The Faith of a Physicist, by John Polking-horn/Nature, Reality, and the Sacred, Langdon Gilkey

...Lord Gifford's establishing bequest specified that the topic of the lectures be natural theology, "without reference to or reliance upon any special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation " It is in this sense that Polkinghorne calls himself a bottom-up thinker, moving from the scientific perception of nature to the loftier themes of faith...

...Like Gilkey, he rejects the "lunar landscape" of reductionist science...

...Polkinghorne's is the bolder agenda, and for this reviewer results in the more engaging of the two books However, both books are patch jobs, plastering over the hole in our lives...

...But science is not our only way of knowing, and a large part of Gilkey's agenda—rightly so, this scientist reviewer believes—is to put science in its place Both science and religious ways of knowing have surrendered some of their past pretensions to intellectual supremacy and objectivity, says Gilkey Both disciplines use symbols and analogies to describe their subjects (God and nature respectively), in both disciplines the knower plays an essential role in the knowing process, and both theology and science depend upon each other for their completion This last claim is perhaps the most controversial, and it is here that Gilkey is at his best He demonstrates convincingly that science draws its necessary presuppositions from a broader cultural context that includes religious perceptions about the power, life, order, and redemptive unity of nature These religious perceptions are most 31 I want to try to show that although faith goes beyond what is logically demonstrable—and what worthwhile view of reality does not?—yet it is capable of rational motivation...

...REALITY, AND THE SACRED The Nexus of Science and Religion Langdon Gilkey Fortress Press, $18, 266 pp Chet Roymo There is akind of "God-shaped hole in many people's lives," says John Polkinghorne And he's right, at least about there being a hole in our lives As we approach the end of the scientific century, many educated people in the Western world long wistfully for something akin to traditional religious faith As Polkinghorne says, they can neither accept the idea of God nor quite leave it alone This longing is evidenced by an avalanche of books by scientists interested m matters theological, and by theologians interested in science These books tumble prodigiously into that hole in our lives, with no sign of filling it...

...Langdon Gilkey Nature, Reality, and the Sacred...

...Alas, the bottom-up evidence for the Virgin Birth is weaker than for cold fusion Thus the yawning chasm between science and religion remains...

...More to the point, he nudges and tugs at the envelope of the hole to encompass the God of the Creed...

...Polkinghorne admits that "how we actually weigh that evidence will be influenced by the extent to which we can make sense of the notion of the Resurrection of Jesus within our general world view," and this is certainly true This is why, for example, the scientific community was (and remains) skeptical of the evidence for cold fusion...

...it simply does not mesh with the rest of what we have learned about nature...

...The central chapter of Polkinghorne's book is "Crucifixion and Resurrection," as these are the pivots upon which Christian faith turns As a professed "bottomup thinker," he looks at matters of historical evidence, admittedly sketchy and unreliable by scientific cntena, even sometimes contradictory "It seems to me entirely possible that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him," says Polkinghorne Well, yes, but to many contemporary intellectuals this will sound suspiciously like top-down thinking...

...Evidently, the hole is deep and capacious The shape of the hole is at issue, and to call it "God-shaped" begs the question, for the affliction of our times is that we have no satisfactory image of God that rests comfortably with what scientists have learned about the creation These two fine books move heaven and earth to replenish our longing for spiritual wholeness Langdon Gilkey is emeritus professor of theology at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago He confesses himself a scientific outsider, but is fully informed about contemporary scientific theones John Polkinghorne is a former professor of mathematical physics at Queen's College, Cambridge, and an ordained priest of the Church of England He is a scientific insider, and no slouch at theology...

...Science is our most dependable and accurate way of knowing the world, says Gilkey, indeed, it is the astonishing success of science that creates the present dilemma...

...What is required is a yet bolder fusion of scientific knowing and religious apprehension of the divine It remains to be seen if this can be accomplished without jettisoning the Nicene Creed ? 32: / have found [cosmologistsj Heinz Pagels, Carl Sagan, Steven Weinberg, Richard Dawkins, and John Barrow and Frank Tipler learned, intelligent, enthralling, and surprisingly charming...

...For example, Gilkey admits that in our present scientific understanding there are no spirits without bodily organisms, no minds without brains, but he does not face the thorny issue of what this means for the essential Christian notions of resurrection and eternal life, or the personhood of God At the end, he wntes "God is, therefore, the name for that unlimited reality spanning the entire ordered past and the entire open future, uniting into an ongoing order achieved actuality, on the one hand, with the open possibility of the novel future, on the other, uniting destiny from the past with freedom in and for the future...

...Several times, for example, he draws attention to "the immense gap between neural activity and perceiving a patch of pink," thereby supposedly carving out a place for something akin to soul or spirit...

...He takes as his chapter subtitle phrases from the Nicene Creed, and doesn't flinch from "On the third day he rose again," or even "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come " These chapters were originally presented as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh for 1993-94...

...It is not clear to this reviewer that the gap is as immense as Polkinghorne says, Apple's new Personal Digital Assistant (called Newton) does a fairly adequate job converting my handwntten scrawl (more subtle than a patch of pink) into computer commands, and the chips in this machine are not remotely as complex as the neural webs in my brain However, on the whole, Polkinghorne steers a marvelously adept course between the Scylla of top-down theology and the Charybdis of naive scientism To fit the God of Moses and Jesus into the hole in our lives, he rounds off some projecting comers (for example, he says that God is rightly called Father, but not in the narrowly masculine or patriarchal sense...

...They appear (to the layperson) to know exactly what they are talking abouteven if much of it remains incomprehensible to me....What I did find, however, is that none of these cosmologists seems to be conscious of the important epistemological and metaphysical problems that inevitably hover in the background of their work...

...There is nothing wrong with this sentence, except that it provides little hope for the continued vitality of traditional faiths Further, it is the kind of flabby language that will evoke groans from scientists, who will prefer a more graspable referent for the word "God " John Polkinghorne has a more ambitious agenda- To discover if "the strange and exciting claims of orthodox Christianity are tenable in a scientific age...

...John Polkin^orne The Faith of a Physicist vividly experienced in archaic religions, argues Gilkey, and it is here that his image of God begins to collapse into a vague, even pantheistic, notion of cosmic mystery Such a notion will satisfy many contemporary scientists and intellectuals, but it is a tottery foundation for Christian faith...

...Gilkey has wntten extensively on issues of science andrehgion, his writings constitute a scholarly counterpart of our culture's quest for spiritual and intellectual wholeness Nature, Reality, and the Sacred is probably not his last word on the subject, but that is its strength Gilkey' s humility in the face of large issues is reassuring...

...Christians do not have to close their minds, nor are they faced with the dilemma of having to choose between ancient faith and modern knowledge...