the more we see how inextricably interlinked all these things are and that there is a dark side as well as a light side to what is going on. That is a small hope, a small help, in relation to what is going on.
I always finish what I have to say, and the conversation will be the most interesting part of the evening. If you are totally convinced by everything I have said this evening, it would have led you no more than to a picture of God as the great mathematician or the cosmic architect. It has been a limited form of inquiry, and there is still much more that one might ask about the nature of God and much more that one might seek to learn about the nature of God; that will have to be found in other forms of human experience. A very important aspect of belief in God is that not only is there a Being who is the Creator of the world, but also this Being is worthy of worship, and I just indicate with a tiniest sketch how I would approach that issue.
I am deeply impressed by the existence of value in the world— something that science directly does not take into account. But our physical world, of which we are a part, is shot through with value, with beauty. For example, music is very interesting. Suppose you ask a scientist as a scientist to tell you all he or she can about music. They will say, “It is neuro-response— neurons firing away to the impact of vibrations in the air hitting the eardrum,” and, of course, that is true and, of course, in its way, it is worth knowing. However, it hardly tells you all you might want to know about the deep mystery of music. Science trolls experience with a very coarse-grained net, and the fact that these vibrations in the air somehow are able to speak to us— and, I believe, speak truly to us of a timeless beauty— is a very striking thing about the world.
Similarly, I think we have moral knowledge of a surer kind than any that we possess. I do not, for a minute, believe that our conviction that torturing children is wrong is either some kind of curious, disguised genetic strategy or just a convention of our society. Our tribe just happens to choose not to torture children. It is a fact about the world that torturing children is wrong. We have moral laws. Where do these value-laden things come from? I think they come from God, actually. Just as I think that the wonderful order of the world and the fruitfulness of cosmic history are reflections of the mind and purpose of the Creator, so I think that our ethical intuitions, our intimations of God’s good and perfect will, and our aesthetic experiences are a sharing in the Creator’s joy in creation.
For me, theistic belief ties together all these things in a way that is deeply satisfying and intellectually coherent, and then there would be many other questions still remaining. Even if there is such a God worthy of worship, does that God care for you and me? That is a question I could not answer without looking into taking the risk both of commitment and ambiguity and looking into personal experience. For me, that would mean looking into my Christian encounter with the person and reality of Christ. That is a subject for another discussion.
Here I am. I stand before you as somebody who is both a physicist and a priest. I am grateful for both of those things, and I want to be two-eyed. I want to look with the eye of science on the world, and I want to look with the eye of my Christianity on the world. The binocular vision those give me enables me to see and understand more than I would be able to with either of them on their own.
But it would be nice to know what you think about these things, and I think the time has come to let you have a go. So, over to you.
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
