kind of knowledge is more important than scientific knowledge. To a religious person God is everything and knowledge starts with God and passes through layers before reaching at its most basic level knowledge about the physical world.
On the whole, this is a very worthwhile book that is filled with ideas and references to other books. I have not read much on this subject but this book probably shows how far rational theology can go which is not very far - a sobering and important conclusion.
Rating: 3
Summary: Wow.
Comment: Simply put, unless you have a PhD. in Physics and Theology, which John C. Polkinghorne does, don't even try. The book is so dense that it took me several times reading each chapter to pull much out of it (and I still feel like there is more in there I haven't touched.)
On the other hand, if you do have these PhD's or would like some good light (light being emphasized very sarcastically here) reading, this is the book for you. Polkinghorne did not mean to prove God's existence through physics or math, just open the minds of those that might never have thought that it is possible to believe in God in an Age of Science.
Rating: 4
Summary: Dense, yes, but worth the effort!
Comment: This book is dense in ideas. Fr. Polkinghorne does not talk down to you, he expects you to keep up. I must admit, that even with an MSEE, I had to read some passages three or four times before I felt that I had grasped the nuances. However, it is well worth the effort (assuming you have your OED on hand as well as your old physics and philosophy texts!). I would say that fred101 did a better job than any other reviewer to date in summarizing the key elements of this book, but I will attempt to condense it further and make it more readable -- even if it may only be for my own edification!
Fr. Polkinghorne makes clear that he knows that he cannot claim to make a "proof" of God's existence nor can he likewise claim that science (that is to say the human endeavor to "explain" and thereby predict/retrodict commonly observed phenomena -- my apologies to Huston Smith, but there is my attempt) can completely approach an all encompassing explanation of reality. Modern philosophy as well as modern physics itself (through QM's indeterminancy) and the Incompleteness Theorem of Godel have seen to that. Those who seriously study these subjects will appreciate this. What he can say, however, is this, that science has approached a certain practical level of explanation that cannot be ignored any longer by those of more mystic beliefs or philosophies. Likewise, he argues that at least the belief in a God of the new natural philosophy as he outlines here (and in his other books) would be as (if not more) "intellectually satisfying" in placing a context to the cosmos as we understand it currently than a universe born out of nothing! He adds to this that it is to his thinking nothing short of spectacular to heap upon this a belief, as non-intelligent design'ers must, in the coincidences of the apparently narrow path which not only brought us into existence, but which also makes the universe appear to fight our general understandings of entropy (chaos) by "becoming" something more "complex" and even "self aware" (through our minds) rather than just remaining within its equally likely state of the original primordial chaos of the big bang. Perhaps, only David Bohm or Fritjof Capra have offered something plausible here, but they are not in the mainstream of interpretations of QM. Fr. Polkinghorne relies on the former to explain this God's possible method of interaction with our reality through its complex (edge of order and chaos) systems. This could be considered a weak link by many, but there it is. I admit that I am slightly inclined to it myself, as far as it may be taken.
If there are any other weak points to Fr. Polkinghorne's thinking, they would start with the connection he attempts to make between this neo-natural theology and the orthodoxy of Christianity. I honestly didn't understand it. At best I would describe it as a liberal application of "Cartesian Doubt" -- If you don't know/have any better facts, it's best to stick with what's most commonly believed. But by that logic then we should all perhaps be Buddists or Muslims. Anyway, from other reviews, I am apparently not alone. In his defense, he rightly points out that "critical realism" as applied to theological study is a new field and better theological minds than he have only begun to grope its boundaries -- we therefore must be respectfully patient on this perhaps. Equally unfortunate is the fact that he evades (squarely!) facing the question of the rather spectacular notion that such a Creator, as he just envisioned, should bestow any particularly special character to one (incredibly small!) cultural group and to add perhaps more insult to this, only visit them with an incarnation of Himself -- leaving no first-hand written word. For a design as spectacular and intricate as this universe appears to me, on a planet as small as ours, it would seem to be a blundering oversight to miss all the other diverse cultures -- though, to the mind of a chaotician, nothing could be a sweeter picture, perhaps, than one illiterate man, coming from seeming nowheresville, and exhibiting such a major influence upon the world.
In all, this may be one of the most important books you'll ever read, if you understand it! I very highly recommend it.
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Title: Science & Theology: An Introduction by John C. Polkinghorne ISBN: 0800631536 Publisher: Fortress Press Pub. Date: February, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Faith, Science and Understanding by John Polkinghorne, John C. Polkinghorne ISBN: 0300091281 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (Theology and the Sciences) by John C. Polkinghorne ISBN: 0800629701 Publisher: Fortress Press Pub. Date: January, 1996 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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Title: When Science Meets Religion : Enemies, Strangers, or Partners? by Ian G. Barbour ISBN: 006060381X Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 16 May, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Quarks, Chaos & Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion by John C. Polkinghorne ISBN: 0824515218 Publisher: Crossroad/Herder & Herder Pub. Date: September, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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