Polkinghorne on Natural Theology:
Similar to William Paley (1743-1805), the new natural theology argues from design. God is the sustainer of the world, Whose faithful will for Creation is expressed in those patterns of regularity found through scientific inquiry. Polkinghorne recognizes that “natural theology is valuable, but it can only take us so far” (Polkinghorne, Creation and the Structure of the Physical World). If scientists, like Paul Davies, claim that physics provides a road to God, then, at the most, they arrive at a divine mathematician or a grand intelligence, but they detect no sign of the personal God of the Jews and Christians. The limited investigation of the natural sciences can only yield limited insight. If one wants to encounter the God and Father of Jesus Christ, one cannot stay with scientific investigation, but must pursue that matter on a different course. The aim of natural theology cannot be a demonstration of the divine, but it is valuable in pointing to the divine and “affording insight into his creation” (Polkinghorne, Science and Creation). The Christian God has to be sought by other means.
According to Polkinghorne, “natural theology may be defined as the search for the knowledge of God by the exercise of reason and the inspection of the world” (Polkinghorne, Science and Creation). Polkinghorne is aware that some might deny the possibility of such knowledge. Yet he is convinced that the world is not just a natural theater in which individual revelatory acts take place. If the Judeo-Christian tradition is true, then the world is God’s Creation, and thereby also potentially a vehicle for God’s self-disclosure. God may be found in the general as well as in the particular. Though natural theology may only help in discerning something like a Supreme Being or an absolute Nature, such insights should not be despised. While there is more to the structure of matter than a chemist can tell us, it would be foolish to refuse chemistry’s assistance if we want to know what the physical world is made of. Conversely, if we want to get the total picture, we cannot just talk about the world as a carrier of divine significance and the expression of God’s purpose. Unless we present a lifeless theology, these claims must be fleshed out with the facts that science has adduced.
Not surprisingly, Polkinghorne affirms that “science and theology have a fraternal relationship and they are complementary, rather than antithetic, disciplines. Yet each surveys the one world of experience from its own perspective and therefore there are possible points of contact, or even conflict, between them” (Polkinghorne, Science and Creation). Polkinghorne suggests that “there is an inescapable interaction between science and theology, as the whole of intellectual history from Copernicus through Darwin to the present day makes abundantly clear” (Polkinghorne, Creation and the Structure of the Physical World). This history is by no means one of continual warfare, as portrayed often by historians. Polkinghorne even concedes that “the two disciplines need each other” (Polkinghorne, Creation and the Structure of the Physical World). For one, if theology is to take seriously its own claim that the world is God’s Creation, it must be open to learn from science what that world is actually like. Conversely, if science refuses to engage in dialogue with theology, it does not allow for an explanation of the world more profound than that which science itself can provide. Therefore, Polkinghorne concludes that: “Religion without science is confined; it fails to be completely open to reality. Science without religion is incomplete; it fails to attain the deepest possible understanding” (Polkinghorne, Science and Creation).
Polkinghorne does not imply that science can only go so far, while theology must pick up the rest. Any question posed by science can in principle also be answered by science. In that sense, science does not require any assistance from theology. If we would insist on that, we would again revert back to the era of the God-of-the-gaps. Similarly, theology is also concerned with understanding its own phenomena. Here, science is in no position to endorse or deny the claims of theology. Were it otherwise, we would return to nineteenth-century scientism, when science staked out the territory in which theology could still move. Both science and theology have their own degree of autonomy.
Yet both theology and science cover a nearly identical territory: the world and everything that is within it. In researching that area, “science is broadly concerned with process, with asking the question how things happen,” while theology “is broadly concerned with meaning and purpose, with asking the question why things happen” (Polkinghorne, Reckonings in Science and Religion). In pursuing these two different, yet to some extent consonant, questions, theology can provide for science answers to “those meta-questions which arise from science but which are not themselves scientific in character” (Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality). This means that theology is deepening the results of science to allow for an ultimate quenching of the thirst for an understanding, which science, as a limited body of knowledge, with a limited area of investigation, cannot provide by itself. On the other hand, science can tell theology “what the physical world is actually like” (Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality). If theology really wants to advance a doctrine of Creation, it must take account of the history of the universe and those facets of that history which science has been able to adduce.
We are living in a period of a revival of natural theology, though in a form revised from its previous periods of flourishing. The new natural theology is more modest in its claims than was the old. It speaks of satisfying insights, rather than “proofs” of God. It points, not to occurrences such as the coming to be of life … but to the basic structure of the physical world, which is the ground of the possibility of any such occurrence (Polkinghorne, Reckonings in Science and Religion).
Polkinghorne is aware that the new interest in natural theology stems mainly from the insights of scientists, while theologians have little interest in that area (Polkinghorne, Creation and the Structure of the Physical World). Most theologians are rather ignorant of what modern science has to say and, educated in the spirit of neo-Reformation theology, are uneasy about the whole enterprise of a “natural theology.” Therefore, they would rather stay within their own area of concern, divine revelation. But Polkinghorne, Arthur Peacocke (1993), Ian Barbour (1990), and others like Nancey Murphy and George Ellis (1996), are not at all interested in reviving the old idea of a God-of-the-gaps, competing with science in explaining the natural world. Instead, they advocate a new and revised natural theology, more modest in its claims that the old one, which wanted to prove certain things, including the existence of God. In contrast, they seek to persuade “that God provides a sufficient reason which can make satisfying sense of the remarkable world revealed through our investigation” (Polkinghorne, Creation and the Structure of the Physical World).