Robert Wright & John Polkinghorne (2003)

Sir John Palkinghorne was a professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University before resigning in 1979 to become an Anglican minister. He served as president of Queen's College at Cambridge until 1996 and in 1997 he was knighted by the Queen. His books include The Quantum World, The Faith of a Physicist, and Belief in God in an Age of Science. I interviewed him at Queen's College. Well, Reverend Palkinghorne, first of all, thanks very much for letting me come here to Queen's College in Cambridge and talk to you. Your background is a little different from most people who are called reverend. For quite some time you were a distinguished scientist. In fact, you were a mathematical physicist here at Cambridge. That's right. And then at some point you decided to get into another line of work. Yes, I mean, I enjoyed being a theoretical physicist very much. I worked in particle physics and I worked in the subject in a very interesting phase during the period that we discovered that matter is made of quarks and gluons. But after doing it for 25 years, I felt I'd done my little bit for physics and I would do something else. And because Christianity has always been central to my own life, I in fact chose to be ordained to become an Anglican priest. Now, one enterprise that you've been involved in is what some people call natural theology. That's right. Which, as I understand it, is an attempt to find in the natural world, not proof of God's existence, but evidence of divinity in some sense, you might say. That's right. Is that right? What are some of the things you've found? Yes. I mean, if God is the creator of the world, one doesn't expect to find the world full of things stamped made by God. But equally, it would be surprising if there weren't certain hints or nudges in that direction. And for me, there are two very important things that suggest there is a divine mind and divine purpose behind the universe. One is the rational beauty and rational transparency of the world. We can understand the world in a very profound way. I mean, obviously, we have to understand things enough to get by in everyday life. We have to be able to figure out you shouldn't walk off the top of a high cliff. But Isaac Newton can figure out the same force that makes the cliff dangerous, also is the one that holds the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun and discover universal gravity and understand the workings of the solar system. And then 200 years later, Einstein generalizes that and produces a theory of the whole vast universe. That's a degree of understanding that is very far beyond anything we need for everyday survival or, indeed, as a sort of spinoff from that. Not only is the universe transparent to us, but it's also rationally beautiful. We've found time and again in fundamental physics that the equations that describe the way the world works are written in terms of what we recognize as beautiful mathematics. There is an aspect of wonder in the organization of the world, which is very striking and very rewarding to the scientists as part of discovery. Now, we can ask the question, is that just our luck or is there a reason for it? And I would say that the universe is rationally transparent and rationally beautiful, in other words, shot through with signs of mind. Because in fact, there is a divine mind, the creator's mind behind the wonderful and beautiful order of the world. Okay, now what about the universe itself? You've written a little about what's called the anthropic principle. Now, is that one of the major, the second thing you're going to... That would be the second hint of God that I would look at. We know, of course, that life here on Earth only appeared when the universe was about 11 billion years old and self-conscious life when it was 15 billion years old. But there's a very real sense in which the universe was pregnant with the possibility of life from the Big Bang onwards. The laws of nature were just exactly finely tuned to allow that to happen. They couldn't happen in just any old world. That's a very striking fact about the world. And again, you can ask the question, is that a happy accident or is it the sign there is some divine purpose behind the very fruitful history of the universe that's turned the ball of energy into the home of saints and mathematicians? What's an example of a physical constant that had to be kind of just right for life to exist? Well, let me give you two examples, both connected with the stars. If you're going to have a life-producing universe, the stars are very, very important. You have to have stars, for example, that are going to burn for a very long time, providing the energy which will fuel the development of life on the planet. Now, we know what makes stars burn that sort of way. It's a very delicate balance between two of the fundamental forces of nature, between electromagnetism and gravity. That's one thing. It's in the nuclear furnaces of the stars, by a very delicately balanced chain of nuclear reactions, which just work, so to speak. The nuclear forces are just right to produce enough carbon, turn some of that into oxygen, but not all of it, and so on and so on. One of the people who unraveled that really fascinating story of how the elements are made was Fred Hoyle here in Cambridge. He's always been rather against religion, but when he saw how delicately balanced it was just to work right, he said the universe was a put-up job. This can't be just an accident, the things that worked out that way, and I don't think it is either. Now one reply you probably heard is that your argument boils down to saying that the universe we live in was conducive to life, and that that is a tautology in the sense that our existence implies a universe conducive to our existence. Yes, of course, obviously if it weren't that way, we wouldn't be here to be astonished and wonder at the fact. On the other hand, the fact that it is so very, very special a universe that works in that way is, I think, significant. A friend of mine who thinks about these things is a philosopher called John Leslie, and he does his philosophy by telling stories. One of his stories is the following. You are about to be executed. You are tied to the stake, and your eyes are bandaged, and the rifles of ten highly trained marksmen are leveled at your chest. The officer gives the order to fire, the shots ring out, and you find you have survived. What do you do? Do you just shrug your shoulders and say, gee, that was a close one, and walk away? Of course, you wouldn't be able to say anything if you hadn't survived, but the fact that you'd survived was so remarkable that it surely calls for an explanation. The fact that the universe is so remarkable that you and I can turn up as its inhabitants, it seems to me, also calls for an explanation. Okay. Being a physicist, you're more familiar with quantum mechanics than I am, certainly. I think so, yes. Many people are. Most of the world's inhabitants actually understand it better than I do. To me, the upshot of it is that the world is much weirder than you might imagine. To hear some people describe it, by some accounts, quantum mechanics implies, for example, that two contradictory statements can in some sense simultaneously be true. First, you could comment on that, but also more generally on the strangeness of the quantum world. The quantum world certainly is very strange. It is counterintuitive. It doesn't correspond to our everyday ideas of how things should behave. One of the examples of that is that there is a different sort of logic that works in the quantum world. The quantum world is not irrational, but it has its own form of rationality. In the everyday world, either something is here or it's there. It's one or the other, and that's all you can say about it. In the quantum world, you can in fact mix together things that you can't mix together in the everyday world. In fact, you can have a mixture—we call it the superposition—of being here and being there. That means that the logic of the quantum world is different because it isn't either here or there. It might be some mixture of the two. Quantum mechanics teaches us certainly that common sense is not the measure of everything, that the world may be stranger either than we think or indeed in some sense than we can think. If that's true about subatomic physics, it might also be true about, say, the spiritual world, our knowledge of God. Maybe there is a special logic for thinking about the divine, just as there is a special logic for thinking about quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics comes up particularly sometimes when philosophers bat it about in connection with the whole question of determinacy, whether the universe really is clock-like and everything from here on out inevitable, or whether there's room for, first of all, human free will. But also, I know you've written about whether there's room for divine action in the physical world. Well, I think there are quite deep and interesting problems about how the world works, about causality. Of course, physics tells us something about that, but it doesn't settle every question. There is a role, in fact, for what people call metaphysics, which is philosophical reflection upon physics in determining that. What we do know for sure is that the world is full of unpredictability, both at the subatomic quantum level and also at the everyday level. That's chaos theory, the butterfly effect, the weather will never be totally predictable in the future. Unpredictability already shows that the world isn't mechanical in the crude sense of being tame, controllable, predictable. As, for example, Newton's successors certainly thought it was. But what we can know, what the philosophers call epistemology, is not quite the same thing as what is actually the case. The question is, what is the connection between the two? What is the case is called ontology, and how do the two connect to each other? That's a decision, it's a metaphysical decision that you have to make and can't be forced upon you. If you're a scientist, you're very much inclined to think that what we know is a reliable guide to what is the case. Otherwise, we wouldn't do science. If we didn't think what we know about the universe didn't tell us what the universe is like, why should we bother? Science is quite hard to do. If you take that point of view, then you will see unpredictabilities as being signs of an openness, that the world does not only not know what's going to happen, but that, in fact, there is an openness about what is going to happen. That doesn't mean it's a lottery, but there is room for other principles to be at work. I think, ultimately, that includes human choice and agency. I think we know—and I know philosophers can contend this—we know that we have the power to decide to raise our arms when we want to do so. If the world is open to us, why should it not be open to God as well? Do we know whether these are true unpredictabilities? Do we know for sure whether the issue is the fundamental unpredictableness of the world or whether it is just a reflection on our own powers of prediction? We know that we are not in a position to gain knowledge of how the world is going to behave. The question then is, is that just that we're ignorant about something, or is it that there is a genuine openness in what's going to happen? The interesting thing is that that is a decision that we can't decide simply on scientific grounds. Take quantum theory. Conventional quantum theory says the world is indeterminate. We don't know when a radioactive nucleus is going to decay. But there is an alternative interpretation of quantum theory, which has exactly the same experimental results. It's due to a very clever chap called David Bohm, but which is totally determinate. The world is running on tram lines, but we don't know enough to see where those tram lines are going. That's a choice we have to make philosophically. I think myself, for reasons I've just said, namely that what we know should be a guide to what the world is like, I take the choice, the realist choice of saying that these unpredictabilities are signs of an openness in the world's present. Okay. One thing in your writing I came across that I hadn't thought about before. Tell me if I've got this wrong. The question, part of quantum physics, I gather, is that when you're measuring these highly microscopic things, there's a certain sense in which they don't really inhabit a state until you measure them. It's the measurement that kind of fixes them in a certain sense in space and time. And as I understood you, you were saying, we still don't know. Okay, it's one thing to say measuring them fixes them, but why does it fix them one place instead of another? That is still not a settled matter? That is a celebrated problem in quantum theory. It's called the measurement problem. We might find the electron here, we might find it there. Why on this occasion do we find it here? Nobody knows how to answer that question, at least not in a way that is acceptable to all the other physicists who worry about these questions. It's very striking. Quantum theory was discovered about 75 years ago. It's been immensely successful in explaining all sorts of phenomena, including many things that just weren't known in the 1920s, but we still don't fully understand it, how to interpret it. That again, I think, is a philosophical decision. It won't be settled by science alone. And is this particular issue in your mind possibly a kind of loophole through which either free will or divine action could enter the picture? Well, I myself think that that's not probably the most interesting way of thinking about those problems, because, after all, subatomic events are very small-scale events, and anything in which we would be aware ourselves would involve literally trillions of atomic events to make it up. I think more interesting are the intrinsic unpredictabilities that we find at the everyday level of our experience. That's chaos theory, of which the weather is the paradigm example. I think that's probably more significant, and I've been one of, actually, a rather small number of people who have argued that chaos theory should be interpreted in this open way, as well as quantum theory. Well, right. In fact, the conventional view, as I think I had heard it, was that the problem when you say a chaotic system is indeterminate, you do just mean that we don't quite know enough. You're not commenting on the fundamental nature of the system itself. In other words, it's just an extremely complex but deterministic system. Well, that's the case if the equations for which you started really are the proper equations. But when the proper equations lead to physical behavior that is contrary to what you would expect them to yield, then either you can say, gee, isn't that amazing? Or you can say, maybe the initial equations are good approximations, but not actually the fundamental equation we should start from. I take that second point of view. That opens up the whole interpretive discussion. So you mean chaos theorists don't quite have the picture yet? The equations they're using are actually not the right ones? Well, we know, of course, they can't completely have the picture, because chaotic systems are very sensitive. They will soon depend upon details so small that quantum effects will be relevant to those details. It's an unsolved problem, and it has very severe technical difficulties connected with it. How to fit chaos theory and quantum theory together? But, of course, obviously, in the end of the day, in some sense that must be possible, because there's just one physical world and one theory presumably that describes that physical world. Natural theology, as we said, is an attempt to find evidence of divinity of some sort. I assume you'd agree that you can only go so far. Yes, you can only go so far in two senses. First of all, I don't think that it's logically coercive. I think there are arguments that say that the rational beauty of the world points to a mind behind it, the fruitfulness of the world points to a purpose behind it. But if you don't see it that way, I can't say to you you're stupid. You just don't see it that way. That's one thing. The second thing is that even if you give me the maximum success of my arguments, it gives me a picture of God, which is a very abstracted picture of God. God is the great mathematician or the cosmic architect or something like that. Now, I'm actually a Christian believer, and so I have a much more, so to speak, detailed and indeed personal, transpersonal picture of God, and that I'll never get out of natural theology. That will have to come from more personal religious experience. And what do you have to say to people who have no particular faith? They may be interested in religious issues, would even like to have faith, would like to believe that there's a God. How far do you feel you can take them on logical grounds? In other words, if you inspected the universe and had no preconceptions about God, you came from no particular faith, so you would necessarily remain at a fairly abstract level in any conclusions about any divinity. How far could you take a person? How would you describe the God that you think would emerge from that extremely kind of detached analysis? Well, I think for that detached analysis, you might reach the point of view that there is a case for believing that there is a divine mind behind the universe, that is to say a mind that is not just produced within the universe, but somehow is the producer of the universe, and there is a divine purpose between the unfolding history of the universe. As I say, that's not a knockdown argument, but it seems to me that there are good grounds for putting that on the agenda, if you like, something to think seriously about. If that's the case, then it seems to me that the inquirer should also be interested in, okay, if there is such a God, does such a God have any interest in you or in me? Or is this just a divine mind behind it all, but we're just beneath the notice of so grand a metaphysical being? If you're going to answer that question, then you're going to have to look at personal encounter or claimed personal encounter with the reality of God. And then I would want to lay out, and in fact in one of my books, which is called The Faith of the Physicist, I've tried to lay out fairly systematically why I adopt Christian belief, to show the motivations for that belief, to show how it arises out of, as I say, experience of the church and the foundational events which are recorded as far as Israel is concerned in the Old Testament, as far as Christianity is concerned in the New Testament. But there were foundational events in your own life as well. I mean, part of your personal history... Of course, yes, yes, of course, that's right. I mean, it's one of the big differences between scientific belief and religious belief. I mean, I believe quite passionately in the existence of quarks and gluons, and that's an intellectual commitment of mine, but it doesn't really affect my life otherwise. But my Christian belief in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has all sorts of implications for my life and arises out of all sorts of experiences. I mean, the experience of being... I mean, I've not had any spectacular religious experiences, but regular worship and prayer and meditative reflection on Scripture is very much a sustaining part of my life. It makes me what I am and gives me what I hope for. And, by the way, have you found, is it my imagination, or is it the case that it's more common for physicists to see in their work evidence of divinity than it is, say, for evolutionary biologists? I think that's right. I think that's right for two reasons. One of which is simply that physics does see, at its level, a universe that is very beautiful in terms of its order and fruitfulness. Now, the biological scene, the ups and downs of evolutionary history, the extinctions, the parasitism, that's a much more messy scene, a more ambiguous scene. And religious believers have to take that ambiguity and that messiness seriously, and to grapple with it, as I think they can. But I can understand why biologists are not carried away with the sort of intellectual beauty that fires up physicists. That's one reason. But there is a second reason, and that is that biology is in a particularly interesting and perhaps a particularly triumphalist phase at the moment. In the last 40 years or so, with the discovery of DNA and the molecular basis of genetics, it really has made a stunning big discovery. It has come of age, in a sense, in the way that physics came of age, with Newton's stunning discovery of universal gravity. Now, Newton himself, of course, was a very religious man, but the generations that followed Newton in the 18th century, particularly the French, who were the most active people, soon became atheistic. They felt, we've explained the solar system, we can explain everything, we don't need God, I have no need of that hypothesis, as Laplacius said to Napoleon. Now, the biologists are in a similar sort of phase at the moment. They've scored a big success, and I think they think, we've explained genes, we can explain everything. I think that's a mistake, just as it was a mistake of the 18th century physicists, and I think the biologists will find that out, but at the moment, they're rather at the crest of a wave. In fact, it's at the Eagle Pub right here in Cambridge, where Francis Crick walked in the day they discovered the structure of DNA and said, we found the secret of life. In a somewhat jocular tone, I assume, but you would suggest that actually they're not quite there yet. There's something deeper. Of course, yes. Obviously, knowledge of our genes and how our genes work is a part of how we work, but it's only a part of how we work. We are more than our genes, and certainly, we are more than genetic survival machines. Now, you've written a little about process theology. First of all, do you have a... which I think is often taken as something that is in some ways more compatible with the modern scientific world than other theologies. First of all, do you have a thumbnail definition of it? Well, process theology is based on the idea that stems from Alfred North Whitehead, the philosophical ideas. Whitehead felt that the thing out of which the world is made is events. He called them actual occasions, and that entities like you or me or like electrons, if you come to that, are strings of events, so to speak. So his fundamental thing is the event, and he believed that each event had a variety of different outcomes, and various things would try and decoy that event in a particular direction, including the lure of God. God played an important role in Whitehead's scheme, but a sort of sidelines role, as a sort of encourager, take from the sidelines, come this way, come this way. But the event itself, in some sense, decided what was going to happen. Well, I have two difficulties about that, one a theological one, and one a scientific philosophical one. The scientific philosophical one is that I don't think that Whitehead's picture of physical process fits very well onto our modern picture of the physical process of the world. Quantum theory does have some discontinuities in it, but it has an enormous amount of continuity. It unfolds through the Schrodinger equation and so on. It doesn't look like a punctuated series of events in the way that Whitehead thought about it. So I think Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit onto the actual physics very well. The other difficulty I have is a theological difficulty, that the God of Whitehead's theology, or process theology, which developed out of it, is a sort of persuader from the margins of what's happening. And I think that the God in whom I believe and put my trust, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead, is not quite so powerless a God as the God of process theology. So, though I owe a debt to process theologians for some ideas, for example, that God interacts with time in a serious way and is not just inhabiting eternity, nevertheless, I'm not a process theologian. When I come to the United States, people often say to me, you're a process theologian, but you don't know it. And I always decline the honor and explain, as I've just explained, why, in fact, I'm not signed up to that program. But I suppose Whitehead might say that too powerful a God is indistinguishable from a completely deterministic world. Yes, absolutely. I think the theology, Christian theology, has to steer a course between two unacceptable extremes about God. One is the cosmic tyrant, and Whitehead very much rebelled against the idea of God as the cosmic tyrant, and rightly so. The God who does everything, pulls every string, the universe is really God's puppet theater. The God of love couldn't be so unrelentingly in control. The God of love has to allow creatures to be themselves, indeed, to make themselves. That's what evolutionary theory means in theological terms. That's one unacceptable extreme. The other extreme is the God who does nothing, the indifferent spectator, the God of deism, who just sets it all spinning away and then stands back and wonders what's going to happen. Somehow or other, we need to find, in a lot of my own writing and the writing of scientists, theologians like me who struggle with how God acts in the world, is to find an acceptable middle course between those two. The God who interacts with the world, but doesn't overrule the world. And there are lots of, of course, problems of balance in getting that right, but I think that's the right place to look. Okay. I found in talking to theologians that their conception of God is sometimes more abstract than I had assumed. I mean, I grew up as, my family was Southern Baptists, so I had a very specific image of a God that was a man with a beard, kind of, and often not in a good mood. Yes, yes. But where do you come out? I mean, when you think of God, how abstract a concept is it to you? Well, of course, it's extremely difficult to think about God. God is an infinite, mysterious being. I certainly want to think of God as, I mean, God isn't an old man in the sky, but it seems to me it is less misleading to speak about God in personal terms than in impersonal or abstract terms. It's better to call God Father than to call God Force. And so I'm looking in the direction of a God who is not only the mind or purpose behind the universe, but a God who is concerned with what happens in the unfolding history of the universe, indeed to the level of being concerned what's happening in our unfolding individual human lives. So I believe in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of course as a Christian, central to Christianity, is the really stunning, mysterious, but I think exciting belief that the God who is so hard to think about, has acted to make God's nature known in the clearest possible terms by living the life and dying the death and triumphing over their death in Jesus Christ. So the Christian believes that God is made known, if you like, in human terms in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So that's the God I believe in. And surely you've heard this kind of objection, but once you start talking about a specifically Christian conception of God, such questions arise as why did God reveal himself to one part of the world in this specific form, and not to another part of the world? Well, I think that if God is going to live a human life, God will do that uniquely. God will not keep on... The Hindu picture of avatars, of people popping up to represent God from time to time in different places and different points of history doesn't seem to me coherent or an attractive idea. So I think if God is going to do it, there is an unavoidable scandal of particularity, as people say. It's got to happen somewhere, sometime. That doesn't mean to say, it seems to me, that God has left the divine nature without witness at other times and in other places. One of the very, very big problems that theology faces in the 21st century, and one that really perplexes me, is how the different world-faith traditions relate to each other. I mean, I'm a Christian, and therefore I believe that God has uniquely acted in Jesus Christ. But I certainly don't think that God has never spoken through the Jews, no Christian could believe that, or indeed through all the great faith traditions. There's a tremendous puzzle. In one sense, the world-faith traditions are all talking about the same type of experience. It's the encounter with the sacred. You can recognize the authenticity of that in people from very different religious traditions. But they do say very different things about it. Not only about God, but also about humanity, the human person. What's the human person? The Abrahamic faith will say of unique individual importance to God. Judaism, Christianity, Islam would all say that in slightly different ways. Our Hindu friends would see the human person as in some sense recycled through reincarnation. Our Buddhist friends, if I understand them correctly, would in some sense see the human self as an illusion from which to escape release. They can't all be right, and there's very big clashes there. And I'm puzzled by that. And I have to say very frequently, unnerved by that. Because though science again started in a particular place and time, really in Western Europe in the 17th century, it has spread throughout the world. But the religious-faith traditions still remain in tension with each other. And I don't know what the answer to that is. But you do think that all the world's great religions are authentic manifestations of divine inspiration in some sense? I think that they all have some contact with the sacred reality of God. And that each of them provides a form of true encounter with the divine through their life. I mean, I do think, as a Christian, I am bound to think that the Christian church represents the clearest and best-focused account of that. But I think we've moved from the point of feeling that we know everything and they know nothing. That was the so-called 19th century view, really. And one of the reasons we've moved from that is that people in other faith traditions now are no longer funny people in faraway countries who believe strange things. They're down the road. And you can see there is an authenticity in their lives. Right. And you would expect to see a certain amount of... Well, of course, there are people trying to synthesize the world's religions and so on. But you would expect to see perhaps some theological accommodation in a sense. I mean, for example, there are a number of Christian theologians now, I gather, who say that actually non-believers don't go to hell. Now, isn't that a kind of accommodation to the existence of people of different faiths in the world? Yes. I think it's also an accommodation to the rather blatant one, to the Christian understanding that God is the God of love. That God should say to some devout and pious Buddhist person who has grown up in Malaysia, let's say, too bad. When that person had perhaps no real chance of hearing about Jesus Christ and so on. I mean, that doesn't seem to me just a theologically credible thing to say about God. So, I think we've actually made some theological progress in that. Yes. So, are you not sympathetic to what's called the perennial philosophy, which, first of all, you can define better than I can, so maybe you should... Well, if the perennial philosophy is understood as a sort of search for what underlies all religious traditions, I'm not very sympathetic to it, because it seems to me that, in fact, it results in such a lowest common denominator account, but it describes spiritual experience and the nature of the sacred and the nature of the divine in terms of the adherence of no world-based tradition would accept as being an adequate account. It's so thinly spread that I don't think it works that way. So, I think there's a deeper problem that can be met by simply going for the lowest common denominator, and I think it's going to take a long time to find that out. And yet, if you believe that all religions are... all the great religions are, in some sense, legitimately inspired by the divine, there must be, at some level of generality or abstraction, some truth there all onto. Yes. Yes, there must be, but I think that you don't find that by simply writing down all the things they believe and crossing out everything that they don't all have in common. When you've done that, you've really got very little left. And part of the reason for that, obviously, is that religion, religious traditions, involve humanly perceived, humanly expressed encounters with God, and they are, therefore, refracted by the local culture. Now, I don't think that differences of culture explain all the differences between the world faith traditions, but I think that they are a significant component in those differences. And that's a problem, too, again, to be sorted out. As I say, I think this discussion has only recently begun. When you think of how difficult the different Christian denominations and traditions have found to sort out how properly they should relate to each other, this world ecumenical problem is going to take, I think, a long time, really, a few centuries. Probably to make real progress with, but the sooner we start, the better. Okay. One of the attempts to reconcile religion with the scientific world view is pantheism, which, as I understand it, is the idea that the universe is God. Yes. Is that a fair… That's right. Which you don't find satisfying. No, I don't. And frankly, I don't even quite understand what the value added… I mean, what's the difference between saying that and just renaming the universe God? I mean, right? But there's another term I think you've used. Panentheism. Yeah. Now, what is panentheism? Well, panentheism is the idea that the universe is, in some sense, part of God, but that God is more than the universe. The trouble with pantheism is that it just ties God too much to the universe. God becomes, if you like, just a symbol for the order of the universe. I think that's how Einstein, for example, thought about God. But we know, for example, scientifically, the universe is going to die itself. I mean, it's going to either collapse or decay for very long periods of time, but in the end it's going to end in futility. If the universe is identified with God or God with the universe, then God perishes with the universe. I think a very important aspect of belief in God is our commitment to hope, to believe that there is indeed a destiny beyond death, that the world makes sense not only now but forever. I think that depends upon a God who is certainly much more than a perishing universe. I don't myself care for pantheism because I think it still makes God too much. It's very important to me that there is a difference between the creator and creation. One of the reasons for that is I suppose the most difficult problem in religious belief is the problem of evil and suffering in the world. The more you identify God with the world, the more intense that problem becomes. I mean, I think that many things happen in the world which are contrary to God's will but which are allowed to happen because the creator is separate from creation and allows creation to be itself and to make itself. I think that God doesn't will the act of a murderer. God doesn't, I think, will the incidence of a cancer but allows those to happen in a creation that is allowed to be itself. The more you make God identical, connected, intimately connected with creation, the more puzzling that becomes and I think that will be the center of my objection to even the panentheistic solution. And speaking of the problem of evil, what is your… what do you have to say beyond what you just said about the problem of evil which is certainly… which science in some ways highlights, at least evolutionary biology suggests that the price for the existence of the human species was lots and lots of suffering and death along the way. That's right and I think that that insight of science is actually quite helpful. I don't suppose for a minute that it removes all the problems but it does help a little bit. You see, we tend to think that if we'd been in charge of creation frankly we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things and we got rid of the disease and the disaster and all the nasty things. The more scientifically we understand the process of the world, the more it seems a sort of packaged deal that things are interlaced in a way that you can't take out the good and throw away the bad. For example, what has made the development of life so fruitful in some ways anyway has been a genetic mutation. I mean, that's driven the development of life. Now, if you're going to have some cells mutating and producing new forms of life, you're inevitably going to have other cells mutating and becoming malignant. So the fact there's cancer in the world is not because the creator is callous or incompetent. It's the necessary cost of a world allowed to make itself to evolve into great fruitfulness. Now, you can argue whether that cost is worth paying and that is a tricky problem but it does at least mean that these problems are not, so to speak, gratuitous. That a creator God who made a bit more effort or cared a bit more about what was going on could easily have eliminated them. That's a mild help. Well, you're saying this trade-off is kind of part of the metaphysical fabric of the universe? Yes. Or the structure of the universe, yes. Well, couldn't you argue that a truly omnipotent God could have redesigned the metaphysical fabric or is God in some sense enmeshed in the fabric? Well, you have to ask what it means for God to be almighty. What it means is that God can do what God wishes to do. But there are many things that God can't do because God would never wish to do them. I mean, the rational God can't decree that two plus two equals five, for example. Now, I think that the God of love is not going to create a universe which is God's puppet theatre. It's therefore going to be a creation which has a certain degree of independence of God, a certain distance from its creator, a certain freedom, if you like, to be itself and to make itself, to explore and to realise its God-given fruitfulness. And I think that science shows us, evolutionary insights show us, that a world that has those sort of properties is going to be a world that also has other properties like malignancy. So God is all-powerful, but only in a way that is consistent with the divine nature. And the key to the divine nature is that the God of love is not the cosmic tyrant, the cosmic puppeteer. One part of Christian belief is the idea that life goes on after death, which in turn entails the notion of a soul, which in some circles of modern science and or philosophy is considered too ethereal or spooky or mystical or something to take seriously. What do you say to that kind of criticism? Well, I think there are serious issues to think about there. I think that a sort of dualist picture of human nature, that we are really a spiritual bit that happens to be housed in the physical husk of our bodies, and that spiritual bit is released at death, and that's the soul, and that's the aspect of us that is truly immortal. I think that's very hard to believe today. The more we understand how our brains and our minds interact with each other, and the more we understand it, for example, our evolutionary history linking us with the animals and with ultimately inanimate matter long ago, the more we seem to be psychosomatic unities, a sort of package deal. That's not a tremendously upsetting thought to theology. It's the predominant picture of human beings that you find in the Old Testament, and also in the New Testament, that we are, in a famous phrase, that we are animated bodies rather than incarnated souls, and that's the view that I would take myself. Then you have to ask the question, okay, what's the soul then? Well, the soul is the real me, and whatever the real me is, it is certainly not simply the matter of my body, simply the atoms that make it up, because they're changing all the time. We have very few atoms in our bodies that were there even two years ago. So what is it that links? I mean, we don't have to talk simply about destiny or beyond death. We have to talk about this life. What is it that links me now, the aging academic, the little boy in the school photograph of 60 years ago? Again, it's not the atom. It's, in some sense, the pattern, the information-bearing pattern, almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern in which that matter is organized. It's not a fixed pattern. It's a dynamical pattern, obviously, as my character develops, as I acquire new memories. But it's, in some sense, the pattern, the information carried by the matter of my body. And that, I think, is what is the soul. And that is a thought that wouldn't have surprised, for example, Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian who, following Aristotle, thought that the soul was the form of the body and the form is exactly the information content. Do we then have a destiny beyond death? Well, I think when we die, our bodies decay. And in that sense, the pattern that they've been carrying is dissolved. But it seems to me a perfectly coherent hope and belief, which I actually have, that God will remember the pattern that he's made, hold it in the divine memory, and will then reconstitute that pattern in an act of resurrection. The Christian hope, I think, properly understood, has never been simply of survival in a sort of spiritual sense. It has been death and resurrection. Death is real, but it's not ultimate, because only God is ultimate. So I believe that the soul is the pattern that's made, that God will remember that pattern and recreate that pattern in God's act of resurrection. So the reconstitution would actually be a physical one then? Yes, not simply, not a resuscitation, not a reassembling in terms of the matter of this body, because if that happens, I'm just made alive again in order to die again, so that I shall be reembodied in the new creation, is how Christian thinking expresses it. I live at the moment in the old creation, God's first creation. I shall be resurrected as the new creation. And Christians believe, of course, that that new creation has begun to grow with the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's the seminal event, the seed event in which the new creation grows. Jesus' risen body was not the same as his dead body. Jesus wasn't made alive again in the sense of reviving a corpse. His body had new properties, he appeared and disappeared and things like that. He was glorified, but it was still his body. It still carried the scars of the passion, and so on. In some sense, there will be both continuity and discontinuity for us. I think that's a coherent hope. It's a coherent hope if you believe that there is a God who is faithful and trustworthy, which I do believe. Well, thank you very much for talking to me. My pleasure. Good.