Tapestry is a weekly radio series by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which explores "spirituality, religion and the search for meaning". It's available for free as a podcast through iTunes.
The featured guest on the August 30, 2009 broadcast was the Reverend John Polkinghorne, a British particle physicist and theologian. If you get the chance, I urge you to listen to the interview.
Polkinghorne suggests that Christianity, by and large, is not incomptable with belief in the theory of evolution. However, I would have loved to ask him why his belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus is any more compatible with science and reason than the suggestion that the world is only 6000 years old.
Polkinghorne describes the atheist worldview is "
grotesquely impoverished". He doesn't share why God is his default metaphysical explanation aside from the fact that he chooses to believe "
a loving lie".
I love his term "
signals of transcendance" and the phrase "
Joy keeps breaking in". What a crock of sh*t. Please google "
God of Eth" for a splendid article by English philosopher Stephen Law. Law has another great one on his site called "
The Problem of Evil".
A priest and physicist - what a rare combination. I suggest that there's a good reason why: most people as bright as Polkinghorne have long since figured out that monotheistic Yahweh is a myth.
Polkinghorne obviously dislikes the nihilistic implications of science and hopes for something better (why that is his intuition he doesn't explain).
I liked the interviewer's passing reference to Thomas Aquinas (actually, Mary Hynes was more of a cheerleader than an interviewer). I wonder why they didn't mention Aquinas' claims of levitation while encountering divine reality!
"
Consciousness cannot be an accident". This guy is a modern day
William Paley, much like Denver "Christian Philosopher" Douglas Groothuis. Paley is famous for suggesting that a master designer of man is necessary because if you found a watch in the sand there must have been a watchmaker. This inspired Richard Dawkins' book
The Blind Watchmaker (which I should add is a much better read than
The God Delusion). I would love to hand Polkinghorne a deck of cards and ask him to pick any ten. According to his way of thinking, it should be impossible for me to draw that hand without divine intervention. He rejects the notion that we are a fluke that arose on a speck of cosmic dust, again without explaining why. Why can't this all be a happy accident? The answer, of course, is that it can and he doesn't like the metaphysical implications of that realization.
"
Mathematics is pure abstract human thinking". Again, a crock of sh*t. Does Polkinghorne think that the concept of a circle would cease to exist just because humanity might become extinct? His suggestion that "
belief in God ties things together" is probably hitting far closer to the truth than his suggestion that the "
will of the creator lies behind our thinking powers". If that's so, who created the Creator?
I found Polkinghorne's suggestion that "
theism explains more" spot on and get the sense that he hasn't read Lewis Wolpert's
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast - a great read that explains why humans are susceptible to believing fantastic things in order to give a sense of reason to the unknown.
I get demoralized when I hear such a brilliant person as Polkinghorne adopt such an intellectually vacuous approach. It sounds to me like he is angling to win himself a Templeton prize if he hasn't already won it [
after writing this article I discovered that he won it in 2002- surprise, surprise ...]. The Templeton Foundation has been criticized for promoting an accomodationist position between science and religion when many (like me) find them mutually incompatible.
Contrary to Polkinghorne's assertion, atheism is not "
rejection of a spiritual dimension". First of all, you don't have to believe in a myth to have a spiritual experience. Secondly, why should we be so holier than thou to suppose that we are able to conceive all there is to conceive? In the past, I have used the analogy of trying to explain Einstein's theory of relativity to an ant - it simply can't be done. I think it is more than likely that there is plenty about the universe that we are similarly unable to understand or discern, perhaps ever.
