Because the majority of modern scientific, analytic minds are of an atheistic bent the scientist-theologian is a relative rarity. Many of those odd birds are today creation scientists, but the proposition that the Earth is but 6,000 years old is so facially risible that they receive little respect from either the scientific or religious mainstream. However, there is a more respectable sub-class of scientific believer, a believer with an unassailable scientific pedigree in physics or biology who is willing to shamelessly pimp that knowledge in the service of God. In recent years such efforts have been legitimatized by the $1 million Templeton Prize, a sort of Nobel Prize in Astrology, and this year’s winner was Sir John Polkinghorne of the University of Cambridge, a professor of particle physics and Anglican priest. Like most apologists of his ilk, Polkinghorne plugs the most recent findings of science into the old, discredited argument from design before leaping off into an analysis of the historicity of some divine (and in Polkinghorne’s case, Christian) revelation.

The Raving Atheist was greatly heartened, then, to see Sir Polkinghorne’s pretensions so thoroughly deflated in the article “An Unbeautiful Mind” in the current issue of The New Republic by a fellow Cambridge professor, atheist Simon Blackburn of the philosophy department (and author of Think and Being Good). Unfortunately, the text of the article,” — a review of Polkinghorne’s books, Faith, Science and Understanding and The God of Hope and the End of the World — has not been made available online. Hence, I will leave you with a couple of my favorite quotes (with explanatory introductions) and encourage you to go out and pay full newsstand price. [or go here. Ed.]

Blackburn, on Polkinghorne’s embrace of the design argument:

Polkinghorne’s favorite fact is the minute adjustment of the various cosmological constants and magnitudes without which large atoms and molecules could not exist. Why do they have these fortunate properties? We do no know; and in the absence of fairly wild cosmological speculation, there is no evolutionary story to help us. Most scientists would surely leave it there . . . But Polkinghorne jumps in. The problem signals the need for a “deeper from of intelligibility, going beyond the scientific.” In other words, it must be due to the divine architect, or providence, lovingly going to all that trouble to make a universe especially for us.

Hume and Kant told us that such thinking is natural, but not scientific. It is extravagant, and it is not falsifiable, since it generates no new predictions. It merely represents a primitive preference for explaining the unknown in terms of agency rather than in terms of nature — a tendency that science had to suppress and to overcome before it could develop.

Blackburn, addressing Polkinghorne’s argument that the resurrection “is much more likely to be the kernel of an historical reminiscence” than a “made-up tale” due to the differences in various biblical accounts of it:

[O]ne wonders if Polkinghorne the scientist would take the hesitation and the uncertainty and the lack of agreement that attended certain laboratory observations to be confirmations of their accuracy. It is true that there are occasions when agreement is suspiciously perfect, and many frauds have been detected because of it; but this does not turn a confusion of witnesses into a reliable indicator of anything.

Blackburn’s sad conclusion:

I did end Polkinghorne’s books, with their supreme contempt for philosophical reasoning and historical thinking, in despair about humanity’s desperate self-deceptions and vanities and illusions. Everything will be all right in the end, we are washed in the blood of the lamb, we are blessed, and above all God is on our side. Who could dissent? Fantasy beats reason every time. People believe what they want to believe

One Response to “The God of the Scientists”

1. Nor
   March 28th, 2003 @ 7:00 pm

   The “god” of scientists is simply “the motivation … the energy … to passion to explore the natural phenomena.”

   Other than that, the concept of “god” is a malignant mind-cancer that hinders critical thinking.