Science and Religion: An Interview with John Polkinghorne

The January 29, 2008 issue of the Christian Century had an interesting interview with John Polkinghorne, an ordained Anglican priest and a quantum physicist. In fact his work contributed to the discovery of the one of the basic elements of matter, the quark. He is a prolific writer and served as the first president of the International Society for Science and Religion. I have read his book, Exploring Reality, which I thoroughly enjoyed and have yet to read on my bookshelf, Science and the Trinity.

I want to share a bit of the interview, things that he said that I found helpful. At one point in the interview he said,

Symbolism is indispensable to theology, because the mysterious infinite reality of God cannot be caught within the finite nets of human thinking in the way that the physical world, or large aspects of it, can be caught. The precise language of mathematics, which is so natural to physics, has to be replace in theology by a different form of discourse.
The secret weapon of science is experiment. If you don't believe what somebody says about someth9ing, you can in principle and sometimes in practice try to replicate the experiment. That's very persuasive. In the whole swale of human experience, we can't do that. You can't put God to the test. God is not a subject to be manipulated but a subject to be met and ultimately to meet in awe and worship.
That's why revelation is an important category for theology. By revelation I don't mean some ineffable propositional communication which you have to take or leave, but God's act of self-disclosure in individual lives to a small but real extent and, of course, in the history of Israel and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

At another point the interviewer asked this question: Darwinian theory gets a lot of press in the U.S. because natural selection remains controversial. You've written that a good deal of human achievements go beyond what natural selection would call for. To this he responded:

Just take our ability to do science, for example. We're able to understand the world in a deep way--not just the everyday world in which we have to survive but also the subatomic world of quantum theory, which is remote from our direct experience and requires ways of thinking which are totally different--counterintuitive, one might say--from our everyday ways of thinking. I can't believe that our ability to understand and probe and enjoy the structures of that quantum world is simply a spin-off of our ancestors' learning to dodge saber-toothed tigers. It's something more profound than that.
Or consider humans' ability to explore noncummutative algebra. That goes vastly beyond anything that's so central to evolutionary explanation, unless the context in which it was developed is a richer and deeper context than simply the physical, biological context that conventional Darwinian theory would lead us to suppose.

It's a great article.