The mass media rarely carry articles dealing with religion in a truly thoughtful manner. Insofar as they deal with religion at all, newspapers are more apt either to discuss sensational religious events ("Rapture didn't happen; we're all still here!), or to provide comfort to the religiously comfortable ("President lights up White House Christmas tree!").
Last week, however, USA Today ran an interesting feature article based on the thought of physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. Polkinghorne's work in the field of elementary particles led him to play a role in the discovery of quarks, and he has conducted advanced theoretical research in other areas.1 Theoretical mathematicians and physicists typically do their most important work by the age of 30. When Polkinghorne felt his best work had been done, he began studies for ordination to the priesthood.
But the USA Today article focused less on his unusual combination of vocations, and more upon his thoughts concerning doubt and uncertainty. No one has ever seen a quark, the article noted. We "believe" in them because their supposed existence is necessary to make sense of the empirical data. The existence of quarks has not been "proved." In fact, no scientific theory is ever proved -- including evolution, as fundamentalists like to point out. If new data suggest a better theoretical model, scientists of course reconsider their "beliefs."
Similarly, Polkinghorne points out, we don't have empirical evidence of God's existence. The traditional "proofs" offered for the existence of God suggest reasons to believe, but do not constitute mathematical or logical proofs.
In other contexts, Polkinghorne has pointed to scientific or cosmological evidence that make belief in God reasonable, or even compelling, but the evidence does not logically demand belief in God's existence.
As we go through life, we are constantly forced to believe or not believe in logically possible conclusions based on our judgment of the conflicting strengths of the evidence and the repercussions resulting from making the wrong judgment. If we don't "believe" in global warming and so ignore it, for example, what are the consequences of being wrong?
Polkinghorne says that, as a thinking person, he naturally considers the possibility that God and Christianity could be human inventions with no basis in reality.
"It's [i.e., belief in God] a reasonable position, but not a knock-down argument," he said. "It's strong enough to bet my life on it. Just as Polanyi2 bet his life on his belief, knowing that it might not be true, I give my life to it, but I'm not certain. Sometimes I'm wrong."
Quarks may be a fiction. Fossil evidence of dinosaurs may have been planted in the ground by a capricious God to lead prideful men to question Genesis. The universe, as I discussed in an earlier post, may have been a child's toy -- like a model train set -- cobbled together by a young super being, a toy that he left running after he went off to college. The world we observe by our senses may even be the dream of some Matrix-like pod people.
But based on the evidence known to him and on his life experiences, Polkinghorne has made a conscious decision to accept the existence of God and the message of Christianity, and to base his life on that decision. As Christian doctrine traditionally holds, belief in Christ would not be meritorious if it were forced on us by logic. Christian belief is not contrary to logic, but the merit adheres in our voluntary decision to assent to its message of love and to live our lives in accordance with that message.
Polkinghorne's own message goes beyond these age-old arguments between atheists and theists, however. If even devout Christians such as Polkinghorne are forced to admit the logical possibility of being wrong, how much more should those of us dealing with the more mundane, human questions of politics be willing to admit at all times that we know nothing with certainty, that our political and economic convictions are merely hopeful theories, and that we may well be thinking and acting in error.
Oliver Cromwell's exclamation to the Scottish church, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken," applies to all facets of life. John Polkinghorne, Ph.D., professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, President of Queen's College (Cambridge), and Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral has issued our world a call for intellectual and emotional humility, a reminder that there is little if anything in our universe about which we can claim absolute certainty.
------------------------1He has "researched the analytic and high-energy properties of Feynman integrals and the foundations of S-Matrix theory," according to Wikipedia.
2"Michael Polanyi (March 11, 1891 – February 22, 1976) was a Hungarian–British polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and the theory of knowledge. In his philosophical writings he argued that positivism not only gives a false account of the practice of science, it also, if taken seriously, undermines our highest achievements as human beings."
--Wikipedia
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