"God's Action In The World"

I was recently challenged, "I don't think everyone's faith is a 100% emotional response to the world without any rationality in it. John Polkinghorne would be a prime example. Before you can make this claim, you need to object carefully to the various things which people claim are the rational basis for faith and show that they are all, in fact, emotional. I challenge you to do this with John Polkinghorne for starters."

So, I read his lecture, which he gave in 1990, called "God's Action In The World" which you can find on his website. This is my answer...

"I must say, although it is made to appear scientific, underneath the camouflage, it's just the same old "I believe and thats that".

The lecture contains contradictions, imagined ideas, inventions, pure speculation and uses the old trick of giving us limited choices to make us think we have to pick God or nothing.

Contradiction

“We are not talking about a God of the gaps, an agent acting among other agents in the process of the world, and just invoked to explain the currently scientifically inexplicable. Such a God is truly dead, and no one should lament his passing.”

“…there are aspects of the laws of physics which raise questions beyond physics' competence to answer, issues that almost inevitably raise in the mind the feeling that there is more going on here that has met the purely scientific eye.”

So he sets out to say this is not just filling in the gaps of our knowledge and then bases his ideas on the fact that we have gaps in our knowledge.

Invention

“the reason within and the reason without”

“I believe there is such a rationality, namely the reason of the Creator who is the ground of both our mental life and our physical life.”

He invents this idea that our mind is not physical and suggests that the connection between the two is evidence for a Mind at work.

The human mind IS physical. Our thoughts, miraculous though they may seem, have been shown by science to be created by physical activity in the brain. We may not know everything about the brain, but there is certainly no evidence that thought is anything other than a chemical and physical process.

Imagination/pure specualtion

“what I'm saying is that the physical world seems shot through with signs of mind and to me”

“It is a world in which we can act, and if we can act, I don't see why God can't act in it as well, within the hiddenness of flexible process.”

“We live in a world whose openness and hidden flexibility mean that it is a world in which God can be at work.”

“If it is true (and I believe it is true) that God was present in Christ in a way that he has not been present in any other person, then Jesus represented the presence of a new regime in the world.”

All this is PURE speculation, wrapped up in his interpretation of the things he sees in science.

Well, as I have said before, we can all interpret the world any way we want. I'm sure I could come up with ten different ideas which would explain the Universe in a week, let alone the years he's had to think about it.

Limits our choices

“You can either say, "Well, that's just the way it is; we're here because we're here."

Or, wait for it...

“I would say that for me the most satisfying insight is that the world is ... a creation whose given law and circumstance has been willed by its creator to be capable of fruitful process.”

Erm, sorry mate, but there's a whole load of other choices you forgot to mention. Why must I decide between his idea or nothing at all? Because a poor fool will think these really are the only choices available. Its the oldest (con) trick in the book."

I prefer, "I don't know why we're here. I've yet to read, or see for myself, any evidence that there is a reason why we're here. But if there is a reason, I definately want to know what it is."

But religious people don't want us to keep our minds open. They want us to fix them in the belief: "God is right and God is good and what he says is the way it is and always will be". They don't like ambiguity or not knowing. They want life to be based in a solid foundation of certainty. And who can blame them?

Besides, even if I did buy Polkinghorne's "evidence" for a creator, that still leaves a massive "gap" for who that creator could be - it could be anyone or anything. In fact, I could be the creator, or You - let Him prove we're not.