Science and Religion: Where have we come from and where are we going?

John Polkinghorne

I would like to extend to you all a warm welcome to this Inaugural Meeting of the International Society for Science and Religion. It is a great pleasure to see so many people drawn from so many different parts of the world and coming from such a diverse variety of scientific, cultural and religious backgrounds. It is just such an all-embracing comprehensiveness that we hope will characterise the International Society and which will be a major source of strength in its activities.

Those of us involved in planning this Meeting chose Granada for two important reasons, over and above the undeniable fact that it is a very nice place to visit. One was that Southern Spain is close to the meeting point between two continents, Africa and Europe. Our geographical location, therefore, symbolises the truly world-wide character that we believe will be so important and fruitful an aspect of the Society. The second reason is that, in the later Middle Ages, this region was a place where adherents of three great religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were able to intermingle and to interact with each other. In fact the later Middle Ages generally was in many ways a golden period for interfaith interaction. One has only to recite the names of Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas and Ibn Sina, and to recall all the fascinating threads that interconnect their thinking, to see that this was so. It is sad that this state of affairs did not last, for it was brought to an end by political upheavals and expulsions and then the three Abrahamic faith traditions turned from each other and went their separate ways. The time has come to seek to reverse that process and to do so today in a fully world-wide way. It is our hope that the International Society will play a significant part in encouraging fruitful contacts and exchanges between all the faith traditions, conducted on a truly global scale as the insights of the Eastern religions are drawn in to augment those of the three Abrahamic faiths. Finally by way of introduction, I would like to express the thanks of all of us to the John Templeton Foundation for the generous financial support that they have given to ISSR as it seeks to bring itself into independent existence. This truly international gathering here in Granada would have been quite impossible without this munificent assistance.

These plenary talks are intended to view future prospects for science and religion from a variety of perspectives. It is famously difficult to define both the subjects of our Society's concern, but let me first say something about how I understand the nature of science and the nature of religion. I see science as an activity of great value that has purchased its impressive success by the self-limited character of its ambition. It does not seek to consider all aspects of human encounter with the world, but it restricts itself to the realm of the impersonal, where reality is encountered as an It, an object that can be manipulated and put to the empirical test. Hence the origin of science's great secret weapon, the experimental method. I am a theoretical physicist, but I gladly acknowledge the way in which my subject has developed through the empirically-discerned nudge of nature. In that way we have been led to ideas that would otherwise have been beyond our powers even to imagine - just think of the counterintuitive character of quantum theory. Much has been learnt in this fashion, but we all know that there is another dimension to our encounter with the world, in which we meet reality personally - as a Thou and not as an It -and where true knowledge can be found only through trusting rather than through testing. Religion operates in this latter domain, and in particular in that transpersonal dimension, so differently described in detail by the different faith traditions but also clearly capable of being treated under the common rubric of a meeting with the reality of the Sacred.

The impersonal is the sphere of the repeatable, but the personal is the sphere of the unique. We never hear a piece of music exactly the same way twice, even if we replay the same disc. This unique significance of the unrepeatable is the reason why all the faith traditions have literature that acts normatively as scripture for that tradition, that is to say as the record of those particular fundamental insights and experiences that are the basis of that tradition's understanding of the nature of the Sacred. Recognising the indispensable role of the unique in religion, and of the foundational significance of scripture, also leads us to recognise another contrast between the practice of science and the continuing self-reflection of a religious community upon the character of its tradition.

Science is very much a matter of contemporary understanding. The cumulative character of the insights that it acquires in a well-winnowed field of investigation means that scientists can sit lightly to the discussions of the past. What was of value in those discussions will have been incorporated into the current account, and what did not prove to be of value will have been discarded on the way. What was worthwhile in the past is still accessible to us in the deposit of the present, so one does not need to look back to find it. The learned would describe this as being the synchronic character of scientific understanding. I am just an ordinary physicist, but I know much more about the universe than Isaac Newton ever did, great genius though he was. That is simply because I live three centuries later, and so I am the heir of all the scientific discoveries that were made in those intervening years.

Things are different in religion. It is a diachronic subject, rather than a synchronic one. There is no presumptive superiority of the religious insights of the teachers of today over the insights of the sages of the past. The conversations of religion cannot simply be conducted in the present; they have to range over the centuries. In Christianity, my own faith tradition, the thought of figures such as Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin continues to engage the attention of the theologians of the twenty-first century. Of course, this does not mean that religion is simply in thrall to the past, caught in an antiquarian trap from which it cannot escape. New insights are certainly acquired, not least from interaction with new knowledge such as that which science has to offer.

I might by now have seemed to have indicated such a degree of difference between science and religion that one might wonder why one needed a Society to study their mutual interaction. Therefore, let me emphasise in the strongest possible terms what I see as the fundamental common feature that they share together and which means not only that they can talk to each other, but that they must talk to each other. It is simply this: that science and religion are both concerned with the search for truth. I realise, of course, that there are many today who would deny this claim, both in respect of science and in respect of religion. It is not possible for me in the course of this talk to articulate an adequate reply to postmodern assertions of relativistic despair at our being able to gain any reliable knowledge of reality. Certainly, if such a response is to be made, whatever kind of realism it affirms will have to be qualified by the adjective 'critical'. In science, the intertwining of theory and experiment, interpretation and experience, necessarily introduces a degree of circularity into the argument, but I believe that one can give reasons why this circularity is to be regarded as benign rather than as vicious. I am influenced here by Michael Polanyi, the only twentieth century writer on these topics who was a distinguished scientist before he turned to philosophy. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polanyi tells us that he was writing to explain how he might commit himself to what he believed to be true, though he knew, in principle, that it might turn out to be false. I suppose a religious believer might say much the same, though, of course, realism in connection with religion's account of the veiled nature of the Sacred is a yet more delicate and precarious matter. I believe that all the world faith traditions, in their different ways, point to what in Christian'ty we call apophatic theology, the necessary acknowledgement of the limitation of any finite human mind in its ability to grasp the Infinite, to comprehend fully that ineffable mystery that lies at the heart of ultimate Reality. Yet I do not believe that any tradition finds itself simply driven to silence. There is a role for kataphatic utterance, the affirmation of those parts of truth that have been revealed to us. Subject to these provisos, we should recognise that truth is as important a matter for religion as it is to science. I also believe that both seek to attain their understanding of truth through the pursuit of motivated belief though, as I have already indicated, the character of the motivations that are appropriate will be different in the two cases.

Yet, there are also differences in the scope of the truth-seeking ambition that science and religion respectively aspire to. I have already said that I believe that science's success stems from the limited character of what it tries to achieve. Religion must strive for more. Since it is concerned with the Ground of all reality, it must seek to embrace all aspects of that reality. Religion, therefore, is seeking an overarching and comprehensive view. In that endeavour it must respect and take into account the insights of more specialised and limited enquiries, such as that of science. Here is a reason for the necessity of interaction between science and religion and for the establishment of our Society.

If we are to consider where the dialogue between science and religion is going, we need to be clear in our minds about where it has come from. The second half of the twentieth century saw an increasingly lively conversation between the two. I want to give a brief overview of that interactive relationship, as I see it from my point of view as a Western Christian. There will be others, I hope, who will offer us alternative perspectives. In these matters we certainly need the resource of multi-ocular vision.

Many of those who were engaged in this recent period of interchange between science and religion came from an intellectual background in physical science. Physicists, particularly those who work in the fundamental regimes of the very large and the very small, tend to be deeply impressed by the profound intelligibility and wonderful order of the universe. The world is rationally transparent to our enquiry, and rationally beautiful in its character, to a very remarkable degree. These facts give science both the possibility of its enterprise and the reward that accompanies its labours. Added to this there is the property of the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' (Wigner), that makes that abstract discipline the key with which to unlock the secrets of the physical universe. It is a proven technique of discovery in fundamental physics to seek mathematically beautiful equations in the expectation, fulfilled time and again in our experience, that it is only equations with this character that will prove to have the long-term explanatory fruitfulness that persuades us of their verisimilitudinous nature. This is precisely how Einstein discovered general relativity and how Dirac discovered the relativistic equation of the electron. These properties of the deep intelligibility of the cosmos seem too striking to be treated as just happy accidents, requiring no further explanation. In consequence, many have suggested that they should be regarded as signs of the presence of a Divine Mind behind the order of the world. The claim made for this insight is that it is intellectually satisfying rather than logically coercive in its character. I, for one, certainly see the matter that way, as an illustration of how scientific experience and religious understanding can complement each other, without supposing that they entail each other.

Although, as far as we know, life only appeared in the universe when it was about ten billion years old, and self-conscious life after fourteen billion years, there is a real sense in which the cosmos was pregnant with the possibility of carbon-based life almost from the big bang onwards. I am referring, of course, to the surprising collection of scientific insights into the fruitful particularity of our universe that are collected together under the rubric of the Anthropic Principle. In this company, I do not need to explain the many considerations that indicate to us that this is so, nor to remind you of the many metascientific arguments that have raged about what significance might be attributed to it. It certainly seems to me, at the very least, that the belief that a divine Purpose lies behind the world provides an intellectually satisfying and economic explanation of why the universe has this 'finely tuned' character embedded in its given physical fabric.

Of course, this inbuilt potentiality has been expressed and realised through the shuffling explorations of evolutionary process, both at the cosmic level and at the level of terrestrial biology. Although some biologists have been notably hostile to religion and have asserted that the role of contingency in evolution shows that the world is 'meaningless' in its character, there have also been religiously minded biologists who have counterattacked with an alternative metascientific interpretation. The line they have taken can be traced back to the response to Darwin's ideas expressed by some English clergymen very soon after the publication of the Origin of Species. The key idea is to understand an evolutionary world as a creation allowed by its Creator to make itself. God neither produced a ready-made world nor imposed upon its history an eternally predetermined rigid form. Instead, the process of the universe is that of a continuously unfolding creativity, a kind of improvisation in which creatures participate together with their Creator. Such a world of freely developing fertility is a great good, but it has a necessary cost. The evolution of life has been driven by genetic mutation, but it is inevitable that the same processes that produce changes in germ cells leading to new forms of being will also, in somatic cells, produce changes leading to malignancy. The anguishing fact of the presence of cancer in creation is not due to the Creator's callousness or incompetence, but it is the necessary cost of a creation allowed to make itself. Here, I think, we see something of the potential power of the dialogue between science and religion, as the insight of the former assists the latter with one of its most perplexing problems: the presence of so much suffering in the world.

In my sector of the science and religion community, the topic that absorbed most of our attention in the last decade of the twentieth century was how we might properly think about divine providential action, considered in relation to what science has to say about the reliable process of the universe. It was widely recognised that contemporary science no longer gave a mechanical account of a clockwork world, in which all that happened was tame and predictable. On the contrary, the discoveries of quantum theory and chaos theory had revealed the presence of widespread intrinsic unpredictabilities present in physical process. Of course, questions of predictability are epistemological issues, while questions of causality are ontological issues. There is no logical entailment between epistemology and ontology, and what connection one chooses to make between them is a matter for philosophical argument and metaphysical decision. If you are a realist, as I am, you will suppose that the two are closely aligned, and this can lead to a variety of possible conjectures about the open nature of the causal nexus of the world. It is not my present purpose to summarise that ten-year discussion, which was certainly fruitful, but which did not issue in much in the way of generally agreed conclusion beyond a recognition that physical process is subtle and - so many of us thought - supple in its character. It is attractive to believe that here lies the clue to the way in which we ourselves are able to exercise agency in a top-down manner, as persons executing our intentions. If we play a part in bringing about the future in this holistic fashion, it seems highly reasonable to believe that the Creator does so providentially in some analogous way. What was important about this long discussion, considered from a Christian point of view, was that it drew the science-religion dialogue into closer contact with concerns of central theological significance, a move that I personally very much welcomed. Another development in the Christian camp taking place in the last few years, has carried this process further, for issues of eschatology have come onto the agenda. In terms of its purely 'horizontal' perspective, science prophesies a dismal end for the universe, culminating either in cosmic collapse or in decay. Of course, this predicted futility lies many billions of years in the future, but that surely does not deprive it of significance for theology, since religion, in its comprehensiveness, has to take the longest possible view. In doing so, it also has access to resources unavailable to science, for it can appeal to the 'vertical' perspective of the everlasting faithfulness of the Creator. Here, in my view, is the sole source of hope for redemption from futility. Exploration of these eschatological issues is mainly based upon religious insight, but in assessing the credibility of the concept of a destiny beyond death, either for individuals or for the universe itself, there are some constraints arising from science, not least from its strong suggestion that human beings are to be thought of psychosomatic unities and not as apprentice angels. Once again, I do not want to try to go into any detail, but I simply mention this development as an illustration of the vigour and interest characteristic of the contemporary dialogue taking place between science and religion. I believe that the foundation of our Society is a very timely act.

What then are my hopes for the future of that dialogue and for the role that ISSR may play in its development? I want first to re-emphasise two points I made at the beginning, for they relate to what I believe is truly new and promising about our Society. First, that it should be completely international in its character, going beyond simply regional associations, valuable as the latter undoubtedly have been and will continue to be. We need the richness of cultural variety, and the multiplicity of perspectives, that can only come from a properly global body. Having said that, I am conscious that we are rather far from attaining that goal at the present time. A substantial proportion of our current membership is drawn from Europe and North America. There are important parts of the world that are scarcely represented at all in our present counsels. We have to strive hard to correct this imbalance. I particularly appeal to those members who come from outside the European-North American axis to help us in this task. Without your active assistance, we shall not be able adequately to identify those persons from your part of the world who by their knowledge, experience and willing participation could do so much to foster the aims of the Society and to enrich its work.

What I have said about the need to improve geographical inclusiveness, applies equally to the need to improve religious inclusiveness by achieving a more balanced participation of all the great world faith traditions. The Society must be truly interfaith in its character. At present, there is a preponderance of membership drawn from a broadly Christian background. I must appeal to my brothers and sisters in the other world faiths to help us with the solution of this problem. We cannot improve the situation without the Society being able to avail itself of your knowledge and assistance.

This observation leads me directly to one of the issues that I see as being at the top of the agenda for our work in the years ahead. There is a very significant and perplexing difference between science and religion that I did not refer to in my opening remarks. It lies in the universal character of the one and the largely regional character of the other. Of course, modern science arose in particular historical and geographical contexts, but now scientific insight, and scientific techniques for the pursuit of well-motivated belief, have spread world-wide. Stop people in the street in London or Kyoto, Jerusalem, Delhi or Islamabad, and ask them what matter is made of and - provided you have selected suitably well-informed persons - they will all tell you 'quarks and gluons'. Stop people in the street in those same five cities and ask them a religious question, such as what is the nature of ultimate reality, and the chances are very high that you will receive five very different-seeming answers. I have to say that, as a scientist, I find it worrying, and even to some degree unnerving, that there is this apparently divergent multiplicity of testimony among the world faith traditions. You cannot help wondering at times if the critics might not be right after all, and that religion is really no more than culturally influenced opinion. Since you have already heard me affirm that I believe that religion is as much concerned with truth as science is, you will realise that I do not give in to this temptation to embrace religious relativism, but I am not altogether sure how to deal effectively and scrupulously with these problems.

One of the reasons that these interfaith issues press upon us inescapably today is that, though the traditions remain strongest in, and centred on, their historic heartlands, there is now a substantial religious diaspora from each tradition spread throughout the world. People of other faiths are no longer odd people in faraway countries who hold strange beliefs, but some of them are our neighbours, living down the street. We cannot avoid seeing the integrity of their spiritual lives and it is no longer possible for us to dismiss them with the thought they are totally mistaken and we are totally right.

In a broad sense, all the faith traditions are speaking about the same area of human experience, the spiritual dimension of human life and our encounter with the reality of the Sacred. Yet the traditions seem to say such very different things about the character of this human experience and the way in which it should be understood. I find these cognitive clashes extremely puzzling. Of course there are cultural factors that enter in and refract the different perspectives, but I do not find it possible to attribute all the differences to these effects. The disagreements seem to me to be too great. Is the nature of reality constituted by a clear separation between the Creator and creation, or is it a monistic unity at its deepest level? Is the human person of enduring and unique significance, or recycled through reincarnation, or ultimately an illusion from which to seek release? Is time a linear path to be trodden or a samsaric wheel from which to seek liberation? It does not seem to me to be at all conceivable that all these answers are equally true.

I am sure that I have things of great importance to learn from my brothers and sisters in other faith traditions, but I think that we can only meet with integrity if I hold to my non-negotiable Christian beliefs, just as they hold to the particularities of their own tradition. This makes our encounter painful and difficult, but I do not think it can properly occur on any other basis. The attempt to construct a 'common denominator' religiosity seems to me to result in an account so bland and anaemic that it would be not be recognised as adequate by any adherents of a faith tradition, or thought worthy of being taken seriously by them.

I believe that the ecumenical meeting of the world faith traditions will be of prime importance throughout the whole of the third millennium. It will certainly not be easy, but it must be undertaken. The initial ground on which the traditions first meet must not be too threatening. If the conversation starts with questioning each tradition's central tenets, it seems to me that defences will immediately go up on all sides and that will make the encounter abortive. Yet the meeting must concern issues that are sufficiently serious and important to warrant enduring painful encounter to discuss them. It seems to me that one meeting ground of this kind could be provided by mutual exploration of how the faiths each relate to science and to its understanding of the nature and history of the world in which we live. The project Science and the Spiritual Quest has already made a very important entry into this kind of endeavour and I am glad that a number of us will be staying for the SSQ meeting that follows on after ours. I very much hope that ISSR will also be a powerful contributor in this area. Interfaith encounter is something that is likely to occupy the concern of the Society for many years ahead.

Another central task for ISSR is to keep abreast of important new scientific developments and to assess their significance for religious understanding. We all have a real responsibility here, not least with respect to the members of our own faith communities, where we need to encourage them not to be suspicious or fearful of the discoveries of science, but to welcome them as further contributions in the great human quest for truth.

Among my hopes for scientific developments in the twenty-first century is the expectation that there will be very important new insights stemming from the study of complex systems. Work on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics of dissipative systems, and the studies of the behaviour of computer simulations undertaken by the complexity theorists, have both revealed the existence of astonishing natural powers for the spontaneous generation of large-scale order. At present these matters are at what one might call the natural history stage of the investigation of particular instances. Yet surely there must be a deep general theory that underlies these remarkable behaviours. When that is discovered, as I am sure it will be, I anticipate that a consequence will be that information (meaning by that, something like the specification of complex dynamical pattern) will take its place alongside that of energy as a basic category for thinking about physical process.

The systems whose behav'our scientists are presently able to discuss in some detail, are of trivial complexity when compared to that of the simplest living cell, let alone to that of the human brain. Yet it seems to me that if developments take the course that I expect, at least our imaginations will have been enhanced in a potentially very fruitful direction. I have even been bold enough to suggest, in relation to human psychosomatic unity, that we should think of the soul as being the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern carried by the matter of the body.

Another science from which we may hope for important future discoveries, is neuroscience and I am happy that some of our members are well-qualified to help the rest of us to keep abreast with developments in that discipline. At present, as I understand it, much effort, as one might expect, is concentrated on the detailed level of investigations into such particular matters as the neural pathways by which the brain processes visual information. It will be when the subject attains the ability to reach agreed understanding of how to discuss higher levels of integration, moving in the direction of an overarching account of brain functioning, that we may anticipate important interaction taking place with religious thinking. I know, of course, that work has already been done with that aim in mind, but I think that religion has to be somewhat careful about placing too much reliance of scientific insight until the scientists themselves are able to give a fairly unanimous account of what should be said from their point of view.

Will that kind of agreed understanding ever be possible in relation to consciousness studies? Is this, as some would assert, 'the last frontier' that scientists will soon begin to cross? Or is consciousness so constitutive of what we are as human beings that we shall never be able to step out of ourselves to gain an objective account of its origin and nature? I do not know the answer, and I think the only way to find out is to see how far we can go with the enquiry. It does seem to me, however, that the prospects are very distant. There seems to be a yawning gap between talk of neural networks and synaptic discharges, however valuable and interesting such talk undoubtedly is, and the simplest mental experience of seeing red or feeling hungry, a chasm that at present we have not the slightest idea of how to bridge. In other words I take the problem of qualia very seriously, as I also do the hard problem of awareness, and I am not at all disposed to accept grandiose claims that consciousness is explained (contra Dennett).

Much work lies ahead of the International Society for Science and Religion. We have the opportunity here in Granada not only for intellectual exchange and stimulation, but also for thinking together about the shape of our Society and its future activities. Those of us who were members of the interim committees that set things in motion and that planned this Meeting, are very anxious to hear what you have to say. I thank you all for finding time in your busy schedules to be here and I urge you to help ISSR in every way that you can, both now and in the future that lies ahead for our Society.

Back to Conferences