POLKINGHORNE, John
The Faith of a
Physicist (Reflections of a bottom-up
thinker: the Gifford lectures for 1993-4)
Princeton University Press, 1994
As the second subtitle indicates the contents
of this book were delivered at the University of Edinburgh as the Gifford
Lectures for the academic year 1993-94. Since these reflections center around
various articles of the Nicene Creed, the author considered it appropriate to
justify his approach as consonant with the terms of Lord Gifford's will which
establish that these lectures are to treat Natural Theology as a strictly
natural science.
The author is an Anglican priest since 1982. He
is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former Cambridge professor of
Mathematical Physics. Currently he is President of Queens' College, Cambridge.
His personal scientific experience is that of a theoretical elementary particle
physicist. He characterizes himself as a bottom-up thinker, which he contrasts
with a top-down thinker. The former take experienced data as the starting point
whereas the latter take evident general principles as their starting point. While
not denying a role to "such ambitious intellectual effort", i.e., the
top-down thinking he considers to be the instinctive approach of many
theologians, he is "wary of it" and wishes to "temper its grand
generality with the questionings that arise from the consideration of particularity"
(pp. 4-5).
The author considers that "the interaction
between science and religious reflection is not limited to those topics (such
as cosmic history) concerning which the two disciplines offer complementary
insights" (p. 1). His own "religious reflections" have more of
the character of an apologetic for Christian faith than as a demonstration,
whether a priori or a posteriors, of the existence of God. "I have
wished to revalue the classical 'proofs' of God's existence as suggestive
insights rather than logically coercive demonstrations" (p. 41). "The
character of natural theology is insightful rather than demonstrative" (p.
46). "My concern is to explore to what extent we can use the search for
motivated understanding, so congenial to the scientific mind, as a route to
being able to make the substance of Christian orthodoxy our own" (p. 1). Thus
his reflections extend not only to topics which would traditionally be
considered capable of demonstration but also to others that would be
traditionally considered as incapable of demonstration. The title of these
lectures seems a very appropriate characterization. They are a personal
profession of faith supported by considerations intended to show that such a
faith is reasonable and consonant with current scientific beliefs.
"The approach followed is the one, natural
to a scientist, of the search for motivated belief, together with the
recognition that the way things actually are often proves contrary to prior
expectation and thus enlarges our intellectual imagination" (p. 2). "The
fundamental question to be asked about any theology statement is, 'What is the
evidence that makes you think this might be true?' Of course, the kind of
evidence considered, and the kind of understanding attained, must be conformed
to the Reality about which one is attempting to speak, but so it is in the
natural sciences also" (pp. 3-4). His stress on evidence as opposed to
mere conceptual analysis is constant, as is his rejection of any narrow
restriction of evidence to that appropriate, for instance, in physics or
chemistry. The full range of human experience must be accepted as evidence. "It
was a brilliant tactic of investigation for Galileo and his successors to
confine themselves to the primary quantitative questions of matter and motion,
but that narrow view would be a poor metaphysical strategy, condemning one to a
narrow reductionist conception of reality. Those discarded secundary qualities
of human perception may in fact prove to be primary clues to the construction
of an ampler view of the way the world is" (p. 9).
"For me, the Nicene Creed is not a demand
for intellectual surrender to a set of nonnegotiable propositions; instead it
represents the summary of insights and experience garnered from the founding
centuries of the Church's history" (p. 6). Thus "the creed is very
sparse in its formulation. It provides a framework for Christian thought. The
way I fill in that outline is influenced, both in style and in content, by my
experiences as a scientist (more particularly, a theoretical elementary
particle physics) and as a twentieth-century Christian believer who has spent
all his life within the contemporary worshipping and confessing community of
faith" (p. 3). Clearly a reader should not expect to find an expression of
Catholic faith in these reflections, and in fact there are a number of
important discrepancies between the author's faith and the Catholic faith.
"Revelation is not the presentation of
unchallengeable dogmas for reception by the unquestioning faithful. Rather, it
is the record of those transparent events or persons in which the divine will
and presence have been most clearly discernible" (pp. 5-6). The author's
style, as exemplified in this statement, is frequently excessively dichotomous.
The second alternative, which he accepts, does not exclude the presentation of
prepositional content conveyed by God through words and events recorded in Holy
Scripture. "Even though such events and persons are unique and
non-repeatable, they must not be excluded on that account. The need to seek God
where he can most clearly be seen has the consequence that the unique is not to
be excluded from our consideration" (p. 5). "Opportunities for
gaining insight are not wilfully to be refused" (p. 6). "What I want
to know is whether the strange and exciting claims of orthodox Christianity are
tenable in a scientific age" (p. 7). "I want to try to show that
although faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable —and what worthwhile
view of reality does not?— yet it is capable of rational motivation" (p.
5).
The author often insists on the need to turn to
experience in order to know how things actually are. "Natural theology
derives from the general exercise of reason and the inspection of the world. It
is part of theology's necessary engagement with the way things actually
are" (p. 3). "Throughout, my aim will be to seek an understanding
based on a careful assessment of phenomena as the guide to reality" (p.
8). The Bible constitutes a datum which must be considered. Yet "for me, the
Bible is neither an inerrant account of prepositional truth nor a compendium of
timeless symbols, but a historically conditioned account of certain significant
encounters and experiences" (p. 8). Here as in other important assertions,
the author formulates a false dichotomy, at least on the face of it, which
could lean toward a "modernist" conception of revelation. This is
symptomatic of his rejection of dogmatic authority of the Pope and of bishops
together with the Pope in Council.
"I present such understandings of the
nature of humanity and of how we may gain knowledge, as result from a critical
encounter with the findings and methods of modern science" (p. 1). "Such
concepts as we may form of the nature of humanity and its relationship to God,
will exercise an influence upon how one approaches and understands the
Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Christ" (p. 3).
We cannot be satisfied with a mere recitation
of fact but must seek an appropriate explanation that accounts for how things
actually are. "Even his" (Newton's) "achievements could amount
to no more than verisimilitude" (p. 7). Yet we cannot be satisfied with
less than verisimilitude either. "Our concern is with the search for
truth" (p. 30). In human matters, where we have to rely on human
experience, "we must maintain a dialogue with the past as a corrective to
the limitations of the present" (p. 8). The insistence on true becoming is
present from the start. "The physical world is a universe endowed with
true becoming" (p. 1). However, this true becoming is not simply opposed
to Parmenidean illusory becoming, but also to any mere cyclical becoming of new
individuals. It entails an evolutionary becoming of new and more highly
organized kinds of individuals. This entails a causal influence which would be
called final causality in classical terminology and cannot be reduced to mere
efficient causality. His insistence on the objective nature of truth goes so
far that while embracing tolerance with respect to persons who hold
non-Christian beliefs, he rejects tolerance of error itself. "In the end,
it is the question of truth that matters, and there is an inevitable
exclusivity about truth" (p. 190).
Concerning human nature
"None of us can do without metaphysics. We
all need to form a world-view going beyond the particularities of our
individual disciplines. Scientists are especially prone to recoil from the
notion of what they fear will prove to be the cloudy claims of such a
generality, and then go on to promote the insights of their own field of study
into a rule for all" (p. 9).
"Ian Barbour has identified three
metaphysical implications of current physics: (1) temporality and historicity
(the physical world is endowed with true becoming); (2) chance and law (the
intertwining of regularity and randomness as the basis of fruitfully evolving
process); (3) wholeness and emergence (increasing complexity of organization
gives rise to wholes which cannot adequately be described in terms of their
parts alone)" (pp. 9-10). "For theology, the critical metaphysical
issues are the nature of humanity and the coherence and plausibility of the
concept of God, issues in whose consideration physics will play only a modest
role" (p. 10).
"It was a brilliant intuition" of
Anaximenes "to surmise that behind the variety of the physical world's
appearance there might be just a limited kind of basic physical stuff" (p.
10).
"The existence of consciousness is a fact
of fundamental significance about the world in which we live" (p. 11). "The
essence of consciousness is awareness rather than mere ratiocination" (p.
11). "In self-consciousness we are getting close to the centre of the
mystery of personhood" (p. I 1). He rejects the notion that man could be
machine or a computer, and in general reductionist science. "It flies in
the face of our direct experience of mind and treats as uninteresting what is
in fact the most significant development of cosmic history: a universe become
aware of itself" (p. 12).
"I take the existence of rationality and
free will to be part of the foundation on which to build a bottom-up
metaphysics. The strategy is to take with equal seriousness all parts of basic
human experience" (p. 13). "I would want to go further, beyond the
recognition of free agency and intellect, to discern a component of human life
which calls for labelling as spiritual. By that I mean simply that there are
aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and
that encourage the expectation of a fulfillment whose ground could only be in
something or someone other than ourselves" (p. 13).
"It is suggested that we are not by nature
self-sufficient beings, but in our heteronomy we need to find the way of being
reunited with the Ground of our being. The fall is not to be understood as a
single disastrous ancestral act from which all our troubles flow. Yet in the
course of human evolution there must have been a period of dawning
consciousness of the self, accompanied by dawning consciousness of God, in
which the former was asserted against the claims of the latter" (p. 15). "It
is even conceivable that this would bring about a genetic bias towards a
certain kind of human nature" (p. 15).
"This character of spiritual openness
possessed by humanity stands in some tension with our understanding that we
have emerged in the course of a history of continuous development linking the
universe today with the expanding and rapidly transmuting fireball consequent
upon the big bang" (p. 16). "Yet one can accept the insights of
natural selection and still feel that one has not heard the full story"
(p. 16). "So much of evolutionary argument seems to be that'it's happened
and so it must have happened this way... (p. 17). Timescale presents a serious
problem which has not been addressed. "There is a direction of increasing
complexity apparent in nature" (p. 17). Yet "neo-Darwinism" does
not enable the prediction of long-term increase in complexity. The development
of the human brain is the most severe problem. "I would want to suggest
that the sensible and hopeful alternative direction" (to natural
selection) " in which to look is to the existence of higher-order
organizing principles, at work in the history of the world" (p. 18).
"Basically there are two alternative
strategies" to account for man. "One treats the mental and the
physical as entirely distinct kinds of reality. This is the approach of
dualism, and its modern patron saint is Rene Descartes" (p. 19). After
mentioning standard objections he says that "these difficulties with
dualism are greatly enhanced by our modern evolutionary understanding of the
origin of humanity from lower forms of animal life" (p. 19). "There
seems to be an implied restraint on the nature of the physical before it can be
a fitting receptacle for the mental, which hints at a connection between the
two, unexplained by dualist theory" (p. 19). He calls the alternative a
"dual-aspect monism. There is only one stuff in the world (not two — the
material and the mental), but it can occur in two contrasting states (material
and mental phases, a physicist would say) which explain our perception of the
difference between mind and matter" (p. 21). "A dual-aspect monism
will be some sort of complementary mind/matter metaphysic (there is only one
stuff, just as there is only one light); and it seems possible, by analogy,
that the clue to its consistency will lie in some radical indefiniteness
present in the structure of the basic stuff" (pp. 24-25). He expects more
help can be obtained from the theory of chaos than from quantum theory, since
the former allows for structured randomness. "The ontological picture
proposed is one of increasing complexity generating increasing openness within
which there is increasing scope for the use of explanatory causative concepts
of a holistic and increasingly mental-looking kind" (p. 26). Read final
causality here. The solution to the mind body problem could well take many
centuries yet. "In the meantime we have a rudimentary picture of a
physical world evolving entities like ourselves whose open flexibility enables
them to participate in an everlasting noetic world of thought ... Out of the
primeval quark soup have emerged saints and mathematicians" (p. 27). The
world has evolved from an initial chaotic "soup" by virtue of
intrinsic principles rather then distinct divine interventions, although the
whole of creation depends in its entirety on God who is the ground of its being
and is provident with respect to it. There is no creation of individual souls
conjoined to matter.
The author certainly rejects a materialistic
reductionist account which would claim that physical and chemical laws
(ultimately physical laws) can account for everything. A fortiori he also
rejects a purely mechanistic explanation of the world. "It was always
foolish to deny our basic experiences of consciousness and free agency on the
grounds that they had no obvious place in a mechanical universe" (p. 27). See
also sections on creation and on eschatological hope.
Concerning faith and knowledge
"Whatever our intellectual discipline may
be, we are heirs to its traditions, and though our generation may transform the
understanding it inherits, it will do so on the basis of correcting the past
rather than denying it" (pp. 30-31). "While the search for truth
requires a critical evaluation of the past (and present), it is not likely to
be assisted by a negative scepticism. The risk of initial commitment to what
appears to be the case is a necessary part of finding out what is actually the
case" (p. 31). "The search for truth is an intellectual adventure
rather than the execution of a programmed procedure" (p. 32). "We
have to believe in order to understand and we have to understand in order to
believe" (p. 32). "How we know is controlled by the nature of the
object and the nature of the object is revealed through our knowledge of
it" (p. 32). "One is only too aware of how inadequate our powers of
rational provision are to anticipate the surprising way the world is" (p.
33).
"God is known because he has chosen to
make himself known, through gracious disclosure. This revelatory action does
not take the form of a mysterious conveyance of incontestable prepositional
knowledge; rather, it is mediated through events and people which have the
character of a particular transparency to the divine presence and to
intimations of a lasting hope" (p. 33).
"I do not pretend that belief in the
resurrection is demonstrable beyond a peradventure, but in chapter 6 I shall
seek to show that it is rationally motivated" (p. 34). "Scientific
facts are not uncontroversial matters, like electronic counter readings or
marks on photographic plates, but they are the interpretations of those raw
registrations, interpretations which are themselves embedded deep in current
theoretical understanding" (p. 34). "The more deeply personal the
encounter with reality, the more profoundly will its significance depend upon
the interpretation attributed to it by its participants" (p. 34).
"The diversity of religious claims can be
seen as a cancelling cacophony. Or it can be seen as the inevitable consequence
of the search for One whose glory must be veiled, whose infinitude can never be
caught in our finite nets, whose light is refracted by the cultural prisms of
humanity" (pp. 34-35). "The matter cannot be settled by a priori
argument" (p. 35). "I am certain, however, that our search for
knowledge of God will have to seek an anchorage in experience: that theology
stands in need of data which in George Tyrrell's words are not tacked down to
the table by religious authority"' (p. 35). "The data for Christian
theology are to be found in scripture and the tradition of the Church
(including, of course, the contribution of our own experience), and in such
general insights about order and purpose that may be brought to light by the
play of reason on the process of the world" (p. 35).
"The distinction between explanation and
understanding is very important for theology. Understanding in science is a deep
experience going beyond mere predictive power or the currently fashionable
notion of algorithmic compressibility" (p. 36). "To understand
something is to feel an intellectual contentment with the picture being
entertained" (p. 36). "The ability of understanding to outrun
explanation ... points to an ability to grasp things in totality, the
occurrence of an insight which is satisfying to the point of being
selfauthenticating, without dependence on detailed analysis" (p. 37). "The
attainment of understanding in this way does not remove the obligation to seek
subsequent explanation, to the degree that it is available, but the insight
brings with it a tacit assurance that such explanation should be there for the
eventual finding" (p. 37). "Theology, of course, faces an additional
problem in that its method is not only elusive but its infinite Subject is also
necessarily beyond the total grasp of finite minds. A consequence is that it is
easier to say negatively what is not the case than to describe positively what
is the case" (p. 39). "The way things are is the only reliable basis
for the way we should respond to them" (p. 41). "Theology shares with
any other metaphysical world-view that generality of account which means that
it is neither impervious to contrary evidence nor immediately falsifiable by
it" (p. 42). "I think science and theology can make common cause in
opposing decline into a merely intellectual utilitarianism and in insisting on
the pursuit of the difficult but essential task of seeking to understand what is"
(p. 50).
Concerning God himself and his unity
"It is part of the classical Christian
tradition ... to lay stress on the simplicity of the divine nature. Naturally
this does not mean a facile rational transparency ... but an unanalysable unity
of being. ... The main import of that proclamation is surely to assert that
there is one prevailing will behind the world's existence and so to free us
from the ambiguity of a dualism of light and darkness. It is not to make a
metaphysical point about the divine nature" (p. 54).
"Theism explains much more than a
reductionist atheism can ever address" (p. 56). "Modern Western
unbelief has something of the air of a cultural aberration in its rejection of
a spiritual dimension to reality" (p. 57).
"It is clear that there must be an eternal
pole to the divine nature. His steadfast love cannot be subject to fluctuation
if he is worthy of being called divine. ... I do not think that God is
necessarily simply eternal, so that he can only relate to time in a holistic
way" (p. 59). "Thus, I am persuaded that in addition to God's eternal
nature we shall have to take seriously that he has a relation to time which
makes him immanent within it, as well as eternally transcendent of it" (p.
61). "The veiled action of God within unpredictable process means that
divine providence cannot be factored out from what is going on, with this set
of events attributable to him and that set to natural causes. There is one web
of occurrence in which all agencies interlace" (p. 69).
"My claim would be that theism has a more
profound and comprehensive understanding to offer than that afforded by
atheism" (p. 70).
Concerning creation
The current scientific account of cosmic
history is briefly described. "There are some speculations (particularly
in the very early cosmology) and some ignorances (particularly in relation to
the origin of life), but there seems to me to be every reason to take seriously
the broad sweep of what we are told. Theological discourse on the doctrine of
creation must be consonant with that account" (p. 73). The general
impression left in the reader is that the evolutionary account of cosmic
history is scientifically certain, though it is subject to some improvement. Theology
in the author's view cannot reject portions of this account as contrary to what
is known through a divine communication of knowledge in Holy Scripture. To my
mind this is a naive credulity in scientific speculation. "Theology is
concerned with ontological origin and not with temporal beginning" (p.
73). Emanationism is rejected. "Christian theology, on the contrary, sees
the world as the consequence of a free act of divine decision and as separate
from deity" (p. 73). "This concept can be held to have played an
important part in the ideological undergirding of modern science, for it
implied both that the world was rational and also that the nature of its
rationality depended on the choice of its Creator, so that one must look to see
what actual form it had taken" (p. 74). "To hold a doctrine of creation
ex nihilo is to hold that all depends, now and always, on the freely
exercised will of God. ... There is no contradiction in holding at the same
time a doctrine of creatio continua, which affirms a continuing creative
interaction of God with the world he holds in being. The two are respectively
the transcendent and the immanent poles of divine creativity" (p. 75). "Belief
in creation ex nihilo will always be a metaphysical belief, rooted in
the theologically perceived necessity that God is the sole ground of all else
that is. Belief in creatio continua can be more directly motivated by
our perception of cosmic process, the evolving complexity of a universe endowed
with anthropic potentiality" (p. 76). "The intrinsic unpredictability
of chaotic systems is to be interpreted as leaving room for the operation of
top-down organizing principles, which complete the description of what happens
by their accounting for the way a system actually negotiates its labyrinthine
envelope of possibility" (p. 77). "These higher-order principles act
in a way corresponding to the input of information rather than energetic
causation" (p. 77).
"God's will is not whimsical. It is
steadfast and he is the very antithesis of any arbitrary magician. Yet he is
also personal and he can be expected to act in particular ways in particular
circumstances" (p. 77). "There may well have been throughout
its" {cosmic history} "unfolding a succession of particular critical
points at which a divine influence was exercised in particular ways" (p.
78). "Another consequence of the picture I am proposing is that God
interacts with the world but is not in total control of all its process"
(p. 81). "This curtailment of divine power is, of course, through
self-limitation on his part and not through any intrinsic resistance in the
creature" (p. 81). "The appearance of self-conscious beings has
profoundly modified the course of evolutionary history, for now there is an
alternative mechanism, of great power and effectiveness, for transmitting
information from one generation to the next, other than by coding in DNA"
(p. 86). The author seems to fully accept a polygenesis of humanity and not to
accept the descending of all human beings from one initial man and one initial
woman. This is even clearer when he presents his understanding of original sin.
"The subtle complexities of ecological
feedback make the predictions of models very uncertain in their relevance,
however confidently they may be proclaimed.... What does seem certain is that
the politically very delicate question of population control is central to the
attainment of a sustainable strategy" (with respect to the environment)
(p. 87).
Concerning Jesus Christ
"There are two extremes to be avoided. One
is to attribute to Jesus such extraordinary powers that he effectively ceases
to be credibly a recognizable human being. The other is so to recoil from this
error that one treats him as if he were an uninteresting mediocrity" (p.
100). The author defends the extraordinary character of Jesus Christ. He will
profess his faith in the sinlessness of Christ, but he seems to take a rather
heterodox view of Christ's consciousness of who he was. "I cannot think
that Jesus saw his future laid out before him in fine detail, for I believe he
lived a truly human life to which precise foreknowledge would be foreign. But
equally I cannot believe that he did not see in general terms that rejection
and execution awaited him in Jerusalem, or that he did not trust that
nevertheless he would be vindicated. To believe less than that is to make him
out to be lacking in insight and faith" (p. 100). "The basis of
Jesus'understanding of his mission lay in his firm confidence in God his
Father, not in a detailed foreknowledge of what would happen" (p. 101).
Concerning the divinity of Christ
"The New Testament writers raise the
question of Jesus' relation to the divine without resolving it" (p. 126). In
the author's view, the realization of the divinity of Christ only comes later. "Why
is Jesus so different? I think the answer must be that God was perceived to be
present in and with him in some unique, unprecedented way. Clearly, the
resurrection was a spur to this judgment, but it was also motivated by the new
life those early believers had found for themselves in Christ" (p. 128). The
author asserts his belief in the full genuine humanity of Jesus Christ and also
his divinity. He rejects docetism and adoptionism. "The Church came to the
conclusion that it had to use both divine and human language about Jesus, and
it had to do so simultaneously, not sequentially as the primitive Christologies
had attempted to do. It was necessary to assert that Christ was true man but
also 'of one Being (homousios) with the Father"' (p. 134). He rejects
Arianism. Even more explicitly he claims that "no account of the
incarnation will fail to emphasize that Jesus makes God known to us in the
plainest possible terms, by living the life of a man, but to rely on the
revelatory character of his life alone is to adopt a gnostic account of our
redemption" (pp. 140-141). He professes his belief in the salvific
sacrifice of Christ. "All the divine that could be shared by humanity is
united with humanity in Christ. He is totus deus (wholly God), but the
earthly Jesus is not totum dei (all of God)" (p. 142). Does he fail
to take the step of uniting the human nature and the divine nature in the unity
of the second divine person, because he finds traditional philosophical and
theological conceptions unacceptable?
Concerning the Holy Spirit and the Church
"The early Church felt that it experienced
divine power present within it with a peculiar intensity and personality. ... It
took several centuries to reach the agreed conclusion that the Holy Spirit is
to be spoken of as a third divine Person, together with the Father and the
Son" (p. 146). The Holy Spirit is a work within the world and within
believers and has inspired scripture. "The Bible is not a kind of divinely
guaranteed textbook in which we can, without any trouble, look up all the
answers. I find the notion of the'classic', rooted in its own age but
possessing through its underlying universality the power to speak across the
centuries to other ages, to be the category which best contains my
understanding of the spiritual power of scripture" (p. 152). "The
Spirit's activity in relation to scripture cannot be confined to the initiating
moments of authorship. He must be conceived as being at work in the Church's
endorsement leading to the formation of the canon, and in the developing
understanding of the sacred writings within the tradition of the Church"
(p. 153). A special role of the Holy Spirit in the magisterium of the Church is
missing.
Concerning eschatological hope
"I have already (chapter 1) explained that
my understanding of our nature is not framed in the dualist terms of an
incarnated soul. The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of
survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual
component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather,
the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the
soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing
pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and
continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily
make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is
dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly
coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its
instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new
environment of his choosing" (p. 163). "An intermediate state between
death and the End could be accommodated, and it would find its natural
expression in terms of those remembered patterns of ourselves held in the mind
of God" (p. 173). For all of the author's insistence on hope in personal
individual resurrection, His conception of man's constitution does not seem to
warrant such a hope. It is hard to see how his explanation allows for genuine
personal identity between the individual in this life and the resurrected
individual. The link he supplies, the remembered pattern in God's mind, hardly
makes the individuals be actually one and the same individual.
"One might say that panentheism is true as
an eschatological fulfillment, not a present reality" (p. 168). This is
the interpretation he gives to the Eastern Christian notion of deification.
Summary remarks
On the positive side the author criticizes a
good many heterodox views expressed by contemporary authors. On the negative
side his own orthodoxy is incomplete, as would in part be expected in a
Christian who does not embrace the fullness of Catholic faith.
He views the understanding of faith by the
Christian community as normative but does not acknowledge any special authority
to the magisterium (it is hard to see, of course, how anyone who does not
accept the fullness of Catholic faith could hold otherwise). Theological
explanation is reformable, like scientific explanation, but it must also
conform to the given, in this case not only the experience of the initial
disciples but also the experience of God's ongoing action through the Holy
Spirit in the Christian community. There does not seem to be room, however, for
dogmatic authority to judge when revised theological explanation does in fact
conform to the given. This is certainly a weakness in his position. Likewise,
there does not seem to be any room for dogmatic authority in determining the
genuine meaning of Holy Scripture. The author rejects many contemporary
heterodox assessments of the New Testament, but seems to leave it to the
private judgment of the individual within the believing and worshipping
community to distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
He attributes a structure to God's nature and
temporality to God and not merely to his effects. His purpose seems legitimate
enough, but his formulation inadequate. If he intends no more than the
distinction between the divine persons within the unity of the divine nature,
all is well. Does he contemplate three agents with a specifically common nature
and complete agreement of will? If that were to be the case, it would not be acceptable.
He does not claim to be more than an amateur theologian. Thus his lack of
clarity might at times be the result of an inadequate conceptual framework. His
formulation of theological explanations does not employ many fundamental
traditional philosophical and theological distinctions, such as substance and
accident, without which, in my opinion, an adequate theological explanation of
"the sacramental real presence of Christ" (p. 159) in the Eucharist
is not possible. It should be noted that on this point, as on others, the
author refers in a very summary fashion to other works in which he develops his
position more explicitly. Without reading those works, only a guess as to his
views would be possible.
There are a good many sound criticisms of reductionist
accounts of the world, and also of the inadequate presentation of scientific
methodology by some philosophers of science.
The lack of a clear essential (or substantial)
ontological unity of the evolved more highly organized individual components of
the world as distinct from aggregation of multiple individuals in an accidental
unit seems to be one source of the deficiency of his proposal. He does not
appear to have first hand knowledge of the theological positions of St. Thomas
Aquinas. His few references to Thomism appear to come from very secondary
sources.
The author's reflections are so broad in scope
that even with the lengthy excerpts and comments in this review, much as been
left without explicit comment.
In summary, there is much that is good in this
book, but there are also significant deficiencies. It would be good reading for
those scientists who think that Christian faith is not compatible with what we
now know to be true.
Because of his criticisms of many heterodox
positions, the book could be useful to persons well founded in Christian
theology, who would not be mislead by the author's theological and creedal
deficiencies.
J.W.A. (1995)
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