Evolution—Part 4 on John Polkinghorne

As a physicist, John Polkinghorne doesn’t pretend to know too much about evolution. From the vantage point of physics, however, he is able to offer some helpful perspectives.

Polkinghorne accepts evolution. As a scientist he finds no difficulty with a material explanation of God’s creation of life. After all, God holds the planets in place through gravity. He makes light through a nuclear explosion. Why should he not, if he likes, create life through “the shuffling explorations of possibility, which we choose to call ‘chance.’“ [Beyond Science, 77] On the contrary, if evolution is the way in which God created the diversity of life, then Polkinghorne looks for ways in which evolution illuminates God’s work and ultimately God himself.

Evolution suggests a God working less like an engineer, designing a blueprint of the giraffe’s neck from the beginning, than a creator using materials and processes that are naturally fruitful. He is more a gardener than an architect. He does sculpture with wind and water, rather than steel. God’s creation is dynamic. It tends, over vast stretches of time, to extend itself into ever-greater articulation, variety and beauty. Does this vision of God diminish his power and majesty? Not according to Polkinghorne.

On the other hand, Polkinghorne knows that scientists are apt to get carried away with the overarching significance of their discoveries—to overinflate their universality. Thus, physicists after Newton were convinced that they understood precisely how matter moved and interacted. In theory, if they had perfect information about every atom in the universe, they could perfectly predict everything that would happen.  In the broader culture Newton’s discoveries resulted in a materialistic chauvinism, likening the universe to a watch. Fate worked like clockwork, and human freedom was an illusion. This is the “modernism” that “postmodernism” put post to.

More than 200 years passed before physicists realized that Newton had not understood everything—that the clock of the universe was in fact a very odd timepiece. We cannot conceptualize how it works at all. We can only describe it using very advanced mathematical equations. Its gears operate by probability, not linear necessity. The rationalistic modernism of western civilization began to unravel at about the same time that Newton’s physics did.

Polkinghorne gently suggests that the great discoveries of biology in the past 150 years—and he agrees they are great—may be exaggerated in a similar way. Thus Richard Dawkins, an outstanding biologist, becomes convinced that his understanding of genetic destiny has triumphed over the shallow insights of non-biologists in philosophy and cosmology.

Polkinghorne thinks that evolution explains a lot, uncovering “an astonishing drive to fruitfulness” in the world God has made. Polkinghorne does not, however, think that evolution tells the whole story. For one thing, it struggles to explain phenomena like consciousness, beauty, ethics, literature, art, religion, and science. Survival does not seem enhanced by any of these. Evolutionists may attribute them to accidental impulses left over from some primitive survival tactic, but that hardly seems like an adequate explanation for Van Gogh. “Darwinian ideas provide partial insight into the developing history of a fruitful world but it is certainly not known that they tell the whole story.” [Beyond Science, 79] Just as quantum physics ultimately provided a much subtler account of matter and energy, so some future understanding may enhance what we have learned about biological life through evolution.

However, Polkinghorne does not make too much of that future possibility. He is more interested in understanding the meaning of what we already know. Taking evolution just as we presently understand it today, Polkinghorne makes the point that evolution is not simply the story of chance. It is the story of chance operating within the laws of physical necessity. That necessity is astonishingly finely tuned.

“You cannot, if you want to fulfill the role of Creator, simply bring into being more or less any old world and just wait a few billion years for something interesting to happen…. The interplay of chance and necessity requires the necessity to have a very special form if anything worthy (by our standards) to be called ‘life’ is to emerge. It is this surprising conclusion that has been called the Anthropic Principle.” [Beyond Science, 81]

You can let “chance” whack the balls on a billiard table for a very long time, and you will never get anything interesting. It requires some very special conditions for those billiard balls to start spelling out words.

In my next post, I’ll go into more detail.

Tags: creation, evolution, John Polkinghorne, Newtonian physics, postmodernism, quantum mechanics, Richard Dawkins