Eyre Lines

In the Open and Relational Theology reading group I’ve been following, we’ve arrived at John Polkinghorne, who has the distinction of being a brilliant particle physicist, a knight of the realm and a priest in the Anglican communion. I feel considerable fellow-feeling with him, as I did my BSc in Theoretical Physics many years ago and, like Polkinghorne, decided that most physicists had their good ideas in their teens or 20s, and I was probably not going to have any more really good ideas, so I changed direction – in my case, to law. I was never in Polkinghorne’s class as a thinker, though, and part of my decision was based on the realisation that I probably didn’t have the instinctive flair for mathematics which would have potentially carried those ideas I had had through to being useful scientific work. After 30 years practising law, again like Polkinghorne I’ve turned to theology (we also share a faith, in both our cases uncomfortably coexisting with a scientific rationalist), and to writing small books on limited topics – but again, I’m comparing my one published book so far to his massive oeuvre…

We’re looking at selected chapters from “The Polkinghorne Reader” edited by Tom Oord, the first of which deals with creation. Polkinghorne gives an account of the first 14 billion years or so in scientific terms in a couple of pages, and then comments “Of course, the first thing to say about that discourse is that theology is concerned with ontological origin and not with temporal beginning. The idea of creation has no special stake in a datable start to the universe. If Hawking is right, and quantum effects mean that the cosmos as we know it is like a kind of fuzzy spacetime egg, without a singular point at which it all began, that is scientifically very interesting, but theologically insignificant. When he poses the question, “But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary, or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” it would be theologically naive to give any answer other than: “Every place—as the sustainer of the self-contained spacetime egg and as the ordainer of its quantum laws.” God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in boundaries. Creation is not something he did fifteen billion years ago, but it is something that he is doing now.”

Unfortunately, it isn’t particularly clear to me that the “spacetime egg” needs sustaining or that the laws governing it’s behaviour (to which scientific laws hopefully approximate increasingly closely) need ordaining. Tripp and Tom talk in their discussion about Polkinghorne being a realist, which they say most scientists are (i.e. what we discover in science has some correspondence to what is really there, i.e. ontology). I don’t feel able to go quite that far myself. Certainly I think that the models of reality we create through science have some similarity with what is really there; they have to, as they have immense predictive power for how reality is going to behave, but the best I can say is that they are approximations to reality, hopefully closer and closer approximations. I have a lurking suspicion that like all asymptotic functions, the approximation can never reach exact duplication.

He clearly thinks, however, that revelation can tell us about ontology, and goes on to insist that the Christian doctrine is of a God separate from reality who creates something distinct from Godsself; he wants to avoid panentheism. I’m a mystic; I experience God as being radically immanent and therefore not reasonably distinct from creation, and the only really amenable god-concept I can find to express that experience is panentheism (though pantheism, which would be an immanent God with no transcendent remainder, is not something my experience can entirely rule out). He really wants to preserve a doctrine of “creation ex nihilo”, and possibly a Moltmanian withdrawing of God in order to make a space separate from God in which creation can occur (something which is absolutely not consistent with my experience, though I do find value in the concept of kenosis in relation to creation). I don’t see the need to do that; I don’t read Genesis 1 as involving creation ex nihilo in any event, and generally reject the arguments of Platonists and Aristoteleans which lead to that, not being a member of either camp.

He also seems wedded to the preservation of God’s power (which is admittedly severely curtailed by, for instance, Process thought); personally I think the concept of omnipotence is a “theological mistake” following Charles Hartshorne’s argument on the subject. I would point out, however, that in a panentheistic conception of God, all the power which exists is God’s power, without the need for that to be infinite (a determination which I argue we are incapable of making as we cannot observe infinity, merely intuit it – and I think intuit wrongly from the astonishingly large).

Like Polkinghorne, I consider speculation about the universe emerging from a quantum vacuum (which would not, as he comments, be “nihilo” but might well be “tohu wabohu” – without form and void) to be pointless. However, I can’t muster the confidence he shows in revelation (even if “ex nihilo” were what was revealed, which I don’t think is the case). If the mathematics of cosmology is right, there is no “outside” to the universe in which there might be a quantum vacuum, but there is also no “before” to found an act of creation either. T=0 is an absolute limit, and the very concept of “creation” demands that first there not be something and then that there be something – and without a “before”, the term has no meaning. Though my own (pointless) speculation might be that there could be a timelike dimension in which a “before-like” state might be thought to have existed – but such a dimension is one which we cannot observe and have, it seems, no need of in order to explain anything else in the universe, so probably doesn’t exist.

The second chapter being discussed is “Providence”. Polkinghorne rejects Cartesian mind-body dualism in favour of what he describes as “dual aspect monism”, arguing that what is has physical and mental poles, while being one thing at root. This is, I suppose, a form of panpsychism. I have major problems thinking about what it might be to be a bat, without trying to think what it might be to be, say, a single cell (whether an organism in its own right or part of a larger whole) a rock or, ultimately, an electron. Is that a possibility, I wonder? Can an energy probability density have a mindlike quality? I can’t see that, myself – it would be slightly easier to conceive of it having “experience”. He does, on the back of that, seem to at least toy with the idea of emergence – that properties can be seen at higher levels of organisation which could not be predicted from a completely reductionist examination of the individual elements involved (i.e. the idea that physics is not actually all there is, with chemistry, biology and psychology being progressively less exact and more wooly representations of phenomena which can all be explained by physics). I agree with that, which produces the odd phenomenon of two physicists agreeing that physics is not the be-all and end-all…

I have huge sympathy for his argument that there could, just possibly, still be direct divine agency at work in the world via a “tweak” of quantum states which, conceivably, could then via chaos theory have macroscopic effects. Rather than a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon and causing a storm in Europe, it’s more a matter of a single particle popping into existence out of the Dirac sea and having the same effect – OK, maybe via a butterfly. It’s one which I’ve entertained myself, as while I fall within the category mentioned by Tom who have no experience of anything which could be regarded as a miracle (or as supernatural intervention) as such, I do have that first mystical experience, which felt as if it was given to or imposed on me. I would really like to think that there were circumstances in which God qua God (and not as that which underlies everything) could act. Indeed, frankly from my perspective, that’s pretty much the only way I can see Tripp’s line that God creates novel possibilities all the time happening. But around 99% of my brain says that that is wishful thinking.

The trouble is, anything of this kind seems to me to contravene Tom Oord’s “not even once” principle, in that even one intervention by God would negate openness. I’m entirely unconvinced that Polkinghorne’s “top down” provision of information can get round this problem – why, for example, does God not provide people on the brink of committing some dastardly act with the full knowledge (including empathetic knowledge) of the consequences of that act?

That said, Polkinghorne talks of “strange attractors”, and it seems to me that memes might provide some such strange attractor as a “top down” causation. Memes are, of course, human creations, but we have to assent to following as well as creating memes. “Jesus is Lord”, for instance, is a statement which in part effects and instantiates the lordship of which it talks, given that rule is always ultimately by consent.

When he talks of prayer, I can follow on from the previous paragraph and regard prayer as aligning ourselves with the God-meme. I have also in the past speculated that prayer might release in us capabilities which were not otherwise accessible. Certainly, prayer does release in us a reflective knowledge of our own desires, and possibly even those desires which are normally hidden from us. Mainly, though, for me, the point of prayer is in the last line of anything I pray “nevertheless, Lord, not my will but yours be done” (or, more briefly “whatever, boss”).

The “not even once” principle, however, seems to me to negate any possibility of the gross physical miracles he discusses, even with Lewis’ caveat that they only occur at pivotal moments. To that, I enquire “And the holocaust?”

The final essay which the group is considering is about time.  Polkinghorne seems to have something of the problem with time which bedevils me, though he doesn’t ascribe it to the same source – in my case, it stems from the fact that time appears in all cases except in mystical experience to flow ineluctably (albeit, as Polkinghorne notes, not necessarily regularly in the case of special relativity, where time passes differently depending on the speed of ones motion), while the mystical experience tends to yield a strong sense of atemporality. I would have been happy with his final conclusion that everything is subject to time were it not for that mystical intuition. Having read Hartsthorne, the attribution of any infinite aspect to God seems to me to be unwarranted, quite apart from my own thought that it is inevitably unobservable.

I’m not particularly encouraged by his note that simultaneity or the lack of it is a judgment performed in all cases after the event as negating the idea that, at root, all exists simultaneously anyhow, nor by his use of the concept of a “light cone” (which is a three-dimensional diagram representing a four-dimensional space, indicating all those places from which light could by now have reached us).  Actually, the light-cone diagram illustrates one of the huge problems of talking about time, possibly whether as a physicist or not – it represents a time dimension by a space dimension, and space dimensions lack any “arrow of time”; the mathematics used does not yield any directionality, and that has to be imposed, commonly by adding the principle of entropy. In the mathematics of space-time, everything is reversible, and “things fall apart” is just not true – they might just as well spontaneously come together. All the representations we come up with fall into that trap, including Feynman diagrams. We think we are explaining something by saying that particles “move along” the lines of the diagram, but the very concept of “move along” already has time embedded in it. Polkinghorne, indeed, suggests that Physics lacks a concept of “now” – I would suggest that what it really lacks is a concept of anything else but “now”.

He also suggests that the concept of causality is not the same as that of time. While I would agree that far, the concept of causality likewise has time implicit in it – a cause now produces an effect at a later stage (or, if we were talking about teleology or “final cause”, a cause now is explained by an intention at an earlier stage). I don’t think he has managed to bypass the problem of time…

It is always interesting to see another physicist grappling with these concepts, but at the end I arrive at a quotation I once saw ascribed to Augustine but cannot now find an origin for, along the lines of “I know what time is, but when you ask me, I don’t”.