Part 1： Is Anyone There？. Professor John Polkinghorne. 2002

This is the 25th year in the series of the Geneva Lecture Series, and we're extremely proud to be able to bring an outstanding slate of lecturers and presenters this anniversary year. The series is as much the brainchild of Reverend Jason Chen as anyone on the lecture committee. He certainly started, initiated the series, has seen it through its 25 years. And speaking to that, I hope that Jason is at a point where he might be able to give attention to a representative from the Association of Campus Ministers, Father John Steckler, who would like to say a few words, perhaps at this point, if our guest will permit us. Thank you very much. Jason, if you'd come forth, we, from the Association of Campus Ministers, would love to recognize your 25 years as leadership of the Geneva Lecture Series. So please come forth, Jason. Let's give Jason an applause for his many years. Thanks. In those 25 years, I believe I've made about half of these great presentations, and I appreciate Jason's great leadership in this. We wish, as the Association of Campus Ministers, as which Jason is a member, to show our appreciation and celebrate with him these 25 great years of leadership. So we have here a certificate we wish to present him from the Association, from all the members. It reads, the Association of Campus Ministers honors the many years of faithful leadership and ministry of Jason Chen, and for his many outstanding contributions to the academic and spiritual life of the University of Iowa community, given with grateful appreciation on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Geneva Lecture Series, March 2002. Congratulations, Jason. Thank you. I'm surprised, and I'm humbled. And thank you so very much, and thank you for being here, too. And thank you, Sir John, for being here. Thank you, John. Thank you, Jason. Certainly, to Jason's and the committee's great credit, there has been an expansion of interest in these symposia, which seek to link the life of the mind with the spiritual side of students, faculty, and the Iowa City community. To this end, this lecture is co-sponsored by the University of Iowa Student Government, the Department of Physics, the School of Religion, and the Program in Literature, Science, and the Arts. And we, on behalf of all of them, welcome you here this evening, particularly guests who have traveled from other universities to be with us this evening. Turning now to Dr. Polkinghorne, I think those of you who attended the afternoon session realized the breadth of his learning and the depth of his spiritual commitment. He wears many titles, all of them nobly, among them the title Sir, as a Knight Commander of the British Empire. He is a member of the Royal Society, and I believe the only ordained clergy member currently as a member of the society. And I think this speaks to the perspective that he brings from his broad training in physics, particularly in elementary particle physics, where he enjoyed a very fruitful career before undertaking studies toward ordination to become an Anglican priest. He served in parish assignments for a number of years, and then was called back to his alma mater, Cambridge, to be president of Queen's College and to assume a number of very important responsibilities, both within Cambridge University and within the policy determination bodies of the government of the United Kingdom. And of particular interest are those concerning the use of human stem cells in research, which has attracted a great deal of attention, as well as controversy, on this campus in recent weeks. At this time, I would just like to welcome Sir John to the podium, suggest that he is, indeed, a man of all seasons, particularly having come directly to us from Calgary and finding that this is a very tropical welcome. And I hope that you will support that with your applause as he comes forward to talk to us on, is anyone there? Sir John? Well, thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here and have the chance of taking part in this really very remarkable lecture series that has been going for these 25 years. It's a privilege and a pleasure for me to do that. So is there anyone there? Well, what I'm asking, of course, is, is there a mind and a purpose behind what is happening in the world? Or is it just one thing after another? And so I'm raising the question of the existence of God. Is the world a creation? Well, if it's a creation, we don't expect it to be full of items that have been stamped, made by God. God is going to be a little bit more subtle in revealing the divine presence than that. It's raising the question of whether there is a meaning and purpose of work in the world, whether God's mind and will lie behind what is happening. As I say, God's presence will be more subtle than our simply stumbling across items stamped, made by God. But it would be very surprising if there weren't some hints and nudges of the divine presence, if indeed this universe is a creation. So what form could they take? Well, they could take a variety of forms. I'd like to start by going to Stephen Hawking's book, Brief History of Time. And the interesting thing about that book, or one of the many interesting things about that book, is that God keeps on popping up in the middle of the book. It's a book about quantum cosmology. And there isn't any reason particularly why Steve, who is a former colleague of mine, should mention God at all. But nevertheless, God does keep on popping up. You won't find God in the index of the book, but you will find God in the text. So why is that? Well, it's not for me to put thoughts into Steve's mind, but it seems to me that one of the reasons may well be that as physicists study the universe in which we live, we are deeply impressed by the rational transparency and rational beauty of the world. We live in a world that has a very deep order to it. A world, moreover, whose order is something that we can ourselves discover and enjoy. Of course, obviously, we need to understand the world in an everyday sense, just to make our way to survive in life. But we can go very much beyond that. I was a quantum physicist, and the quantum world, the subatomic world of the very small, is totally different from the world of every day. 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 Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in a nutshell. It's quite different from the clear and determinate world of every day. It's different, but nevertheless, we can understand it. The world is rationally transparent to us, and when we do understand it, we receive the reward of wonder. Wonder is a very important word for a scientist. Doing science is pretty hard work, but the payoff for that hard work is that the more we understand the world in which we live, the more we see its beautiful order, and that fills us with that experience of wonder. Moreover, we come to realize that the world is very particular in its character, although, as far as we know, life only began on Earth about four billion years ago, and of course, self-conscious life only occurred very, very recently in the history of the world. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the universe was pregnant with life from the very beginning, immediately following the Big Bang. The physical fabric of the world, its given structure. So what I was trying to say was that the universe was pregnant with life in the beginning in the sense that the physical fabric of the world, that means the given laws of nature, had to be just right to allow the possibility of carbon-based life. You can see that by simply thinking about carbon itself. Every atom of carbon in your body came from a star. You are people of stardust, and it's only because the laws of nuclear physics are exactly what they are that stars are able to make the carbon that is the essential constituent of life. So we live in a world that is fruitful in its built-in potentiality, which is, to my mind, suggestive that there is a purpose behind this world, and that it's rationally beautiful in its structure and order, which is, to me, suggestive that there is indeed a divine mind behind the order of the world. When Steve Hawking talks about the mind of God, I'm never quite sure where Steve's tongue is in relation to his cheek, but it does seem to me that as we study this world of rational beauty, a world shot through with signs of mind, we should be prepared to consider the possibility that that mind is spelt with a capital M. That's the first thing I want to say. But, of course, the coming to be of life, and indeed the development of structure in the whole universe, has been a long evolving process, spreading over about 14 billion years. So the next thing I think we need to consider is how we should think about an evolutionary world. There's no doubt at all that that's the universe in which we live. Now, people sometimes think that there is some sort of conflict between evolutionary thinking and religious thinking. But I think that's a bad mistake to make. And it is certainly a very bad historical mistake to suppose that when Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, there was this confrontation between scientific light and religious darkness. That's a myth, a misleading story in this case, that writers and the media very often want to try and peddle to us. But it's historically quite inaccurate. When Darwin published his ideas, there was a good deal of discussion and a good deal of struggle about it. There were people in the scientific world who found it difficult to accept his understanding. And there were people in the religious world who from the beginning were welcoming to the insights that Darwin had provided. One of those people who was most active in that way was an Anglican clergyman called Charles Kingsley, who wrote a book called The Water Babies and a number of other novels as well. And in that writing, Kingsley coined the phrase that I think perfectly describes how theologically we should think about an evolutionary world. What Kingsley said was this. No doubt God could have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world. And in fact, Kingsley said, God had chosen to do something cleverer than that. For in making an evolutionary world, God had brought into being a creation that could make itself. That's the way to understand an evolving world. God has endowed the world with very great fruitful potentiality. But the way that potentiality is brought to birth, the way it is realized, is through the shuffling explorations of happenstance, if you like, of the way that creatures are allowed to be themselves and to make themselves. And that, it seems to me, is a very satisfying theological insight because if we believe that the creator is also the God of love, then I don't think we can believe that the world that God brought into being is God's divine puppet theater in which God pulls every string and makes every creature dance to the divine tune alone. The gift of love is always the gift of some due degree of independence to the object of love. I mean, parents know that. Parents, as their children grow up, have to allow their children to be themselves and to make themselves. Children learn to ride a bicycle and there has to come a time when they are allowed to go off into the dangerous traffic on their own. Similarly, God has brought into being a world in which creatures are allowed to make themselves. And that world, it seems to me, is a greater good than a ready-made world would be. It is a greater good, but it is a good that has, to it, unnecessary cost. You cannot have a world that is exploring and realizing its potentiality, which is free from ragged edges or blind alleys. And it's interesting that the scientific insight of an evolutionary world is able, I believe, to help theology with what is religious belief's most difficult problem. What is the most difficult problem for religious belief? Well, you all know what it is. It is, of course, the problem of the evil and suffering in the world. And if we think about evolutionary process, we think about the evolutionary process that has brought about the growth and complexification of life here on Earth, that amazing three-and-a-half to four-billion-year history has been driven by the engine of genetic mutation. It is gene change that brings about new forms of life and has turned a world that for a billion or two years contained only bacteria into a world that now today contains you and me. Now, that's a great fruitfulness. But if you have a process of genetic mutation that enables some cells to change their character and to produce new forms of life, you cannot help also having a world in which other cells will mutate and become malignant. You can't have one without the other. The presence of cancer in the world, which is an anguishing fact about the world, is not a gratuitous fact about the world, is not a sign that the creator is callous or incompetent. It is the necessary cost of a world allowed to make itself. It is the shadow side of an evolving world. Now, I don't suggest for a minute that that solves all the problems that we feel about evil and suffering. But as I say, I do think it provides us with very mild help in that respect. You see, we all tend to feel 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 thrown away all the nasty things. We would have had the sunsets and the flowers and so on, but we would have got rid of the disease and disaster. But the more scientifically we understand the process of the world, the more we see how those things intertwine with each other. The process of the world, in a sense, is a package deal. You can't pull it apart and keep the good things and throw away the bad things. They are inextricably intertwined with each other. And I think that is a mild help in our thinking about why the world is a world that has malignancy as part of its process. So that's the next thing I want to say. The revolving world is, in my view, a great good, but it is a good that has a cost. I don't know if we could argue about whether that is a cost worth paying. I don't say that's a trivial question. In fact, it's quite a profound question, but it is a question that we have to face. I suppose you believe that everything I've said so far is totally convincing and totally helpful in everything. If you were to buy all that, it would only give you a rather limited picture of the nature of God. It would give you a picture of a God who is, if you like, the cosmic architect, the one who holds the world in being, but that God could as well be the God of deism, the God who simply sets the world spinning and sees what happens as the God of the universe.