On Tuesday I began a discussion of a recent book by The Rev. Dr. Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science. This is a rather academic book – but the kind of book that someone who wants to move beyond the culture war issues of young earth, old earth, and evolution should find useful. In this book Dr. Polkinghorne looks at the ways in which the insights from science and the scientific way of thinking may be used to help Christians explore theology in our 21st century context.

In Ch. 2 Dr. Polkinghorne discusses some ways in which there can be a discourse between modern science and Christian theology. One of these is in the insight that physics has provided about studying the unknown. One profound insight from physics is the danger inherent in extrapolating from things we are familiar with to other circumstances and regimes. Ordinary objects traveling at ordinary speeds in ordinary gravitational fields can be described quite well using the physics developed by Newton. The world was explicable and common sense. But in the early 20th century an accumulation of inexplicable observations changed this view.

As the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane said in 1928, commenting on the work of his physicist colleagues, he had come to suspect that the universe was not only queerer than we had supposed, but queerer than we could have supposed. Under the prompting of the way that nature actually turned out to behave, physicists had been driven to discover entirely novel modes of thought. (p. 20)

Electrons are neither here nor there but can be both here and there. There is a distinct probability that, if measured, it will be here and another probability that it will be there – but any given measurement is unpredictable. There is no universal experience of time shared by all observers. Indistinguishability, entanglement, superfluidity, superconductivity, symmetry, subatomic particles, and black holes – none of these phenomena are consistent with our “common sense” everyday experience of the world.

Science is a useful context for theology; not because science constrains or limits or worse, undermines belief in God; not because science gives us facts about the world; but because science has taught us to think in novel and unexpected ways.

Does science have important approaches, modes of thought, to offer to theology?

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