Transcript
Dr. David Willis, who is in the Department of Theology, will be our introducer. Please, David. One of the great byproducts of having the inauguration of President Gillespie this week is that we have an occasion to see and greet old friends and new friends. And it's a great personal joy and a privilege to introduce Dr. Torrance to you this morning. I made a list of the things which should be mentioned to you to indicate his significance in
the world of scholarship and the life of the church. And I think if I do that thoroughly, that would leave him about five minutes for his talk. So I've decided to make a very brief remark. Dr. Torrance has the significance of being a person who has, throughout his career, called attention to theology as a science. In various ways, that theme has come up over and over again. And the way in which that has been defined and
insistently pushed has been a refreshing contribution, I think, to all of us. Dr. Torrance is very much a church person. He's given leadership as a moderator of the Church of Scotland. He has served on numerous ecumenical agencies. In particular, has been a person who has engaged the Eastern Orthodox Church in discussion with the churches of the West. And has served on the Joint Committee of the Vatican and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in the preparation
of a particular study document as well. His writings are numerous. I particularly have appreciated in early work that you did on the Doctrine of God and Calvin's theology, and then those intriguing studies on space-time and incarnation, space-time and resurrection. The Royal Priesthood was another study which was of great help to us, to all of us. Dr. Torrance has primarily, in these more recent times, been concerned with the dialogue between theology as a science and
other sciences. And has set in motion a whole range of other studies done by other people. I'm so pleased to see Professor Nabelsick with us here, who is also pursuing work in his own right in that area, so that Dr. Torrance has not simply been a person who has done his own work in private, but has been a servant of the church, a servant of the university, and has engaged in a very contagious way of getting
other people interested in their own research. So it's with great joy that we ask Dr. Torrance to address us today. And afterwards, there will be some time, I think, for some questions and answers. The topic before us now is the concept of order in theology and science, Dr. Torrance. Thank you, sir, for your very kindly introduction, both of you. It's always a joy to come to meet Princeton when I have so many former New Collegians. Dr.
Cooper took his doctorate there, and your former president was a student of mine in Edinburgh. I can't claim that about Dr. Gillespie, but I'd like to take the opportunity of giving him my very warm congratulations and prayerful good wishes for his presidency. And I'm so glad that someone so worthy of his predecessors, whom I knew so well, Jim McCord and John McKay, now occupies this place in Princeton, and it's a place throughout the world. It's not
just a place in Princeton. And so I'm so delighted that we have in him the one he is. I'm supposed to be concerned with theology and science. People think about that everywhere. But I'd like to say quite frankly that my work in theology and science is a par ergon. I engage in it simply to clear the ground for proper theology in its own right, in its own field. The trouble is, I'm afraid, that having done so
much, mainly scientists in different parts of the world who want to be the believers and laugh at the philogens who are not believers – oh, there you are, Dr. Gillespie, I'm looking for you – who want to be believers, drag me all over the world. And so I don't get enough time now, as I hope I will have – God gives me time – to introduce the dogmatics I've been working on within this context. All rational
knowledge has to do with order, in developing an orderly account of the way in which things actually are in their own inherent structure or intelligibility. If they were not orderly in themselves, they would not be intelligible to us, and would not be open to rational description and explanation. Broadly speaking, then, we are accustomed to equate the orderly with the rational, and the disorderly with the irrational, or at least the non-rational. It should be noted right
away, however, as another new collegian, Alastair MacKinnon of McGill, has shown, that order is not something we can ever prove, for we have to assume order in any attempt at proof or disproof. That is to say, order presupposes an ultimate ground of order with which we operate at the back of our mind in all rational activity. Belief in order, the conviction that whatever may appear to the contrary in so-called random or chance events, reality is
intrinsically orderly, constitutes one of the ultimate factors in all rational and scientific activity. The same belief in order, together with a refusal to accept the possibility of an ultimate fortuitousness behind the universe, lies deeply embedded in religious consciousness. Where is that more powerfully expressed than in the anguished cries of the Old Testament Psalmists, whose faith in the truth, righteousness, and steadfast love of God remains finally unshaken in spite of being desperately baffled by the frequent triumph
of evil in the world? Thus, both scientific and religious approaches to states of affairs that defy rational explanation do not make us abandon our belief in order. They point us to an ultimate ground of order, both as a sufficient reason for our compulsive belief in order and as a controlling center of reference for a scientific or theological interpretation of what would otherwise appear quite disorderly and irrational. This ultimate ground of order is and must be hidden,
for in the nature of the case, it cannot be conceptualized, far less explained in terms of the orderly arrangements of things within the universe that is indebted to it. In a strange way, it is known only in not being known, or known only in an implicit or subsidiary way as the comprehensive presupposition for the understanding of any or all order whatsoever. Without it, everything would finally be meaningless and pointless. It is the argument of the discussion
that follows, however, that science and theology are each dedicated in their own way, not only to clarifying and understanding order, but to achieving order, not only into probing into and disclosing the order of things as they actually are, but the actualizing or realizing of order in our interaction with nature and with one another. That is to say, in theology and science alike, we are concerned with the kind of order that ought to be through relating actual
order to the ultimate controlling ground of order from which all order proceeds. Let us first consider theology in that respect. The belief in order with which we have so much to do in Christian life and thought has its ground in the love of God, for it is ultimately God's love which is the power of order in created existence. Here we are concerned not only with belief in the order inherent in the universe as it becomes disclosed
through our scientific inquiries, but with the kind of order that ought to be actualized within the universe, for that is the law of God's love for the universe. God is love, for love is the self-determining form of God's being within himself as God, and therefore also the determining basis of all reality other than God, the creator and contingent upon him. This does not mean that God is necessarily related to the world, for it was out
of his overwhelming, overflowing love that he freely and ungrudgingly brought the world into being, giving it a genuine reality of its own, so utterly differentiated from himself. Moreover, he continues freely and ungrudgingly to sustain it in being through relation to himself, thereby constituting himself in his love as its true determining end. God is the only one who is what he does and does what he is, so that the very love that God eternally is in himself
and in his relation to the universe he has made bears in a commanding ontological way upon it. That is the ultimate ground for its created order as well as its created being, but it is a commanding ground which as such is as such the ultimate judge of all disorder and evil wherever it may arise. That is why in the Old Testament, for example, the majestic I am of God is revealed as the one ground upon which
all the prohibitions in the Decalogue rest. Disorderly ways of behavior being the very antithesis of what God is, and why the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves is intrinsically bound up with the supreme commandment to love the God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and with all our strength as Jesus reiterated in the Gospel. The kind of order that ought to be realized in the world is the law of
God's love. Now this is the concept of order which Christian theology seeks to think out by relating the incarnation of the word of God in Jesus Christ to the creation which was brought into being from nothing through the creative power of that word. It was thus that the all important concept of contingent intelligibility originally arose in Western thought as the Christian doctrine of the incarnation had the effect of overthrowing the Greek notions of the unreality of
matter and the divine nature of the rational forms imminent in the world. That did not take all at once by any manner of means for while the decisive revolutionizing concepts injected into the stream of human culture had a radical effect at the time they have had to struggle ever since with the persistence in our Western mind of pre-Christian forms of thought which have come down to us with an immense prestige due to the magnificent contribution
of ancient Greece to human civilization. Our task now is to develop this essentially biblical concept of order by relating the creation to the incarnation from the perspective of its embodiment the embodiment of the love of God in Jesus Christ within the spatial temporal structure of our existence in world and therefore in the light of the fact that the overwhelming commanding love of God has taken precisely this astonishing way of humiliation passion and atoning sacrifice to realize
its supreme end within our disordered world. In Jesus Christ the new order of the kingdom of God's love has intersected the old order of our existence in this world with a view to redeeming and liberating it from the forces of disorder and darkness entrenched in it and renewing the whole created order. It is incumbent upon us therefore to relate to the actual order we find in the world to the redemptive order which lies at the heart
of the Christian message. In the Christian faith we look for a new order in which the damaged order or the disorder that explicitly arises in the world will be healed through a creative reordering of existence as it is reconciled to its ultimate ground in the creative love of God. Hence far from thinking of the saving acts of God in Jesus Christ as in any way an interruption of the order of creation or some sort of violation
of natural law we must rather think of the incarnation passion and resurrection of Christ and indeed of his miraculous acts of healing together with the so-called nature of miracles all as the chosen way in which God the ultimate source of all rational order brings his transcendent mind and will to bear upon the disordered structures of our creaturely existence in space and time. That is the way of his redeeming and love. The kind of order with
which we are concerned in Christian theology therefore is creative and normative, redemptive and regulative at the same time. It is order fulfilling and expressing the imperative of the overwhelming and unconditional liberating love of God. Now let us consider science in the same respect. Science, natural and physical science is no less dedicated to order not only to the understanding of order but to the attainment of order. The kind of order that our scientific inquiries disclose is not
only that of past of affairs but that of states of affairs which are constantly emerging and developing. This is nowhere more apparent than in the way in which we are forced to relate all our scientific inquiries and indeed science itself to the expansion of the universe from its initial dense state and the so-called primeval soup toward an increasingly ordered state in an expansion of order to ever richer and more complex order. This has been greatly
reinforced by the rethinking of classical thermodynamics in application to open systems in which we discover that order spontaneously arising far from states of equilibrium where instead of random fluctuations or chaos we find more organized and higher levels of order. The kind of order that arises in this way is what R.B. Lindsay in a very interesting article has recently called entropy consuming that is an orderly movement against the natural tendency toward an increase in entropy or
the dissipation of order but that is after all is it not what science itself is about. Science is an entropy consuming activity geared into the entropy consuming activity of nature and dedicated to the understanding and maintaining of order in face of the natural incarnation of nature to degenerate into states of disorder the sort of thing that every gardener knows only too well. It is in the biological anthropological and sociological sciences in which we study life processes
in various forms that we find most evident the kind of order that consumes entropy. Indeed an instructive history of human civilization could be written from this very point of view as the increasing development and cultivation of order in man's interaction with the intelligible universe around him in the course of which science in various forms plays an essential and supreme role as an entropy consuming pursuit. At the same time of course achievements of this kind have to
pay the penalty of a considerable dissipation of energy or the transmutation of energy from an available to a non-available form. It should now be apparent that in natural science we strive to grasp not only how things as a matter of fact are found to be arranged in nature but how things ought to be arranged. In our engagement in scientific activity we respond to an ontological imperative which we share with the whole universe of created reality
in its constant expansion toward maximum order. Only relatively few people of course are passionately committed to scientific research in unraveling the imminent secrets of nature but scientific activity after all as Einstein used to point out is only a refined form of our normal rational behavior in the world. Hence it is justifiably to be claimed that the inner compulsion which prompts and drives our science is no more than an extension of the rational compulsion under which we
human beings live our daily life. Now this inner compulsion is what Arby Lindsay to virtue him again for a moment has called the thermodynamic imperative which in line with the second law of thermodynamics he defines in these terms. While we do live we ought always to act in all things in such a way as to produce as much order in our environment as possible in other words to maximize the consumption of entropy. Now this helps us
to appreciate why science is always generating fresh and more sophisticated technologies ways of transmuting available energy into higher and more complex patterns through which the inherent forces of nature are encouraged to function in accordance with their own latent potentialities for order. It should be added however that this thermodynamic imperative is not to be associated with a masterful ambition in human beings to triumph over nature or to impose their own egos and wills upon their environment in
the most convenient way to serve their interests although admittedly human selfishness and greed do actually lead people to misuse science and technology in just that way. I believe that we must discern behind this imperative to increase the degree of order whether in nature or in human life something much more compelling a requirement or obligation emanating from the ultimate ground of all order and echoed by the claims of created reality upon us. This is the imperative of
which we are acutely aware as we tune our minds as faithfully as possible to the intrinsic structures of the universe for it generates in us what has been called very appropriately the scientific conscience. In other words it is an imperative which the scientist as scientists cannot in rational conscience disregard or disobey but to which he is precisely as rational scientist wholly committed. This is what lies at the back of the fact that the order inherent in
the universe which presses ineluctably upon our minds in all inquiry is a feature of the universe which as we have already noted it is impossible to prove but which must be presupposed in all proof. It is the order that provokes and guides our inquiries on which we rely in all testing of evidence or in formulating our theories and to which we appeal in the last resort as the ultimate judge of the truth or falsity of our
understanding concepts and explanations. It is this ultimate order the ontic truth of things to which we are rationally committed and over which we have no control which stands guard over all our scientific inquiries and theories from discovery and to verification. Here let me offer three remarks about the ground we have covered so far. First we have moved away from the old idea that natural science is concerned only with the how and not with the why that
is only with mechanical processes and not with ends whereas theology it was alleged is concerned only with why questions that is questions about beginnings and ends. That sharp distinction had the effect of importing a deep split between science and theology and indeed between the natural sciences and the humanities from which our way of life and thought suffered severely in the most sensitive areas of human culture. It is now evident however that the how questions and the
why questions cannot be finally separated and that they appear different when they are found linked together. I think here particularly the place that time has come to occupy at basic points in scientific inquiry and theory in respect of the age of the universe or the dynamic states of matter or the history of atoms and the structure of molecules and in view of the unceasing expansion of the universe the place of time as an essential factor in
physical law. That time is a central constitutive ingredient in our understanding of the universe tells us that the universe must be regarded as finite in space and time which forces us to ask questions about its beginning and its end even on the level of natural scientific inquiry. But when in the midst of such inquiries the question why is raised and must be raised it has the effect of bringing theological science and natural science into closer relation
to one another if only through approchement of their different objectives or ends. And second the fact that natural and theological science both operate under the constraint of an ultimate ground of order which will not allow a divorce of actual order from the order that ought to be shows us that there is only one rational order pervading the entire universe. Although this may take various forms such as we have to express in terms of as I've called
it elsewhere number rationality word rationality organismic rationality and aesthetic rationality they are all interlocked very deeply distinctive differences and basic unity have to be taken into account in each field of inquiry but under the constraint of the ultimate order of things over which we have no control and to which we owe obedience as something rationally imperative. To take this imperative seriously will not allow us to segregate in some Kantian fashion a categorical imperative that obtains in
the moral realm but is not bound up intelligibly with the ontology of the created universe nor will it allow us to segregate a categorical imperative that obtains in structures of created being but is not bound up intelligibly with transcendent obligations that is to say we are now forced to rethink moral laws in terms of their intrinsic ontological grounds and to rethink physical laws in terms of their contingent relation to a stable ground of intelligibility beyond themselves.
Three there is a fundamental harmony between the laws of the mind and the laws of nature that is an inherent harmony between how we think and how nature behaves independently of our minds. This is nowhere more evident than in the relation between mathematics and physics a point that constantly provoked wonder from James Clark Maxwell and Albert Einstein and Eugene now Princeton has expressed this in our own day by what he has called the unreasonable effectiveness of
mathematics in the natural sciences. In one sense the theoretical concepts and structures that we employ are free creations of our minds free in the sense however and most commentators forget this as Einstein argued that they are not logically derived like necessary deductions but they are not free in the more basic sense for they arise in our minds under the compelling demands of reality to which we ourselves belong in mind as in body. The more profoundly our
understanding penetrates into the created universe the more clearly and fully that pre-established harmony between mind and nature becomes manifest between the way we think and what we think about. In view of these developments we should not be surprised at the claim that there are deep interrelations between the sciences between various ways of understanding the universe in accordance with its inherent modes of order all of which overlap and interpenetrate each other nor should we be surprised
that this applies no less to the interrelations of theological science and natural science although they are concerned in different ways with the kind of intelligible order inherent in the created universe. Natural science of course is concerned to explore and account for the ongoing processes nature in their autonomous structures that is in their contingent reality as utterly different from the transcendent reality of God. Theological science is concerned to understand and interpret states of affairs and events in
the created universe insofar as they are dependent upon God the creator and redeemer and are specifically correlated to his revealing and saving purpose in history but since both natural science and theological science operate within the same framework of space and time which is the carrier of all our creaturely rationality their inquiries cannot but overlap even though they move in different directions going to the different ends they have in view and yet the more rigorous their questioning
is the more aware they are of the limits which they cannot rationally cross and the more ready they are to suspend judgment and even to call for help from one another before the face of the creator. It is a highly interesting situation of this kind which we have now reached in subatomic particle research. The way in which the quanta behave in our interaction with them is very baffling for it resists precise description within the parameters of
geometrically defined space and time to which we have been accustomed in atomic theory so that apparently only an indirect account can be offered which has built into it the basic equations of the role of the observer a theme so which is so dear to John Wheeler with whom I have been having a running discussion on this matter but then the question is raised as to whether our traditional impersonal understanding of physical reality should not be radically
revised for an actual fact there is maybe no reality so Wheeler says no reality in the universe which is not observer conditioned at this junction absolutely fundamental epistemological questions are posed which physics cannot resolve alone without engaging in dialogue at the deepest epistemological level with other sciences it is not just that physics has found its limits but that physics has gained a profound insight into the contingent nature of rational order which it cannot adequately grasp within
its own restricted perspective and where it needs help from beyond its own frontier maneuver the more deeply scientific inquiry penetrates to the rock bottom structures of nature such as quarks which are not self explainable it seems to be putting its finger upon the very edge between being and nothing existence and creation establishing contact with the state of affairs intelligibility of which calls for a sufficient reason beyond itself there must be in Wheeler's language a regulating principle
in the behavior of quanta which we haven't yet got there's to say quantum theory has the effect of forcing out into the open the contingent nature of physical reality in such a way as to make a genuine doctrine of creation pertinent in its own field how are theologians to act react to this turn of events certainly the more theologians have the courage to think out the profound interactions between the incarnation and the creation the more they
will be forced to regard the startling patterns disclosed by scientific research in the space-time universe as constituting in its contingent rational order a created correspondence to use Karl Barth's expression a created correspondence to the uncreated rationality of god himself this will involve rather more than courage however it will mean that theologians must be prepared for the kind of hard intense thinking to which physicists are accustomed as they are to partner them in any way at
these exciting points in the advance of scientific knowledge i recall this collection in heisenberg's autobiography how he would spend months wrestling with just a single equation to get it out and used to play his violin of piano to tune in to the central order in order to do so months of just hard thinking tell me what theologians prepared to do that the reward just about one point the rewards for both theology and physics in this kind
of partnership will surely be very valuable if only in the discovery that there is and always has been a hidden traffic of ideas of surprising significance for both physics and theology now the fact that there are deep interrelations between natural scientific and theological inquiry means that the advantages and the disadvantages the truths and the errors in one inquiry are liable to affect the other inquiry that there have been such interrelations between theological science and natural science
which have influenced the course of each inquiry very profoundly is evident from the way in which the notions of contingence and inertia have arisen and played a very far-reaching role in modern science let us turn first to the concept of contingence which as we know from examination of the history western thought has a basically christian not just a judaic christian they're basically christian so tied up with the incarnation now this is not at all the
ancient greek notion of accident or chant or the germans called which was contrasted to the orderly and irrational the necessary and the timeless or the eternal as something essentially disorderly and irrational in relating the incarnation of the logos if you like the mind or the reason of god to the creation however christian thinkers came up with the idea that the whole universe in matter and form is created out of nothing now for the pagan greek mind
that was an impious doctrine since it implied that the eternal divine forms imminent in the cosmos example such as we have in geometry were created out of nothing and they rejected it as a form of atheism now we have to appreciate that conflict between christianity and ancient greek culture nevertheless it was just this christian concept of contingent form contingent intelligible order that was eventually to become the ultimate foundation upon which our empirical and theoretical science were
to rest is because nature is contingent that we cannot read off its rational order through logical deductive operations merely after the pattern of euclidean geometry but may discover the kind of rational order embedded in nature only through asking nature to reveal itself to us because only nature can tell us that is what we do through our scientific experiments when we put our questions to nature in the physical mode appropriate to nature and get back answers which
we could not obtain otherwise moreover because nature is contingent not only its matter but in its form or order the kind of science we need for understanding of it must be formal or theoretical as well as empirical now the problem was precisely how to relate the empirical to the theoretical how to grasp the actual way in which empirical theoretical elements are found embedded together in nature and how therefore to understand the way they must be brought
together in the structure of science itself if science is to go on being successful that was a much more difficult problem than modern science at first realized blinded no doubt by the astonishing advances in scientific knowledge of the universe achieved through newton a more satisfactory answer to the problem was given by michael faraday and james clark maxwell both of whom were deeply influenced by the christian doctrine of creation and incarnation and thinking out a way to
express what clark maxwell called the real modes of connection in nature in the face of the failure of newtonian mechanical connections to explain the electromagnetic field it was left to einstein however to show especially through the theory of general relativity how the newtonian way of relating geometry and experience had to be replaced by another in which theoretical and empirical interpenetrate one another in nature and correspondingly in the structure of science an interesting the language that einstein
uses in that great essay or lecture given in berlin in 1930 i think on geometry and experience takes over without reference to the basic expressions used by james clark maxwell in this connection and incidentally may i point out in passing the profound influence of his christian upbringing and his belief in jesus christ as god incarnate and savior upon clark maxwell's physics he just he he just could not believe no matter how hard he tried that nature
which had come from the wisdom of god that we see in the face of jesus christ could be described in the mechanical way of newton it just didn't fit in with his intuitive notion of god and at the back of his mind they kept on calling in question until finally he had to abandon newtonian mechanics in face of the extraordinary different relation intelligibility that he found in the electromagnetic field and there he used specific theological doctrines
like the interrelation of persons which belong to what persons are to help explain the way in which the so-called particles are interrelated one another that by the way here then we have a basic concept thrown up by christian theology that has played an all-important role in natural science contingent order or intelligibility is a feature of nature that forces itself more and more upon our scientific inquiry in the that order is not self-explanatory not
self-sufficient not timeless or necessary but order that is dependent on an ultimate rational ground beyond with reference to which the created order is the kind of order it actually is and ought to be contingent open structured order ever reaching beyond what we can grasp or define within the four corners of our propositions or equations this is constantly expressing it impressing itself upon us in the altogether surprising character of the universe and correspondingly in the surprising
turns that are taken in our scientific theories now let us consider the other concept i mentioned that of inertia it is not difficult to trace its source either in late patristic and medieval not to mention neoplatonic and arabian or a veroist thought particularly as the doctrine of the immutability and impassibility of god became tied up with the aristotelian notion of the unmoved mover or a center of absolute rest which was resurrected and powerfully integrated with latin
scholastic philosophy science and theology and theology itself unfortunately it induced a deistic disjunction between god and the world which scholastic thought tried to modify through bringing into play all four aristotelian causes the final the formal along with the material and efficient causes the effect of this however it was not to overcome the dualist modes of thought inherited through saint augustine the great magister teologi of the middle ages but actually to harden the dualism by throwing it
into a strictly causal structure this was a particularly apparent in the conception of sacraments as causing grace which was further aggravated as in the doctrine of the real presence by the acceptance of aristotle's definition of place as the immobile limit of the containing body in medieval science on the other hand the medieval conception of a causal system ultimately grounded and determined by a center of absolute rest had the effect of obstructing attempts to develop empirical interpretations
of nature for denigrated contingentia as irrational and we can see breaking out again and again for example they published just last year for the first time in history the astonishing hexamer on a robert gross test we knew it existed in manuscript of course but never been published and now been published and as you read that you can see here the fruit of the christian doctrine of contingent order beginning to break out but kept on being suppressed
by the doctrine of inertia in the middle ages well it was alas this illogical and metaphysical concept of inertia shown up in this way and was taken up and built into the fabric of western classical science by Galileo Descartes and Newton when inertia used as a kind of mathematical x from which to make calculations about bodies and motion became mythologized into a kind of force now there's no doubt that inertia played a very important role in
the remarkable elaboration of a coherent and consistent system of the world within the static parameters of euclidean geometry such as Isaac Newton carried out which was very successful within its own limits the end result however was the damaging idea of the closed mechanistic universe by which not only theology but all our western theology western culture became seriously infected the concept of inertia is still proving difficult to dislodge or if you like to demathologize in spite of
the work of clark maxwell einstein bore heisenberg but this is due in part at least i believe to the fact that the cultural framework of thought within which scientific inquiry and theory operate are and expressed has been profoundly shaped by it in this way inertia has itself acquired a hidden inertial force in virtue of which it continues to obstruct the kind of open textured scientific thinking required at the frontiers of knowledge in the face of this
christian theology can only cry mea culpa mea maxima culpa for it was largely through christian influence that modern classical science took this unfortunate path at this point i have perhaps my sharpest conflicts and support from physicists today today a steady conflict between these two basic notions of order contingent order and inertial order continues to take place and not always below the surface in the course of this conflict they have been thrown up new ways of thought
that are shaking themselves free of mechanistic terministic structures and it is increasingly realized that nature is much more subtle rafine at this einstein's term and flexible then can be expressed in terms of the old couplet chance and necessity the universe is now found to have an open structured labile nature which is no less but all the more deeply rational than the older closed deterministic view of the universe allowed this movement within science however has been taking
place at a time when our theology in large part is still trapped in rigid newtonian patterns of thought and is thus unable to give scientific inquiry the kind of basic help it needs in the fundamental ideas that it must develop in order to do justice to the actual nature of the universe as it is now daily being disclosed to us the great questions now being thrust upon our natural science run something like this is there a
range of reality that does not lie within the realm of what we call nature this is what i heard pollard the other day referring to rumors of transcendence in science why is it that the rate of expansion of the universe and the tight-knit nuclear structure of matter seem to indicate that the physical laws which we have to formulate under the pressure of nature's inherent mode of order are so staggeringly improbable that's tied up with the
anthropic principle in one way must we not think of the order characterizing nature at all levels as radically contingent it's pointing to a rationality that extends indefinitely beyond it does the order of the created universe not depend after all upon a divine creator and his will an order for the universe and its open-ended development these are the questions that the scientists are asking and which all these demythologizing theologians just cannot begin to answer god help
us seems to me that at present at precisely this point there can be a fruitful correlation between theology and science as a mathematical physicist john pulkinghorn trinity college cambridge who has recently taken antican orders has expressed i quote him behind intelligibility of the universe its openness to the investigation of science there lies the fact of the word of god the word is god's agent in creation impressing his rationality upon the world that same word is also
the light of men giving us thereby access to the rationality that is in the world end of quotation if this is the case as i believe it to be scientists and theologians must surely act and think together and inquiring as deeply as they can into the interrelation between the kind of order which is disclosed through the incarnation of the word and the creative order of redeeming love and the kind of order that nature discloses to our
scientific inquiries an open textured order that is unable to reveal to us its own deepest secrets but can finally only point mutely and beyond itself yet since this is an order that we may apprehend only as we allow our minds to yield to the compelling claims of reality to its ought it is to be found to be an order burdened with a latent imperative which we dare not rationally or morally resist the order of how things
actually are which may appreciate adequately only as we let our minds grope out for what things are meant to be and ought to be it is when this order that impregnates nature and pervades the whole universe is correlated with the word of god incarnate in jesus christ that it becomes articulate beyond beyond what it is capable of in itself and as such becomes not only a sounding board as it were for the message of the truth
and love of god in jesus but the means whereby that message may be received and understood and actualized in human life and civilization as perhaps never before thank you for your patience thank you very much professor torrance i think we do have time for questions and i'll just let you uh feel them yourselves that's a turkey which what is the role of disorder in the order of let me begin from the logical point of view i'm
referring to the word of saint augustine that is i've misused oh phoenix culpa if we hadn't had our sin we would never have had on this line the revelation and enactment of the love of god in the cross of jesus now that doesn't mean to say that the disorder had to be in order to love of god to them but it doesn't mean that although disorder and evil have arisen in the world god so marvelously overrules
it he makes the disorder even the wrath of man to serve his love now can we say that about disorder in nature uh here the problem is to relate as i see it the problem of disorder to entropy and this is a tricky area i think it's quite clear that there are disorderly irrational elements in nature and we have to probe into these but but but most of the disorder we have in nature are the entropy
it's not that kind it is as it were um you know much better than i do as a kind of anticipation of greater order in priggin's idea about thermodynamics when we move away from equilibrium that's a clear definite order we come what he calls random fluctuations of disorder even use the word chaos but then we have emerging higher richer order or when john wheeler speaks about the higgledy-pigglediness of behavior of the quanta and then there
must be a regulating principle about it my question to both of them is this if there was if there is a regulating principle then ultimately there's no higgledy-pigglediness but that's the higgledy-pigginess of our minds that of nature my word to ilia priggin is if it does emerge higher richer forms of order then there was no real chaos but we couldn't understand it but nevertheless there is a period in which order as it were is
shaken up and and and and it's out of the open textured shaken order and that's it disorder that higher richer order arrives but now you're the one to tell us about that please do you think we have to pay for order by having more disorder i think in our world this is this is the case as i said all well all order is achieved only by transmuting available energy into energy that is not available now we
don't understand yet the unavailable order energy that we have dissipated in in the world i don't understand all that it doesn't mean and we have prophecies of gloom of doom about this some people i say it's a catastrophe and so on but it does look as though in our world as it is and that's the logic i would say our fallen world we are unable to get that order cheaply we pay penalty for it and yet
we must achieve order but what about the scientist what have to think about you were telling me about the fact of the that crystals have to be a little disordered in order to grow that that part of the just a yes that's the i agree this is the point but unfortunately we human beings have an enormous amount of disorder that's why i think that they are that the idea if it's taken over too much that of
the observer will really impose upon science a lot of disorder i'm very worried about that's why i'm in dialogue with john wheeler just to edge it without this i like to obtain that last statement about the observer and order if indeed the order by which we look at the organization is redeemed order and that's got a logical order rather than a present order in which you have to take the equipment then we don't really find order
by investigating nature well but you and i belong to nature and science itself is part of nature science itself is part of the expanding universe therefore we cannot divorce that from from the expensive wheelers right to that point you see i accept that so in the way you put your question we were separated from nature and you don't mean that no no wheeler does speak about quantum activities being registered in nature independently man uh and using
the word register and bore sense of observed but this is an area that requires a lot of discovery i what i'm afraid of is that to wheeler's point of view can't will come in by the back door you see and that was exactly einstein's fear of bore and i think he's dead right but but but but nevertheless there's truth on both sides we have to work out this is part of the dialogue is needed but we're
created in the image of god pardon we're created in the image of god yes uh in one sense all nature is because all nature is has rationality imposed upon it and that is as i use what's expression a creative correspondence to god's rationality calvin could make the same point but it says that man is made in the image of god i think this has to do with with with the fact that his relationship to god is
personal beyond that of the animal but he shares with the animal or the inanimate nature a correlation of created rationality to uncreated rational created light to uncreated light uh but if man is made uh in such a way that he has a unique and distinctive relation to god in person as a person god then of course he is given a place in the universe which uh well as genesis where he has to name the animals so
in creation itself man has given a place which recognizes that he has he is that constitutive element in the universe whereby the universe knows and understands itself and i think it's his two man's personal communion with god therefore that ultimately science can reach its highest form because they don't see how it could part from that i think we forget that there's Satan also who's bothering us very very very seriously and some of our battles and some
of our distortions and some of our rebellion rebellion of mankind stems from that other element that we have to we have to fight and if we follow a logical healthy line we then can conquer that impulse to go with Satan rather than with God up to a point very much i would agree but there is the devil is even more subtle than that because somehow even when you resist him you are lending him something you are
lending him something this is the the thing that that kalabash in some ways was concerned with the problem of the nickel if the devil of evil were merely negative then of course it would be relatively easy to overcome him but if there's a positive element in evil so you resist it and resistance to it the rejection of gives it so to speak a status under the rejection which it wouldn't have otherwise so this is the impossible
possibility now there's something terribly subtle here something we can't unravel and that is evil now we know how fearfully intertwined and serpentine this is in human behavior in life i brought you but we find elements of evil in in the universe before a man emerged and this worries us we and that we must try to understand why there are monsters in nature or why there such a destruction in nature can we we can't simply put that
down to the devil partly perhaps you don't we don't know but there's no question that that today i think we have now by all kinds of affairs of social political and human affairs and by the point that science has reached the point where it could become in the hands of people a fearful monster that we have to wrestle in the way we've never wrestled before with the problems of nature in man and beyond man we we
just don't know so that the question that your husband raised is desperately important and we need to work together about that so i have a difficulty and i think that's related to that this ground link creation in the love of god and is that not in fact a limitation which is which already starts to limit the origin to particularly the love of god and perhaps it's also a limitation in the sense that we're moving into a
kind of model concept which you certainly must avoid no i can't see that at all you see it's god we're concerned with and we're concerned with god and his unlimited freedom unlimited love unlimited rationality now certainly we are limited for example our freedom is limited we are given freedom but the very limitation of our freedom is limited by the unlimited freedom of god so the limits of our freedom are grounded the unlimited freedom of god i
would say have the same argument regarding the love of god you see we tend in our history of thought to separate love from rationality but god god isn't logos and love they're one and this is what we see in christ in the logos of god incarnate we have the love of god incarnate as in and through christ alone that we can really understand that i see no limitations i see the opposite this idea that god in
creating the world limited himself is tied up to bogus medieval habits actually of of cataphatic thought and you have to demathologize all that i'm i'm accusing you of that i find this nowhere more beautifully discussed interestingly then in some of the writings of civil of alexandria who discussed the fact how we look at these limits of the love of god as it appear when we take the incarnation and the incarnation and in the carnation god himself
and the son entered within the metro within the the limits of our space-time world this is part but but but the point that he makes it is only the limited love of god who could do they could do that it's the only unlimited power of god and and the fact that god came a little baby shows us that god is just so if you like omnipotent transcendentally powerful beyond anything we can express so the weakness
of jesus is a manifestation of the unlimited love and power of god that's how i would prefer to look at i think that so unfortunately sero hasn't been done into english and we have a nice in post-19 father so i'm delighted that my son ian and a former student here i may george draggers are putting out an edition of sero in english which will go into post-19 father's and then we will be able to
draw help from that because so what do you mean by part of contact that maybe a an actual theology no see this this is that whole old way of thinking because it comes from but you see the old idea was that man is rational well actually it comes from the tradition that man is a spark of the divine and the reason human mind is a spark so that man as as a divine creature is divine now
that was slaughtered through life by the doctrine of incarnation which said no if if it's by that logos incarnate that all things visible and invisible material and mental were made up of nothing and that doesn't hold but that doesn't mean that when god created the world he did not create the world with a created rationality which was stagnantly correlated to his uncreated rationality and that there's a created life which is stagnantly correlated to uncreated life now
that means that um see god has revealed himself to us only within the structures of space and time that's only within the kind of rational order we have and therefore it's only within that rational order that we can understand now we have something else this is the point i referred to that and you see the particular mathematical physics that there's a staggering relationship which a great scientist can pursue in an intuitive relation between this mathematical thinking
and pocahontas nature so in view of that intuitive relation he can reach out far beyond empirical evidence under the compelling structure as a case of angst and again and again and later on empirical evidence comes to justify it why is this intuitive relation between archaeology minds and nature but it doesn't mean to say there's the same kind of intuitive relation between nature and god because the relation with nature and god is one out of nothing but
there is a relationship a created i like about the expression correspondence all this is but contingent contingent order and it is in virtue that contingent order only but we are at no point therefore able to project ourselves mythologic or any other way so i understand your point but we have to restate this our scientists in cultures of different faiths being forced to wrestle with their will share a common scientific language and acceptance of this imposition of
reality from their minds that forcing them to deal with their lives it's very difficult uh but i think we have to when i have to talk to a hindu for example the first thing i put on my agenda is creation uh now and i then try to show him that the science that then i showed him that this concept of creation comes from the concept of the incarnation until we proceed further now and so that there's
no doubt about it you see that the christianity and and and science is now are profoundly integrated in the very roots of development now that means therefore that john mcmurray my old colleague in edinburgh is to say that so science that christ that science for him was was the supreme expression of of the christian faith as it came out the reformation and therefore it's the science of christian faith bears a witness to the rest of the
world i think this is true and in this day of of mushy muzzy interfaith dialogue all that's blotted out you can't do that definitely you can't really help the buddhist or the hindu now i was brought up in a buddhist country in china and i know they just can't do that and in china for example buddhism on the ground or in india you cannot have it without idolatry because man is a body so so body he
cannot exist without physical structures so you must have to have idolatry with that kind of fuel but the destruction of the dualism lag behind that after all for against the dualism had quite a big effect in greek journalism we know that idea the destruction of that dualism and the integration of the mental and material and creation really puts immense questions to buddhists and hindu thought on the reality and so but at this point we have to
be very sensitive because they have certainly ideas for example about relational thinking which we attended a lot to lose but it is no answer therefore to modern problems like capra trying to interpret content theory in terms of the laws of physics i i tried to show him that the pedagogic relations of the kind of i want to take this opportunity to thank you already uh tom for your presentation that always happens when you are with us
we find ourselves caught in the middle of a series of interesting questions we want to pursue them i was just...