Arthur Peacocke - Paths From Science Towards God

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PATHS FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD

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This ebook edition published in 2013

Arthur Peacocke 2001

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ISBN 9781851682454

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To
Peter, David and Rachel

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

I n an overview of this kind I have inevitably drawn on and modified material of mine given as lectures and in three papers in the volumes resulting from the conferences convened in 1993, 1996 and 1998, by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California, on the general theme of Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. The lectures include: the Idreos Lectures at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, May 1997; Science and Religion: The Challenges and Possibilities for Western Monotheism (Christianity) at the conference on Science and the Spiritual Quest, Berkeley, June 1998; Nature as Sacrament at the conference on Science, Ethics and Society, Edinburgh, October 1998; Science and the Future of Theology some critical issues at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, April 1999 (published in a fuller version in Zygon, 35, 2000, pp. 11940); and The Challenge and Stimulus of Evolution to Theology at a course at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 1999 (published as Biology and a Theology of Evolution in Zygon, 34, 1999, pp. 695712).

I have learnt an immense amount from the conferences mentioned and, in particular, from the continuing seminars of the Ian Ramsey Centre (for the interdisciplinary study of religious beliefs in relation to the sciences, including medicine), Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford. I am also especially indebted to Sir David Lumsden and Mr Dennis Trevelyan, CB, for being percipient readers of the manuscript, in the preparation of which I am grateful for the invaluable assistance of Mrs E. Parker.

).

I n any enterprise that has been underway for some time, there comes a point at which it is wise to stand back a little and view where one is and how one got there. I have been thinking about the relation of the scientific worldview to Christian belief ever since my school days in the 1940s, when the lively forum of the sixth form of Watford Grammar School resounded in disputes about Darwinism and the book of Genesis. A subsequent, all-consuming scientific career, in which, as a physical biochemist, I was privileged to be involved with those discovering the structure of DNA and to follow up the physico-chemical ramifications of that fascinating structure, did not entirely suppress the search for wider meanings the traditional concern of religion. I have recounted elsewhere the relation of science to religion in general, and to Christianity in particular.

There had fortunately, in England, been a succession of outstanding people who had kept alive an intelligent, open, yet integrating approach to this relation. Major figures then were the Anglican Charles Raven, the public relation between science and theology had lapsed into a kind of uneasy truce. Across the Atlantic, Ralph Burhoe in Chicago had nurtured the debate since the 1950s, in the Institute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), the Center for Advanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and other associated activities, notably from 1966 onwards in the pages of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.

It was in the 1950s and early 1960s that my interest in this interaction quickened and I began, while still a full-time scientist, to develop my own approach, eventually published as Science and the Christian Experiment. was published and began to open up theological thinking in the USA towards taking account of the impressive scientific worldview that had been developing. This process appears to have been inhibited in the USA after the Scopes Trial, concerning evolution, in 1925. By the 1960s the truce in the USA between science and theology was even more uneasy than in Britain, it would seem.

However, thirty years later the whole scene has been transformed. Meetings, papers, books and new journals concerned with the interaction of science and theology and science and religion proliferate. The pressure has mounted to find meaning in a universe opened up by cosmology and astrophysics, and in an evolutionary process that has highlighted the significance of genetics, and so of DNA in shaping human nature. Who could have imagined thirty years ago that the hot big bang of cosmologists and astrophysicists and the DNA of molecular biologists would become household words? Yet thus it is and scientists, philosophers and theologians (and many who are combinations of these) have been stimulated to make great efforts in this field, in many cases generously assisted by the John Templeton Foundation, which has made this interaction a particular concern.

For myself nearly thirty years after taking the plunge from a full-time scientific career into the turbulent stream of science-and-religion this seems an appropriate point at which to survey where we are in our explorations from the world of science towards God.

There are particular issues about which I have written in the past that I need to revisit, since the discussions about them have led to clarifications and I would like to fine-tune what I have written elsewhere, sparing the non-scientific and non-theological reader the more technical details of the academic debates. I also want to offer the general reader a broad perspective on where lines of investigation have proved to be dead ends and where I think other lines promise to be more fruitful. So I hope the book will prove to be a useful overview and judgement on the field of science-and-theology by one who has been much involved in its explosive and dynamic growth over the last thirty years.