Faith, Science 

and Understanding

by John C. Polkinghorne

Published by Yale University Press:  2000.  224 pages.

Reviewed by Burns McLean

Faith, Science and Understanding is not a book for beginners.  It moves from one big concept to the next with alacrity.  Polkinghorne’s vocabulary and his background knowledge are astonishing.  He is just as much at home quoting Augustine as Stephen Hawking.  Those who are neophytes, or even relative neophytes, will find themselves sitting with Polkinghorne in one hand and a dictionary in the other and they won’t find the dictionary much use!  If I can compare the human mind to a filing cabinet, when reading this book many may quickly find themselves running out of new files and labels.  They may also find some of their old files starting to bulge at the seams.

Polkinghorne’s specialist vocabulary has been developed for a reason, the same reason why chemists developed terms like "enthalpy" and "entropy":  sometimes we need a special word to communicate a precise concept.  Trouble is, its technical vocabulary makes this book difficult to read.

Polkinghorne was first a scientist, then a theologian.  Perhaps if he had spent more time in front of a classroom he might have seen the benefit of being able to explain things in a way that can be comprehended by hoi polloi [the many].  Ian Barbour, someone Polkinghorne refers to regularly, has managed to achieve this in his book When Science Meets Religion (Harper San Francisco:  April, 2000.  224 pages).  It’s a shame Polkinghorne has not.

Yes, I remember Einstein’s adage “everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler;" however, I could pick nearly any paragraph from this book and read it to my Year 10 Science class and watch their eyes glaze over.  C. S. . Lewis, Carl Sagan or Ian Barbour would not create this effect so dramatically.

There are a couple of conversations in which I like to imagine being  a “fly on the wall."  The first would be between Polkinghorne and Albert Bandura who has developed an extensive psychology on the concept of “agency,” an important theme in this book.  The second would be between Polkinghorne and some of the preeminent educational philosophers of the 20th century, such as R. S. Peters, on the centrality of theology in the academic regime of a university.  Polkinghorne's discussion of this in the first chapters of this book is likely to elicit some controversy among those who cannot conceive of theology in a non-sectarian way.

I learned a surprising thing in the book:  I didn’t know that Sir Isaac Newton was an Arian (p. 183).  This gives him an unexpected point of contact with historical Seventh-day Adventism.

John Polkinghorne is passionate about Christ’s divinity and resurrection and has reconciled these convictions with a non-fundamentalist interpretation of Genesis.  I don’t think this book will be on the “must read” list of the Creation Scientists, however.  More’s the pity!

 So, if you’re after a bit of fluff to while away some time reading on a Sunday afternoon, look elsewhere.  But if you’re after some very solid Christian writing that takes up cudgels with some deep, difficult theological, philosophical and scientific issues, this book is for you.  It warrants a second read, and probably a third.