JOHN C. POLKINGHORNE WINS 2002 TEMPLETON PRIZE John C. Polkinghorne, a mathematical physicist and Anglican priest whose treatment of theology as a natural science has invigorated the search for interface between science and religion and made him a leading figure in this emerging field, has won the 2002 Templeton Prize.
Solon, here might be a contemporary dialogue on related issues.
"He has not only destroyed the idea that the world-views of science and theology are opposed to one another, but he has opened up the road ahead for a new stage in conceptual integration which cannot but make for immense progress in religion all over the world." T.F. Torrance
Sample from Polkinghorne Serious Talk, Science and Religion in Dialogue (copyrighted) First, we are looking for a Grand Unified Theory -- a GUT, as we say in physics. We are looking, therefore, for some form of total explanation and total understanding of the world. When we look for that, there are really two possible starting points. Everybody who is seeking an understanding of the world must have some given assumption as the basic starting point. Noting comes of nothing. If we are to understand things, we must have some basic beliefs, some intellectual commitment, in terms of which our explanation will be framed. If we are to understand the nature of reality, we have only two possible starting points: either the brute fact of the physical world or the brute fact of a divine will and purpose behind that physical world. these are the only two intellectually respectable starting points, as we push the argument back; therefore here are the only two possible foundation points as we then draw the argument forward. Someone like the Scottish skeptic David Hume would say, "Just start with brute matter, the fact of the physical world. You don't need more than that." That would be a materialist answer to the problem. Why should one go back beyond that to look for the will of a divine agent, a creatorly purpose at work in the world? The question where you start or stop is a question of where you feel intellectually comfortable -- where you feel you have a basic belief that is not begging important questions.
Impressive though our scientific understanding of the world is, and impressive as our grasp of the laws of nature is, the laws of nature are not by themselves sufficiently intellectually satisfying, sufficiently self-explanatory to be an adequate and acceptable foundation on which to build one truth about one world. I say that because if we take physics seriously, we see that there are inescapable questions that seem to arise from the laws of nature, questions that seem sensible to ask but that push us beyond taking those laws as our unexplained starting point.
Two meta-questions (questions going beyond) arise from the laws of science and seem to indicate that they are not themselves a comfortable intellectual resting place.
One is our amazing power to understand the physical world -- the fact that the physical world is rationally transparent to us to a quite astonishing degree, and that in that transparency it is mathematics which plays the key role. It is an actual technique in fundamental physics, which has proved its worth and fruitfulness time and again in the history of physics, to seek for theories that in their mathematical expression are economic and elegant, in the expectation that it is such theories that explain what is going on in the physical world. When we use mathematics in that sort of way something very odd is happening. Why does our reason so perfectly fit the physical world? One might say, "Otherwise we wouldn't have survived in the struggle for existence." That is true up to a point. But it is true only of our everyday experience and our everyday thinking about that experience. When I point to the marvelous power of mathematics to illuminate our understanding of the physical world, for example, I am referring to the quantum world, which is totally counterinutuitive, totally unpicturable in everyday terms; but is not unintelligible to us, though its understanding requires in fact very abstract forms of mathematics. So it does seem that there is something to understand -- why the world is so intelligible, why science is possible. Not only does it strike me that way, but it also struck Einstein, which is perhaps a rather more impressive thing to say. He once said, "The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." So I would like to understand why the .... End of sample at amazon. amazon.com
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I may include later his description of himself as a bottom-up thinker. Looks like fruitful reading to me. |
