Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 12 May 2002

One World

John Polkinghorne is a former academic physicist who decided to abandon honest living, become a Christian priest and theologian, and live off widow’s mites. Among his new endeavours is the writing of fatuous books that he readily gets published by Christian publishing houses especially as he is a rare beast—a clever scientist and also a Christian. Regrettably, as a Christian his main critical target is his fellow scientists whom he loves to insult in the patronizing books he writes for the benefit of juvenile clappies.

In one SPCK paperback called One World, Polkinghorne tries to tell us that theology is an equal study to science, both offering a view of the reality of the “One World”, which they treat in their different but equally valid ways. Needless to say, like all apologetic books, this is dishonest. All of these evangelical types put on their dog collars, real or imagined, and then feel free to lie their eye teeth out. In his very first sentence in the book, Polkinghorne writes:

My impression is that scientists are as likely to be religious believers as any other section of the community.

This sentence ought to be sufficient for anyone of a scientific bent to sling the book in the nearest dustbin. Theologians doubtless put their faith in impressions, having nothing better to work with, but scientists can test their impressions for veracity before they publish them publicly. Academics have access to extensive university resources, denied to ordinary punters, and can easily check whether their impressions are accurate or not.

Of course, Polkinghorne is suitably vague about who he means. The sentence must be intended to suggest to the reader that “the community” is the community at large in the modern liberal democracies that Polkinghorne lived and worked in. Unless it means this, the statement is pointless. If, for example, it meant the community of Catholic believers that he spent his time in church with, then it is hardly surprising.

So, he meant it to be the wider community. Yet, social studies have often been done on the religious beliefs of “sections of the community”, and Polkinghorne could have consulted any of them to find that his impression, however obtained, is false. One study in the USA found that scientists were about 25 times less likely to be religious than the average American, who is compulsively religious. The cleverer the scientists were, as measured by their eminence, the less likely they were to be religiously inclined.

What can we conclude? The kindest conclusion would be that Polkinghorne is naïve. He thinks he lives in a typical community when he has chosen people of similar beliefs to spend his time with. Polkinghorne is, however an FRS, a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honour a British scientist can receive. Such a man can hardly therefore be so naïve. Since he has retrained as an Anglo-Catholic priest and a theologian, we have to conclude that he has voluntarily become a liar for God, and begins his book, One World, with a lie to show he is serious about it. It makes it difficult for any discerning reader to respect anything in the book, and if they have the patience to persist, they find their judgement was right. In short passages, devoted to explaining a point in science, Polkinghorne’s old talent shines, but most of the rest is a feeble apology for theology and an even feebler attack on his old profession.

The only people who will like any of it are Christians who are notoriously uncritical when they read about Christ and God, and love to hear atheists put down. These Christians, you see, have a different impression from their hero, professor Polkinghorne. They see scientists as atheists and the enemy of Christianity—especially Catholics. Since they share the belief with Polkinghorne that a wafer biscuit becomes the flesh of a god in the act of the Catholic mass, they will have no trouble in believing anything that Polkinghorne tells them. None of his lies are as big as this one.

Trickery

Polkinghorne fully realizes that his move from physics to metaphysics looks peculiar and speaks of people viewing him with the “wariness appropriate to the sleight-of-hand artist”. Nevertheless, he tells us he can defend his position. All sleight-of-hand artists can! They prove it by sleight-of-hand to the satisfaction of the street corner crowds of oohers-and-aahers they attract. Christianity began in the same way 2000 years ago on the mean streets of Greek cities, and not one of them has ever felt any reason not to continue in the same mould as their originators. God plainly approves of their dishonesty.

Among his tricks, Polkinghorne claims that theology is a rational activity with phenomena to investigate and its own criteria of investigation. You could say the same about astrology, UFOlogy, racing tipsters, Barbara Thiering, Eric von Daniken and Graham Hancock, but who, other than fools, take them seriously? Polkinghorne says there is something “in religious experience which demands study and explanation”. That is true enough, but why is it theology that should study it, rather than psychiatry? The legendary basis of western religions can be studied by history and anthropology but the churches and biblicist historians and archaeologists have destroyed so much of the evidence and muddied the rest that it is hard to discover the truth unequivocally. Despite that, there is enough evidence shouting out that much of the basis of western religion is phony that only determined Christian ostriches will not see it. For those more open to truth, these AskWhy! pages offer fourteen megabytes of evidence that Christianity and Judaism is not what Jews and Christians think it is.

William Blake, when he was asked what he saw when the sun was rising, replied not a round disc of fire but the “innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ ” Polkinghorne declares that Blake’s view was “idiosyncratic”, yet it was for millennia not only the vision that people had of God but the actuality of God! It is from God perceived as the solar disc that almost all of the imagery of the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament comes in their references to God. The theologian, FRS, shows no signs of acknowledging this, but his purpose in life now is to persuade people that the Christian view of God is the proper one, whether history considers it to be something else or not.

Designer

Polkinghorne deals a blow to Creationists by freely accepting evolution, a position that any reputable scientist must adopt.

Darwin showed how competitive selection could sift favourable mutations from random variations, creating thereby the appearance of design.

Yet no designer was necessary. Paley had put forward the justification for God as the designer of Nature but this, apparently convincing, explanation of God, “on which the eighteenth century theologians had placed such great reliance, was found to be fatally flawed”. The Enlightenment showed that Laplace was right in that there was no need for the hypothesis of God, and people increasingly ceased to feel the need for it too.

Having admitted this, Polkinghorne tries to retrieve God through psychology and the principle of uncertainty! Only a rogue would try to find God in statistical mechanics or quantum statistics, but that seems to be what Polkinghorne wants to do. What is not strictly determinable but only statistically probable in some degree, suddenly becomes the realm of God. God is therefore randomness! Polkinghorne hastily says of his discovery, it is “no great cause for religious rejoicing”. Still, it is Polkinghorne’s justification for writing.

He begins in earnest by explaining the nature of science but has to be dishonest immediately, setting up straw dolls to knock over, as Christian apologists always do because they cannot answer their critics. The straw men are for the benefit of the Christian sheep, and anything will convince them.

Experimental testing verifies or falsifies the proposals offered by theory. Matters are then settled to lasting satisfaction; laws which shall never be broken are displayed for all to see.

Polkinghorne has to introduce eternity into his statements perhaps because it is the only thing Christians can understand, but by so doing falsifies them, and he has to pretend then that it is a popular view not his own. It is a popular view among Christians because they can refute it, but, as Polkinghorne knows, it is not true, and he is merely confirming the prejudices of his readers by using it thus.

A basis of Christian dislike of science is what Polkinghorne calls a “triumphalist point of view”. Any trumphalism in science is because it has taught us an immense amount and improved living standards for most in only 200 years, whereas Christianity taught us nothing, indeed kept us in ignorance for the remaining 1500 years, and kept Europe in abject poverty. In short, science works to our benefit, theology works to our detriment.

Piling on apologist ploy upon apologist ploy, Polkinghorne tries to imply that the successes of science are merely partial, and, in particular, they have not disproved religion. You do not disprove religion, you cure people of it. It has repeatedly been shown that religious people believe in the face of contrary evidence. Religious fantasy is always more real to the religious than reality. Religious people are therefore no more subject to persuasion that they are wrong than the man in the madhouse who thinks he is Napoleon. Both require psychological attention not logic. Polkinghorne is himself a prime example. Of course, in the modern age, in the UK at any rate, most religious people are quiescent, but elsewhere we have seen that all of them are not. Religion therefore can be an extremely serious delusion, and the fact that most religious people today are law-abiding should not fool us into forgetting the witch hunts, and the Inquisition.

Polkinghorne concludes this small section saying that the flight from religion at the Enlightenment was merely a “psychological effect” based on a distrust of non-scientific knowledge rather than “logical analysis”. We are kept waiting for the demonstration of this “knowledge” that is not scientific.

Objection Sustained

Revelling in his new role of theologian, Polkinghorne goes on cleverly spreading falsehoods by denying them. It is the “objection sustained” ploy. The thought is planted even though the author himself claims he does not accept it! Thus he paints a conventional picture of an anorak watching a pointer move across a scale until it gets to the point where his world shattering theory is proved. “Eureka!” Polkinghorne denies it, but he has reminded his reader of their prejudicial movie image of the scientist. He always looks like Einstein too, dishevelled and slightly insane.

In modern western society, when a large proportion of people have science lessons at school and go on to university where they must meet science students even if they are not scientists, everyone must know that experimental science is mainly excruciatingly tedious and laborious. Experimental runs have to be repeated incessantly, changing some variable a bit at a time, until a collection of data are put together after months or years that allow some conclusions to be drawn. Or in synthetic preparations, the scientist tries method after method to make his substance, but might never succeed. The quality that experimental scientists need above all is patience. Theoreticians like Polkinghorne might have a more inspired life, but they are the glamour boys, and there are fewer of them. Their problem is that their inspiration runs out at a fairly young age, and then they might as well retrain as theologians where a lack of inspiration is an advantage. If Polkinghorne’s readers had such images then they are too simple-minded to notice Polkinghorne’s refutations of them, so all he does is uphold them, as he knows.

Polkinghorne launches into a long example of how science is a mixture of theory and experiment in which each sometimes takes the lead, and in which even observations depend upon scientific constructs. Following Russell Hanson, he calls these “the spectacles behind the eyes”. Where is all this leading? He mentions David Bohm’s alternative explanation to the uncertainty principle, apparently wanting to suggest that what is accepted by science is nothing more than what is fashionable, or is a choice not rationally made. In fact one of the criteria used for choosing between alternative hypotheses is elegance—their beauty and economy. This has been found to be a valid criterion, but is also aesthetically pleasing. Pleasing theories are often right ones. It is probably a reflexion of the fact that Nature is herself elegant, rational, orderly, harmonious. The economy factor is a practical restraint as well as an aspect of elegance. Long drawn out theories are less easy to deal with and require too much time and resources to handle, so why choose one when a simpler alternative works as well?

Polkinghorne seems to think this is arbitrary, but it is a criterion that has always been used and so is part of the scientific method, and has been found to work. Such criteria confirm that Nature is orderly, so why are they arbitrary? Systems settle into the state of least potential energy, just as rainwater runs downhill to a lake or a sea where its gravitational potential energy is least. The harmony and simplicity of Nature seems to be a reflexion of this sort of principle.

Part of this harmony is that, like a jig-saw puzzle, putting a piece in its right place reveals clues to further answers. In other words, successful theorems are “fruitful”—they offer scope for yet more answers. So, the selection of theorems to test and the selection of alternative possibilities are not arbitrary at all. They follow rules that agree with experience, Nature and human aesthetics, and as a consequence they work in real life.

Of course, if we knew everything, there would be no puzzles remaining and no need for scientists, but we are just beginning to understand Nature, so there are myriads of puzzles yet to be solved, and it is far from certain that the phenomenon of fruitfulness does not generate more puzzles than successful hypotheses solve, albeit at more and more abstruse levels of understanding.

Polkinghorne highlights that quantum mechanics and relativity are two theories that are not yet reconciled. It is one of the places in science where there is a visible seam. Polkinghorne concludes:

Even pure theory is never exhaustively rational.

What though is irrational about using two perfectly good theories in their own spheres even though they have not yet been reconciled at their margins? Experience shows that one or other theory can be modified to produce the reconciliation, or better still that a fresh theory combines both. It is at the margins that discoveries are made. The fact that things remain as yet undiscovered does not mean the search for them is irrational. Obviously Polkinghorne knows this but it is Christians he wants to impress not scientists.

Polkinghorne, at best, is patronizing. He tells his readers that scientific method is not as simple as the moronic examples he cites as straw dolls, then proceeds to give more complicated examples why not. Presumably he gives moronic examples because he rates his readers as morons, but why then would they understand the hard ones? Is he defending science? Not at all. He is determined to show that it is personal fancy and not really rational. “Personal judgement”, he likes to call it, but his aim is to reassure his Christian readers that they do not need to fret over science, because it is the same at core as theology—arbitrary:

Once one has acknowledged the part that personal discrimination has to play in scientific endeavour, the whole enterprise may seem to have become dangerously creaky, its rationality diminished, or even destroyed, by the importation of acts of individual judgement, even if they are claimed to be validated by the eventual assent of the scientific community.

Here is the dishonesty of the gamekeeper turned poacher. Just how any human endeavour avoids personal discrimination is hard to know. The lynch mob might sweep you along with mob feelings but you do have the choice whether to reject them and go home peacefully rather than murdering someone. We all have to discriminate sometimes. A practice like science requires it in a high degree, but the poacher, FRS, tries to tell us that by choosing you are being “creaky” or “irrational”. He projects his new career values on to his old one. Even the validation by the scientific community is made to sound arbitrary. Arbitrary decisions are not likely to work in practice or be fruitful, as Polkinghorne knows, so what is he doing? He is being dishonest. Apologists for Christianity cannot avoid it.

He invokes Thomas Kuhn to back him up, but here too he is dishonest. Kuhn spoke of scientific “revolutions”—when ideas arise that peal the dry old skin from the cosmic onion to reveal a juicy new one. No scientist denies this process because all scientific knowledge is provisional—Polkinghorne likes to say “corrigible”. New techniques and discoveries give new information that sometimes challenge old ideas—notably at the boundaries of knowledge. When this happens, for a while there are scientists who defend the old skin, or scientific paradigm, as Kuhn called it, while others, usually younger ones challenge them, favouring the new skin. Kuhn said:

The proponents of two competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds.

Polkinghorne explains that the competing paradigms are incommensurable, having no point of contact or comparison. If Kuhn said this somewhere then he is plainly wrong, and Polkinghorne knows it because he adds:

If this were really so… there would be no rational grounds for preferring one to the other.

That indeed is the impression he wants to leave but the remnants of honesty left in him oblige him to admit that this is “greatly overdone”, and that Kuhn withdraws from this error in later writings. So, it is “objection overruled”, but he has left the impression of arbitrariness that he intended.

His aim all along can be nothing other than to confirm his audiences’ doubts about science. Science hurts their Christian sentimentalities and could damage their faith, so he undermines it to comfort and save them, thereby securing his St Peter’s Pass to Heaven, but he can only do so by dishonesty. He flicks around a few postmodern critics of scientific method like Paul Feyerabend and Andrew Pickering, half-heartedly being sympathetic to science, but affecting a false even handed-ness is an archetypal apologetic ploy, and that is what he seems to be doing. It should not need stating that no convinced Christian is fair. It therefore becomes an utter necessity in apologetics for them to seem that they are. This is Polkinghorne’s ploy here. A few favourable words about science makes the final judgement against it seem even-handed, and leaves the sheep feeling saintly.

Polkinghorne finally gets to the point. That personal judgement in science puts it on a par with aesthetical, ethical and religious thinking, all modes of thought considered inferior by the Enlightenment.

Reason has a broader base than corresponds to a totally specifiable method of verification.

Cosmic Onion

Polkinghorne admits that the nature of scientific progress means that “truth” is never certainly known. It is wrong to think that certainty is the immediate scientific goal. We might be able to peel off skins from the cosmic onion as long as we have the tools and motivation to do it, so all scientific conclusions, as stated above, are provisional or corrigible.

Our understanding of the physical world will never be total but can become progressively more accurate.

Once we got past the childhood of science, established scientific theories tend not to be proved wrong, but of limited scope. They are true, subject to certain conditions. Polkinghorne admits this only to reinforce the doubts about science in the minds of his sensitive little believers. Observations he tells them are never complete, so one day what has always been observed might not be. The purpose of this is plain enough for a Christian audience—it justifies miracles.

In science nothing can be verified beyond doubt, but that is no justification of miracles. Verification becomes a statistic rather than an absolute. What is absolute is falsification. A single contrary instance will falsify a hypothesis. That instance, however, is not a miracle. It is an opportunity for the diligent scientist to search for the cause of the violation of the previously held theorem. The research has the prospect of yielding new hypotheses and new discoveries.

The principle of falsification was formulated by Karl Popper, and now serves as a criterion of worth of a hypothesis. If a hypothesis cannot be falsified then it is worthless because it is arbitrary. My hypothesis that “Santa lives” is impossible to falsify so it is merely my irrational belief. Notionally, I could falsify, or even verify this particular example by getting hold of Santa and testing him for life, but finding him to test offers insurmountable problems. The reason is that he is a fiction, made up by the imagination, a figment. All such figments offer the same problems of falsification.

Providing that something can be falsified by observation, the lack of universal verification is not a criticism of science. The whole reason for devising laws from observations is to be able to predict accurately what will happen when the event is observed again. It is precisely because all possible observations cannot be made that laws are required to predict them. It is the success of scientific theories at predicting the outcome of unobserved events that shows science to be valid. When conditions are found under which a law begins to fail, then the scientist starts to get interested. It requires study and might yield a new law, or at least a correction to the old one.

Polkinghorne, to his credit, tells us that science is not merely about predicting but also about understanding. A hypothesis might successfully predict an outcome, but it is incomplete unless it also explains why. Some hypotheses are to help understanding rather than to predict something. The atomic theory postulates that atoms are little balls, and for many purposes helps understanding, and offers some predictions, but it is only a crude approximation. The preponderance in Nature of pentadactyl limbs suggests a Creator with only limited imagination, but is explained well by the idea that all such animals have evolved from a common predecessor. Yet evolution has little practical predictive value because human life is too short to observe it. However, evolution itself is satisfactorily explained by the double helix of DNA, and when the genome is fully worked out, that will have immense practical predictive value.

Polkinghorne believes the world is real and that science is by degrees genuinely approximating to it. He refutes idealism. We can imagine atoms as tiny balls and see what comes of it, but that is not what they really are and the hypothesis that they are soon breaks down. These are entities that we cannot picture properly because they are on a scale beyond our senses. When we extend our senses with scientific instruments we are still only getting images of the entities on that scale.

Atoms are found to be spherical but they are not miniscule billiard balls. Their edges are diffuse, and consist of electrons which make them repel other atoms that approach, except under certain conditions when they stick together and form a molecule. We can certainly use little coloured balls to represent atoms and join them together with sticks to get molecules but these are just models of a reality beyond our direct observation. It should be clear enough to anyone that a model is not real, but so long as it helps us understand what we cannot observe directly, and gives us predictions that we can verify by observation, then the model has value.

Polkinghorne’s account of science compared with aesthetics, ethics and religion, shows that it has many more checks and balances than the personal judgement that he wants to reduce it to. In the end he concedes that:

The personal element is less significant in science than in, say, judging the beauty of a painting, but it is not absent.

His backtracking might be the last vestiges of scientific honesty, but his aim is still to leave the impression that whatever has a personal element is subjective or arbitrary. He wants to bring science off its pedestal of “rational invulnerability” so that it is no longer superior to theology, for example. Even mathematics, he tells us, is not complete but depends on arbitrary axioms:

Even mathematics involves an act of faith.

This ignores the fact that mathematics is merely an amusement if it is not a tool of science that is ultimately true or false on the basis that it agrees with real experience. Abstruse forms of mathematics can be built on unusual axioms but sometimes when this has been done circumstances are found where the axioms are met by reality and the mathematics built on them produces results that fit that real system. Standard geometry is planar but axioms of geometry for curved surfaces can be formulated and are found to work. Sometimes a peculiar mathematics like quantum mechanics works for systems beyond our direct observations, implying that whatever axioms it is built on apply at that level of Nature and therefore tell us something about it.

Having defended science with the faintest of praise, Polkinghorne turns his attention to his new love, theology. Scientists, he says have ideas about theology that are “dangerously misleading”. He means ideas like: “the believer stands by his faith whatever the evidence against it”, and “religion is built on immutable dogma that purports to represent immutable truth”. God is never in the dock because the religious believer accepts any outcome, good or bad, as God’s will. This is one of religion’s main objectives—to keep people passive! Social studies show that it does this extremely successfully. If the government is benevolent and liberal then thank God for it. If the government is cruel and punitive, then it is God’s will. Accept it. The Jewish scriptures are chock full of examples. Heads! God wins! Tails! God wins! Or rather the people that spread the idea of God.

Respect

Polkinghorne says that religious understanding has to be recognized as having its own nature which has to be respected, but that is absurd, especially coming from a scientist. When do we decide not to respect something, and on what criteria? Should we respect David Icke, who seems to be trying to start a religion, and has a following already, and tells us that the British royal family are reptilian aliens dressed in human disguises? Should we believe the Heaven’s Gate sect, if any remain alive? Should we believe that millions of people are being abducted by aliens every night, that alien monsters are roaming our streets, or banshees or goblins, or demons?

Some beliefs do not merit respect. That is why it is ridiculous to legislate to protect beliefs in acts like the UK blasphemy laws that the government were intent on strengthening not long ago, when they should be abolishing them. Christians must know at heart that their beliefs are absurd, and that is why the are always forcing others to respect them.

Polkinghorne tries to identify the tested wisdom of science with the dogma of the church. All human activity has to begin with some axioms, and, for him, any will do! He thinks Maxwell’s equations are no different from the Ten Commandments, though he does not tell us which ten. Obviously, it does not matter. Doubtless anything could be accepted as a received wisdom but whatever is chosen has consequences. We could believe that people should eat their dead parents’ brains. Some primitive tribes had reasons for thinking they should, but they became plagued by BSE-like illnesses transmitted by prions or similar agents that warp the brain and cruelly incapacitate the person. All supernaturally-based religions have a similar effect, but not a physical one, a psychological one. Brains and reason are warped but not usually to the point of incapacity of the person, usually to the point of incapacity of someone else who disagrees.

If consequences are considered in what we believe then we are back to scientific criteria. Are the consequences desirable? Such questions can be answered. We have seen the consequences of Christian dogma in history. They cannot be said to be desirable.

What of the personal form of knowledge that comes through a single person, Polkinghorne wants to know. He calls it the “scandal of particularity”. He cites J S Bach. It is hard to get the apologist’s point. Bach produced beautiful music, but is music knowledge? How to write it is knowledge but what Bach makes is a commodity like a chair. People buy it for enjoyment. J S Bach and many other geniuses produced works that large numbers of other humans enjoy. Polkinghorne wants us to see the “spiritual masters” in the same way.

He picks a Jewish wandering carpenter as an example. Would he consider L Ron Hubbard, David Koresh or even Madame Blavatsky in the same way? What of the six English Messiahs in the book of that name by R Matthews? “Spiritual masters” are not producing works of art that can be independently assessed, but are claiming certain supernatural powers or revelations that you have to take on trust! That is the same as having faith! It is buying a pig in a poke, and is objectively assessed as a confidence trick or a delusion and not as a spiritual gift.

Polkinghorne wants us to accept that dogma is not immutable but is corrigible, like science, and is reviewed and corrected by each generation in the light of experience. What is corrigible however is merely how the fundamental dogmata—which are indeed immutable—are presented to the new generation of sheep. The generational review never goes so far as to declare the whole thing bunkum, and murderous bunkum at that, judging by the blood splattered history of Christianity. Is the dogma of the resurrection up for review? Indeed, is the entire historicity of the Christ up for review? Is God up for review? What Polkinghorne means is that the way these beliefs are spun by the theological spin-doctors is reviewed and nothing more.

What theologians want to do is to equate religious experience with sense experience. They are fond of citing A N Whitehead on this, as if it makes it true. It does for them, of course because Whitehead placed God at the center of his philosophy. They ought to cite Sigmund Freud because it is a psychological problem, not one equatable with science in any way. Polkinghorne is reported to have said:

A reason for taking the transcendental seriously begins with my own experience of prayer and worship. However fitful and elusive my experience of God may be, it is not to be denied.

Why is it not to be denied? How can a scientist say that something he admits to be “elusive” and “fitful” cannot be denied? Some people have an elusive and fitful illusion that something has moved in their peripheral vision. When they turn to see it, there is nothing there that could have moved. Doubtless these are fairies, or goblins, but even Polkinghorne will not think they are God. Yet whatever his elusive and fitful experience is, Polkinghorne takes it to be an experience of God. He is a scientist. What then is his basis for this conclusion? Polkinghorne is supposed to be one of God’s best qualified spokespeople, at least so far as the deputy Lord Mammon—aka Templeton—thinks, so why does his chief Lord only present Himself so elusively and fitfully?

It is certainly true that, if Polkinghorne says he has elusive and fitful experiences, that is not to be denied. It seems they occur during prayer and worship, which we must accept too, but Polkinghorne concludes therefore that the experience must be of God. As we saw, peculiar experiences are not unusual. Some are illusions, and some are emotions—not unusual because they are at all uncommon, but because they are difficult to control. Religious worship and prayer is meant to arouse peculiar emotions, and so it does, particularly among a sample of the population that have been indoctrinated into it from an early age, and an overlapping sample of the population who are psychologically susceptible to it. Perhaps these are bred from millennia of falling on their faces before some overlord, thereby keeping their heads, until today generations later the habit is no longer beneficial to life, but is so inbred into the psyche that it emerges anyway.

On the other hand, there are people who think they are Napoleon, and nor is their belief elusive or fitful, but is firm and continuous. Such a belief must be a better candidate for not denying than Polkinghorne’s feeble ones of God. Yet these people are locked up in asylums as being seriously deranged in their perceptions. The truth is that the delusion of God is acceptable in society, probably because for most people it is so fitful and elusive that it really does not matter much to them. Because Polkinghorne’s experience of God is like most people’s—it is practically non-existent—he was allowed to remain President of Queens College, Cambridge, instead of being the Pope of Devizes mental hospital.

Polkinghorne says we have to take religious experience seriously or finish up with an impoverished view of it. He cannot seem to understand, FRS or not, that what is rubbish deserves nothing better than an impoverished view, otherwise all of us would be wasting our time studying neurotic and deceitful claims instead of pursuing something useful. He has spoken of personal discrimination in science and this is where it starts. Should we accept the claims of serial murderers that they are following God’s own instructions whispered into their ears as a “still small voice?” Psychiatrists have taken what they say seriously and declare them insane. That is a better view than Polkinghorne’s who thinks we are impoverished if we do not believe them. Polkinghorne thinks that equally insane but less murderous people should be believed, and says that unless we do we cannot understand God!

The stronger the faith of Christians, the stronger is their self-delusion of an experience of God. That intelligent and well read people like Polkinghorne refuse to deny their absurdly subjective interpretation of their experiences shows what a serious delusion it is. They cannot see that their mind, like one’s senses, can play tricks, especially when there has been preceding indoctrination to encourage these baseless beliefs. In the modern world, it must be a serious delusion that someone will reject that their brain and senses are not perfect in favour of an unbudgeable belief in a figment.

Religious Experience

The sort of experiences he means when he lists them turn out to be more mundane than getting direct instructions from God. He knows that is a symptom of insanity and goes for less explicit feelings, which he lists as:

1. an encounter with a presence;
2. recognition of a unity with a transcending reality;
3. a feeling of reassuring purpose in the world;
4. a feeling of an ultimate significance in the world.

None of these suggest anything other than natural feelings. They are engendered in Nature and by Nature with no intervention of a supernatural or unnatural entity. The fact that these characteristics are not culturally conditioned shows them to be natural not supernatural. Supernatural experiences are culturally conditioned.

What is remarkable is that clever scientists like Polkinghorne want to see something unnatural in these feelings rather than something natural that might be worth investigating by the methods of science rather than the empty methods of theology. The study might tell us a great deal about ourselves and our relationship with Nature. The feeling sounds like a feeling of unity with Nature not with any figmentary God. To evolve successfully, we have developed a sense of individuality. This has been useful because it obliges the individual to fight for its own survival, rather than shrugging and saying, “Nature goes on. That is all that matters”.

The feelings Polkinghorne lists are the residual awareness that we are indeed of a oneness with the rest of life—with Nature’s kinunity! William James says the experience is of the oneness of the whole of Nature. Polkinghorne accepts that mystical experience is “the experience of unity with the ground of all being”, but he considers the “ground of all being” to be God when it is really the meta-organism that life is. Religious experience is that of the “unity of all being”. Others call it an experience of the Absolute, but by that they simply mean God. If mystical experience is an experience of humanity’s unity with God, then God is identically Nature.

Polkinghorne acknowledges that many people have experiences less intense than the mystical but similar in character. Observers of these things like Sir Alister Hardy (The Spiritual Nature of Man) beg the question of their nature by calling them “spiritual” or using other religious laden terms like “the Absolute”. A constant feeling of the mystical is a breakdown of the personality or the sense of individuality and becomes unbearable and distressing as the illness called schizophrenia. Theologians never consider this because it is too close to admitting that religious experience is a form of insanity. By so doing they miss the fact that there is a phenomenon important to us all that might, if controllable, be beneficial, but that needs scientific study not theology.

To be slipped a dose of LSD unaware of it can be scary, but under control can be pleasurable. Mystical experience might be the same. Schizophrenia, because it is not understood and apparently uncontrollable, gets mixed up with symptoms of panic, the need to flee and rage. If the unpleasant symptoms are controlled, are the ones that remain the archetypal religious experience? No one knows how to bring it on, and perhaps are scared to risk it, but if it could be controlled properly, it might be the sort of “religious experience” we all can enjoy. Theologians would not want that!

Mysteries of Theology

Polkinghorne now enters into the mysteries of theology, beginning, as they always do, with excuses about why it is all so difficult. Some of these difficulties are that God is beyond time and space. At the same time he is also in space! Not just in it, but immanent in it! An infinite being can do this trick because His love of humanity is kenotic—self-limiting! He said it was difficult! Of course, the scientist has no trouble in seeing that an infinite God of zero substance can have no trouble in fitting into a jam jar however small it is… but the theologian has to invent kenosis. Polkinghorne muses that:

The tension between God’s eternal nature and his involvement with the world, his timeless knowledge and acts of human choice is closely allied to an important element in human religious experience.

It is a “paradoxical element”, needless to say. God is working within you but there is only one person responsible for what emerges—you are! God can happily be dispensed with and nothing apparently will change because we are then obviously responsible for our own actions, as Christians say we are even though God is interfering. Indeed, many of us never even realized that we were not, or that God was secretly working inside us. Perhaps the world would be a better place if God stopped wasting his time working within us and set about working on important matters to us all that are outside us, such as saving the world from exploitation. No chance. The main exploiters are rich Christians and big donors to God’s churches. Herman Wouk quotes Rabbi Tarfon as saying the opposite and it sounds much more sensible to an Adelphiasophist:

The work is not yours to finish, but neither are you free to take no part in it.

Paradoxes are always explanations to Christians, and even former theoretical physicists will offer them as such. Whatever is incomprehensible is profound. In this case, Christians seem not to agree with their theologians because many of them accept no responsibility for what they do that is wicked because they blame the Devil for taking control of them to make them do it. Some, as we saw, even claim it is God who makes them, so they too reject the theologian’s explanation that we are responsible even when God’s work within us fails. All this paradoxical drivel has been around for so long that even responsible and intelligent people pander to it, even if they do not believe it. Polkinghorne shows that some still do.

Science and theology are kin! They are both trying to understand the world. Both are fallible and corrigible. Science has these features in trying to approximate to the world about us, so theology must have these features in trying to approximate to the supernatural world. Science responds to new discoveries in the world that we all live and die in, but how does theology make discoveries about life after death, or supernatural places like heaven and hell? Here is the source of the theologians’s trickery. For them, the supernatural is part of the world, but it is a part that does not manifest itself until death. Theology is not therefore about anything that is known in the real world. It is not, for example, an attempt to find out what a mystical experience is but a way of excusing the failings of religion. It is the religious wallpapering department for papering over cracks before they become too obvious.

Theological Discourses

Undeterred, Polkinghorne gives us another list, this time of criteria for theological discourses.

1. Coherence (though some degree of paradox might be necessary!).
2. Economy—Occam’s Razor—eschew multiplication of entities.
3. Adequacy—all matters of concern must be covered.
4. Existential relevance—theology must have a bearing on actual religious experience.

Although, as Polkinghorne himself notes, there is no parallel here to verifiability or falsifiability, professor theology, FRS, declares it to be similar to the scientific outlook. Yet if its precepts cannot be gainsaid, even if it applies itself to the field of religious experience, how can it be revealing anything to us. Anything at all could be declared true with no way of testing it. All that can happen is that a structure of excuses and supposed explanations can be built up to defend it, but that violates Occam’s razor and takes us in the direction of the outrageous philosophies of the Sufis with entities flying in all directions.

Polkinghorne insists that reasons can be given for and against theological claims. Reasons can be given for and against Dick Whittington’s cat and Noah’s Flood. Theologians can argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Polkinghorne’s argument is absurd and futile. Simple people will argue endlessly about matters that can be settled immediately by reference to a book. Theologians can argue endlessly about matters that it is impossible to settle because they are arbitrary. Both could save their breath and energy, but ultimately who made the winning score in the 1955 final at least has an answer. Theologians do not. Let them decide whether Conan the Barbarian is stronger than Rambo. That is a theological question often discussed by schoolboys aged about seven.

Polkinghorne has another excuse. Theology refers to reality but only in metaphorical terms. So does mythology, but these men do not like to admit that their religion is mythological. That would be to admit that the bible was at best a set of moral fairy tales. God could find no real place in such a scheme because He too would be mythical—a projection of human guilt on to the cosmos or the superego magnified to keep us good children. Theologians usually reject metaphorical and allegorical explanations these days precisely because of the criticism it invites. Christianity is historical, and that is it—one of those incorrigible dogmas that Polkinghorne chooses to overlook.

Polkinghorne tells us that theology actually is verifiable but only post mortem! It is another of those Christian paradoxes. This extension of Pie-in-the-Sky is “eschatological verification”. If it is false you are past caring about anything, mouldering in your grave, and if it is true, you don’t care anyway about anything because you have your balmy place on the heavenly beach for eternity! Polkinghorne says it shows theology has a factual content but of an unusual kind. It sounds a great joke, but, if it is, the whole book is a spoof.

Polkinghorne’s theological scheme abhors the mutiplication of entities but the greatest entity of all, the physical universe, is doubled at the outset because the natural world is paralleled by the spiritual world. This initial doubling of entities leads to theology and all the tripe it spouts. If there is no such world as the spiritual world, but only the natural world, then all discussion of it is futile. If certain manifestations of the natural world and the human personality lead to strange experiences from time to time these experiences can be explained purely naturally through science. That is the Adelphiasophist view. The fact that the phenomenon is natural makes it no less mystical to those who experience it, unless they define nothing as mystical that does not involve the Christian figment.

The religious experience could be seriously examined as a phenomenon of the world we experience but religious charlatans have never wanted to solve mysteries because it is the mysteries that keep them employed. Polkinghorne rejects any sort of pantheism or panentheism because “otherness” is a basic religious experience of God. Pathetic, eh? A basic feeling when individuality is weakened would be “otherness!”

What is Empty Space?

Polkinghorne now leads us through the real world in ten features that he picks out as typical of it. The world is real but Dr Johnson did not refute Bishop Berkeley when he kicked the stone, refuting him, “Thus!” The stone is mainly empty space! Johnson was wrong.

Polkinghorne means that it is empty space to x-rays or neutrinos, but it is certainly not empty space to a foot! Christians are among critics of science who call scientists reductionists, but here the Christian is the reductionist, even if he is a scientist too—or was. It is interesting and useful for us to investigate Nature at an atomic level but whatever we find does not alter the reality of the world we actually experience at this macro level, and that is what has to be explained. In short, Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley and Polkinghorne stands.

The impenetrability of the stone to a foot demonstrates its reality to us quite effectively. Polkinghorne saves himself by adding, to his statement that the stone is empty space, “what is not a weaving of quantum mechanical patterns”. Sure enough, and similar patterns fill your foot and shoe. Mainly these “patterns” are the way the electronic matter and charge is distributed among the nuclei of the atoms there. The net effect of all this negative charge wrapping the nuclei is that the foot and stone approach each other led by negative charge. At a certain distance, the repulsion between the like charges becomes so huge that the foot experiences the full mass of the stone and not the empty space that Polkinghorne’s naïve explanation offered. The space is not empty, it is full of electronic charge and that sets up a solid repulsive surface that is the hardness we experience in reality.

Polkinghorne knows this and his cryptic mention of quantum patterns is his get out, but he is defending the bishop in his new profession of theologian, and doing it by being dishonest and dishonourable to his old one. His sin is a sin of omission. He does not tell the full story to save Christians from seeming idiots. Instead he makes himself seem one.

The world self-evidently is intelligible. Polkinghorne calls this an assumption and so cannot be explained by science. Scientists can understand the world by studying it carefully. So, science has found that the world is intelligible from practice, not by assuming it. Why is it? Science does not know, but professor Polkinghorne cannot explain it any better through theology as he claims. The theologian thinks he has an explanation but all he offers are further assumptions such as that the world is the creation of God. God is no answer. God is assumed to be harmonious because Gods are assumed to be perfect not chaotic, and then he is assumed to have created a harmonious world because he is harmonious himself. What is the point of this unnecessary conjecture? The harmony we see in Nature is spuriously retrojected into God. What is wrong with simply accepting what we know? Nature is harmonious!

The fact that the world cannot be adequately pictured at the theological level without metaphor is a parallel to the world of the quantum level requiring models to describe it, Polkinghorne tells us. Models are a type of metaphor. Perhaps so, but however those electrons might look singly, when there are a lot of them we can feel them as Dr Johnson ably proved. Theology gets no more real for having a hundred billion angels.

Polkinghorne, a physicist who has turned to the world of the supernatural, quotes himself about “Gee-Whizz” “science popularizers, always out to stun the public with the weirdness of what they have to offer”. Is he laughing at himself? However bizarre some scientific discoveries might seem, they correspond with observations. What do gods, angels, demons, messiahs, cherubim, seraphim, saints and so on correspond to? It is often hard to take Polkinghorne seriously because what he writes can only be interpreted as parody. Did the SPCK realize that, or is it not true?

Science and Theology

Having covered the features of the real world, Polkinghorne comes to points of interaction between science and theology. He admits that the theologians were wrong in opposing Galileo and Darwin. Remember, Polkinghorne thinks that science and theology are alternative ways of looking at the world, but evidently each has its range of competence, and in these two cases the theologians were stepping out of theirs into the range of scientific competence. In any event, theology proved to be wrong and science correct. It is normally the case and has led to the notion of the “God of the Gaps”. The corn spirit had to have a corner of the field left uncut for him to dwell in. This is like the “God of the Gaps”. He has to retreat into the mysteries of Nature not yet elucidated by science. None of this gives us any confidence in thinking that theology is competent at all, especially as there is no way of verifying or falsifying any of the pronouncements it makes that do not intrude upon the domain of science.

What sort of things will theology deal with? Polkinghorne offers, the “faithfulness of God”, and the “sustaining power of God”. Theology deals with God, so He is assumed from the outset. Thereafter theology becomes an exercise in ingenuity. How many ways can God be introduced spuriously into descriptions of necessity? One way is to impose upon that harmony of Nature—a harmony that, in fact, needs no intervention from transcendental fathers or any need for the baton of a Great Orchestrator. Polkinghorne observes that the great harmony of Nature “evokes thoughts which verge on the religious”. What “verges on the religious” will soon be proof of it. He cites Einstein who in one of his more Adelphiasophist sentences wrote:

In every true searcher of Nature there is a kind of religious reverence.

Einstein goes on to compare discovery with a child beginning to understand adult ways. Whether he meant to imply a child-adult relationship between humanity and God is not clear from the quotation but Polkinghorne likes to read it that way. For Polkinghorne the searcher after Nature here is the natural theologian, not the scientist. Natural theology is the search for God in or through Nature, not the search of Nature. Polkinghorne tells us frankly that natural theology is not popular among theologians because they have been stung by its disappointments. The argument from design, for example, disastrously sank on the rock of evolution. Moreover most theologians are “somewhat ignorant of modern science”. It is just as we suspected but nice to hear from a theologian.

Paul Davies (God and the New Physics) says science offers a surer path to God than religion because “there is more to the world than meets the eye”. Polkinghorne approvingly cites this as evidence of natural theology from an antagonistic source when it is the exact opposite. Nature is itself wonderful. Supernaturalists will not however credit it. The credit is removed from Nature and attributed to the figmentary father. The supernumerary entity God should be dispensed with and the “divine” aspects of Nature studied in their own right. They will, of course, be studied by science and not by theology, natural or otherwise. Polkinghorne might have been in a perfect situation to do this, but preferred to return to the Dark Ages where gods can emerge properly in mass ignorance.

Polkinghorne cannot get over his amazement at Nature, but, like most religious people, he cannot bring himself to believe it is natural. We are in harmony with the world in which we have evolved. If we were not, we would not exist. It naturally looks wonderful to us, but then so do the faeces in your colon to the gut bacterium E.coli. It is fitted to its, to us, unpleasant environment but would be unable to live in the open air and UV environment that we inhabit. We have evolved intelligence and can look at the world more closely than E.coli can. We judge that it all looks marvellous, so God made it that way. Had we evolved as intelligent gut bacteria, we would have been marvelling that God had designed such a shitty world for us to live in! Here is an anthropic principle noted by the ancient Greek but which Christians are too scared or stupid to entertain in case it challenges their faith.

Polkinghorne admits that science has surgically removed various appendages from the body theological, but can see in this no implication of relative value, or indeed that ultimately the whole body might be cut away. Scientists think it in their arrogance, but it is scientific reductionism. Polkinghorne can see the crass stupidity of the stance he adopts. Geology and evolution liberate theology from the early chapters of Genesis. He recognizes that these chapters of the bible are purely mythical. Yet, he will not consider that the remainder of the bible might be no less, or only slightly less, mythical.

A proper scientific and historical approach would show that so-called sacred history is essentially mythology and romance with little history in it, and most of that impossible to discern among the fiction, except at the few points where an external reference allows us to anchor it historically. Any competent writer of historical fiction does this precisely. Most of the book is romance but it is placed in a historical setting. Again, the modern theologian is trapped by his religious tenets. It is dogma that Christianity is historically based. That history requires the Jewish scriptures also to be history. Metaphorical and allegorical interpretations of scriptures refute them as history, so the original truths, whatever they were, written in allegorical form have been lost through a perverse insistence that myth is history. Even the early critics of Christianity knew this but the Christian bishops were always determined to remain ignorant.

Polkinghorne now enlightens us on how he reconciles various problems of science and theology. God is not merely a cause of the Big-Bang, He is the sustainer of the world in being. This He does through a constant exertion of will. Does this scientifically endowed theologian explain why the universe needs continuously sustaining by God’s will power? No chance! Nor will he because that would be a “God of the Gaps”. As soon as someone shows that this sustaining will power, supposing that it is needed, is gravity or the curvature of space-time, or whatever else, then big-bang goes God again, and the theologians then have the problem of resurrecting Him.

What of chance? Well, God might be the divine cause of chance events, or He might have invented chance to relieve Him of having to determine when every radioactive atom decays. Here are two diametrically opposite theological explanations. Theology offers no way of deciding which is right, and for theologians both are! It then becomes a divine mystery proving that it must be so. Why not eliminate God in this and leave chance operating of its own accord? That would never do. Polkinghorne declares that the balance of chance and necessity we experience is the will of his divine Sustainer. Er, isn’t that a “God of the Gaps?” Not in this case, my son.

Polkinghorne settles one question for the Christian sheep—the question of the appearance of the soul in evolution. The theologian, FRS, says that the soul is the ability to communicate with God. It is, or is an aspect of, consciousness. Consciousness evolved, and so the soul was not suddenly added to a beast to make a man. Nevertheless, humans have consciousness and therefore souls but animals do not, so we can continue to beat our dogs.

The belief that God can interact with us is “consonant with our experience”. It is an experience that less and less people have in the modern world, but Polkinghorne turns to this difficult problem for theologians—why God does not actually seem to be there at all. His love is, we saw, kenotic. It limits Him. Then again, perhaps he works it all at the quantum level, so it does not look too obvious, but he does decide when the radioactive atom will decay, and the consequences of such trivial quantum effects manifest at the macro level. Or God uses providence to arrange “random” events to coincide—synchronicity—but Polkinghorne finds it “tentative and unsatisfactory”. No answers there.

Direct Intervention by God

Polkinghorne now comes to direct intervention by God and discusses miracles. Immediately he again rejects whole chunks of the bible as mythical such as Joshua stopping the sun in its path, and the miracles of Jesus, except for the resurrection! Polkinghorne uses theology against miracles. A good God ought to do miracles more often to alleviate suffering, but suffering continues unalleviated and miracles never or rarely happen. The answer is that God has to undergo a phase change to allow miracles. In his normal state, miracles are not possible, but when God undergoes a phase change such as when he appears as a man on earth, then miracles are possible. Is this a spoof?

Considering the promise of immortality, Polkinghorne immediately notes that the Christian hope properly is not spiritualist as nearly all Christian now think it is. The promise is resurrection of the whole body. What this theologian does not understand is that the resurrection was in God’s kingdom “in earth” as it is in heaven. Polkinghorne tells his sheep it is in “some other environment of God’s choosing”, presumably leaving it possibly in heaven. He does not want to disturb them too much. Naturally, God, who made the universe, could easily make a whole new body for us identical to our old one, wherever it was to be resurrected. There is no problem about the molecules having to be the same because they change constantly throughout life, coming and going with respiration, feeding, urination, defaecation, sweating, skin loss, hair loss, etc. Yet the molecules have to come from somewhere where they are presumably serving a function already, unless God makes us new molecules too.

The problem that this glosses over, though, is what state the body will be in when it is resurrected? If it is in the same state as it was when we died, resurrection would do us not much good because the last body in that state expired. It has to be in some healthy state but which one? Youthful? Mature? The thologian offers us no answers.

He also does not tell us which partner we will be resurrected back into life with, if we have had more than one. Most Christians expect to be resurrected with their loved ones, in heaven usually, but what of the wife who really loved her first husband killed young in the war and expected to be resurrected with him rather than her second husband who nevertheless loved her and with whom she lived a lifetime and had her children. Polkinghorne makes no attempt to answer this theological question, although Jesus himself did. Jesus’s answer would not suit believers however because in the resurrected state no one has wives and husbands! Do Christians realise this? Obviously most do not, and theologians are not about to remind them.

Of course, if God could make a whole new identical body for us, he could make more than one. Perhaps we are resurrected into multiple bodies in which we live with different resurrected partners. That might be truly heavenly because the resurrected people could have simultaneous orgasms with all of their different partners. Wow! They are in different bodies though.

The Christian, in the end, must bow to what Jesus is alleged to have taught himself, so they must not have the illusion of awakening from death with their lover, husband or wife, but as an angel, indifferent to sex, because it has no purpose for an immortal being.

Polkinghorne conflates the natural and the supernatural into one reality, a typically dishonest theological ploy but one not expected of a scientist who seeks firm evidence of phenomena before categorizing them. Again it shows that theology is an exercise in verbal gymnastics and nothing real. For the natural and the supernatural to be part of one reality, the meanings of words have to be abandoned, just as they do for God to be simultaneously transcendent and immanent, Jesus to be simultaneously alive and dead, and so on. It sounds mysterious, but it is all verbal trickery. We get more of it. Natural theology is “insightful” not “demonstrative”, not “compelling” nor “unmotivated”. Polkinghorne likes Davies’s expression “more than meets the eye in Nature” obviously because he thinks it implies God, but again it is a “God of the Gaps”. Polkinghorne states that it is not entirely “clear why this irreducible character of unexplained being should not be attributed to the material of the cosmos itself”. Quite so, but he leaves the puzzle in the air.

Divinity of Nature

Returning to his list of features of Nature, he explains them as reflexions of the reason of the Creator, but keeps on avoiding the better explanation that Nature is itself divine. It is truly hard to understand why supposedly rational people who say they will not multiply entities unnecessarily cannot just ditch the unnecessary entity God. If Nature is the divinity, all of these religious devotees have been worshipping an illusion for 2500 years. If Nature is the divinity, why do they not realize that they are ignoring and insulting the truly divine by persisting in their figmentary father? If they are right that belief has post mortem consequences, why do they not worry that they have picked the wrong god, and picked it contrary to all the plain evidence the divinity offers right before their eyes? It shows how effective the Christian trick is. It is like mainlining. For many people, once they start with it they are addicted and cannot stop the habit even if they wanted to. It controls them. That is Satanic.

Polkinghorne briefly considers speculations about multiple and oscillating universes, conjectures that do not require God as a hypothesized Creator, but he rejects them as inelegant or uneconomic—too many entities, he tells us! He does not however explain the being of God who was plainly in being in some sense before the universe was created, even if He supposedly lived outside of time and space. Simply pushing the original Creation of God into the supernatural realm does not explain Creation. It just avoids the issue.

And why are all those universes not parsimonious? They are all universes like this one but with variations in the values of the fundamental constants. It is like saying that Maxwell’s equations are not parsimonious because they represent millions of cases, or, more pertinently, Schrödinger’s equation. Or it is like saying that the concept of species is not parsimonious because a species is a large number of individuals. The concepts are indeed parsimonious because they “reduce” a large number of separate cases into a single type to explain them. That is the harmony of Nature at work.

Polkinghorne gets even more pathetic when he tries to find an excuse why there should be so much suffering in the Creation of his loving Sustainer. It is beyond the scope of his book, he hastily says, but nevertheless tells us that, in the crucifixion, God “opened his arms to embrace the bitterness of the world he made”. Is that all the Creator of everything can do? Polkinghorne succeeds merely in making God sound more pathetic than His apologist. The reason this is all God could do is that He had no choice. He is limited by His own Nature.

Is He then a god at all? Perhaps He is just a wicked angel suffering from delusions like his devotees? That used to be a respectable position to take, 2000 years ago, and after those 2000 years have passed, it looks most likely, history being what it is, and especially that of the church. However, the Christian theologian presumably still believes it will all end in bliss for the believer, so God cannot be that hamstrung by his limitations. Why doesn’t He end all suffering now? Polkinghorne finds yet another excuse, but the sensible answer he never addresses—God exists only in the imagination and that is why He is unable to do anything about human suffering.

Polkinghorne even points to the tribulations of Job at the hands of his God, saying that God uses the “grandeur of creation” as an answer to the poor victim’s suffering. The theologian is depending on his sheep accepting what their guru says and not turning to the passages themselves (Job 38:4;16, and nearby passages). Their plain sense is that God is arrogantly taunting Job as being an insignificant moment in history, who should put up with his lot and not question God who made all these wonderful things.

Reductionists

Polkinghorne finishes off showing that he is learning well from his new tutors. The favourite insult of critics too lazy to understand science, like hacks and theologians, is that they are “reductionists”. It is not an insult you expect from a scientist except when they have a “higher” agenda like Christianity. For Polkinghorne, scientists are reductionists. He means that scientists seek to “reduce” all experience to science and ultimately to physics. Christianity however is not reductionist even though it reduced all experience to the cross for over a thousand years thereby causing suffering we can never conceive of. Certainly Christians themselves refuse to contemplate it. Polkinghorne picks out as a “thoroughgoing” reductionist P W Atkins. Atkins will rightly regard this insult as an accolade.

The basis of the insult is that scientists are Philistines, quite unable to see beauty or appreciate any form of art or aesthetic. The critics, however, have some God given insight into these things that make them superior creatures in every way. It is like the football supporter whose team has lost who says, “Yeah, but we played better football!” In other words, these poor empty-heads are desperately seeking an alternative to the plain fact that they lost. What Polkinghorne’s motivation is is hard to know, but could be guilt, which figures strongly in many religous people. They feel guilty and hope that God is the answer, so they will do anything to support the figment in the hope he will have mercy on them and relieve them of their heavy conscience.

The reductionist argument, anyway, is that scientists are too pre-occupied with atoms and forces to see the purpose of a Rembrandt painting or a Shakespeare sonnet. The critics however, can see such things and can talk about them endlessly and to no purpose but it proves their superiority. The truth, of course, is that they are too stupid to be able to study anything as complicated as science and prefer to stick with subjects for which there are no rights and wrongs but only opinions. Criticism and theology are two such fields.

In apologetics, the point of these base attacks are that theologians are writing for simple people and children aiming to indoctrinate another generation of dupes who will keep filling the platters in exchange for a fraudulent salvation. Their biggest enemies are scientists who encourage people to examine and judge on the basis of evidence and testing, the last thing that any clergyman wants. These children of all ages trust their mentors to be truthful, but they are not, and because the converts lack maturity and discernment the apologist can get away with many sins, making them seem virtues. Mostly they are short planks themselves, as Polkinghorne admitted, making it all the more surprising that this FRS in physics is joining them.

He has quickly donned his theological vestments and started to practice the tricks of their trade. Yet Polkinghorne obviously feels uneasy because he essentially defends the scientists then by admitting to a “structural reductionism”. What is that? Everything is indeed made up of particles, and the study of these fundamental entities is particle physics! Structural reductionism then is all right but it is different from “reductionism”. Indeed it is, because “reductionism” is nothing more than an insult and has no basis for anyone with a functioning synapse in their brain. Polkinghorne admits what scientists really are. They are saying what the world is made of, and ultimately that is particles that behave according to laws that can be studied and formulated.

“Reductionist” means Philistine, and imples that scientists cannot see art but only atoms. Atkins equally cannot have written a compendious text-book much valued by several generations of students because he could not distinguish the words he wrote from the atoms they were made of. This reductio ad absurdum should dispense with the crude name calling of apologists for Christianity. The truth that Polkinghorne admitted however cannot be gainsaid: most scientists can appreciate art and humanities but few artists or theologians can understand science. This inequality is what worries the critics. They know they are inferior and can only try to make up for it by denigrating their superiors.

Being a Christian vicar, Polkinghorne will be convinced that whatever he says is right because his holy book told him so, and the Holy Ghost would guarantee it. This is the basis of Christian lying. They think they cannot lie when they are defending God and His religion. If it were so, then their God is less than godly. No good God could condone lies and one who advocates them must be devilish. Let any Christian once consider this possibility and it will be instantly cast out of their mind and they will rush for absolution.

Yet, if God is truly good, they are all simply guaranteeing that at the judgement they will find their deckchair on the balmy beach of heaven has not been reserved. Instead they have a red hot wrought iron griddle with manacles awaiting them in the firey place. The loving god they all expect has shown in his sacred history, book 1, that he is quite bad tempered and not necessarilty loving at all. Poor old king Saul tried his best but made a few mild mistakes and got hung up on a wall for his troubles. We do not know where he ended up but can guess. Watch out, smuggies!

Polkinghorne is convinced that “conceptual reductionists” cannot tell a seal cub from a fur coat, and so he twitters on to his gaping readers about reductionist scientists not noticing that water is wet or that some crystals conduct while some do not. They cannot know these things because they are reductionists who only think of particles, and single particles do not have these properties. Polkinghorne will not be getting any reputable awards for these puerile thoughts.

The point of all this might be that scientists are quite aware of changes of quality, and know that they can extend to such changes as the emergence of life or consciousness quite naturally. Theologians want to reserve such changes for God and appreciation of them to God’s gift. There is no reason for any scientist to believe that these matters cannot be studied and eventually understood, but the religious fringe think that this is stepping on God’s toes. Polkinghorne has rejected the old idea of vitality or a life force in living things, but must resent it and it leaves him trying to depict scientists as some sort of Goon, like those in the Popeye cartoon.

Theological types suffer from low self-esteem and guilt, which is why they are forever bowing, kneeling and scraping before their figmentary father, seeking his figmentary approval, but it also manifests itself in a need to paint themselves as superior to some scapegoat, and scientists are it. They decry the scientific mortal sin of reductionism and insist that we must be “holistic” (wholistic?), although they want to say “holy”. Polkinghorne shows the utter dishonesty of his diatribe by discussing the EPR experiment which shows, he says, that holism is reasserting itself at the “very root of reductionist physics”. So, who did the experiment? Reductionist physicists! If it is striking at the roots of their reductionist values, why did they report it? Er? Polkinghorne says even the basic laws of physics are reductionist, but presumably these laws of physics were set up by God, in the Christian view, at Creation, so is Polkinghorne sure that God is not in some sense a reductionist himself?

Really Polkinghorne is leading up to the fact that reductionists do not distinguish between mind and brain. Polkinghorne says “I think” therefore mind exists before brain. This is a most important distinction for all supernaturalists. If they are to survive after physical death, then mind cannot be a function of brain. Mind and matter are simply ways that we have of classifying changes—different kinds of events. Change is the fundamental property of the cosmos. Since change is fundamental, immortality is impossible.

Our nature consists in movement. Absolute rest is death.

Blaise Pascal

Neither mind nor matter is immortal. The basic feature of mind is memory, and nothing has shown that anyone’s memory survives their death. Memory depends on brain structure and functions, and these decay and cease at death.

Though Polkinghorne has argued for realism, it now deserts him, or rather he deserts it. He knows a crack on the skull empties his mind, but FRS or not, he cannot deduce anything rational from it. When he is in this unconscious state, he is no longer able to say, “I think”, but that does not invalidate his previous deduction. Personality must be independent of the brain or the Christian promise of immortality is a lie. No Christian, let alone a Christian theologian can contemplate the possibility. For most of them Christianity is their guarantee that there is life after death, and that is their main reason for being Christian.

The world we experience has the appearance of a materialist world. The working hypothesis that it is has proved fruitful. Opponents of materialism are motivated by their desperation to prove that:

1. the mind is immortal,
2. the ultimate power in the universe is mental rather than physical.

Within our experience, only on the earth’s surface does anything happens because somebody wishes it to happen. Our power is limited. Our power depends on the energy of the sun, and none of our wishes could be fulfilled if it failed. No one can do anything practicable for us to the sun, or planets or even to the interior of the earth. Why should anyone suppose that what happens in regions to which our power does not extend is caused by any decision of a mind? If the second law of thermo-dynamics is true, the human race will not continue for ever. In these respects, materialists are right. Materialistic science has removed our heavenly aspirations, but has improved our comfort here on earth. So, even theologians have had to tolerate science.

Polkinghorne keeps on coming up with straw dolls after straw dolls. Some of them make jokes such as: “How can two electrons have a rational argument!” Polkinghorne hopes to assure his audience that science cannot hope to explain anything as complicated as consciousness or reason. Rationality is a function of assemblies of particles, and reductionist scientists will never be able to understand that. Does FRS stand for “Flog Reductionist Scientists?”

Polkinghorne decries behaviourism but talks about brains as if they were computers. Where then does the software come from to operate the system? Not from the great God himself, surely—Bill Gates? Behaviour is partly programmed in the DNA and partly programmed by experience—behaviourism! The brains of creatures allow them flexibility of response in their environments. The environment also includes the working of the brain itself, so the brain can provide some of its own input. We call it thinking. The crack on the skull still stops it!

His conclusion is that God is what holds the many levels of existence together—rather a “God of the Gaps” for sure. Like the theological idea of salvation, Polkinghorne never, demonstrates to us that it is necessary. Why does existence need holding together by God? If it does not, then God in this role can be discarded. Nothing in the world requires God and the world existed for countless ages without realizing that it was held together by a God or feeling that it needed one. God was born with human consciousness. Despite that, it took a long time before anyone realized that humanity needed saving. Finally, Christianity was invented and with it the tyranny of the sacraments.

Polkinghorne tells us the interlocking activity of God the Sustainer acts through this sacrament, the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ. Any sinner can purchase this salvation for a few coins in the platter when they attend mass. The more frequent the attendance, the stronger the interlocking force gets and the safer the world is from flying apart for no apparent reason. A beneficial side effect is that God’s army of clergy can use the contents of the platter to reward themselves with bottles of whisky and port wine for their thankless salvific efforts.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History