John Polkinghorne - Why Science and Religion Think Differently

John, when I speak to physicists or philosophers or theologians about how science and religion relate to each other, everyone always describes how different they are in terms of their areas of approach and their methodologies. You've talked about similarities. Almost nobody else does. What are some of them? I think the main similarity is that both science and religion are seeking truthful understanding and trying to find it through motivated beliefs. In other words, we're looking at some form of evidence to motivate the beliefs. Of course, there are different kinds of beliefs and different kinds of motivations. Science is dealing with the world at an impersonal level, where you can put things to the test, where you can repeat things. That gives science the great secret weapon of experiment. Religion is looking at personal and transpersonal encounter with a reality where every experience is unique and cannot be repeated. Okay, now that defines the differences, but what are the kinds of similarities in what they seek? Well, the similarities are that they have to respond to the way they encounter reality at the level they're looking at it. If science teaches you anything, it teaches you that the world is surprising. I worked in quantum physics. The quantum world is totally different from the everyday. In the quantum world, if you know where something is, you don't know what it's doing. You know what it's doing, you don't know where it is. That's a different sort of world. So therefore, scientists have learned that the question to ask, I think both within science and beyond it, is not what is reasonable, as if we knew beforehand the shape that reason has to have. Nobody would, 1899, because is it reasonable that something could behave somehow like a wave, spread out and sometimes a little particle. But that, of course, is how light does behave. So the natural question for a scientist to ask is not, is it reasonable? But what makes you think that might be the case? In other words, I'm not going to tell you beforehand what an acceptable answer is going to be. If you tell me something surprising, you'll have to produce some motivating evidence to support it. And I'm very happy to approach my religious beliefs in that sort of way, too. Religion believes that Jesus is both divine and human. That's an even more remarkable mixture than the wave and particle. But I think I have reasons for accepting and embracing and indeed committing myself to that belief. Okay. Take that a little bit further in terms of what that should enable us to make progress in both areas, in terms of our way of thinking. Well, I think it enables us to say that, look, we need to be what I like to call bottom-up thinkers. A bottom-up thinker tries to move from interpreted experience to understanding. And that, I think, is a strategy that we can follow in religion, too. So we have to say, what is the experience that motivates religious beliefs? Some of that experience is very general, looking at the order of the world, looking at the fruitfulness of the world, saying is there a divine mind and purpose behind it? Some of it is much more personal. Does God care for individual people in any sort of way? That's the answer that can only be, that can't be answered in general. You have to approach that at a much more personal level of engagement. So science would say, though, indeed there are surprises in science, but then you can put those surprises to the test and get objective proof, demonstrable and repeated, of those surprises. So then it may still seem counterintuitive, but it is repeated so often and that there is universal acceptance. Whereas religion, you can never achieve that. In fact, on a universal basis across culture, you have continuing differences that cannot be resolved. Well, science is lucky in having recourse to experiment, and that does help it to get, very often, intersubjective agreement about things. If you don't believe me, try it for yourself, so to speak. But there's a whole realm of human encounter, not just religious encounter, but encounter at every sort of personal level, where we don't have that power of repetition. Nevertheless, we do have a power to reach understanding and truth which is reasonable to commit ourselves to. Just think about the relationship between persons. Are you really my friend? If I try and set little traps to establish that, I'll destroy the possibility of friendship. It has to be based upon trust. But my belief that you're my friend is not an unmotivated belief. And similarly, take our aesthetic experience. Bach's Mass in B minor, I think, is one of the greatest works of art. I can't prove that, and I can listen to the Mass in B minor several times and persuade you to do so. I can't force you to see it as a great work of art. Nevertheless, if we were to write out everything that I experienced that can't be repeated, as if it was of really no value or interest, it would be an extraordinarily diminished life that we were living in. It would be a sort of lunar landscape. It would have replicating information processing systems in it, but it would have no persons in it. Personal knowledge is inevitably more elusive, but also much more profound and important than repeatable impersonal knowledge. So let's follow the analogy. I love Bach's Mass in B minor, but it's not my favorite piece. Maybe Beethoven's Missa Solemnis or Mahler's Second Symphony. So we have different views on that. But in music, that's quite harmonious. But if you believe that Jesus is God and I believe in the Buddha or some Hindu god, that's not the same thing. That's quite incompatible. I don't think it's quite incompatible. It certainly poses very severe problems. I think one of the biggest challenges to religious belief today is this fact that there are people of very different faith traditions. They're obviously speaking about the same form of human experience, encounter with something you might say the spiritual dimension of reality. But they say such different things about it. Not just about the status of the Buddha or the status of Jesus, but things like what about the human person? The Abrahamic faiths all see the human person as of unique and continuing significance. Our Hindu friends see the person as in some sense recycled, reincarnation. Our Buddhist friends, if I understand them right, see the person as ultimately an illusion of which to seek release. Now those aren't three sets of people saying the same thing in culturally different languages. There are clashes. That's a very serious problem. And I think it's a problem that we are really just beginning to take seriously. People in other faith traditions are no longer strange people in faraway countries. They're living down the street. We can see that their lives have an authenticity. I think one of the great challenges to religious theological thinking, not just in the 21st century, but I think the third millennium, will be to try and understand how the world's faith relations relate to each other. I don't think they're simply in direct confrontation. Equally, they're not all saying the same thing in culturally different languages. It's a very subtle and difficult area to explore and of great importance. John, summing up over your great career in both science and religion, what is your emotional sense? I know we know your intellectual sense, but as you look at science and religion, what insight can you give us from your own personal emotion? Well, I've derived great satisfaction from my life as a scientist. I'm very grateful to have played a small part in a great human endeavour. The centre of my life, however, is my religious belief. That is what I really commit myself to, both in present experience and also in hope for the future. So that's the centre of my commitment. But I fortunately don't believe I have to choose between the two. I believe I can be two-eyed. I can look at the eye of science, look at the eye of religion, and I'll see more with that binocular vision than I will with either eye on its own.