Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS, is fellow and retired president of Queens’ College, Cambridge. Winner of the 2002 Templeton Prize, he is both a quantum physicist and an Anglican priest.

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Exploring Reality

Yale University Press

Contents

Preface..........................................................................ixAcknowledgements.................................................................xviiCHAPTER ONE: Reality?............................................................1CHAPTER TWO: The Causal Nexus of the World.......................................7CHAPTER THREE: Human Nature: The Evolutionary Context............................38CHAPTER FOUR: The Historical Jesus...............................................60CHAPTER FIVE: Divine Reality: The Trinity........................................90CHAPTER SIX: The Nature of Time: Unfolding Story.................................113CHAPTER SEVEN: The Spirit and the Faiths.........................................127CHAPTER EIGHT: Evil..............................................................136CHAPTER NINE: Ethical Exploration: Genetics......................................147CHAPTER TEN: Imaginative Postscript: Some Nave Speculations.....................169Index............................................................................179

Chapter One

For some the title of this book will be a red rag to a bull. They will dismiss it as exhibiting the author's naivety. 'Reality', and the closely-allied word 'truth', are not in common currency in some circles today, and consequently those who employ them lay themselves open to intellectual condescension and pity. I am unrepentant.

Much of the tone of contemporary sceptical discourse was already set by those nineteenth-century Masters of Suspicion, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. The former once referred to truths as illusions that we have forgotten are illusions, and the latter, through his work in human psychology, suggested that the actual motivations for our beliefs often lie hidden in unconscious depths, so that they are frequently quite different from those which our conscious egos propose to us. Of course, each of these thinkers implicitly exempted their own ideas from subversion along the lines of their particular critiques, as also did Karl Marx in relation to the influence of economic factors and social class.

More recently, the extreme wing of the movement loosely categorised as postmodernism has suggested that instead of truth about reality, we have to settle for a portfolio of opinions expressing personal or societal points of view. Though there may appear to be conflicts between the different perspectives proposed, it is said that there is no real competition because, in fact, there is not actually anything to contend about. All points of view can claim equal authenticity, since none is constrained by an independently accessible external reality. The story goes that intellectual life is strictly la carte.

Science has not been exempt from this assault on the possibility of rationally conclusive discourse. Its findings are held simply to be the products of the communities that propose them; its theorisings are supposed to be more about the exercise of power than about the attainment of veracity. For the extreme postmodernist, there are not really quarks and gluons as the constituents of matter, but the idea of them is a construct of the invisible college of physicists, who have simply colluded in seeing the world in a quarklike way.

As with many other reductive and dismissive accounts of human activity and human nature, these critiques are based at best on no more than quarter truths, whose scope is then exaggerated in the attempt to promote them into the pretension of total explanation. Of course, the motivations for human beliefs do lie at a variety of levels within the psyche, an insight known to Augustine and to generations of spiritual directors. Of course, scientific activity is influenced by cultural and social judgements of what investigations it would be valuable to pursue and viable to fund. Of course, experience has to be interpreted before it becomes truly interesting, and this introduces the danger of distortion through tricks of perspective, a problem that has to be recognised and taken into account. A naive objectivity of unproblematic 'facts' is far too crude a way to encapsulate our encounter with the way things are. Yet few critics of the ideas of truth and reality are so committed to that cause that it is matter of indifference to them what kind of doctor, witch or medical, they consult when they are ill. Nor do they tend to regard belief in the safe functioning of the aircraft they are about to board as being sufficiently established if it has arisen simply as the result of a socially negotiated consensus. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the positivist philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach denied the existence of atoms. Can any one really believe today that matter does not have an atomised structure? Scientific knowledge of a reliable kind really does increase. Of course, we know now that atoms themselves are made out of still smaller constituents (quarks, gluons and electrons). The maps that science makes of the physical world have always had to be open to revision when territory comes to be surveyed on a more intimate scale than had been explored hitherto. Yet these maps have proved reliable and trustworthy at the level of detail that they profess to describe. Science's achievement is not absolute truth, but it can rightly claim verisimilitude.

The realist counter-claim that is being made against the sceptics-a claim that certainly requires detailed defence-is that of a critical realism. The adjective is necessary because something more subtle than naive objectivity is involved (we do not see quarks directly, but their existence is indirectly inferred). The noun is justified because the best explanation of persistent scientific explanatory power and technological success is that science succeeds in describing, within the acknowledged limits of verisimilitude, the way things actually are.

Almost all scientists, consciously or unconsciously, are critical realists. Scientist-theologians are often self-confessed critical realists about both science and theology. I have written rather often on the subject, seeking to base the argument on case studies, since I do not believe that it can be settled solely by abstract considerations. I do not intend to repeat that discussion here. Let me be content to make three simple points:

(1) Defence of realism in science depends partly upon recognising the unexpected character often stubbornly displayed by nature. Far from its behaving like epistemological clay in our pattern-seeking hands, capable of being moulded into any pleasing shape that takes the fancy, the physical world frequently proves highly surprising, resisting our expectations and forcing us to extend, in unanticipated ways, the range of our intellectual understanding. In consequence, the feel of actually doing science is undeniably one of discovery, rather than pleasing construction. Theologians can claim something similar about the encounter with God. Time and again human pictures of deity prove to be idols that are shattered under the impact of divine reality.

(2) An experience fundamental to the pursuit of science is a sense of wonder, induced by the beautiful order and fruitful nature of the universe. There is an authenticity about science's discoveries of explanatory insight that is deeply persuasive that the scientists...