Science in Christian Perspective
ACCEPTANCE ADDRESS FOR THE TEMPLETON PRIZE 1978
THOMAS F. TORRANCE
Professor of Christian Dogmatics
Edinburgh
University, England
From: JASA 31 (June 1979): 102-105.
"The objective of the Templeton Foundation Prize is to stimulate the knowledge and love of God on the port of mankind everywhere ... there has been a long departure, at least in Western culture, from the last synthesis when religious knowledge and scientific knowledge were organically related . . . . The Templeton Foundation Prize serves to stimulate this quest for deeper understanding and pioneering breakthrough in religions knowledge by calling attention annually to the achievements that are being made in this area." (From "The Objectives," Program for the Sixth Presentation of The Templeton Foundation Prize far Progress in Religion at Guildhall, London, March 21, 1978.)
The donor of the Templeton prize is John M. Templeton, a member of the ASA since 1975, a graduate of Yale in economics and of Oxford in law. He holds honorary degrees from Beaver College and Wilson College. An elder in the United Presbyterian Church, Dr. Templeton lives in Nassau, Bahamas.
The Templeton Prize for 1978 was awarded to Professor Thomas F. Torrance, Professor of Christian Dogmatics at Edinburgh University. Professor Torrance is the author of Theological Science; Space, Time and Incarnation; and Gad and Rationality, all published by Oxford University Press; Evrdmans published a collection of his works in Space, Time and Resurrection. In August 1979, the University of Virginia Press in Charlottesville, Virginia 22903, will publish The Ground and Grammar of Theology. On October 16, 1978, Professor Torrance spoke at Princeton Theological Seminary on "Christian Theology in the Context of Scientific Revolution" and at a Forum sponsored by the American Scientific Affiliation and Oxford University Press.
In order to acquaint the readers of the journal ASA with Professor Torrance, we reprint here his acceptance speech for the Templeton Prize.
Your Grace, Dr. and Mrs. Templeton, Eminent Judges of The Templeton Foundation,
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you greatly honoured and humbled
by the judgment which makes me the recipient this year of The
Templeton Foundation
Prize for Progress in Religion. No one engaged in thinking out the
interrelations
of theological science and natural science could be more encouraged than I am
by this international recognition of what I have been trying to do, although I
know that my work falls short of what it ought to be. But the award in the area
of human inquiry into the relation of the creation to the Creator focuses the
spotlight on the point where before the astonishing nature of the universe as
it is revealed in scientific inquiry I am overwhelmed with awe and wonder of a
profoundly religious kind in which
my prime thought is of praise and glory to God the Father Almighty, the Maker
of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.
When I look at the sky, which you have made, at the moan and the stars, which you set in their places
what is man, that you think of him;
mere man, that you care for him (Psalm 8:3, 4)
How often those words from the ancient Psalm of Israel have echoed in
our thoughts
as the incomprehensible immensity of the universe began to be disclosed to the
inquiries of our astronomers! Vast as our solar system is, the sun is only one
star among the 100 thousand million stars that make up our own galaxy which we
call The Milky Way. The Milky Way is so
immense that light travelling at the rate of approximately 186,000
miles a second
would take 100,000 years to pass from one end of it to the other. But the Milky
Way is only one galaxy among at least 100 million similar systems of stars far
beyond it. But what is also staggering is that this universe
comprising all these
galaxies, is expanding at the rate of more than 160,000 miles a second. What is
man, mere man, in the face of this incomprehensible immensity, that God should
think of him and care for him?
And now, as if in answer to that question, our astronomers have come tip with
something which to me is even more breath-taking in its implications:
the narrow
margin of possibility which all this allows for the rise of
intelligent life anywhere
in the universe. I refer here to the F. W. Angel Memorial Lecture delivered by
Sir Bernard Lovell in Newfoundland in October 1977, in which he asked: Why is
the universe expanding so near the critical rate to prevent its
collapse? If the
universe had begun to expand in the first few minutes after the
explosion of its
original incredibly dense state by a rate slower than it did by a
minor difference
it would have collapsed back again relatively quickly. But if the expansion of
the universe had been different only by a tiny fraction one way or
the other from
its actual rate human existence would evidently have been impossible. 'But our
mearureineuts', Sir Bernard declared, 'narrowly define one such universe which
had to be that particular universe if it was ever to he known and comprehended
by an intelligent being.'
All this seems to say two things. First, this vast universe is the
kind of universe
it is because it is necessary for the existence of man: somehow man
and the universe
are profoundly bracketed together. Many years ago when Einstein first
formulated
the theory of general relativity Hermaon Weyl pointed out that since
all things,
bodies in motion and space and time, are ultimately defined by
reference to light,
light occupies a unique metaphysical place in the universe. But now even from
the way that astrophysical science is developing it appears that man occupies
a unique metaphysical place in the universe. It is in this direction
that science
was pointed by Professor John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton in a
lecture he gave
in 1973 in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Copernicus,
which he entitled 'The Universe as Home for Man', And it is much the same theme
which Sir John Eccles has taken up recently in his Gifford Lectures
in Edinburgh.
Secondly, the fact that the universe has expanded in such a way that
the emergence
of conscious mind in it is an essential property of the universe, must surely
mean that we cannot give an adequate account of the universe in its astonishing
structure and harmony without taking conscious mind into account,
that it, without
including conscious mind as an essential factor in our scientific
equations. That
is a point that Schrodinger made as long ago as 1958 in his Cambridge lectures
on 'Mind and Matter', and which Sir John Eccles took up in his work
'Facing Reality'
in 1970. If this is the case, as I believe it is, then natural
science is on the
verge of opening itself out towards higher levels of reality in a movement of
wonder and awe in which our increasing awareness of the limitations
of science-the
theme of Sir Bernard Lovell's Presidential lecture to the British
Association for the Advance of Science in 1974-is matched by our awareness that
as we probe into the intrinsic order of the universe we are in touch
with a depth
of intelligibility which reaches indefinitely beyond what our finite minds can
comprehend. I cannot but recall here those sentences of Einstein in
which he spoke
of 'that humble attitude of mind towards the grandeur of reason
incarnate in existence,
and which, in its profoundest depths is inaccessible to man' (Out of My Later
Years, p. 33), and of 'the rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law,
which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all
systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly
insignificant reflection'
(The World as I See it. p.28).
To all this theological science presents a complementary account, for
this universe
of space and time explored by natural science, far from being alien,
is the universe
in which God has planted us. He created the universe and endowed man with gifts
of mind and understanding to investigate and interpret it. Just as he made life
to reproduce itself, so he has made the universe with man as an
essential constituent
of it, in such a way that it can bring forth and articulate knowledge
of itself.
Our scientific knowledge of the universe as it unfolds its secrets to our human
inquiries is itself part of the expanding universe. Regarded in this light the
pursuit of natural science is one of the ways in which man, the child of God,
pursues his distinctive function in the creation. That is how, for
example, Francis
Bacon at the outset of our modern scientific era understood the work of human
science as a form of man's obedience to God. Science properly pursued in this
way is a religious duty. Man as scientist can be spoken of as the
priest of creation
whose office it is to interpret the books of nature written by the
finger of God,
to unravel the universe in its marvellous patterns and symmetries, and to bring
it all into orderly articulation in such a way that it fulfils its proper end
as the vast theatre of glory in which the Creator is worshipped and hymned and
praised by his creatures. Without man nature is dumb, but it is man's part to
give it word, to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to
the glory and majesty of the living God.
Space and Time
This is the universe of space and time through which God has also
revealed himself
personally to man in historical dialogue with the human race, which
has involved
the establishment of communities of reciprocity in which his Word is
intelligibly
mediated to us and knowledge of God becomes communicable through Holy
Scriptures.
But since all this takes place within the created universe of space and time,
and space and time are the bearers of all rational order within the universe,
it is in and through this universe as its orderly connections are
unfolded under
man's scientific investigations that we are surely to develop and express our
knowledge of God mediated through his Word. The natural scientist and
the theologian
are both at work within the same space-time structures of the
universe and under
the limits of their boundary conditions. The natural scientist
inquires into the
processes and patterns of nature, and man himself is a part of nature; and the
theologian inquires of God the Creator of na
ture and the source of its created rationalities, to which man also
belongs. Thus
theological science and natural science have their own proper and distinctive
objectives to pursue, but their work inevitably overlaps, for both respect and
operate through the same rational structures of space and time, while
each develops
special modes of investigation, rationality and verification in accordance with
the nature and the direction of its distinctive field. But since each
is the kind
of thing it is as a human inquiry because of the profound correlation between
human knowing and the space-time structures of the creation, each is
in its depth
akin to the other.
Regarded in this way natural science and theological science are not opponents
but partners before God, in a service of God in which each may learn from the
other how better to pursue its own distinctive function, how better
to be natural
science or how better to be theological science. This is a relationship which
is not onesided but mutual, for natural science has actually learned far more
from theological science than is generally realised. In a lecture I gave last
July in New York to the International Institute of Theoretic Sciences I showed
how three of the most basic ideas of modern natural science, which
have come very
much to the front since general relativity, go back to definite
roots, and indeed
derive from Christian sources in Alexandria as Greek theologians from
the fourth
to the sixth century thought out the relation between the Incarnation and the
Creation and reconstructed the foundations of ancient science and culture. But
let me give you today a different example, taken from James Clerk
Maxwell, whose
death a hundred years ago we commemorate this year. The distinctive idea which
he used in developing his celebrated field theory which has had such a powerful
impact on modern science, not least upon the thought of Einstein, Clerk Maxwell
gained as a student in Edinburgh University not so much from his
classes in physics
but from Sir William Hamilton's lectures in metaphysics, an idea
which had a theological
as well as a philosophical root. It is crossfertilisation of this kind which is
to be found behind some of the most outstanding advances in human
knowledge. But
the great day for creative integration between apparently separate or opposing
disciplines such as natural science and theological science, lies not behind us
but ahead of us. This kind of dialogue and exchange in thought is now possible
in a new and exciting way because of far-reaching change that has been going on
in the foundations of knowledge in which both science and theology
have been sharing
in different ways.
Since it is this deepening co-ordination in understanding between
natural science
and theological science that I have tried to serve, and which the
Templeton Foundation
has so handsomely recognised, it may be of interest if I indicate briefly how
I regard this change in scientific activity which makes such
co-ordination possible.
Fundamental Principle
The fundamental principle that I have been concerned with is a very simple one,
but its implications are deep and far-reaching when worked out
consistently over
the whole range of human knowledge. We know things in accordance with
their natures,
or what
they are in themselves; and so we let the nature of what we know determine for
us the content and form of our knowledge. This is what happens in our ordinary
everyday experiences and knowledge, when, for example, we treat trees
in accordance
with their nature as trees and not as rocks, or treat cows in accordance with
their nature as cows and not as horses, or treat human beings in
accordance with
their nature as persons and not as things. Science in every field of our human
experience is only the rigorous extension of that basic way of
thinking and behaving.
This is a way of understanding scientific activity which is much more
appropriate
to the complexity and richness of nature as it becomes disclosed to us through
the great advances of the special sciences, than that to which we
became accustomed
within the compass of a mechanistic universe and its rigid
instrumentalism. This
is particularly evident in the field of biology where advance has
been obstructed
through reduction of organismic relations into mechanistic concepts.
Nature must
be respected and courted, not imposed upon. We must let it develop and flower,
as it were, under our investigations if we are really to know
something in accordance
with what it is in itself, and not simply along the lines of its
artificial reaction
to our tormenting distortion of it. Science is not, therefore, something to be
set against our ordinary and natural experience in the world, but on
the contrary
a development and a refinement of it, with a deeper penetration into
the natural
coherence and patterns already embedded in the real world and already governing
our normal behaviour day by day.
All this applies as much in our relations with God as in our
relations with nature
or with one another. There is no secret way of knowing either in science or in
theology, but only one basic way of knowing which naturally develops different
modes of rationality in natural science and in theological science because the
nature of what we seek to know in each is differentand that is a
difference which
we are rationally and scientifically obliged to respect. Thus it
would be unscientific
to transfer from one field to another the distinctive mode of rationality that
develops within it. Just as it would be irrational to try to know a person by
subjecting his physical existence to chemical analysis or to treat a chemical
substance as though it were a human being and try to talk to it and listen to
it, so it would be irrational to look for God through a telescope or treat him
like a natural process, as irrational as it would be to use God as a stopgap in
the formation of some hypothesis to explain a set of physical
connections in nature.
In each field of inquiry, then, we must he faithful to what we seek
to know, and
act and think always in a relation of relentless fidelity to it. This is why we
cannot oppose natural science and theological science as though they could or
had to contradict one another, but rather regard them as applying the one basic
way of knowing faithfully to their respective fields and seek to coordinate the
knowledge they yield through the appropriate modes of inquiry and thought they
develop.
Changes
In recent years the increasing fidelity of science to the nature of things has
resulted in a number of changes which are proving to be highly significant for
the
unification of knowledge in overcoming the split between the natural
and the human
sciences and between both and theological science. Let me refer to
four of these
changes.
1. Science has been leaving behind its abstractive character, in which through
a predominantly ohservationalist approach it tended to tear the surface pattern
of things away from its objective ground in reality, as though we could have no
knowledge of things in themselves or in their internal relations but
only in their
appearances to us. That abstractive method involved the damaging bifurcation in
nature with which the deep splits in our modern culture are associated. But now
all that is being cut back, as in sheer faithfulness to things as they actually
are in themselves science is concerned to understand the surface
patterns of things
in the light of the natural coherences in which they are actually embedded, and
therefore operates with the indissoluble unity of form and being, or
of theoretical
and empirical elements in human knowledge. Here we have a reconciling force in
the depths of scientific knowledge which cannot help but heal the breaches that
have opened out in our culture. This is a reconciliation in which theological
science can not only share but to which it can make a creative
contribution.
2. The great era of merely analytical science is now coming to an end, for the
new science, if I can call it that, starting from a unitary approach operates
with an integration of form which transcends the limits of analytical methods
and their disintegrating effects. Atomistic thinking is replaced by relational
thinkingnowhere is that more true than in the development of high
energy physics
and particle theory, in which many of the so-called particles are not discrete
particles but energy knots in the fields of force between the
stronger particles.
Here we have a model of onto-relational thinking with which Christian theology
has long been familiar, out of which, for example, there came the
concept of the
person. But let us look at the change in another way. Merely analytical science
has had great difficulty in coping with the problem of how to think
together being
an event or the geometrical and the dynamic aspects of nature, such
as the particle
and the field in light theory or position and momentum in quantum
theory together.
Although Einstein failed to develop a unified field theory which
would transcend
the divergent corpuscular and undulatory theories of light, he
insisted that any
real description of nature in its internal relations must involve the unity of
the particle and the field, as indeed Faraday had already indicated in the last
century. As I understand it this is the stage which high energy physics has now
reached. But in Christian theology this stage had already been reached by Karl
Barth 40 years ago when with herculean effort he brought together the ancient
emphasis upon the being of God in his acts and the modern emphasis
upon the acts
of God in his being, and thus integrated in a remarkable way the whole history
of Christian thought. It is integrative thinking of this kind,
whether in natural
or in theological science, that is bound to have the greatest effect
in the future
upon all our human knowledge.
3. One of the most startling developments in recent science is the success with
which scientists like Katsir and Prigogine have wrestled with the
problem of how
to relate the so-called random elements in nature to the laws of thermodynamics
which as classically formulated hold only within closed systems.
Katsir tragically
lost his life in the Lods airport massacre a few years ago, but Prigogine has
recently been given the Nobel prize for work in which he has applied the laws
of thermodynamics to open or non-equilibrium systems. It is difficult to grasp
all that this means, but what does seem clear to me is that the old
way of thinking
in terms of the couplets chance and necessity, uncertainty and determinism must
now be replaced by a new way of thinking in terms of spontaneity and
open-structured
order, for what is revealed to us is an astonishing spontaneity in nature which
yields a dynamic kind of order with an indefinite range of
intelligibility which
cries out for completion beyond the universe to our natural
scientific inquiries.
Theologically speaking, what we are concerned with here is an understanding of
the spontaneity and freedom of the created universe as grounded in
the unlimited
spontaneity and freedom of God the Creator. Here natural science and
theological
science bear closely upon one another at their boundary conditions, and what is
needed is a more adequate doctrine of creation in which knowledge
from both sides
of those boundary conditions can be co-ordinated.
4. Science has been moving away from a flat understanding of nature to one that
is characterised by a hierarchy of levels or dimensions. Science of this kind
is concerned to discover the relations between things and events at different
levels of complexity. It has the double task of penetrating into a new kind of
connection and of lifting up the mind to a new level where we can apprehend and
bring that new kind of connection to appropriate formulation. The universe is
not flat but is a stratified structure, so that our science takes the form of
an ascending hierarchy of relations of thought which are open upward
in a deeper
and deeper dimension of depth but which cannot be flattened downward by being
reduced to connections all on the same level. The old-fashioned
science that tried
to reduce everything to hard causal connections in a rigidly
mechanistic universe
damaged the advance of knowledge in all the higher levels with which
we are concerned
in our culture, but that is now going and the new science gives ample room for
the human sciences and the sciences of the spirit, and all sciences concerned
with living connections, within the framework of an open-structured,
dynamic universe
in which the human person is not suffocated but can breathe freely transcendent
air, and yet be profoundly concerned with scientific understanding of the whole
complex of connections that make up our universe. No one has pioneered this way
of heuristic thinking in science more than Michael Polanyi whose
thought reveals
an unrivalled subtlety and delicacy in showing how the different
levels of human
understanding are coordinated in such a semantic focus that meaning is brought
back to our world with new force and direction, for here instead of fragmenting
in disintegrating specializations the whole enterprise of science recovers in
depth and breadth an uplifting unitary outlook that begins to match
the character
of the universe itself, and indeed the relation of the universe to
God its transcendent
Creator and Sustainer.
It is more and more clear to me that, under the providence of God,
owing to these
changes in the very foundations of knowledge in which natural and theological
science alike have been sharing, the damaging cultural splits between
the sciences
and the humanities and between both and theology are in process of
being overcome,
the destructive and divisive forces too
long rampant in world-wide human life and thought are being
undermined, and that
a massive new synthesis will emerge in which man, humbled and awed by
the mysterious
intelligibility of the universe which reaches far beyond his powers, will leans
to fulfil his destined role as the servant of divine love and the
priest of creation.