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Q & A

Well, thank you, Dr. Polkinghorne. I am sure there are people here who have questions. I am sure I know some of them personally. If anyone has a question or comments, as long as they end in a question mark and are very brief, get in line. So, go ahead.

Q: You started your speech stating that a common denominator of science and religion is the search for truth. When I was in school, I learned that the basis of science is the search for proof, not truth. So, I was waiting in your speech for some kind of sentence to the question about how you can prove that there is God. You know that this is the core question, and I am kind of missing that.

A: I think that is a very interesting comment to make. I think that we have learned that all forms of rational inquiry are a little bit more subtle than concluding with knockdown proof, knockdown argument. Even in mathematics, Kurt Gödel taught us that any mathematical system of sufficient complexity to include arithmetic, which means the whole numbers, will contain statements that can be made which can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. So, there is all openness, even in mathematics. In fact, a little act of faith is involved in committing myself to the consistency of a mathematical system. It cannot be demonstrated.

Not many people lie awake at night worrying about the consistency of arithmetic, but nevertheless, that is the case. So, I think we have learned that the proof in the knockdown rationale of the clear and certain ideas of the Enlightenment program which Descartes put on the agenda is a glorious, magnificent program, but it is a failure. No form of human life has that kind [of proof]. Science, though it certainly produces convincing theories, does not, I think, produce proof.

In my view, the greatest philosopher of science was Michael Polanyi, who was a very distinguished physical chemist before he became a philosopher and knew science really from the inside. In the preface to his famous book called Personal Knowledge, he says, “I am writing this book”— and he is writing about science, remember— “to show how I may commit myself to what I believe to be true, knowing that it might be false.” I think that is, actually, the human situation.

What I think we are looking for— and what I am looking for in my scientific searches and in my religious searches— is motivated belief. I believe that the success of science and also the illuminating power of religion encourage the idea that motivated belief is sufficiently close to truth for us to commit ourselves to it. But, I think, proof is actually not the category that we might think it is.

Q: I had the fortune to meet Stephen Hawking at Caltech, and I had a question for him about the coded information that is in the biological world (and he wouldn’t answer): did he believe in God? I was wondering, with your having been at Cambridge, what your thoughts were about his thoughts on that.

A: Stephen and I were colleagues in the same department for many years. It’s not easy to have a conversation with Stephen, because it is so laborious for Stephen to produce things. When he does give an answer, he tends to say, “Yes,” or “No.” While the rest of us say, “We think of it this way, or maybe that way,” he just can’t do that with the handicap he has fought against so remarkably.

It is a very interesting question of why God keeps on popping up in the text of A Brief History of Time. God is not in the index. God is certainly there in the text, and it is a book about quantum cosmology, which does not require one to mention God from the start to finish for its prime purpose. I wouldn’t try to presume to say what Stephen thinks.

A lot of people, a lot of my friends in the scientific world, are both wistful and wary about religion. They are wistful because they can see that science doesn’t tell you everything. They wished there to be a mystique— a broader, deeper story of science that they can tell— but they are wary of religion because they know that religion is based upon faith and they think that faith is shutting your eyes, gritting your teeth, and believing six impossible things before breakfast, because some unquestionable authority tells you that is what you’ve got to do. They don’t want to do that, and I don’t want to do that. I guess that you don’t want to do that.

What I am always trying to explain to my friends, and to you if I can, in a way, is that I have motivations for my religious beliefs. They are not just here in the Nicene Creed: “So, don’t ask me questions, sayonara.” I have motivations for my religious beliefs, just as I have motivations for my scientific beliefs. Of course, those two sets of motivations are somewhat different, because the types of truth dimensions of reality that are being investigated are somewhat different, but they have that in common. That is all that I mean by the search for truth.

Eric, Metaxas: Can everyone in this area hear?

Polkinghorne: I am sorry. What should I do?

Eric, Metaxas: You should berate one of the sound people.

Polkinghorne: That is cathartic but not very useful. I will try to stand closer to this [microphone]. I am sorry; forgive me. Look, nothing is more irritating on an occasion like this than for somebody to come up to you afterward and say, “I couldn’t hear a word.” If you can’t hear what I’m saying, just wave, and I will do what I can.

Q: I believe you just missed the idea of many different universes operating with separate laws of engagement, instead of thinking of a universe that is finely tuned. I have read several studies, New York Times articles, and friends have told me about the possibility of alternative dimensions, more intriguing dimensions— four, five, six, seven. So, I am wondering how that idea, that reality, would coincide with what you were saying about the existence of many universes or one.

A: Many theories in modern physics have become very speculative. Take string theory. There was a program I saw on television about that the other night; it was a very interesting exploration of possible ideas, trying to guess what the world is like at sixteen orders of magnitude. That means sixteen powers of ten based on what we know from direct empirical or observational encounter. The lessons of history are against even the cleverest people being able to do that. So, I would be cautious about that.

Even if you did that, string theory is based upon a certain way of putting these things together. The existence of quantum mechanics, the existence of general relativity, of gravitational theory— where do they come from? They are indispensable items in a fruitful world. You need gravity to make stars and everything to produce structures. You need quantum mechanics because it is both orderly and open. It fixes some things; it doesn’t fix everything, and you need a certain flexibility for the development of complex systems.

The universe would still have very remarkable properties to it, which would still demand some sort of explanation and would not be explained just by saying, “It is just our luck.” So, I think there is something left to think about. I could have done a more nuanced discussion about that, but I didn’t have time.

Q: In your presentation of the anthropic principle and theistic evolution, you presented us with a God who was clever enough to allow us to be involved in the creation. With the current state of genetic research and potential manipulation, what are the limits, if any, of our involvement in that creation?

A: That is a very important question and obviously a pressing question. I just finished all of this now, but for about ten years I was involved with various United Kingdom government advisory committees connected with genetic advances. What happens is that science gives you knowledge, and I think that knowledge is always a good thing. It is a better basis for decision than ignorance, but technology takes knowledge and turns it into power, and not everything that you can do, you should do. So, you need to add to knowledge and power; you need to add wisdom, which is the ability to choose the good and refuse the bad. There are obviously quite difficult things to decide there.

First of all, things have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. There is no simple rule that says, “If you take five boxes out of seven, it is okay.” You have to look at these things case by case, and you can’t leave the judgments simply to the experts, because research is very exciting and you can get carried away by the technological imperative: “We have done this, we have done that; come on, let’s do the next thing.” The next thing may be the thing that you shouldn’t do. So, you can’t leave it to the experts. That is why society has a role to play.

Of course, you cannot do without the experts, because the experts might tell you what might be on the agenda. So, we need a debate, and it much grieves me that in my own country— and I rather suspect in this country too— so much of moral debate is the clash of single-issue pressure groups, one side shouting, “X is wonderful,” and the other side shouting, “X is terrible”— whatever X is. It is very unlikely to be either of those things. X could be good for some purposes and bad for others. We need a more careful, temperate, and nuanced ethical discussion.

Q: My question is aimed more at the artistic side of the search. I now am a playwright and a designer, and one of the things that I come across more than anything is the search for truth, both in my clients and in myself. I am a Christian, and I feel very strongly. In one of your books, you had said that art is between, I think, theology and physics or theology and science. You also had said in that book something about how Earth is the theater where all this plays out. So, could you possibly elaborate on that a little bit?

A: It is a big subject, and I did refer to it very briefly. At the end, I was talking about God being worthy of worship and the role of value. One of the things I am always trying to encourage in myself and others is to take a rich and generous view of the world we live in, the multilevel reality within which we live; for example, to believe— as I do, indeed, believe— that the personal is as important, indeed more important, than the impersonal; that the unique and unrepeatable is as significant as the repeatable. Science is concerned largely with the impersonal and the repeatable.

In my talking to my friends, it’s hard to get from science to God in one step; that is far too big a leap. So, I ask them what they think about music— and I broached that subject very briefly this evening. I ask them what they think about music, and it encourages them, I think, to take seriously a more generalist metaphysic. That is a very important thing.

If you think science told you everything that is worth knowing, it would be a very cold, impersonal world that we so described. We wouldn’t find ourselves in that world. So, I think the arts are very, very significant in that respect, if we reflect on human nature. For example, what is it to be a human being? One of the prime windows into human nature is through literature. Great literature is always concerned with the individual and the personal. The subject of great literature is not every man or every woman, but Hamlet or King Lear or whatever it is. We have to take those things seriously.

Q: I first have a comment. I observe that the unfortunate relationship between religion and science is that religion is often a science-stopper. That is, for example, in the creationist-versus-evolution debate, there were problems in science about what the creationists called irreducible complexity. The answer to this problem was God— the God of the gaps. I think there are biochemical processes we understand where a lot of these problems of irreducible complexity have been addressed.

I have two questions. Basically, I think, you have presented two arguments for, at least, an Intelligent Designer. One is the conformity between the reason within and the reason without, and you say that this is a metaphysical question beyond the realm of science. I am wondering if we can pose this as actually a scientific question. How is it that human beings are able to reason about deep, abstract mathematical truths?

I would guess that one answer is that the very same cognitive processes of generalization and inductive reasoning which allow a person to look at one cliff that has one shape and another cliff that has one shape and generalize that when you go over both of them, you die— these are the very same cognitive processes that allow us to think deeply and abstractly about mathematical problems.

The second question is with the anthropic argument. I am wondering if you would agree that there are two premises behind the anthropic argument that are unproven, one that it is possible for the universe to have other cosmological constants or other natural laws. I think it is an unproven premise of the argument. The second premise is like ten marksmen aiming at a person— that it was highly improbable that the constants are what they are. Again, I think that is a premise that has not been proven. I am wondering if you would agree with those statements.

A: The first question is about everyday reasoning leading us to unreasonable effectiveness in mathematics. I tried to deal with that, and I think the answer is “No, it won’t.” The quantum world requires a type of thinking about it— indeed, it requires a type of logic that is different from the Aristotelian logic of the everyday world. So, we certainly didn’t get that out of just somehow generalizing our everyday experience. I think my answer would be no.

Let me try to answer the last part. Some people suggest that maybe the true constants of nature are absolutely fixed by consistency of the theory. I think that is only even remotely credible if you already suppose the theory has to contain quantum theory and gravity, because that is the only thing that would sharpen it up. But supposing that would, I am still very doubtful there will not be scale parameters in any successful combination of those two theories. Secondly, suppose it was the case that the only logically consistent theory happened also to be a theory that produced beings of our complexity. I would think that [to be] the most astonishing anthropic coincidence of all, in actual fact.

Q: Regarding what you said about mutations being both beneficial and harmful as part of your model of a created-by-design universe, as a layman, I have observed and heard constant news reports about genetic defects and so on, and that obviously points to harmful mutations. Do we have actual evidence— observable and empirically so, in the laboratory or in just everyday life— of bona fide beneficial mutations, as opposed to something by inference that we assume from billions of years ago?

A: We certainly have in things like bacteria, which have very rapid reproduction rates. It is beneficial to bacteria, but it is not beneficial to us. They mutate and produce strains that resist antibiotics, and then those strains, of course, become dominant. So, at the bacterial level, certainly we see that, and maybe a bit higher up, too. I think we do have that; that does happen.

Q: If natural laws reflect the mind of the Lawgiver and if natural laws contemplate cancer as a necessary component of evolution, what do you say to the skeptic who rejects the idea of God based on God’s culpability for the content of his laws?

A: That is a very fair point, and I did say that I didn’t think that observation removed, by any means, all the difficulties. They are considerable. We live in a world that is remarkably fruitful and beautiful, remarkably chilling and frightening and destructive. It is a very ambiguous sort of picture, and somehow or other, the bad things are the necessary cost of the good things. That is not an argument you can utter without a quiver in your voice. The world is too complex and too strange for that.

I have to say one specifically Christian thing this evening: For me, the possibility of religious belief really centers on my Christian belief. A Christian understanding of God’s relationship to suffering is not that God is simply a compassionate spectator looking down on the strange and bitter world that God holds in being. As a Christian, I believe that God is participating in the suffering of the world, that God is truly a fellow sufferer. The Christian God is the crucified God. That is a very deep and mysterious, though, I believe, true, insight. That is the deep level at which the problem of suffering has to be met, and the possibility for religious belief really, for me, rests at that level.

Q: This sort of involves both Eric and you, Sir John. In Eric’s joke about you being able to be knocked over by a feather, could you maybe use your applied physics to determine when the joke reached terminal velocity? Or retrograde? I had to say that.

There are several people here who are artists, writers, and people from California with questions. Here you described a theorem or a mathematical equation, when it is right, being beautiful. There is order and structure, maybe even scientific structure, and that is involved in beauty. You also mentioned obviously in physics and life, there is a story, a history involved in science.

There are a myriad of books out there about the right structure to art or the right structure to storytelling. In reading Joseph Campbell and things as a writer, I’ve had lights go on in terms of there being true structures. I am wondering as a priest, as someone involved in the clergy and also in the Bible, whether you see structure to God’s stories and to art in that there is something that you can determine empirically to be true.

A: I do believe that God discloses the divine nature through the unfolding of history and particularly, in particular people and particular events. There are particular occasions and particular persons through whom the divine nature is more visible than is normally the case. In my view, the authority of the Bible stems from the fact that it is an account of the history of Israel and then of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, to me, are the prime events through which God has acted to make God’s nature and purposes known.

Yes, there is an unfolding there. We have to read the story and accept the story on its own terms, so to speak, it seems to me. The story is not determined by our judgment beforehand. We have to respond to that. Authors tell me that about writing novels and that sort of thing, and I am inclined to understand that may be so. So, there is a sort of authenticity that is involved in story, whether it is a scientific story or not. I am sorry that is a very stuffy answer to a question that leaves me a little bit at sea, as you may perceive.

Q: I had a conversation today with my mom, and I just have a very basic question. John, verse something [3:16]: “God so loved the world that he gave his only” whatever. If you don’t believe in him, you shall perish. Are we so right in our conviction that we are the ones that will be right? If you don’t believe in him, you shall perish. I think that has far-reaching implications to Muslims, Buddhists, Shintos, and there are more of them than us.

A: I believe that God is merciful and loving, and I believe that God’s offer of mercy and love is not a limited offer for this life only. After death, a curtain comes down, and if you are caught on the wrong side, God says, “Too bad, you had your chance; you missed it.” That doesn’t seem to be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Equally, I believe that whatever decisions and actions we take in this life, the beliefs to which we commit ourselves are very important. Those who wittingly and willfully turn from God in this life will find it, to say the least, more painful and more difficult to accept God’s mercy. I think more know Christ than know Christ by name.

I also believe that all will come to the Father through Christ ultimately, because believing, as I do, that Jesus is both human and divine, he is the unique bridge between the life of God and the life of created humanity, and that is the way. Our ultimate destiny is to share in the life and energy of God, I believe. The way into that is, indeed, the way through Christ. Again, I believe there are people who are on that way without knowing the name of the way in which they are coming.

Eric, Metaxas: We have time for one question, and it can’t be about evolution.

Q: You mentioned that evolution was absolutely fundamental to an understanding of science. As you know, in the biological world especially, the coded information passed on in DNA is extremely complicated— just the running of a body, the building of a body, and on and on. A. E. Wilder-Smith has made comments that in evolutionary theory, the missing fact is information. Could you comment on if the coded information that is in the biological world comes by chance through evolution, as you have talked about it?

A: Yes, that is a very interesting question. I think that the concept of information is going to be an extremely important concept in twenty-first-century science, and I venture to think that by the end of the twenty-first century, information in some sense— meaning the structure and the specification of dynamical pattern— will be as important a concept as energy has been in the last 150 years. We are just beginning scientifically to study the detailed behavior of complex systems— nothing as complicated as a single living cell, let alone a human being, but mostly models that are logical models that are run on computers.

Those already show us that complex systems in their totalities display astonishing properties that you would never guess from thinking about the properties of the constituent bits and pieces. Many of those properties relate to the spontaneous generation of extraordinarily high patterns of order, in other words, the spontaneous generation of something like information-bearing behavior.

Let me give you an example, chosen from Stuart Kauffman’s book At Home in the Universe. Kauffman is a chap who works on so-called complexity theory and has an interest particularly in its application to biology. Consider a system consisting of electric lightbulbs. This will be a picture of it:

The bulbs are either on or off. The system develops in steps. Each bulb is correlated with two other bulbs somewhere else in the array. What those two bulbs are doing now— either on or off— determines what this bulb does at the next step in the array, and there are very simple rules that specify this.

You start the array off in a random configuration of illumination. Some bulbs are on; some bulbs are off. Then you let it just play away on your computer and see what happens.

I would guess nothing really interesting would happen. It would just twinkle away haphazardly as long as you would let it, but that is not true. The system soon settles down to a self-generated, extraordinarily ordered behavior cycling through a very limited number of patterns of illumination.

If there are ten thousand lightbulbs in the array, there are two to the ten thousand [2^10,000] or ten to the three thousand [10^3,000]different states of illumination, in principle possible. That is a one followed by three thousand zeros. In actual fact, you will find that the system will soon cycle through one hundred different patterns of illumination. One with three thousand zeros possibility has somehow spontaneously gotten focused down into a hundred possibilities. That is quite an astonishing generation of order. I can see that as the generation of information. In fact, I think, if I remember correctly, he calls that chapter “Information for Free.”

So, there are still lots of things to discover. I don’t say there aren’t problems. Of course there are, and they certainly are not solved yet. I do think we should be wary of generalizing too quickly.