paths from science towards god the end of all our exploring

PATHS FROMSCIENCE

TOWARDSGOD

The End of All Our Exploring

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PATHS FROMSCIENCE

TOWARDSGOD

The End of All Our Exploring

A RT H U R P E AC O C K E

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PATHS FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD

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NL08

To

Peter, David and Rachel

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We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

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Contents

Acknowledgements xiPreface xiii

Prologue: Genesis for the third millennium 1

PART I: THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN THENEW WORLD OF SCIENCE

1 The contemporary challenge of science to 5religious beliefs

The ‘two cultures’ and the dominance of science 5The spiritual life of scientists 6The rise of science 9The forging of Christian belief through past challenges 12The challenge of the scientific culture to religion today 15

2 Science and the future of theology 18

The intellectual reputations of science and theology 18Science withstands the postmodernist critique 22Evolution and human rationality 24Reasonableness through inference to the best 26

explanationTheology at the crossroads 30

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PART II: EXPLORING FROM SCIENCE TOWARDS GOD:NEW VISTAS, CHALLENGES AND QUESTIONS

3 The world as it is 39

That the world is 39God and time 43The world: one and many 48Whole–part influences in the world 51The flow of information in the world 53The world-as-a-whole: a System-of-systems 54A lawlike world – no intervention 56A world containing inherently unpredictable events 58Brains, minds and persons in the world 59Communication between persons in the world 62

4 The world in process 65

The epic of evolution 65The physical origin of the universe 67The origin of life 68The anthropic principle 70The duration of evolution 72The mechanism of biological evolution – natural 73

selectionThe process of chance and law (necessity) 75The emergence of humanity 78Human behaviour 79Trends and directions in evolution? 81The ubiquity of pain, suffering and death 83The evolution of life and our exploration towards God 84Evolution: a risky process? 88

5 God’s interaction with the world 91

The problem 91Predictability and causality 95‘Chaotic’ systems and divine action 99Quantum events and divine action 104

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Whole–part influence and God’s interaction with 108the world

God as ‘personal agent’ in the world 114

6 The sound of sheer silence 116

God, human experience and revelation 117How does God communicate with humanity? 121

PART III: THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING

7 An open theology 129

8 ‘In him we live and move and have our being’ 135

Immanence: a theistic naturalism 135Panentheism 138

9 The world as sacrament 144

The instrumental and symbolic relation of God and 144humanity to the world

The world as an instrument of God’s purposes 145The world as a symbol of God’s purposes 146A congruence between the scientific and sacramental 148

perspectives

10 Arriving where we started 154

The Wisdom of God 154The Word, the Logos, of God 158The uncreated energies of God 160

11 Knowing the place for the first time 163

Vistas of the end? 163A global perspective 168

Epilogue 172Appendix: A contemporary Christian understanding of sacrament 175

Contents ix

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Notes 177Glossary 185Supplementary reading 188Index 193

x Contents

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Acknowledgements

In an overview of this kind I have inevitably drawn on and modifiedmaterial of mine given as lectures and in three papers in the

volumes† resulting from the conferences convened in 1993, 1996 and1998, by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology andthe Natural Sciences, Berkeley, California, on the general theme of‘Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action’.† The lectures include: theIdreos Lectures at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, May 1997;‘Science and Religion: The Challenges and Possibilities for WesternMonotheism (Christianity)’ at the conference on ‘Science and theSpiritual Quest’, Berkeley, June 1998; ‘Nature as Sacrament’ at theconference on ‘Science, Ethics and Society’, Edinburgh, October1998; ‘Science and the Future of Theology – some critical issues’ atthe Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton, New Jersey, April1999 (published in a fuller version in Zygon, 35, 2000, pp. 119–40);and ‘The Challenge and Stimulus of Evolution to Theology’ at acourse at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, April 1999(published as ‘Biology and a Theology of Evolution’ in Zygon, 34,1999, pp. 695–712).

I have learnt an immense amount from the conferencesmentioned and, in particular, from the continuing seminars of the IanRamsey Centre (for the interdisciplinary study of religious beliefs inrelation to the sciences, including medicine), Faculty of Theology,

xi† See ‘Supplementary Reading’ (p.191).

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University of Oxford. I am also especially indebted to Sir DavidLumsden and Mr Dennis Trevelyan, CB, for being percipient readersof the manuscript, in the preparation of which I am grateful for theinvaluable assistance of Mrs E. Parker.

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Preface

In any enterprise that has been underway for some time, therecomes 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 therelation of the scientific worldview to Christian belief ever since myschool days in the 1940s, when the lively forum of the sixth form ofWatford Grammar School resounded in disputes about Darwinismand the book of Genesis. A subsequent, all-consuming scientificcareer, in which, as a physical biochemist, I was privileged to beinvolved with those discovering the structure of DNA and to followup the physico-chemical ramifications of that fascinating structure,did not entirely suppress the search for wider meanings – the tradi-tional concern of religion. I have recounted elsewhere1 some of theways and byways into which this parallel interest led me until, nearlythirty years ago, I found myself in a position, as Dean of ClareCollege, Cambridge, to study in depth2 the relation of science toreligion in general, and to Christianity in particular.

There had fortunately, in England, been a succession ofoutstanding people who had kept alive an intelligent, open, yet inte-grating approach to this relation. Major figures then were theAnglican Charles Raven,3 a former Regius Professor of Divinity inCambridge and a keen naturalist, and the Methodist layman CharlesCoulson,4 eventually Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in Oxford

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and a superb exponent of quantum chemistry. Other figures, too,kept the flame alive – such as G.D. Yarnold,5 A.F. Smethurst,6 E.Mascall7 – so that a fruitful interaction between science and theologycontinued among thinking Christians. But it was certainly true by theearly 1960s, at least in Britain, that, as John Habgood noted inSoundings,8 the public relation between science and theology hadlapsed into a kind of ‘uneasy truce’. Across the Atlantic, RalphBurhoe in Chicago had nurtured the debate since the 1950s, in theInstitute for Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS), the Center forAdvanced Study in Religion and Science (CASIRAS) and other asso-ciated 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 inter-action quickened and I began, while still a full-time scientist, to developmy own approach, eventually published as Science and the ChristianExperiment.9 While I was writing this work, Ian Barbour’s Issues inScience and Religion10 was published and began to open up theologicalthinking in the USA towards taking account of the impressive scientificworldview that had been developing. This process appears to have beeninhibited in the USA after the Scopes Trial, concerning evolution, in1925. By the 1960s the truce in the USA between science and theologywas even more uneasy than in Britain, it would seem.

However, thirty years later the whole scene has been trans-formed. Meetings, papers, books and new journals concerned withthe interaction of ‘science and theology’ and ‘science and religion’proliferate. The pressure has mounted to find meaning in a universeopened up by cosmology and astrophysics, and in an evolutionaryprocess that has highlighted the significance of genetics, and so ofDNA in shaping human nature. Who could have imagined thirtyyears ago that the ‘hot big bang’ of cosmologists and astrophysicistsand the ‘DNA’ of molecular biologists would become householdwords? Yet thus it is and scientists, philosophers and theologians(and many who are combinations of these) have been stimulated tomake great efforts in this field, in many cases generously assisted bythe John Templeton Foundation, which has made this interaction aparticular concern.

For myself – nearly thirty years after taking the plunge from a full-time scientific career into the turbulent stream of science-and-religion

xiv Preface

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– this seems an appropriate point at which to survey where we are inour explorations from the world of science towards God.

There are particular issues11 about which I have written in thepast that I need to revisit, since the discussions about them have ledto clarifications and I would like to fine-tune what I have writtenelsewhere, sparing the non-scientific and non-theological reader themore technical details of the academic debates. I also want to offerthe general reader a broad perspective on where lines of investigationhave proved to be dead ends and where I think other lines promise tobe more fruitful. So I hope the book will prove to be a usefuloverview and judgement on the field of science-and-theology by onewho has been much involved in its explosive and dynamic growthover the last thirty years.

However, this interaction between science and theology is notoccurring in a vacuum. It has enormous implications for the way religious beliefs are established and for judging which of them arecredible today. So in the first part of this book the current state oftheology is examined – and found wanting – and a plea is made forthe new directions that the theological enterprise must take if it is tomeet the highest intellectual standards prevailing in Western culture.This also has repercussions for religion in general – not just fortheology, which is but the rigorous intellectual assessment of thegrounds and nature of the content of widespread religious belief.

The religious scene in Western Europe, and especially in Britain,cannot be regarded as encouraging. It seems that more and morepeople are believing but not belonging. That is, they have some kindof belief in God as creator but it is ill-formulated and plays little partin their public lives and they are not attached overtly to the institu-tions of organised religion. Moreover, a growing proportion of thosewho are members of, at least, the Christian churches in Britainincreasingly adhere to very conservative forms of Christianity, both‘evangelical’ and ‘catholic’. The prime casualty in this developmentwithin the churches is truth that is public, accessible to all, based onreason reflecting on experience – and not on the supposed infallibleauthority of book, church or any individual. In my view what isperennially ‘indefectible’ – to use the technical theological word fornot being liable to failure, defect or decay – is not so much theChurch, as so much ecclesiology has stated, but public truth.

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There is little doubt in my mind that, whatever other sociologicalpressures may be at work in Western Europe (and among Americanintellectuals), it is the lack of credibility of what people perceive to beChristian belief that has undermined it. I say ‘perceive to be’ becausethere are many misconceptions prevailing about what constitutesChristian belief today. It has recently been argued,12 for example,that there is a strong case for ‘treating Contemporary Christianity asa new religion or at least treating historical Christianity and contem-porary Christianity as two quite different religions’. In spite of thepersistence of many elements in the liturgies, many modern educatedChristians would be shocked by the general beliefs of 150 years ago– in eternal hell for unbelievers, in the literal interpretation of theBible, in a historical Fall of Adam and Eve just after the creation ofthe world six thousand years ago, in the death of Christ interpretedas propitiating the ‘wrath’ of God, in the historical Jesus as omnis-cient, etc. This is because the content of belief is not static, once forall ‘delivered to the Saints’, but is a dynamic corpus of ideas, beliefsand symbols which has historical continuity with the past but cantake quite new forms.

The broad aim of this book is to expound how science hasopened up fresh vistas on God for human perception and life. Allreligious thinking, and notably Christian theology, is challengedby these new vistas, which afford a unique opportunity to weldtogether the human search for meaning through religion and thehuman quest for intelligibility through science. ContemporaryWestern culture is, for historical reasons, dominated by science,which has many able communicators who are mostly antipathetic toreligion. However, scientists themselves are often involved in a spiritual quest, and Christian theology has historical grounds forwelcoming this contemporary challenge, for challenges in the pasthave been the stimulus to theology’s revivification.

The modes of inquiry that characterise the theological enterprisehave an unfavourable academic reputation compared with those ofscience, which has successfully withstood the critique of postmod-ernism. The results of applying rational criteria can also, it isargued, be vindicated by an evolutionary perspective. It thereforebehoves theology to attempt to satisfy the proper demand forreasonableness by inferring the best explanation of the variety of

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data available. In this book I make a preliminary examination of theimplications of this for theology.

With these considerations in mind, the paths from the world ofscience towards God are explored by examining the profound theo-logical repercussions of scientific perspectives on:

• the world as it is;• the world in process, that is, phases in the ‘epic of evolution’, and

its cost;• God’s interaction with the world and with humanity, especially

when this constitutes special divine action.

This exploration leads to the advocacy of an open theology seekingintegrating perceptions and thus to: a renewed stress on God’simmanence in the world and thence to a theistic naturalism andpanentheism; the perception of the world as sacramental; revisitingthe roots, ‘where we started’, of Judaeo-Christian concepts of theWisdom, Word (Logos) and Uncreated Energies of God; and areformulation of trinitarian understandings of our experience ofGod in a form open in principle to the insights of other religions.The book ends with a hopeful epilogue.

Nicholas Ferrar had been a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, andone of my great experiences at that college was, once a year, to gowith students to Little Gidding, where he had founded a Christianlay community in the seventeeth century. There we conferred andthen celebrated the Eucharist in an unforgettable, evocative anddignified small chapel with the light of the setting sun streamingthrough its west door. The words of T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Giddingthereby acquired a new power in ‘the intersection of the timelessmoment’ in that place ‘where prayer had been valid’ which was‘England and nowhere. Never and always.’ There and then we learntthat the vortex of our discussions had a still centre to which we, withour variegated presuppositions, were drawn from many directions.That experience grounds my hope for the track followed here. Forscience is one of the major spurs goading believers in God into newpaths for expressing their beliefs and commitments. This work is anaccount of an exploration from the world of science towards Godwhich recognises that although the ride may be bumpy, the goal is in

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itself unchanged. That end is simply, as at Little Gidding, God’s ownself. If indeed God is at all, the honest pursuit of truth cannot butlead to God. In the last part of the book, I try to point to how the‘end of all our exploring’ from the world of science is indeed the Godof the Abrahamic and Judaeo-Christian tradition, the place ‘wherewe started’, and that we can know that God, that place, ‘for the firsttime’ in a new way.

That is my hope for the reader, too.

Arthur Peacocke

Note

Words (or their cognates) that appear in the glossary have been set inbold type when they are first mentioned in the text.

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There was God. And God was All-That-Was. God’s Love over-flowed and God said, ‘Let Other be. And let it have the capacity tobecome what it might be, making it make itself – and let it explore itspotentialities.’

And there was Other in God, a field of energy, vibrating energy –but no matter, space, time or form. Obeying its given laws and withone intensely hot surge of energy – a hot big bang – this Otherexploded as the Universe from a point twelve or so billion years agoin our time, thereby making space.

Vibrating fundamental particles appeared, expanded andexpanded, and cooled into clouds of gas, bathed in radiant light. Stillthe universe went on expanding and condensing into swirlingwhirlpools of matter and light – a billion galaxies.

Five billion years ago, one star in one galaxy – our Sun – becamesurrounded by matter as planets. One of them was our Earth. OnEarth, the assembly of atoms and the temperature became just right toallow water and solid rock to form. Continents and mountains grewand in some deep wet crevice, or pool, or deep in the sea, just over threebillion years ago some molecules became large and complex enough tomake copies of themselves and became the first specks of life.

Life multiplied in the seas, diversifying and becoming more andmore complex. Five hundred million years ago, creatures with solid

Prologue: Genesis for the third

millennium

1

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skeletons – the vertebrates – appeared. Algae in the sea and greenplants on land changed the atmosphere by making oxygen. Then threehundred million years ago, certain fish learned to crawl from the seaand live on the edge of land, breathing that oxygen from the air.

Now life burst into many forms – reptiles, mammals (anddinosaurs) on land – reptiles and birds in the air. Over millions ofyears the mammals developed complex brains that enabled them tolearn. Among these were creatures who lived in trees. From theseour first ancestors derived and then, only forty thousand years ago,the first men and women appeared. They began to know aboutthemselves and what they were doing – they were not onlyconscious but also self-conscious. The first word, the first laughwere heard. The first paintings were made. The first sense of adestiny beyond – with the first signs of hope, for these people buriedtheir dead with ritual. The first prayers were made to the One whomade All-That-Is and All-That-Is-Becoming – the first experiencesof goodness, beauty and truth – but also of their opposites, forhuman beings were free.

2 Prologue: Genesis for the third millennium

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PART I:

THE SPIRITUAL QUEST

IN THE NEW WORLD

OF SCIENCE

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The ‘two cultures’ and the dominance of science

It is now over forty years since C.P. Snow, the novelist and theoreticalphysicist, delivered his broadside at contemporary English-speakingculture in his Rede Lecture on ‘The Two Cultures and the ScientificRevolution’. It exploded on to the cultural scene and the reverbera-tions continue, and the ‘two cultures’ became part of the stock-in-trade of intellectual discourse. The polarisation persists: a 1999radio debate (BBC Radio 4, 13 March) among a select audience ofacademics resulted in a vote for the motion that ‘This house believesthat forty years after C.P. Snow’s famous lecture, Britain is still anation of two cultures’.

Nevertheless, some of the dividing walls between the scientific andliterary cultures have been breached, or at least impaired. We havehad plays, successful in both the UK and the USA, such as Arcadia byTom Stoppard, invoking chaos theory, and Copenhagen by MichaelFrayn, on the historical origins of the Heisenberg uncertainty prin-ciple, both taking seriously the implications of scientific ideas. Butthese are notable exceptions and recent years have witnessed a newphenomenon – the rise of the guru-scientists as popular, oftenpolemical, communicators. They are calling the tunes in the intel-lectual world and so, more diffusely, among the general public.

1

The contemporary challenge of

science to relig ious beliefs

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In one sense, they have broken down the barriers between thetwo cultures, for they (among others, Peter Atkins, RichardDawkins and Susan Greenfield in the UK and Steven Pinker andStephen Gould in the USA) write with elegance and consummateskill and some of them with an informed knowledge of theEnglish-language literary tradition. Yet it is a notable feature ofmost, though not all, of these authors that their basic stance istinged with an all-consuming scientific imperialism that attributesto science the role of the only objective mentor and guide throughthe jungle of current problems concerning the nature and destinyof humanity.

This exaltation of science is thereby implicitly made at theexpense of the humanities, which include theology and religiousstudies. This demoting of theology is often not so much implicit asvituperatively explicit, for some go further in their denunciation ofChristian theology, denying even its legitimacy as a subject worthy ofserious pursuit in a contemporary university.

Ironically though, even if ‘science’ is popularly regarded ashaving somehow undermined ‘religion’, people have come to besuspicious of science itself and of apparently authoritative scientistspronouncing, for example, on the safety of beef with respect to BSE,of genetically modified (GM) foods and of experiments to test GMorganisms. Much of this suspicion is based on inadequate under-standing of the nature of scientific inquiry, and of its results.Nevertheless, it has caused a certain unsettling of the pedestal of self-pronounced guru-scientists in the eyes of the general public – whichadds to the cultural confusion of our times and catalyses, paradoxi-cally, the resort to esoteric and exotic, not to say superstitious,notions in the midst of an increasingly high-tech society.

The spiritual life of scientists

Much more significant, however, for our present purposes is thatnew voices have been heard from within the community of scienceitself, voices that challenge dismissive attitudes towards religion andtheology which are supposedly based on science. For in the last threedecades the dialogue between science and Christian theology, andincreasingly Islamic and Jewish theology, has intensified as thewritings of scientist-theologians have become widely dispersed, and

6 Paths from Science towards God

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numerous organisations and symposia devoted to this theme haveproliferated and new journals have begun to appear.

Hence the voice of science itself is not accurately represented bythe anti-theistic guru-scientists. Indeed it transpires from surveysthat in the USA, at least, some forty per cent of practising scientistshave theistic beliefs. In 1999, I attended a symposium in Berkeley,California, in which, before a public audience of more than threehundred, two dozen leading scientists related their professionalactivity as scientists to their own personal, spiritual quests. Theyincluded Muslims, Jews and Christians and some who woulddescribe themselves as agnostics. What was striking was a sharedsense of wonder about the natural world and their personal anec-dotes of their joy in scientific discovery. Commitment to excellencein science was clearly not for them inconsistent with commitmentto religion – even to highly specific traditions of belief and practice.They did not see their work as scientists as separate from their lifeas religious people, and they displayed an openness to new expe-rience, acknowledged the diversity of religious traditions andemphasised the beliefs they shared in common. For them, the scien-tific and religious quests were explorations into realities – twovocations that are intertwined, indivisible and mutually sustaining.

There was, moreover, no sign at this significant occasion of thearrogant ‘scientism’ which claims that the only knowledge availableto humanity is scientific or that scientific knowledge alone can satisfythe human quest for meaning. The speakers were very different incharacter, provenance, temperament, race and field of study, yet Ithink they would all have concurred with the humility of outlookexpressed by that arch-hammer of ecclesiastics and Darwin’s‘bulldog’, Thomas H. Huxley, in a letter to Charles Kingsley, theauthor and evangelical clergyman:

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner thegreat truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entiresurrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, beprepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humblywherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learnnothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since Iresolved at all risks to do this.1

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The scientists also echoed the wonder expressed by Fred Hoyle, then(perhaps still) a convinced agnostic, in the remarks with which heconcluded his broadcast lectures in 1950 on the nature of the universe:

When by patient enquiry we learn the answer to any problem, wealways find, both as a whole and in detail, that the answer thusrevealed is finer in concept and design than anything we could everhave arrived at by a random guess.2

The widespread and sympathetic reporting of that Berkeleysymposium in the national newspapers and weekly journals of theUSA gives grounds for hope that the misconception of the supposed‘warfare’ between science and religion is, at last, giving way to arecognition of their symbiotic role in the human quest for both intel-ligibility and meaning.

Yet for the last 150 years this has not been either the popular oracademic perception and is light-years away from that synthesis oftheology and natural philosophy which pervades that great epitomeof the Middle Ages, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante could depict thefigure of Virgil – the Latin poet he admired above all others and forhim the embodiment of human wisdom – as leading him throughHell and Purgatory to the very threshold of Heaven. Only there didhe have to be handed on to Beatrice, the embodiment of divineWisdom, to lead him to the ultimate beatific vision of the divineTrinity, of ‘The Love that moves the heaven and the other stars’.Today, science appears to most thinking people to represent thesurest and soundest form of human knowledge but is not widelyperceived as leading into the divine presence – even when its practi-tioners evince attitudes of reverence and even awe towards nature, asevidenced at the Berkeley symposium.

Given signs of some members of the scientific communitybecoming open to the spiritual dimensions of their work, has not thetime come for the Christian community, and those of other religions,to reflect more profoundly on the experience of nature, of the world3

that the sciences have opened up?In spite of the corrosion (corruption, in my view) of post-

modernist relativities, scientists and religious believers share acommon conviction that they are dealing with reality in theirrespective enterprises. Scientists would give up if they ceased to see


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themselves as discovering the structures and processes of nature, evenif only approximately – and worship and prayer would be vacuous ifthe God to whom they were directed were not regarded as real.

As we shall have cause to discuss later (p.23), the presuppositionsof what I say here will be ‘critically realist’ with respect to bothscience and theology. I think that both science and theology aim todepict reality, that they both do so in metaphorical language with theuse of models, and that their metaphors and models are revisablewithin the context of the continuous communities which havegenerated them. For it is also the aim of theology to tell as true astory as possible. Hence the religious quest must have intellectualintegrity and take into account the realities unveiled by twentieth-century science. These are, needless to say, markedly different fromthose understood by Dante, let alone those understood two to threemillennia ago when the Judaeo-Christian literature of the Biblewhich has so shaped our religious models and language wasassembled. Given the inevitable influence of historical context on theperceived relations between knowledge of nature and knowledge ofGod, between science and religion, it clearly behoves us to examinethe history of the rise of science to provide a better understanding oftheir relation.

The rise of science

One of the most significant periods in all human history was in thecenturies around 500 BCE, when, in the three distinct and culturallydisconnected areas of China, India and the West, there was a majorexpansion of human consciousness: in China, Confucius and Lao-tseand the rise of all the main schools of Chinese philosophy; in India,the Upanishads and Buddha; in Iran, Zarathrustra; in Palestine, theHebrew prophets; and, in Greece, the literature of Homer, the pre-Socratic philosophers, followed by the whole great legacy of classicalGreece to human culture.

In Ionia, the Greek colonists established a vigorous and hard-working culture, flexible and open to many influences – from Persiaand further east. It was a time of travel, migration of populations,breakdown of the old and rising of the new. It was in this milieu offluidity and change that science was born. The earliest scientificdocuments we possess that are in any degree complete are in the


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Greek language and were composed about 500 BCE. I say ‘scientific’because of the new quality of systematic, rational reflection whichthe Ionians brought to bear on their questions about the naturalworld, a quality that was distinctive and original and has remainedthe central characteristic of science ever since.

To appreciate what the Greeks did, imagine yourself as a Greekchild growing up in the seventh century BCE, that is, without any ofthe scientific knowledge we have today. What would you think werethe shape and size of the Earth? How would you map it? Whatwould you think of the lights that shine, by day or by night, far outof reach in the sky above? And what would you make of eclipses? Ifyou or others were ill, how should you treat them? We find Thales(born c. 625 BCE), asking the question ‘What is everything made of?’,– the first person, as far as we know, to look behind the infinitevariety of nature for some single principle to which it could bereduced and so made intelligible. His answer was that all things weremade out of water, which is by no means so silly if one thinks of itsall-pervasive presence in the natural world. It is significant that inthis search for unity behind the diversity of things the Ioniansrefrained from evoking any of the deities and mythologies of naturewhich are found in Homer and Hesiod.

Later, when science had moved westwards, the Pythagoreansdiscovered the significance of numbers but they were handicappedby the want of adequate instruments for experimental research andthey thought it vulgar to employ science for practical purposes. Yetwe see in their thinking brilliant anticipations of modern discoveriesand, as Sir Richard Livingstone has said,

[Their] real achievement ... was in the fact they wanted to discoverand that by some instinct they knew the way to set about it ... theystarted science on the right lines ... I am thinking of four qualities ...the desire to know ... the determination to find a rational expla-nation for phenomena ... open-mindedness and candour ... industryand observation.4

So science was born among the Greeks. But with the coming ofRoman dominance, although science continued, like other efflores-cences of the human spirit in history the flame began to flicker andgrow dim. From here the torch was handed on to the Muslim


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culture. Although having allegiance to a single monotheistic religion,followers of the Prophet incorporated many elements of Greek,Egyptian, Persian, Indian and other cultures to enrich their newlymade empires. Their language of discourse was always Arabic, suchwas their intense regard for its special qualities, but they came tocultivate what they called the ‘foreign sciences’ of philosophy,medicine, astronomy and the other natural sciences.

We in the West often forget that Muslim science lasted for nearlysix centuries – longer than modern science itself has existed. Only inabout 1100 CE did Europeans become seriously interested in thescience and philosophy of their Saracen enemies and they had tolearn all they could from them before they themselves were able tomake further advances. Hence Islam was midwife to the Greekmother of the modern, Western scientific outlook.

The reception in the West of Arab and Greek science laid thefoundation both of medieval natural philosophy and of theremarkable awakening in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tothe power of human reason to interpret natural phenomena, espe-cially in the form of mathematics when combined with experiment.It is well established historically that those involved in this devel-opment saw their activities as an outward expression of theirChristian belief. That belief led them to expect to observe orderlinessin a world given existence by a Creator God who transcends it and issupra-rational. Moreover, because that world was believed to becreated by the free act of God, the way that rationality was imprintedin it had to be discovered by experiment. The enterprise wasregarded, as Kepler famously said, as ‘thinking God’s thoughts afterhim’. Thus monotheistic Christian culture, like the Islam centuriesbefore, was an intellectually welcoming environment within whichthe natural sciences, as we now know them, could flourish.

From that origin in the West some four centuries ago has arisen themodern world in which science dominates intellectual culture – and, Ibelieve, will continue to do so in spite of postmodernist misgivings, forthe claim of the natural sciences to depict reality is continuously andpragmatically vindicated by their successful technological applications.That is enough, for most people, to maintain its position in any hier-archy of reliable knowledge (we shall return to this theme later,pp.22ff). As an intellectual enterprise, science is characterised by


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rigour, openness, flexibility, innovation, the welcoming of new insights,and a genuinely international, global community. In all of theserespects, its public image stands in marked, and usually unfavourable,contrast to that of religious communities, including Christian ones.These latter tend to be seen, if not as lethargic and supine, as closed,inflexible, unenterprising and immune to new insights, continuallyappealing to the past, to the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, andsocially divisive. So the Christian Churches have an uphill job tocommend themselves globally to a world aware of the vastness of newvistas and opportunities.

More particularly, there has been, in the West, at least,5 a collapsein the credibility of all religious beliefs, notably Christian ones, as theyare perceived as failing to meet the normal criteria of reasonableness,so strongly present in the practice of science, namely: fit with the data,internal coherence, comprehensiveness, fruitfulness and generalcogency. Yet spiritual hunger is endemic in our times – and attempts tosatisfy it lead to many aberrations in the ‘new religions’, the resurgenceof ‘paganism’ and ‘Earth cults’, and so on. Intellectual society seems tobe full of wistful agnostics who would like to be convinced that thereis indeed an Ultimate Reality to which they can relate but who are notconvinced by the claims of the monotheistic religions to be speaking ofreality. Thus all religions, and especially Christianity in the West, facenew challenges posed by the successful methodology of the sciencesand by the worldview it has generated. Such an intellectual challenge isnot new in the history of Christianity. It is worthwhile to recall in briefsome of the past perceived threats to its basic beliefs.

The forging of Christian belief through past challenges

Religion in general has been defined by Gerd Theissen as ‘a culturalsign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to anultimate reality’.6 Through its language, symbols, rituals, scriptures,art, music and architectural sign language, the Christian faith haspromised the fruition of human existence in profound and eternalrelation to the Ultimate Reality of God as manifested and madeeffectual in and by the teaching, life, death and resurrection of aparticular person, Jesus of Nazareth.

More than almost any other religion, Christianity has elaborateda complex conceptual system of beliefs to give intellectual coherence


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to its intuitions and practices. What is affirmed, how it is affirmedand what sort of metaphors are utilised to elaborate its system ofbeliefs have, much more than most Christians would admit, contin-ually changed – and sometimes with an abruptness comparable tothat of the paradigm shifts said to characterise the history of science.

In the two millennia of Christian history one can identify manytransitions induced by facing up to threatening challenges, thatgenerated a new vitality and relevance. In the very earliest days,recorded in the pages of the New Testament, St Paul faced the chal-lenge of taking the insights of the first Jewish followers of Jesus –claimed to be the hoped-for Messiah, the ‘Anointed One’ – into thewider Jewish diaspora (hence Paul’s struggles with and analyses of‘Law’ and ‘grace’). Then, as in the speech attributed to him atAthens, he entered the wider Hellenistic culture, an extension exem-plified also by the books attributed to ‘John’ in the New Testament.Paul’s journeys from Jerusalem to Athens and then to Romesymbolised a profound challenge to the faith and experience of theearly Jewish witnesses, which was magnificently surmounted,enabling Christianity to become the conduit, more than twocenturies later, of the religious impulses of the whole Roman Empire.

Christians then had to come to terms with the intellectual life ofthat Empire, expressed as it was in the sophisticated and philo-sophical terms of a modulated Hellenism. The Cappadocian Fathers(Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea)achieved this when they were able to articulate a system of Christianbeliefs consistent with and in terms of the most convincing, largelyNeoplatonic, philosophy of their day. They out-thought their oppo-nents both inside and outside the Christian church.

I have already mentioned another potentially traumatic chal-lenge, in the thirteenth century, to the received Christian faith –namely, the arrival in the West through the mediation of the Arabs ofgreat swaths of Greek literature. The works of Aristotle posed aparticular challenge with their comprehensive worldview arrived atby critical thinking. To this Albert the Great and his pupil ThomasAquinas responded so effectively that the latter’s intellectuallypowerful synthesis of faith and reason dominated the church formore than six centuries. It remains today an intellectual constructthat Christian philosophers ignore at their peril.


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Apart from certain famous contretemps, the emergence of modernnatural science in the seventeenth century was nurtured by its advo-cates and practitioners in a way that, as we have seen, they regardedas consistent with and a natural consequence of their general under-standing of nature as creation – that is, as being given existence by atranscendent Ultimate Reality, named ‘God’ in English.

However, the subsequent eighteenth century too readily inter-preted Newtonian science to imply a natural order that was so mech-anistic and clocklike that God was often relegated to the role of theoriginal Clockwinder. This concept of the absentee God of deismundermined the belief of Christians (and indeed of any adherents tothe Hebrew scriptures) in God as living and immanent in theprocesses of the world. In the nineteenth century, Darwin’s discoveryof the evolving nature of the biological world and of the role ofnatural selection entailed for some the final demise of a God nolonger needed to account for biological design, yet it also reinstatedthe idea of God as creating all the time through natural evolution. Asone Anglican theologian said in 1889, ‘Darwinism appeared, and,under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend.’7 Nevertheless,the supposed warfare between science and religion imprinted itselfon the popular mind in the English-speaking world, not least afterthe 1880s because purely legendary and unhistorical accounts of the1860 Oxford encounter between the Bishop of Oxford, SamuelWilberforce, and Thomas Henry Huxley were propagated.

An uneasy truce between science and the Christian religionprevailed thereafter, each preserving a demarcated field for itself. Ittook over a hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century,for it to become apparent to a number of thoughtful scientists whowere also Christian thinkers that the situation was not that simple.For them the whole relation of science to religious belief, inparticular to Christian belief, was ripe for reappraisal. In practicethis renewed dialogue between theology and science has taken placemainly in the academic world and has not had much impact on thegeneral public or even upon those in the pews. Current academicactivities include: the development of an increasingly sophisticatedliterature; the establishing of societies and academic centres devotedto these issues; the publication of international journals in the field;the organising of public lectures and a swarm of conferences and


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symposia; the funding of academic courses; and, at long last, thefunding of permanent academic posts in this field. Of all this, mostpeople, including many religious people, are largely unaware.

The challenge of the scientific culture to religion today

Our brief incursion into the history of Christian thought suggeststhat the meeting of intellectual challenges, painful though it may beat the time, in the long run reinvigorates Christian theology andthereby the Christian community at large. Today it is the scientificworldview that constitutes the challenge to received understandingsof nature, humanity and God – in a way that can be initially devast-ating yet is potentially creative. The credibility of all religions is atstake under the impact of: new understandings of the natural world,of the place of humanity in it and of the very nature of personhood;and – even more corrosively – the loss of respect for the intellectualintegrity of religious thinking in general and of Christian theology inparticular. The impact of science is a challenge primarily to theology,which is concerned with the articulation and justification of religiousassertions about God and about God’s relation to nature andhumanity. This will be the centre of our concerns here. Not that theapplications of science, especially at present the biological sciences,does not raise profound ethical issues and have implications for thepractice, norms and injunctions of religious communities – but thatwill not be the focus of this work.

Theology, like science, is a search for intelligibility but, unlikescience, it also seeks to meet the human need to discern meaningwhich has generated religion as a social phenomenon in all humansocieties. However, any meaning attributed to the existence andprocesses of nature and human society must rest for its justificationon the hard thinking required to render those phenomena intelli-gible. So I make no apology for concentrating here on theology. Thenature of the challenge of scientific perspectives to theology is wellillustrated by the vista of the cosmic process represented in thatGenesis for the third millennium which forms my Prologue. Thebackground assumptions of religious beliefs, notably those of theJudaeo-Christian tradition, concerning the creation of human life onthe Earth has been entirely replaced in the last 150 years by this newepic of evolution – and even more fundamental changes are


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imminent in our perceptions of human nature as the brain sciencesdelve into the physical basis of human mental capacities.

The Prologue expresses a theistic perspective on cosmic andbiological evolution but it has to be recognised that there is no easyroute from reflection on the natural world unveiled by the sciences toany account of the nature and attributes of God. This was indeed theaim of the ‘physico-theology’ of eighteenth-century English theolo-gians and of much ‘natural theology’ everywhere up to the end of thenineteenth century. It was thought possible to integrate science withwhat was claimed to be ‘revealed’ theology, a procedure going backat least to Aquinas. This aim has been frustrated in the last 150 yearsby the ambiguity of nature itself as a source of inference about Godand by questioning of the validity of claimed sources of divine reve-lation as a result of critical studies of the actual histories of religiouscommunities and their sacred literature.

Nevertheless, any exploration towards God can be based onlyon what we understand to be good grounds for reflection on natureand humanity – and the investigations of science provide the mostwidely accepted and justified basis in this regard. This is, of course,not the only exploratory route towards God – for the paths, amongothers, of aesthetic and mystical experience have been, and still are,those followed by many. But the inevitably subjective character ofsuch experiences makes them less accessible, and so morecontentious, as the basis of public knowledge, of which scientificknowledge is the outstanding exemplar. What characterises scienceis a method that is manifestly capable of producing reliable publicknowledge about the natural world, sufficient for prediction andcontrol and for producing coherent, comprehensive, conceptualinterpretations of that world. The mere existence of such a methodand of such a corpus of reliable knowledge resulting from it is achallenge to traditional religious attitudes. Moreover, suchauthority as the scientific community has – and this too is in markedcontrast to most religious communities – can always be called inquestion. Yet no individual scientist can ever repeat all past experi-ments, which have to be taken on trust. The scientific communityhas therefore a limited but never absolute authority. Can religionlearn to outgrow its reliance on claimed authorities and the popularimage of a God who acts and reveals by supernatural means – the


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‘laser beam’ God rightly caricatured by David Jenkins, formerBishop of Durham?

What can theology learn from the way in which science exploresthe natural world about how its own explorations towards Godmight be conducted? Would, should, this influence the way in whichtheology goes about its investigations in the future, not least in itsengagement with the content of the scientific worldview, so totallydifferent from its traditional presuppositions?


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The human quest for meaning cannot be satisfied without concur-rently pursuing that for intelligibility. Our intellectual, moral andspiritual capacities are not neatly separable into discrete compart-ments. Any meaning or significance we might find in the world hasto be based on the most reliable knowledge we possess of that worldand of human beings in it. The methods of science have revolu-tionised this quest for intelligibility with regard to nature andhumanity over the last 350 years, especially the last 150 years.Consequently, in our theological quest for meaning – in any explo-ration towards God – it would be wise for us to examine whatresources and methods have proved to be suitable for the scientificquest and to what extent they might be applicable to the theologicalone. This is imperative even before we consider the impact ontheology of the content of the worldview generated by science. Webegin with the disparity of intellectual esteem between science andtheology in recent decades and its implications.

The intellectual reputations of science and theology

The science-and-theology dialogue has been dominated recently bywhat I might call the ‘bridge’ model. Just as the Golden Gate bridgethrows an apparently frail, but actually immensely strong, bondbetween the solid rock of the land to the north and south of the sea

2

Science and the future of theology

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outlet of San Francisco Bay, so the interaction of science andtheology has been pictured as building a bridge between two solidestablished disciplines. Across the bridge, dialogue is conceived tooccur with the hope of achieving at least consonance and, maxi-mally, even integration. However, that picture represents only theChristian medieval enterprise of relating natural philosophy torevealed theology.

In those medieval times, be it noted, one had to change vehicleshalfway across, from ‘science’ to ‘religion’ as reason was left behindand the deliverances of a revealed faith took over. The Golden Gatebridge operates traffic in both directions, but the reverse route fromtheology to science was soon rendered impassable, from the point ofview of later scientists, by certain notorious interventions of theChurch in purely scientific matters. Since the Enlightenment, thisbridge building has proved to be hazardous, and the attempt hasoften been abandoned altogether. For although the foundations onthe science side of the gulf seemed solid rock enough to the modernmind, those on the theological side were regarded as but shiftingsand, having little solid rational basis.

For many decades now the Western intellectual world has notbeen convinced that theology can be engaged in with intellectualhonesty and integrity. Our unbelieving contemporaries have oftenbeen the ‘cultured despisers’ with whom Schleiermacher felt impelledto deal. There are also many wistful agnostics who respect Christianethics and the person of Jesus but also believe that the explicitly real-istic baggage of Christian affirmations can be dismissed as notreferring to any realities.

This deep alienation from religious belief of the key formers ofWestern culture in recent times has been almost lethal to aChristianity that has usually based its beliefs on authority of the form‘The Bible says’, ‘The Church says’, ‘The Magisterium says’, evensometimes ‘Theologians say’! Educated people know that suchauthoritarian claims are circular and cannot be justified because theycannot meet the demand for validation from any external, universallyaccepted viewpoint. One can no longer today appeal to what is said inthe Bible or in the teaching of the Church simply by asserting thatthey are ‘authoritative’. Propositions in theology, as in all fields ofenquiry, have to be justified in terms of their content and not their

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source, however eminent or revered. I may well come to believe what,say, St Paul has written by virtue of its content being cogent and wellbased, but not simply because he wrote it. The latter may have beenpossible in the past and might still be so in appropriately shielded andconditioned social groupings, but authoritative claims can no longerjustify public belief. For the diffusion of critical questioning hasbecome too widespread, at least in the West, through bettereducation, the influence of the media, and knowledge of science.

No one expressed it better than John Locke:

For our simple ideas, then, which are the foundation, and sole matterof all our notions and knowledge, we must depend wholly on ourreason; I mean our natural faculties; and can by no means receivethem, or any of them, from traditional revelation. I say, traditionalrevelation, in distinction to original revelation. By the one [originalrevelation], I mean that first impression which is made immediatelyby God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set any bounds;and by the other [traditional revelation], those impressions deliveredover to others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying ourconceptions one to another.1

Traditional revelation is, for Locke, revelation from God which ishanded down from its original recipient through others by means ofalready designating words and signs. His subsequent percipientcomments on the relation of faith and reason could not be morerelevant:

Whatever God hath revealed is certainly true; no doubt can be madeof it. This is the proper object of faith: but whether it be a divine reve-lation or no, reason must judge; which can never permit the mind toreject a greater evidence to embrace what is less evident, nor allow itto entertain probability in opposition to knowledge and certainty.There can be no evidence that any traditional revelation is of divineoriginal, in the words we receive it, and in the sense we understand it,so clear and so certain as that of the principles of reason: andtherefore Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clearand self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assentedto as a matter of faith, wherein reason hath nothing to do.2

I find myself warming to such passages as one for whom the inheri-tance of the Enlightenment is regarded as irreversible in its effects on


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theology – not in the exaltation of ‘Reason’ alone to Olympus, but inthe pursuit of reasonableness, of ‘reason based on experience’ as theAnglican tradition in Christianity has stressed. As the redoubtableBishop Joseph Butler asserted, probability is indeed the ‘very guide oflife’ for belief as well as for action, about which he went on to affirm,‘For surely a man is as really bound in prudence to do what upon thewhole appears, according to the best of his judgement to be for hishappiness, as what he certainly knows to be so.’3

By the criteria of reasonableness, theology in the twentiethcentury has been weighed in the balance of modern intellectualinquiry and found wanting, not only by many of those with a scien-tific training but also by those trained in philosophical and historicalcritical methods. The content of theology has become regarded asnot worthy of reasonable assent by modern thinkers as inheritors ofthe Enlightenment – however much respect the person of Jesus ofNazareth and Christian ethics might command.

More recently the intellectual climate has changed, the attitudesof postmodernist thinkers apparently softening towards theology.This is because in a pluralistic society, postmodernist attitudes haveallowed theology – in company with most other metaphysicallybased systems of thought, not excluding science – to be regarded as apermitted, socially contextualised discourse within religious commu-nities, but to make no claim to relate to any general, public realities.I will argue that this is a poisoned chalice that must be refused bytheology, which is in the business of exploring and affirming divinerealities just as science is exploring and affirming natural ones.

The ‘modern’ Enlightenment situation, one might say plight, oftheology – as not meeting the intellectual standards of rational inquiry– continues. However, recently, for causes obscure and to me them-selves irrational, the very word ‘rationality’ has come under a cloud ofsuspicion. The gale of postmodernism blows in from who knows whatalien strand and not only removes, it would claim, any need for abridge between science and theology, but pulverises the foundationson each side of that putative bridge into shifting quicksands.

Or so it is said. ‘Relativism rules’ is all the cry, so that some theologians retreat

into spelling out the ‘grammar’ of their received, confessional,indeed parochial (even when called ‘catholic’) traditions and are


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thereby self-exonerated from justifying their beliefs in the arena ofpublic discourse. So the supporting bases for structures on the theo-logical side of the bridge are deemed to have crumbled under theonslaught of postmodernist relativism. We shall have to return later(p.30) to this counsel of despair about the state of theology but, atthis stage, enquiry into the relation of science to postmodernistcritiques is especially rewarding for any reassessment of the theo-logical enterprise.

Science withstands the postmodernist critique

So we ask: what about the other side of the gulf? Scientists stillbelieve that they are exploring a reality other than themselves; that,even after the demise of positivism, their researches aim to enablethem to depict reality, namely, the entities, structures and processesof the natural world; that they do so fallibly, making use ofmetaphors and models that are revisable; and that, because theirprocedures make it possible to predict and sometimes even to controlnatural processes, their efforts enable them to depict nature withsuch increasing verisimilitude as is available to finite human minds.

They would point out that even the postmodernist literary criticor sociologist relies on solid-state physics being true enough for thechips in his PC to function as a word processor. I well remember, at a1979 meeting convened by the Church and Society section of theWorld Council of Churches (WCC) in Boston on ‘Faith and Scienceand the Future’, the indignant reply of an astronomer from Australiato delegates from developing countries in the South who, based ontheir unhappy experience of multinational corporations using tech-nology to exploit their countries, criticised the integrity of science.He affirmed, with some passion, that ‘quantum theory does notchange as you go South across the Equator’.

The philosophical debate about scientific realism which raged adecade ago has quietened down considerably. Some kind of realreference of scientific terms, involving entities, structures, processesand often theories, seems to be widely accepted, with ‘realism’preceded by various adjectives (such as ‘critical’, ‘qualified’,‘convergent’). None of these forms of realism is what has been called‘naïve’. They do not assert that terms in scientific theories are literaldescriptions of the entities, structures and processes to which they


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refer; that there are facts to which all scientific propositions cor-respond; and that scientific language can exhaustively describe theexternal world. I judge that, as against some other philosophies ofscience, realism is still the majority view of philosophically informedpractising scientists, who would not pursue their exacting professionif they did not think they were uncovering real aspects of the under-lying mechanisms and relationships in the natural world. (Thosemost at risk would be the cosmologists, whose theories are, andalways will be, grossly underdetermined by the facts. Theologiansneed to remember this in dialogue with them.)

Scientific realism is a quite limited claim which purports toexplain why certain ways of proceeding in science have worked out aswell as they have. A formidable case for such a critical realist inter-pretation of science can be mounted based on the historical fact thatin many parts of natural science (e.g. geology, cell biology, chemistry)there has been over the last two centuries a progressive andcontinuous discovery of hidden structures in the entities of the naturalworld, processes that account causally for the observed phenomena.

But how has this consensus among philosophers of science, andeven more among scientists, withstood the gales of postmodernism?Very well indeed, I would judge. In concord with that Australianastronomer at the WCC meeting, it is still the experience of scientistsin all fields that in global congresses the criteria for good sciencetranscend all ethnic, religious, political and social backgrounds.Clearly these latter affect the provision of grants, the scientific ques-tions selected for study, and the imaginative and intellectualresources available to scientists – but not the eventually acceptedcontent of science.

In America academics need no reminding of how the post-modernist critique of science was false-footed by the famous hoax inwhich Alan Sokal published, in the American cultural studies journalSocial Text, a parody article crammed with nonsensical, but unfortu-nately authentic, quotations about physics and mathematics byprominent French and American intellectuals of the postmodernistschool. In their Intellectual Impostures, Alan Sokal and JeanBricmont4 recount the full story and demonstrate that ‘postmodernscience’ is a vacuous concept. To be sure, the role of the social contextin the historical development of science cannot be controverted.


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Individuals and groups of scientists depend and feed on socialresources of funds, institutions, symbols and concepts and the generalZeitgeist, like everyone else. Nevertheless the justification of scientifictheories and the putative existence of the entities, structures andprocesses to which they refer is subject to rigorous sifting in the scien-tific community which eventually makes their enterprises an explora-tion of reality. Human beings may indeed make mistakes, but there isno merit in the idea that they can make nothing but mistakes.

Let us return to that bridge hopefully spanning the gulf betweenscience and theology. It now seems that the science side is certainly notquicksand but more like a lava flow from a volcano, which inexorablymoves forward in a fluid manner (often destructive of preconceptionslying in its path) but leaves behind an increasingly solid base of estab-lished knowledge about the natural world. My conclusion, so far, isthat science has proved a bastion against the gales of postmodernism.Science serves to preserve, and even restore if we strayed so far, aconviction that the processes of rational inquiry, fallible though theyare, are not always fated to be engulfed in relativism, social contextu-alisation, and even nihilism. By its very success in withstanding theweasel words that lead to abandoning any search for justified beliefabout what really is the case, science challenges humanist disciplines,including theology, to live up to its intellectual standards in their use ofthe data specifically relevant to those disciplines.

Evolution and human rationality

There has, of course, been much debate about whether or not any basisfor a common rationality is now possible in these non-scientific disci-plines. None of us now want to be foundationalists who urge that allour beliefs can be justified by appealing to some item of knowledge thatis self-evident or indubitable and serves as an unchangeable core. Intheology this leads to fideism (the core belief is the faith as delivered bythe religious community) or fundamentalism (the core belief is thecontent of the Bible or other writings regarded as sacred). So which waydo we go from here? Curiously, certain perspectives in modern biologyindicate that the exercise of human rationality is not likely to be fruitlessand to result in an unreliable, relativistic circularity of affirmation.

Evolutionary biology can trace the steps in which a succession oforganisms have acquired nervous systems and brains with which


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they obtain, store, retrieve and utilise information about their envi-ronment in a way that furthers their survival. That this informationso successfully utilised must be accurate enough for their survival hasled to the notion of ‘evolutionary epistemology’. This is the idea thathow we know reliably and realistically is a consequence of the evolu-tionary process. If living organisms successfully survive naturalselection to reproduce, then it must be because what they are awareof in their particular kind of interaction with the environment is real.Awareness and exploration of the external world reach a peak inHomo sapiens, who, through the use of language, visual imagery,and mathematics, is able to formulate abstract concepts interpretingthe environment. The natural environment, both physical and social,is experienced and becomes an object of what we then call‘knowledge’ – information that is reliable enough to facilitateprediction and control of the environment, and thereby survival.Our sense impressions must be broadly trustworthy, and so must thecognitive structures by which we know the world; otherwise wewould not have survived. In human beings a number of cognitivefunctions, which are also found in animals and which make theirown individual contributions to survival, are integrated into aunique system of higher order.

In a nutshell, our cognitive faculties qua biological organisms mustbe accurate enough in their representations of reality to enable us tosurvive. In the case of human beings these cognitive faculties includethe representations of external reality we individually and sociallymake for ourselves. Hence these representations have at least thedegree of verisimilitude that facilitates survival in the external realitiesof our environments. The extent to which evolutionary biology willhelp us understand the cognitive processes by which this reliableknowledge about the environment was acquired is still an open,indeed confused, question. However there can be little doubt thatthere is continuity in the evolution of Homo sapiens between:

• the cognitive processes that allow a physically rather poorlyendowed creature to survive against fiercer predation and in avariety of environments;

• the processes of ordinary common-sense ratiocination applied ineveryday life;


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• the ability to think abstractly and to manipulate symbols in math-ematics, art, science, music and the multitudinous facets of humanculture.

The scientific method is not radically different from the rationalattitude in everyday life or other domains of human knowledge.Detectives, archaeologists and plumbers – indeed, all human beings –use the same basic methods of induction, deduction, inference andassessment of evidence as do scientists. Science just does it more system-atically and through carefully contrived experiments, which are oftennot available in other spheres of human activity. There is a similarity inbasic approach, as becomes even more evident when the science isconcerned with inferring the nature of past events, as in evolutionarybiology and geology. We must recognise, but not overplay, the appar-ently esoteric and counter-intuitive character (notoriously in quantumtheory) of the conceptual content of scientific explanations, dependentas they are on an informed understanding of a long chain of reasoningbased on experiments. This is not to detract from the special characterof the human capacity for abstract thought which must neverthelessresult from integration of the simpler modes of ratiocination thatoperate in ordinary life and at earlier stages of evolution.

The central consequence for this enquiry is enhancement of ourconfidence in the reality-referring capacity of the cognitive processesthat evolution has provided us with. It warrants postulating the exis-tence of a general rationality in Homo sapiens which yields, for thepurpose of living, reliable knowledge and justified belief. However,biology gives few clues about the evolution of human cognition.Moreover, this enhancement by evolutionary considerations ofconfidence in the possibility of human ratiocination providingreliable knowledge does not in itself exonerate us from enquiringinto the validity of the information resulting from human ratiocina-tion and also from asking about the criteria that should operate. Tothis we must now attend.

Reasonableness through inference to the best explanation

We are obtaining from evolutionary epistemology the stimulus totake seriously once more the results of the processes of humancognition and rationality. Can we discern any features of these


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processes that are common to biological survival, everyday experi-ence and our explanatory accounts of the activities that constitutehuman culture in the sciences, the humanities and theology? It ishardly necessary to remind any student of postmodernism of thecontroversies that rage around such a seemingly innocent question.I have given grounds why I think science has been able to resist thesiren calls of postmodernism. The continuity of its procedures withthose of reasonable decision making in ordinary life, which can beattributed to their common biological origin, is significant for ourassessment of human rationality in general. When one analysesthese two kinds of exercising of human rationality, a strong case canbe made for asserting that such deliberations are not purelydeductive, nor purely inductive, but a composite of a particularkind, namely, inference to the best explanation (IBE – sometimescalled abduction). According to IBE, we infer what would, if true,provide the best of the competing explanations of the data we cangenerate. Such inference may often involve imaginative guessing ofthe answer to the question ‘If X were true, then would it not coverappropriately the range of experience, or experiment, I am trying toexplain?’, and then proceeding to say, ‘Let us postulate X, see if itworks and then see how much more it might explain.’5 Inference tothe best explanation accounts in a natural and unified way both forthe inferences to unobservable entities, structures and processeswhich characterise much scientific research and for many of theinferences we make in ordinary life. In IBE, the process of argumentis to present those features of a case which severally cooperate infavour of the conclusion. Decisions have, of course, to be madeabout which is the best of competing, plausible explanations, butnote that strict falsifiability is not emphasised nor any absoluterequirement for novel predictions. Hence it is particularly apt fortheology to adopt this IBE model, which is so adequate for scienceand everyday life, since overt falsifying of theological affirmations isnotoriously unavailable.

What are the criteria for deciding which is the ‘best’ explanationamong any set of plausible proposals, the one that would, if true,provide the most understanding of the topic in question? Bearing inmind the intention to use IBE in theology, I prefer to distinguish thefollowing as the criteria for deciding on a best explanation:


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1. Comprehensiveness: the best explanation accounts for more of theknown experiences and/or observations by giving a unified explana-tion of a diverse range of facts not previously connected. There areconverging lines of argument based on different kinds of data withwhich the best explanation fits. Such data will, for theology,encompass human experience, including (though not exclusively)experiences designated as ‘religious’.

2. Fruitfulness: the best explanation can often, but not always,suggest new and corroborating observations and sometimes newconceptual possibilities. The best explanation is not ad hoc, forone specific purpose.

3. General cogency and plausibility: on account of the fit of the bestexplanation with established background knowledge.

4. Internal coherence and consistency: no self-contradiction.5. Simplicity or elegance: stressing the need to avoid undue complexity.

It would be naïve to think that these criteria, depicted with such abroad brush, do not need further detailed analysis, justification anddevelopment. Moreover, they often have to be held in tension witheach other. Discussion of them has been grist to the mill of the lastfew decades of the philosophy of science and of epistemology, thefield of philosophy concerned more generally with the nature ofknowing. I cannot pretend to do justice to that complex discussion –though I do note that the term ‘inference to the best explanation’ hasbecome broadly acceptable to the practitioners of a wide range ofdisciplines in the sciences and the humanities. Various elements – e.g.experience, understanding, judgement and deciding – have beendistinguished in the processes of knowing the variegated multiplicityof physical objects, concepts, processes, persons, symbols, texts,histories, etc. (the list is endless) that constitute the web of beliefs ofthe knowing consciousness. This web of beliefs and knowledge –including those about God and God’s relation to humanity – will besusceptible to revision and even replacement as new experiences,new experiments, and so new knowledge, impinge upon its outeredges. The process of adjustment of this web to new inputs has beenlikened by N.H. Gregersen6 to the gradual enlargement and reconsti-tution of a raft of planks of different types (the candidates for truth)by the addition of new planks that strengthen the structure. No


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plank forms the raft in itself but each is significant in its contributionto the whole. The addition of new planks may have repercussionsthat necessitate, for the coherence of the whole, the undoing of partsof the raft previously in place and the reconstruction of particularolder planks. As Gregersen says, this demand for coherence, for thatis what it is,

implies for theology that it should be able to clarify how, and in whatsense, developments in science have reverberated for the under-standing of faith, and how theology should cope with these reverber-ations in terms of eventually revised internal self-descriptions, interms of external descriptions of scientific data and theories, in termsof appropriate thought models and scientific elements of worldviews,and in terms of a potential exchange of metaphors.7

In opting for the pre-eminence of IBE in the present context, in noway do I wish to discount the subtlety and complexity of the manyaspects of the knowing process in relation to the variety of whathuman beings can experience – in particular, their significance for theinterpretation of religious experience. Of course, religious beliefs(and particularly Christian ones), even when expressed in theologicallanguage, start from assumptions and premises that, although notyet fully reasonable, may be said to seek reasonableness. Like anyother beliefs, one can pursue this goal only by the feedback obtainedfrom critical and rational discussions of these beliefs with others.The theory or rationality expressed here is

best understood in terms of the ‘inference to the best explanation’model adapted from the philosophy of science. On this view, manyChristian beliefs are potential explanations: they tell why certaindata that need to be explained are the way they are; they account forcertain facts about human existence. When I believe them, I believethey do a better job of explaining the data than the other explanatoryhypotheses of which I am aware. The task of rational discussion is toweigh competing explanations, whatever their respective sources,and to select the one or more that do the best job of explaining thedata at hand … Accomplishing this task involves making religiousbeliefs available to intersubjective assessment – translating them intothe terms, and connecting them with the kinds of evidence, that willmake them genuinely discussible by a broad community of inquirythat comprises believers and nonbelievers alike.8


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I urge that IBE is the procedure that best leads to public truth aboutthe relation of nature, humanity and God which is both communi-cable and convincing by its reasonableness through reflection on ourmost reliable and generally available knowledge of nature andhumanity. To most in Western culture such knowledge is pre-eminently forthcoming from the sciences. Such an approach mighteven open a path towards God for the many wistful agnostics andthe ‘cultured despisers’ of any form of theism.

Theology at the crossroads

Earlier I drew attention to the parlous state of the reputation oftheology as an intellectual discipline. A large proportion of educatedpeople do not find Christian (or any) theology reasonable: it is notseen by them to meet the standards of modern intellectual life, notleast in its relation to science.

So I would describe the first key critical issue for theology, exem-plified supremely in its relation to the natural and human sciences, asfollows:

Dare theology proceed in its search for even provisional ‘truth’ byemploying the criteria of reasonableness that characterise otherforms of human enquiry, in particular the sciences?

In the natural and human sciences, a strong case can be made thatthey achieve their aims of depicting, revisably and metaphorically,the realities of the natural and human worlds by IBE. Because of theepistemological revolutions of our time, it is now essential that thetheological pier of the bridge to science be subject to the samedemands for epistemological warrant and intellectual integrity asother disciplines, especially science – and to relinquish any unestab-lished confidence that the content of traditional theological affirma-tions is divinely warranted.

Theology needs to be truthful, free and critical; and to deal withand interpret the realities of all that constitutes the world, especiallyhuman beings and their inner lives. Dare theology, by using IBE,enter the fray of contemporary intellectual exchange and stand upand survive in its own right? To do so, it has to become an openexploration in which nothing is unrevisable.

The bridge model for science-and-theology must go, and bereplaced by that of a joint exploration by IBE into a common


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reality, some aspects of which will prove, in the end, to be ultimate– and pointers to the divine. Let us now look at how theology isactually practised.

THEOLOGY AS IT IS

What do we find? A variety of theological procedures that do notmeet the above criteria:

1. Reliance on an authoritative book: ‘The Bible says’. Even thosenot given to biblical literalism and fundamentalism still have ahabit of treating the contents of the Bible (now mostly twothousand or more years old) as a kind of oracle, as if quotationsfrom past authorities could settle questions in our times (like abiologist resorting to Aristotle, or a physician to Avicenna, or achemist to Geber!). Ordinary Christians, I fear, often think thatministers ought to believe this, and are paid to do so. Yet thelibrary of books we call the Bible was itself constituted by a self-critical dialogic process of revising, repudiating and extending thework and experience of earlier generations – even within theperiod of authorship of the New Testament.

2. Reliance on an authoritative community: ‘The Church says’,‘The Fathers said’, ‘The Creeds say’, ‘The Magisterium says’.Here the religious community listens and talks only to itself.According to this interpretation, the doctrines of the Christianchurch function to establish the framework for thatcommunity’s conversation which elucidates the grammar of itsown internal discourse without ever exposing itself to anyexternal judgement of reasonableness. At its best it can be fidesquaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding, but even thisprescinds from rational justification of the fides, the ‘faith’. Iwould urge that the only defensible theology is one that consistsof understanding seeking faith, intellectus quaerens fidem, inwhich ‘understanding’ must include that of the natural andhuman worlds which the sciences have inter alia unveiled. (I donot mean to exclude aesthetic and other experiences ofhumanity from this understanding.) There can be withincommunities of faith a kind of submission to a revelatorydogmatism or doctrinal fundamentalism. I recall in my experi-ences of the World Council of Churches it being taken for


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granted that what ‘the Gospel’ was was precisely understoodand universally agreed – when in fact it wasn’t. The Word, itwas said, has been given by God to the community of Christiansand has to be expounded – but its authenticity as the Word ofGod was never questioned. Thus, however much the fides isexplicated and enriched within the community, it fails to equipitself with the means by which it can convince those outside it totake seriously its affirmations. It has forgone and repudiatedwhat I would regard as the God-given lingua franca of humandiscourse – the use of criteria of reasonableness, as in IBE. Howotherwise can the Christian and other religious communitiesever convince others that they proclaim any kind of public truthcomparable in cogency to that which that world recognises inscience and, in its applications, utilises?

3. Reliance on a priori truth: In some forms of philosophicaltheology, the internal ‘truths’ held by the Christian communityare regarded almost as basic a priori truths arrived at by pureratiocination. This kind of foundationalism is rare today becauseof the wider recognition of the cultural conditioning of what canseem to be a priori. Clearly, such a theology would find it verydifficult to come to terms with the world whose realities arediscovered by the sciences.

THEOLOGY AS IT MIGHT BE

If Christian (indeed all) theology is to meet the intellectual standards ofour times by, for example, utilising IBE and not relying on authoritiesor claimed a priori notions, it will have to take account of:

S the realities of the world and humanity discovered by theSciences;

CRE the Jewish and Christian communal inheritance of claimedClassical Revelatory Experience;

WR the perceptions and traditions of other World Religions.

Hence the data of theology are S + CRE + WR.Here we have, regretfully, to put WR on one side but let it be

noted here that a second critical issue for Christian theology inrelation to the sciences is the ways other religions have related to thescientific worldview and what can be learnt from them.


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But for our present purposes let our data be taken to be onlyS + CRE.

If we put these together, we are faced with a third critical issue,namely, that a very radical revision of past notions concerning whatChristians can in future hold as credible, defensible and reasonablebecomes imperative.

We have hadCRE �� T, where T represents Christian Theology.

But now, we have to pursueS + CRE �� RT, where RT represents a radically Revised Theology,

which will not live at all comfortably with the theology, T, promul-gated by many churches and in most pulpits. (Eventually, of course,we need

S + CRE + WR �� GT, where GT represents a global theology.)Deployment of IBE in the dialogue between the scientific under-

standing of the world and the theological quest for meaning asrepresented in RT will be very different from the ‘natural theology’which was the classical prelude to ‘revealed theology’, based onCRE, and on to which it was grafted. The traditional ‘naturaltheology’ (especially in its eighteenth-century English form ofphysico-theology) sought to deduce the existence and the attributesof God from natural phenomena. Such deductive links now proveto be weak and overplayed in the classical theological schemes.Today the process of relating our understanding of nature to thetheological enterprise has to be more subtly nuanced. As I haveargued above, we can only infer to the best explanation and noclaim can be made for logical proof in this process (as claimed inthe classical Five Ways to prove the existence of God). This non-availablity of hard proof applies even to the natural sciences (or tohistory, for that matter), in which IBE is the dominant procedure.Proof in the hard sense is possible only in logic and mathematics,which deduce from stated axioms. Hence the exploration in whichwe are to be engaged must not be confused with the old ‘naturaltheology’ – and it would be misleading even to call it a new orrevised or resuscitated ‘natural theology’.

What is needed is careful attention to scientific knowledge of theworld as we apply IBE in our reflection upon it in relation to the theo-logical quest for meaning. How, then, should we conduct such a


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dialogue of the sciences with theological formulations of the contentof religious experience and the traditions of the Christian community?

Here we encounter a fourth set of critical issues concerning themethodology of this process. Those of us engaged in the interactionof science and theology must be especially committed to certainnorms, for the formulation of which I am indebted in large part toWillem Drees.9

We should aim:

1. To avoid importing spurious spiritualisations into our discourse.This is one multilevelled world; there is no evidence for anyexisting entities other than those emerging from the naturalworld (see pp.48ff). Hence, no magic, no science fiction and nofudging to avoid offending notions held simplistically in igno-rance of this picture.

2. To be explicit when our language is metaphorical, and not beafraid to be agnostic when the evidence does not warrantpositive assertions.

3. To avoid well-known fallacies: ‘genetic’ (explaining awaycurrent beliefs and procedures by reference to their origins);‘naturalistic’ (deriving an ‘ought ’ from an ‘is’); and that of‘misplaced concreteness’ (not all words refer to real entities –they often refer to relations and properties).

4. To beware of marginal and speculative science (note the cascadesof paper discussing Hawkings’ speculations, or even life on otherplanets).

5. Not to be selective of our science, choosing the parts favourableto our theologies.

6. Not to overly socially contextualise science – most people seethat science works.

7. To keep a historical perspective but not to be bound to thinkingthat past issues have simply reappeared today. The boundaries of‘science’ and ‘religion’ are shifting all the time.

8. To distinguish ‘theology’ (the study of the intellectual content ofreligious beliefs) from ‘religion’, which is about individual andcommunal experiences.

9. Not to claim for theology credibility based on its long history – ithas to meet today’s challenge.


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10. Not to be tempted to discern prematurely coherences and conso-nances between science and theology, since the latter may beexplicating a prophetic dimension in religion which refers to theas yet unknown future.

11. To recognise that much religious language is functional insociety rather than referential, as it should be in theology.

I cannot help wondering if, in spite of the honest efforts of many ofus, we have always maintained such standards.

A fifth critical issue in any exploration towards the divine is thattoday we have to take into account that the current study of all reli-gions and their sacred resources – especially Christianity with itsdistinctive historical foundations and its Bible – has been revolutionisedover the last 150 years by critical historical, archaeological and literaryinvestigations. Neither the Christian New Testament nor the Jewishscriptures of the so-called Old Testament can now be read unreservedlyas containing, in their historical narratives, veridical history and theactual words of those depicted as uttering or writing them. Careful,analytical judgement is required in assessing such ancient literature,much of which was written simply to reinforce the ideologies andbeliefs of the communities to which they were presented. Hence muchis simply persuasive literature (propaganda even), whose historicalveracity is very hard to assess today – and, even if this were established,it would be difficult to discern its significance for us in our quitedifferent cultural situation. Too much Christian theology (Christology,to be precise), for example, has been based on the dubious assumptionthat the utterances of Jesus as reported in the fourth Gospel were hisactual words – piling a mountain of interpretation on uncertain foun-dations. Nevertheless, again and again sequences in both the Old andNew Testaments can light up the reader with an intense insight byvirtue of that perception and inherent wisdom that make the wholecorpus of the Bible the most remarkable compilation concerning theexperience of God which we possess. It remains an irreplaceableresource in our exploration towards God. Yet critical judgement of itscontent is always necessary in the light of scholarship – combined withopenness to its sitting in judgement on the reader.

Such considerations become crucial in relation to Christian asser-tions about the significance of the life, death and claimed resurrection


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of Jesus of Nazareth in one’s exploration towards God. For it willnever again in Western culture be intellectually defensible simply toclaim authority for propositions by asserting that they are ‘biblical’.They have to stand on their own feet as warrantable and justified.This stance towards the biblical literature will be presumed in whatfollows – not least because it is the only fair-minded and open onefrom which plausibly to set out on any exploration towards Godtoday. Interestingly, modern investigations demonstrate that thebiblical authors and redactors themselves again and again did nothesitate to revise and reinterpret their biblical predecessors – thebiblical ‘tradition’ is one of continuous dialogue with the past andfrequent revision of it. With this critical background in mind, let usstart the exploration.


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Having recognised that in any quest for meaning we have to resort toinference to the best explanation (IBE) in the light of the standardsprevailing in the general human search for intelligibility, we neednow to consider the various areas to be explored. These are asdiverse as the humanity engaged in the quest. Here we are primarilyconcerned with those new perspectives on nature and humanity thatare derived from the sciences – as being the most likely to be capableof yielding public knowledge. For they are the agreed basis of actionsand policies in much of our communal activity and are the commonpossession of many thinking people in contemporary culture. Theworld of science therefore constitutes a common starting point fromwhich all might set out on any exploration towards the divine.However, although widely held basic presuppositions are deeplyinfluenced by scientific perspectives, they are not exhaustively condi-tioned by them and there are more general philosophical considera-tions that should carry weight and must also be deployed andreferred to in what follows.

We begin by looking at the world as it now appears to thesciences – a kind of ‘still shot’ of its moving panorama.

PART II:

EXPLORING FROM SCIENCE

TOWARDS GOD: NEW VISTAS,

CHALLENGES AND QUESTIONS

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That the world is

The existence of the world (all-that-is) is not self-explanatory. If weask the famous ‘mystery of existence’ question, ‘Why is thereanything at all?’, science cannot provide any answer. Whatever thephysical milieu (a fluctuating quantum field, superstrings, orwhatever) in or from which the universe emerged and expandedtwelve billion or so years ago, no scientific account is possible for thefact of its existence as such. Nor is an account possible of the exis-tence of the relationships it manifests (the laws of physics, such asthose of quantum theory). They are not logical necessities. Thusthere is not, nor can there be, any scientific account of the very exis-tence of a universe of this kind and not some other. All has to betaken as given, as contingent, since all could have been otherwise.

The best explanation to be inferred from the very existence of theworld and of the fundamental laws of physics which it instantiates isthat the whole process, with all its emerging entities, is grounded insome other reality which is the source of its actual existence. Such areality cannot but be, by definition, ultimate – it must be self-existent, the only reality with the source of its being in itself, theGround of Being. It is not a ‘cause’ in the scientifically observednexus of events, for that would lead to the notorious infinite regress

3

The world as it is

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of causes and events ad infinitum. The ‘mystery of existence’ thuspoints to an Ultimate Reality (the capitals denoting its uniqueness)which in some sense gives existence to all-that-is – words ‘strain,crack, and sometimes break, under the burden’1 of striving to expressand refer to such a Transcendent. That such an Ultimate Reality isand was and always will be is, I am urging, the best explanation ofthe very existence of all-that-is. This Ultimate Reality is what givesexistence to all matter–energy–space–time in their manifold forms.But what this Other, this Ultimate Reality, is is bound to be inex-pressible and of a nature that, by definition, can be referred to onlyby metaphor, model, analogy and extrapolation.

Philosophical enquiry has unpacked further the implications ofpostulating the existence of this Ultimate Reality that is the sourceof all being and to which IBE, when applied to all-that-is, has led us.To be a coherent notion, there can only be one such UltimateReality, for the universe discovered by the sciences is an interlockingnetwork of multifarious entities universally related by the sameregularities and laws – it is indeed one world (see pp.42ff.).Furthermore, if the putative Ultimate Reality were itself multipleand divisible into separate realities, we would be bound to ask theorigin of this multiplicity, for it would not then be ultimate. Allentities, structures and processes in the world, including humanity,are too interlocked – mutually and reciprocally linked and subjectto common laws – for any proposal that there is a multiplicity oforiginating realities to be feasible or coherent.

The world, past and present, displays a rich, cornucopian varietyin its constituent entities, structures and processes. It manifestsremarkable diversity, fecundity and multiple levels of complexity. Sothe ‘Oneness’ of the Ultimate Reality must be of such a kind that ithas the capacity to give existence to this variety of entities, structuresand processes (the ‘Many’). Its unity cannot be that of meresimplicity but rather of some kind of diversity-in-unity, one Being ofunfathomable richness, capable of multiple expression and varie-gated outreach.

One of the earliest experiences of the novice research scientist isthe warm glow that suffuses him or her when planned experimentsor postulated theories about the natural world actually work – whenit turns out that experiments can succeed in determining what was


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previously unknown, and that theories can explain and sometimeseven predict. We recall the percipient remark of the astrophysicistFred Hoyle quoted in chapter 1:

When by patient enquiry we learn the answer to any [scientific]problem, we always find, both as a whole and in detail, that theanswer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything wecould ever have arrived at by a random guess.2

In physics, mathematics – a free creation of human ratiocination –transpires to be the necessary means at the deepest levels for formulatingthe fundamental relationships on which the observable world depends.

It is not only mathematics that excites wonder. Biology at alllevels (molecular, macromolecular, organismic, phenotypic,ecological) is delving more and more deeply into the structures oflife. The intricacies of the interlocking mechanisms of the utilisationof food, of reproduction, of protection, of behaviour, of all thatfavours the survival of evolved living organisms seem to be inex-haustible. Yet they prove to be amenable to intelligent explicationand to exhibit an inherent rationality different from but just asimpressive in their own way as the elegant equations of fundamentalphysics. In this context, too, we can echo Einstein’s aphorism ‘Theeternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.’3

But why should the world possess this embedded rationalityamenable to the most comprehensive analysis of which the humanmind is capable and to formulation in terms of often the most abstractof human concepts? The simplest explanation, and so the best in thisglobal context, is that the source of the existence of all being, theUltimate Reality, must possess something akin to, but far surpassing,human rationality – must be supremely and unsurpassedly rational.

All-that-is must in some sense also be known by its Originator forit to be the embodiment of rationality; and this Ultimate Reality thatgives it existence must therefore know all that it is logically possibleto know – that is, it must be omniscient. Again, ‘giving existence to’all-that-is implies the possession of powers such that the UltimateReality is able to do whatever it is logically possible to do – it mustbe, in this sense, omnipotent.

To our ordinary perceptions, based on our senses and consciousexperience, the world appears to consist of matter which possesses

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energy and to exist in space enduring through time. However, all ofthese concepts have had to be radically transformed in the light ofinvestigations into and new understandings of the very small, thesubatomic, and for anything moving at speeds comparable to that oflight. Einstein’s insights at the beginning of the twentieth century notonly established light as being the fastest signal that can be trans-mitted across the universe but also spatialised the concept of timeand temporalised the concept of space. Both now have to be thoughtof together. Even what we mean by ‘simultaneous’ is found todepend on the frame of reference in which we are operating and itsspeed relative to those in other such frames whose events we seek torelate to those in our own. Much of this leads to results that arecounter-intuitive, not least in the fundamental identification ofmatter and energy which Einstein’s analysis also entailed. Indeed,‘e = mc2’ – representing the relation between energy (e), mass (m) andthe speed of light (c) – has become a fashionable logo and isconfirmed every time we turn on the light using electricity from anuclear power station. At the most fundamental mathematical levelmatter (mass), energy, space and time are inseparable concepts forthe physicist dealing with the subatomic and cosmological, even ifthis is outside the experience of our biologically limited senses.Hence, when we propose that there is an Ultimate Reality givingexistence to all-that-is, that Reality must be other than, give exis-tence to, and so transcend (‘go beyond’) matter–energy–space–time.It follows that this postulated Ultimate Reality that gives existence toall experienced space and time must know and be present to them –and so must be omnipresent and eternal, transcending all createdspace and time, as well as matter and energy.

Furthermore, does not the very intimacy of our relation to thefundamental features of the physical world, its so-called ‘anthropic’features (p.70), together with the distinctiveness of personhood,point us in the direction of looking for a best explanation of all-that-is in terms of some kind of entity that could include the personal?Since the personal is the highest level of unification of the physical,mental and spiritual of which we are aware, it is legitimate torecognise that this Ultimate Reality must be at least personal, orsupra-personal – that is, it will be less misleading to attach personalpredicates to this Ultimate Reality than not to do so at all – for


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example by calling the Ultimate Reality a ‘Force’, or ‘Power’, or ‘theAbsolute’, or even just ‘Reason’. In English this Ultimate Reality istherefore at least ‘he/she’ rather that ‘it’. We are therefore justified inattaching personal predicates to this Ultimate Reality, while recog-nising continuously and sensitively the limitations of such language.

Hence, mysterious as is this source of all being, this UltimateReality, it transpires on reflection that he/she must be the self-existent Ground of Being; one, but a diversity-in-unity, a Being ofunfathomable richness; supremely and unsurpassedly rational;omniscient; omnipotent; omnipresent and eternal; and at leastpersonal or supra-personal. In English the name of this existent is‘God’, with all its cognates in the other languages of the monotheisticreligions, and this is the term we shall use from now on. It will be thisGod, a Creator God, towards whom (‘whom’ rather than ‘it’ now)our exploration will henceforth be directed.

God and time

I have already drawn attention to the fundamental revision of ourconcepts of time and its relation to space and of matter–energy thathave been necessitated by the well-confirmed insights of Einstein andhis successors. In order to understand the relation between observedevents in different frames of reference, having relative velocities withrespect to each other, theoretical physicists have resorted to a ‘block’model of the universe. This involves placing events at points in a four-dimensional model (three of space plus one of time), each point repre-senting a particular spatial location and time. Entities then trace asuccession of points in this representation, which is their ‘world-line’.The relation of such world-lines, or trajectories, in four-dimensionalspace–time sorts out the many counter-intuitive paradoxes that resultfrom the loss of simultaneity and from the speed of light, thoughimmense, being an upper limit to the speed of transmission of anysignals across space and time. If we take this model to be whatactually exists, then we are led to what is called a ‘block view’ of theuniverse, or simply the ‘block universe’. On this interpretation world-lines extend until the entities they represent go out of existence; andfurthermore at our present ‘now’ in our time all future events wouldalready exist ‘there’ at a point in the block universe representing thefuture of the universe as a matter of unalterable fact.


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One influential interpretation of God’s relation to time has oftenbeen encapsulated in the famous phrase of the fifth/sixth-centuryphilosopher Boethius that God’s eternity is ‘the total, complete,simultaneous possession of eternal life’. In this interpretation God isaware of the contents of past, present and future with the immediacyof an eternal ‘now’. In this view, which has been dominant for manycenturies, God surveys, as it were, from a mountain peak the wholesequence of past, present and future along a continuous line andknows it all. God is believed to transcend time in this almost geo-metrical sense. However, it has also been recognised while thisnotion has prevailed that this view of God’s relation to time leads toirresolvable problems concerning free will and the determination ofevents – the problem of predestination. This was sufficient forMilton to mock the interminable disputes to which these problemsled by saying that Satan and his fallen angels in hell

reason’d highOf providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,Fix’d fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.4

If God knows in advance what we are to do, can our will be freeand is God responsible for human evil (as well as for natural evils)?Do we then live in an absolutely determinate universe? And howdoes this square with the ontological indeterminancy of theoutcome of measurements on quantum-mechanical systems (seep.97)? In the view of a growing number of philosophical theolo-gians and scientist-theologians – who otherwise differ widely intheir theologies and philosophies – the problems so formulated areinsoluble and can be surmounted by taking note of the followingconsiderations:

• The block model is useful for mathematical purposes but thisdoes not mean the universe is itself a block, that is, four-dimensional so that entities and events really do have world-linesrunning beyond from the present throughout the future.

• Time is a relation between events and is created with events (asAugustine long ago perceived) so it is coherent to think of God asgiving existence, not only to all matter–energy, but also to eachsegment of time as and when, in our view, it comes into existence.


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• There is therefore no ‘future’ existing at this moment which has acontent that could, logically could, be known – for it does notexist in any sense to be known.

• Since for God to be omniscient God must know all that it is logi-cally possible to know, and the future does not have a content tobe known, God cannot, logically cannot, know definitively thefuture with all its content.

• But God, being omniscient, will be able to predict the probabilitiesof occurrence of all future events (including those that are certainwith probability 1); and so God knows them to that extent.

• God is the only being who will be present at all future events: Godis indeed eternal and omnipresent. God is the ‘God ahead’, beingpresent to all future events, including the outcomes of freelywilled human decisions. God can therefore respond to futurehuman decisions and actions.

• Hence God is not ‘timeless’ in the sense of having no activerelation to time. The continued use of personal language aboutGod is therefore legitimised as being the least misleading way ofrepresenting human experience of God’s nature and God’s ex-perience of history and humanity. There is therefore in the divineexperience that which corresponds to successiveness in ourconscious experience. God relates successively to events. Soalthough God is eternal and transcends created time, God alsorelates to our psychological sense of time, that is, relates in apersonal way to us. There is therefore a kind of dipolarity inGod’s relation to time – transcendence combined with experienceof succession, like the two foci of an ellipse, or perhaps twomodes of being.

• If God has created the world and its time to be of this kind, thenit becomes coherent to speak of God’s ‘self-limited’ omniscience.For, in this perspective, God has made the world in such a waythat God does not know definitively, but only probabilistically,the outcomes of human decisions – and indeed only the probabil-ities of quantum measurement events too, if these do indeedprove to be ontologically indeterminate.

This understanding of God’s relation to time makes more intelligiblethan does the ‘block universe’ proposal the nature of prayer and of


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God’s continued personal interaction with human beings. It will bepresumed in our subsequent exploration towards God from theworld of science. That is, I shall assume that:5 God is not timeless;God is temporal in the sense that the divine life is successive in itsrelation to us – God is temporally (and so personally) related to us;there is a dipolarity in God’s relation to time – God is transcendentbut also experiences succession in relation to events and persons;God creates each segment of time in the created world; God tran-scends past and present created time; God is eternal in the sense thatthere is no time at which God does not exist nor will there be a futuretime at which God does not exist; God is omnipresent – is present toall past events and will be to all future events.

There is a feature of time as we experience it to which so far Ihave drawn insufficient attention – namely, that time has a directionfrom the past to the future. This is inherent in our sense of self-consciousness, for we have memories of the past, experience thepresent ‘now’ and anticipate a future in which we shall still exist, atleast for a time. This psychological sense is closely linked with themetabolic processes in our brains and bodies and of the experience ofgrowing to maturity and subsequently of declining powers. Theseprocesses are themselves biochemical and like all such are not totallyreversible. The non-reversibility of natural events has always beenrecognised by human beings but in the nineteenth century it was clar-ified and given wider significance as a result of new insights into theexchanges between different kinds of energy. Some of these forms ofenergy were more directional and capable of being harnessed toperform work, in mechanical processes. Others (notably heat) weremore random and non-directional and proved to have limitations inthe extent to which they could be interconverted. For example, notall of the heat in a system can be converted into work: there aredefined limitations to the exchange. From these considerations,constituting the science of thermodynamics, it was possible tomeasure the degree of irreversibility of any natural process in termsof a quantity called ‘entropy’. The change in entropy during anyprocess represents its degree of irreversibility. Later in the nineteenthcentury it became clear that entropy was related to the degree ofrandomness in the distribution of energy among the possible energystates of the system (the science of statistical thermodynamics). In all


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natural processes in closed systems (no matter or energy entering orleaving) it was proved that there was an increase in entropy, inrandomness. Hence the quantity entropy came to be called ‘time’sarrow’ because its continued increase in natural closed systems(taken as a whole) runs parallel with the direction of the clock timeof physics as well as with that of our experienced sense of time.

Along this now scientifically defined direction of time in theobserved universe, new systems emerge through cosmic, physical,chemical and biological evolution. There seems in these processes tobe a kind of ratchet effect whereby one level of complexity can oftenprovide the launching stage for another more complex one – right upto the intricacies of living organisms and, eventually, of the humanbrain, the most complex organisation of matter known to us. Thetime to which the Creator God gives existence is indeed the ‘carrierand locus of innovative change’.6 In the created order, God isunfolding, by the interplay of chance and law (see pp.75ff.), thepotentialities of the universe that God’s own self has given it.

In such a perspective, God has to be conceived of as relating tothe continuously unfolding panorama of events and entities at alllevels and so to have changing relations with them, each according totheir distinctive capacity. In this regard, God is again not immutableor timeless. However, just as a human person while reacting to thekaleidoscope of experience can nevertheless display certain steady,defining characteristics, so God can be regarded as unchanging inpurpose and disposition towards creation, including humanity, whilereacting continuously to it in the time Godself goes on creating. Thisis what is referred to in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as thesteadfast love and faithfulness of God which intends the ultimategood, welfare and fulfilment of creation, including humanity.

It is on this basis that this tradition has looked forward to a stage incosmic history in which time as we know it will cease and in whichGod’s purposes for the created order and for humanity will be consum-mated by all being taken up, in some new form, into the divine life.This hope can rest only on what is believed to be the character of Godas creative Love and, in my view, can have no other basis. What thisconsummation (this ‘End’, eschaton, Omega point) might consist inhas been the subject of much speculation – including the last book ofthe New Testament, Revelation. I prefer to be judiciously agnostic


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about its nature and to rely entirely on the character of God, not onlyinferred as the best explanation of features of the world as we areattempting here but, to take a different tack, also on the revelation ofGod as self-offering Love in the person of Jesus the Christ. All specu-lation on detailed scenarios of this consummation, the theologicalexercise called ‘eschatology’, surely constitutes a supreme example ofattempting to formulate a theory underdetermined by the facts. Assuch, it seems to me a fruitless and unnecessary exercise – for thesource of Christian hope rests only on the steadfastness and faith-fulness of the God who is revealed as Love.

The world: one and many

The underlying unity of the natural world is, we have seen, evidencedin its universal embedded rationality, which the sciences assume andcontinue to verify. In the realm of the very small and of the very large– the subatomic and the cosmic – the extraordinary applicability ofmathematics in elucidating the entities, structures and processes ofthe world continues to reinforce that it is indeed one world. Yet thediversity of this world is apparent not only in the purely physical –molecules, the Earth’s surface, the immensely variegated entities ofthe astronomical heavens – but also more strikingly in the biologicalworld. New species continue to be discovered in spite of thedestruction caused by human action.

This diversity has been rendered more intelligible in recent yearsby increased awareness of the principles involved in the constitutionof complex systems. There is even a corresponding ‘science ofcomplexity’ concerned with theories about them. The natural (andhuman) sciences give us more and more a picture of the world asconsisting of complex hierarchies – a series of levels of organisation ofmatter in which each successive member of the series is a wholeconstituted of parts preceding it in the series. The wholes areorganised systems of parts that are dynamically and spatially interre-lated. This feature of the world is now widely recognised to be signif-icant in relating our knowledge of its various levels of complexity –that is, the sciences that correspond to the different levels.

The concepts needed to describe and understand – and also themethods needed to investigate – each level in the hierarchy ofcomplexity are specific to and distinctive of those levels. Sociological,


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psychological and biological concepts are characteristic of their ownlevels and quite different from those of physics and chemistry. It isvery often the case (but not always) that the properties, concepts andexplanations used to describe the higher-level wholes are not logicallyreducible to those used to describe their constituent parts. Thus soci-ological concepts are often not logically reducible to, that is trans-latable into, those of individual psychology (e.g. the differencebetween communities of more than three, three and two); psycho-logical concepts are not reducible to those of the neurosciences;biological concepts to those of biochemistry, etc. Such non-reductionist assertions are about the status of a particular kind ofknowledge (so they are ‘epistemological’) and are usually stronglydefended by the practitioners of the science concerning the higherlevel of complexity. When the non-reducibility of properties, conceptsand explanations applicable to higher levels of complexity is wellestablished, their employment in scientific discourse can often, butnot always, lead to a putative, and then to an increasingly confident,attribution of a causal efficacy to the complex wholes which does notapply to the separated, constituent parts. It has often been argued thatfor something to be real, new and irreducible it must have new, irre-ducible causal powers. If this continues to be the case under a varietyof independent procedures and in a variety of contexts, then new anddistinctive kinds of realities at the higher levels of complexity mayproperly be said to have ‘emerged’. This can occur with respect eitherto moving up the ladder of complexity or, as we shall see, throughcosmic and biological evolutionary history. This understandingaccords with the pragmatic attribution, in both ordinary life andscientific investigation, of the term ‘reality’ to that which we cannotavoid taking account of in our diagnosis of the course of events, inexperience or experiments. Real entities have effects and play irre-ducible roles in adequate explanations of the world.

All entities, all concrete particulars in the world, including humanbeings, are derived from and constituted of fundamental physicalentities (see pp.67ff.) – quarks or whatever it is that current physicspostulates as the basic building constituents of the world (which, ofcourse, includes energy as well as matter). This is a ‘monistic’ viewthat everything can be broken down into fundamental physicalentities and that no extra entities are thought to be inserted at higher


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levels of complexity to account for their properties. I prefer to call it‘emergentist monism’, rather than ‘non-reductive physicalism’.Those who adopt the latter label for their view, particularly inspeaking of the ‘physical realisation’ of the mental in the physical,often seem to hold a much less realistic view of higher-level prop-erties than I wish to affirm here – and also not to attribute causalpowers to that to which higher level concepts refer.

If we do make such a commitment about the reality of theemergent whole of a given total system, the question then arises ofhow one is to explicate the relation between the state of the wholeand the behaviour of parts of that system at the micro level. Thesimple concept of chains of causally related events (A�B�C ...) inconstant conjunction is inadequate for this purpose. Extending andenriching the notion of causality now becomes necessary because ofnew insights into the way complex systems, in general, andbiological ones, in particular, behave. (See also the next section.)

This perspective on the relationships between higher and lowerlevels of complexity has been derived primarily by reflection on thehierarchy of complexity manifest in the world as we now see itdescribed by the sciences pertinent to different levels. It has becomeincreasingly clear that one can preserve the reality, distinctiveness andcausal powers of higher levels relative to lower ones while continuingto recognise that the higher complexes are complex assemblies of thefundamental building blocks currently being discovered by physicists.No new entities are being added to the constituent parts for such partsto acquire the new distinctive properties characteristic of the wholes.For example, in the early twentieth century it was proposed that some-thing had to be added to matter to explain the difference betweenliving organisms and the inorganic. Such ‘vitalism’ is now universallyrejected by biologists. Even more significantly with respect to humanbeings, one can affirm the distinctiveness of the language of the‘mental’ as not, in principle, reducible to that of neurophysiologywithout asserting the existence of an entity, the ‘mind’, in a realm otherthan that of the physical world. The new challenge then becomes howit is that what we have regarded as physical entities can in the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society be so organised to become athinking self-conscious person. Persons are better regarded, it tran-spires, as psychosomatic unities with physical, mental and spiritual


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capacities – rather than physical entities to which a ‘mind’ and/or a‘soul/spirit’ have been added. This is in fact the biblical understanding,as H. Wheeler Robinson expressed in a famous epigram: ‘The Hebrewidea of personality is an animated body and not an incarnated soul.’7

Talk of the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of human beings as such entities, and espe-cially as naturally immortal ones, no longer represents the best ex-planation of the emergence of spiritual capacities in the light of whatwe now know about the kind of complexity that constitutes a humanbeing. Dualism of that kind seems to be incommensurate with anypicture of the world consistent with scientific observations. Holisticlanguage becomes more appropriate. This does not, of course,undermine the reality and validity of mental and spiritual activitiesand capacities. Those Christians who have affirmed not the naturalimmortality of the soul/spirit but the biblical doctrine of resurrectionof the whole person, can welcome this development.

The only dualism now theologically defensible appears to be thedistinction between the Being of God and that of everything else (the‘world’ = all-that-is, all-that-is-created). Talk of the ‘supernatural’ asa level of being in the world, other than God, therefore becomessuperfluous and misleading, and a genuine naturalism is thus entirelycompatible with theism – for God is the only super-natural entity orbeing. In spite of ‘naturalism’ often being associated with a reductivematerialism and opposed to belief in God, a theistic naturalism isentirely defensible. Nouns such as ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ are best replacedby adjectives (or the corresponding adverbs) such as ‘spiritual’ and‘mental’ predicating activities and functions of whole persons. Forexample, in this perspective human beings do not possess somespecial apparatus, some antenna, which has a non-natural way ofinteracting with God – some special wavelengths for divine communi-cation – but nevertheless they do naturally have a holistic capacity, a‘spiritual’ one, to relate to and be aware of God. Similar remarksapply to their possession of the capacity for mental activity.

Whole–part influences in the world

We saw above the need for more subtle understanding of how higherlevels relate to lower levels in the complex systems that constitutenatural reality and we hinted that this could still allow application ofthe notion of a ‘causal’ relation from whole to part (of system to


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constituent) – never ignoring, of course, the bottom-up effects ofparts on wholes, which depend on their properties for the parts beingwhat they are.

A number of terms have in recent years been applied to this effectof the higher level whole on the behaviour of its constituents, forexample ‘downward causation’, or ‘top-down causation’ or, mypreferred term, ‘whole–part influence’. A classic example is that ofthe Bénard phenomenon: at a critical point a fluid heated uniformlyfrom below in a vessel ceases to manifest the entirely random motionof its molecules, but displays up and down convective currents incolumns of hexagonal cross-section. Certain autocatalytic reactionsdisplay spontaneously rhythmic temporal and spatial patterns in theconcentrations of the reacting molecules. Many examples are nowknown of such dissipative systems which can self-organise into large-scale patterns in spite of the random motions of the units – ‘order outof chaos’, it has been dubbed.

The ordinary physico-chemical account of the interactions at themicro level of description is not adequate to explain these phenomena.It is clear that the activities of the parts and the patterns they form arewhat they are because of their incorporation into the system-as-a-whole. In fact they are patterns within the systems in question. In thechemical and biochemical cases they incorporate feedback influencesthat affect other stages in the process. This occurs also in the muchmore complex, and only partly understood, systems of genesswitching on and off and their interplay with cell metabolism andspecific protein production in the development of biological forms.The parts would not behave as observed if they were not parts of thatparticular system (the whole). The state of the system-as-a-whole isinfluencing (i.e. acting like a cause on) what the parts, the constituents,actually do. Many such examples of self-organising and dissipativechemical and biochemical systems have now been recorded and theliterature extends also into the economic and social arenas.

We do not have available for such systems any account of eventsin terms of temporal, linear chains of causality as previouslyconceived (A�B�C�...). Here the term whole–part influence will beused to represent the net effect of all those ways in which a system-as-a-whole, operating from its higher level, is a causal factor in whathappens to its constituent parts, the lower level. This feature of the


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world provides a significant clue to how we might conceive of Godaffecting events in an entirely naturalistic, non-supernatural world(see pp.108ff.). At this point, however, I want to mention anothergeneral concept that has often been found applicable to under-standing the relation between higher and lower levels.

The flow of information in the world

There is a flow of information from higher to lower levels in a single,hierarchically stratified complex. The higher level is seen asconstraining and shaping the patterns of events occurring among theconstituent units of the lower one. Although ‘information’ is a conceptdistinct from matter and energy yet, in real systems, no informationflows without some exchange of energy and/or matter. As an interpre-tative concept it is useful not only in the more obvious context of themind–brain–body relation but also in considering the relation of envir-onment to biological processes, including evolution. In this context, atemporal flow of information about the environment is over a longperiod of time impressed indirectly (via the effect of the environmenton the viability of organisms possessing mutated DNA) on theorganism’s DNA. This DNA then shapes the functioning of theorganism in such a way as to aid its production of viable progeny. Theconcept of information is indeed very apt for situations in which aform at one level influences forms at lower levels – a process that canthen be conceived of as a transfer of information, as distinct fromenergy or matter. One can usefully distinguish,8 in this context:

1. ‘Information’ in the physicists’, communication engineers’ andbrain scientists’ sense – in which ‘information’ is related to theprobability of one outcome, or case selected, out of manyprobable outcomes or cases. (In this sense it is, in certain circum-stances, the negative of the thermodynamic concept of entropy.)

2. ‘Information’ in a sense related to the Latin informare, meaning‘to give shape or form to’, used as the noun corresponding to thetransitive verb ‘to inform’, in the sense of ‘To give “form” orformative principle to; hence to stamp, impress, or imbue withsome specific quality or attribute’.9

3. ‘Information’ in the ordinary sense of ‘that of which one isapprised or told’.10


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Information (1) is necessary to shape or give form, as information(2), to a receptor. If that receptor is the brain of a human being, theninformation (3) is conveyed. Here the term ‘information’ is beingused broadly to represent this whole process of (1) becoming (2) –and only modulating to (3) when there is a specific reference tohuman brain processes in which (1) acquires meaning for humanbeings. I am not intending here to imply that (3) is reducible to (1),only that (1) is the necessary precondition for the manifestation andemergence of (3).

Information (1) and (2) are often applicable to the higher- tolower-level interactions in hierarchically stratified physical andbiological systems. The transition from information (1) and (2) to (3)is somewhat ambivalently related to the opaque mind–brain–bodyrelation, though it has been widely employed in that context.Although attempts have been made to use the concept of information(1) to define living entities, biologists have often been sceptical aboutit its usefulness in, for example, understanding development. (It hada historically significant application in interpreting the relationbetween the structure of DNA and the proteins whose structure itcontrols and thus for providing the molecular basis for heredity, thatis, for genetic information.) The notion of flow of information is aconceptual tool ready to hand to interpret the relation of higher tolower levels in a particular hierarchically stratified complex but itmust be used warily. We shall later (see pp.121ff.) consider whetherit can be utilised in relation to how God might communicate withhumanity ‘naturally’, that is, through the natural.

The world-as-a-whole: a System-of-systems

The world consists of myriads of individual systems, which are oftenthemselves hierarchically stratified complex systems of stable parts.We have been exploring their internal (whole–part) relationships.However, these individual systems can themselves interact in a highlyramified manner across space and time. Distant events (e.g. flaringspots on the Sun showering cosmic rays on the Earth; the ellipticalorbits of the planets about the Sun) can affect the Earth’s climate andbiological evolution. The individual systems of the world are increas-ingly demonstrated by the sciences to be interconnected and inter-dependent in multiple ways, with great variations in the strengths of


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mutual coupling. On the Earth’s surface, the ecological interconnect-edness of all forms of life and their matter and energy cycles, them-selves related to atmospheric and geological ones, has in recent yearsbecome increasingly apparent in all its baffling intricacies. Theseinteractions between individual systems over space and time cannotbe ignored in our reflections on the nature of the world and God’srelation to it, simply because we can never have one comprehensivetheory of them. This character of the world-as-a-whole suggeststhat it is metaphysically plausible to perceive it as an interconnectedand interdependent System-of-systems, the ‘systems’ being now ofdifferent types. Such an assertion about all-that-is, based on what weknow (so epistemological), would have, as always when this is so, aputative significance concerning its nature (and so an ontologicalreference). In that case, the ‘world-as-a-whole’ is not simply aconcept or an abstract description, but could, at least provisionally,be regarded as a holistic reality at its own level – even if the couplingbetween systems is much looser and more diffuse, and therefore lessclassifiable, than it is within a particular system. The apprehensionof all-that-is in its holistic unity as a System-of-systems is not obvi-ously apparent to the limited horizons and capacities of humanity,though every advance in the sciences serves to reveal further cross-connections between its component systems. Moreover, such inter-connectedness would be transparent to the omniscient Creator Godwho continuously gives its constituents and its processes existence.

Earlier we noted that when a particular hierarchical system isconsidered, a flow of information can be envisaged from higher tolower levels. Is this notion of the flow of information any help inthinking of the multiple, highly variegated and overlapping interac-tions between individual systems in the world system?

The world may be thought of as an interconnected network ofdifferent types of systems interacting in specific ways and mutuallyinfluencing each other. A common factor then discernible in themultiple interactions between such systems (in the whole cosmicSystem) is the transfer of information whereby patterns of events inone system affect patterns of events in another. The interchangesbetween the myriad systems of energy and/or matter are, of course,variegated beyond the possibility of generalisation. Use of theconcept of information is thus particularly apt for elucidating these


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interactions, since it is independent of the concepts of matter andenergy – though in nature it never occurs without involving theirexchange. These considerations are relevant (see pp.111–12) to howone might conceive of an interaction of God with the world whichcould influence particular events in it.

A lawlike world – no intervention

The successes of the sciences in unravelling the intricate, oftencomplex, yet beautifully articulated web of relationships betweenstructures, processes and entities in the world have made it increas-ingly problematic to regard God as ‘intervening’ in the world to bringabout events that are not in accordance with these divinely createdpatterns and regularities that the sciences are unravelling. Indeed thevery belief of most scientifically educated monotheists in the existenceand nature of the Creator God depends on this character of theworld. The transcendence of God, God’s essential otherness anddistinct kind of being from everything else, always allows in principlethe possibility that God could act to overrule the very regularities towhich God has given existence. However, setting aside the immensemoral issues about why God does not intervene to prevent rampantevil, this could give rise, more fundamentally, to an incoherence in ourunderstanding of God’s nature. It suggests an arbitrary and magic-making Agent far removed from the concept of the One who createdand is creating the world that science reveals. That world nowappears convincingly closed to external causal interventions of thekind that classical philosophical theism postulated, e.g. in the idea ofa ‘miracle’ as a breaking of the laws of nature.

Furthermore, one has to recognise, with Hume, that adequatehistorical evidence for any supposed interventions by God in thenatural, created, causal nexus – and thus contravention of thedivinely established regularities – could never, as a matter of fact, beavailable. One would need vastly more evidence for any eventsupposed to have departed from the multiply observed regularitiesthan for one thought to be consistent with them. Yet it is of thenature of our fragmentary evidence (even today) that this cannot beforthcoming. Assessment of the supposed historical evidence forsuch a divine intervention depends critically on the assessor’s presup-positions about their possibility. I have already argued that the


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scientist who is a theist infers the existence of a Creator God as thebest explanation of the existence of the world and of its inbuiltrationality. For such a theist it is incoherent ever to accept thepresupposition that God intervenes in the created processes of theworld, in the divinely created fabric of existence, of which humanbeings are an integral and emergent part. A God who intervenescould only be regarded, by all who adopt a scientific perspective onthe world, as being a kind of semi-magical arbitrary Great Fixer oroccasional Meddler in the divinely created, natural and historicalnetworks of causes and effects.

So the problem is: how can one conceive of the God who is theCreator of this world affecting events in it without abrogating thevery laws and regularities to which God has given existence andcontinuously sustains in existence? The problem has been intensifiedby the general scepticism among philosophers, theologians and scien-tists (if not the general public) about the existence of a ‘supernatural’world. That supposed world, by manifesting an ontological categoryof immaterial ‘spirit’, appeared to provide a channel along whichdivine influences could supposedly operate to manipulate matter andhuman beings. Such dualism is not intellectually defensible today, andhas few supporters, not least with respect to human nature. We haveseen that theists find themselves having to assert that the only dualismto which they are committed is that between God and the world –that is, to the absolute difference between an infinite and necessaryBeing and the contingency of existence of the entire created order.This inevitably leads, in all hypotheses concerning how God mightbring about particular events, to the problem of what has (infelici-tously) been called the ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’. For if Godin God’s own Being is distinct from anything we can possibly know inthe world, then God’s nature is ineffable and will always be inacces-sible to us so that we have only the resources of analogy to depict howGod might influence events in the world.

This question will occupy us more fully later (see pp.93–4) but atthis stage the relevance of the idea of panentheism must bementioned. Panentheism is the belief that the Being of God includesand penetrates all-that-is, so that every part of it exists in God and(as against pantheism) that God’s Being is more than it and is notexhausted by it. In contrast to classical philosophical theism, with its


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reliance on the concept of necessary substance, panentheism takesembodied personhood for its model of God and so places muchgreater stress on the immanence of God in, with and under the eventsof the world.

The problem of God’s interaction with the world, if not theintractable problem of evil, is illuminated by such a panentheisticunderstanding of God’s relation to the world. The total network ofregular, natural events, in this perspective, is viewed as in itself thecreative and sustaining action of God. Of course, this network ofevents is not identical with God and is not God’s body, for it is not inany sense a ‘part’ of God as such. God is the immanent creatorcreating in and through the processes of the natural order. Thispoints us in the direction of postulating that the ontological gap(s)between the world and God is/are located simply everywhere – or,more precisely, because the world is ‘in God’, God can influence theworld in its totality, as a System-of-systems.

A world containing inherently unpredictable events

In the context of the preceding discussion, it must be recognisedthat the description of the world as being lawlike requires qualifi-cation. For the regularities in relationships between eventsoccurring at the level of the smallest entities in the world, at thesubatomic and quantum levels, are often only statistical and prob-abilistic. For example, in any given interval, however small, weknow accurately only the proportion of an assembly of radiumatoms that will break up and not what will happen to any givenindividual atom. Moreover, if such a micro-event occurs in a system(for example, some ‘chaotic’ ones) in which its outcome could beamplified to the macroscopic level, then events readily observableat the human level might also then become unpredictable. Thepredominant view among practising physicists – to abbreviate ludi-crously a sharp and unsettled question – is that this unpredict-ability of the effect of measurement on quantum-level systems isinherent. If one takes this view, then there is no definite knowledgeof which, say, radium atom will split up in the next smallestpossible time interval – only probabilistic knowledge is available.In that case there is no definite fact of the matter even for God toknow, so God logically cannot know it, for omniscience is the


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ability to know all that it is logically possible to know. One wouldhave to conclude that God has so made the world that God knowsthe outcome of such events only in a probabilistic manner. That is,God is omniscient, with only a probabilistic knowledge of theoutcomes of some events. Clearly this postulate depends on thebelief that God also does not know the future (see pp.43ff). Theseconsiderations do not apply to so-called ‘chaotic’ processes, whichare fully deterministic, even if unpredictable by us because of ourinadequately precise knowledge of the initial conditions to whichthey are so sensitive in their outcomes. But an omniscient Godcould always know those conditions with any precision required topredict their outcome at some future time.

In parallel with this qualification of God’s omniscience is thecognate proposal of God’s self-limited omnipotence. Christiantheology has always affirmed that God’s omnipotence is that ofdivine Love: God can do only what is consistent with God’s nature asLove. The will of created human beings is free so that, in particular,God has let Godself not have coercive power over human actions. Soin the Christian understanding, divine omnipotence has always beenregarded as limited by the very nature of God. That is, God isomnipotent, but self-limited by God’s nature as Love.

These considerations would appear also to extend the notion ofdivine self-limited omnipotence in relation to measurement ofquantum-level events the outcomes of which are probabilistic. Tohave power over the outcomes, God would need to predict what theywould be if God did not act specifically in that context and we haveseen that that is impossible for quantum events. This is still a fraughtissue in the debates concerning how God could act in the worldconsistently with the regularities observed by the sciences andwithout law-breaking interventions and will need to be consideredagain later (see pp.104ff.).

Brains, minds and persons in the world

Self-conscious persons have emerged naturally in the world by theprocesses of evolution, as we shall discuss more fully in the nextchapter. Here, continuing to take a ‘still shot’ of the world as it is, weshall consider what kind of being is manifest in Homo sapiens, andin particular the basis of consciousness.


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Much discussion of the relation of higher to lower levels in hier-archically stratified systems has centred on the mind–brain–bodyrelation, on how mental events are related to neurophysiologicalones in the human-brain-in-the-human-body – in effect the wholequestion of human agency and what we mean by it. A hierarchy oflevels in the brain can be delineated, each of which is the focus of acorresponding scientific study, from neuroanatomy and neuro-physiology to psychology. Those involved in studying how the brainworks have come to recognise that properties not found in compo-nents of a lower level can emerge from the organisation and inter-action of these components at a higher level. For example, rhythmicpattern generation in some neural circuits is a property of the circuit,not of isolated pacemaker neurons. Explanations coexist at all levels,as they do in other sciences.

The still intense philosophical discussion of the mind–brain–bodyrelation has been broadly concerned with attempting to elucidate therelation between the ‘top’ level of human mental experience and thelowest, physical levels. The question of what kind of causation, ifany, may be said to be operating from a top-down, as well as theobvious and generally accepted bottom-up, direction is still muchdebated in this context. Earlier, I used ‘whole–part influence’ todescribe the general relation of wholes to parts in complex systemsand maintained that a non-reductionist view of the predicates,concepts, laws, etc. applicable to the higher level could be coherent.Reality could, it was argued, putatively be attributable to that towhich these non-reducible, higher-level predicates, concepts, laws,etc., applied; and these new realities, with their distinctive prop-erties, could properly be called ‘emergent’. When this emergentistmonist approach is applied to the mental activity of the human-brain-in-the-human-body, to elucidate its nature we find we have tolook to vernacular (‘folk’) psychology and its characteristic ways ofexpressing beliefs, desires and so forth. Mental properties are nowwidely regarded by philosophers as irreducible to their physical ones,indeed as emergent from them, for mentalistic terms cannot logicallybe translated into neurophysiological ones. However, mental eventsare nevertheless interlocked with the lower-level events. In the widerrange of physical, biological and other complex systems, thecausative effects of the higher levels are real but different in kind


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from the effects the parts had on each other operating at the lowerlevel. What happens in these systems at each level is the result of thejoint operation of both higher- and lower-level influences – thehigher and lower levels could be said to be jointly sufficient, type-different causes of the lower level events. When the higher–lowerrelation is that of mind/brain–body, it seems to me that similarconsiderations should apply.

Up to this point, I have been taking the term ‘mind’, and its cognate‘mental’, to refer to the emergent reality distinctive especially ofhuman beings. But in many wider contexts, not least that of philo-sophical theology, a more appropriate term for this emergent realitywould be ‘person’, and its cognate ‘personal’, to represent the totalpsychosomatic, holistic experience of the human being in all its modal-ities – conscious and unconscious, rational and emotional, intellectualand aesthetic, active and passive, individual and social, etc. We mustrecognise that we have thoughts, wishes and desires that togetherconstitute our character and we express these mental states throughour bodies. Our very embodiedness appears to be the precondition forperception and action, moral agency, community and freedom.

There is therefore a strong case for designating the highest level,the whole, in that unique system which is the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-social-relations as that of the ‘person’. Persons areinter alia causal agents with respect to their own bodies and to thesurrounding world, including other people. They can, moreover,report with varying degrees of accuracy on aspects of their internalstates concomitant with their actions. Hence the exercise of personalagency by individuals transpires to be a paradigm case and supremeexemplar of whole–part influence – in this case exerted by personson the bodies that constitute them and on their surroundings. Thedetails of the relation between cerebral neurological activity andconsciousness cannot in principle detract from the causal efficacy ofthe content of the latter on the former and thus on behaviour. Inother words, ‘folk psychology’, imprecise though it is, cannot becavalierly dismissed, for the real reference of the language ofpersonhood is both justified and necessary. The thrust of all this isthat in the case of Homo sapiens we have to explore God’s relationwith persons and can expect distinctive features in that relationdifferent from those of God’s relation with the non-personal world.


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The nature of such relationships of persons with God may also beilluminated by our understanding of the emergence of new realitiesin complex, especially self-organising, systems. In many situationswhere God is experienced by human persons we have by intentionand according to well-winnowed experience and traditioncomplexes of interacting personal entities, material things andhistorical circumstances which are epistemologically not reducible toconcepts applicable to these individual components. Could not newrealities – and so new experiences of God for humanity – be seen toemerge in such complexes and even to be causally effective? (TheEucharist can be so interpreted; see pp.151–2.)

Communication between persons in the world

It is profitable at this point to remind ourselves how human personscommunicate with each other. How do we get to know each other,not only by description but also by acquaintance – that is get toknow what is, as we say, ‘in each other’s mind’?

All communication at its most basic level is mediated through thesenses – hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell. The physical intermedi-aries are vibrations in pressure in the air, electromagnetic waves,physical pressure, changes of temperature, molecules, etc. – this is theone world of our monistic scientific perception. Our genes, culture,nurture and education have enabled us to decode patterns of thesephysical intermediaries so as to convey information about the contentof the consciousness of the one attempting to communicate. Thesepatterns can be immensely complex (associated with long histories forexample) in language and mediated by the objective carriers of acultural heritage, such as books, tapes, paintings, sculptures, CDs,etc. They can be woven in time, as in music, drama, language; andthey can be more bodily based, as we now know from research intobody language and communication through eye contact. In all theseways individual persons communicate with each other and also withthe wider human community, both past and present.

The receptor of this information in the individual person is theindividual human brain, which stores this variegated informationthat constitutes knowledge of another’s state of consciousness(corresponding to the state of another’s brain). This occurs atdifferent levels and is integrated into a perception of the other


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person. Such knowledge of the other person can be recalled, withvarying degrees of rapidity and accuracy, into consciousness. From anon-dualist viewpoint, this process can be regarded as a reactivationof the brain to reproduce the original patterns that previously consti-tuted this conscious awareness of the other person – as long as itcontinues to be recognised that these conscious mental events are anon-reducible reality that is distinctive of the human-brain-in-the-human-body.

It seems that all the processes involved in communicationbetween human persons can be investigated and described atdifferent levels by the methods and concepts appropriate to the levelin question without invoking any special, ontologically distinct‘psychic’ medium, unknown to the natural sciences, as the means ofcommunication. This is not to say that the meaning of what iscommunicated can be reduced simply to physical patterns in themedia in question, for the interpretation of these necessitates arecognition of their distinctive kind of reality. But it is to stress thatall communication between human beings, even at the most intimateand personal level, is mediated by the entities, structures andprocesses – that is, by the constituents – of the world. The subtlyintegrated patterns of these means of communication do in factallow mutual comprehension between two human individuals ofeach other’s distinctive personhood. This knowledge of two personsof each other, this knowledge by acquaintance, is notoriously notfully expressible in any of the frameworks of interpretation appro-priate to the various modalities of the interaction process. Thereremains an inalienable uniqueness and indeed mystery concerningthe nature of the individual person and of the nature of the inter-action between two persons. The sense of personhood, of being aperson, and awareness of interpersonal relations are unique, irre-ducible emergents in humanity.

Recognition of the rootedness of the means of interpersonalcommunication in the monistic constituents of the world does notdiminish or derogate from the special kind of reality that constitutespersons and their mutual interactions. For in such communicationbetween persons there occurs a subtle and complex integration of thereceived sense data with previous memories of that person. This isitself shaped by a long-learnt cultural framework of interpretation


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which provides the language and imagery with which to articulatethe relation in consciousness. So recognition of the physical natureof the means of communication between persons in no way dimin-ishes the uniqueness and in-depth character that can pertain topersonal relationships at their most profound level for the indi-viduals concerned – indeed often the most real and significant expe-riences of people’s lives.


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The epic of evolution

The foregoing still shot (chapter 3) of the way the world is now seen isonly one aspect of the scientific vista on the world. The Prologuedescribed the results of the time-oriented scientific exploration of thephases of the universe in process from its distant cosmic origins to theliving world of the Earth. This is what some have called ‘the epic ofevolution’. Whatever we call it, it is a thought framework sufficientlywell established that it is now impossible for us to set ourselves back intothe temporal framework that shaped Jewish, Muslim and Christian reli-gious beliefs. The framework for these monotheistic faiths has, for twomillennia, been the cosmology of the Old Testament, the Hebrew scrip-tures, especially the early chapters of Genesis (together with parts of thePsalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature). Doctrines concerning humannature have depended strongly on the different mythical accounts of theGarden of Eden and of the Fall in Genesis 2–3, and so consequentlyhave understandings in Christianity of the ‘work’ of Jesus the Christ – inparticular, theories of atonement. And, of course, much more.

Since theology is, in principle, the relating of everything to God, it isnot surprising that the establishment of this evolutionary perspectivehas often been perceived as a challenge – and even as a threat – toreceived monotheistic beliefs about God, nature and humanity. I hope

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to show that, far from being a threat, the scientific vista for the thirdmillennium, or at least the twenty-first century, constitutes a stimulus totheology to become more encompassing and inclusive, but only iftheology radically alters its widely assumed paradigms. We are nowliving through the most fundamental challenge of all to theistic belief –the fundamental transformation of our basic understanding of natureand humanity, and consequently also of God, which is being provokedby the scientific vision of the ‘epic of evolution’ depicted in the Prologue.

In 1999, the BBC radio morning news programme invitedlisteners to name the ‘most significant British figure of the secondmillennium’. You can imagine the list that emerged! Among the topthree or four, Shakespeare was nearly always included and, veryoften, Churchill – but rarely scientists. Yet the intellectual history ofthe seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was transformed and domi-nated by the creative achievements of Newton. A fundamental tran-sition occurred which is well documented and widely recognised.Needless to say, many scientists were shocked by this response of thegreat British public and the lack of attention to Darwin outragedRichard Dawkins (who has lectured on ‘Universal Darwinism’). I donot think he was wrong in choosing Darwin to head the list. Yet theimpact of Darwin – and even more so of Darwinism – is regardedwith suspicion by some Christian believers. But Darwin’s uniquelyeminent place in the history of biology is totally assured, for hepropounded a plausible mechanism for the transformation of species– that of natural selection (the increasing predominance of forms ableto produce and rear more progeny as the environment changes). Hebrilliantly, doggedly, at great personal cost, showed that the operationof this mechanism was the best explanation, and made most sense of,widely disparate data concerning the form, habitats, distribution andbehaviour of an immense variety of living organisms. His work is aparadigm case of that inference to the best explanation (IBE) of awide range of observations and experiences which I am hereespousing. His ideas were vindicated by the later discovery of the lawsof heredity (to which Darwin did not have access), and by a numberof developments in the twentieth century. These included: thestatistics of the process; direct observation of natural selection invivo; irrefutable evidence for the interconnectedness of all livingforms in the universality of the genetic code (linking the sequence of


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units in DNA to that in proteins); and by the evidence of genealogicalconnections between widely diverse species, based on sequence rela-tionships in genetic DNA and in particular proteins. No professionalbiologist can honestly work now on any other basis than on recog-nising the historical connectedness of all living forms and of the roleof natural selection in their mutual transformation over four billionyears. As Theodor Dobzhansky (an Orthodox Christian) affirmed,‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’

Now, at the turn of the millennium, we also have a naturalistic,intelligible account from the cosmological and astronomical sciences, inassociation with the relevant chemistry and physics, of the developmentover the last twelve billion years of the observable universe from aprimal concentration of mass–energy. The two stories join up to give usthe contemporary epic of evolution – a perspective of a universe inprocess from an original fluctuating quantum field, or ‘quark soup’, tothe astonishing complexity of the universe, as observed by the Hubbletelescope, and to the fecund complexity of life on Earth. This vistacompels us, more than ever before, to regard God as continuouslycreating, as the eternal Creator, for God continues to give existence toprocesses that are inherently creative and producing new forms.

Any theology – any attempt to relate God to all-that-is – will bemoribund and doomed if it does not incorporate this perspective intoits bloodstream. Yet much Christian theology appears to be simplytinkering apologetically with vulnerable chinks in its armour,trusting that it will survive into what it hopes will be less challengingtimes. That is a recipe for extinction, for it is on planet Earth, part ofan evolving world, that the tragicomedy of human existence isworking itself out. We are part of nature, part of an evolving cosmos– indeed we are stardust become persons.

Let us now look, in sequence, at stages in the processes leading tolife and reflect on their significance for our understanding of nature,humanity and God – that is, their significance for theology, for ourexploration towards God.

The physical origin of the universe

Extrapolation backwards in time on the basis of known physicalrelations and observations enables astronomers to trace theevolution of the universe back to when it was only a tiny fraction of

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a second old, in the form of a compressed fireball hotter than thecentre of the Sun. However far astronomers and cosmologists goback, the universe was indisputably physical, consisting ofmatter–energy–space–time in its most basic forms (e.g. a fluctuatingquantum field). From this all else has developed, hence it can at leastbe affirmed (and there will be much more to affirm) that all concreteparticulars in the world, including human beings, are constituted offundamental physical entities. This supports the monistic view weadopted earlier (see pp.49–50) in the sense that everything can bebroken down into fundamental physical entities and that no extraentities are to be inserted at higher levels of complexity. It is entirelyin accord with the biblical tradition that ‘the Lord God formed manfrom the dust of the ground’1 and that Adam was told ‘you are dustand to dust you shall return’.2

Such a monistic view of the constitution of all entities in theuniverse, including living organisms and human beings, does notmean that in the long run all is to be explained by fundamentalphysics. For life is emergent (in the sense we have already defined; seep.49) from the physical and chemical, as is the psychological fromthe neurological, and personhood from the human-brain-in-the-human-body – all are non-reducible levels of reality.

The origin of life

There is a complex, and unresolved, debate concerning the way therecame into existence the earliest entities that could be called living –that could replicate complex structures that are maintained by incor-porating molecules from their environment. It is nearly thirty yearsnow since the two Nobel laureates Ilya Prigogine and Manfred Eigenshowed by two entirely different approaches that the transformationof certain, apparently inchoate, physico-chemical systems of very largemolecules into complex, self-copying ones is likely to occur underappropriate conditions. So much so that Eigen affirmed that theevolution of life must, given appropriate environmental conditionswhich have existed on Earth, be considered physico-chemically to bean inevitable process – despite its indeterminate historical course.

The inability of scientists to discover the precise mechanism of theorigin of life is not at all surprising, for it can be inferred only indir-ectly from current physical chemistry and biochemistry. This has led


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some to become sceptical about the possibility of life emerging onEarth without coming from some other external source (anotherplanet perhaps – though this would only displace, not solve, theproblem). Others, usually non-scientists, have even resorted to postu-lating divine intervention. However, the pioneer work I referred toshows this scepticism about the natural origin of life to be unwar-ranted. It has become increasingly established since those earlierstudies that matter on planet Earth has the capacity to be self-organ-ising on account of the very nature of the processes that its atomic andmolecular constituents can and do undergo. Such self-organisationinto spatial and temporal patterns has now been observed inhundreds of chemical, biochemical and biological systems.

In the last few years, arguments have been advanced3 that, forexample, the complex biochemical cycles that enable all cells toutilise chemically stored energy have an ‘irreducible complexity’, asif they were like a mousetrap all of whose parts are simultaneouslyessential for its operation. This irreducible complexity is deemed anddefined to be such that the cycles could come into existence only intoto and complete for, it is argued, any incomplete cycle could notfunction (just as a mousetrap lacking a part could not work). It isasserted that such irreducible complexity implies what is called‘intelligent design’. The implication intended is that they must havebeen created all in a piece, presumably by God conceived of as thenecessary Designer who not only conceives of but actually makeseach cycle separately and individually all at once. This version of‘special creation’, now postulated for the molecular level, has gaineda certain amount of currency in some circles. However, it is based onthe false supposition that molecular systems could not self-organiseinto such cycles and this contradicts the experimental and theoreticalevidence already referred to. It also ignores the extensive redundancydisplayed by all such systems in vivo (including complexes of genesin action) and their ability to function even when only part of themechanism is present. This renders inapplicable the concept of irre-ducibility as applied to these complex cycles (so the mousetrapanalogy is a false trail). Moreover, a naturalistic, evolutionaryaccount also gives an intelligible explanation of what might, objec-tively, be called the notable imperfections of ‘design’ in the featuresof many living organisms – for example, human beings having too


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many teeth for their jaws’ size, and the relatively large size of thehuman head, which makes birth dangerous.

It is the view of those scientists studying the emergence ofcomplexity – including, for example, the Nobel laureate C. de Duve(‘Chance does not exclude inevitability’4) – that the principle ofEigen has been established, namely the inevitability of the emergenceby natural processes of life on some planet, some galaxy, some timein the universe, with the precise details of how and when left open.The emergence of living organisms from non-living matter can beregarded as a natural phenomenon requiring no ‘God of the gaps’ tointervene in any law-breaking manner (no deus ex machina) toensure its occurrence. Indeed, God made things make themselves, asaffirmed over a hundred years ago by a future Archbishop ofCanterbury.5 For theists, the whole process is given its existence,with the potential capacity for the emergence of self-organisingsystems and of life, by God (who is therefore not ‘of the gaps’). It isamusing to note that, in spite of this, Richard Dawkins, in responseto a claim made in the USA to having synthesised a living systemusing artificial genes, could assert: ‘Synthesising life in a test tubewould be a blow to the religious view that there’s something specialabout life.’6 This is a misunderstanding of belief in God as Creator –for theology is not committed to an act of divine intervention as theexplanation of the existence of life on Earth, or anywhere else.

The anthropic principle

Not long before delivering the 1978 Bampton Lectures,7 I had heardBrandon Carter giving an account in Cambridge of his perception ofthose ‘large number coincidences’, as he called them, that madecarbon-based life possible in the universe. He called this the‘anthropic principle’ (though ‘biotic principle’ would have beenbetter). This phrase refers to the realisation that, if a wide variety ofphysical quantities8 that characterise our present universe had beenonly slightly different, then the development of galaxies, stars andplanets would have been totally different, and the possibility of lifedeveloping on Earth might have been zero. The development ofcarbon-based life, and so of human life, turns out to be crucially andsensitively dependent on certain physical quantities having the valuesthey actually do have. In those days, my first theological reflection


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on this so-called principle was to emphasise that it reinforced againthe essential contingency of biological and human life, and that itdemonstrated with new force how closely interlocked human exis-tence is with the physical nature of the universe – we are stardust, forevery carbon atom in our bodies, every iron atom in our blood’shaemoglobin was made in stars and scattered by supernovae explo-sions before the Earth existed as a planet.

Since then others have come to interpret this anthropic character-istic of our universe as undergirding a modern ‘argument fromdesign’ for the existence of a God who intends to bring about humanlife – and so creates this universe with just these anthropic relations.I have always been wary of employing the anthropic principle forsuch apologetic purposes, since this is indeed the only kind ofuniverse which we could be in and know. What can be said on thebasis of the anthropic principle is that our emergence in this universeis at least consonant with the postulate of a Creator God who has thepurpose of bringing into existence living and eventually self-conscious persons. I remain inclined not to think the anthropic prin-ciple affords a design-type proof for the existence of a Creator God.

Since, on the basis of various defensible physical theories, theexistence of multiple universes (universes out of communicationwith each other, existing at times or in spaces beyond mutualaccessibility to light wave signals) is a real possibility,9 some haveargued that it is only by chance that our universe happens todisplay those anthropic features that allow carbon-based life.Other possible universes with different physical quantities maywell exist and be void of life in any form. Hence, it is argued, noimplications of divine creation are permissible, even of conso-nance between the anthropic principle and the existence of aCreator God. However, as we shall see (pp.75ff.), there are goodgrounds for thinking that it is through the interplay of chancewithin a lawlike framework that God must be regarded as creatingin biological evolution by exploring the possibilities and bringingnew forms into existence. Hence I would still argue (see note 7)that, if one accepts this, why cannot one similarly conceive of Godalso operating through random exploration of all possible kinds ofuniverse within the framework of whatever meta-law governs therange of possibilities? God would then be allowing chance to bring


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into existence a universe capable of generating and sustaining life.In which case, the existence of multiple universes would still beconsonant with them being given existence by a Creator God whohas the intention – some time, some place, some galaxy, someuniverse – of bringing into existence living organisms capable ofevolving into persons. But, given that we do exist, it cannot beargued from this that the initial state of the universe is divinelydetermined to ensure our existence, which is what arguments fromdesign seem to involve.

The duration of evolution

The oldest rocks to contain fossils of living forms (prokaryotic cells –bacteria and cyanophytes; no nucleus) are 3.5 billion years old and,since these are already very complex, the origin of life must be locatedin the first half billion years of the Earth’s existence, of some fourbillion years. If the Earth was formed at midnight of the day beforeyesterday and each hour is equivalent to one hundred million years,then life first appeared during yesterday morning. Only at 6 p.m.today did calcareous (hard-shelled) fossils appear; at 6 to 7 p.m. onthis second day, the seas filled with shelled creatures; at 8 p.m. fishesevolved; at 9 p.m. amphibia appeared on land; by 11.30 p.m.mammals and the first primates had spread across the globe; monkeysand apes evolved at 11.50 p.m; in the last few minutes of this secondday hominids arose, and only on the last stroke of tonight’s midnightbell do we see tool-making Homo sapiens.

During the aeons before our emergence on Earth hundreds ofmillions (if not billions) of species have come and gone, the prede-cessors of the perhaps as many as 15 million species still extant – andrapidly being extinguished by human action. Theists, who believethat the ultimate ground of all existence is God as Creator, have toface new questions: is it permissible to regard these myriads ofspecies other than Homo sapiens, most of them now extinct, assimply byproducts in a process aimed at producing human beings?Or do they have value to God as Creator in and for themselves? Theprocess is so fecund and rich and the variety and intricate beauty ofcoordinated structures and functions so great, that surely we nowhave to escape from our anthropocentric myopia and affirm thatGod as Creator takes what we can only call delight in the rich variety


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and individuality of other organisms for their own sake. Certainlythe Hebrew scriptures encourage such a view – Psalm 104, forexample, depicts the ‘Lord’ as caring for living creatures anddelighting in their enjoyment of their vitality; and the conclusion ofthe Priestly account of creation in Genesis is ‘God saw everythingthat he had made, and indeed, it was very good’.10

We have here the basis for an eco-theology that grounds the valueof all living creatures in their distinctive value to God for their ownsake and not just as stages en route to humanity and as resources forhuman exploitation.

The mechanism of biological evolution – natural selection

This is the proposition that species are derived from one another bynatural selection of the best procreators. In the words of Darwin,

If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individualdifferences in almost every part of their structure … if there be, owingto their geometrical rate of increase, a severe struggle for life … then… it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variations had everoccurred useful to each being’s own welfare ... But if variations usefulto any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus charac-terised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle forlife; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend toproduce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preser-vation, or the survival of the fittest, I have called Natural Selection.11

In more recent language, we would say today that the original muta-tional events in the gene-carrying DNA are random with respect tothe future of the biological organism, including its survival. Thebiological niche in which the organism exists then statisticallyfavours in a lawlike way those changes in the DNA that enable theorganisms possessing them to produce and rear more progeny. (Wewill refer again to the interplay of chance and law in this process.)

There are no professional biologists who doubt that naturalselection is a factor operative in biological evolution – and mostwould say it is by far the most significant one. Some, such asRichard Dawkins, say it is all-sufficient. It can certainly be subtle inits operation and counter-intuitive with respect to the degree ofchange and the complexity of new structures and functions it caneffect. However, other biologists are convinced that natural


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selection is not the whole story, and some even go so far as to saythat it alone cannot account for the formation of distinctly newspecies. They claim a significant role for other factors, including: the‘evolution of evolvability’; the constraints and selectivity effected byself-organisational principles; ‘genetic assimilation’; that how anorganism might evolve is a consequence of its state at any givenmoment; the innovative behaviour of individual organisms in aparticular environment; ‘top-down causation’ through a flow ofinformation from environment to the organism; group selection(after all!); long-term changes resulting from ‘molecular drive’;effects of the context of adaptive changes or even stasis; and therecognition that much molecular evolutionary change is immune tonatural selection. What is significant about all these other factors isthat they too occur entirely within a naturalistic framework – anevolutionary process is assumed to be operating, albeit withdiffering degrees of speed and smoothness. Furthermore, thedepiction of this process as ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ is a cari-cature. For, as many biologists have pointed out, natural selection isnot even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle as such – inspite of the language of Herbert Spencer (‘the survival of the fittest’)which Darwin unwisely borrowed. Natural selection involves manyfactors such as better integration with the ecological environment,more efficient utilisation of available food, better care of the young,more cooperative social organisation and better capacity to survivesuch struggles as do occur – remembering that it is in the interest ofany predator that their prey survive as a species.

It must be noted that death of individual members of a speciesis essential to survival of the species and to its ability to adapt toenvironmental changes and, if need be, to evolve into a new one.In evolution we witness new life through death of the old;believers that God creates through this process have to accept thatthe biological death of the individual is the means whereby Godhas been creating new species, including ourselves. Biologicaldeath was this creative means aeons before human beingsappeared. Hence we can no longer take Paul’s ‘The wages of sin isdeath’12 to mean that our biological death can be attributed tohuman sin, as has often been assumed in so-called ‘theories of theatonement’. If we wish to rescue Paul’s phrase, we will have to


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reinterpret it to refer to some kind of spiritual ‘death’ as being theconsequence of ‘sin’.

Furthermore, the believer in God as Creator has to viewbiological evolution through natural selection, and other operatingprocesses, as simply the means whereby God has been, and is,creating. God does not make things, but makes things make them-selves. Their existence is inherently transformative. There is noprima-facie case for and no need to postulate any special inter-vention by God in order to understand what has been going on.Some theologians postulate, I think mistakenly, a kind of specialguidance – or ‘lure’, or pull, or ‘nisus’ – whereby God pushes orpulls evolution in a direction it would not otherwise have taken byits own natural processes and propensities (see pp.81ff.). There is noneed for such hypotheses. God, it appears, has given and continuesto give existence to entities that, given time under the appropriateconditions, have the inherent capacity to become alive and to evolveand (see p.70) eventually to manifest the qualities of self-conscious,thinking persons.

A process of chance and law (necessity)

The interplay in biological evolution between chance, at themolecular level of DNA, and law or necessity, at the statistical levelof the population of organisms, tempted Jacques Monod13 to elevate‘chance’ to the level almost of a metaphysical principle by which theuniverse might be interpreted. He concluded that the ‘stupendousedifice of evolution’ is, in this sense, rooted in ‘pure chance’ and thattherefore all inferences of direction or purpose in the development ofthe biological world, in particular, and of the universe, in general,must be false. In his view, it was the purest accident that anyparticular creature came into being, such as Homo sapiens, and onecould never expect to discern any direction or purpose or meaning inbiological evolution. A Creator God, for all practical purposes,might just as well not exist, since everything in evolution went on inan entirely uncontrolled and fortuitous manner.

The responses to this thesis and attack on theism came mainly fromtheologically interested scientists,14 and some philosophers, ratherthan from theologians. For there is no reason why the randomness ofmolecular events in relation to biological consequences has to be given


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the metaphysical significance that Monod attributed to it. Theinvolvement of what we call ‘chance’ at the level of mutation in DNAdoes not, of itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trendsand manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms,populations and ecosystems. To call the mutation of the DNA a‘chance’ event serves simply to stress its randomness with respect tobiological consequence. Instead of being daunted by the role of chancein genetic mutations as being the manifestation of irrationality in theuniverse, it would be more consistent with observation to assert thatthe full gamut of the potentialities of living matter could be exploredonly through the agency of the rapid and frequent randomisation thatis possible at the molecular level of DNA.

This role of chance, or rather randomness (or ‘free experiment’)at the micro level is what one would expect if the universe were soconstituted that all the potential forms of organisation of matter(both living and non-living) which it contains might be thoroughlyexplored. Indeed, since Monod first published his book in France in1970, there have been key developments in theoretical andmolecular biology and physical biochemistry from the Brussels andGöttingen schools. These demonstrated that it is the interplay ofchance and law that is in fact creative within time, for it is the combi-nation of the two which allows new forms to emerge and evolve, sothat natural selection appears to be opportunistic. As in many games,the consequences of the fall of the dice depend very much on therules of the game – and chance does not exclude inevitability. It hasbecome increasingly apparent that chance operating within a lawlikeframework is the basis of the inherent creativity of the natural order– its ability to generate new forms, patterns and organisations ofmatter and energy. If all were governed by rigid law, a repetitive anduncreative order would prevail; if chance alone ruled, no forms,patterns or organisations would persist long enough for them to haveany identity or real existence and the universe could never be acosmos and susceptible to rational inquiry. It is the combination ofthe two that makes possible an ordered universe capable of devel-oping within itself new modes of existence. The rules are what theyare because of the givenness of the properties of the physical envir-onment and of the already evolved other living organisms withwhich the organism in question interacts.


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This givenness, for a theist, must be regarded as one of the God-endowed features of the world. The way in which what we call‘chance’ operates within this given framework to produce newentities, structures and processes can then properly be seen as an elic-iting of the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed from thebeginning. Such potentialities a theist must regard as written intocreation by the Creator’s purpose and as gradually being actualisedby the operation of chance stimulating their coming into existence.One might say that the potential of the ‘being’ of the world is mademanifest in the ‘becoming’ that the operation of chance makesactual. God is the ultimate ground and source of both law (necessity)and chance.

For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the worldthrough what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order,each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next. TheCreator is unfolding the divinely endowed potentialities of theuniverse through a process in which its creative possibilities andpropensities (see pp.81ff.) become actualised. This occurs within acreated development in time shaped and determined by thoseselfsame God-given potentialities. In the words of Howard van Till,God has ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘forma-tional economy’ – the set of all of the dynamic capabilities ofmatter and material, physical and biotic systems – that ‘is suffi-ciently robust to make possible the actualization of all inanimatestructures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course oftime’.15 The creative relation of God to the evolving world issimilar to the way in which a composer can begin with anarrangement of notes in an apparently simple tune and then elab-orate and expand it into a fugue by a variety of devices. Thus mighta J.S. Bach create a complex and interlocking harmonious fusion ofhis original material. The listener to such a fugue experiences, withthe luxuriant and profuse growth that emanates from the originalsimple structure, whole new worlds of music that result from theinterplay between an expectation based on the past (‘law’) and anopenness to the new (‘chance’ in the sense that the listener cannotpredict it). So might God as Creator be imagined to unfold thepotentialities of the universe which God’s own self has given it –God is an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity, involved in the


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creative exploration of making possibilities actual and continuallygiving existence to the processes that do this. These processes arethemselves God’s actions which are unravelled and revealed by thesciences: they are not themselves God, as in pantheism, but are inthemselves God’s creative activity.

The emergence of humanity

The biological, palaeontological, archaeological and historicalevidence is that human nature has emerged gradually by acontinuous process from other forms of hominids and primatesand that there are no sudden breaks of any substantial kind in thesequences noted by palaeontologists and anthropologists. This isnot to say that the history of human culture is simply a smoothlyrising curve. There must have been, for example, key turningpoints or periods in the development of speech and so of socialcooperation, including rituals for burying the dead, with provisionof food and implements, testifying to a belief in some form of lifeafter death. These apparently occurred among the Neanderthals ofthe Middle Palaeolithic even before the emergence of Homosapiens some 100,000 or so years ago, after which further strikingdevelopments occurred. However, there is no past period forwhich there is reason to affirm that human beings possessed moralperfection and existed in a paradisal situation from which therehas been a subsequent decline. All the evidence points to acreature slowly emerging into awareness, with an increasingcapacity for consciousness and sensitivity and the possibility ofmoral responsibility and, I would affirm, of response to God(especially after the ‘axial period’ around 500 BCE). So there is nosense in which we can talk of a Fall from a past perfection. Therewas no golden age, no perfect past, no individuals – Adam or Eve– from whom all human beings have descended and declined andwho were perfect in their relationships and behaviour. We appearto be rising beasts rather than fallen angels – rising from anamoral (and in that sense) innocent state to the capability of moraland immoral action. (I hardly need to mention that, of course, themyths of Adam and Eve and of the Fall have long since been inter-preted non-historically and existentially by theologians andbiblical scholars.)


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What is also true is that humanity manifests aspirations to aperfection not yet attained, a potentiality not yet actualised, but no‘original righteousness’ in the sense of a past state. Sin as alienationfrom God, humanity and nature is only too real and appears as theconsequence of our very possession of that self-consciousness whichalways places ourselves at the egotistical centre of the universe of ourconsciousness which has evolved biologically. Sin is primarily a theo-logical concept and only secondarily about ethical behaviour. It isabout our alienation from God, humanity and nature, aboutawareness of our falling short from what God would have us be andis part and parcel of our having evolved into self-consciousness,freedom, intellectual curiosity and the possession of values. Thedomination of Christian theologies of redemption, for example, byclassical conceptions of the Fall as a past event urgently needs, itseems to me, to be rescinded and the notion of ‘redemption’ to berethought if it is to make any sense to our contemporaries. Shouldnot, for example, the effect of the life, death and resurrection of Jesusthe Christ ( the ‘work of Christ’, in traditional terms) now beregarded not as the restoration of a lost, past state of perfection, butrather as the potential transformation of humanity into a new, previ-ously unattainable, one?

We are all aware of the tragedy of our failure to fulfil our highestaspirations, of our failure to come to terms with finitude, death andsuffering, of our failure to realise our potentialities and to steer ourpath through life. Freedom allows us to make the wrong choices, sothat sin and alienation from God, from our fellow human beings andfrom nature are real features of our existence. So the questions of notonly ‘Who are we?’ but even ‘What should we be becoming – whereshould we be going?’ remain acute for us.

Human behaviour

Our understanding of human behaviour has been enriched by thenew sciences of sociobiology and behaviour genetics. Sociobiologyis the systematic study of the biological, especially genetic, basis ofpatterns of social behaviour in socially organised species andaspires to include even human behaviour and culture in itspurview. Behaviour genetics aims to examine over a wide range theinheritance of many different behaviours in individual organisms,


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including humanity. These studies do not necessarily have to bepursued with excessively reductionist ambitions, though that hascertainly been the stance of many of its practitioners, e.g. E.O.Wilson, the founder of sociobiology. These new sciences cannotbut influence our general assessment of human nature and of thegenetic constraints under which free will operates. Theologiansshould acknowledge that it is this kind of genetically basedcreature that God has actually created as a human being throughthe evolutionary process. The limits and scope and perhaps eventhe procedures of human thinking and action are clearlydependent on our genetic heritage. We are, more than we realise,under the leash of our genes. However, that heritage cannot inadvance itself determine the content of our thinking, for exampleof our of moral reasoning – even if it is a prerequisite of ourpossessing these capacities. I think we must not, in this context,perpetrate the ‘genetic fallacy’ of reductively explaining humancultural development entirely in terms of its biological (or evencultural) origins. Just as science is not magic, so ethics, on the samegrounds, is not genetics.

Even so, the theologian need not enter this debate withdestructive ambitions. If God, as a scientifically sensitive theologyaffirms, is creating immanently through the evolutionary processes,it would not be inconsistent with such a theology for human moralawareness to have originated sociobiologically. This is not to pre-empt the maturation of moral sensitivity in self-aware, reasoningpersons whose emergence in the created order God can properly beposited as intending (as I hope to make clear a little later).Furthermore, a distinctive role for the religious impulse of humanitycan be discerned in this context. For committing oneself to living fora transcendent God’s purposes, not one’s own or those of one’sgenetic kin, can be a commitment to optimise the social systemrather than the individual. Some cross-cultural surveys indicate thatbelief in transcendent deities that are concerned with the morality ofhuman behaviour towards other human beings occurs morefrequently in more complex societies. Moreover, humanity couldonly have survived and flourished if it held social and personal valuesthat transcended the urges of the individual, embodying ‘selfish’genes – and these values are closely related to belief in a transcendent


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Ultimate Reality. The existence of such values points to the nature ofthat unsurpassable Ultimate Reality and this then enriches and stim-ulates our own sense of values.

Trends and directions in evolution?

I have argued that God must now be regarded as creating throughprocesses involving the interplay of chance, in random events, andlaw, in structured situations manifesting regular properties.Nevertheless can God be said to be implementing any purpose inbiological evolution? Or is the whole process so haphazard, such amatter of what Monod and Jacob called ‘tinkering’ (in French,bricolage), that no meaning, least of all a divinely intended one, canbe discerned in the process? The realisation of possibilities, whichmay be random, depends on the total situation within which thepossibilities are being actualised so that there exist weighted possibil-ities that are tendencies or propensities to become real which areproperties of the whole situation.

Propensities are simply the effects of the context on the outcomesof random events. I suggest that the evolutionary process is charac-terised by such propensities, namely the emergence of certainfeatures that, in appropriate circumstances, favour survival. Theyinclude: increased complexity, information processing and storage,consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness (aprerequisite for social development and the cultural transmission ofknowledge down the generations). Some successive forms, alongsome evolutionary branch or twig, have a distinct probability ofmanifesting more and more of these characteristics. However, thephysical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actu-alised is contingent on the history of the crossing of disparate chainsof events, including survival of the mass extinctions that haveoccurred (ninety-six per cent of all species in the Permo-Triassic one).

In his Wonderful Life,16 Stephen J. Gould has interpreted theextraordinary fossils of very early (c. 530 million years ago) soft-bodied fauna found in the Burgess Shale of the Canadian Rockies torepresent a maximum in the disparity of forms. After this, he claims,there was a dramatic decline in the range of types (phyla) of species –technically, in ‘disparity’. On this basis he then, notoriously, so empha-sises the role of contingency in evolution that he can attribute no


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trends, let alone inevitability, towards the emergence of particularfeatures in evolution. This interpretation of these fauna has now beenstrongly opposed by Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeo-biologist, who has devoted his research life to study of the BurgessShale and related formations. He shows, in The Crucible of Creation,17

that disparity has not in fact diminished since that point. Even moresignificantly he demonstrates, pace Gould, what is widely accepted byevolutionary biologists, namely the eminent role of convergence inevolution, whereby in independent lines and places similar solutionsare found to the same kind of environmental challenges. Gould arguesthat if we were to rerun the ‘tape of life’ from the time of the rapidexpansion in biological diversity in the Cambrian epoch (550 to 485million years ago) we would unfold a totally different biological world.From this anything remotely like humans would be absent. ConwayMorris argues that this argument is based on a basic confusionbetween the destiny of a given lineage and the likelihood that aparticular biological property or feature will sooner or later manifestitself as part of the evolutionary process. Living organisms often cometo resemble each other despite having evolved from different ancestors– convergence, is a ubiquitous feature of life. He cites as an example ofconvergence, the sabre-toothed cat of the Northern Hemisphere, arelative of the tiger and the panther, and the very similar SouthAmerican sabre-toothed ‘cat,’ which is in fact a marsupial, related tothe kangaroos and opossums. He concludes that the tape of life can berun as many times as we like and in principle brains and intelligence,for example, will surely emerge.

All of which gives support for the notion of propensities – that is, ofinbuilt trends in biological evolution. Hence, given enough time, acomplex organism with consciousness, self-consciousness and socialand cultural organisation (the basis for the existence of ‘persons’) wouldbe likely eventually to evolve on any planet amenable to the emergenceof living organisms. It would not, of course, have to have the physicalform of Homo sapiens. There can, it now appears (pace Gould), beoverall direction and implementation of divine purpose through theinterplay of chance and law without a deterministic plan fixing all thedetails of the structure(s) of any organism that emerges with personalqualities. Hence the emergence of self-conscious persons capable ofrelating personally to God can still be regarded as an intention of God


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continuously creating through the processes of that to which God hasgiven an existence of this particular, contingent kind and not some other.

Again, I emphasise, there is no need to postulate any specialaction – any non-natural agent pushing, or pulling, or luring by, say,some divine manipulation of mutations at the quantum level – toensure that persons emerge in the universe, and in particular onEarth. Not to coin a phrase, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’.18

The ubiquity of pain, suffering and death

The whole epic of evolution in its biological phase has seemed tomany sensitive scientists, beginning with Darwin himself, to involvetoo much pain and suffering, culminating in death, for it to be thecreative work of any Being who could be called benevolent. The cost-liness of the whole process cannot be gainsaid and raises acute ques-tions for all human beings, but especially for theists.

In this context we have to recognise that the ability to process andstore information is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for theemergence of consciousness. This sensitivity to the surroundingsinevitably involves an increase in the ability to experience pain, whichprovides the necessary biological warning signals of danger anddisease. Insulation from the surrounding world in the biological equiv-alent of three-inch nicked steel would be a sure recipe for preventingthe development of consciousness. The pain associated withbreakdown of health owing to general organic causes also appears tobe simply a concomitant of being a complex organised system incor-porating internal as well as external sensors. When pain is experiencedby a conscious organism, the attribution of ‘suffering’ becomes appro-priate and with self-consciousness empathy with the suffering ofothers emerges. The ubiquity of pain and suffering in the living worldappears to be an inevitable consequence of creatures acquiring thoseinformation processing and storage systems (nerves and brains in thelater stages of evolution) that are so advantageous in natural selection.

Complex living structures can have only a finite chance of cominginto existence if they are not assembled de novo, from their basicsubunits but emerge through a kind of modular process through theaccumulation of changes in simpler forms. Having come on to thescene, they can then survive, because of the finitude of their lifespans,only by building preformed complex chemical structures into their


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fabric through imbibing the materials of other living organisms. It isimpossible for the chemist and biochemist to conceive how complexmaterial structures, especially those of the intricacy of livingorganisms, could be assembled in a finite time otherwise than fromless complex ones, that is, by predation. So there is a kind of struc-tural logic about the inevitability of living organisms preying on eachother. We cannot conceive, in a lawful, non-magical universe, of anyway by which the immense variety of developing, biological, struc-tural complexity might appear in a finite time except by utilisingstructures already existing, either by modification of them (as inbiological evolution) or by building them up by incorporating pre-made simpler structures (as in feeding). Plants feed on inorganicmaterials from the soil and air, animals on plants, and some animalson other animals. The structural logic is inescapable: new forms ofmatter arise only through incorporating the old.

Moreover, new patterns can only come into existence in a finiteuniverse (‘finite’ in the sense of the conservation of matter–energy) if oldpatterns dissolve to make place for them. This is a condition of thecreativity of the process, of its ability to produce the new, which at thebiological level we observe as new forms of life arising from death of theold. For the death of individual organisms is essential to release foodresources for new arrivals, and species die out by being ousted frombiological niches by new ones better adapted to survive and reproducein them. Hence biological death of the individual is prerequisite for thecreativity of the biological order, the creativity that eventually led to theemergence of human beings. Furthermore, death not only of individualsbut of whole species has occurred on the Earth during the periods ofmass extinctions, often attributed to chance collisions of the planet withcomet showers, asteroids or other bodies. These have destroyed somethousandfold more species than are at present extant. This adds afurther element of sheer contingency to the history of life on the Earth.To summarise, we can say that new life through death of the old isinevitable in a finite world composed of common building blocks(atoms, molecules, macromolecules) having regular properties.

The evolution of life and our exploration towards God

Any understanding today of God’s relation to the world cannotignore these features of the way in which it now appears God has


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been and is creating the living world, including humanity. Some ofthe theological impact of this knowledge about the processes ofcreation has already been discussed. But now we must stand backand look at the whole panorama in relation to our understandingof God.

Certain new positive features in this perspective need first to bestressed. The caricature of biological evolution by natural selectionas ‘nature, red in tooth and claw’ has often been taken up by ag-nostic biologists. It has to be recognised that Darwin was led intoagnosticism both by this aspect of evolution and by the role ofchance. However, as we have seen (p.74), caricature it is, for naturalselection is not even in a figurative sense the outcome of struggle assuch.

We must also note that the natural world is immensely variegatedat any particular time in its hierarchies of entities, structures andprocesses and abundantly diversifies with cornucopian fecundity inits becoming in time. The branching bush of terrestrial biologicalevolution appears to be primarily opportunist in the direction itfollows and, in so doing, it has produced the enormous variety ofbiological life on this planet. We can only conclude that, if there is aCreator, then that Creator intended this rich diversity – the wholetapestry of the created order in its warp and woof – and not simply asstages on the way to Homo sapiens. We can only make sense of this,using our limited resources of personal language, if we say that Godmay be said to have something akin to joy and delight in creation.We have a hint of this in the first chapter of Genesis: ‘And God saweverything he had made, and indeed, it was very good.’19 This natu-rally leads to the idea of God’s ‘play’ in creation in relation to Hinduthought (lila) as well as to that of Judaism20 and of Christianity.

However, there is, as we have seen, a darker side – the ubiquity ofpain, predation, suffering and death in the creative evolutionaryprocess. The theist cannot avoid asking, ‘If the Creator intended thearrival in the cosmos of complex, reproducing structures that couldthink and be free – that, is self-conscious, free persons – was there notsome other, less costly and painful way of bringing this about? Wasthat the only possible way?’ These are unanswerable metaphysicalquestions concerned to ‘justify the ways of God to man,21 to whichour response has to be based partly on our understanding of the


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biological parameters (already described) discerned by science to beoperating in evolution. These indicate that there are inherentconstraints on how even an omnipotent Creator (recall our definitionof ‘omnipotence’ on p.41) could bring about the existence of a law-like creation that is to be a cosmos and not a chaos. If the theisticpostulate is to be coherent, the world has to be an arena for thecoming to be of the fecund variety of living organisms in whose exis-tence the Creator delights, and for the emergence and free action ofself-conscious, reproducing, complex entities. All of which is predi-cated on the attribution of the very existence of all-that-is to thatself-existing Ultimate Reality, God, whose inherent nature is of sucha kind as to give existence to other entities to enable them eventuallyto share in the ineffable, divine life of that Ultimate Reality. Such aCreator God must be conceived of now not only, as in pre-Darwinian days, as giving existence to everything and of sustainingall in existence, but as deeply involved in the evolutionary processesof creation. These processes are to be seen as the very action of Godas Creator. But if that is so, then the ubiquity of pain, predation,suffering and death as the means of creation through biologicalevolution entails, for any concept of God to be morally acceptableand coherent, that we have to propose tentatively that God suffersin, with and under the creative processes of the world with theircostly unfolding in time. In other words the processes of creation areimmensely costly to God in a way dimly shadowed by and reflectedin the ordinary experience of the costliness of creativity in multipleaspects of human existence – whether it be in giving birth, in artisticcreation, or in creating and maintaining human social structures. Weare then seen not to be the mere playthings of God, but as sharing asco-creating creatures in the suffering of the creating God engaged inthe self-offering, costly process of bringing forth the new.

There has, in fact, been increasing assent in the Christiantheology of recent decades to the idea that it is possible to speakconsistently of a God who suffers above all others and yet is stillGod. God, we find ourselves having to conjecture, suffers the naturalevils of the world along with ourselves because (we can only hint atthis stage) God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby,namely, the kingdom of free-willing, loving persons in communionwith God and with each other.


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I have been speaking, analogically, of suffering in God, thissuffering being an identification with and participation in thesuffering of the world. We have already given (pp.57–8) and shallagain later be giving (pp.38ff.) reasons for talking in panentheisticterms of God being ‘more than’ the world yet of the world as being‘within God’, and also for using female metaphors for the creating byGod of the world ‘in God’. Now the dimension of suffering which weare here incorporating into our understanding of the relation of Godto the world gives an enhanced significance to this panentheisticmodel, especially when this is given a feminine connotation.Moreover, it gives a new and poignant pertinence to St Paul’s poeticvision of creation as being in the pangs of childbirth:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of thechildren of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of itsown will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that thecreation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and willobtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know thatthe whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now.22

In Christian theology, there has long been attributed self-limitationto God in the very notion of God creating something that is otherthan Godself and is given a degree of autonomy. For example, thishas been depicted by the idea of God in creating making a ‘space’ forthe created order. Now, as we reflect on the processes of creationthrough biological evolution, we can begin to understand that thisself-limitation involved God’s costly, suffering involvement in themon behalf of their ultimate fruition in the divine purpose and in theirultimate consummation.

We can say that there is a self-emptying of God into and sharing inthe suffering of God’s creatures, in the creative, evolutionaryprocesses of the world. Such a perception now enriches the specifi-cally Christian affirmation of God’s nature as best understood asinherently one of Love. God suffers the natural evils of the worldalong with ourselves because – we can but tentatively suggest at thisstage – God purposes to bring about a greater good thereby, that is,the kaleidoscope of living creatures, delighting their Creator, andeventually free-willing, loving persons who also have the possibilityof communion with God and with each other. Indeed the creation


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may be said to be through suffering, for suffering is widely recognisedas having creative power when imbued with love. So God’s sufferingmust be construed as not merely passive but as active with creativeintention, the activity that is manifest in the creative processes of theworld. God brings about new creation through suffering. Christianscan infer, in the light of the significance attributed to Jesus the Christ,that God thereby also overcomes the evil introduced into the creationby free human beings. For humanity is free to go against the grain ofthe creative processes, to reject God’s creative intentions, to marGod’s creation, and to bring into existence disharmonies uniquely itsown – and has perennially done so. Hence humanity has the ability tocause God to suffer in a distinctive way.

Human pain and suffering are increased by our self-consciousness, our empathy with each other and by that emergentability we have of questioning our actual relation to our Creatorwhile enduring such experiences. When we do so question we arefree to rebel against God and, more generally in our lives, to ignorethe divine presence, thereby augmenting the suffering of God in thedivine, creative process.

Evolution: a risky process?

Creation was for God clearly a risky and costly enterprise. As wereflect on the nature of humanity we are bound to ask that anyconclusions we draw be consistent with the intelligibility providedby the explanation of the world as created, that is, with affirming theexistence of God as Creator. This intelligibility is in danger ofcollapsing because of the enigmatic and paradoxical nature of thehuman person so evolved. What does God think God is up to inevolving this ‘glory, jest and riddle of the world’,23 with its enormouspotentiality both for creative good and for degradation and evil,destructive both of itself and of the rest of the created world? What isthe meaning God is expressing in creating humanity?

The sequence from the inanimate to the conscious and then tothe self-conscious is concomitant with increasing independence andfreedom from the environment. This independence in humanityattains the critical point where it can attempt to be an independenceof and freedom from the intentions of the Creator. This inde-pendence and freedom are an inevitable consequence of the very


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self-consciousness that has emerged naturalistically through theevolutionary processes in God’s regular way of effecting God’screative intentions. We cannot help concluding that God intendedthat out of matter persons should evolve who had this freedom, andthereby allowed the possibility that they might depart from God’sintentions. To be consistent, we must go on to assume that God hadsome overarching intention that made this risk worth taking, thatthere was and is some fundamental way of God being God whichallows God’s relationship with freely responding persons to bevalued by God. So our model of God as the personal agent of thecreative process has had to be amplified to include a recognition ofthe Creator as suffering in creation as it brings into existence newand hazardous possibilities – most of all, those implicit in thecreation of self-determining human persons.

If God willed the existence of self-conscious, intelligent, freelywilling persons as an end, God must, to be self-consistent, bepresumed to have willed the means to achieving that end. This divinepurpose must be taken to have been an overriding one, for it involvesas a corollary an element of risk whereby God renders Godselfvulnerable in a way that only now are we able to perceive. This ideathat God took a risk in creation is not new – as in the traditional,mythical narratives of creation in the Old Testament – but is nowreinforced and given a wider context by these considerations basedon the nature of biological processes.

The appropriation of values depends, because of their very nature,on free consent to do so. A compelled response nullifies their verycharacter as values. God can instantiate in creation God’s own truth,beauty and goodness only by bringing into existence free beingscapable of holding them. Hence free beings are incorporated by Godas a potential outcome of the cosmic processes, with all the risks thisinvolved. The cost to God, we may venture to say, was in a continuingself-limitation and self-emptying that constitutes both God’s creativeaction and a self-inflicted vulnerability of God to the very processesGod creates in order to achieve an overriding purpose, the emergenceof free persons. Creation thus involves for God what we have called a‘risk’, which God incurs lovingly and willingly, and with suffering, forthe opportunity of the greater good of freely responsive humanitycoming to be within the created world. Love and self-sacrifice are,


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from this perspective, seen as inherent to the divine nature andexpressed in the whole process of creation. Perhaps this is what theauthor of Revelation was hinting at when he did not shrink fromdescribing Christ, whom he saw as now incorporated into God, as‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’.24


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The problem

Insurers used to describe inexplicable, unpredictable, unexpectedevents as ‘acts of God’, and if these were favourable to theirpurposes or health, individuals would often describe them as‘miracles’. This serves to emphasise the confusion and obscuritythat surround the whole question of how and whether God acts inthe world. We have already seen (p.56) why the intellectual pressureof the scientific account of the world makes it increasinglyincredible, even to theists, that God would actually intervene in thecausal nexus of the world that God’s own self creates.

To these earlier considerations, based on the increasing success ofthe sciences in accounting for natural events, must be added the moraldilemma that, if God can and does intervene in events in the world,why is evil allowed to flourish? All of this arises from the notion of‘acts’ of God in which God is supposed to ensure that certainparticular events, or patterns of events, occur when otherwise theywould not have done so. But such acts are not the only ways in whichGod has been thought to interact with the world. We have, forexample, already talked of God as giving existence to all-that-is by anact of God’s own will and as the expression of God’s own nature. Thisis what the classical monotheist affirmation of creatio ex nihilo,

5

God’s interaction with the world

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‘creation out of nothing’, was about. We have also seen cause(pp.65ff.), from the epic of evolution, to regard God as the eternalCreator sustaining in existence processes that are endowed by Godwith an inherent capability to generate new forms and so withpossessing a derived creativity. Classically, monotheists have regardedthis as the sustaining activity of God. In the past this was conceived ofin somewhat static terms, seeing God rather like the figure of Atlassupporting the terrestrial globe. However, in view of the epic ofcreation, this now has to be clothed with much more dynamicimagery. God gives existence to each instance of space–time with allforms of matter–energy themselves dynamically and continuouslyand creatively being metamorphosed into new entities, forms andpatterns. These latter have included ourselves – all human beings andtheir societies and history. From this human perspective, thesustaining creative interaction of God with the world has often beencalled God’s ‘general providence’. The scientific vision we nowpossess reinforces and enriches this understanding of God’s creatingand sustaining interactions with the world.

This is not the case when we consider the possibility of particularevents, or patterns of events, being other than they would naturallyhave been because God intended them to be different. Such possibil-ities have often been denoted as the ‘special providence’ in God’sinteraction with the world – the outcomes of special divine action.This category can be extended to include miracles, regarded as eventsnot conforming to natural regularities believed to be well estab-lished. Indeed the followers of the monotheistic faiths, the ‘childrenof Abraham’ – Jews, Muslims and Christians – shape their lives andreligious practices on the general belief that God does indeedinfluence people and events. Private devotions and public liturgies inthese religious traditions include much else of spiritual significance(for example, thanksgiving, adoration, contemplation, meditation).Yet they certainly involve an inexpungeable element of petitionaryprayer which is based on the belief that God can make particularevents happen if God so wills. Nevertheless, in contrast, a‘presumption of naturalism’ – no supernatural causes, no interveningGod – prevails in the present cultural milieu in which the mono-theistic religions, especially Christianity in the West, operate. Thatmilieu is dominated by the success of the sciences in explaining not


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only physical events but also human psychological and social ones –the whole epic of evolution from the ‘hot big bang’ to humanity hasbecome intelligible in scientific terms.

This presumption in favour of intelligible, scientific explana-tions is reinforced by its methodological necessity in our investiga-tions of the world and by the emergentist monist position weestablished earlier (pp. 48ff.). We argued there that all-that-is, the‘world’, is made up of whatever physicists conclude are the basicbuilding blocks of matter. Although there is nothing else in theworld in one sense, nevertheless there is more to be said than such astatement seems to imply. As we saw, there are hierarchies ofcomplexity constituted of those fundamental entities and thesecomplexes display emergent properties that can have causalefficacy on lower levels. So they represent higher-level realities thanthose fundamental ones. There is, we recognised, no grounds forany kind of supernaturalism, non-natural causal agents, vital forces(the ghosts of discarded vitalisms), any of the ‘fields’ modernoccultisms postulate or even for mind/body or spirit/body dualityin human beings.

It is this basically monistic, but many-levelled and so emergentist,world with which God must be seen to be interacting. Such is thesuccess of the sciences that it is very hard to see how God, in prin-ciple, could affect patterns of events in the world without actuallyintervening in the natural, causal chains of events. If so, then how arewe to conceive of God’s special divine action, of a form of God’sinteraction with the world that influences, steers or even directsevents to be other than they would have been had not God particu-larly willed them to be so? The presumption of naturalism hastightened into the realisation that the causal nexus of the world isincreasingly perceived as closed. There would seem to be no way forGod to affect events other than by direct intervention in causalchains or providing new environing structural causes. This remainsin principle a possibility, since God could bring about events in theworld by simply overriding the divinely created relationships andregularities. That is always a theoretical, though incoherent, possi-bility for the monotheist, but our present understanding of the worldincreases to the point of unattainability the onus on those whobelieve in such special providence and/or miracles to obtain

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convincing historical evidence for them. The more irregular andunlikely the event, the better the evidence must be. Moreover, it isnot sufficient for an event to be inexplicable by current science, forscience has continuously closed the gaps in our knowledge andunderstanding of the world. Any ‘God of the gaps’ is vulnerable tobeing squeezed out by increasing knowledge, as is widely recognisedby theologians.

Given this cultural and intellectual impasse in our ability toconceive of how God could interact with the world through specialprovidence and/or miracles, it is not surprising that this has been a keyissue in the quickening pace of the dialogue between science andtheology in the last two decades. At the spearhead of this attempt torelate our knowledge of the natural world to received theologicalbeliefs, especially in regard to this issue, have been the biennial researchsymposia instigated since 1987 by the Vatican Observatory with thecooperation of the Center of Theology and the Natural Sciences inBerkeley, California. The scientists, theologians and philosophers(often embodied in the same individuals) have, beginning with Physics,Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding(1998), produced since then a succession of state-of-the-art volumesabout scientific perspectives on divine action. These have been focusedon different areas of the sciences: quantum cosmology and the laws ofnature; chaos and complexity; evolutionary and molecular biology;and neurosciences and the person. These, with more general texts,should be consulted to follow the ebb and flow of the discussions.1 Itcannot be pretended that consensus has yet been obtained but thenature of the problems and the strengths and weaknesses of variousproposals have been and continue to be thoroughly examined.

Meanwhile popular Christianity continues to affirm the mira-culous nature not only of certain events recorded in the Bible, buteven some events in everyday life. It does so without recognising theincoherence and insupportability of such beliefs in a cultural milieumore critically informed of the nature of the world than in theprevious generation – light years from the presuppositions of thebiblical and Koranic texts. This style of belief will no doubt persist inmany circles, but meanwhile the educated in Western Europe, atleast, vote with their feet in absenting themselves from the churches.At present this is an especially acute issue for Christianity (and


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possibly Judaism), which has borne the brunt of the Enlightenmentcritique of its sacred sources and of the effect of the wideningperspectives through science of the origin and evolution of nature,especially humanity. Other major religions have yet to experience anequivalent awakening to rational criticism.

I have elsewhere (for example, in the volumes just referred to)expounded in detail my own reflections on God’s interaction withthe world from the perspectives of the sciences, and my detailedanalysis of the reflections of others. In what follows I willsummarise for the general reader where I think the discussions haveled and state my own position on these controversial issues. I shallnot conceal my conviction that certain routes of exploration, albeitfollowed by very able investigators, have proved to be culs-de-sacand I shall point out the lines of enquiry that I judge still to befruitful. Part of the underlying problem in such investigations is thegeneral, and often vague, assumption that science has somehowensured that events in the world are predictable, and so we mustfirst look at this background issue.

Predictability and causality

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, John Donne (in hisAnatomie of the World) lamented the collapse of the medievalsynthesis – ‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerance gone’ – but after thatcentury nothing could stem the rising tide of an individualism inwhich the self surveyed the world as subject over against object.This way of viewing the world involved a process of abstraction inwhich the entities, structures and processes of the world werebroken down into their constituent units. These parts wereconceived as wholes in themselves, whose lawlike relations it wasthe task of the ‘new philosophy’ to discover. It may be depicted,somewhat oversuccintly, as asking, firstly, ‘What’s there?’, then,‘What are the relations between what is there?’ and finally, ‘Whatare the laws describing these relations?’ To implement this aim amethodologically reductionist approach was essential, especiallywhen studying the complexities of matter and of living organisms.The natural world came to be described as a world of entitiesinvolved in lawlike relations that determined the course of events intime and so allowed predictability.


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The success of these procedures has continued to the present day, inspite of the revolution necessitated by the advent of quantum theory inour understanding of the subatomic world. On the larger scales thatare the focus of most of the sciences, from chemistry to populationgenetics, the unpredictabilities of quantum events at the subatomiclevel are usually either ironed out in the statistics of the behaviour oflarge populations of small entities or can be neglected because of thesize of the entities involved, or both. Predictability was expected insuch macroscopic systems and, by and large, it became possible afterdue scientific investigation. However, it has turned out that science,being the art of the soluble, has until recently tended to concentrate onthose phenomena most amenable to such interpretations.

The world is notoriously in a state of continuous flux. AsHeraclitus said in the fifth century BCE, ‘Nobody can step twice intothe same river.’ It has, not surprisingly, been one of the major preoc-cupations of the sciences ever since to understand the changes thatoccur at all levels of the natural world. Science has asked, ‘What isgoing on?’ and ‘How did these entities and structures we nowobserve get here and come to be the way they are?’ The object ofcuriosity was both causal explanation of past changes in order tounderstand the present and also prediction of the future course ofevents, of changes in the entities and structures that concern us.

The notions of explanation of the past and present andpredictability of the future are closely interlocked with the concept ofcausality. Detection of a causal sequence in which, say, A causes B,which causes C, and so on, is frequently taken to be an explanationof the present in terms of the past. It is also predictive of the future,insofar as observation of A gives one grounds for inferring that B andC will follow as time elapses, since the original A–B–C sequence wasitself a succession in time. It has been widely recognised thatcausality in scientific accounts of natural sequences of events canonly reliably be attributed when some underlying relationships of anintelligible kind have been discovered between the successive formsof the entities involved. The fundamental concern of the sciences isthe explanation of change, and so with predictability and causality. Ittranspires that different kinds of natural systems display variousdegrees of predictability and that the corresponding accounts ofcausality are therefore different.


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Science began to gain its great ascendancy in Western culturethrough the succession of intellectual pioneers in mathematics,mechanics and astronomy which led to the triumph of theNewtonian system with its explanation not only of many of the rela-tionships in many terrestrial systems but, more particularly, of plan-etary motions in the Solar System. Knowledge of both the governinglaws and the values of the variables describing initial conditionsapparently allowed complete predictability of these particular vari-ables. This led, not surprisingly, considering the sheer intellectualpower and beauty of the Newtonian scheme, to the domination ofthis criterion of predictability in the perception of what scienceshould, at its best, always aim to provide – even though single-levelsystems such as those studied in both terrestrial and celestialmechanics are comparatively rare. It also reinforced the notion thatscience proceeds, indeed should proceed, by breaking down theworld in general, and any investigated system in particular, into theirconstituent entities. So it led to a view of the world as mechanical,deterministic and predictable. The concept of causality in suchsystems can be broadly subsumed into intelligible and mathematicalrelations with their implication of the existence of something ana-logous to an underlying mechanism that generates these relation-ships. Furthermore certain properties of a total assembly cansometimes be predicted in more complex systems. For example, thegas laws are not vitiated by our lack of knowledge of the directionand velocities of individual molecules.

It is well known that the predictability of events at the atomic andsubatomic level has been radically undermined by the realisationthat there is a fundamental indeterminacy in the measurement ofcertain key quantities in quantum mechanical systems. It arises fromthere being only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcome of thecollapse of the wave function which occurs when measurements aremade. This introduces an inherent limitation, in some respectsthough not all, in the predictability of the future states of suchsystems. A related example of such inherent unpredictability occurs,as we have seen (p.58), for any collection of radioactive atoms. It isnever possible to predict at what instant the nucleus of any particularatom will disintegrate – all that can be known is the probability of itbreaking up in a given time interval. This exemplifies the current


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state of quantum theory, which allows only for the dependence oneach other of the probable measured values of certain variables andso for a looser form of causal coupling at this micro-level than hadbeen taken for granted in classical physics. But note that causality, assuch, is not eliminated.

However, there are also Newtonian systems that are deterministicyet unpredictable at the micro-level of description. This has been atimebomb ticking away since the 1900s under the edifice of thedeterministic, and so predictable, paradigm of what constitutes theworldview of science. The French mathematician Henri Poincaréthen pointed out that the ability of the (essentially Newtonian)theory of dynamical systems to make predictions depends onknowing not only the rules for describing how the system will changewith time, but also the initial conditions of the system. Predictabilityoften proved to be extremely sensitive to the accuracy of ourknowledge of the variables characterising those initial conditions.Thus it can be shown that even in assemblies of bodies obeyingNewtonian mechanics there is a real limit to the period during whichthe micro-level description of the system can continue to be specified,that is, there is a limit to predictability at this level. This limit hasbeen called the horizon of ‘eventual unpredictability’. We cannotachieve unlimited predictability, because of our inability ever todetermine the initial conditions with sufficient precision, in spite ofthe deterministic character of Newton’s laws.

For example, in a game of billiards, suppose that, after the first shot,the balls are sent in a continuous series of collisions, that there are avery large number of balls and that collisions occur with a negligibleloss of energy. If the average distance between the balls is ten times theirradius, then it can be shown that an error of one in the thousandthdecimal place in the angle of the first impact means that allpredictability is lost after one thousand collisions. Clearly, infiniteinitial accuracy is needed for total predictability through infinite time.The uncertainty of the directions of movement grows with each impactas the originally minute uncertainty becomes amplified. So, althoughthe system is deterministic in principle – the constituent entities obeyNewtonian mechanics – it is never totally predictable in practice.

Moreover, it is not predictable for another reason, for even if theerror in our knowledge of the angle of the first impact were zero,


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unpredictability still enters because no such system can ever beisolated completely from the effects of everything else in the universe– such as gravity and the mechanical and thermal interactions withits immediate surroundings.

Furthermore, attempts to specify more and more finely the initialconditions will eventually, at the quantum level, come up against thebarrier of the measurement problem against our knowledge of keyvariables characterising the initial conditions even in these‘Newtonian’ systems. So new questions arise. Does this limitation onour knowledge of these variables pertaining to individual units(whether atoms, molecules or billiard balls) in an assembly reducethe period of time within which the trajectory of any individual unitcan be traced? Is there an ultimate upper limit to the predictabilityhorizon set by the irreducible quantum fuzziness in the values ofthose key initial conditions to which the eventual states of thesesystems are so sensitive? Does eventual unpredictability prevail withrespect to the values of those same parameters that characterised theinitial conditions and to which quantum uncertainty can apply?Many physicists think so.

‘Chaotic’ systems and divine action

One of the paths taken in the exploration from science towards anunderstanding of divine action has been to consider ‘chaotic’systems. One of the striking developments in science in recent yearshas been the increasing recognition that many other non-quantumsystems – physical, chemical, biological and neurological – can also become unpredictable in their macroscopically observablebehaviour. This is so even when the course of events is governed byequations that are deterministic in their consequences so that thefinal states are determined. Basically the unpredictability to humanobservers arises because two states of the systems in question whichdiffer only slightly in their initial conditions eventually generate radi-cally different subsequent states and we are unable to measure thesignificant differences in those initial conditions. These are generally,and somewhat misleadingly, called ‘chaotic’ systems. One particularequation (the so-called ‘logistic’ equation) has proved to be signif-icant for a number of natural systems, e.g. predator–prey patterns,yearly variation in insect and other populations, and physical


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systems too. In some other systems there can occur an amplificationof a fluctuation of the values of particular variables (e.g. pressure,concentration of a key substance, etc.) so that the state of the systemas a whole undergoes a marked transition to a new regime ofpatterns of these variables. The state of such systems is then criticallydependent on the initial conditions that prevail within the key tran-sitory fluctuation which is subsequently amplified. A well-knownexample is the ‘butterfly effect’ of Edward Lorenz, whereby abutterfly disturbing the air here today could affect what weatheroccurs on the other side of the world in a month’s time throughamplifications cascading through a chain of complex interactions.Another is the transition to turbulent flow in liquids at certaincombinations of speed of flow and external conditions. Yet anotheris the appearance, consequent upon localised fluctuations in reactantconcentrations, of spatial and temporal patterns of concentration ofthe reactants in otherwise homogeneous systems when these involveautocatalytic steps – as is often the case, significantly, in keybiochemical processes in living organisms. It is now realised that thetime sequence of the values of key parameters of such complexdynamical systems can take many forms: limit cycles, regular oscilla-tions in time and space, and flipping between two alternativeallowed states.

In the real world most systems do not conserve energy: they areusually dissipative ones (p.52) through which energy and matterflow, and so are also ‘open’. Such systems can often give rise to thekind of sequence just mentioned. Moreover, recent physics has alsoled to the recognition that, in such changeovers to temporal andspatial patterns of system behaviour, we have examples of the self-organisation mentioned earlier (pp.52, 69). New patterns of theconstituents of the system in space and time become establishedwhen a key parameter passes a critical value.

Explicit awareness of all this is relatively recent in science andnecessitates a reassessment of the potentialities of the stuff of theworld, in which pattern formation had previously been thought tobe confined to the large-scale, static, equilibrium state. In theserecently examined systems, matter displays its potential to be self-organising and thereby to bring into existence new forms entirely bythe operation of forces and the manifestation of properties we


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already understand. ‘Through amplification of small fluctuations it[nature] can provide natural systems with access to novelty.’2

How do the notions of causality and predictability relate to ournew awareness of these phenomena? (We shall discuss this withouttaking account of quantum uncertainties.) Causality, as usuallyunderstood, is clearly evidenced in the systems just discussed.Nevertheless, identification of the causal chain now has to beextended to include unobservable fluctuations at the micro levelwhose effects in certain systems may extend through the wholesystem so as to produce effects that extend over a spatial range manyorders of magnitude greater.

The equations governing all these systems are deterministic,which means that if the initial conditions were known with infiniteprecision, prediction would be valid into the infinite future. But it isof the nature of our knowledge of the real numbers used to representinitial conditions that they have an infinite decimal representationand we can know only their representation up to a certain limit.Hence there will always be, for systems whose states are sensitive tothe values of the parameters describing their initial conditions, an‘eventual unpredictability’ by us of their future states beyond acertain point. The ‘butterfly effect’, the amplification of micro-fluc-tuations, turns out to be but one example of this. In such cases theoriginating fluctuations would anyway be inaccessible to us experi-mentally. Note, however, that – after much discussion – it hasbecome clear that although these states are unpredictable by us theyare not intrinsically (more technically, ‘ontologically’) indeterminate,in the way that quantities dependent on quantum states and sensitiveto measurement indeterminacy are taken to be, in the prevailingorthodox interpretation of physicists. Nevertheless, this whole scien-tific development does show that there can exist states of particularsystems that are extremely close in energy, yet differ in their patternor organisation and so in information content.

In spite of the excitement generated by this recently wonawareness of the character of the systems described above, the basis,in practice, of the unpredictability of their overall states is, after all,no different from that of the eventual unpredictability at the microlevel of description of classical Newtonian systems. However, theworld appears to us less and less to possess the predictability that


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had been the presupposition of much theological reflection on God’sinteraction with the world since Newton. We now observe it topossess a degree of openness and flexibility within a lawlikeframework, so that certain developments are genuinely unpre-dictable by us on the basis of any conceivable science. We have goodreasons for saying, from the relevant science and mathematics, thatthis unpredictability will, in practice, continue.

The history of the relation between the natural sciences and theChristian religion affords many instances of such gaps in humanability to give causal explanations – that is, instances of unpre-dictability – being exploited by theists as evidence of the presenceand activity of God, deployed to fill the explanatory gap. But nowwe have to take account of permanent gaps in our ability to predictevents in the natural world. Should we propose a ‘God of the (to us)uncloseable gaps’? There would then be no possibility of such a Godbeing squeezed out by advances in scientific knowledge. This raisestwo questions of theological import:

1. Does God know the outcome of these situations/systems that areunpredictable by us?

2. Does God act within such situations/systems to effect the divine will?

With respect to the first question,3 an omniscient God may bepresumed to know not only all the relevant, deterministic laws thatapply to any system, but also the relevant initial values of the deter-mining variables to the degree of precision required to predict itsstate at any future time, however far ahead, and also the effects ofany external influences from anywhere else in the universe, howeversmall. So, for those systems whose future states are sensitive to theinitial conditions, there would be no eventual unpredictability for anomniscient God, even though there is such a limiting horizon forfinite human beings because of the nature of our knowledge of realnumbers and because of ineluctable observational limitations.Divine omniscience must, for example, be conceived to be such thatGod would know and be able to track the minutiae of those fluctua-tions in dissipative systems which are unpredictable and unob-servable by us and whose amplification leads at the large-scale levelto one particular outcome rather than another – but still unpre-dictable by us. God would just know all that it is logically


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conceivable to know about the systems (initial conditions,controlling equations, etc.), indeed knows them as they deterministi-cally are, and so knows what they will be – even if the future does notyet exist for God to know with direct immediacy (p.45).

This is an affirmative answer to our first question. Could we thengo on to postulate that God might choose to influence events in suchsystems by changing those initial conditions so as to bring about adifferent macroscopic consequence conforming to the divine will andpurposes? This would be also to answer question two affirmatively.God would then be conceived of as acting ‘within’ the (to us) flexi-bility of these unpredictable situations in a way that, in practice, wecould never detect. Such a mode of divine action would always beconsistent with our scientific knowledge of the situation. In thesignificant case of those dissipative systems whose macro-states arisefrom the amplification of fluctuations at the micro level, God wouldhave to be conceived of as actually manipulating micro-events inthese initiating fluctuations in the natural world in order to producethe results at the large-scale level that God wills.

Such a conception of God’s action in these, to us, unpredictablesituations would then be no different in principle from that of Godintervening in the order of nature, with all the problems that thatevokes for a rationally coherent belief in God as the Creator of thatorder. The only difference in this proposal from that of earlier onespostulating divine intervention would be that, given our recentrecognition of the actual unpredictability, on our part, of manynatural systems, God’s intervention would always be hidden from us.Discussion of these systems has, however, served to emphasise how,in the limit,4 ‘chaotic’ systems may become very close in energy(perhaps even within the quantum range) but different in pattern andso in information content. But at present there is no theory availableto deal with such ‘quantum chaos’ and there is therefore no basis forpursuing this as a line of investigation which might help us to under-stand special divine action.

At first sight this introduction of unpredictability, open-endedness and flexibility into our picture of the natural worldseemed to help promise a possible location for where God might actin the world in now uncloseable ‘gaps’. However, the above consid-erations indicate that such divine action would be simply the kind of


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divine intervention which we were striving to avoid postulating.Note, too, that this analysis continues to assume that God can knowall it is logically possible to know about natural events, that God isomniscient and so does know the outcome of deterministic naturalsituations which are unpredictable to us.

All of this leads us to the conclusion that this newly wonawareness of the unpredictability, open-endedness and flexibilityinherent in many natural processes and systems does not, of itself,help directly to illuminate the causal joint of where God acts in theworld – much as it alters our understanding of what is going on. Thisroute for understanding special divine action based on our scientificperceptions has therefore proved to be a cul-de-sac. But even deadends have their uses and the exercise has demonstrated how open forus are the outcomes of many scientifically understood processes andthat we are wise not to assume our total ability always to be able topredict the outcome of situations where there are many alternativestates, structures and sequences of events that are very close inenergy but differ in pattern and so in their information content.

Quantum events and divine action

Another route in the exploration towards an understanding of divineaction in the light of the sciences, which has again been followed inrecent discussions among scientists and theologians, and those whoare both, is the possibility that the indeterminacy of the outcomes ofmeasurements at the quantum level might provide another possibleuncloseable gap in the causal chains of nature. This indeterminacy isregarded as inherent, irremovable and basic by most physicists. Theydo not believe there are hidden variables to be discovered to renderquantum events deterministic. In such an unclosable gap at thequantum level, God, it is proposed, could be affecting the outcomes ofparticular events consistently with the laws of the relevant science(quantum mechanics in this case) and unbeknown to humanobservers. Although some proponents of this view have argued forGod being active in all quantum events, others postulate divine actiononly in some – and preferably those whose consequences are amplifiedto larger-scale levels, for example by ‘chaotic’ processes, and/or indissipative systems. This last kind of proposal is particularly attractive,seductive even, insofar as it can be propounded as the means whereby


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God might affect the course of biological evolution and even of humanthinking – by divine action at the quantum level of mutations in DNAand on neuronal synapses, respectively. So it is not surprising that thishypothesis has attracted weighty supporters. Those making this kindof proposal all accept, with most physicists, the inherent, ontologicalindeterminancy of the outcomes of particular quantum events – moreprecisely, of the outcomes of measurements at the quantum level. Theyrecognise that there can be only a probabilistic advance knowledge ofcertain key parameters of a quantum mechanical system which wouldresult from measurements made upon it. The state of such a system,according to the most widely accepted view, is represented before themeasurement by a superposition of wave functions, which thencollapses into a single one after it. Which one it will collapse into,which state the system will then be in, can be known in advance onlyprobabilistically and no other more precise, advance knowledge ispossible – in principle, most physicists would add. That is the force ofthe adverb ‘ontologically’ when it precedes ‘indeterminate’ and isapplied to such situations.

Those who argue for direct divine involvement in all suchquantum events, in all such wave-function collapses, are – such is thebasic underpinning of all natural events at the quantum level – really,it seems to me, implicitly supporting total direct divine determinationof all events. This is a form of the theological view called ‘occasion-alism’ and entails notorious problems concerning evil and free will,among many others. So the most defensible form of this hypothesis isthat which proposes that God influences directly the outcomes ofonly some quantum events, in particular those whose outcomes canbe amplified to bring about specific effects at larger-scale levels.

All involved in this discussion, whether or not in agreement withthe proposals just outlined, accept that God upholds and sustains,gives continuous existence to, those processes and events in thenatural world for which quantum mechanics is the current best (andindeed highly successful) interpretation. That is not the issue. Whatis in dispute is whether or not more direct and particular divineaction needs to be postulated at this lowest structural level of knownnature. However qualified, this cannot but be regarded as an inter-vention of the kind about which we have the general grounds forscepticism already given. These were, briefly, that any model of God


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directly, specifically and intermittently determining particularoutcomes of processes already established scientifically is incon-sistent with one of the key emphases that the recent dialoguebetween the sciences and theology has been found to deliver. This isthat the processes of the natural world have an inherent rationality,consistency and creativity in themselves which gives rise to novelty,diversity and complexity – thereby pointing to the very nature of theGod who creates them, all the time sustaining them in their existenceof that kind. The assumption of the above hypothesis that God actsto alter the probability, or the actual outcome, of wave-functioncollapses would still be a hands-on intervention by God in the veryprocesses to which God has given existence. This would still be soeven if we could never, in practice or in principle, detect this divineaction. It would imply that these processes without such interventionwere inadequate to effect God’s creative intentions if they continuedto operate in the, usually probabilistic, way God originally madethem and continues to sustain them in existence.

These are general criticisms of all such hypotheses of divine inter-vention, but in the case of the proposed quantum-level intervention,there are further specific problems to be faced. If one does notassume, with most physicists, that there are hidden variables reallydetermining events, then the outcomes of measurements onquantum-mechanical systems really are ontologically indeterminate,within the restrictions of the deterministic equations governing thedevelopment of the state of the system in time.5 These equationsgovern only the probabilities of the outcome of measurements. SinceGod can know only what it is logically possible to know (‘omnis-cience’) and that is confined to the probabilities of the outcome ofany measurement, God cannot, logically cannot, know definitivelythe precise outcome of any particular measurement. Furthermore, ifGod were to alter one such event in a particular way, then, for theoverall probabilistic relationships that govern the quantum events tobe obeyed, many others – absurdly many – would also have to bechanged. Only thus would we, the observers, detect no distortion ofthe overall statistics, as the hypothesis assumes. So this is certainly noneat, tidy way to solve the problem and one wonders where the chainof necessary alterations would end. Indeed, to determine micro-scopic events on any terrestrial scale, God would have to determine a


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fantastically large number of quantum processes over extraordinarylong periods in advance. As Nicholas Saunders has put it,

[I]magine God wishes to annihilate the dinosaurs by colliding anasteroid into the face of the Earth. If by coincidence an asteroidhappened to be ‘naturally’ going to just skim the Earth’s atmospherethen God could steer it into the Earth for a collision by usingquantum adjustments. Such a steering would take approximatelythree million years to achieve if no violations of physical lawsoccurred. This implies that God would have had to start steering theasteroid long before the evolution of the dinosaurs. Whilst this is atheologically unsatisfactory model (not least because it ignores thepossibility of divine action on any part of creation other than theasteroid) it does go some way to illustrating the scale of the controlGod must employ. If God does act regularly in quantum mechanics,then there are relatively few quantum processes that would escapehis control. If this is the case then it seems very irrational that Godwould formulate quantum mechanics as a product of his creation ofthe world to be indeterminate.6

Even more critical issues about the ‘quantum divine action’proposals arise when one asks how God can actually influence theoutcomes of quantum events, more precisely, the outcomes of meas-urements on quantum-mechanical systems, some of which couldthen be amplified to the macroscopic level of observable events.

Telling scientific arguments have in fact been assembled by NicholasSaunders (and others, see note 6) which show that these proposals arealso not consistent or coherent in terms of quantum theory itself. (Thearguments are summarised in an endnote7 to this chapter for readersacquainted with quantum theory.) His conclusion is:

The thesis that God determines all quantum events is not only scien-tifically irreconcilable with quantum theory, but also theologicallyparadoxical. There are also fundamental philosophical difficulties tobe overcome if we hold to the thesis that God influences only someevents at a quantum level. Moreover the scale of the providence whichis required for divine action through quantum mechanics is trulyphenomenal – it takes millions of years of action to achieve even themost simple effects. If it is also held that human beings have free willthen this situation becomes absurd. By making quantum measure-ments we are determining the state of divine quantum determinations


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in a way that must significantly increase the already considerableamount of time God requires to achieve anything. The linking ofdivine action to quantum mechanics must take place by some kind ofmeasurement interaction and this also places God in a subordinateposition to creation and the episodicity of measurements places severelimitations on the possible actions God could achieve. The resultingview of divine action is far from the Biblical and traditional accountsof providence and it thus seems reasonable to conclude that atheology of divine action that is linked to quantum processes is theo-logically and scientifically untenable.

This verdict seems to me to be correct for the foreseeable futureunless some unexpected radical changes occur in the widely acceptedunderstanding of quantum mechanics on which the foregoing hasbeen based.

Let us now investigate what I consider to be a more promisingpath in our exploration towards understanding the interaction ofGod with the world, one that the sciences of the last century of thesecond millennium have opened up.

Whole–part influence and God’s interaction with the world

We have seen (p.51) that causality in complex systems made up ofunits at various levels of interlocking organisation can best be under-stood as a two-way process. There is clearly a bottom-up effect of theconstituent parts on the properties and behaviour of the wholecomplex. However, real features of the total system-as-a-whole arefrequently an influence upon what happens to the units (which maythemselves be complex) at lower levels. The units behave as they dobecause they are part of these particular systems. What happens to thecomponent units is the joint effect of their own properties, explicablein terms of the lower-level science appropriate to them, and also theproperties of the system-as-a-whole which result from its particularorganisation. When that higher level can also be understood only interms not reducible to lower-level ones, then new realities havingcausal efficacy can be said to have emerged at the higher levels.

We have also seen (pp.54ff.) that the world-as-a-whole may beregarded as a kind of overall System-of-systems, for its verydifferent (e.g. quantum, biological, cosmological) componentssystems are interconnected and interdependent across space and


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time, with wide variations in the degree of coupling. There willtherefore be an influence on the component unit systems, at alllevels, of the states and patterns of this overall world-System and ofits succession of states and patterns. Moreover, God, by God’s ownvery nature as omniscient, is the only being that could have anunsurpassed awareness of such states and patterns of the world-System in all its interconnectedness and interdependence. Thesewould be totally and luminously clear to an omniscient God in alltheir ramifications and degrees of coupling across space and time.For God is present to and constitutes the circumambient Reality ofall-that-is – that is what is meant by my emphasis on the immanenceof God and what panentheism is all about.

I want now to explore the possibility that these theologicalinsights informed by new scientific perspectives might provide aresource for exploring how we are to conceive of God interactingwith the world. Let me make it clear from the outset that I am notpostulating that the world is ‘God’s body’, for, although the worldmay best be regarded as ‘in’ God (panentheism), God’s Being isdistinct from all created beings in a way that we are not distinct fromour bodies. Yet, although the world is not organised like a humanbody, it is nevertheless a system, for all-that-is displays real intercon-nectedness and interdependence. So we shall continue to speak of the‘world-System’ without relying, at this stage, upon any analogy withthe mind–brain–body relation or with personal agency.

If God interacts with the world-system as a totality, then God, byaffecting its overall state, could be envisaged as being able to exerciseinfluence upon events in the myriad sublevels of existence of which itis made without abrogating the laws and regularities that specificallyapply to them. Moreover, God would be doing this without inter-vening within the supposed gaps provided by the in-principle,inherent unpredictabilities noted earlier (p.58). Particular eventscould occur in the world and be what they are because God intendsthem to be so, without any contravention of the laws of physics,biology, psychology or whatever is the pertinent science for the levelin question – as in the exercise of whole–part influence within themany constituent systems of the world.

This model is based on the recognition that an omniscient Goduniquely knows, over all frameworks of reference of time and space,


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everything that it is possible to know about the state(s) of the world-System, including the interconnectednesss and interdependence ofthe world’s entities, structures and processes. By analogy with theoperation of whole–part influence in real systems, the suggestion isthat, because the ontological gap between the world and God islocated simply everywhere in space and time, God could affect holis-tically the state of the world-System. Thence, mediated by thewhole–part influences of the world-system on its constituents, Godcould cause particular patterns of events to occur which wouldexpress God’s intentions. These latter would not otherwise havehappened had God not so specifically intended.

Any such interaction of God with the world-System would beinitially with it as a whole. One would expect this initial interactionto be followed by a kind of ‘trickle-down’ effect as each level affectedby the particular divine intention then has an influence on lowerlevels and so on down the hierarchies of complexity to the level atwhich God intends to effect a particular purpose. We have alreadyseen (p.103) how in ‘chaotic’ systems, especially dissipative ones,states can differ in pattern and organisation (and so in informationcontent) yet be very close in energy. This provides a flexible route forthe transmission of divinely influenced information from the world-System as a whole down to particular systems within that whole.These could well be those of individual human-brains-in-human-bodies-in-society (pp.59ff.) and so this could be the means wherebyGod is experienced in acts of meditation and worship – as well asrecognised as ‘special providence’ in events judged to be responses tosuch human acts. If such divine responses were so transmitted thenthey would be indirect and elusive and could well take a long time byhuman reckoning – which corresponds to actual religious expe-rience. This action of God on the world is to be distinguished fromGod’s universal creative action in that particular intentions of Godfor particular patterns of events to occur are effected thereby.

The ontological interface at which God must be deemed to beinfluencing the world is, on this model, located in that which occursbetween God and the totality of the world-System and this, from apanentheistic viewpoint, is within God’s own self. What passesacross this interface may perhaps be appropriately conceived of as a‘flow of information’ without energy transfer (as would necessarily


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accompany it in such flows within the world-system). But one has torecognise that there will always be a distinction, and so gulf, betweenthe nature of God and that of all created entities, structures andprocesses (the notorious ‘ontological gap at the causal joint’ ofAustin Farrer8). Hence this model can attempt to postulate intelli-gibly only the ‘location’ and tentative character of the initial effect ofGod on the world-System seen, as it were, from our side of theboundary. Whether or not this analogical use of the notion of infor-mation flow proves helpful in this context, we do need some way ofindicating that the effect of God at this level, and so at all levels, isthat of pattern shaping in its most general sense. I am encouraged inthis kind of exploration by the recognition that the concept of theLogos, the Word, of God is usually taken to refer to God’s self-expression in the world and so to indicate God’s creative patterningof the world (see pp.158ff.).

The model is propounded to be consistent with the monistconcept that all concrete particulars in the world-System arecomposed only of basic physical entities, and with the convictionthat the world-System is causally closed. There are no dualistic, novitalistic, no supernatural levels through which God might besupposed to exercising special divine activity. In this model, theproposed kind of interactions of God with the world-System wouldnot, according to panentheism, be from ‘outside’ but from ‘inside’ it.The world-System is regarded as being ‘in God’. This seems to be afruitful way of combining God’s ultimate otherness with God’sability to interface holistically with the world-System.

These panentheistic interrelations of God with the world-System,including humanity, I have attempted to represent in figure 1. This isa kind of Venn diagram and represents ontological relationships; theinfinity sign represents not infinite space or time but the infinitely‘more’ of God’s Being in comparison with everything else. Thediagram has the limitation of being in two planes so that the ‘God’label appears dualistically to be (ontologically) outside the worldand although this conveys the truth that God is ‘more and other’than the world, it cannot represent God’s omnipresence in and to theworld. A vertical arrow has been placed at the centre of this circle tosignal God’s immanent influence and activity within the world. Itmay also be noted that ‘God’ is denoted by the (imagined) infinite


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GOD

GOD

G O D

G O D

Figure 1. Diagram representing spatially the ontological relation of, and the interactions between, God

and the world (including humanity).

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G O D

Mental experiences[conscious and unconscious]

Brain and CNS

Systems

Maps

Networks

Neurons

Synapses

God, represented by the whole surface of the page, imagined to extendto infinity (∞) in all directions

the world, all-that-is: created and other than God, and including bothhumanity and systems of non-human entities, structures and processes

the human world: excluding systems of non-human entities, structuresand processes

God’s interaction with and influence on the world and its events

a similar arrow to the preceding one but perpendicular to the page:God’s influence and activity within the world

effects of the non-human world on humanity

human agency in the non-human world

personal interactions, both individual and social, between human beings,including cultural and historical influences

Multilevelled humanity

Apart from the top one, these are the levels of organisation of the humannervous system depicted in Patricia S. Churchland and T.J. Sejnowski,‘Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience’, Science, 242, 1988, pp. 741–5.

Key

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planar surface of the page on which the circle representing the worldis printed. For, it is assumed, God is ‘more than’ the world, which isnevertheless ‘in’ God. The page underlies and supports the circle andits contents, just as God sustains everything in existence and ispresent to all. So the larger dashed circle, representing the onto-logical location of God’s interaction with all-that-is, really needs amany-dimensional convoluted surface not available on a two-dimen-sional surface. The figure is but a more mundane representation ofAugustine’s vision of ‘the whole creation’ as if it were ‘some sponge,huge, but bounded ... filled with that unmeasurable sea’ of God,‘environing and penetrating it though every way infinite ... every-where and on every side’.9

In conclusion, this model of God’s interaction with the world asincluding a whole–part influence has proved, in my view, to be apromising path to take in our exploration from science towards anunderstanding of God’s special providence and has indeed beenadopted by other thinkers, though often in combination with other,less warranted bottom-up proposals, such as those involving chaoticsystems and/or quantum events.

God as ‘personal agent’ in the world

I hope the model as described so far has a degree of plausibility independing on an analogy only with complex natural systems ingeneral and on the way whole–part influence operates in them. It is,however, clearly too impersonal to do justice to the personal char-acter of many (but not all) of the profoundest human experiences ofGod. So there is little doubt that it needs to be rendered more cogentby the recognition that, among natural systems, the instance parexcellence of whole–part influence in a complex system is that ofpersonal agency. Indeed I could not avoid, above, speaking of God’s‘intentions’ and implying that, like human persons, God hadpurposes to be implemented in the world. For if God is going toaffect events and patterns of event in the world, then we cannotavoid attributing the personal predicates of intentions and purposesto God – inadequate and easily misunderstood as they are. So wehave to say that though God is ineffable and ultimately unknowable,yet God is ‘at least personal’ and that personal language attributed toGod is less misleading than saying nothing!


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We can now legitimately turn to the exemplification ofwhole–part influence in the mind–brain–body relation (pp.59ff.) as aresource for modelling God’s interaction with the world. When wedo so the ascendancy of the ‘personal’ as a category for explicatingthe wholeness of human agency comes to the fore and the tradi-tional, indeed biblical, model of God as in some sense a personalagent in the world is rehabilitated. It is re-established here in a quitedifferent metaphysical, non-dualist framework from that of muchtraditional theology but now consistently with the understanding ofthe world which the sciences provide. Accounts of religious expe-rience are, of course, deeply suffused with the language of personalinteraction with God and at this point our philosophical and theo-logical explorations towards God begin to make contact with thecommon experiences of believers in God.

When we were using non-human systems in their whole–partrelationships as a model for God’s relation to the world in specialprovidence, we resorted to the idea of a flow of information as ahelpful pointer to what might be conceived as crossing the onto-logical gap between God and the world-as-a-whole. But now as weturn to more personal categories to explicate this relation andinterchange, it is natural to interpret the flow of informationbetween God and the world, including humanity, in terms of thecommunication that occurs between persons – rather in the waythat a flow of information in the technical engineering sense trans-mutes, say in a telephone call, in the human brain into ‘infor-mation’ in the ordinary sense of the word, so that communicationoccurs between persons. Thus, whatever else may be involved inGod’s personal interaction with the world, communication must beinvolved and this raises the question of to whom God might becommunicating. There would not have been such intense investiga-tions into scientific perspectives on divine action if it had not beenthe case that humanity distinctively and, it appears, uniquely hasregarded itself as the recipient of communication from God. But inwhat ways has the reception of communication from God beenunderstood and experienced?


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He [Elijah] got up, and ate and drank; then he went in the strength ofthat food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God. Atthat place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then theword of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘What are you doing here,Elijah?’ He answered,

‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for theIsraelites have forsaken your covenant, throw down your altars, andkilled your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they areseeking my life, to take it away.’

He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, forthe Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strongthat it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces beforethe Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after theearthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire asound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face inhis mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave.

I Kings 19:8–13 (NRSV)

When Elijah in extremis and in flight from the wrath of Jezebelsought a message from God and stood expectantly on the ‘mount ofGod’, Horeb, what brought him to the mouth of his sheltering cavewas not the great wind, the earthquake or the fire but, we are told, ‘a

6

The sound of sheer silence

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sound of sheer silence’.1 From its depths Elijah is addressed by God.The story encapsulates the immediacy of such experiences and at thesame time exemplifies their baffling character. For it is not only thearchetypal figures and events in the biblical tradition which have thischaracter, but also the widespread religious experiences of humanity,both those inside and those outside religious traditions. Their veryexistence raises questions of the kind we have been consideringabout the general nature of God’s interaction with the world andwith humanity, especially when viewed in the contemporary perspec-tives of the natural and human sciences.

Our exploration towards God has inevitably led us to thequestion of how God can communicate with a humanity depicted bythe sciences as a part of a monistic natural world and evolved in andfrom it. The world is now seen in an entirely differently light fromthe way it was seen in the cultural milieu of the legends concerningElijah, and indeed the way it was seen even two hundred years ago.The dominance of the essentially Greek, and unbiblical, notion in theChristian world that human beings consist of two distinct kinds ofentity (or ‘substance’) – a mortal, physical body and an immortal‘spirit’ (or ‘soul’) – provided a deceptively obvious basis for envis-aging how God and humanity might communicate. The divine‘Spirit’ was thought to be in some way closely related to, and capableof communication with, the human ‘spirit’. The two were capable ofbeing, as it were, on the same wavelength for communication. Thisontology of ‘spirit’ was not physicalist insofar as it was understoodthat spirit was not part of the causal nexus of the physical andbiological world which the natural sciences continued to explicate.

The basis for such an ontology has, we have seen, been funda-mentally undermined by the pressure of the relevant sciencestowards an emergentist monistic view of the world and a non-dualistview of humanity. This raises the general question of how we are toconceive of God communicating with humanity in the light of theaccount we have been developing of how God interacts with theworld-System as it is depicted by the sciences.

God, human experience and revelation

It is clear that all mutual interactions between human beings and theworld (the pairs of arrows in figure 1) are mediated by the constituents

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of the physical world of which human beings are part and in whichhuman actions occur. Furthermore all interactions between humanbeings (the pairs of solid single-headed arrows in figure 1) are alsomediated (pp.62ff.) by the constituents of the physical world, includingthe cultural heritage coded on to material substrates. Such interactionsinclude communication between human beings, that is, between theirstates of consciousness, which are also, under another description,patterns of activity within human brains. This raises the question ofhow, within such a framework of understanding, one can conceive ofGod’s communication with humanity, the self-communication of Godto humanity. This in turn raises the traditional question of how Godmight reveal Godself to humanity – in what way can we think of Godcommunicating with humanity in the light of the perspectives we havebeen led to adopt in our exploration towards God from the sciences?

In communication between human beings some of our actions,gestures and responses are more characteristic and revelatory of ourdistinctive selves, of our intentions, purposes and meanings, than areothers. ‘It’s not what you say but the way you’re saying it.’ Thisprompts us to seek in the world those events and entities, or patternsof them, that unveil God’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively anddistinctively – constituting what is usually called ‘revelation’, for inrevelation God is presupposed to be active.

The ways in which such a revealing activity of God have beenthought to occur in the different ranges and contexts of human expe-rience can be graded according to the increasing extent to which Godis said to be taking the initiative.

GENERAL REVELATION

If the world is created by God then it cannot but reflect God’screative intentions and thus, however ambiguously, God’s characterand purposes; and it must go on doing so if God continuouslyinteracts with the world in the way we have proposed. The classicaltext is St Paul’s letter to the Romans:

For what can be known about God, is plain to them [all who by theirwickedness suppress the truth] because God has shown it to them.Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divinenature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seenthrough the things that are made.2


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Paul urges that there can be a knowledge of God, however diffuse,which is available to all humanity through reflection on the characterof the created world.

REVELATION TO MEMBERS OF A RELIGIOUS TRADITION

Belonging to a religious tradition provides one with the language andsymbols to articulate one’s awareness of God at any instant and as acontinuing experience. The tradition provides the resources that helpthe individual both to enrich and to have the means of identifying hisor her own experience of God. Thus there is a general experience ofthe ordinary members of a continuing religious community whichmay properly be regarded as a mode of revelation that enhances, andis more explicit than, the general revelation to humanity.

This kind of religious general revelation arises when there is amerging of, on the one hand, the streams of general human expe-rience and general revelation and, on the other hand, those of therecollected and relived particular and special revelations of Godwhich a tradition keeps alive by its intellectual, aesthetic, liturgical,symbolic and devotional resources. These all nurture the uncon-scious experience of adherents to that tradition and so shape theirconscious awareness of God.

SPECIAL REVELATION

This is revelation regarded as authoritative, and so as ‘special’ in aparticular tradition. Some experiences of God by individuals, orgroups of individuals, are so intense and subsequently so influentialthat they constitute initiating, dubbing experiences. These serve toanchor in the community later references to God and God’s relation tohumanity, even through changes in the metaphorical language used todepict that ultimately ineffable Reality. The community then regardsthem as special, even if not basically different from those referred to inthe previous section. So it is not improper to seek in history thoseevents and entities, or patterns of them, that claim to have revealedGod’s meaning(s) most overtly, effectively and distinctively.

That there might be such a knowledge is entirely consistent withthe understanding of God’s interaction with the world as representedin figure 1. The double arrows denote an input into the world fromGod which is both influential in a whole–part manner and thereby


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conceivable as an input of ‘information’ in the sense of alteringpatterns of events in the world. The states of human brains canproperly be considered to be among such patterns, so, in the modelwe are deploying, there can be a general revelation to humanity ofGod’s character and purposes in and through human knowledge andexperience of the world.

The Jewish and Christian traditions have, more than most others,placed a particular emphasis on God’s revelation in the experiencedevents of history. Such special revelation, initiated (it is assumed) byGod, has been regarded by Christians as recorded particularly in theBible. How we are to receive this record today in the light of criticaland historical study is a major issue in contemporary Christianity,since it involves a subtle dialogue of each generation with its own past.

REVELATION AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

This attempt to discriminate between modes of revelation accordingto the degree to which God is experienced as taking the initiative inmaking Godself explicitly known is helpful only up to a point. Onemust avoid the not uncommon tendency to press the distinctions toosharply and to ignore the smooth gradations between the differentcategories of revelation already distinguished. It is notable from awide range of investigations3 how widespread religious experience is,even in the secularised West, and that it is continuous in its distri-bution over those who are members of a religious community andthose who are not. The evidence is that the boundary between generalrevelation and revelation to members of a religious tradition is veryblurred. But so also is that between the latter and special revelation.For there are well-documented non-scriptural accounts over thecenturies of devotional and mystical experiences, regarded as revela-tions of God, among those who do belong to a religious tradition.

It is also widely recognised that the classical distinction between‘natural’ and ‘revealed’ theology has proved difficult to maintain inmodern times. For it can be held that the only significant differencebetween supposedly ‘natural’ and supposedly ‘revealed’ insights isthat the former are derived from considering a broader (though stillselected) range of situations than the latter. The same could also besaid of the subsequently more widely favoured distinction between‘general’ and ‘special’ revelation, for the range of and overlap


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between the means whereby insights are gained into the divine realityhave had to be recognised.

There is therefore a gradation, but there are also differences, inintensity and the degree of explicitness with which these religiousexperiences are received as revelations of God as their initiator – ratheras a variegated terrain may be accentuated to give rise to distinctivehills and even sharp peaks without loss of continuity. The questionsthat now follow are: ‘How does our understanding of God’s inter-action with the world including humanity relate to human revelatoryexperiences of God?’ ‘How can the notion of religious experiences beaccommodated by, be rendered intelligible in, be coherent with, theunderstanding of God’s interaction with the world that we have beendeveloping?’ This leads to the question posed below.

How does God communicate with humanity?

If God interacts with the world in the way already proposed,through a whole–part influence on the whole world-system, howcould God communicate with humanity in the various kinds of reli-gious experience? It has been noted that the interpersonal relation-ships we know about are mediated by the constituents of the world.This suggests that religious experience that is mediated throughsensory experience is intelligible in the same terms as is the interper-sonal experience of human beings. That is, God communicates withhuman persons through the constituents of the world, through allthat lies inside the dashed circle representing the world in figure 1.God communicates through such mediated religious experiences byimparting meaning and significance to constituents of the world or,rather, to patterns of events among them. (This may properly bethought of as a ‘flow of information’ from God to humanity, so longas the reductive associations of such terms are not deemed toexclude, as they need and should not, interpersonal communi-cation.) Thereby insights into God’s character and purposes forindividuals and communities can be generated in a range of contextsfrom the most general to the special. The concepts, language andmeans of investigating and appraising these experienced signalsfrom God would operate at their own level and not be reducible tothose of the natural and human sciences. The interpretation ofmediated religious experience would have its own autonomy in


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human inquiry – mystical theology cannot be reduced withoutremainder to sociology or psychology, or a fortiori to the biologicaland physical sciences.

What about those forms of religious experience that areunmediated through sense experience? They may be divided into:the mystical, ‘where the primary import of the experience is afeeling of intimacy with the divine’, and the numinous, ‘thoseexperiences where awe of the divine is the central feature’.4 Orinto: ‘the case where the subject has a religious experience inhaving certain sensations … not of a kind describable by normalvocabulary’ and, on the other hand, religious experiences in which‘the subject ... is aware of God or of a timeless reality … it just soseems to him, but not through his having sensations’.5 The expe-rience of Elijah at the mouth of the cave on Mount Horeb was ofGod communicating to him through ‘a sound of sheer silence’, animage of absolute non-mediation.

In such instances, is it necessary to postulate some action of Godwhereby there is a direct communication from God to the humanconsciousness which is not mediated by any known natural means,that is, by any known constituents of the world? Is there, as it were,a distinctive layer or level within the totality of human personhoodwhich has a unique way of coming into direct contact with God?This was, as we saw in the Introduction (and also p.112), certainlythe assumption when the human person was divided into ontologi-cally distinct parts, one of which (often called the ‘spirit’ or the‘soul’) had this particular capacity.

Now we cannot but allow the possibility that God, being theCreator of the world, might be free to set aside any limitations bywhich God has allowed his interaction with that created order tobe restricted. However, we also have to recognise that those veryself-limitations that God is regarded as having self-imposed arepostulated precisely because they render coherent the wholenotion of God as Creator with purposes that are being imple-mented in the natural and human world and unveiled by thesciences. Such considerations also make one very reluctant topostulate God as communicating to humanity through whatwould have to be seen as arbitrary means totally different in kindfrom any other communications to human consciousness. These


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latter include the most intensely personal communications yeteven these, as we have already seen, are comprehensible asmediated subtly and entirely through the biological senses and theconstituents of the world.

So, to be consistent, even this capacity for unmediated experienceof God cannot but be regarded as a mode of functioning of the totalintegrated unity of whole persons – persons who communicate withother persons in the world through the world’s own constituents. Forhuman beings this communicating nexus of natural events within theworld includes not only human sense data (as ‘qualia’) and humanknowledge stored in artefacts, but also all the states of the humanbrain that are concomitant with the contents of consciousness andthe unconscious. The process of storing and accumulating bothconscious and unconscious resources is mediated by all the variedways in which communication to humanity can occur – and all thesehave been seen to be effected through the natural constituents of theworld and the patterns of events that occur in them.

When human beings have an experience of God apparentlyunmediated by something obviously sensory – as when they aresimply ‘waiting upon God’ in silence – they can do so through Godcommunicating via their recollected memories, the workings oftheir unconscious and everything that has gone into their formation,everything that has made them the persons they are. All of whichcan be mediated through patterns in the constituents of the world,including brain patterns. Experiences of God often seem to be inef-fable, incapable of description in terms of any other known experi-ences or by means of any accessible metaphors or analogies. Thischaracteristic they share with aesthetic and interpersonal experi-ences, which are unquestionably mediated through patterns in theevents of this world. Experiences of God could take the variety offorms that we have already described and could all be mediated bythe constituents of the world and through patterns of naturalevents, yet could nonetheless be definitive and normative as revela-tions to those experiencing them. If God can influence patterns ofevents in the world to be other than they would have been but forthe divine initiative – and still consistent with scientific descriptionsat the appropriate level – then it must be possible for God toinfluence those patterns of events in human brains which constitute


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human thoughts, including thoughts of God and a sense of personalinteraction with God.

The involvement of the constituents of the world in the so-called unmediated experiences of God is less overt and obviousbecause in them God is communicating through subtle and lessobvious patterns in the constituents of the world and the events inwhich they participate. These latter include the patterns ofmemory storage and activity of the human brain, especially thoseoperative in communication at all levels between human persons(including sounds, symbols and images), and the artefacts thatfacilitate this communication.

On the present model of special, providential action as the effectof divine whole–part influence, it is intelligible how God could alsoaffect patterns of neuronal events in a particular brain, so that thesubject could be aware of the God’s presence with or without themediation of memory in the way just suggested. Such address fromGod, whether or not via stored (remembered) patterns of neuronalevents, could come unexpectedly and uncontrived by the use of anyapparently external means. Thus, either way, it would seem to theone having the experience as if it were unmediated. The revelation toElijah at the mouth of the cave had both this immediacy and a basisin a long prior experience of God.

On examination, therefore, it transpires that the distinctionbetween mediated and unmediated religious experiences refers notso much to the means of communication by God as to the nature ofthe content of the experience – just as the sense of harmony andcommunion with a person far transcends any description that canbe given of it in terms of sense data, even though they are indeedthe media of communication. We simply know we are at one withthe other person; similarly in contemplation the mystic can simplybe ‘aware of God ... it just seems so to him’; and both experiencescan be entirely mediated through the constituents of the world. Soit is not surprising that those experiencing such communicationsfrom God experience them as intensely personal, for this is theclosest kind of experience to them in ordinary life. What thetreatment here has therefore been pointing to is that it is intelligiblehow God can communicate personally to human beings in a way


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consistent with the descriptions of that world given at other levelsby the natural and human sciences.

Certainly, for the Elijah of the legend, ‘the sound of sheer silence’left no doubt about the personal nature of the command and of hisresponse to it.


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We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Any exploration from the world of science into the mystery of Godwill, if genuine, ipso facto be consummated in a deeper insight intothe same One ‘than which nothing greater can be thought’,† who wasonly partially and more fallibly discerned at the start of anyreflection on the created order illuminated by the sciences. It will notbe God who has changed in our quest but we in our perception andexperience of the divine. Hence the forging of a Christian theology inthe white heat of the scientific world of the twenty-first century is atask not of iconoclasm but of the disclosure of profounder and morecomprehensive ways of building on the well-winnowed insights ofgenerations of seekers after God.

PART III:

THE END OF ALL OUR EXPLORING

† Anselm, Proslogion, II.

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Our exploration in Part II, starting from the realities of the world asperceived by the sciences, has led us so far to infer that the best ex-planation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming is, in terms gatheredfrom part II, an Ultimate Reality, God, who:

• is the self-existent Ground of Being, giving existence to andsustaining in existence all-that-is;

• is One – but a diversity-in-unity, a Being of unfathomable richness;• includes and penetrates all-that-is, but whose Being is more than

and is not exhausted by it (panentheism);• is supremely and unsurpassedly rational;• is the immanent Creator creating continuously in and through the

processes of the natural order;• is omniscient, with only a probabilistic knowledge of the outcomes

of some events;• is omnipotent, but self-limited by God’s nature as Love;• gives existence to each segment of time for all-that-is-becoming;• is omnipresent to all past and present events and will be to all

future ones;• is eternal, exists at all times – past, present and future;• transcends past and present created time (but does not know the

future, which does not exist to know);

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• possesses a dipolarity in relation to time, transcendent but alsoexperiencing succession in relation to events and persons; hence isnot ‘timeless’; and is temporally, and so personally, related tohumanity;

• is (at least) personal or supra-personal – yet also has impersonalfeatures;

• is the ultimate ground and source of both law (‘necessity’) and‘chance’ – an Improvisor of unsurpassed ingenuity;

• has something akin to ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ in creation;• suffers in the creative processes of the world;• took a risk in creation;• is an Agent who affects holistically the state of the world-System

and thereby, mediated by whole–part influences, can affectparticular patterns of events to express divine intentions;

• communicates with human persons through the constituents ofthe world (in religious and other experiences) by impartingmeaning and significance to particular patterns of events.

These general inferences concerning the nature of God and of God’srelation to nature, humanity and time are not specifically Christianand are significantly different from those of the classical philo-sophical theism that has dominated Christian thought. However, it isnecessary to be clear about the status of the proposed revisionaryinferences. It is not being affirmed that we have proved from ourreflections on what we now know of the world from the sciences thatthere is an Ultimate Reality, God, with just these attributes – anymore than science actually proves the existence of natural realities tobe existents with the attributes that the terms of its theories incor-porate. Science, too, only infers to the best explanation and its depic-tions of the realities to which it refers are inevitably metaphorical,revisable and not naïvely realistic without qualification. Thus, in thisexploration, the postulate of the kind of God here depicted, even ifproperly inferred, is still only the best explanation. One cannot denythe existence of other possible, competing explanations, some of themparticular to the various contexts in which the inferences have beendeployed. However, I do argue that the proposed inferences aboutGod, if taken together, are cumulative in their effect and make a moreconvincing case than any of the rival explanations – especially that of


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atheism (often under the guise of agnosticism), which asserts, amongother things, that the world just happens to be rational and to displaythe emergence in and from matter of persons who possess values andcreativity. That path is, in my view, an abandonment of the humanexploration that seeks an answer to the question ‘why?’ over thewhole gamut of experience.

The inferences we have made about God and God’s relations tonature and time have inevitably, because of the process of argument,been couched in general and abstract terms, some of which are to befound in philosophical reflections extending from classical Greektimes to the present. To that extent, in our exploration, our resourcesfor making judgements of reasonableness have been moulded by thesocial context in which this author, and many of his readers, areembedded, namely those of post-Christian Western civilisation. I donot think this is a fatal flaw, since we have to think with the linguistictools we have inherited and have currently developed if we are tothink at all. It is with those same tools that we conduct our own innerdialogue to establish by what beliefs and principles we are to steerour brief lives. Absolute truth is unattainable; but sufficient truth bywhich to live meaningfully and consistently with what we can bestinfer about the realities and the Ultimate Reality in which we live isworth seeking.

Moreover, many of the inferences about the nature of the UltimateReality, God, which are proposed here as the best explanation of all-that-is and all-that-is-becoming, have been made in cultures quitedifferent from that of the former Christendom, both East and West.The same polarity and tensions, with a similar spectrum of emphasis– for example, with respect to attributions of transcendence andimmanence to the Ultimate Reality and in its subtle relations to theobserved world – are to be found not only when we consider themonotheistic beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but also whenthose of Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are in question.

The inferences summarised at the beginning of this chapterconstitute, I am urging, key nodular points for the understanding ofthe nature of God and of God’s relation to the world with which wehave to weave a web of beliefs. For this to be accessible to personaland communal life it needs to be interpreted and enriched bysymbolic, analogical and metaphorical resources. The fabric of this

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web of beliefs about God (see pp.28–9) will, as in the past, be suscep-tible to revision and even replacement as new experiences and newknowledge impinge upon it – but these can be envisaged as exertingtheir influences only at its edges, so that adjustment will be gradualand not cataclysmic. It is precisely a process of this kind in which thiswork is engaged and which has led to the constellation of affirma-tions about God which have been developed here to revise those ofclassical Christian philosophical theology.

We have, then, been exploring some of the consequences for ourunderstanding of God and of God’s relation to the world, humanityand time in the light of what the sciences have revealed. Even thoughthese consequences are not yet spelled out very publicly, they arewidely sensed as a consequence of the increasing accessibility ofscientific knowledge and of the resulting increased awareness of theepic of evolution to people without scientific training. Today, intel-lectually educated but often theologically uninformed people, if theyare still attached in any way to the Christian churches, are hangingon by their fingertips as they increasingly bracket off large sections ofthe liturgies in which they participate as either unintelligible, orunbelievable in their classical form, or both (e.g. the virginalconception of Jesus; the resurrection of the body; the use of sacri-ficial, substitutionary and propitiatory imagery with respect to Jesus’death; and much else). There is an increasingly alarming dissonancebetween the language of devotion, liturgies and doctrine and whatpeople perceive themselves to be, and to be becoming, in the world.For they now see themselves increasingly in the light of the cognitivesciences and of the historical sciences that have generated the epic ofevolution (cosmology, geology, biology).

Hitherto Christian apologetic based on science, often undertakenby scientist-theologians, has been a well-expressed reinventing of thewheel which strengthens Christians who are wobbling in their faithbut does not convince the general, educated public. It is still tooentangled in worn-out metaphors and images. I have often arguedfor a more dynamic view of God’s continuous action in the processesof the natural world – the action of a God who is indeedTranscendent, Incarnate and Immanent, in whom the world existsand who is its circumambient Ultimate Reality. What we all have todo in this interaction of theology with the sciences is, by argument


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and imagination, to develop a concept of God, belief in the reality ofwhom is consistent with what we now know from science about thecosmos, this planet and our own arrival here. Theology – which I stilltake to be wisdom and words about God – has to develop concepts,images, metaphors that represent God’s purposes and implantedmeanings for the world we are finding it to be through the sciences.

We require an open, revisable, exploratory, radical – dare I say it?– liberal theology. This may well be unfashionable among Christianswho seem everywhere to be retreating into their fortresses ofProtestant evangelicalism, traditional (Anglo-) Catholicism and/orso-called ‘biblical theology’. Nevertheless, transition to such atheology is, in my view, unavoidable if Christians in the West, andeventually elsewhere, are not to degenerate in the new millenniuminto an esoteric society internally communing with itself and therebyfailing to transmit its ‘good news’ (the evangel) to the universal(catholicos) world.

Hence, a paradox: to be truly evangelical and catholic in itsimpact and function, the church of the new millennium will need atheology that, in its relation to a worldview everywhere shaped bythe sciences, will have to be more genuinely open, radical and liberal.For such a Christian theology to have any viability, it may well haveto be stripped down to newly conceived basic essentials. Only thenwill Christian theology attain the degree of verisimilitude withrespect to ultimate realities that science has to natural ones – andcommand respect as a vehicle of public truth.

Consider, for example, the attempt of Bishop David Jenkins tocapture in simple, direct words the essence of Christian belief:

God is. He is as he is in Jesus. So there is hope.God is. He is for us. So it is worth it.1

Even well-meaning, recent liturgical revision (as, for example, in theChurch of England), utilising predominantly what are believed to bescriptural images, savours too much of an exercise in rearranging thedeckchairs as the Titanic goes down. A liturgy can be meaningfulonly when it relates to what can be defended as public truth – all elseis in danger of becoming the mere whistling in the dark of a belea-guered minority. I have already (in chapter 2) argued for a ‘theologyas it might be’, one that is genuinely open and not uniquely and

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wholly dependent on authoritative sources, especially sacred books,on traditional (especially hierarchical) communities or on presumeda priori truths. Because of the rise of excessive individualism inregard to ultimate questions and the infection of the common mindwith debilitating relativism, there has been a marked tendencyamong Christians (and also, I suspect, among Muslims and someHindus) to retreat into citadels fortified against these destructivetides. In the Christian church in Britain this has largely taken theform of a revived evangelicalism that ignores the results of over 150years of careful biblical study and bases its teaching on interpreta-tions of the Bible no longer justifiable, whatever may have beenthought in previous centuries. But truth must be the overridingcriterion in the exploration towards God, and intellectual integrityrequires that the facile simplicities of unwarranted authoritarianpaths (biblical, communal or a priori) be eschewed.

So we are encouraged to resume our exploration now by exam-ining some of the ways in which the web of belief might justifiably bewoven today around our inferences concerning God and God’srelation to the world, humanity and time. This contemporaryinterplay of theology with science and in the interpretation of reli-gious experience will require us to deploy both new and old conceptsand symbols – for, as Jesus himself is reported as saying, ‘a learner inthe kingdom of heaven’ is like ‘a house-holder who can producefrom his store things new and old’.2 A rebirth of images is desper-ately needed to satisfy the spiritual hunger of our times. We shalltherefore look for clusters of concepts, images, symbols andmetaphors that can integrate the key inferences to which we havebeen led in a way that might touch the spiritual nerve of our times.


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Immanence: a theistic naturalism

For a century or more after Newton, creation was still thought of asan act at a point in time when God created something external toGodself in a framework of already existing space – not unlike thefamous Michelangelo depiction of the creation of Adam on theceiling of the Sistine Chapel.2 This led to a conception of God whichwas very ‘deistic’: God was external to nature, dwelling in an entirelydifferent kind of space and being of an entirely different substancewhich by definition could not overlap or mix with that of the createdorder. In practice, and in spite of earlier theological insights (towhich we will come in chapter 10), there was an excessive emphasison God’s transcendence and on the separation of God from what iscreated. However, cracks in this conceptual edifice began to appearin the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when theantiquity of the Earth inferred from geological studies was beingstretched from the 4004 BCE, deduced by adding up the ages of thebiblical patriarchs, to a process lasting many hundreds of thousandsof years or more. But it was Darwin’s eventually accepted proposalof a plausible mechanism for the changes in living organisms whichled to the ultimate demise of the external, deistic notion of God’screative actions. In particular, those Anglican theologians who were

8

‘In him we live and move

and have our being’1

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recovering a sense of the sacramental character of the world stressedGod’s omnipresent creative activity in the world. Thus AubreyMoore in 1889:

The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day,is that which represents him as an occasional visitor. Science haspushed the deist’s God further and further away, and at the momentwhen it seemed as if he would be thrust out all together Darwinismappeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. Ithas conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit,by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives. EitherGod is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere.3

Moore and his co-religionists were not alone – the evangelicalPresbyterian Henry Drummond saw God as working continuouslythrough evolution:

Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and therefor special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtuallyexcludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically,He disappears periodically ... Positively, the idea of an immanentGod, which is the God of Evolution, is definitely grander than theoccasional Wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.4

Similarly Frederick Temple (see p.70, and chapter 4, note 5), togetherwith the Anglican evangelical Charles Kingsley, in The Water Babies,could affirm that ‘God makes things make themselves’.5

For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the world often,as we have seen (pp.75ff.), through what we call ‘chance’ operatingwithin the created order, each stage of which constitutes thelaunching pad for the next. The Creator unfolds the created poten-tialities of the universe through a process in which its possibilitiesand propensities become actualised. We have seen (p.77) that Godmay be said to have ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, witha ‘formational economy’ that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possiblethe actualization of all inanimate structures and all life forms thathave ever appeared in the course of time’.6

So we have emphasised the immanence of God as Creator, ‘in,with and under’ the natural processes of the world unveiled by thesciences in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since thosedebates in the nineteenth century. For a notable aspect of the scientific


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account of the natural world is the seamless character of the web thathas been spun on the loom of time – at no point do modern naturalscientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain theirobservations and inferences about the past. The processes that haveoccurred display, as we have seen (pp.48–9), emergence, for newforms of matter and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms appearin the course of time. New kinds of reality emerge in time.

Hence the scientific perspective of the world, especially the livingworld, inexorably impresses upon us a dynamic picture of the worldof entities, structures and processes involved in continuous andincessant change and in process without ceasing. This has impelledus to reintroduce into our understanding of God’s creative relation tothe world a dynamic element. This was always implicit in theHebrew conception of a ‘living God’, dynamic in action, but it hasbeen obscured by the tendency to think of ‘creation’ as an event inthe past. God has again to be imagined as continuously creating,continuously giving existence to, what is new. God is creating atevery moment of the world’s existence through the perpetuallyendowed creativity of the very stuff of the world.

All of this reinforces the need to reaffirm (p.58) more stronglythan at any other time in Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) historythat in a very strong sense God is the immanent Creator creatingthrough the processes of the natural order. The processes are notthemselves God, but the action of God as Creator. God gives exis-tence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth thenew – thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look forany extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms whereby, Godmight be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world.

To revert to our musical analogy (pp.77–8) – when we arelistening to a musical work, say, a Beethoven piano sonata, there aretimes when we are so deeply absorbed in it that for the moment weare thinking Beethoven’s musical thoughts with him. Yet if anyonewere to ask at that moment (unseemingly interrupting our concentration!), ‘Where is Beethoven now?’, we could only replythat Beethoven-as-composer was to be found only in the music itself.Beethoven-as-composer is/was other than the music (he transcendsit) but his communication with us is entirely subsumed in and repre-sented by the music itself – he is immanent in it and we need not look

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elsewhere to meet him in that creative role. The processes revealedby the sciences are in themselves God acting as Creator, and God isnot to be found as some kind of additional influence or factor addedon to the processes of the world God is creating. This perspective canproperly be called ‘theistic naturalism’.

Panentheism

The scientific picture of the world has pointed to a perspective onGod’s relation to all natural events, entities, structures and processesin which they are continuously being given existence by God, whothereby expresses in and through them God’s own inherent ration-ality. In principle this should raise no new problems for Western clas-sical theism when it maintains the ontological distinction betweenGod and the created world. However, classical theism also conceivedof God as a necessary ‘substance’ with attributes and there was aspace ‘outside’ God in which the realm of the created was located –one entity cannot exist in another and retain its own (ontological)identity if they are regarded as substances. Hence, if God is also soregarded, God can only exert influence ‘from outside’ on events inthe world. Such intervention, for that is what it would be, raisesacute problems in the light of our contemporary scientific perceptionof the causal nexus of the world being a closed one (pp.56ff.).Because of such considerations, this substantival way of speakinghas become inadequate in the view of many thinkers. It has becomeincreasingly difficult to express the way in which God is present tothe world in terms of ‘substances’, which by definition cannot beinternally present to each other. This inadequacy of Western classicaltheism is aggravated by the evolutionary perspective which, as wehave just seen, requires that natural processes in the world need to beregarded as such as God’s creative action.

We therefore need a new model for expressing the closeness ofGod’s presence to finite, natural events, entities, structures andprocesses and we need it to be as close as possible to imagine, withoutdissolving, the distinction between Creator and what is created. Inorder to respond to this pressure, we have already used the notion of‘panentheism’ – that the world is in God but God is more than theworld. This led to deploying the analogy of this interaction to that ofthe whole–part influences observed in complex systems (p.111). To


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say, as in the definition of panentheism, that the world is ‘in’ Godevokes a spatial model of the God–world relation, as in figure 1 andSt Augustine’s picture of the world as a sponge floating in the infinitesea of God (p.114). This ‘in’ metaphor has advantages in this contextover the ‘separate-but-present-to’ terminology of divine immanencein Western classical theism. God is best conceived of as the circum-ambient Reality enclosing all existing entities, structures andprocesses; and as operating in and through all, while being more thanall. Hence, all that is not God has its existence within God’s operationand Being. The infinity of God includes all other finite entities, struc-tures and processes, as figure 1 attempts to indicate. God’s infinitycomprehends and incorporates all. In this model, there is no ‘placeoutside’ the infinite God in which what is created could exist. Godcreates all-that-is within Godself.

This can be developed into a more fruitful biological model basedon mammalian, and so human, procreation. The Western classicalconcept of God as Creator has placed, as we have seen, too muchstress on the externality of the process – God is regarded as creatingrather in the way the male fertilises the female from outside. Butmammalian females nurture new life within themselves and thisprovides a much-needed corrective to the purely masculine image ofdivine creation. God, according to panentheism, creates a worldother than Godself and ‘within herself’ (we find ourselves saying forthe most appropriate image) – yet another reminder of the need toescape from the limitations of male-dominated language about God.

A further pointer to the cogency of a panentheistic interpretationof God’s relation to the world is the way the different sciences relateto each other and to the world they study. For it transpires that ahierarchy of sciences from particle physics to ecology and sociologyis required to investigate and explicate the embedded hierarchies ofnatural systems. The more complex is constituted of the less complexand all interact and interrelate in systems of systems. It is to thisworld discovered by the sciences that we have to think of God asrelating. The external God of Western classical theism can bemodelled only as acting upon such a world by intervening separatelyat the various discrete levels. But if God incorporates both the indi-vidual systems and the total System-of-systems within Godself, as inthe panentheistic model, then it is readily conceivable that God could


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interact with all the complex systems at their own holistic levels. Godis present to the wholes as well as to the parts.

At the terminus of one of the branching lines of natural hierar-chies of complexity stands the human person – the complex of thehuman-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society. Persons can have inten-tions and purposes that can be implemented by particular bodilyactions. Indeed the action of the body just is the intended action ofthe person. The physical action is describable, at the bodily level, interms of the appropriate physiology, anatomy, etc., but alsoexpresses the intentions and purposes of the person’s thinking. Thephysical and the mental are two modalities of the same psychoso-matic event. To be embodied is a necessary condition for persons tohave perception, to exert agency, to be free and to participate incommunity.

Personal agency has been used both traditionally in the biblicalliterature and in contemporary theology as a model for God’s actionin the world. Our intentions and purposes seem to transcend ourbodies, yet in fact are closely related to brain events and can only beimplemented in the world through our bodies. Our bodies are indeedourselves under one description and from another perspective. Inpersonal agency there is an intimate and essential link between whatwe intend and what happens to our bodies. Yet ‘we’ as thinking,conscious persons appear to transcend our bodies while neverthelessbeing immanent in them. This pychosomatic, unified understandingof human personhood reinforces the use of a panentheistic model forGod’s relation to the world. For, according to that model, God isinternally present to all of the world’s entities, structures andprocesses in a way analogous to the way we as persons are presentand act in our bodies. This model, in the light of current concepts ofthe person as a psychosomatic unity, is then an apt way of modellingGod’s agency in the world as in some sense ‘personal’.

As with all analogies, models and metaphors, qualifications areneeded before we too readily draw a parallel between God’s relationto the world and our relation as persons to our bodies. The first isthat the God who, we are postulating, relates to the world like apersonal agent is also the one who creates it, gives it existence andinfinitely transcends it. Indeed the panentheistic model emphasisesthis in its ‘more than the world’. Moreover we do not create our


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own bodies. The second qualification of the model is that, as humanpersons, we are not conscious of most of what goes on in ourbodies’ autonomous functions such as breathing, digestion andheart beating. Yet other events in our bodies are conscious anddeliberate, as we have just been considering. So we have to distin-guish between these, but this can scarcely apply to an omniscientGod’s relation to the world. God’s knowledge of the world wouldinclude all patterns of events in it – both those implementing God’sgeneral providence in giving existence to the world’s entities, struc-tures and processes, and also those patterns of events that may bepertinent to God’s particular intentions. Both would be imple-menting various intentions in and through what we, through thesciences, observe as natural events. The third qualification of themodel is that, in so using human personal agency as analogous tothe way God interacts with the world, we are not implying that Godis ‘a person’ – rather that God is more coherently thought of as ‘atleast personal’, indeed as ‘more than personal’ (recall the ‘morethan’ of panentheism). Perhaps we could even say that God is‘supra-personal’ or ‘transpersonal’, for there are some essentialaspects of God’s nature which cannot be subsumed under the cate-gories applicable to human persons.

In my view, the panentheistic model allows one to combine astrengthened emphasis on the immanence of God in the world withGod’s ultimate transcendence over it. It does so in a way that makesthe analogy of personal agency both more pertinent and lessvulnerable than the Western externalist model to the distortionscorrected by the above qualifications of any model of the world-as-God’s-body. In regarding God’s interaction with the world to be anintra-worldly causality, it is also more consistent with those reflec-tions on the implications of scientific perspectives which led to thepropositions with which chapter 7 began (pp.129–30).

The fact of natural (as distinct from human, moral) evil continuesto challenge belief in a benevolent God. In the classical perception ofGod as transcendent and as existing in a space distinct from that ofthe world, there is an implied detachment from the world in itssuffering. This renders the problem of evil particularly acute. For Godcan only do anything about evil by an intervention from outside,which provokes the classical dilemma of either God can and will not,


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or he would but cannot: God is either not good or not omnipotent.The offence of the existence of natural evil can be somewhat miti-gated along the lines already developed (pp.83–4) but an unelim-inable hard core of offence remains, especially when encountereddirectly, and tragically, in personal experience. For the God of clas-sical theism witnesses, but is not involved in, the sufferings of theworld – even when closely ‘present to’ and ‘alongside’ them.

Hence, when faced with this ubiquity of pain, suffering and deathin the evolution of the living world (p.86),we were impelled to inferthat God, to be anything like the God who is Love in Christian belief,must be understood to be suffering in the creative processes of theworld. Creation is costly to God. Now, when the natural world, withall its suffering, is panentheistically conceived of as ‘in God’, itfollows that the evils of pain, suffering and death in the world areinternal to God’s own self. So God must have experience of thenatural. This intimate and actual experience of God must also includeall those events that constitute the evil intentions of human beingsand their implementation – that is, the moral evil of human society.

The panentheistic model of God’s relation to the world istherefore much more capable of recognising this fundamentalaspect of God’s experience of the world. Moreover, the panenthe-istic feminine image of the world, as being given existence by God inthe very ‘womb of God’ (p.139), is a particularly apt one forevoking an insight into the suffering of God in the very processes ofcreation. God is creating the world from within and, the worldbeing ‘in’ God, God experiences its sufferings directly as God’s ownand not from the outside.

In a more specifically Christian perception, God in taking thesuffering into God’s own self can thereby transform it into what iswhole and healthy – that is, be the means of ‘salvation’ when this isgiven its root etymological meaning.7 God heals and transformsfrom within, as a healthy body might be regarded as doing. Theredemption and transformation of human beings by God throughsuffering is, in this perspective, a general manifestation of what isexplicitly manifest in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus theChrist. In brief, this redemptive and transforming action of God ismore congruent with the panentheistic model than with the Westernclassical externalist interpretation of God’s relation to the world.


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I have been referring to this classical kind of theism as ‘Western’because it has been dominant in Western Christianity (RomanCatholic, Anglican, Protestant), with some notable exceptions, suchas Hildegard of Bingen. She certainly stressed the panentheistic char-acter of the world and in The Book of Divine Works asserts,

All living creatures are, so to speak, sparks from the radiation ofGod’s brilliance, and these sparks emerge from God like the raysfrom the sun.

And God, as Holy Spirit, addresses her in striking terms,

I, the highest and fiery power have kindled every living spark and Ihave breathed out nothing that can die … I am … the fiery life of thedivine essence – I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in thewaters; in the sun, moon and the stars … I, the fiery power, lie hiddenin these things and they blaze from Me, just as man is continuallymoved by his breath, and as the fire contains the nimble flame. Allthese things live in their own essence and are without death, since Iam Life … every living thing is rooted in Me. 8

But it is the Eastern Christian tradition that is most explicitlypanentheistic in holding together God’s transcendence and imma-nence, according to Bishop Kallistos.9 For example, GregoryPalamas (c. 1296–1359 CE) made a distinction-in-unity betweenGod’s essence and God’s energies (see pp.160ff.); and Maximus theConfessor (c. 580–662 CE) regarded the Creator-Logos (seepp.158ff.) as characteristically present in each created thing asGod’s intention for it – its inner essence (logoi) which makes itdistinctively itself and draws it towards God.

I have attemped in this chapter to explicate the idea that it is God‘in whom we live and move and have our being’, in the words said tohave been quoted by St Paul in his address to the ‘cultured despisers’of his day in Athens. This immanentist and panentheistic strand inthe Christian understanding of God’s relation to the world has takenmany forms and we now resort in our exploration to one deeplyimplicit in its liturgies and spirituality, namely, the sacramental.


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The WORLD is unknown, till the Value and Glory of it is seen: tillthe Beauty and the Serviceableness of its parts is considered. Whenyou enter into it, it is an illimited field of Variety and Beauty: whereyou may lose yourself in the multitude of Wonder and Delights. Butit is a happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity:and to find GOD in exchange for oneself. Which we then do whenwe see Him in His Gifts, and adore His Glory.

... Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morningyou awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and lookupon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys: having sucha reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the Angels. The brideof a monarch, in her husband’s chamber, hath no such causes ofdelight as you.

Thomas Traherne1

The instrumental and symbolic relation of God and humanity tothe world

We are accustomed in our mutual interactions to use material thingsin ways that both express our minds, or intentions, and simultan-eously effect what is in our minds, or fulfil our intentions. Thus asigned order form both expresses the desire of the one who signs itto purchase, say, a book and sets a sequence of events in motionwhich leads to the possessing of it; a deed of covenant both

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expresses the attitudes of benevolence of an individual towardssome project and itself contributes to the realisation of that project.Analogously, in the Christian understanding of God’s relation tophysical reality, the world of matter is seen as both expressing themind of God, its Creator, and effecting God’s purposes. These twoaspects of our and of God’s relation to the material world wereperceptively analysed over seventy years ago by Oliver Quick in hisstudy of the Christian sacraments.2

He pointed out that in human experience we make thedistinction, while recognising its frequent arbitrariness, between‘outward’ realities that occupy space and time and are in principle,though possibly not in fact, perceptible by bodily senses and ‘inward’realities that do not satisfy those conditions. He went on to point outthat the material objects that constitute part of our outward realitycan have two different relations to our inward mental life: they canbe instruments that take their character from what is done withthem; or they can be symbols that take their character from what isknown by them. This useful working distinction in human expe-rience has a parallel in two ways in which God may be regarded asrelated to the world. The world may be viewed as the instrumentwhereby God is effecting some cosmic purpose by acting on or doingsomething with it. Or the world may be viewed as the symbolthrough which God is expressing God’s eternal nature to those whohave eyes to see, that is, revealing Godself within it. Let us look atthese two aspects of God’s relation to the world.

The world as an instrument of God’s purposes

As we have seen, the scientific picture of the natural world is of aprocess that is continuous from its cosmic beginning, in the ‘hot bigbang’, to the present – with no non-natural causes required toexplain the observations and inferences of scientists about the past.The processes that have occurred display emergence (p.49) for newforms of matter, and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms,appear. To these new organisations of matter it is, very often,possible to ascribe new levels of what can only be called ‘reality’.New kinds of reality may be said to ‘emerge’ in time. Notably, on thesurface of the Earth, new forms of living matter (that is, livingorganisms) have come into existence by a continuous process. Any

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notion of God as Creator has to take into account that God is contin-uously creating, continuously giving existence to, what is new. Wesaw that the traditional notion of God sustaining the world in itsgeneral order and structure has now had to be enriched by a dynamicand creative dimension – the model of God sustaining and givingcontinuous existence to a process that has creativity built into it byGod. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existencethrough the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of theworld. God makes things make themselves.

The scientific perspective, and especially that of biologicalevolution, has impelled us to take more seriously and in strongersense than hitherto the notion of the immanence of God as Creator –that God is the immanent Creator creating through the processes ofthe natural order. If one asks where do we see God as Creator during,say, the processes of biological evolution, one has to reply: theprocesses themselves, as unveiled by the biological sciences, are theaction of God as Creator. (This is theistic naturalism and panen-theism, not pantheism.) God gives existence in divinely created timeto a process that itself brings forth the new: thereby God is creating.This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps inwhich, or mechanisms by which, God might be supposed to be actingas Creator in the living world. There is no need to look for God assome kind of additional factor supplementing the processes of theworld. God, to use again language usually applied in sacramentaltheology, is ‘in, with and under’ all-that-is and all-that-goes-on.

Moreover, God is intimately related to what is created, for it existswithin God according to the panentheistic view which (pp.138ff.)provides a coherent model of God’s agency in the world – God’sinstrumental relation to it.

The world as a symbol of God’s purposes

We have to ask, what does this process signify? What does it mean?At each emergent level in evolution, matter in its newly evolvedmode of organisation manifests properties that could not, in prin-ciple, be discerned in the earlier levels from which the new emerges.In a sense, therefore, one could say that the potentialities of matterhave been, and still are being, realised in cosmic development. Inparticular, matter organised in the way we call ‘human’ is capable of


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distinctive activities such as: conscious thought, self-consciousness,communication of abstract thoughts to other human beings, theinterrelations of personal life and ethical behaviour, creativity in artand science, the apprehension of values – and all that characterisesand differentiates humanity from the rest of the biological world.Matter has evolved into humanity and we cannot avoid concluding,even from the most materialistic point of view, that this demon-strates the ability of matter to display in humanity functions andproperties for which we have to use special terms such as ‘mental’,‘personal’, ‘spiritual’. These properties are characteristically human.Affirmation of, for example, the reality of human conscious and self-conscious activities is not dependent on any particular philosophy ofthe relation of an entity called ‘mind’ to one called ‘body’. Thisproblem remains open to philosophical analysis; what is significantis that the problem arises and can be posed. It seems that by takingseriously the scientific perspective, we cannot avoid arriving at aview of matter which sees it as manifesting mental, personal andspiritual activities.

It is in the light of this new evolutionary perspective that, over ahundred years ago, the significance for Christians of Jesus the Christwas enriched when J.R. Illingworth wrote,

[I]n scientific language, the Incarnation [of Jesus as the Christ] maybe said to have introduced a new species into the world – the Divineman transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest ofthe animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spir-itual process to subsequent generations.3

Jesus’ resurrection convinced his followers that the union of hispersonal identity with God had not been broken by death and that hehad been taken up into God. This has been central to Christian beliefever since. Jesus manifested the kind of human life which, it wasbelieved, can become fully life with God not only here and now, buteternally beyond the threshold of death. Hence, for Christians, hisimperative ‘Follow me’ constitutes a call for the transformation ofhumanity into a new kind of human being and becoming. Whathappened to Jesus, it was thought, could happen to all.

In this Christian perspective, Jesus the Christ, the whole Christevent, shows us what is possible for humanity. The actualisation of


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this potentiality can then properly be regarded as the consum-mation of the purposes of God begun but incompletely manifestedin evolution. The created and creating world in its evolving andemergent aspects is thus symbolic of God’s deepest purposes. InJesus, Christians have seen a divine act of new creation becausethe initiative was from God within human history, within theresponsive human will of Jesus inspired by that outreach of Godinto humanity designated as ‘God the Holy Spirit’. Jesus the Christis thereby seen as the paradigm of what God intends for all humanbeings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to,of being open to, of becoming united with God. In thisperspective, Jesus represents the consummation of the evolu-tionary creative process that God has been effecting in andthrough the world of matter.

A congruence between the scientific and sacramental perspectives

We have been suggesting, in the light of the evolutionary epic, thatthe world of matter in its relation to God has both the instrumentalfunction of being the means whereby God acts in the world and thesymbolic function of effecting and expressing his purpose. Thecreated world can be valued for what God is effecting through it. Itcan also be seen as a symbol because it is a mode of God’s reve-lation, an expression of the divine truth and beauty that are the‘spiritual’ aspects of its reality. But these two functions of matter,the instrumental and symbolical, also constitute the special char-acter of the use of matter in particular Christian sacraments. Thereis, in each particular sacrament, a universal reference to thisdouble character of created physical reality. Correspondingly,meaning can be attached to speaking of the created world as asacrament or, at least, as sacramental even if this sacramental char-acter is only implicit. For it is obscure and partial both because ofthe limited perception and sensitivity of humanity and because of evil. The significance for Christians of their belief in the incar-nation of God in a human being, Jesus the Christ, within thecreated world is that in him the sacramental character of thatworld was made explicit and perfected. In this sense, it seems legit-imate for them to regard the incarnate life of Christ as the supremesacrament. For in this outward historical life, Christians claim,


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there was both uniquely expressed and uniquely operative thatpurpose of goodness which is the purpose of God himself that alllife and all nature should fulfil.

In the sacraments of the church, these two ultimate sacraments,the created order and Jesus the Christ as God incarnate, regularlycome together and are brought into one focus in time and place.There is strong historical evidence that at the Last Supper, whichdeveloped into the church’s Eucharist, Jesus identified the mode ofhis incarnation and reconciliation of God and humanity (his ‘bodyand blood’) with the very stuff of the universe when he took thebread, blessed, broke and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘This: myflesh for you’ – and similarly the wine, saying, ‘This: my blood ofthe [new] covenant’, or, in parallel to the other saying and moresimply, ‘This: my blood for you [and for many]’. It seems to me thatit is a legitimate extension of the ideas and symbolic referenceswhich are implicit in these features of this original historical act toaffirm that in this act a new value was explicitly set upon the breadand wine, obstinately molecular as they are, an intimate part of thenatural world (corn and grapes) and a product of human cooper-ation with nature (bread and wine). Jesus’ words and these actsseem to me to have involved a revaluation of the things themselves,a new value assigned to the world of matter by God’s own act inJesus the Christ.

Furthermore, the very stuff of the universe is in this act manifestas the means whereby the self-offering, self-emptying, self-limiting ofthe Creator in the very act of creation is made explicit as alsoinvolving the perennial suffering of God. The bread and winesymbolise the broken Body of divine suffering and the outpouring ofthe divine Life. The cruciform Eucharist makes explicit the cruciformnature of the created order.

A further development seems natural in the light of what I havebeen saying about the universal reference of sacramental acts: a newvalue was imputed not only to these particular elements of breadand wine used in this way, but to the whole created material world.For sacraments have general significance only as part of a wholewhose true relation to God is being represented and effectivelyrealised. This value was implicit, though not available to humanobservation, in the act of creation. It remained a potentiality of


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matter, only partially realised in humanity. It was the ground of theincarnation, the root of its possibility, for it was in God’s own worldthat God as Logos was incarnate in a human being, that world ofwhich God was already the formative principle. Even at the historicLast Supper, God was still largely incognito to the disciples, but toChristians God is now no longer unknown. So in Christian thinkingthe sacraments as a whole, especially the Eucharist, manifest contin-ually the ultimate meaning of matter as a symbol and instrument ofGod’s purpose.

The participants in the Eucharist consciously and humbly offertheir own lives in service to God and humanity in unity with theself-offered life of God as the Christ which is believed to be present‘in, with and under’ the elements of bread and wine in the contextof the total communal act. Thus, in this act, Christians believe theyare participating in that reformation and new creation of humanitywhich the coming of Jesus initiated through his incarnation andself-offering. Their self-offering is cogently represented by thebread and wine offered with sacrificial reference both at theoriginal Last Supper and at every Eucharist of the church sincethen. This union with the offering of Christ is not self-directed, but‘for others’, and it is worth noticing that what Christ took andwhat is used in the Eucharist is the product of human action onnature – bread not corn, wine not grapes. So the whole life andwork of human beings may be regarded as offered in this act that isso closely associated with the historic initiation of the newhumanity ‘in Christ’.

Many themes interlock and interweave in this central act ofChristian worship, and all of them have immense significance forour attitude to the stuff of the cosmos of which we are part. Forthe Eucharist of the Christian church, like a parabolic mirror,focuses many parallel rays into one point of time and space. Fromthe earliest times its liturgy contained overt references to God’screative activity, although this insight has been somewhatobscured since then. The ‘words of institution’ of Jesus, alreadyreferred to, took place within the context of the Jewish meal-time blessing over bread and wine (the ‘cup of blessing’). Theseblessings took the form of thanksgiving to God for creation.Similarly directed thanksgiving appears in the earliest liturgies of


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the Eucharist and are referred to by Irenaeus (c. 130–200 CE), whospeaks of Jesus as

Instructing his disciples to offer to God the first-fruits of his owncreation, not as though he had need of them, but, that they themselvesmight be neither unfruitful nor ungrateful. He took that bread whichcomes of the [material] creation and gave thanks saying, This is mybody. And the cup likewise, which is [taken] from created things, likeourselves, he acknowledged for his own blood, and taught the newoblation of the New Covenant … we ought to make oblation to God… offering first fruits of those things which are his creatures.4

These prayers of thanksgiving in the Eucharist developed into anoffertory of other foods in addition to the bread and wine. In thecourse of a complex history this basic feature has been fragmentedand overlaid, but survives in the ‘these thy creatures of bread andwine’ in Holy Communion in The Book of Common Prayer and inthe ‘haec dona, haec munera, haec sancta sacrificia illibata’ of thetraditional Latin Mass.

I am suggesting that there is a convergence between, on the onehand, the implications of the scientific perspective for the spiritualcapabilities of matter and, on the other hand, the sacramental viewof matter which Christians have adopted as the consequence of themeaning they attach to Jesus’ life and the continued existence of thechurch. Christians have had to understand matter both in the light oftheir conviction that matter was able in the human Jesus to expressthe being of God – who is nevertheless regarded as supra-mental,supra-personal and supra-spiritual, so that God’s mode of being liesbeyond any sequence of mental or other predicates we can supply –and in the light of their understanding of the sacramental acts ofJesus, made in the context of his death and resurrection, and inwhich the continuing life of Christian humanity originates.

It looks as if Christians, starting from their experience of God inChrist (through the Holy Spirit, they would say) acting in the stuff ofthe world, have developed an insight into matter which is consonantwith that which is now evoked by the scientific perspective of matterbecoming humanity.

In the Eucharist, a conjunction occurs of a group of baptisedChristians, who are committed to fulfilling God’s purposes in the


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world, with the elements of bread and wine which are present incommunal continuity with the Last Supper of Jesus. We have in suchevents unique, though temporary, configurations of Christian peoplein relation to other Christians and of bread and wine taken, blessed,broken and given because of the intention of the historical Jesus. It isbelieved that God gives himself in a special way to human beings inthis situation. This can be expressed as believing that in thisdistinctive configuration there emerges, in accordance with thedivine purpose, a new potentiality of the stuff of the universe. Thiswould parallel the actualisation of potentialities at other stages in theemergence of new complex configurations. Here a new potentialityis mediated to humanity through what the historic Jesus the Christinitiated and effected. God was and is able to act in and through theparticular configuration of this corporate event in ways denoted bysuch terms as ‘presence’ and ‘sacrifice’. One could say, using ourearlier terminology for the relation of complexes to theirconstituents, that in the holistic totality of the Eucharist, with all itselements, God acts within a ‘whole–part’ influence that reconstitutesthe Christian person and community (see also p.62).

This way of looking at and speaking of the Eucharist shows thatthere can be a mutual enrichment between Christian incarnationaland sacramental insights on the one hand and the scientificperspective of the evolutionary epic on the other. Each approachremains distinct and autonomous, but their relationship indicates aconvergence into a new unified vision, even if the parallel lines meetonly at the infinity of the divine. This convergence gives a new rele-vance5 to Christian sacramental worship, which is now seen not torepresent some magical, cabbalistic and esoteric doctrine, but toexpress, in a communal context, the basic nature of the cosmicprocess that has brought humanity to this point and in which itscreator now invites it to participate consciously and willingly.

Our explorations of the significance and meaning of the world asrevealed by the sciences had hitherto principally and inevitably takenus deeper and deeper into that terra incognita where we can begin todiscern signs of the nature and mystery of the God who gives exis-tence to all. But now, in exploring the world as sacrament, we havehad to cross the boundary into that landscape tilled and nurtured by


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Christian believers in God. These are they who have had theirinsights into God and God’s creation shaped and defined by theirexperience of God as distinctively discerned in the person of Jesus theChrist – and in the devotional and mystical experiences of thecommunity stemming from him. So, from this point on, our explo-ration needs to go deeper into this territory to discover the resourcesit has guarded for humanity, resources themselves rooted in the expe-riences and literature of the Jewish people to whom Jesus himselfbelonged. We shall find there a rich treasure of images, metaphorsand models for our deployment – and our spiritual nourishment.


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God the Creator’s outgoing activity towards and dwelling in thecreated world has been expressed in a rich variety of images in theJudaeo-Christian tradition. The centuries immediately before andafter the times of Jesus were particularly fertile in this regard inboth the Hebrew and Greek cultures, especially in the cross-fertilisation that occurred in many of the great cities of theHellenistic–Roman world, such as Alexandria. These imagesenriched the New Testament and from there have entered thebloodstream of much Christian theology and philosophy, notleast that of the Eastern Christian traditions of Orthodoxy. Wemust therefore delve, briefly, into these rich mines of insights fromthe past. They hold out the promise of light in our quest for arebirth of images to aid our understanding God’s relation to theworld.

The Wisdom of God

Biblical scholars have, in recent decades, emphasised the significanceof the central themes of the so-called ‘Wisdom’ literature (the booksof Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) and theWisdom of Solomon). Some characteristic passages, reflecting theflavour of this evocative literature, follow.

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From Proverbs:

The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understandinghe established the heavens; by his knowledge the deepsbroke open, and the clouds dropped down the dew.1

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise hervoice?

On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takesher stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at theentrance of the portals she cries out:

‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live ...The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first

of his acts of long ago.Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of

the earth ...When he established the heavens, I was there, when he

drew a circle on the face of the deep,When he made firm the skies above, when he established

the fountains of the deep ...When he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker (little child),And I was daily his delight, rejoicing in his inhabited world

and delighting in the human race’.2

From the Wisdom of Solomon:

There is in her [wisdom] a spirit that is intelligent, holy,unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted,distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible,sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, andpenetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure,and altogether subtle. For wisdom is more mobile thanany motion; because of her pureness she pervades andpenetrates all things.

For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pureemanation of the glory of the Almighty; thereforenothing defiled gains entrance to her.

For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror ofthe working of God, and an image of his goodness.3

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From Ecclesiasticus (Sirach):

Wisdom was created before all other things, and prudentunderstanding from eternity.

The root of wisdom – to whom has it been revealed? Hersubtleties – who knows them?

There is but one who is wise, greatly to be feared, seatedupon his throne – the Lord.

It is he who created her; he saw her and took her measure;he poured her out upon all his works,

Upon all the living according to his gift; he lavished herupon those who love him.4

One biblical scholar has recently expressed her conclusions concerningthis literature in the following terms:

These various wisdom texts and traditions link wisdom to God’s roleas creator and to God’s life-giving and redemptive power. On the onehand, wisdom is the content of what one must know to understandthe deep logic underlying the natural world and the social order alike... By discerning that coherence (be it through God’s gift or humaneffort) and by following the ethical ‘way’ consistent with it, peoplecould shape their lives in congruence with God’s will. On the otherhand, more than simply the content of God’s creative acts, Wisdom isalso God’s working partner, or perhaps even the expression of God’sown creative self. As the self-disclosure of Wisdom, then, creation isnot simply something God has done, but a glimpse into the very heartand nature of God.5

In this broad corpus of writings the feminine figure of ‘Wisdom’(Greek Sophia), according to another scholar, is a ‘convenient wayof speaking about God acting in creation, revelation and salvation;Wisdom never becomes more than a personification of God’sactivity’.6 This Wisdom endows some human beings – those whorespond to her call – with a personal wisdom that is rooted in theirconcrete experiences and in their systematic and ordinary obser-vations of the natural world (what we would call ‘science’). Butwisdom is not confined to this, and represents the distillation ofwider human, ethical and social, experiences. All such wisdom,imprinted as a pattern on the natural world and in the mind of thesage, is but a pale image of the divine Wisdom – that activity


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characteristic of God’s relation to the world. In the present context,it is pertinent that this important concept of Wisdom (Sophia)unites intimately the divine activity of creation, human experienceand the processes of the natural world.

The significance of Wisdom has been emphasised7 in relation toour attitude to the environment and the applications of biotech-nology, for Wisdom theology is at the centre of creation theology.Celia Deane-Drummond writes that, anthropologically,

[W]isdom is the art of steering, applying knowledge to the experi-ences of life in a way that includes a ‘fear’ of the Lord. This ‘fear’ isnot so much terror or religious experience of awe, but piety charac-terized by faith in God as the creator and sustainer of life. Wisdomvalues the human capacity to discern truth and celebrates humanfreedom ... This anthropological thread is important in that it puts itsemphasis on the right relationship between humanity and theCreator, which is the basis for finding wisdom.

And, in a more cosmic perspective,

Wisdom seems to function as the artificer of creation ... and as [such]it follows that wisdom is involved with all created beings ... all ofmatter and all ordering comes through wisdom.8

This concept of Wisdom comes to us now as a major biblical andtraditional resource for imaging the panentheism we have found to beneeded to express our theological response to the contemporaryworldview of the sciences. Theists brought up in a culture shaped bythe Bible may be forgiven for thinking that we seem to be arriving‘where we started’ and beginning to ‘know the place for the first time’.

But other memories should also reverberate in the minds ofChristian theists. Did not St Paul call Jesus the Christ ‘the wisdom ofGod’, the one ‘who became for us wisdom from God’?9 And he goeson to describe what the Corinthians had heard from him, and otherevangelists, as ‘God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreedbefore the ages for our glory’.10 J.G. Dunn, in his study of the natureof Christ, Christology in the Making, concluded that

The doctrine of the incarnation [of God in Christ] began to emergewhen the exalted Christ was spoken of in terms drawn from theWisdom imagery of pre-Christian Judaism …


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Christ showed them what God is like, the Christ-event defined Godmore clearly than anything else had ever done … As the Son of Godhe revealed God as Father ... As the Wisdom of God he revealedGod as Creator-Redeemer.11

No wonder Eastern Christians dedicated their greatest church, inConstantinople, to Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. This specificallyChristian theme, of Jesus as the manifestation in human form of theWisdom of God active in creation, will emerge even more explicitlyas we now consider another concept, one genetically linked to that ofWisdom and so pertinent to any insight into the relation betweenGod and the created world.

The Word, the Logos, of God

This concept has been implanted firmly and deeply within Christianthought by the prologue to the Fourth Gospel (John 1), which isfamously read as the Gospel at the Eucharist on Christmas Day. Thisprologue is really a poem, or hymn, about the ‘Word’ (Logos inGreek), but contains prose interpolations (omitted below) concerningJohn the Baptist and believers. It can be set out as follows:12

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was withGod, and the Word was God.He was in the beginning with God. All things came intobeing through him, and without him not one thing cameinto being. What has come into being in him was life, andthe life was the light of all people. The light shines in thedarkness, and the darkness did not overcome it …He was in the world, and the world came into beingthrough him; yet the world did not know him. He came towhat was his own, and his own people did not accept him.But to all who received him … he gave power to becomechildren of God ...And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and wehave seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, fullof grace and truth …From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.13

Scholarly study has revealed that the Word/Logos is a profoundlyfruitful conflation of at least two concepts. One is the Hebrew (OldTestament) usage of the ‘word of the Lord’ for the will of God


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expressed in utterance to the prophets (‘The word of the Lord cameto ...’) and in creative activity (‘By the word of the Lord the heavenswere made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth ... For hespoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm’14). Theother sense attributed to Logos is that which arose withinHellenistic Judaism as expressed by Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE –c. 50 CE). He is usually taken to echo the development withinJudaism of Stoic thought, for which the divine Logos, the principleof rationality, is especially present in the human logos or reason.Philo’s Logos is the meaning, plan, purpose of and principle ofreality in the universe, as the thought of God, and also as thecreative power by which the universe came into being and issustained. Both of these notions form the background to the Gospelof John and, no doubt, both would be in the minds of its readers tovarying degrees. The concept of the Word/Logos of God as existingeternally as a mode of God’s being, as active in creation and as theself-expression of God’s own being, imprinted in the very warp andwoof of the universe, is clearly congruent with panentheism. Forpanentheism unites intimately, as three facets of one integratedactivity, the divine, the human and the (non-human) natural.

It is widely agreed among New Testament scholars that there is aconflation in the Gospel of John between the idea of the ‘Word’(Logos), with its multiple meanings, and that of the divine ‘Wisdom’(Sophia), with its rich fusion of meanings, in order to convey whatJesus the Christ had come to mean for his early witnesses and theirsuccessors. This deeply influenced Christian thought in the next fewcenturies. Jesus the Christ came to be understood as the incarnation,the becoming human, of the mediator of creation – the Word which,being divine, pre-existed the historical human Jesus and was latertermed ‘God the Son’.15 And we recall that St Paul could call Jesusthe ‘Wisdom of God’.

In the concept of the divine Word/Logos active in creation, inshaping the patterns of the world, including that of the human person,we rediscover a fusion of images that enrich the notions of Christiansacramental panentheism and theistic naturalism to which we camethrough exploring the implications of scientific understanding for ourunderstanding of God and God’s relation to the world. Again we have,in a sense, ‘arrived where we started’, but now knowing that ‘place’ in


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a new and enhanced and deepened way ‘for the first time’. Such is theunique spiritual and theological opportunity of our scientific times.

The uncreated energies of God

The Eastern Christian church (Orthodoxy) has long maintained –ever since the Cappadocian Fathers16 in the fourth century – adistinction that today still has potential for expressing the continuing,dynamic, creative activity of God. This is the distinction between

the essence of God, or His nature, properly so-called, which isinaccessible, unknowable and incommunicable; and theenergies, or divine operations, forces proper to and insepa-rable from God’s essence, in which He goes forth fromHimself, manifests, communicates, and gives Himself.17

These energies, which are specifically denoted as ‘uncreated’, are amanifestation of God in the general realm of the structures, patternsand organisation of activities in the world. God’s ‘essence’ (Greekousia) is hidden, infinitely transcendent, beyond all understanding,yet is regarded as made known in God’s ‘energies’ (Greek energiai) –that is, in his work, the outcomes of his creative activity. The divineenergies are not an intermediary between the world and God; theyare God’s own self in action. This is an essentially panentheisticperception of God’s relation to the world, for God is seen in every-thing and everything is seen in God.

Vladimir Lossky in his classic work, The Mystical Theology of theEastern Church, has expounded this concept for Western readers, usingtrinitarian language, and it is best grasped by quoting from that work:

God’s presence in His energies must be understood in a realisticsense. It is not the presence of a cause operative in its effects: for theenergies are not effects of the divine cause, as creatures are; they arenot created, formed ex nihilo, but flow eternally from the one essenceof the Trinity. They are the outpourings of the divine nature whichcannot set bounds to itself, for God is more than essence. Theenergies might be described as that mode of existence of the Trinitywhich is outside of its inaccessible essence.18

It is in creatures – beings created from nothing by the divine will,limited and subject to change – that the infinite and eternal energiesabide, making the greatness of God to shine forth in all things, and


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appearing beyond all things as the divine light which the createdworld cannot contain. This is the inaccessible light in which, as StPaul says, God makes his dwelling: ‘dwelling in light unap-proachable, whom no man hath seen or can see’ (I Tim. 6:16).19

The notion of the divine energies is not a merely abstract conception,a purely intellectual distinction, for it arises out of the realities of theexperience of God:

Hence the formulation of the doctrine as an antinomy … the energiesexpress by their procession [proceeding from God] an ineffabledistinction – they are not God in His essence – and yet, at the sametime, being inseparable from His essence, they bear witness to theunity and simplicity of the being of God.20

The energies manifest the innumerable names of God … Wisdom, Life,Power, Justice, Love … Like the energies, the divine names are innu-merable, so likewise the nature which they reveal remains namelessand unknowable – darkness hidden by the abundance of light.21

I hope these extracts will give the reader some insight into thisprofound emphasis among Eastern Christians, for I find it morecongenial to my scientific presuppositions than much Western tradi-tional religious talk of the ‘supernatural’ as the milieu of God’sactivity. Indeed, we find Lossky eschewing this term:

Eastern tradition knows no such supernatural order between Godand the created world, adding, as it were, to the latter a new creation.It recognizes no distinction, or rather division, save that between thecreated and the uncreated. For eastern tradition the created super-natural has no existence. That which western theology calls by thename of the supernatural signifies for the East the uncreated – thedivine energies ineffably distinct from the essence of God.22

We arrived at this same stance – no division save that between thecreated and the uncreated – as a result of exploring the implicationsof the sciences for our understanding of God’s relation to the world,and denoted it by the terms ‘sacramental panentheism’ and ‘theisticnaturalism’. Moreover, I find this way of thinking about that relationalso powerfully expressed by Lossky in relation to humanity:

It is in creation alone that God acts as cause, in producing a newsubject [humanity] called to participate in the divine fullness;


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preserving it, saving it, granting grace to it, and guiding it towards itsfinal goal. In the energies He is, he exists, he eternally manifestsHimself. Here we are faced with a mode of divine being ... which,moreover, in the created and perishable world, is the presence of theuncreated and eternal light, the real omnipresence of God in all things,which is something more than His causal presence – ‘the light shinethin darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not’ (John 1: 5).23

The concluding quotation from the Gospel of John reminds us againhow closely these Eastern Christian concepts are based on thatGospel and so are integrated with the concepts of the Wisdom andWord of God. The place we have arrived at is indeed richly furnished.


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Vistas of the end?

The paths we have been following, from our knowledge of the world asdescribed today by the sciences towards an understanding of God andof God’s relation to that world, have led to various kinds of insight. Thefirst is represented by the results of inference to the best explanation ofall-that-is and all-that-is-becoming as summarised at the beginning ofchapter 7. These inferences were necessarily abstract because of thenature of the process and had to be couched in general terms.

The second kind of insight arose from reflecting on the first anddeveloping (chapters 8, 9) an understanding of God’s immanentpresence in the world in terms of theistic naturalism and sacra-mental panentheism. At that point, a third kind of insight resultedfrom our going back (chapter 10) to the roots of most of ourthinking about God and the world, namely, the Judaeo-Christianscriptures and tradition. We found there a rich resource of conceptsconcerning God’s relation to the world which are surprisingly aptfor representing the insights to which our explorations from sciencetowards God had led us.

As we expounded these concepts – of the Wisdom, Word/Logosand Uncreated Energies of God – again and again we were led to theedges of specifically Christian territory, the understanding of God and

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of God’s relation to the human part of nature which resulted from theexperience of the community stemming from the encounter with thehistorical Jesus the Christ.1

The New Testament records how Jesus’ first followers experi-enced him and came to express the significance for them of histeaching, life, death and resurrection. For this purpose, they drew onthe concepts that were available in their own sacred literature – forexample the Wisdom and Word/Logos of God. Succeeding centuriesadded to these resources, for example in the evocative idea of theUncreated Energies of God. Over some four centuries or so,Christian thinkers hammered out a way of least inaccurately repre-senting and speaking about that initial communal experience and itscontinuation in the life of their diverse communities, the ‘church’. Sothe church developed its formulations of faith in its creeds, inparticular the Nicene Creed. Prominent among this creed’sdistinctive affirmations and those of later pronouncements were thatJesus the Christ is the incarnation, in some sense, of God in a humanperson, and that God is a Trinity-in-Unity subsisting in three‘persons’. Inevitably, these often controversial works of intellectualclarification and synthesis which led to the classical (often credal)formulations were couched in the terms available to Christianthinkers at the time. These were mostly those of Hellenisticphilosophy, both Aristotelian and Neoplatonist, and used language(for example, of ‘substance’) that is not philosophical currencytoday. However, these early Christian thinkers were largelysuccessful in drawing together in these classical formulations variousthreads in their cultural inheritance and weaving them into their ownexperience of God in Jesus the Christ and their communal experienceof God (as Holy Spirit). They achieved a synthesis between theirinheritance and their experience which, in the language of orthodoxChristian doctrinal formulations, is still available to us as a base anda tool in our explorations. Indeed, our mode of exploration nowtakes the form not so much of discarding these classical formulationsbut rather of reinhabiting them and giving them new nuances andreference. This process inevitably involves relating them to thoseways about thinking about God and God’s relation to the worldwhich we have inferred from our scientific understanding of theworld. For we see through the eyes of people at the beginning of the


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third millennium since the birth of Jesus, to whom science hasrevealed the deep wonders of the created world to an extent that hasaltered the whole horizon and context of humanity’s thinking aboutitself and its place in the world and so of God’s relation to both.

At this point in our exploration, this guide feels himself (if thecomparison dare with humility be made) to be somewhat in theposition of Virgil, the embodiment of human wisdom who, in Dante’sDivine Comedy, leads the Everyman figure of Dante to the verythreshold of Heaven. He took that pilgrim and explorer as far ashuman intellectual resources could and at that boundary handed himover to the figure of Beatrice, who represents all the agencies that havebecome for humanity the bearers of images of God and the revealers ofGod’s presence. She finally led him to the sublime, consummatoryvision of the Triune God as ‘the Love that moves the sun and otherstars’. The kind of exploration we have been undertaking here too canlead us so far but no further. Our ‘inferences to the best explanation’ ofthe world described by the sciences led us to conceptual formulationsabout God and God’s relation to it; reflection on these evoked atheistic naturalism and sacramental panentheism; and we found in theJudaeo-Christian tradition rich resources for imaging these ideas.From this point, the seeker has to ask whether the significanceChristians have found in the teaching, life, death and resurrection ofthe historical Jesus (who appeared to refer to himself primarily as ‘Sonof Man’) warrants his being given his early title of ‘Son of God’ – as ahuman being designated and anointed by God for a unique revelatoryrole. Subsequently, Christians regarded him as the incarnation in ahuman person of God’s very Being and Becoming; the Word of God‘became flesh’2 in him, it was claimed.

Many paths may be taken from here and I have tried elsewhere3 tooutline the reasonable basis on which specifically Christian affirma-tions may be based. Here I can only indicate how I integrate where wehave arrived in this exploration with some of the classical formula-tions of the Christian church. For Jews, Muslims and Christians, Godis experienced as transcendent: as totally ‘other’; as the source andground of all existing entities, structures and processes; as ineffable,whose nature is inherently inexpressible and beyond words. God isalso experienced by them as immanent, closer to human beings thantheir own heartbeats, omnipresent in and to everything that is

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created. For Christian theists, God was also present in the historicalJesus of Nazareth, in whose teaching, life and self-abandoning deaththe character of God’s self-offering love was embodied and revealed.All of this God vindicated for them – and continues to do so – byJesus’ resurrection, in which God revealed explicitly the uniquecloseness of the relation of Jesus to God his ‘Father’, as he character-istically and intimately called him. This led his first followers, mostlymonotheist Jews as they were, to affirm him, initially, as ‘Son of God’,a Messianic title implying that he was ‘anointed’ as a royal Davidicfigure uniquely commissioned by God. He was therefore given thedesignation of Jesus the Christ (Greek Christos = Anointed).Furthermore, against all their monotheistic instincts, they came toaffirm that he was in himself a unique human being fully manifestingthe true character of God’s own self-offering, suffering Love – as Godexpressed in a human being insofar as a historical person could do so.To express this the Gospel of John appropriated the image of theWord/Logos, which continuously creates all and is itself a mode of thevery Being and Becoming of God (and behind this image lies that ofthe Wisdom of God). The evangelist says this Word/Logos was ‘madeflesh’ (incarnate, embodied) in the historical Jesus. As Christianreflection developed in minds shaped by both Hellenistic philosophyand Hebrew tradition, Jesus of Nazareth, called the ‘Christ’ from theearliest times, came to be seen as the embodiment of God within thecreated order. He became identified with God’s Word/Logos and withthe Wisdom of God, images of that through which God created theworld and of the rationality that penetrates everything and isimmanent especially in humanity.

That inherent mode of God so embodied came eventually to be designated as ‘God the Son’ as a transmutation of theMessianic–Davidic title of ‘Son of God’ which we have seen hadalready early been attached to Jesus. Moreover, the Christian expe-rience, both initially and in the succeeding millennia, of encounteringGod in Jesus the Christ has so often been communal, dynamic andoverwhelming in character (recall the ‘rushing mighty wind’ of Acts2:2) that an enhanced emphasis on God’s immanence in the humancommunity occurred. Hence the active immanence of God has espe-cially been associated with regarding God as ‘Holy Spirit’, where‘Spirit’ links with words related to ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ (and so to ‘life’).


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Hence the Christian experience of God is not only as tran-scendent and immanent, but also as incarnate in the historical Jesus –a threefold experience and manifestation of God in God’s encounterwith humanity. These various nuances are encapsulated in the tripledescription of the Christian experience of God:

Transcendent God as Father Creator; the ultimate source and origin of allbeing and becoming

Incarnate God as Word/ Redeemer and Liberator; Logos/Son the self-expression of

God within creation, and manifested fully in Jesusthe Christ

Immanent God as Holy Spirit Sanctifier and Unifier of human beings according to the likeness of Jesus the Christ, and dynamically energising all created being and becoming

This way of schematising the Christian experience of God is, of course,too wooden and structured to articulate the fullness and richness of itsvariety and depth. It is important to recognise that in all these modal-ities it is the One God who is experienced (hence my use of the phrase‘God as ...’). Nevertheless these broad distinctions have been widelyrecognised and indeed most Christian theologies have gone further.They have affirmed that this differentiation is related to one withinGod’s inner Being and Becoming and that three distinctive ‘persons’ (L persona)4 within the one Godhead may be said to exist. Hence the useof the phrases ‘God the Father’, ‘God the Son’, ‘God the Holy Spirit’.

How to avoid such affirmations spilling over into tri-theism andstill to maintain the unity of the Godhead has been a perpetual chal-lenge to Christian thought. I prefer to be non-assertive about thenature of any differentiation within the divine Being and Becoming,willing to accept that it is threefold but not to speculate about therelationship of the three to each other. The triple nature of Christian


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experience certainly points to a threefoldness in the modes of Beingand Becoming of God, but I prefer to remain reticent about any morepositive, ontological affirmations concerning the, by definition, inef-fable and inaccessible Godhead.

Furthermore, for Christian theists, all of what Jesus the Christwas experienced as and found to be has shown us what is possiblefor humanity. He can properly be regarded as the consummation ofthe purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolvinghumanity. In Jesus the Christ, Christians affirm, there was a divineact of new creation because the initiative was from God, withinhuman history, within the responsive human will of Jesus inspired bythe outreach of God into humanity – ‘God as Holy Spirit’. Jesus theChrist is thereby seen, in the context of the whole complex of eventsin which he participated, as the paradigm of the self-offering lovethat God intends for all human beings to embody. Human beings arethereby revealed to have the potential to respond to, be open to, andbecome united with God who is Love. In this perspective, Jesus theChrist represents the consummation and apogee of the divinecreative process which God has been effecting in and through theworld in the process described by the epic of evolution.

A global perspective

Our exploration has, inevitably in view of the limitations and socialmilieu of the author, been formulated in terms that to some may seemto be excessively, and so too exclusively, Christian. However, the wayour understanding of God’s relation to the world has been developedhere now allows an inclusive interpretation of the central themes inChristian belief, which may be amenable to those of other faiths. For itis God as Word/Logos who is believed to be incarnate, embodied inthe historical Jesus the Christ – and God as Word/Logos has beencontinuously active throughout creation at all times and in all places.So what Jesus the Christ manifested is what is universal and perennial.It existed long before the historical Jesus and now continues to existeternally, for, according to Christian belief, Jesus was taken into thelife of God in his resurrection and ascension. Although for ChristiansJesus is the unique, historical embodiment of God as Word/Logos, thisdoes not preclude God as such being expressed in other people,cultures and times. Who dare affirm that God was not at work


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expressing Godself, God as Word/Logos, in other times and places toreshape humanity through the great founders of other religions and inthe continued experience of their disciples and followers? From thisglobal perspective, it is the ever-present self-expression in all-that-is ofGod as Word/Logos that is explicitly, and uniquely historically,revealed in the person of Jesus the Christ. He was and is a particularmanifestation of what is the eternal and perennial mode of God’s inter-action in, with and under the created order. Hence, what was revealedin Jesus the Christ should also, in principle, be capable of beingmanifest in other human beings and so in the other world religions.Indeed, it should also be capable of being manifest on other planets, inany sentient, self-conscious, non-human persons inhabiting them who(whatever their physical form) are capable of relating to God. Thisvision of a universe permeated by the ever-acting, ever-working andpotentially explicit self-expression of the divine Word/Logos incarnatein extraterrestrial personal beings has been adumbrated in a poem byAlice Meynell (1847–1922) where ‘Christ’ now designates not thehistorical Jesus as such but the eternal Word/Logos of God that wasincarnate in him on Earth two millennia ago:

Christ in the UniverseWith this ambiguous earth

His dealing have been told us. These abide:The signal to a maid, the human birth,the lesson and the young Man crucified.

But not a star of allThe innumerable host of stars has heardHow he administered this terrestrial ball.Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word…

••

Nor, in our little day,May his devices with the heavens he guessed,His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way,Or his bestowals there be manifest.

But, in the eternities,Doubtless we shall compare together, hearA million alien Gospels, in what guiseHe trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.5


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For Christians the epic of evolution has been consummated in the incar-nation in a human person of the cosmic self-expression of God, God’sWord/Logos – and in the hope this gives to all self-conscious persons ofbeing united with the Source of all Being and Becoming. Indeed, in thesecond century Irenaeus invited his contemporaries to contemplate

The Word of God, our Lord Jesus ChristWho of his boundless lovebecame what we areto make us what even he himself is.6

This apparently purely Christian affirmation can have, I amproposing, universal and inclusive intent when the full implicationsof what the ‘Word of God’ means are taken into account. TheWord/Logos that Christians believe was incarnate in the humanJesus cannot be confined in its manifestations to Jesus alone even ifhe transpires to be a uniquely explicit, historical embodiment. SoChristians, indeed all of us, should be ready with humility to hearand to be open to the Word/Logos as it is manifested in other reli-gions as not at all derogating from the Christian revelation.

I therefore hope that the place at which we have arrived in thisexploration may turn out to be one from which the seekers of manyreligions have started and that we all might be prepared to know it‘for the first time’ – that is, to recognise that, though our imagings ofGod and of God’s relation to the world have been restricted by ourrespective traditions, the new vistas presented by the sciences allowus to make inferences that enrich and develop all of them, whateverthe cultures in which we are rooted. I have tried to show how thisdevelopment can be fruitfully and particularly linked to certainimages in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I would urge those of allfaiths, or of none, to join in a more cooperative, common search byhumanity for a clearer and more intimate apprehension of thatUltimate Reality, the God ‘in Whom we live and move and have ourbeing’. Everyone needs to recognise that, though we each have ourown distinctive cluster of symbolic, conceptual and imaginativeresources, we are all attempting to peer into the depths of that samecreative Ultimate Reality.

The world of science has pointed us towards inferring certainappropriate ways – some of them new – of talking about this Ultimate


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Reality. Since science is a truly global cognitive resource acceptedacross all cultures, might not these inferences constitute a commonpool of resources for the exploration towards God by the seekers ofmany religious traditions, or of none? To ‘arrive where we started’ bythe route signposted by the sciences and to ‘know the place for thefirst time’ is an opportunity to establish a new, surer, shared base fromwhich the long search of humanity for God might set out. In thatsearch our resources will certainly be richly diverse and usually otherthan scientific – historical, aesthetic, symbolic, mystical, experiential,philosophical – but at least we might, with our new scientificallyinformed insights, share a starting point more common than hitherto.


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To conclude, I want to indicate why I am full of hope, in spite ofthe gargantuan task facing a Christian theology aspiring, as we

enter its third millennium, to transmute into a global theology. Thishope is based on the perennial character of God’s creativeengagement with the world. Back in 1990,1 I observed that, naturalas the evolutionary process is, yet, oddly enough – and in spite of thefavourable light cast on human rationality by its contribution tosurvival – there are signs of a misfit between human beings and theirenvironment which is not apparent in other creatures. We alone inthe biological world, it seems, individually commit suicide; we aloneby our burial rituals evidence the sense of another dimension to exis-tence; we alone go through our biological lives with that sense ofincomplete fulfilment evidenced by the contemporary quests for‘self-realisation’ and ‘personal growth’. Human beings seek to cometo terms with death, pain and suffering, to satisfy their need to realisetheir own potentialities and to learn how to steer their paths throughlife. The natural environment is not capable of satisfying such aspi-rations – nor can the natural sciences describe, accurately discern orsatisfy them. So our presence in the biological world raises questionsoutside the scope of the natural sciences to answer. For we arecapable of forms of happiness and misery quite unknown to other

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creatures, thereby evidencing a ‘dis-ease’ with our evolved state, alack of fit which calls for explanation and, if possible, cure.

Subsequently,2 I urged again that the alienation of human beingsfrom non-human nature and from each other appears to be ananomaly within the organic world. As human beings widen theirenvironmental horizons, so they experience this ‘great gulf fixed’between the biological environment out of which they have evolvedand the environment in which they conceive themselves as existingor in which they wish they existed. I asked, ‘Why has, how has, theprocess whereby there have so successfully evolved livingorganisms finely tuned to and adapted to their environments failedin the case of Homo sapiens to ensure this fit between lived expe-rience and the environing conditions of their lives?’ It appears thatthe human brain has capacities that originally evolved in responseto an earlier environmental challenge but the exercise of these nowengenders a whole range of needs, desires, ambitions and aspira-tions that cannot all be harmoniously fulfilled.

Such considerations raise the further question of whether or nothuman beings have really identified what their true environment is –that environment in which human flourishing is possible. Thereseems to be an endemic failure of human beings to be adapted towhat they sense as the totality of their aspired environment – anincongruity eloquently expressed by the great nineteenth-centuryPresbyterian preacher, Thomas Chalmers:

There is in man, a restlessness of ambition ... a dissatisfaction withthe present, which never is appeased by all the world has to offer …an unsated appetency for something larger and better, which hefancies in the perspective before him – to all which there is nothinglike among the inferior animals.3

Does not the human condition raise the profound question of whathumanity’s true environment really is, the question of what is thenature of that Reality with which humanity must be in harmony inorder to flourish? Might it not be, after all, that even modern (yes,and postmodern) humanity must come to recognise that the Realitythat encompasses us is in fact the Source of our existence and is theEnd of all our exploring for fruition and so that to which we havewillingly to adapt?

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Thus it was that St Augustine, after years of travail and evendespair, addressed his Maker: ‘You have made us for yourself andour heart is restless till it rests in you.’4 Augustine’s Maker is ours tooand no one who asked has not had it given and no one who hassought has not found.5 So let us knock and it will be opened to us.For the God we seek is seeking us.

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The world is created and sustained in being by the will of God, thewill of perfect Love. The ‘Son’, the Logos, is the all-sufficient

principle and form of this created order. At every level, this orderreflects in its own measure something of the divine. Each in its ownway expresses the divine creativity and contributes to the fulfilment ofGod’s purposes. Furthermore the process of creation has been revealedby the natural sciences to be one in which new qualities and modes ofexistence continuously emerge out of simpler forms of matter by theoperation of natural laws. The level of organisation which is reachedin humanity represents not only a new stage in this evolutionaryprocess but a new departure in the way in which change is initiated.For humanity is characterised by activities and purposes that can bedescribed only in terms of mind, self-consciousness and freely willeddecisions. Human beings are nevertheless incomplete and unfulfilledand are tragically aware of the lack of fulfilment of their own poten-tialities. Thus it can be said that in humanity matter has become awareof itself, of its past and of its unfulfilled potentialities.

The Christian claim – and here it differentiates itself from secularhumanism – then amounts to the affirmation that this whole processis the outworking of the creative purposes of God in the world, andthat this process has culminated in the manifestation of God as a

Appendix: A contemporary Christian

understanding of sacrament

(Based on Chapters 9 and 10)

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complete human being within the created world. Only thus couldGod express fully within creation God’s character as creative Love: allother levels of created being up to this point were inadequate and butimplicit manifestations of a God still incognito. On the one hand, thatwhich God has brought into existence, the stuff of the cosmos, is seenthrough the sciences to be the matrix and necessary condition for theappearance of purpose, mind, self-consciousness and values – all thatcharacterises the human person. On the other hand, the Christianexperience affirms that this character of the stuff of the cosmos is sofundamental that God brought the process to its culmination by beingin, and acting through, the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, inJesus we see what fully being a person amounts to. The two enter-prises converge in a view of the cosmos which can therefore beproperly called ‘sacramental’. This term recognises simultaneouslyboth the duality in our experiences represented by our familiarbody–mind, subjective–objective dichotomies and the observationthat all the ‘higher’ qualities of existence which characterise personaland mental life are qualities of matter in particular forms and appearonly when matter is so organised. The term recognises bluntly theduality necessary in our talk about ourselves and about the characterof the evolutionary process, but also recognises that the mental andspiritual features of existence are always those of and embodied in theorganised matter which constitutes the observable cosmos.

At the historical crisis of the human life of the Jesus who was Godincarnate, at the moment before ‘the Love that moves the sun and theother stars’ culminated in the self-offering of the cross, Jesus himselfgave a new significance to that characteristic act of humanity’s crea-turehood, the need to imbibe the world of matter in order to live.Eventually that common meal became the symbolic meal of a poten-tially ‘new humanity’ stemming from him, one might almost say of anew level of actualisation of human potentialities. For the churchbelieves that in the Eucharist God acts to recreate both the individualhuman being and society, to bring to fruition the purpose of God’screation, manifest in the incarnation. In the Eucharist, God expressesthe significance of the created material order, and through it isachieving the divine purpose for that order of protons, atoms, mole-cules, proteins, amoebae, mammals and humanity.

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Preface

1. In A. Peacocke, From DNA to DEAN: Reflections and Explorations of aPriest-Scientist (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1996).

2. Resulting in my Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1978, published asCreation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), andother publications.

3. Charles Raven was a prolific author. His most comprehensive work onscience and religion is his Gifford Lectures of 1951 and 1952, publishedas Natural Religion and Christian Theology: First Series, Science andReligion; Second Series, Experience and Interpretation (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1953). There is an interesting biography byF.W. Dillistone, Charles Raven: Naturalist, Historian and Theologian(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975).

4. C.A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1953); Science and Christian Belief (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1955). D. Hawkin and E. Hawkin, The Word ofScience: The Religious and Social Thought of C.A. Coulson (London:Epworth Press, 1989) includes some biographical material and a list ofCoulson’s publications on science and Christian belief.

5. G.D. Yarnold, Christianity and Physical Science (London and Oxford:Mowbray, 1950).

6. A.F. Smethurst, Modern Science and Christian Belief (London: Nisbet,1955).

7. E. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science, Bampton Lectures,1956 (London: Longman, Green & Co., 1956).

Notes

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8. J.S. Habgood, ‘The Uneasy Truce between Science and Thology’, inSoundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, ed. A.R. Vidler(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 23–41.

9. A. Peacocke, Science and the Christian Experiment (London: OxfordUniversity Press, 1971).

10. I. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row,1966).

11. Among others: the relation of God and time; predictability and deter-minism in the debates concerning possible special divine action; and howto express God’s immanence in the world.

12. P. Badham, ‘Contemporary Christianity as a New Religion’, ModernBelieving, 40(4), 1999, pp. 17–29.

Chapter 1

1. In a letter to Charles Kingsley; Life and Letters of T.H. Huxley, Vol. 1(New York: Appleton, 1913).

2. F. Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 103.3. By the ‘world’, we shall usually mean simply all-that-is, other than God.

It will carry no moral or normative undertones.4. R. Livingstone, The Pageant of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923),

p. 414.5. In the USA, to my observation, in the intellectual and academic world, if

not in the general public.6. G. Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM

Press, 1999), p. 2.7. A.L. Moore, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Lux Mundi, 12th edn,

ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, London, 1891), p. 132.

Chapter 2

1. J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book IV,XVIII, 3.

2. Ibid., Book IV, XVIII, 10.3. J. Butler, The Analogy of Religion (1736), Introduction (emphasis added).4. A. Sokal and J. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern

Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (London: Profile Books, 1998).5. I am indebted here to a recent account by D.B. Smith of the ideas on

‘abduction’ of the American thinker C.S. Pierce (1839–1914,) in hisrecent book The End of Certainty and the Beginning of Faith: Religionand Science for the 21st Century (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000).

6. N.H. Gregersen, ‘A Contextual Coherence Theory for the Science–Theology Dialogue’, in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models forthe Current Dialogue, ed. N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (GrandRapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: W.B. Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 189–90. Heis here developing, in the context of the science-and-religion dialogue, thecontextual pragmatist coherence theory of M. Rescher.

7. Ibid., p. 226–7.

178 Notes


8. P. Clayton and S. Knapp, ‘Rationality and Christian Self-Conceptions’,in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W.M.Richardson and W. J. Wildman (London and New York: Routledge,1996), pp. 134, 138.

9. W. Drees, ‘Ten Commandments for Quality in Science and Spirituality’,Science and Spirit, 9(4), 1998, pp. 2–4.

Chapter 3

1. T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (London: Faber & Faber, 1944).2. F. Hoyle, The Nature of the Universe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 103.3. A. Einstein, Out of My Later Years (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,

1970), p. 61.4. J. Milton, Paradise Lost, line 555.5. Cf. A. Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age (TSA), 2nd edn (London:

SCM Press, and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), p. 132. 6. H.K. Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and Religion

(London: SCM Press, 1973), p. 126.7. H.W. Robinson, ‘Hebrew Psychology’, in The People and the Book, ed.

A.S. Peake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p. 362.8. Following J.C. Puddefoot, ‘Information and Creation’, in The Science and

Theology of Information, ed. C. Wassermann, R. Kirby and B. Rordoff(Geneva: Edition Labor et Fides, 1992), p. 15.

9. Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1974), sense II.

10. Ibid., sense I.3.

Chapter 4

1. Genesis 2:7 (NRSV).2. Genesis 3:19 (NRSV). 3. M.J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution

(New York: Free Press, 1996).4. C. de Duve, Vital Dust (New York: Basic Books, 1995); ‘Constraints on the

Origin and Evolution of Life’, Proceedings of the American PhilosophicalSociety, 142, 1998 – pp. 1–8.

5. F. Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science (London:Macmillan, 1885). The actual quotation is: ‘God did not make things,we may say, no, but He made them make themselves.’

6. The Independent, 25 January 1999.7. A.R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1979) – henceforth CWS. See, in this context, pp. 67–72.8. Such quantities include the actual strengths of the four forces that

operate in the universe (gravitational, strong and weak nuclear, electro-magnetic), the electronic charge, the velocity of light, Planck’s constant,various particle masses, the mass of the universe, and many others. Fordetails see J. Barrow and F. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Notes 179


9. See, for example, the confidence in the existence of a ‘multiverse’expressed by Michio Kaku, a co-founder of ‘string field theory’, whichunifies quantum and relativity theory, in a lecture in the BBC WorldService series ‘The Essential Guide for the 21st Century’, reported in TheIndependent, 19 January 2000.

10. Genesis 1:31 (NRSV).11. C. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th edn (London: Watts & Co.,Thinkers

Library, 1929), pp. 97–8.12. Romans 6:23 (AV).13. J. Monod, Chance and Necessity (London: Collins, 1972). 14. For example, in my ‘Chance, Potentiality and God’, Modern

Churchman, 17, 1973, pp. 13–23: also in Beyond Chance and Necessity,ed. J. Lewis (London: Garnstone Press, 1974), pp. 13–25.

15. Howard van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or OptimallyEquipped?’, Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 349, 351.

16. S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History(London: Penguin, 1989).

17. S. Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and theRise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

18. Recalling Laplace’s famous response to Napoleon, who had asked him ifhe needed God to explain his physics: ‘I had no need of that hypothesis.’

19. Genesis 1:31 (NRSV).20. For example, in Proverbs 8:27–31, quoted on p.155.21. J. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), 1.22.22. Romans 8:19–22 (NRSV).23. A. Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle ii, 1.28.24. Revelation 13:8 (AV).

Chapter 5

1. For details see ‘Supplementary reading’ (p.191).2. J.P. Crutchfield, J.D. Farmer, N.H. Packard and R.S. Shaw, ‘Chaos’,

Scientific American, December 1986, p. 48.3. Excluding quantum-theory considerations and assuming that the future

does not already exist for God to know, as argued earlier (pp.37ff.).4. The limit as trajectories become infinitely close together is called the

‘strange attractor’ in the mathematical theory of chaos.5. The trajectory of the wave function is controlled by the deterministic

Schrödinger equation.6. N. Saunders, in ‘Does God Cheat at Dice? Divine Action and Quantum

Possibilities’, Zygon, 35, 2000, pp. 517–44; and quoting from D. Jones,‘Daedalus: God Plays Dice’, Nature, 385, 1997, p. 122. This issue ofZygon also contains articles by C.S. Heinrich, P.E. Hodgson and J.Koperski dissenting from the hypothesis of special divine action at thequantum level.

7. Saunders (note 6) argues that there are only four broad ways in whichGod might conceivably influence the outcomes of measurements on

180 Notes


quantum-mechanical systems: (1) God alters the wave function betweenmeasurements; (2) God makes God’s own measurement on a givensystem; (3) God alters the probability of obtaining a particular result;and (4) God controls the outcome of measurements.

Saunders’s careful analysis shows that (1) is not only a highly interven-tionist action but that, at the point of measurement, there would be noguarantee that the result intended by God would be obtained. So doesGod then, as it were, ‘switch off’ indeterminacy to get the desired result?Moreover the time evolution of such a system is entirely deterministic,governed by the Schrödinger equation, and if it is still to be valid cannotallow the introduction of an entirely new component wave function. So(1) seems unlikely.

Possibility (2) fares no better. If God ‘makes a measurement’,presumably and questionably via an observable part of creation, then,like any other measurement on the system, the outcome is governed bythe probabilities of which the unmeasured state is already compounded.So it is not possible for God to achieve any particular intended result.The result of a measurement is not determined – only its probabilities.

Suggestion (3) involves God altering the probabilities prevailinghitherto in a measurement so that the divinely intended result is morelikely. Its probability will range between certainty (probability one) andimpossibility (probability zero). This proposal assumes, problematically,that in some sense the probabilities exist as features of the system inquestion before the measurement – that they describe the nature ofphysical reality. Hence God would, on this proposal, be altering thenature of reality before a measurement and this involves intermittent andinterventionist action on God’s part.

Suggestion (4) also involves God being involved in the process ofmeasurement. God simply sidesteps the probabilities predicted bynormal quantum mechanics and just controls the outcomes of meas-urement. This involves a contrary assumption to that implied by (3),namely, that the probabilities follow from the measurements and notvice versa. This would imply, as in (3), that divine action is intermittent –because if God acted directly to control the outcomes of all such meas-urements, then God would be conceived of as arbitrarily making surethey fit the probabilities prescribed by quantum mechanics (and thatwould be a very ‘occasionalist’ proposal).

From his analysis Saunders concludes, I think rightly, that (2)combined with (4), and (4) alone prove to be the most plausibleproposals for ‘quantum divine action’, with only some events, somemeasurements, being the direct action of God. This emphasises againhow episodic and very interventionist is this whole account of divineaction in the world – as well as placing strong constraints on God’sactions. Moreover, these proposals need to rely on amplification ofquantum events and the capacity of ‘chaotic’ processes to do this – andthis capacity is itself highly problematic in the light of the unresolvedproblems in relating quantum mechanics to chaos theory.

Notes 181


8. A. Farrer, Faith and Speculation (London: A & C Black, 1967), p. 66.9. Augustine, Confessions, VII, 7.

Chapter 61. I Kings 19:12 (NRSV). The implicit paradox is well illustrated by the

alternative translations: ‘a low murmuring sound’ (NEB); ‘a faintmurmuring sound’ (REB); ‘a sound of gentle stillness’ (RV, footnote); andthe familiar ‘a still small voice’ (AV and RV).

2. Romans 1:19–20 (NRSV).3. See, for example, D. Hay, Religious Experience Today: Studying the Facts

(London: Mowbray, 1990). 4. D. Brown, The Divine Trinity (London: Duckworth, 1985), pp. 37, 42–51.5. R. Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979),

p. 251.

Chapter 71. D. Jenkins, God, Jesus and Life in the Spirit (London: SCM Press,

1988), p. 8.2. Matthew 13:3 (REB).

Chapter 81. Acts 17:28 (AV, NRSV). It may be of significance for our attempt here to

render the idea of ‘God’ intelligible to our own times that St Paul isdepicted by the author of Acts as addressing the sceptical Athenian‘cultured despisers’ of belief in God in these panentheistic terms throughthis quotation from one of their own poets (possibly Epimenedes). Thespeeches in Acts appear to be of the genre of much literature of theirtime, wherein such speeches are not historical but are shaped by theauthor as typically representative of and appropriate to their supposedcontext, often a dramatic episode.

2. Though it also signifies God giving ‘spirit’, and so spiritual awareness, tohumanity.

3. A. Moore, ‘The Christian Doctrine of God’, in Lux Mundi, 12th edn, ed.C. Gore (London: Murray, 1891), p. 73.

4. H. Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man (London:Hodder & Stoughton, 1894), p. 428 – quoted by N.H. Gregersen in ‘AContextual Coherence Theory for the Science–Theology Dialogue’, inRethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue,ed. N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (Grand Rapids, MI andCambridge UK: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 216.

5. C. Kingsley, The Water Babies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, [1863]1930), p. 248.

6. H. van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’,Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 349, 351.

7. ‘Salvation’ in English is derived from (ecclesiastical) Latin salvatio,rendering Greek soteria, which means bodily health, deliverance from

182 Notes


physical illness and danger, and from Latin salus (adjectivesalvos/salvus), which also has the double reference of health/welfareand of preservation/deliverance from danger.

8. Quoted by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia in ‘Through the Creation to theCreator’, Ecotheology, 2, 1997, p. 15, from F. Bowie and O. Davies (eds.),Hildegard of Bingen: An Anthology. (London: SPCK, 1990) pp. 33, 91–2.

9. Ibid., pp. 12–14.

Chapter 9

1. Thomas Traherne, Centuries, 1670; First Century (18), (28).2. O.C. Quick, The Christian Sacraments (London: Nisbet, 1927), ch.1.3. J.R. Illingworth, ‘The Incarnation and Development’, in Lux Mundi,

12th edn, ed. C. Gore (London: Murray, 1891), p. 132.4. From G. Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Dacre Press, 1945),

pp. 112ff.5. For further exposition of the significance of the Eucharist for contem-

porary Christians, see the Appendix.

Chapter 10

1. Proverbs 3:19–20 (NRSV).2. Proverbs 8:1–4, 22, 23, 27, 28–31 (NRSV).3. The Wisdom of Solomon 7:23–8 (NRSV).4. Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 1:4–10 (NRSV).5. S.H. Ringe, Wisdom’s Friends (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox

Press, 1999), p. 44.6. J.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making (London: SCM Press, 1980), p. 210.7. C. Deane-Drummond, Theology and Biotechnology: Implications for a

New Science (London and Washington: Geoffrey Chapman, 1997), ch. 6.8. C. Deane-Drummond, ‘FutureNatural?: A Future of Science through the

Lens of Wisdom’, Heythrop Journal, 40, 1999, pp. 45, 46.9. In I Corinthians 1:24, 30 (NRSV).

10. I Corinthians 2:7 (NRSV).11. J.G. Dunn, Christology in the Making, pp. 259, 262.12. See Ringe, Wisdom’s Friends, pp. 48–53, where she follows a scheme of

Raymond Brown.13. John 1:1–5, 10–12b, 14, 16 (NRSV).14. Psalm 33:69 (NRSV).15. Note that the title ‘Son of God’ as applied to the historical Jesus is,

strictly speaking, a Messianic, royal title of an earthly, albeit divinelycommissioned, figure.

16. St Basil of Caesarea, St Gregory of Nyssa and St Gregory of Nazianzus.17. V. Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Cambridge:

James Clarke, 1991), p. 70 (emphasis added). This distinction betweenthe essence and energies of God is not to be confused with the distinctionin Christian theology, both Western and Eastern, between the essenceand nature of the Triune Godhead, on the one hand, and the three

Notes 183


‘persons’ (Latin personae) Father, Son and Holy Spirit of the Trinity asexperienced in revelation to humanity, on the other.

18. Ibid., p. 73.19. Ibid., p. 76.20. Ibid.21. Ibid., p. 80.22. Ibid., p. 88.23. Ibid., pp. 88–9.

Chapter 11

1. I have deliberately used the designation ‘Jesus the Christ’ rather than theusual ‘Jesus Christ’ because I wish to emphasise that ‘Christ’ is a title, fromthe Greek Christos, meaning ‘Anointed One’ and is the Greek equivalentof the Hebrew ‘Messiah’. But this has long been forgotten so that ‘Christ’is used almost as the surname of the historical ‘Jesus’. Hence mention of,for example, ‘the pre-existence of Christ’ and of the ‘cosmic Christ’ tendsto be thought of as referring to the pre-existence and cosmic character ofJesus, the man from Nazareth. This evacuates those phrases of intelligiblemeaning and renders them incredible. However, what can be said to bepre-existent and cosmic in significance with respect to ‘Jesus the Christ’, asI have designated him, is none other than the pre-existence before the birthof Jesus of God the Word/Logos, who is of cosmic significance. The veryname ‘Jesus Christ’ appears to have become a source of misunderstandingtoday.

2. John 1:14 (NRSV).3. In my TSA, 2nd edn, ch. 13–16, and God and Science: A Quest for

Christian Credibility (London: SCM Press, 1996), ch. 4.4. Persona is translated in English as ‘person’ but the meaning is that of the

mask or face of an actor rather than that of an individual consciousness. 5. A. Meynell, ‘Christ in the Universe’, in The Faber Book of Religious

Verse, ed. H. Gardner (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), p. 292.6. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V, praef.

Epilogue

1. TSA, 1st edn (1990), pp. 77, and earlier in my CWS, pp. 179ff.2. TSA, 2nd edn (1993), pp. 231–2, 252–3; see also CWS, pp. 181–2.3. T. Chalmers, ‘The Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God’, First

Bridgewater Treatise, 3rd edn, Vol. II (London: William Pickering,1834), pp. 129–30.

4. Augustine, Confessions, Book 1[1], 1.5. Matthew 17:7.

184 Notes


Deism: This is usually taken today to imply belief in the concept of aSupreme Being who, having created the universe, then lets it proceedaccording to its inbuilt, created laws and capacities. More particu-larly and historically it has involved ‘The belief that God exists buthas not revealed himself except in the normal courses of nature andhistory’ (The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (FDMT), ed.A. Bullock and O. Stallybrass (London: Fontana, 1977). This under-standing of ‘God’ strongly emphasises God’s transcendence andscarcely attributes any immanence to God’s activity in the world.

Dissipative systems and structures: A dissipative system is one that is open to exchange of matter and energy with the externalsurroundings and has the capacity at a certain critical point of developing a new structure, a new molecular order, ‘that basicallycorresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilized by the exchange of energywith the outside world’ (I. Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Timeand Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: Freeman,1980), p. 90). In general such behaviour depends on the systems beingopen, a long way from equilibrium and non-linear in certain essentialrelationships between fluxes and forces (see A.R. Peacocke, AnIntroduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983, chs 2, 4). They can then self-organise

Glossary

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into large-scale temporal and spatial patterns in spite of randommotions of their constituent units. Such systems are not confined topurely physical and chemical ones; their essential features can occuralso in economic and geographical (urbanisation) patterns (I. Prigogineand I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature(London: Heinemann, 1984).

Epistemology: ‘The philosophical theory of knowledge, which seeksto define it, distinguish its principal varieties, identify its sources, andestablish its limits’ (FDMT).

Immanence: Divine immanence is ‘the omnipresence of God in Hisuniverse’ (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, ed.F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1974), p. 693). Etymologically, ‘immanent’ means ‘in-dwelling,inherent; actually present or abiding in’ (Shorter Oxford EnglishDictionary (SOED) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), so theologi-cally it carries the sense of an abiding and indwelling presence of Godin the universe. It is to be contrasted with ‘transcendent’.

Naturalism: Those types of philosophy ‘which assert that the worldcan best be accounted for by means of the categories of natural science(including biology and psychology) without recourse to the super-natural or transcendent as a means of explanation’ (A New Dictionaryof Christian Theology, ed. A. Richardson and J. Bowden (London:SCM Press, 1983). ‘A view of the world, and of man’s relation to it, inwhich only the operation of natural (as opposed to supernatural orspiritual) laws and forces is assumed (1750)’ (SOED). A theistic natu-ralism is expounded in the present work (Chapter 8 and passim)according to which natural processes, characterised by the laws andregularities discovered by the natural sciences, are themselves actionsof the God who continuously gives them existence.

Ontology: ‘The theory of existence or, more narrowly, of what reallyexists, as opposed to that which appears to exist but does not ... Theontology of a theory or body of assertions is the set of things to whichthat theory ascribes existence by referring to them in a way thatcannot be eliminated or analysed out’ (FDMT). It is ‘The science orstudy of being: that department of metaphysics which relates to thebeing or essence of things, or to being in the abstract’ (SOED).

186 Glossary


Panentheism: ‘The belief that the Being of God includes and pene-trates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in Him, but(as against Pantheism) that His Being is more than, and is notexhausted by, the universe’. Pantheism is ‘The belief or theory thatGod and the universe are identical’ (both definitions from TheOxford Dictionary of the Christian Church).

Transcendent: Theologically, ‘Of the Deity: In His being, exaltedabove and distinct from the universe’ (SOED). The term stresses theultimate ‘otherness’ of God’s nature in relation to all else. Moregenerally, ‘to transcend’ means ‘to pass over or go/extend beyondeither a physical or a non-physical limit’ (SOED).

Wave function: In quantum theory, a mathematical expression, ofthe form used to depict waves, which represents the probabilities of agiven system being in a certain state at various times. Before a meas-urement, the state of a system, according to quantum theory, is repre-sented by a superposition of wave functions which collapse into oneafter the measurement – which one is governed only by probabilityand is, to that extent, unpredictable.

Glossary 187


The following are some useful resources for the reader whowishes to follow the exploration of this book further. In no way

can I pretend the list is exhaustive but I hope it will nevertheless beuseful. It is intended to supplement the references given at the end ofthe chapters and is biased towards the chapters’ particular themes.

General

The recent version of Ian Barbour’s well-known text Religion andScience: Historical and Contemporary Issues (London: SCM Press,1998) continues to be a valuable and comprehensive source, fair andimpartial in its judgements. Barbour has now produced a shorterversion for the general reader, When Science Meets Religion (SanFrancisco: Harper, 2000).

The textbook God, Humanity and the Cosmos, edited by C.Southgate and other contributors (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999) isnoteworthy both for its smooth, readable style and for its carefultreatment of continuing controversies. Science and Religion: ACritical Survey by Holmes Rolston, III (New York: Random House,1987) is a stimulating book and is especially significant for itstreatment of the biological, psychological and social sciences.

John Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in an Age of Science (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1998) provides a highly readable,

Supplementary reading

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indeed elegant, defence of such belief for the general reader; it couldusefully be read in conjunction with his Science and Theology: AnIntroduction (London: SPCK, and Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1998), which contains a carefully selected bibliography particularlyhelpful to newcomers to the field.

Religion and Science: History, Method and Dialogue, edited byW.M. Richardson and W. J. Wildman (New York and London:Routledge, 1996) is an important collection of in-depth essays byindividuals currently involved in the field.

PART I

Different epistemological perspectives on science and theology arecogently presented in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Modelsfor the Current Dialogue, edited by N.H. Gregersen and J.W. vanHuysteen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmnans, 1998).

An influential research procedure for theology based on that ofscience has been proposed by Nancey Murphy in Theology in theAge of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1990) and a significant comparison between the epistemologies ofscience and theology is given by Philip Clayton in his Explanationfrom Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).

The best source for an account of IBE is Peter Lipton’s Inferenceto the Best Explanation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991).

PART II

To the general reader are strongly recommended the very readable,yet philosophically and theologically sophisticated treatments of awhole range of science–theology issues by Keith Ward in God,Chance and Necessity (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996) and God, Faithand the New Millennium (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998).

A useful account of the problem of God’s relation to time, as it hasbeen discussed over the centuries, is given by Grace Jantzen in ‘Timeand Timelessness’, in the New Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. A.Richardson and J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 571–4.Current issues are outlined by C.J. Isham and J. Polkinghorne in ‘TheDebate over the Block Universe’, in Quantum Cosmology and theLaws of Nature, ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham (Vatican

Supplementary reading 189


Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences,University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 135–44, and (an elabo-ration of my own views) in my Theology for a Scientific Age: Being andBecoming – Natural, Divine and Human (TSA), 2nd edn (London:SCM Press and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 128–33.

The physico-chemical (kinetic and thermodynamic) interpreta-tions of biological organisation and its origins are surveyed in my AnIntroduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The work of the Göttingen school(led by M. Eigen) is expounded by R. Winkler and M. Eigen in Lawsof the Game (New York: Knopf, and London: Allen Lane, 1982), andits relevance to the origin of life by M. Eigen in Steps towards Life: APerspective on Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).The studies of the Brussels school (led by I. Prigogine) are expoundedby him in From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman,1980), and their general consequences in his and I. Stengers’ Orderout of Chaos (London: Heinemann, 1984).

In the 1990s scientists analysed more generally the theoreticalbasis of self-organisation of systems in critical states, which are on theedge of chaos and can switch suddenly into new patterns of organi-sation (P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-OrganizedCriticality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); S. Kaufmann, AtHome in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Complexity(London: Penguin, 1996)).

The notion of ‘intelligent design’ based on the supposed ‘irre-ducible complexity’ of, especially, biochemical and genetic systemshas been strongly promoted not only by M.J. Behe (Chapter 4, note 3)but also by W.A. Dembski in The Design Inference: EstimatingChance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998). For cogent refutations see H.J. van Till, ‘TheCreation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’, TheologyToday, 55, 1998, pp. 344–65; K. Miller, ‘God the Mechanic’, inFinding Darwin’s God: A Scientists’s Search for Common Groundbetween God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999),ch. 5; N. Shanks and K.H. Joplin, ‘Redundant Complexity: A CriticalAnalysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry’, Philosophy ofScience, 66, June 1999, pp. 268–82; and F.J. Ayala, ‘Arguing forEvolution’, The Science Teacher, 67(2), 2000, pp. 30–2.

190 Supplementary reading


A fuller discussion of the anthropic principle and the possibilityof there being an ‘ensemble of universes’ is given in my TSA, pp.106–12. For its use in an ‘argument to design’, see the statisticallyargued treatment of D.J. Bartholomew in God of Chance (London:SCM Press, 1984), pp. 64–5, and, more recently, his UncertainBelief: Is it Rational to be a Christian? (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1996), ch. 6 and pp. 255–6.

Philip Hefner expounds persuasively in his The Human Factor:Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993)the general theological significance of the epic of evolution for therelation between God and humanity in terms of humanity as ‘createdco-creator’, a much discussed and fruitful concept.

The series of research conferences convened since 1987 by theVatican Observatory with the Center for Theology and the NaturalSciences, Berkeley, CA, have resulted in a series of state-of-the artvolumes with the general subtitle Scientific Perspectives on DivineAction. The individual volumes are: Quantum Cosmology and theLaws of Nature (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham, 1993);Chaos and Complexity (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and A.R.Peacocke, 1995); Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (ed. R.J.Russell, W.R. Stoeger and F.J. Ayala, 1998); and Neuroscience andthe Person (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy, T.C. Meyering and M.A.Arbib, 1999) – all distributed by the University of Notre DamePress, Notre Dame, IN. They are the best source for the detailed cutand thrust of the discussions concerning divine action betweenleading representatives of various interpretations, including thosedepending on chaos theory, quantum processes and whole–part(top-down) influences.

PART III

For an interesting exposition of a ‘radical naturalist’ viewpoint, seeReligion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996) by Willem B. Drees.

Panentheism has been defended by Philip Clayton in his God andContemporary Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,1997), ch. 4; ‘The Case for Christian Panentheism’, Dialog, 37(3),1998, pp. 201–8; and ‘The Panentheistic Turn in ChristianTheology’, Dialog, 38(4), 1999, pp. 289 – 93. I have long argued for

Supplementary reading 191


the usefulness of the model this term denotes in my Creation and theWorld of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 141, 207,238–9, 352; and TSA, pp. 158, and 370–2, where references to othersources are given. For a fuller development of the philosophical andtheological implications of this approach, see Christopher Knight’sforthcoming Wrestling with the Divine: Science, Religion andRevelation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

The concept of Wisdom as a resource for relating the divineactivity of creation, human experience and the processes of thenatural world is increasingly coming into the spotlight, notably inCelia Deane-Drummond’s Creation through Wisdom: Theology andthe New Biology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). A valuablediscussion of ‘Jesus as the Wisdom of God’ is also to be found in TheGod of Evolution by Denis Edwards (New York: Paulist Press, 1999),pp. 113–28 – a work very much in tune with the direction of myexplorations here.

The ground work for a more global theology is to be found inChristian Systematic Theology in a World Context by N. Smart andS. Konstantine (London: HarperCollins, 1991); The FifthDimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick(Oxford: Oneworld, 1999); and the distinguished series of volumesby Keith Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press): Religion and Revelation(1994), Religion and Creation (1996), Religion and Human Nature(1998), Religion and Community (1999).

192 Supplementary reading


Albert the Great 13anthropic principle 70–2Aquinas, Thomas 13, 16Aristotle 13Atkins, Peter 6

Barbour, Ian: Issues in Science andReligion xiv

Bible 120Acts 182authority of 31, 35–6and belief 19, 31composition of 31, 36cosmology in 65, 73, 89Genesis xiii, 65, 73, 85as historical narrative 35, 182John 158, 162, 166I Kings 116–17, 182New Testament 13, 35, 158–9,

164Old Testament 35prophets 9, 65, 159Proverbs 155Psalms 65, 73Revelation 47Romans 118–19Wisdom literature 65, 154–8worldview of 9

Boethius 44Bricmont, Jean: Intellectual

Impostures 23Buddha 9Burhoe, Ralph xivButler, Joseph 21

Cappadocian Fathers 13, 160 Carter, Brandon 70Chalmers, Thomas 173chaos theory 5, 58–9, 99–104,

110, 114Christianity xiii, xv–xvi, 86–7, 88,

132–4, 142–3, 147–8, 148–53,158–60, 163–70, 175–6

and agnostics 19beliefs xvi, 12–13, 19, 35, 120,

147, 148challenges to 12–17, 21, 65–7creeds 164Eastern 143, 154, 158, 160–2Eucharist xvii, 62, 149–52,

158, 176and miracles 94–5and philosophical systems 13,

21, 130, 154and reasonableness 21–1, 32–3sacraments of 149–53, 175–6

Index

193

GodIndex.qxd 15/01/01 07:34 Page 193

and scientific discoveries 8,11–12, 14, 66, 132–3

the Trinity 164, 165, 167–8,183

Western 133–4, 135–6,139–40, 141–3, 161

see also Jesus, revelation,theology

Confucius 9Conway Morris, Simon: Crucible

of Creation 82cosmology 23, 67–8

‘hot big bang’ xiv, 93, 145Coulson, Charles xiii–xiv

Dante: Divine Comedy 8, 165Darwin, Charles 14, 66, 73, 74,

83, 85, 135Darwinism xiii, 66, 136see also evolution

Dawkins, Richard 6, 66, 70, 73Deane-Drummond, Celia 157de Duve, C. 70deism 14, 135, 139, 142, 185dissipative systems, and structures

52, 100, 102–4, 110, 185Dobzhansky, Theodor 67Donne, John: Anatomie of the

World 95Drees, Willem 34Drummond, Henry 136Dunn, J.G.: Christology in the

Making 157–8

Eigen, Manfred 68, 70Einstein, Albert 41, 42, 43Eliot, T.S. xvii, 127Enlightenment 19, 20–1, 95epistemology 25, 26, 28, 186eschatology 48evil 58, 141–2

and free will 44, 105God and 44, 56, 91, 141–2human (moral) 44, 142natural 44, 141, 142

evolution xvi, 14, 15–16, 24–6,47, 49, 53, 59, 65–90, 135–6,146–8, 167, 170, 172–3, 175

anthropic principle 70–2

chance and necessity 75–8, 81,85

convergence 82epic of evolution xvii, 15, 65–7,

83, 92, 132, 148, 152, 170evolutionary epistemology 25natural selection 14, 25, 66,

73–5, 76, 83, 85propensities 81–2

existence of the world 11, 14, 15,24, 39–43, 130–1

Farrer, Austin 111Ferrar, Nicholas xviiFrayn, Michael: Copenhagen 5

genetics xiv, 52, 54, 79–80behaviour genetics 79–80DNA xiii, xiv, 53, 54, 66–7,

73, 76, 105God xv, xvi, xvii–xviii, 39–48,

56–9, 69–70, 71–3, 74–5,84–153, 154, 163–8, 173–4,180–1

as absent 14as continuously creating 44,

46, 47, 55, 67, 80, 82–3, 86,92, 105–6, 118, 129, 136–7,146, 186

as Creator xv, 11, 43, 47, 55,57, 67, 70, 71–3, 74–5, 77–8,85–6, 88–9, 92, 103, 122,135–8, 139, 146, 149, 154,167

essence of 160, 161, 183as eternal 43, 44, 45, 46, 129and evolution 14, 69–70existence of, proofs for 33, 71as external to nature 135, 139,

142and free will 44, 45, 59, 86,

87–9as Ground of Being 39, 43,

129as immanent xvii, 14, 58, 109,

129, 131, 132, 135–8, 143,146, 163, 165, 166–7, 178,185, 186

as ineffable 165

194 Index


as influencing events 56–9, 75,91, 92, 93–4, 102, 103–8,110–11, 114, 119–20, 123–4,130, 148, 180–1

interaction with humanity 46,54, 61–2, 86, 87, 88, 115,116–25, 130, 134, 164–7

as Love 47–8, 87, 129, 175–6and omnipotence 41, 43, 59,

86, 87, 89, 107–8, 122, 129,141–2

and omniscience 41, 43, 45,55, 58–9, 102–3, 104, 106,109–10, 129, 141

and pain and suffering 83,85–8, 89–90, 142

personal experience of 114–15,116–25, 130

personal nature of 42–3, 45,85, 114–15, 130, 140, 141

purposes of 81, 82–3, 88–90,93, 109, 110, 114, 133, 141,144–5, 146–8, 149, 152,175–6

relation with the world xvii,15, 28, 51–3, 55–8, 61, 72–3,84–8, 91–115, 118, 119–21,131, 134, 138–48, 154,156–7, 159, 160–2, 163–5,168–9, 170, 172

as suffering 86–7, 130, 142, 149and time 43–8, 130as transcendent 14, 56, 80–1,

131, 132, 135, 141, 143, 165,167, 185, 187

as Ultimate Reality 12, 14,39–40, 41, 42–3, 81, 86, 129,130, 131, 132, 139, 170–1

uncreated energies of xvii,160–2, 163, 164, 183

unity of 129, 167see also miracles, panentheism,

revelationGould, Stephen 6: Wonderful

Life 81–2Greenfield, Susan 6Gregersen, N.H. 28–9

Habgood, John: Soundings xiv

Hawking, Stephen 34Heisenberg uncertainty principle

5, 104–8Heraclitus 96Hildegard of Bingen: The Book of

Divine Works 143Hoyle, Fred 8, 41human beings 50–1, 59–64,

78–81, 83–4, 86, 87, 88–9,117, 140–1, 146–7, 172–3,175–6

brain 60, 62–3, 118, 120,123–4, 173

communication between 62–4,115, 118, 122–5, 147

and consciousness 83, 88, 118,123, 147

and evolution 67, 70–1, 78,146–7

human behaviour 79–81pain and suffering 83, 88as physical entities 50, 68, 117,

140and rationality 166relationship with God 51,

114–15, 116–25, 130religious impulse 80self-consciousness 50, 59, 83,

88–9, 147soul 51spiritual capacities of 50–1,

117, 122, 172and the world 144–6, 172–3,

186humanism 175Hume, David 56Huxley, T.H. 7, 14

Illingworth, J.R. 147immanence see Godinference to the best explanation

(IBE) 26–30, 32, 37, 40, 66Irenaeus 151, 170

Jacob, François 81Jenkins, David 16–17, 133Jesus xvi, 12, 35, 134, 147,

148–53, 164–9, 176, 184‘the Christ’ 166, 184

Index 195


as culmination of divine creativeprocess 147–8, 168

as God incarnate 148–9, 150,151, 157–8, 164, 165, 166,167, 170, 176

historical 35, 152, 164, 166,167

life, death and resurrection of79, 164, 165, 166

as Messiah 13and redemption through

suffering 88, 142relationship to God 48, 90,

147, 148–9, 166, 167respected personally 19, 21as the ‘Son of God’ 165, 166,

183and Wisdom 157–8, 159, 166

Kallistos, Bishop of Diokleia143

Kepler, Johannes 11Kingsley, Charles 7

The Water Babies 136

Livingstone, Sir Richard 10Locke, John 20Lorenz, Edward: ‘butterfly effect’

100, 101Lossky, Vladimir: The Mystical

Theology of the EasternChurch 160–2

Mascall, E. xivMaximus the Confessor 143Meynell, Alice 169Milton, John 44miracles 91, 92, 93–4, 110

as breaking laws of nature 56,93

monism 49–50, 60, 62, 68, 93,111, 117

Monod, Jacques 75–6, 81Moore, Aubrey 136

naturalism 92–3, 186theistic xvii, 51, 135–8, 159,

161, 163, 165, 186Newton, Isaac 66

Newtonian systems 97, 98–9,101–2

ontology 44, 55, 57, 101, 105,106, 110, 111, 114, 117, 138,168, 186

ontological gap 57, 58, 110,115

Palamas, Gregory 143panentheism xvii, 57–8, 87, 109,

110–14, 129, 138–43, 146,157, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165,187

Philo of Alexandria 159philosophy 131, 164

Aristotelian 164biblical 9Chinese 9Greek 9–10, 13Hellenistic 164, 166medieval 11, 19Neoplatonism 13, 164pre-Socratic 9Stoic 159see also theology

physico-chemical systems xiii, 52,68

Pinker, Steven 6Poincaré, Henri 98postmodernism xvi, 8, 11, 21–4,

27relativism 8, 21–2, 134and science 22–4and theology 21

Prigogine, Ilya 68

quantum theory 26, 96–9, 104–8,180–1, 187

Quick, Oliver 145

Raven, Charles xiii, 177realism 22–3

critical 9, 23scientific 22–3

redemption 79, 142religion xv, 7, 12–17, 34,

168–70and authority 31–2

196 Index


and belief 19–20, 131–4critical studies of 16and evolution 65–6framework for 65‘new religions’ 12and reason 19–21, 28, 29,

31–2and revelation 117–25and ‘special providence’ 92,

94–5, 110and Western culture 19see also theology

revelation 20, 32, 117–25, 148general 118–19, 120–1mystical experiences 120, 122,

124numinous experiences 122and religious experience

120–1special 119–21within religious traditions 119,

120

St Augustine 44, 114, 139, 174St Paul 13, 74–5, 87, 118–19,

143, 157, 159, 182Saunders, Nicholas 107–8,

180–1Schleiermacher, Friedrich 19science 9–12, 14, 15–17, 22–6,

39–43, 46–7, 48–51, 52, 55,56, 68–76, 93, 95–104, 139,145–6, 179, 180

experiment 10, 11, 26, 40–1Greek 9–10guru-scientists 5, 6, 7and human rationality 26–30Muslim 10–11and postmodernism 22–4, 27Pythagoreans 10rise of 9–12scientific imperialism 6, 7, 11and Western culture xvi, 5–6,

11–12, 30, 97see also cosmology, evolution,

genetics, philosophy, universescience and theology xiii–xviii,

5–36, 65–6, 94–5, 99–114,121–2, 129–34, 135–8,

152–3, 157, 159–60, 161,170–4, 180–1

Center for Advanced Study inReligion and Science(CASIRAS) xiv

common factors 9, 11, 14, 15dialogue between 6–7, 14–15,

18–22, 23, 24, 30, 33–6, 94,106

differences between 6, 7, 14,15–16, 19–22

Institute for Religion in an Ageof Science (IRAS) xiv

‘natural theology’ 16‘physico-theology’ 16, 33quest for meaning 7–9,

15–16, 18, 30–6, 37, 88,127, 170–1

scientists and spirituality 6–9,14, 44, 56, 57, 75, 94

sin 79see also evil

Smethurst, A.F. xivSnow, C.P. 5Sokal, Alan: Intellectual

Impostures 23Spencer, Herbert 74Stoppard, Tom: Arcadia 5

Temple, Frederick 136Thales 10theism 51, 56–7, 130, 136, 138,

139, 142–3Theissen, Gerd 12theology 30–6, 59, 65–6, 67, 80,

129–34, 142, 154–62,166–71, 172, 183

Christology 35fideism 24foundationalism 32fundamentalism 24and God as suffering 86–7,

142inference to the best explanation

(IBE) in 27–36, 37, 40, 66,129–30 163, 165

‘natural theology’ (physico-theology) 16, 33, 120

occasionalism 105

Index 197


‘revealed theology’ 33, 120see also science and theology

van Till, Howard 77Virgil 8, 165

wave function 97, 105, 106,180–1, 187

Wheeler Robinson, H. 51Wilberforce, Samuel 14Wilson, E.O. 80Wisdom (Sophia) xvii, 156–8,

159, 162, 163, 164Beatrice as divine Wisdom 8wisdom literature 154–8Jesus as 157–8, 159, 166Virgil as human wisdom 165

Word (Logos) xvii, 111, 158–60,162, 163, 164, 166, 167,168–9, 175

Jesus as 166, 168, 170, 184world

anthropic principle 70–2‘block’ model of 43, 44–6chance and necessity in 75–8,

81, 85, 136complexity of 40–1, 47, 48–53,

54–6, 67, 69–70, 72–3, 83–4,85, 93

entropy 46–7, 53flow of information in 53–4,

55, 74, 110–11, 119–20and God 51–3, 69–70, 77, 81,

108–14, 136, 139–40, 145–8,169, 175

interconnectedness of 54–6,66–7, 76, 108–10, 139

origins of 67–72pain and suffering in 83–4, 85,

87, 89, 142predictability of 58–9, 95–108,

178, 187as sacramental xvii, 136, 143,

144–53unity of 40–1, 48, 53, 57whole–part influences in 50,

51–3, 60–1, 108–15, 119–20,121, 124, 130, 138–9

World Council of Churches (WCC)22, 31

Yarnold, G.D. xiv

Zygon: Journal of Religion andScience xiv

198 Index


Also available from Oneworld

God, Chance and NecessityKEITH WARD

The ‘new materialism’ argues that science and religious belief areincompatible. This book considers such arguments from cosmology(Stephen Hawking, Peter Atkins), from biology (Charles Darwin,Richard Dawkins) and from sociobiology (Michael Ruse), andexposes a number of crucial fallacies and weaknesses.

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KEITH WARD

Does being a Christian in the modern scientific age require intellectual suicide?

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