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Mc Nair Lecture
Chapel Hill, UNC
March 23, 1993

Religion in an Age of Science
John Polkinghorne
Queens' College, Cambridge


     I have spent most of my working life as a theoretical
physicist and all of my consciously remembered life as part of
the worshipping and believing community of the Church, so that I
am someone who wants to take absolutely seriously the possibility
of religious belief in a scientific age.  If that belief is to be
embraced with integrity, then I think two conditions must be
fulfilled:
(1)  We must take account of what science has to tell us about
the pattern and history of the physical world in which we live.
Of course, science itself can no more dictate to religion what it
is to believe that religion can prescribe for science what the
outcome of its inquiry is to be.  The two disciplines are
concerned with the exploration of different aspects of human
experience: in the one case, our impersonal encounter with a
physical world that we transcend; in the other, our personal
encounter with the One who transcends us.  They use different
methods: in the one case, the experimental procedure of putting
matters to the test; in the other, the commitment of trust which
must underlie all personal encounter, whether between ourselves
or with the reality of God.  They ask different questions: in the
one case, how things happen, by what process?; in the other, why
things happen, to what purpose?  Though these are two different
questions, yet, the ways we answer them must bear some consonant
relationship to each other.  If I assure you that my purpose is
to create a beautiful garden and then I tell you that how I am
going to do so is by covering the ground with six inches of green
concrete, you will rightly doubt the genuineness of my
intentions.  The fact that we now know that the universe did not
spring into being ready made a few thousand years ago but that it
has evolved over a period of fifteen billion years from its fiery
origin in the Big Bang, does not abolish Christian talk of the
world as God's creation, but it certainly modifies certain
aspects of that discourse.
(2)  We must understand that religious belief, just like
scientific belief, is motivated understanding of the ways things
are.  Of course, a religious stance involves faith, just as a
scientific investigating starts by commitment too the
interrogation of the physical world from a chosen point of view.
But faith is not a question of shutting one's eyes, gritting
one's teeth, and believing the impossible.  It involves a leap,
but a leap into the light rather than the dark.  It is open to
the possibility of correction, as God's ways and will become more
clearly known.
     Scientists do not ask, 'Is that reasonable?', as if we knew
beforehand what the world is going to be like.  They know that
when we move into regimes far away from everyday experience, all
sorts of surprising things can happen.  Common sense will not be
the measure of all things.  We are not clever enough to see very
far ahead.  Therefore, the scientific question is ' What makes
you think this might be the case?'.  A different question, you
see, from 'Is that reasonable?' - a question that is open to the
possibility of enlarging our understanding of how things are.
Let me give you an example of the surprises that the physical
world has proved to have in store for us.  If I were to say to
you, 'Bill is at home and he is either drunk or sober', you would
expect either to find Bill at home drunk or to find him at home
sober.  It seems trivial and obvious; the learned would say that
you  have used the distributive law of logic.  Oddly enough, the
corresponding argument applied to a quantum world is found to
obey a different kind of logic.  May the same not also be true of
encounter with divine reality?
     In explaining my Christian belief in the setting of an Age
of Science, I know it has to be motivated belief, based on
evidence that I can point to.  The centre of my faith lies in my
encounter with the figure of Jesus Christ, as I meet him in the
gospels, in the witness of the church and in the sacraments.
Here is the heart of my Christian faith and hope.  Yet, at a
subsidiary but supportive level, there are also hints of God's
presence which arise from our scientific knowledge.  The actual
way we answer the question 'How?', turns out to point us on the
pressing also the question 'Why?', so that science by itself is
found not to be sufficiently intellectually satisfying.  I want
to spend the rest of this lecture sketching these encouragements
to religion that are available to us in our Age of Science.
      A characteristic of scientific thought is the drive for
synthesis.  We want to have as unified an understanding as we
possibly can.  That is the drive behind the present activity in
my old subject, particle physics, which is looking for a grand
unified theory - a GUT, as we say in our acronymic way.  So it's
the instinct of a scientist to seek as economic and as extensive
an understanding as possible, a unified understanding of the
world.  I believe, actually, that the grandest unified theory
that you could ever conceivably reach is a theological
understanding of the world.  Theology is the drive to find the
most profound and most comprehensive understanding of our
encounter with reality.  Now, if we're going to look for such a
total theory, there are basically two strategies that are
possible, for if we are looking for a total explanation we won't
get it for nothing.  Every explanation depends upon certain basic
unexplained assumptions.  Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from
nothing.  That's true intellectually, and, therefore any theory
of the world will have to have its basic assumptions on which the
rest of the understanding is built.  There are basically two
strategies corresponding to two different choices of hat you
regard as fundamental, (and so not to be explained).  Firstly,
you can just take the brute fact of the physical world as your
starting point.  That's what somebody like David Hume would take.
Start with the brute fact of matter as your unexplained bases.
Or secondly, you can take the brute fact (if that's the word to
use) of God.  In other words, one can appeal to the will of an
Agent, the purpose of a Creator, as the basic unexplained
starting point for understanding the world.  The first approach
is the strategy of atheism.  The second approach is the strategy
of theism.  I want to defend the second strategy and to explain
to you why I believe that, if we are driven be the desire to have
as comprehensive and unified an understanding as possible, we
shall find it in a scheme of things that has a place for belief
in God.
     If we were to start with the brute fact of the physical
world. that world is described for us at least in part by the
laws of science.  Therefore, if that's going to be a satisfactory
starting place for us, we would have to feel intellectually
satisfied with those laws as being a comfortable intellectual
resting place, the foundation on which to build the rest of our
understanding.  The first important point I want to make is to
suggest that in fact if we take the laws of nature as discerned
by science seriously, and if we look at them carefully, we will
find that they are not sufficiently intellectually satisfying in
themselves alone.  They are not sufficiently self explanatory to
be comfortable resting places, or a natural given foundation for
our belief.  They seem to have a certain character, which I am
going to describe, which actually points beyond themselves.  In
other words, out of the scientific understanding of the world,
arise questions which seem to direct us beyond science itself to
a deeper level of intelligibility,  Here are two examples.
     The first example is a fact about the physical world which
is very familiar to us, a fact indeed that makes science
possible.  Most of the time we take it simply for granted, but,
if we stop to think about it, I think we'll see that it is not a
fact that we should accept without further thought.  It is simply
this: that we can understand the physical world, that it is
intelligible to us in its rational transparency.  Not only is
that so, but it is the case that it is mathematics which is the
key to the understanding of the basic structure of the physical
world.  It is an actual technique in theoretical physics, a
technique that has proved its value time and again in the history
of the subject, to look for theories which in their mathematical
expression are economic and elegant.  In other words, we seek
theories which have about them that unmistakable character of
mathematical beauty.  It is our expectation that it is precisely
those theories with that character of mathematical beauty which
will prove to be the ones that describe the structure of the
world in which we live.
     If you have a friend who is a theoretical physicist and you
wish to upset him or her, you simply say to them, 'That latest
theory of yours looks rather ugly and contrived to me'.  They
will be very upset, because you are saying to them 'It doesn't
have that indispensable character of mathematical beauty'.  When
we use mathematics in that way, as a key to unlock the secrets of
the universe, something very peculiar is happening.  You see -
what is mathematics?  Mathematics is the free exploration of the
human mind.  Our mathematical friends sit in their studies, and
out of their heads they dream up the beautiful patterns of
mathematics.  If mathematics is not your subject, just think of
mathematics as being a pattern-creating, pattern-analyzing
subject.  What I'm saying is that some of the most beautiful
patterns thought up by the mathematicians are found actually to
occur in the structure of the physical world around us.  In other
words, there is some deep-seated relationship between the reason
within (the rationality of our minds - in this case mathematics)
and the reason without (the rational order and structure of the
physical world around us).  The two fit together like a glove.
If you stop to think about it, I think you'll see that is a
rather significant fact about the world.  It's a fact about the
world that the mathematicians, in their very modest way of
speaking, would describe as non-trivial.  Non-trivial is a
mathematical word meaning highly significant!  Not only does it
strike me as significant, but it also struck Einstein that way,
which is perhaps more interesting.  Einstein once said, "The only
incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is
comprehensible".  Why are our minds so perfectly shaped to
understand the deep patterns of the world around us?
     You have a choice in these matters.  You can always just
shrug your shoulders and say, 'Well, that's just the way it
happens to be, and a bit of good luck for you chaps who are good
a mathematics'.  My instincts as a scientist, as someone who is
searching for understanding, is not to be as intellectually lazy
as that.  I want to ask the question a famous theoretical
physicist called Eugene Wigner once asked, Hey is mathematics so
unreasonably effective in understanding the physical world?'.
You might reply, 'Why pretty easy - evolutionary biology will
explain that for you'.  If our minds didn't fit the world around
us, we just wouldn't have survived in the struggle for existence.
Now, that's obviously true, but it's only true up to a point.
It's true about our experience of the everyday world of rocks and
trees where we have to dodge the rocks and miss the trees, and
it's true of our mathematical thinking of the world, which I
suppose amounts to a little elementary arithmetic and a little
elementary Euclidean geometry.  But, when I'm talking about the
power of mathematics to illuminate and give understanding of the
physical world, I'm not talking just about the everyday world.
I'm talking, for example, about that counter-intuitive,
unpicturable quantum world.  That is a world that we can't
visualize, bit we can understand it, and, for its understanding
we need very abstract mathematics, ultimately the mathematics of
spontaneously broken, gauge-field theories - which I'm sure
you'll agree is fairly abstract mathematics!
     Paul Dirac invented something called quantum field theory
which is fundamental to our understanding of the physical world.
I can't believe Dirac's ability to invent that theory, or
Einstein's ability to invent the general theory of relativity, is
a sort of spin-off from our ancestors having to dodge
sabre-toothed tigers.  It seems to me that something much more
profound, much more mysterious is going on.  I would like to
understand why the reason within and the reason without fit
together at a deep level.  Religious belief provides me with a
entirely rational and entirely satisfying explanation of that
fact.  It says that the reason within and the reason without have
a common origin in this deeper rationality which is the reason of
the Creator, whose will is the ground both of my mental and my
physical experience.  That's for me an illustration of theology's
power to answer a question, namely the intelligibility of the
world, that arises from science bit goes beyond science's unaided
power to answer.  Remember, science simply assumes the
intelligibility of the world.  Theology can take that striking
fact and make it profoundly comprehensible.
     You could summarize what I have said so far by saying that
when we look at the rational order and transparent beauty of the
physical world, revealed through physical science, we see a world
shot through with signs of mind.  And, to a religious believer it
is the Mind of the Creator that is being discerned in that way.
That's one example of how I think our thirst for understanding
will take us beyond science and will make science itself, or the
brute fact of the physical world, by itself and unsatisfactory
intellectual resting place.
     Let me give you another example, a scientific discovery of a
more specific character that's been made in the last thirty or
forty years.  We thought a little earlier about the fact that we
live in a universe that's had a very interesting history.  It
started about fifteen billion years ago and it started extremely
simple.  One of the reasons why cosmologists can talk with great
confidence about the very early universe is that the very early
universe is so simple, just an expanding ball of energy.  Yet,
the world that started so simple has become very rich and complex
through its evolving history, with you and me as the most
interesting consequences of that history known to us.  We are the
most complicated physical systems that we have ever encountered
in our explorations of the world.  So, the history of the
universe has been astonishingly fruitful, and we understand many
steps in that evolving, fruitful process.  When we think about
those steps and our understanding of them, we reach a very
surprising conclusion.
     Scientists can play intellectual games, and they play those
games with a serious intent.  The sort of game they play is this:
when we think of the universe we live in, it is characterized by
certain types of scientific laws and certain types of basic
forces that go with those laws.  For example, we live in an
universe which has gravity in it, not just any old gravity, but
gravity of a particular type and a particular strength.  There is
an intrinsic strength to the force of gravity built into the
fabric of our universe, into the specification of what sort of
world we live in.  In fact, it's a very weak force, the way we
measure things.  That might surprise you if you have ever walked
out of a second story window, but the force of gravity is
intrinsically very weak.  Now we can play intellectual games and
say, 'I wonder what the universe would be like, and what its
history would have been like, if gravity had been a bit different
- if it had been much stronger, or even a little bit weaker than
it is'.  And we can play similar games with all the other
fundamental forces of nature.  We can take electromagnetism, the
force that holds matter together.  You can sit on your chairs
because electromagnetism holds them together, and it holds you
together as well!  We can again say, 'What would the universe be
like if electromagnetism were weaker, or if it were stronger?'
and so on.  We can play these intellectual games and, when we do
that, a very surprising conclusion follows.  Unless the
fundamental physical laws were more or less precisely what they
actually are, the universe would have had a very boring and
sterile history.  In other words, it's only  a very special
universe, a finely-tuned universe, a universe in a trillion, you
might say, which is capable of having had the amazingly fruitful
history that has turned a ball of energy into a world containing
you and me.  This insight is called the anthropic principle: a
world capable of producing anthropoi, (complicated consequences
comparable to men and women) is a very special finely-tuned
universe.  It's a very surprising discovery!
     Let me illustrate why we think that's so.  If you are to
have a fruitful universe, one of the things you've got to have in
it are stars.  And, you've got to have stars of the right sort.
The stars have two jobs that are absolutely indispensable to the
fruitful history of the universe.  One is, they have to act as
long-term, steady energy sources.  Essentially all our energy
here on earth comes from the sun, either directly or indirectly
through fossil fuels.  The sun has been burning steadily for
about five billion years and it will continue to burn steadily
for about another five billion years more.  You need that for the
development of life.  You must have long-term energy sources,
because it takes billions of years for life to develop, and you
must have steady energy sources, because stars that flared up or
died down would either burn life to a frazzle or freeze it to
death.  So you must have what we call main sequence stars which
are steadily-burning, long-lived stars.  Now, we understand what
makes them burn in that sort of way.  Basically it's the balance
between the force of gravity and the electromagnetic forces.  If
you were to alter either of those forces, you would put the stars
out of kilter.  You'd have stars that either burned up very
rapidly, that lived just for millions of years rather than
billions of years, or you'd have stars that were very turbulent
and unstable and flared up and died down, and that would be
disastrous.  No life could develop in a universe of that
character.  So you see how difficult it is to  design a fruitful
universe.  You've got to get the right balance between gravity
and electromagnetism to make the stars act as acceptable energy
sources for like.  But that's only part of the story, because the
stars have another tremendously important thing to do.  The
nuclear furnaces that burn inside the stars are the source of the
chemical elements which are the raw materials of life.  The early
universe is very simple, and because the early universe is very
simple it only produces very simple consequences.  In fact, the
very early universe can only make the two simplest chemical
elements, namely hydrogen and helium.  And they are just not rich
enough in their chemistry to make life possible.  For life you
need a much more complicated chemistry than hydrogen and helium
by themselves could sustain.  In particular, you need the
chemistry of carbon, which has the ability to make those
immensely complicated macro-molecules which are the basis of the
possibility of life.  Every atom of carbon inside your body was
once inside a star.  We're all made from the ashes of dead stars.
The only place you can make those heavier elements which are
indispensable as the constituents of life is inside the right
sort of stars, and it's pretty difficult to make the stars do
that.  Think about it.  What you have to do is this: first you've
got to make carbon by making three helium nuclei stick together.
That's actually quite hard to do and it depends upon very
delicate aspects of the nuclear forces.  Now, suppose you've
figured out how to do that.  You can't sit back and feel
satisfied, because carbon is not enough.  You've got to make lots
more elements.  You've got to make oxygen for example.  That
means making another helium atom stick to the carbon you already
made and turn the carbon into oxygen.  But, wait a minute.
You've got to do that, but you must not overdo it.  You mustn't
turn all the carbon into oxygen otherwise you've lost the carbon.
So, you've got to get all these balances right , and so on, and
so on, up to iron.  If you can just tune the nuclear forces
right, you can make all the elements up to iron inside the stars,
but iron is the most stable of all the nuclear species and you
can't get beyond iron inside the stars.  So, you've still got two
problems left that you've got to solve.  One is you'll need to
make some of the heavier elements beyond iron, some way or
another, and you also have to make accessible for life the
elements you've already made.  It's no good making carbon,
oxygen, and all that, and leaving them locked up,  useless,
inside the cooling core of a dying star.  You'll have made the
elements, but they won't be of any use to bring about life.
You've got to make sure that your stars are such that when they
come to the end of their natural life, which is about ten billion
years, some of them will explode as supernovae and so will
scatter out into the environment those chemical elements that
they've made.  If you're make from stardust, there's got to be
some dust from stars around for you to be made of.  You've got to
have stellar explosions.  And, if you're very clever, you can
arrange in the explosion that the neutrinos, as they blow-off the
outer layer of the star, then make those heavier elements like
lead and so on that you couldn't make inside the star itself.
The details don't matter very much, but I hope I've given some
feeling that making elements is a very complicated process, which
depends for its fruitfulness on a very delicate, fine-tuned
balance between the nuclear forces that control these processes.
If those nuclear forces were in any way slightly different from
the way they actually are, the stars would be incapable of making
the elements of which you and I are composed.  That gives you
some idea how difficult it is to make a fruitful universe.  There
are many, many other considerations of that kind.
     I'll move on to ask the question, 'What do we make of
that?'.  What do me make of the fact that the world we live in is
only fruitful because it's given basic scientific constitution is
of a very special, very finely-tuned character.  Once again, you
can shrug your shoulders and say, 'Well, that's just the way it
happens to be.  We're here because we're here and that's it'.
That doesn't seem to me to be a very rational approach to the
issue.  I have a friend, John Leslie, who is a philosopher at
Guelf University in Canada, and he writes about these questions.
He has written far and away the best book about the anthropic
principle, called Universes.  He's a beguiling philosopher
because he does his philosophy by telling stories, which is a
very accessible way for those of us who are not professionally
trained in philosophy to get the hang of it.  He tells the
following story.  You are about to be executed.  Your eyes are
bandaged and you are tied to the stake.  Twelve highly-trained
sharp shooters have their rifles levelled at your heart.  They
pull the trigger, the shots ring out - you've survived!  What do
you do? Do you shrug your shoulders and say, 'Well, that's the
way it is.  No need to seek and explanation  of this.  That's
just the way it is'.  Leslie rightly says that's surely not a
rational response to what's going on.  He suggests that there are
only two rational explanations of that amazing incident.  One is
this.  Many, many, many executions are taking place today and
just by luck you happen to be the one in which they all miss.
That's the rational explanation.  The other explanation, is, of
course, that the sharp shooters are on your side and they missed
by choice.  In other words there was a purpose at work of which
you were unaware.
     You see how that parable translates into thinking about a
finely-tuned and fruitful universe.  One possibility is that
maybe there are lots and lots of different universes, all with
different given physical laws and circumstances.  If there were
lots and lots of them (and there would really have to be rather a
lot) then just by chance, in one of them, the laws and
circumstances will be such as to permit the development of
carbon-based life.  But, of course, that's the one in which we
live, because we couldn't appear anywhere else.  It's a possible
explanation that's called the many-universes interpretation.  The
other possibility that there is more going on than has met the
eye and the sharp shooters are on our side.  That translates into
the idea that this is not just any old universe.  Rather it is a
universe which is a creation which has been endowed by its
Creator with just those finely-tuned given laws and circumstances
that will make its history fruitful.  It is the fulfillment of a
purpose.
     Leslie says in relation to the anthropic principle that
there is an even-handed choice between those two possibilities.
By itself, I think that is correct.  Let me emphasize that both
are metaphysical explanations.  We have no adequate, scientific
motivation for thinking of any other universe but the universe of
our direct experience.  So the speculation that there are many,
many other universes is a metaphysical speculation.  I'm not
against metaphysics.  In fact, you can't live without it, but the
many-universes interpretation is a metaphysical speculation just
as the existence of a Creator is a metaphysical speculation.  Of
course, if you think there are other reasons, as indeed I do, for
believing that there is a God whose will and purpose lies behind
the universe, then that second explanation, that the world is
fruitful because it is a creation, becomes the more economic and
persuasive explanation.  That, of course, is the one to which I
myself adhere.
     So, in the intelligibility of the world and the finely-tuned
fruitfulness of the world, we see insights arising from science,
but calling for some explanation and understanding which, by its
very nature will go beyond what science itself can provide.  And
that shows to me, at any rate, the insufficiency of a merely
scientific view of the world.  In fact, I think we're living in
an age where there is a great revival of natural theology taking
place.  Natural theology is the attempt to learn something about
God by the general use of reason and by inspection of the world.
That revival of natural theology is taking place, not on the
whole among the theologians, who have rather lost their nerve in
that area, but among the scientists.  Ant not just among pious
scientists like myself, who would be rather inclined to think
that way, but among scientists who have no particular time for,
or understanding of, conventional religion, bit who,
nevertheless, feel that the rational beauty and the finely-tuned
fruitfulness of the world suggest that there is some intelligence
or purpose behind the universe which is more than has met the
scientific eye.  That revived natural theology is also revised in
the sense that it is more modest in its ambitions.  Unlike either
the natural theology of the late middle ages or the eighteenth
century, it doesn't claim to talk about proofs of God.  We're in
an area of discourse, of the search for understanding, where
knock-down argument or proof is not available to anyone.  But we
are in an area where we're looking for insights which are
intellectually satisfying.  I wouldn't want to say that atheists
are stupid, but I would want to say that atheism is less
intellectually satisfying and less comprehensive in the
understanding it provides, than is a theistic view of the world.
     That's part of the story and these are gifts that theology
gives to science.  It offers science a deeper, more comprehensive
understanding than would be obtained from itself alone.  But
there is traffic across the border in both directions and I'll
spend a few moments talking about hat I think are the gifts that
science to theology in this Scientific Age.  That kind of gift is
rather different - for it is to tell theology what the physical
world is actually like in its structure and in its history.  That
raises issues to which theology has to address itself.
     Let me begin by saying just a word about what many people
think is the classic interaction between science and theology,
namely the question of origins.  How did things begin?  Actually
I don't think that's a very important subject, and that people
are mistaken if they think it is.  They are in error because they
wrongly think that the theological doctrine of creation is
concerned with how things began.  Who lit the blue touch paper of
the big bang?  The doctrine of creation isn't about that.  It's
not concerned with temporal origin, but with ontological origin.
It answers the question, why do things exist at all?  God is as
much the Creator today as he was fifteen billion years ago.  Thus
though big bang cosmology is very interesting scientifically,
theologically it is insignificant.  Therefore, if my friend and
former colleague Steve Hawking comes along, as he does in his
book, A Brief History of Time,and says that if you think about
quantum cosmology and how quantum mechanics fuzzed out the very
early universe, then, though the universe has a finite age, it
has no dateable beginning, that's a very interesting scientific
speculation, but there's no particular theological mileage in it.
Steve says, 'If there is no beginning, what place then for a
Creator?'.  It is theologically naive to answer other than by
'Every place, as the Sustainer of the universe in Being'.  God is
not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings.
God id the God of all times and all places.  So I think the
question of origins is not terribly important theologically,
though it is certainly interesting scientifically.
     Much more interesting is the question of the process of the
world.  How does the world history unfold?  It is in sustaining
the fruitful process of the world that God is at work as the
Creator, as much today as he was fifteen billion years ago.  When
we  think about the process of the world, we get two insights
that come to us from science which we have to take seriously and
to think about.  The first is this.  I've talked about that very
fertile process which turned a ball of energy into a world
containing you and me.  I've said that it could only happen in a
very special, finely-tuned sort of universe.  Let's now go on to
ask the question: Given we've got a universe with fine-tuning
(given we've got the right ground rules) how does it actually
come about that the world makes itself?  How does it realize its
in-built fruitfulness, its in-built potentiality?  We understand
many bits of that process quite well.  All those bits we do
understand seem to realize that fruitfulness through an interplay
between two opposing tendencies which, in a sort of slogan-way,
we could describe as 'chance' and 'necessity'.  Those are
slippery words and I have to explain what I mean by them.  By
'chance', I mean simply happenstance - just the way things happen
to be.  When the universe was about a billion years old, there
just happened to be a little bit more matter here than there.
That was chance - happenstance - getting things going.  That
happenstance produced something lasting through the operation of
'necessity', that is to say, lawful regularity.  Because, if
there is a little bit more matter here than there, then that
matter exerts a little bit stronger gravitational pull, ant it
draws more matter to itself in a sort of snowballing process.
That's how we picture the universe, which started so uniform,
began to get a bit grainy and lumpy, and essential step in its
fruitful history.  You've got to have the stars and you've got to
have the galaxies that contain the stars.  A fruitful universe
has to become lumpy at some stage.  That begins through chance,
happenstance, and develops through necessity, snowballing through
the attractive force of gravity.  And, it seems that the
interplay between those two tendencies, chance as the origin of
novelty, and necessity as the sifter and preserver of the novelty
thus produced, is the prime way in which the fruitfulness of the
universe is realized.  A much more familiar example is provided
by biological evolution.  Mutations occur through happenstance.
That produces some new possibility for life, which is then sifted
and preserved in the lawfully regular environment which is
necessary for the operation of natural selection.  In every stage
of the fruitful history of the universe there is an interplay
between chance and necessity.  Now, the question is, 'What do we
make of that?'
     A very great French biochemist called Jacques Monod wrote a
famous book in the early 1970's whose English translation is
called Chance and Necessity.  And, in that book, Monod says, with
passionate Gallic rhetoric, 'Pure chance, absolutely free, but
blind lies at the basis of this stupendous edifice of evolution'.
Of course the word where Monod puts in the knife is the word
'blind'.  For Monod, the role of chance, of happenstance, in the
evolving history of the universe subverts the religious claim
that there is a purpose at work in the world.  For Monod, the
role of chance means that ultimately the universe is a tale told
by an idiot.  That's how he sees it.
     Here is a serious challenge which we have to address.  I
would approach it this way.  There is no unique way of going from
physics to metaphysics, from science to a deeper view.  I will
take the same scientific picture of the interplay between
happenstance and regularity, but offer an alternative
interpretation of it and, I would venture to say, a more
evenhanded interpretation, which lays as much emphasis on the
necessary half as upon the chance half of the process.  I
respectfully suggest that when God came to create the world he
was faced with a dilemma.  The Christian God is a God of love and
the gift of love is always the gift of independence, the genuine
otherness of the beloved.  Parents know that.  There comes a time
when Johnny has to be allowed to ride his bicycle into dangerous
traffic on his own.  The gift of love is a gift of a true
independence.  So, a God who is loving will endow his creation
with its own due freedom, its own due independence.  But,
independence by itself can easily degenerate into simply licence
and chaos.  However God is not only loving, he is faithful.  And
the God who is faithful will surely endow his creation also with
the gift of reliability.  Yet reliability by itself can easily
rigidify into a merely mechanical world.  I believe that the
Christian God, who is both loving and faithful, has given to his
creation the twin gifts of independence and reliability, which
find their reflection in the fruitful process of the universe
through the interplay between happenstance and regularity,
between chance and necessity.  That would be my re-interpretation
of this insight into the fruitful physical process.
     There is a second thing I want to say, and it's this: many
people have a picture of the physical world which is very
outdated.  The great triumphs of the science in the eighteenth
century, and the further discoveries of the nineteenth century,
encouraged a view of the physical world as if it were in some
sense mechanical, a rather rigid and deterministic world.
Actually, we've always known that can't be right, because we've
always known as an absolutely basic fact of human nature that we
have the experience of choice and responsibility.  In the
twentieth century we have made further scientific gains and
twentieth-century science has seen the death of a merely
mechanical view of the world.  In part, that is due to the cloudy
fitfulness of quantum theory lurking at the atomic and sub-atomic
roots of the world.  But I think, more importantly still, it is
also due to another unexpected insight of science gained in the
last thirty - forty years.  Even the physics of the everyday
world, even the physics of Newton, is not as mechanical as Sir
Isaac and his followers would have thought it to be.  That's a
very surprising discovery.  Those of us who learned classical
physics, learned the subject by thinking about certain tame,
predictable systems, like a steadily ticking pendulum.  That's a
very simple robust system.  If you take a pendulum and slightly
disturb it, or you are slightly ignorant about how it is moving,
the slight disturbance only produces slight consequences, the
slight ignorance only produces slight errors in your estimation
of how it will behave.  We thought the everyday Physical world
was all like that.  It was tame, it was predictable, it was
controllable - in a word, it was mechanical.  Now, we've
discovered that, in fact, almost all the everyday physical world
is not like that at all.  Almost all of the everyday physical
world is so exquisitely sensitive that the smallest disturbance
produces quite uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences.
There are very many more clouds than clocks around.  This is the
insight that is rather ineptly named chaotic dynamics.  It came
as a very great surprise to us.   It is not altogether
astonishing that the discovery was first made in relation to
attempts to make models of the earth's weather systems.  In the
trade it is sometimes called the butterfly effect: that the great
weather systems of the earth are so sensitive to individual
circumstance that a butterfly stirring the air with its wings in
Beijing today will have consequences for the storm systems over
London in a month's time.  Now, that world - that exquisitely
sensitive world - is an intrinsically unpredictable world.  We
can't know about all those butterflies in Beijing.  So we've
learned that the physical world, whatever it is, it certainly
isn't mechanical, even at the everyday level.  It is something
more subtle and more supple than that.  To do justice to the full
development of the argument, I'd need to say a good many more
things, but I think already one can see the beginnings of a
picture of the physical world that is unpredictable in detail and
open to the future.  That is a gain for science.  Science begins
to describe a world which is sufficiently flexible in its
development, a world of true becoming, of which we can consider
ourselves as inhabitants.  The future is genuinely new, not just
a rearrangement of what was there in the past.  In such a world
of true becoming, with its open future, we can begin to
understand our own powers of agency, our own powers to act and
bring things about.  I would want to say also that such a
physical world is one which, in my view, is capable also of being
open to God's providential interaction and his agency in the
world.  So that whole picture of the physical world has been
loosened up.  It is much more hospitable to the presence of both
humanity and divine providence than would have seemed conceivable
a hundred years ago.
     It is time for me to come to an end.  I'd like to finish
with a quotation which in many ways summarizes for me what I'm
trying to do in my own intellectual exploration as someone who is
both a physicist and a priest.  You see, I want to hold these two
parts of me together, not without puzzles, of course, but I hope,
without dishonesty, and without compartmentalism.  I don't want
to be a priest on Sundays and a physicist on Mondays.  I've tried
this evening to show one or two examples of how science and
theology interact positively to help each other, how religious
belief is possible with integrity in an Age of Science.  So let
me end with one of my favourite quotations from a great Thomist
thinker of this century, Bernard Lonergan.  He once said this:
'God is the all sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture
glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of eureka'.  I like that very
much.  The search for understanding, which is so natural to a
scientist is, in the end , the search for God.  That is how
religion will continue to flourish in this Age of Science.