Keene Lecture 1

‘The End of All Our Exploring’ – paths from science towards God

Dr Arthur Peacocke

Wednesday 14^th November 2001

Introduction by the Dean, the Very Rev Peter Judd:

It is very good to welcome Dr Arthur Peacocke as our Keene Lecturer in 2001.

Arthur began his academic career as a chemist and then became a physical chemist specializing in DNA. When he first began his work, nobody had heard of DNA, and he’s unique this century in being both a Doctor of Science and a Doctor of Divinity. He was also a founder member of the Society of Ordained Scientists. To put this all in perspective, he likes to quote the epitaph on a theologian’s grave, that ‘He was born a child of God and died a Doctor of Divinity’!

Arthur now joins an even more exclusive band of people: those who have received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In so doing, he joins the ranks of Mother Teresa and Alexander Solzhenitzyn - and you don’t get more exclusive than that!

Thank you for your welcome. I feel myself, at least in origins, very much a part of your community. I am a second generation of an Essex man. My father was brought up in a village on the Blackwater and used to regale me in my childhood with stories of the antics they used to get up to in that village, often involving the local vicar and the local schoolmaster.

I’ve called this talk ‘The End of All Our Exploring – from science towards God ?’, with a question mark, which I couldn’t put on the book title. I want to begin with a small village in Huntingdonshire, called Little Gidding. It is there that Nicholas Ferrer, a doctor well-connected politically, retired with his family in 1626 to lead an ordered life of prayer and good works. He was a medical man, doing book-binding and so on in a lay community, which was the first one in England, lay or ordained, since the English Reformation. The community lasted for 21 years before being broken up by Puritan Protestants. In May 1936, some 300 years later, T S Eliot visited its 17^th Century chapel, which still exists, and later he composed the last of his influential poems, Four Quartets. One of these poems he entitled ‘Little Gidding’ and it is a profound reflection on the significance of Time in the divine purpose. Four lines provide the kind of theme of this lecture and indeed of my book:

‘We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.‘¹

Nicholas Ferrer had been a Fellow of Clare College Cambridge, where I was for eleven years Dean of Chapel and happy to have your present Dean as a colleague. One of our great experiences at that college was once a year to go with students to Little Gidding. There we conferred in the adjacent farmhouse and then celebrated the Eucharist in its unforgettable, evocative and dignified, small 17^th Century chapel - the light of the setting sun streaming through its west door. The words of Eliot’s poem thereby acquired a new power as he spoke of ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ in that place where prayer had been valid, which ‘is England and nowhere. Never and always.’ There and then we learned that the vortex of our discussions had a still center to which we with our many hang-ups were drawn from many directions. That experience crowns my hope, the track which I shall be following here and in these talks.

For science is one of the major spurs goading believers in God into new paths for expressing their beliefs and commitments. We shall be exploring from the world of science towards God. Although the ride may be bumpy, the goal itself is unchanged, is simply that, as at Little Gidding, to God’s own self. If indeed God exists, the honest pursuit of truth cannot but lead to God. It will not be God who is changed in our quest, but we in our perception and experience of the divine.

With this in mind I would like to talk first about the contemporary challenge of science to religious beliefs. In 1999 a widely and sympathetically-publicized conference in Berkeley, California, brought to the platform two dozen leading scientists to talk about their spiritual quest as Muslims, Jews, Christians, and even seeking Agnostics. There was a striking shared sense of wonder in their attitudes to the natural world which had so fired their individual spiritual paths. The quest for intelligibility in science and for meaning in religion can, apparently, work together, even though this has not been the popular perception for the last 150 years. In spite of the attempted corrosions, as I think of them, of post-modern relativities, scientists and religious believers share a common conviction that they are dealing with reality in their respective enterprises. Scientists would leave their laboratories and believers their churches or mosques or synagogues for good, if they did not think they were dealing with the realities of Nature or of God respectively.

Yet what I have to say will be critically realist with respect to both science and theology. Both aim to depict reality. Both use metaphorical languages and models which are revisable in the light of experiments and of experience. The aim of both is to tell as true a story as possible. Only thus, be it noted, can the religious quest have intellectual integrity. However, such a quest has its problems today, since the world is perceived totally differently from that which shaped two or three thousand years ago the language of the Abrahamic religions in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the literature of the Bible, and that of the Koran. So we might ask, how might a third millennium Bible begin? Let me speculate. Here is a Genesis for the 21^st Century:

There was God, and God was All-That-Was. God’s love overflowed and God said ‘Let Other be. And let it have the capacity to become what it might be, making it make itself - and let it explore its potentialities.’

And there was Other in God, a field of energy, vibrating energy - but no matter, space, time or form. Obeying its given laws and with one intensely hot surge of energy -a hot, big bang, this Other exploded as the Universe from a point 12 or so billion years ago in our time, thereby making space.

Vibrating fundamental particles appeared, expanded and expanded, and cooled into clouds of gas, bathed in radiant light. Still the universe went on expanding and condensing into swirling whirlpools of matter and light - a billion galaxies.

Five billion years ago, one star in one galaxy - our Sun - became surrounded by matter as planets. One of them was our Earth. On Earth, the assembly of atoms and the temperature became just right to allow water and solid rock to form. Continents and mountains grew and in some deep, wet crevice, or pool, or deep in the sea, just over three billion years ago some molecules became large and complex enough to make copies of themselves and became the first specks of life.

Life multiplied in the seas, diversifying and becoming more and more complex.

Five hundred million years ago, creatures with solid skeletons - the vertebrates -appeared. Algae in the sea and green plants on the land changed the atmosphere by making oxygen. Then three hundred million years ago, certain fish learned to crawl from the sea and live on the edge of land, breathing that oxygen from the air.

Now life burst into many forms - reptiles, mammals (and dinosaurs) on land reptiles and birds in the air. Over millions of years the mammals developed complex brains that enabled them to learn. Among these were creatures who lived in trees. From these our first ancestors derived and then, only forty thousand years ago, the first men and women appeared. They began to know about themselves and what they were doing - they were not only conscious but also self-conscious. The first word, the first laugh was heard. The first paintings were made. The first sense of a destiny beyond - with the first signs of hope, for these people buried their dead with ritual. The first prayers were made to the One who made All-That-Is and All-That-Is-Becoming - the first experiences of goodness, beauty and truth - but also of their opposites, for human beings were free. ²

I have naturally given this ‘Genesis for the third millennium’ its epic of evolution, a theistic perspective on cosmic and biological evolution; but however private revelations of God may be important to individuals, they’re no use to anybody else. Yet science has, in fact, found a reliable method for establishing public knowledge about Nature adequate for its practical and conceptual purposes.

So the key question is: can theology - thinking about God – actually, critically think about religious beliefs and exercise any methods of comparable reliability to that of science? The Western intellectual world is yet to be convinced that such theology can be done with the kind of intellectual honesty and integrity which is the hallmark of scientific thought. There is an increasingly alarming dissonance between the language of devotion, doctrine and liturgy and the way people really perceive themselves to be in the modern world; a world they now see in the light of the sciences of that ‘epic of evolution’ I’ve just mentioned.

This deep alienation from religious belief among the key formulators of Western culture is becoming almost lethal, for such belief has nearly always been based on some kind of authority: ‘the Bible says’, ‘the Church says’, even ‘theologians say’! Educated people know that such authoritarian claims are circular and cannot be justified because they fail to meet the demand for validation by an external, universally accepted standard. That standard can only be ‘reason based on experience’, or ‘reasonableness’ for short. A strong case can be made that the natural or human sciences have done that and achieved their goal of depicting, provisionally and metaphorically, the realities of the natural world by inferring to the best explanation. This method employs criteria such as comprehensiveness (making sense of most of the data), general plausibility (fitting best with previous knowledge), internal coherence (not being contradictory, and consistent) and simplicity.

So we have to say that a theology based on these principles should be, as Hans Küng has put it: ‘truthful, free, critical, and ecumenical’³, an open theology which deals with and interprets the realities of all that constitutes the world, especially human beings and their inner lives. Can theology, by inferring to the best explanation, actually enter the fray of contemporary intellectual exchange and survive in its own right? Unfortunately, this is not how theology is actually practised in my view. Looking afield today we find a variety of theological procedures that do not meet the criteria: reliance on authoritative books, reliance on authoritative community, and some other a priori beliefs. And it’s difficult for theology, therefore, to come to terms with a world whose realities are being discovered by the sciences. The world as perceived by the natural sciences in fact provides vistas and constitutes challenges and raises questions most of which are entirely new, though some facts go back to the days when the Greeks first woke up to the world around, and some to the reflections provoked by the rise of science in the 17^th Century.

So now let me try to give you some inkling of the issues and, in somewhat staccato fashion, outline the beginnings of those tracks from science towards God that we might make. I shall ask you to forgive me for being somewhat abstract. I ask for patience in this. The track through the jungle of experience and knowledge may be a little tortuous, but I’ll try to be as brief as I can.

The world as it is

First of all, let’s look at the world as it is; a kind of ‘still shot’ of its moving panorama. Oddly, we start with a question that goes back to the Greeks: why is there anything at all? Whatever the physical milieu - and the cosmologists say it might be a fluctuating quantum field of superstring and all sorts of things – whatever it was from which that ‘hot, Big Bang’ in which it occurred, from which the universe expanded twelve or so billion years ago, there is no specific scientific explanation of why it should be at all and why its flaws and regularities happened to be of a form that allowed the development we are talking about.

We might say first, therefore, that there is an ultimate reality which is the explanation of the existence of all that is: a self-existent ‘ground of being’, an ‘x’ as it were, giving existence to and sustaining in existence all that is. This ultimate reality, this ‘x’, must by definition, in principle have a nature beyond the capabilities of language to state explicitly. Hence our need always to resort to metaphor and model and analogy and even poetry.

Now, the world is one. Scientific laws and regularities are universal in their application, and the world, all that is, is an interlocking web of intelligible relationships. So, we might well say, its ultimate reality must be ‘one’ in ultimate nature. Nevertheless, the world displays a remarkable diversity and fecundity and many levels of complexity, so whatever this ‘one’ ultimate reality is, it must be some kind of diversity-in-unity, a Being of unfathomable richness.

To hold even these propositions together, we must note that this ‘x’ must be an ultimate reality, must include and penetrate all that is, whose being is more than, but is not exhausted by, all that is. The world includes persons. If ‘x’ is more than personal, ‘x’ can enter into personal relationships and there must then be something like succession in this Being: we cannot avoid using verbs about this ‘x’, and these have tenses. Time is created. Each moment is given existence by ‘x’, thinking it into being. So, we have to begin to think that ‘x’ gives existence in time to all that is.

When I think of this I sometimes think of the episode in ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ where the Red King is asleep and snoring. Poor Alice is with Tweedledum and Tweedledee:

‘Alice began, ‘Well, they were both very unpleasant characters’, she thought. Then she checked herself. In some alarm she heard something that seemed to her like the puffing of a steam engine in the wood near them, though she feared it was more likely to be a wild beast. ‘Are there any lions or tigers about here?’ she asked timidly. ‘It’s only the Red King snoring’, said Tweedledee, ‘Look at him’, the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice’s hands and led her up to where the king was sleeping. ‘Isn’t he a lovely sight?’, said Tweedledum. Alice couldn’t honestly say that he was. He had a tall, red nightcap with a tassel and he was lying crumpled into a sort of untidy heap, snoring loud, ‘fit to snore his head off’, said Tweedledum. ‘I’m afraid he’ll catch cold with lying on the damp grass’, said Alice, who was a very thoughtful little girl. ‘He’s dreaming now’, said Tweedledee. ‘What do you think he’s dreaming about?’ Alice said, ‘Nobody can guess that.’

‘Why, about you!’ Tweedledee exclaimed, tapping his hands triumphantly, ‘and if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you would be?’ ‘Where I am now, of course’, said Alice. ‘Not you, Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. ‘You’d be nowhere. Why, you’re only a sort of thing in his dream.’ ‘If that there king were to wake’, added Tweedledum, ‘you’d go out bang, just like a candle.’ ‘I shouldn’t!’ Alice exclaimed indignantly. ‘Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know.’ ‘Ditto’, said Tweedledum. ‘Ditto, ditto’, said Tweedledee.⁴

I don’t know of any passage in literature, philosophical or otherwise, which conveys better that in some sense we are all a thought in the mind of God. We are given existence by God. Every moment of time is given existence for us by God, and in that sense God gives existence to all that is and all that is becoming.

I’ve jumped the gun, so I’ll go back a little bit along the path I was taking before. One of the things you discover in science - and I certainly discovered this when I first started doing research - is that, surprisingly, some of your experiments actually work! Why should they? It is based on assumption that in the end the world is always that bit more rational than you have any reason to expect it to be. Fred Hoyle (b.1915), who was no great friend of Christianity, once said, ‘The world always turns out to be more beautifully rational, more beautifully articulated, than you have any right to expect.’ As Einstein (1879-1955) said, ‘The eternal mystery of the world is comprehensibility.’ So whatever is the explanation to be inferred about the existence of this world, this ‘x’ that gives it existence must be supremely and unsurpassedly rational. But if this ‘x’ is to give existence to such a world, he must know this world, he must know all that it is logically possible to know. The technical word for that is, of course, omniscience. Also, ‘x’ must be able to do all that it is logically possible to do: must be in this sense omnipotent. Twentieth-century physics shows the realities to which the concepts of matter, energy, space and time refer are all interlocked. They are all aspects of the created order. Hence, ‘x’ is other than time and present in all times, so ‘x’ must be omnipresent and eternal.

But the highest and most subtle form of existence in the known universe is human persons. Our brain is the most complicated piece of matter in the universe. We know the universe; it does not know us. So it is legitimate to start using personal words to try and point to the meaning, to what this ‘x’, this omnipresent and eternal ‘x’, must be who gives existence to all the world. And so this ‘x’ must be at least, we would say, suprapersonal, even if this ‘x’ has impersonal features. This ultimate reality is what in English we call God, the creator God, and that’s the word I’ll use from now on.

We’ve already seen how this God gives existence to each segment of time for all that is becoming. It raises a very interesting question which has been in much debate amongst philosophers and theologians and scientists in the last ten years; a debate I’ve been involved in: ‘Does God know the future?’ The traditional view was that, of course God knew the future - kind of stood on top of a mountain and saw past, present and future all laid out. There are very good reasons now for saying that if God knows all that is logically possible to know, God cannot know the future definitively since the future does not yet exist with its content. He will know better than any other existent what it is likely to contain, and in some cases what it will certainly contain, because God knows all the laws of Nature; but God does not know in advance what the deliberations of free-will will be tomorrow as we make decisions. God will always be the only existent who is always at all points in the future to respond to what we decide, but God has allowed us freedom, and if our freedom means anything, that’s what it means. And there are a whole slew of quite responsible thinkers now who will say that God does not know the future in the sense that it’s already there to be known. It’s not there to be known, so God cannot know it. He can’t know that two and four make eight because that’s not the case.

In this kind of way, and also with some more technical things in quantum theory where the knowledge is only probabilistic, we have to say therefore, odd though it is, that although we say God is omnipotent, God has, as it were, self-limited God’s own omnipotence to let himself not know what we will do in advance if our will is free. We also have to say – and this has been accepted for many centuries – that God has limited his omnipotence. Although God theoretically can do anything that is logically possible to do – he can’t make the irresistible force move an immovable object – he has self-limited God’s omnipotence by allowing us free will and by allowing the world to be itself and to follow its own regularities.

So we get this ‘picture’ of God thinking about the kind of world that the sciences show us in a still snapshot. But the world, as my ‘Genesis for the 21^st Century’ showed, is in process. The epic of evolution describes the universe in process by means made intelligible to the sciences from the original hot, Big Bang or quark soup, up to today.

Dobchansky (an Orthodox Christian and a great geneticist) said: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ The original quantum fluctuation in that quark soup in the hot, Big Bang has evolved into Mozart, Shakespeare, Dante, Jesus of Nazareth and you and me. The whole process self-inherently produces, cosmically, not only matter, but on Earth matter capable of self-organizing into the intricate complexities of life and that of human beings. The process of creating is continuous. Creation is therefore not just a past event. At 4004 BC (if you add up the patriarchs in the book of Genesis, as Bishop Usher did in the 18^th Century), or even 12 billion BC, creation is still going on. Therefore we have to recognize that the immanent Creator is creating in and through the processes of the natural order to which God, of course, is giving existence. This is the great new illumination from modern evolutionary science.

Note especially that everything began simply with matter, energy, space, time and all else – atoms, molecules, galaxies, amoeba, insects, dinosaurs, Neanderthals, Chinese, Africans – yes, and even the British and Americans: all assemblies of the same basic stuff of the world which physicists currently call quarks. We are stardust. Every iron atom in the haemoglobin taking oxygen to your brains and, I hope, keeping you awake, was made in a supernova explosion before the Sun and the Earth were formed. Of course, we may be just quarks, but we are thinking assemblies of quarks and atoms. We know the universe and it does not know us. The divine in-built creativity of the world has reduced thinking persons from insentient units. This does not mean that we have to say we are nothing but quarks or atoms. The world is, to use a technoword, ‘monist’ - made up of one set of basic physical units; but it is all so emergent and so creative. This is the way we can now see that God has been and is creating in and through the processes the natural sciences reveal.

In the processes of evolution, the emergence of new forms of living matter and organisms was discovered by Darwin: the process of ‘natural selection’. Now this process involves a ‘chance’ element that daunted Darwin and led many 19^th Century thinkers into Agnosticism; for the processes of mutation at the DNA level which cause changes in the structures of the organism are entirely random with respect to the needs of the organism. The environment selects out those mutants which produce more progeny. That’s the process of natural selection. We now realize that if all events were the result only of ‘chance’, then all would be inchoate and nothing stable could exist at all. But if they were all conditioned only by laws, then you would have the clockwork universe which so daunted the 18^th Century: a universe which could never change, a God who wound the clock up and just let it go ticking over the same way aeon after aeon. This is a creative universe, and we have to take on board that God is the ultimate source both of law, necessity and of chance; an improviser of unsurpassed ingenuity.

Such a process can, in fact, display purpose, for in the process there are propensities: situations affecting the outcome of random events that make certain developments possible and even probable. I’m a grandfather, and sometimes my grandchildren allow me to play cards with them. I never win! I’ve come to the conclusion that, although the deal of the cards or the throw of the dice are entirely random, the rules determine the outcome; and they only tell me part of the rules when I start. By the time we’ve finished, they’ve won!

This is a very good illustration of how the result of a random process depends on the law-like framework in which it is embedded. The law-like framework in which natural selection is embedded is of such a kind that there is a propensity to increase in complexity, increase in information processing therefore, in the means for brains and nerve cells and increasing consciousness, of sensitivity to pain, and even to self-consciousness, because language enables social groups to work together to help them survive. Hence the spectre that was conjured up in the 19^th Century can now be exorcised. The role of chance in biological evolution does not mean the process is meaningless and without purpose. Indeed, the fact that life is possible at all is closely related to the physical parameters of the universe - the so-called ‘anthropic principle’. Whatever one makes of that (and in this I differ a bit from some other Keene lecturers⁵), it is at least consistent with the whole process manifesting the intentions of a creator God. The whole process manifests the inherent in-built creativity of the stuff of the world. Notice that at no point is divine intervention necessary to pull it or push it in a particular direction. The whole process is given the creative existence of its kind by the continuous presence and activity of God through the processes.

Yet, of course, we have to recognize that the fecundity of the non-human living world is quite remarkable. There are existing some ten million species, and perhaps some hundreds or thousands of species are now extinct. Do we have to think that all those species were there just to make possible our existence? What sort of God would that be? We have to take on board that in some sense all species, living and dead, were in their time of value to God for their own sake for being what they are - products of the creativity of God’s own God-given processes. We have, therefore, to be a bit anthropomorphic here. We can only make sense of this by saying that God has something akin to joy and delight in the whole of creation. However, there is a dark side to the biological process: the ubiquity of pain, suffering and death. All of these can be given purely biological interpretations, for they are necessary for the formation of new life. Without pain, creatures would not survive ten minutes, because they would have no warning signals. Think of those unfortunate children who have no sensitivity to fire or danger. They hardly live, and they’re very difficult to keep alive.

Death, the death of the individual, is the pre-requisite of the development of new species. We would not be here but for the death of proto-human forms, humanoid forms, who preceded us, and all the way down the evolutionary chain. We cannot as theists, believers in God, duck this one. Whatever St Paul said about the wages of sin being death, he cannot be referring to biological death, because God has created new forms of life through the death of individuals.

What sort of God is this that allows death and pain and suffering to be the means of creation? At this point we have to take on board a new and, I think, really 20^th Century theological insight. It has become clear that the God we believe in, certainly that we as Christians believe in, is a God who suffers in and with the creative process of the world. Creation is costly to God and God took a risk in creation by allowing the autonomy of human beings in it. This is why many Christian thinkers now see God’s creating acts as a kind of self-offering kenosis; self-emptying of vulnerable love. God creates at a cost, with self-limitation, to bring into existence beings freely capable of instantiating the values of truth, beauty and goodness, and of being incorporated into the divine life; but also capable of their contraries, by the egocentric exercise of their freedom for which God suffers.

Well, I’ve tried to give you, and I’m afraid it’s been rather a gallop through some of the considerations in looking at the picture of the scientific world, some pointers and leads to the kind of Being - the kind of explanation of all these realities - to which Christians and Muslims and Jews and other monotheists give the name of God. It’s time to take stock.

Our exploration of the world, as perceived by the sciences, has led us to infer that the best explanation of all that is and all that is becoming, is in ultimate reality God; a God who has all those characteristics I mentioned. I am not affirming that I approve in my reflections on what we now know of the world from science, that there is such an ultimate reality God with just these attributes; only that for me it is the best explanation. They are together cumulative in their effect and make a more convincing case in my view than any of the rival explanations, whether those of atheism or often under the guise of agnosticism.

As a scientist I was trained always to ask ‘Why?’, and I’ve often noticed that many scientists stop at the very point when they ought to go on asking Why?. Why is there anything at all? Why is the world the way it is? Why have persons developed out of quarks and atoms? Why is this extraordinary process, this epic of evolution? Most of them, and I think of names of popular scientific writers who resound loudly with their atheisms or agnosticism, to me often are being very unscientific in the sense that they go on asking the question why? If you go on asking the question why, you cannot but help be led to something like the kind of best explanations I suggest - not conclusions, but best explanations; what makes most sense of the world.

Well, the descriptions I gave you were pretty abstract. To be accessible to personal communal life, we need to develop some more lively images, notions and metaphors that represent what we mean by God and the meanings from the world we find intelligible through this God. Transition to such a theology is in my view unavoidable if Christians and other theists in the West are not to degenerate into an esoteric society, internally communing with itself. We desperately need a rebirth of images to satisfy the spiritual hunger of our time which knows, even if only intuitively, this great epic of evolution which I’ve outlined.

So let me - ludicrously briefly - mention a few which I think can help us at this stage of our exploring, as we arrive closer to the place where we started, namely God. First of all, what I call immanence and a theistic natrivism. One of the positive effects of Darwin’s eventually accepted proposal of a plausible mechanism for the changes in living organisms was that it led to the ultimate device of the external deistic notion of God’s creative action. Let me quote an Anglican theologian who, as early as 1889 and a bit before, said something like this: Darwinism (that is, evolutionary ideas) appeared and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. Either God is everywhere present in Nature or he is nowhere.’ This is an emphasis on what is technically called the immanence of God as creator - in, with and under the processes of the world unveiled by the sciences; and that’s certainly in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates of the 19^th Century. These processes have the seamless character of a web that has been spun on the loom of time. The process appears to be continuous from its cosmic beginning in the hot, Big Bang to the present, and at no point do modern natural scientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain their observations and inferences about the past.

The traditional notion of God sustaining the world in its general order and structure now has to be enriched by a much more dynamic and creative dimension. The old picture was rather like Atlas, statically holding up the globe: God sustaining everything in existence. The processes of the world are not themselves God, but the action of God as creator. God is giving existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new. In this way God is all the time creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed ‘gaps’ in which God might be supposed to be acting as creator in the living world. The God of the gaps – as the gaps get closed by science - disappears over the horizon. That is not the God that we now find ourselves believing in. If I could give briefly a musical analogy; if one’s listening to a piece of music which one’s deeply involved in – a Beethoven Sonata, or whatever it is – when you are listening to that music, if you ask yourself ‘Where is Beethoven now?’, you don’t meet, in the music, that Beethoven who had arguments with his landlady every six months and moved his house, or with his nephew through the law courts about custody. You meet the Beethoven who is the creator/composer. As you listen to the music, you are listening to the music of his creation, and that’s what you are doing in looking at the world of science. You are listening to the music of creation as made by the creator God, this great fugue which is being developed through Time, unravelling the potentialities of the Universe. This view is of the immanence of God; the process of the world as being God- in-action. It is a theistic naturalism; there’s no other finger going in, but the processes are God himself working in the world.

Another view, another way of thinking about this, has this rather difficult word – not pantheism, which means all that is, is God, but panentheism. It’s a word you may hear more of. The ‘en’ in the middle means ‘all is in God’. It is the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part exists in God. But, as against pantheism, God’s being is more than (and is not exhausted by) the Universe. We might recall the speech attributed to St Paul at Athens when he quotes a local Greek poet’s description of God with approval: ‘the One in whom we live and move and have our being’. This notion is in fact deeply embedded in the Eastern Christian tradition, which we ought to listen to more. The classical philosophical theism was that there was space outside God in which the realm of creation was made. I can’t help thinking of the picture of the Sistine Chapel where God from outside puts his finger across to Adam sitting on the earth. I know it is the Spirit of God going into Adam, but the earth and everything else is outside God: the great arm goes across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This way of speaking has become inadequate, for it is becoming increasingly difficult to express the way in which God is present in the world in terms of substances which, by definition, have to be separate from each other. God can only intervene in such a world from outside; yet we have just seen that natural processes in the world need to be regarded as such as God’s creative action. In other words, the world is to God something like our bodies are to us as personal agents, except of course that in the long run we don’t create ourselves.

We are beginning to arrive where we started, to use Eliot’s phrase. God the creator’s outgoing activity towards, and dwelling in, the creative world has been expressed in a rich variety of images in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. We must therefore delve, however briefly, into these rich mines of insights of the past to discern what in a way we already knew. This takes me to the second item on my list here – the concept of the ‘Wisdom’ and the ‘Word’ of God.

Biblical scholars have in recent decades come to emphasize the significance of the central themes of the so-called ‘Wisdom literature’: Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom. In this broad corpus of writings the feminine figure of Wisdom, Sophia, is, as scholar Donne puts it, ‘a convenient way of speaking about God’ acting in creating, revelation and salvation. Wisdom never becomes more than a personification of God’s activity. This Wisdom endows some human beings at least with a personal wisdom that is rooted in their concrete experiences and in their observations of the natural world: what we would call science. All such wisdom imprinted as a pattern on the natural world and in the mind of the sages was but a pale image of the divine Wisdom, that distinct activity of God’s relation to the world. The greatest church ever built in Christendom, in the 6^th Century by Justinian, the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagius Sophia in Constantinople, was devoted to the Wisdom of God in creation. This important concept of Wisdom unites intimately the idea of the divine activity in creation, human experience, and the processes of the natural world. So also does the very closely related concept of the ‘Word’ of God, the logos of God, who we hear about in the first chapter of St John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ This is regarded as existing eternally as a mode of God’s own Being, as active in creation and as a self-expression of God’s own Being and Becoming, imprinted in the very warp and woof of the created order. It seems by origins to be a combination of two ideas – one Hebraic, the idea of the Word of the Lord in creation, (Psalm 33 v.6 ‘By the word of the Lord were the heavens made’), as the will of God in creative activity; and the other the idea in Stoicism of the Logos, the divine principle of rationality which is manifested in the cosmos and in human reason. It is significant for Christians that this ‘Word’, this logos, was regarded as ‘made flesh’ in the person of Jesus the Christ.

The idea of a sacramental universe will be more the focus of my lecture next week, and so I’ll pass over that to the last item. The Eastern Orthodox Church Christian churches have long maintained, ever since the 4^th Century, a distinction between what they called God’s essence, the very being of God in its own self, and what they called God’s energies, the uncreated energies, the outcomes of God’s activity in, with and under the natural world. This has potential for expressing, I think, better than many of our Western ideas, the continuing dynamic creative activity of God. God’s essence is hidden, infinitely transient, beyond all understanding, and not accessible to human minds. The uncreated energies of God are the manifestation of God in the general realm of structures, patterns and activities of the world. The divine energies are God’s own self in action. This is in fact an essentially panentheistic perception of God’s relation to the world, for God is seen in everything and everything is seen in God.

I find this profound emphasis of Eastern Christians more congenial to my presuppositions, influenced by the sciences, than much Western traditional religious talk of the ‘supernatural’ as the way God works. Let me quote Vladimir Lovski, who wrote a great book on the mystical theology of the Eastern Church.

‘The Eastern Christian tradition knows no ‘supernatural’ order between God and the created world. Many Western Christians have got the idea: ‘here is the world of physical matter, here is the world of spirit, and there is God.’ As though God makes contact with something called ‘the spirit’, the ‘supernatural’, and here’s the physical world down below, as though these were a three-layered cake – a world of stuff (the world we’re in), the world of spirit (which is another kind of level), and then God makes contact. Eastern Christian tradition knows no such supernatural order between God and the creative world. What Western theology calls by the name of ‘the supernatural’; for the East is called ‘the uncreated’; the divine energies ineffably distinct from the essence of God and working through the processes of the world. The place we have arrived at is indeed richly furnished from the past, if we did but know it.’

So let us now recapitulate: some vistas of ‘the end of all our exploring’. The paths we have been following from our knowledge of God and of the world, described today by the sciences towards an understanding of God and of God’s relation to that world, have led towards various kinds of insights. From this point the seeker has to ask, what is the general significance of Jesus the Christ, who was successively designated ‘Son of Man’, perhaps by himself, ‘Son of God’ in the New Testament, and ‘God the Son’ by the Church three or four centuries later? He came to be seen as the incarnation, in some sense, of God in a human person, and that God has somehow a ‘trinity-in-unity’. The way of understanding God’s relation to the world that I have been developing here, I think, now allows a more inclusive interpretation of such a central theme in Christian belief, which may be amenable to those of other faiths. What Jesus the Christ manifested is what is universal and perennial. It existed long before the historical Jesus and continues to exist eternally. Although for Christians Jesus is the unique historical embodiment of God as Word, this does not preclude God as Word being expressed in other people’s cultures and times. And who dare affirm that God was not at work expressing God’s self as Word through the great founders of other religions and in the continued experiences of their disciples and followers?

So Christians, indeed everyone, should be ready with humility to hear and be open to the Word, the logos of God, as it is manifested in other non-Christian religions as not at all derogating from the particularity of the Christian revelation. I therefore hope that the place which we have arrived at in this exploration may turn out to be one from which the seekers of many religions have started and that we all might be prepared to ‘know it for the first time’.

A concluding reflection: science is a truly global, cognitive resource, accepted across all cultures. Whenever one goes to a scientific conference, it’s amazing how scientists, whatever religious, ethnic, linguistic, social or other background they have, are immediately on each other’s wavelengths. And they can tell good science from bad science, whatever the colour of the skin or the religious beliefs of the people concerning it. And so one asks, might not these inferences, the kind of ones I’ve been making, constitute a common pool of resources for the exploration towards God of the seekers of many religious traditions or indeed of none?

To arrive where we started by that route signposted by the sciences, and to know the place for the first time, is an opportunity to establish a widely accepted shared base from which the long pilgrimage of humanity towards God might set out. In that pilgrimage our resources will certainly be richly diverse and also other than scientific. They will be historical, aesthetic, symbolic, mystical, experiential, philosophical; but at least we might, with the help of our new scientifically-informed insights, then share a starting point for it more common than in the past; then indeed we should not be ceasing from exploration. And the end of all our exploring would be to arrive where we started and ‘to know the place for the first time’.

Questions: