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Science proceeds by articles; theology proceeds by books. Einstein's entire output in the celebrated annus mirabilis of 1905 was five articles that total seventy-five pages in length, while Louis de Broglie provided one of the foundational insights of quantum mechanics in a four-page paper in 1923. The defining works of theology, on the other hand, are more easily measured in pounds than pages—Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Calvin's Institutes, Barth's Church Dogmatics.
Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality by John Polkinghorne Yale Univ. Press, 2004 208 pp., $24 |
Notwithstanding this difference—and it is just the first of many ways in which the two fields tend to attract and shape persons of rather different temperaments—science and theology both require years of training and immersion in their respective, highly specialized languages. Physics may only require a few pages to lay out a fundamental theory, while theology requires a few volumes, but mastering either one requires a decade or more of study.
Yet the questions that science and theology ask are of interest to far more individuals than can expect to grasp the answers in their full technical glory. Fortunately, between the forbidding technicality of Einstein's papers and the off-putting heft of the average work of systematic theology, there is a kind of sweet spot: the invited lecture series. Such lectures constitute a genre all their own, defined by their unwritten but universal 60-minute time limit, the boundless curiosity and limited specialization of a general university audience, and—at least if the lecturer is John Polkinghorne—the capacity of an elder statesman to sort out with uncommon clarity the core issues of his field. And the result of these lectures—again, at least if the scholar in question is Polkinghorne—is a book that scientists, theologians, and lay people in every sense of the word can engage and enjoy.
Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality expands on the scientist-theologian's 2003 Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. The title and subtitle convey the distinctives of Polkinghorne's approach. On the one hand, as the title suggests, this is not really a treatise on "science and religion," with religion left so ill-defined that the book will frustrate practitioners of any actual faith. Polkinghorne is convinced that Trinitarian theology, anchored in "the scandalous particularity of the incarnation," is a better vantage point for engaging science than religion in the abstract. On the other hand, as the subtitle suggests, twenty years of work as a theoretical physicist have led Polkinghorne to the conviction that science delivers truth about reality, and he is determined not to evade the implications that reality may have for the theory and practice of Christian faith. His account of science and Christian theology succeeds unusually well in doing justice to both sides of the conversation.
Indeed, one of Polkinghorne's themes in Science and the Trinity is that science and theology have more in common than is often supposed. Philosophers of science have demonstrated the fundamental circularity of the scientific process: observations do not make sense without a theory, yet theories can only be constructed based on observations. The astonishing success of the scientific enterprise—the simple fact that mathematics, physics, and engineering form a continuum rather than being, to borrow a phrase from Stephen Jay Gould, non-overlapping magisteria—suggests that there is nothing inherently vicious about hermeneutical circles. Christian theology, no less than physics or chemistry, can be read as an attempt to make sense of real-world data—albeit a different sort of data—in a circular process of experience, theorizing, and "inference to the best explanation." So theology can be subjected to many of the same tests of plausibility as those which give science its force.
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