Part 2： Is Anyone There？ Professor John Polkinghorne. 2002

God of the theism, a God who is more involved with the unfolding history of the world. And so we have to then I think go on to sharpen up the question, is there anyone there, sharpen it up in the direction of asking the question, can we believe that God actually interacts with history? You see, Christian theology, or indeed the Abrahamic faith generally, have tended to use personal language about the nature of God. Now, of course, the faith traditions understand that when one uses finite human language about God, you're using it in some sort of stretched sense. We don't mean by speaking in personal terms of God, that God is some elderly chap with a white beard sitting on a throne in the sky. But we do mean that it is less misleading to speak about God in personal terms than it is to speak about God in impersonal terms. If you like, God is more father than force. And if that's the case, it must mean surely that God does particular things in particular circumstances. The force of gravity is the same all the time. It doesn't take into account the context in which it's operating. It doesn't adjust itself to changing circumstances. But in all personal relationships, there is that degree of specificity, of particularity, of adjustment to the precise nature of what is happening. And if personal language is being used of God in a way that is not misleading, then it must surely mean that God does particular things in particular circumstances. The question is, then, is that really possible for us today, if we also take with absolute seriousness, as I'm sure we should, science's account of the regular process of the world? I think there's no doubt that as science has advanced and as it has elaborated its picture of the reliable process of the world, there has been greater difficulty in believing in a God of providence. I'll give you an easy example. I come from the Church of England, and the foundational prayer book of the Church of England is the Book of Common Prayer of 1662. If you look in that book, you'll find that one of the prayers in that book is a prayer for seasonable weather, so that we may have good crops from the land. When the prayer book was revised in 1928, that prayer was changed, but it was retained in a recognizably similar form. When our modern language liturgy, the Alternative Service Book, was introduced in 1980, that prayer was omitted. The nearest you can find to it in the Alternative Service Book is a retrospective harvest colleague being thankful for a good harvest of the fruits of the earth. Why you should be thankful afterwards for what you didn't have the nerve to ask for beforehand is not entirely clear. Can we pray for seasonable weather? Doesn't the weather just happen? That's the problem we have to think about. And the most important scientific thing I'm going to say this evening is that 20th century science has certainly seen the death of a merely mechanical account of the world. When we looked at Newtonian science, and to a very large extent similarly the science of the 19th century, it really did seem to describe a world that was clockwork in its character. And if that's the case, it was difficult to think that if it had a creator, that the creator was other than a sort of cosmic clockmaker who had set the machinery in position, set it in motion, and you just have to hope that God had constructed it and wound it up in such a way that things would not work out too badly. But of course, in the course of the 20th century, we have discovered that whatever the physical world is, it is certainly not mere mechanism. Meaning by mechanism, something that is tame, controllable, and predictable in its character. We learnt that first of all, of course, at the level of subatomic processes from quantum theory. It's notorious that quantum processes are probabilistic in their character. You can't say for sure exactly what will happen. There's a certain probability that this may happen, a certain probability that that may happen. So already at that level, the world is certainly not merely mechanical. Interesting though that is, and I spent 25 years of my life working as a quantum physicist, interesting though that is, I don't think that's directly relevant to a lot of what happens at the everyday level. In other words, the things that would affect us and affect the history of the world in a direct and easily observable way. And the reason for that is that any occasion of which we are ourselves directly aware would involve a very, very large number, trillions upon trillions, of quantum events. And when you have a lot of random events, when you add them together, the randomnesses, the fluctuations, the differences, tend to cancel each other out. So that when you have a great collection of these events, you get in fact, most of the time, a very reliable behavior. That's the way in which insurance offices work. They don't know when you're going to die, but if they insure enough people of your cohort, of your age and general state of health, they will know what fraction of that cohort will die in the next five years. And they'll know that sufficiently accurately to be able to make money out of you. That's a pretty good test of accuracy. Though quantum theory is important, mostly I think it cancels out the level of things of which we are directly aware. But as you all know, about 40 years or so ago, people discovered that even the everyday world, even the world that was described by Newtonian physics, was not as tame and predictable and controllable as we had thought it to be. It is a world that certainly contains some clocks, but it also contains a very large number of clouds. By clouds I mean, of course, systems that are so exquisitely sensitive to circumstance that the smallest disturbance will totally change their future behavior. Everybody, I'm sure, has heard of the butterfly effect. These chaotic effects, as we call them, were first identified in relation to simple models of the Earth's weather system. And it is a sort of serious joke. All the best jokes are serious. A serious joke to say that the weather can be in such a state that a butterfly stirring the air with its wings in the Central American jungle can produce an effect that will grow and grow and grow until it produces, say, a storm over Iowa in about three weeks' time. That's the time scale for these things to grow in the atmosphere. I can say with complete confidence that detailed long-term weather forecasting is never going to work. We shall never know about all those Central American butterflies. Now, what are we to make of that? I've said every scientist would agree that these chaotic systems are unpredictable in their character. That means that we can't know what their future behavior is going to be. Now, knowledge is what the learned call epistemology. And epistemology, what we can know, is not necessarily the same thing as what is the case, which the learned call ontology. Now, the question is, are these unpredictabilities simply questions of ignorance? That really everything is fixed, that we're just not clever enough to, or are able to observe exactly enough to predict what's going to happen? Or are these things signs of an actual openness, that somehow or other the future is not fully determined? In the case of quantum theory, almost everybody believes that quantum theory is a theory that is open to the future. That Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which I referred to at the beginning, is not just a principle of ignorance. It is a genuine principle of indeterminacy. We don't know how these systems are going to behave. And we couldn't know how they're going to behave. In the case of chaos theory, that has been far less popular an interpretation, but I think it's an interpretation that we should take. And I think that for two reasons. One is this. One is simply that if you're a scientist, your instincts are to believe that what you can know is actually telling you what is the case. We wouldn't really take all the trouble of doing science unless we thought that we were learning what the physical world or what the biological world is actually like. That means in philosophical terms, whether they know it or not, scientists are mostly realists. Realists are people who think that what you know tells you what things are like. There are other people who don't think that. They think that what you know bears no relation to what things are like. But we scientists don't think that way. And so if you take that point of view, then I think you should believe that unpredictabilities are themselves signs of an actual openness to the future. My wife, a few years ago for one of my birthdays, gave me a sweatshirt that has on it the stirring motto, words she'd often heard me speak on occasions like this, epistemology models ontology. You get some pretty funny looks if you walk down the street wearing a sweatshirt like that. But what it's saying is that what we can know is a reliable guide to what is the case, and of course what we can't know is also a reliable guide to what is the case. So that will be one argument for treating chaotic systems as in some sense being open to the future. A second reason would be this. We know, as surely as we know anything, that we are not clockwork ourselves. That we are not automata. There are some philosophers who would challenge that, but nobody lives their lives as if they have no choice, no power of agency. And that seems to me just a fundamental piece of human knowledge. If you don't believe that, then you not only lose some notion of human freedom or human free will, you lose I think also a notion of human rationality. If I'm just a clockwork robot, I'm just quacking away, uttering these words. You're just flapping your ears, listening to these words. There's no rational discourse going on between us. There's just these things happening. But I think there is some rational discourse going on between us. At least I certainly hope so. And therefore I think that we need to... It would be a gain for science if science could so interpret itself that it could describe the world so that we can conceive ourselves as being inhabitants of it. And if we believe that the physical world is open to its future both through quantum theory and through chaos theory then we are beginning to describe a world of which we could conceive ourselves as inhabitants a world in which we can execute our willed intentions. And if we are able to do that then I believe that that world will also be open to God's interaction with it. We're going to discuss some of these things in a little bit more detail in the workshop tomorrow but that's where I'll leave that particular discussion at the moment. So the picture is that there is... Of course that the physics's description of the exchange of energy between constituents, bits and pieces that's part of the causal story of the world. For example when I execute my intention of raising my arm then of course there's a bits and pieces story of that. There are currents that run along the nerves the muscles contract and so on. But there's more to the story than that. I raise my arm. It's an act of the whole me. And in fact if you were to stick an electrode in my arm and make my arm jump up I say you did that. I know the difference between being an agent and being acted upon. And somehow or other we've got to find a way of accommodating that in the world. And I think the way we're going to do that is to recognise that there are two sorts of causality in the world. There is what you might call a bottom-up causality which is the subject of physics which is concerned with exchanges of energy between the bits and pieces that make up the world. But in addition to that there is what you might call a top-down agency. An agency that is concerned with the behaviour of a whole system. It might be a whole weather system or it might be a whole person. And that form of causality is concerned not with energetic exchanges between bits and pieces but the behaviour of the whole and the patterns of behaviour of the whole. It is concerned not with energy in my view but with what specifies pattern which is information. And I think that when I talk about the future being open I don't of course mean that the future is some sort of random lottery that the goddess Fortuna decides what's going to happen in the future. I mean that there is this extra power of world intention of information input into the structure of the world. I think we exercise our powers of choice and agency that way and I think that God also will interact with the unfolding history of the world. That interaction will not be demonstrable it will not be isolatable because it will be hidden within these cloudy unpredictabilities of what's going on. You can't take those systems and analyse them and pull them apart and say nature did this, human will did that, God did the third thing. They are inextricably intertwined with each other but nevertheless I believe it to be perfectly rational to suppose that God is acting in the world in that way. So if that's the case and if God is able to work through divine providence then of course it's also possible for a scientist to pray. It's possible to take all that we know seriously about the process of the world but nevertheless to ask God to do things. Because God is not simply the detached or impotent spectator of the world but God is involved in the unfolding process of the world. So one of the first consequences of that picture I've been trying to sketch is that a scientist can pray. But you might ask why should a scientist pray or indeed why should anybody pray? I mean if God has power to do things and God is good and God is wise why doesn't God just get on with it? I mean why do we have to ask God to do things? What are we doing when we pray? I'm talking here of course about petitionary prayer I'm not talking about adoration, the prayer of wonder which I really refer to when talking about the feeling of wonder that scientists have I'm talking about asking God to do particular things. Why do we have to do that? Are we just making such a fuss that God really feels forced to do something that God wouldn't have bothered to do otherwise? Obviously not. Are we drawing God's attention to something that God might not have noticed otherwise? No, I don't think we're doing that either. Are we offering God a rather clever plan for solving the problems of the world? And you do hear intercessions in church that have a little bit of a taste of that I don't think we're doing that either. So what are we doing when we pray? Why do we have to pray? It's quite a serious question. Well, I'd answer it in two ways. First thing I'd say is this I'm trying to sketch for you a picture of a world of becoming a world in which we play our part in bringing about the future and God also, through divine providence, plays a part in bringing about the future. We have a room for manoeuvre, if you like and God has retained a power for divine manoeuvre. When we pray, I think what we're trying to do is we're offering God our room for manoeuvre to be taken by God and used in alignment with the good and perfect will of God. I'm actually saying a very traditional thing I'm saying that prayer is the alignment of human will with divine will and I believe that when our room for manoeuvre our possibilities of executing our will are lined up with God's things become possible that are not possible when human and divine will are at cross purposes to each other. So I think that's the first thing we're doing when we pray. We're doing, I think the prayer is genuinely instrumental and it enables things to happen that would not happen when divine and human wills are at cross purposes. A metaphor, a scientific metaphor I like to use for that is in fact laser light. We all know that laser light is very powerful. What makes laser light powerful? Well laser light is powerful so you can bounce a beam off a small reflector on the moon, things like that. Laser light is powerful because it is what the physicists call coherent. Now light for this purpose you can think of it as being made up of waves and in coherent light the waves are all in step with each other. All the crests come together in Ara all the troughs come together in Ara