\u201cThe supposed war between science and religion,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0I cited\u00a0Sir John Polkinghorne as, among other things, declaring that, to the extent that there\u2019s a scientistic hostility to religion among scientists today, he perceives it to be more pronounced among writers on biology \u2014 he expressly mentions Richard Dawkins \u2014 than among those who write about the physical sciences.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Polkinghorne, who is both a\u00a0Knight of the British Empire (KBE) and a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society, was a\u00a0professor\u00a0of\u00a0mathematical physics\u00a0at the\u00a0University of Cambridge\u00a0until\u00a0he resigned his professorial chair in order to study for the priesthood. \u00a0He was ordained an Anglican\u00a0priest in 1982\u00a0and, thereafter,\u00a0served as the president of\u00a0Queens\u2019 College, Cambridge,\u00a0from 1988 until 1996.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like that previous entry, these passages\u00a0are taken from\u00a0the text of\u00a0Professor Polkinghorne\u2019s\u00a01996 Terry Lectures, which he delivered at Yale University and which were published as John Polkinghorne,\u00a0Belief in God in an Age of Science<\/em>\u00a0(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998):<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
I think two effects produce this hostility. \u00a0One is that biologists see a much more perplexing, disorderly, and painful view of reality than is presented by the austere and beautiful order of fundamental physics. . . . \u00a0There is, however, a second effect at work of much less intellectual respectability. \u00a0Biology, through the unravelling of the molecular basis of genetics, has scored an impressive victory, comparable to physics\u2019 earlier elucidation of the motions of the solar system through the operation of universal gravity. \u00a0The post-Newtonian generation was intoxicated with the apparent success of universal mechanism and wrote books boldly proclaiming that man is a machine.<\/strong> \u00a0[In his immediately preceding lecture\/chapter, on pages 48-75, Polkinghorne has sketched the way modern physics has modified if not replaced the deterministic and mechanistic Newtonian clockwork model of the cosmos.] \u00a0It seems to me that a similar intellectual inebriation influences some biologists, only too ready to assert that we are nothing more than genetic survival machines. \u00a0In any discipline, you solve the clockwork problem first (they are the easiest) but, as physics has found out, there is always more to the story than the ticking of clocks. \u00a0I am sure that biology will eventually make the same discovery, but for the moment many of its adherents have succumbed to an ill-judged reductionist triumphalism. \u00a0However, the madness is not universal, and we must hope for more biological colleagues to be prepared to participate in the interaction between science and theology.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 In an earlier post, \u201cThe supposed war between science and religion,\u201d\u00a0I cited\u00a0Sir John Polkinghorne as, among other things, declaring that, to the extent that there\u2019s a scientistic hostility to religion among scientists today, he perceives it to be more pronounced among writers on biology \u2014 he expressly mentions Richard Dawkins \u2014 than among […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1014,1053,2195,2746,743,243,401],"class_list":["post-72628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheism","tag-biology","tag-physics","tag-polkinghorne","tag-religion","tag-science","tag-theism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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