Part 3： Is Anyone There？ Professor John Polkinghorne. 2002

and add down. And that way you get the maximum effect. If light is incoherent, if the waves are out of step, then crest and trough can turn side and cancel each other out. And I think what we're seeking in prayer is a laser-like coherence between human will and divine will. And if that's the case, then as I say, I believe things become possible that will not be possible when things are incoherent in that way. If that's the case, and that's right, there are two things that follow from that about praying. One is this. Prayer is not a substitute for action. It is a commitment to action. If I have, as I say, a rather elderly neighbour who likes telling stories about the good old days, keeps on telling the same stories because that's what he or she feels comfortable with, but of course it's all a little bit boring and tiresome after a while when you've heard the story several times. If I've got a neighbour like that, and who is behaving like that because essentially they are lonely and need some sort of company, I don't fulfil my obligation to that neighbour by staying at home and praying for them. I may pray for them when I'm at home, but I have also to be prepared to go around occasionally and hear again that familiar collection of stories. Prayer and action are two sides of the same coin. That's one thing that follows from that. The other thing that follows from that is that it makes intelligible, I think, something that probably all of us feel, but which otherwise might seem puzzling. I think most of us would feel that it's a good idea to have a lot of people praying for the same thing, to have corporate prayer in that sense. Now why is that? Because there are more fists beating on the heavenly door to attract the divine attention? I don't think so. But there are more wills to be aligned with the divine will to bring about its good purposes in the world. It makes sense of our praying together for the same thing. That's one of the things I think we're doing when we pray. But I think there's actually another thing we do when we pray, and I learned this actually from somebody called John Lucas. He's an Oxford philosopher and so it's a pretty generous admission for a Cambridge physicist that he learned something useful for an Oxford philosopher. And what John says is this. He says one of the things that we're called upon to do when we pray is to say what it is we really want, to commit ourselves to what is our heart's desire. And that God will take that seriously, not in the sense of providing us with a blank check from the Heavenly Father Christmas that we just fill in how we want, but God allows us to assign value. God will take that seriously and that is an important part of praying. I find that very helpful and also very challenging in thinking about praying. It's challenging because it means that you have to think very carefully what it is you really want, not to pray for triviality. But I think it's right. You know, in the Gospel story there's a blind man and he shouts out to Jesus as Jesus is going by. Jesus calls him out of the crowd and it's Bartimaeus of course and Bartimaeus stands before Jesus and Jesus says to him, what do you want? What do we want? He's a blind man for heaven's sake. It's obvious what he wants. He wants to have his sight restored, but he has to commit himself. He has to say, Lord, that I may receive my sight before he receives his healing and his sight is restored. I think that's one of the things we're doing when we pray. So, I take petitionary prayer very seriously. A believer scientist can pray and of course many scientists do pray because many scientists are religious believers of various forms. And having said all that, I think there's one more thing I want to say about prayer before I move on to something else. And it's this. Having said all that, we also have to acknowledge that there is an individual mystery in human destiny. And that when, for example, a group of people pray for the recovery of someone who is very seriously ill, they're praying for the healing of someone who is very seriously ill. That healing, which is really wholeness, that may come to the person through physical recovery, through remission or whatever it may be. But it may also come to the person through the acceptance of the imminent destiny of death. Prayer is not magic in that sense. And there is an individual destiny involved which only the people involved themselves can fully appreciate and enter into. No clergyman can breeze in and tell them what's happening. They have to find that for themselves. Let me tell you a little story. I had a friend who was a devout Christian man. And he was suddenly, quite out of the blue, diagnosed as having six months to live. It was a very great shock, of course, to him and to his wife, who was also a devout person. And of course to many of us who were his friends. And of course we began to pray for him. And they were advised by various wise people. And one of the pieces of advice they received was that my friend and his wife should pray together every day seeking his healing and that his wife should lay her hands upon him seeking to, so to speak, be a root of God's healing for my friend. They did that faithfully and those of us who knew them were of course also praying for them. Now my friend died almost exactly six months to the day from the time that he had received the diagnosis from his physician. And after he had died, his wife asked herself what had been going on, what had been their prayerful experience. And she was generous enough to share that with us. And what she concluded was this. My friend was someone who had had a great deal of opposition in his life. He lived in a particular community. And frankly he wasn't popular with everybody in that community. And there were people in that community who disliked him. But everybody in that community was deeply impressed with the courage and fortitude and hope with which he met his death. And that realization healed a number of difficult relationships. The people who had been opposed to him saw something in him that they had been unable to see before. And there was a healing in that community because of that. The other thing was that my friend had a condition that could have led to a very distressful death. But in actual fact he died peacefully at home with his wife by his bedside. And my friend's wife concluded that that had been the answer, those things had been the answer to their prayers for healing. Now I don't doubt for a minute that they were hoping for something different when they began that process. They were hoping for a remission. That wasn't the answer to their prayers. And there is this mystery of individual human destiny. So that's the third thing I wanted to say. The fourth thing I want to say is, and the final thing I want to say, is to look not into the past or into the present, but to look into the future. Because if a scientist can not only appear, a cosmologist can not only appear back, so to speak, looking to the Big Bang, but they can appear into the future and they can answer the question of how, in broad terms anyway, how is cosmic history going to unfold. But if you think about the universe on the largest possible scale, it is a sort of tug-of-war between two very evenly balanced principles. One is the fiery explosion of the Big Bang throwing matter apart. The other is the persistent tug of gravity pulling matter together. And those two forces are very evenly balanced. At the moment, the popular theory among the cosmologists is that the expansive effect will dominate. And if that's the case, the universe will fly apart forever, getting colder and more dilute and decaying in various ways into low-grade radiation. So if that's the future of the universe, it's going to end in a long, long, dying winter. If, by any chance, the cosmologists currently are wrong, and cosmologists are very clever people, but they do sometimes make mistakes. A great Russian physicist, one who contributed to pretty well, called Lev Landau, every branch of physics except cosmology, once said about cosmologists, they are often in error, but never in doubt. And it's just worth bearing that in mind. If gravity were to win, then actually the future is equally bleak. What began with the Big Bang will end with a big crunch as the universe implodes upon itself again. And it ends then with a bang, but not with a whimper. But either way, it is as sure as can be, on a very long timescale, I must admit, but on a very long timescale, the universe is going to end in futility, either in immense heat or in deep cold. So what does that say about the idea of a creator and a creation? If you merely take the scientific story, what you might call the horizontal story, then I think it's a pretty bleak story. One of my friends and sort of ideological enemies is Steven Weinberg. And Weinberg notoriously said, he was a very great distinguished theoretical physicist, and in one of his books he, talking about these things, about the eventual futility of the universe, said in a notorious phrase, the more he understood the universe, the more it seemed pointless to him. In the end, it's just going to be, to either end with a bang or a whimper. And I think that in terms of Steve's horizontal atheistic view, that's right. So what are the reasons for people to make of that? Well, they should take these prognostications seriously, but it seems to me that actually the knowledge of the death of the universe on a timescale of many tens or hundreds of billions of years doesn't present all that greater theological difficulties than the even more certain knowledge of our own death and futility on a timescale of tens of years. The same problem, what is God up to in creation? And I believe that we have no natural hope of a destiny beyond death. But I believe we do have a hope of a destiny beyond death, because it depends not upon us or the nature of the physical and biological world, but it depends upon the faithfulness of God. You know, Jesus had an argument with the Sadducees about whether there was a destiny beyond death. You may remember the story. The Sadducees were very conservative people. They didn't think that they found in the Hebrew Bible an account of destiny beyond death, so they didn't believe one in it. And they came to Jesus and they told him a very ingenious story about a woman who successively married seven brothers, and then they said, okay, if there's a life beyond death, whose wife is she going to be in the world to come? It's a sort of rather interesting and amusing, tricky sort of question, but a trivial question too. And Jesus, in a characteristic way, cuts through all that, and he took them back to Exodus, which is a book, of course, that they took very seriously, and he reminded them that when God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, God says to Moses, I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Jesus comments, the God not of the dead, but of the living. See the point? If the patriarchs mattered to God once, and I doubted that they did, then because God is faithful, they will matter to God forever. They will not be just cast away like broken pots on the rubbish heap of the universe. If you or I matter to God once, and we certainly do, then we shall matter to God forever. So I think that we need to take seriously the ultimate futility of the universe, we need to take seriously our own mortality, but that we have a hope of a destiny beyond death that is, in my view, a sure and certain thing. Because it doesn't depend upon creatures, but it depends upon the faithfulness of the Creator. So there we are. I've tried to explain, to explore a number of issues with you. It's been rather a dodging around exploration in some ways, but I wanted to try and deal with a number of themes. They are all connected really with the idea, is there someone there, is there a divine mind and purpose and beneficent will behind the history of the universe? I think that there is, and I think that I can take all that science tells me about the process of the world, take it with absolute seriousness, and make sense of it all by also looking not only through my scientific eye, but through a religious eye, a theological eye as well. I don't believe for a minute that my atheist friends are stupid. I mean, they obviously are not. Some of them are extremely clever. But I do believe that theism, belief in God, explains more, is more coherent, a more satisfying account of the rich and complex and in many ways puzzling reality within which we live than atheism is able to do. I want to end with a quotation, which is a favorite quotation of mine from a Canadian Jesuit theologian of the 20th century called Bernard Lonergan. He was somebody whose thought was very much inspired and drew from the tradition that stems from the great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas. And Lonergan says this, and it's one of my favorite quotations. He says this, God is the all-sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of Eureka. I love that quotation. It speaks to the physicist in me and it speaks to the priest in me. And I hope it may perhaps speak to something in you too. Thank you very much. In the spirit of the Geneva Lecture Series, we would invite anyone who wishes to pose a question to come forward. I think my colleague Dr. Kip Murphy may handle this better than I. And we'll ask anyone who wishes to direct a question to Dr. Polkinghorne to do so at this time, maybe by coming forward to Kip. We'll make your comment, of course. This is the best bit for me. I enjoy this bit the best. It would be useful if you could use the microphone because then everybody will hear. I hope everybody will hear. And it will also presumably be on the tape as well, which will be good. Oh, yes. God is the all-sufficient explanation. The eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of Eureka. Lonergan likes a bit of purple prose occasionally. It comes from a very difficult book of his called Inside. Okay, you're far away. Thank you. I really appreciate the talk. I had just one clarification and then a question. Sure. On your talk this afternoon, you stated the rejection of what I believe you called the God the Cosmic Tyrant view, and then the puppet theater view, as you mentioned here. I just want to clarify, by that, I assume that you're speaking of the classic Augustinian reform view of the meticulous providence of God and controlling the events, or decreeing the events of the universe? Well, I'm not particularly tilting a lance at any particular Christian tradition, but I am saying that I do think there is very great theological difficulty in account of God's relationship with creation, in which God holds an unrelenting grip upon everything that happens. And there are two basic difficulties for that. One is that it doesn't seem to me like the action of the God of love. And secondly, it makes God responsible for everything that happens in the world. I myself believe that God wills neither the act of a murderer nor the incidence of a cancer, but allows both to happen in a creation to which God has given freedom. But if you believe that God brings about everything, then God brings about those acts as well as other things. Okay, thank you for clarifying that. I guess the question that I have then is, if that's the case, Scripture is replete with instances of God's exhaustive foreknowledge, Ephesians 1, 11, that He works all things after the counsel of His own will, Isaiah 41, 21 through 24, 45, 5 through 7, 48, 3, and 5. Okay, I'll take those votes. Okay, but the question, or one specific example of a murder that God did foreordain that was against His moral will would be the murder of His Son. If you're interested,