John Polkinghorne - Scientist and Priest

I'm glad you brought up Polkinghorne, GDR, as I've already recommended him to at least one creationist type of Christian on this site. If someone has to be a Christian, and wants to talk about science, then the it's worth listening to one of the fast decreasing number of top level scientists who are also Christians.I emboldened the bit where he's lying to himself, a habit of the religious. Religions actually exist because they answer "questions of meaning and purpose and destiny" without reason or evidence, not because they want to ask them. Asking those questions is something that anyone with a philosophical mind might do, but being religious is about cheating, and coming up with faith based answers when there are no known real ones.A religious mind is a believing without reason mind, not an inquiring mind, and the claim that Polkinghorne makes in the sentence I highlighted is outrageous.

All that atheists have in common with each other is that they do not believe in any Gods. They do not share opinions on what "our moral code" is, let alone how whatever it is came about. As an atheist, so do I.

You seemed to imply that you thought that there's more to "our moral codes" than being built up in culture over time. So do I, because a lot of our apparent moral behaviour has its roots in our biological nature.Best for another thread, because as you say, off topic.But briefly, a social animal like us which is capable of behaviour like that described in the good Samaritan parable has certain evolutionary advantages. So, our morals aren't just a matter of culture.I can't speak for other atheists on this, and the reason I picked up on your comment on what atheists think about morals was to point out that atheism is not a belief system, and the only thing that we all have in common is lack of belief in Gods. No other shared politics or philosophical opinions or views on morality or anything else.

Biological "programs" in social animals don't necessarily lead to rational "selfish" behaviour of individuals. Anthropologists will be able to tell you about hunter/gatherer tribes which operate like large extended families, and function on an "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" basis. Without going into details, this makes sense.With modern travel and media communication, people increasingly identify, consciously or subconsciously, with the entire 6 billion as being the tribe, so your example of helping people on another continent is not foreign to our biological nature at all. It's a mistake to see evolution as something that would automatically promote selfishness in individual organisms. Social animals, from ants to ourselves, can make individual sacrifices for the group's "selfish genes".Save a child's life in Uganda, and you as a Christian might see yourself as doing the right thing, but you've also given the individual the chance to reproduce, and be the parent of organisms that carry about 99.9% of your genes.Touching on the topic, Polkinghorne is a good scientist, and he might, at least partially, agree with me on this.When you say: Remember that biological programs don't make us behave in rational "evolutionary" ways in ever changing circumstances, and all of our programs evolved (obviously) long before the present world population crisis.Most species go extinct because, in a sense, evolution doesn't have the time to create the new characteristics, behavioural as well as physical, when environments change too quickly.However, I don't think your example is a very good one, because I think it's definitely to our advantage to increase levels of international help and cooperation. Twentieth century history shows us that the cultures that achieve virtual zero population increase (apart from that attributable to increased life expectancy), are those with the most wealth, highest life expectancies, highest literacy rates, and, I might add especially for you, lowest levels of traditional religion.So, while improving conditions in struggling areas of the world may seem to increase population in the short term, when people feel increasingly secure, they actually choose to have less children, and that means we might be able to achieve relatively stable world population by the end of this century, or early in the next. You seem to be confusing atheists with philosophical movements, like humanism. Atheists are people who don't believe in Gods. One might be a serial killer, and another a philanthropist. They do not share a moral philosophy any more than cigarette smokers or people who don't believe in fairies share a moral philosophy.Atheists are not defined by by anything other than their lack of belief in Gods.When someone makes up a commandment like "though shalt not kill", it's surprisingly meaningless. If you applied modern Canadian values, for example, Moses would be condemned to about a thousand life sentences for murder and genocide. Don't you read your bible?And Christendom, throughout its history, managed a far higher killing rate than the secular modern Western Europe of the last 60 tears or so (church going started to decline rapidly from about 1950 onwards).That lots of our behaviour is the result of past evolution isn't a belief in the "blind faith" sense, it's evidence based. The "something" could be our subconsciousness and our biological natures, both individual and as a species. As these are things that we know to exist, and they fit the bill, don't you think it likely that they are, at least, possible explanations (added to culture, as you agree). Odd if you were brought up a Muslim and indoctrinated as a child with Islam. Or were you, like Polkinghorne, brought up as a Christian?At least 95% of the world's religious people happen to believe that the religion of their background does the best job of explaining things. You can try and intellectualise your cultural programming if you want to, but it won't convince the likes of me. I was brought up in the exact same form of Christianity as Polkinghorne (and Dawkins, interestingly) and I understand very well where he's coming from.I de-programmed myself decades ago.

Quite likely. He doesn't, so far as I know, have any issues with evolution or abiogenesis, both of which can be accommodated in his mind with his particular version of the Christian God (there are many) as an underlying force. The point has frequently been made that neither his God nor any other God seems to be necessary for these processes, neither is there evidence for any of them, so that while he and other believers in other Gods will certainly bring them in, they do not do so by processes of reason, and by looking at the evidence, they seem to do so because they personally desire to believe in these Gods.Using the word "trust" in place of "blind unreasoning faith" doesn't change anything. Asking questions is something we all do. Where I differ from John P. is that he answers questions which are not at this point answerable by human knowledge by sticking in his God. That's not true questioning and enquiring, Brad, it's cheating.He's quick to say that this is not a God of the gaps, but ultimately, it is.Perhaps Gods should be renamed "gap-fillers". I'm sure GDR and I will have to agree to disagree on this, as I don't see religion as playing any thing other than a negative role in serious contemporary thought, or science, and his Christianity is obviously very important to him.

If you think that altruism requires a programmer, the programmer himself, by definition cannot be altruistic. You end up with the same kind of infinite regression that the I.D. people do when they claim that intelligence requires an intelligent designer. The original designer has to be unintelligent. Biological evolution is a non-intelligent, non-altruistic "designer". Really? Perhaps we should develop the welfare programs and old age pension schemes that the religious third world is renowned for. We could try and match their infant and child mortality rates, as well.Actually, if you sign a check for foreign aid, it will be going to one of these very religious societies, for sure. Belief in Gods, like belief in any other supernatural beings, requires faith. Lack of faith in Gods doesn't require faith, by definition.You're making a common mistake of religious people. You probably lack faith in lots of things for which there's no evidence, yet you have a blind spot when it comes to your God, and seem to think that it requires faith to lack faith in it.As for legal and moral standards, do you expect me to torture someone to death for working on a Sunday? Read that Bible of yours. But you and Polkinghorne seem to be suggesting that this intelligence for which there's no evidence does effect our physical environment in some way. And what's odd, and typical of religious people, is that you then make the leap to assuming that an intelligence behind the universe, if it existed, would be a version of the Abrahamic God, an apparent middle-eastern tribal invention, rather than an effectively infinite number of other possible candidates. Buddhism isn't really theistic, and Islam declares the Christian scriptures to be corrupt, and that Christ is not God. Are these minor differences? I don't have the required talents to be religious. I'm terrible at lying to myself.

I've seen that analogy before on EvC, and it's a terrible one. Dark matter is inferred on the basis of indirect evidence, but there's no evidence, direct or indirect, for any Gods. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, or prove that they don't exist, but you have to take it on faith, as you say.Human love certainly isn't indirect evidence for your God or any others, and neither is human altruism. Affection can easily be observed in other mammals (the bonobos are like free love and peace hippies) The ability in social animals to form close bonds can easily be seen as a characteristic that could be selected for in evolutionary terms.Science doesn't disprove the concept of a God, but it's true to say that increased knowledge tends to take away any apparent necessity. It takes away gaps to stick your God into, but there are still plenty of gaps for you to rest your hopes on! It's an EvC habit, hardly surprising when you think of some of your fellow Christian members.Of course I don't believe the universe was created by a racist who particularly favours one tribe and wants us to stone people to death. But why do you cherry-pick? The claim of Jesus to be God is no more likely to be true than the stone throwing bit.It all requires blind faith, and I wish the likes of Polkinghorne would state that loudly and clearly, rather than implying that the effects of an intelligence can be perceived in the universe.The fine tuning argument is silly. To say that the universe is ideal for whatever it contains is just stating the obvious. If it contains galaxies, it's perfect for galaxies, and if it contained falaxies, whatever they are, it would be perfect for them.It's like looking at the earth and saying "how incredible that the atmosphere is fine tuned so that we can breath it, when there are a virtually infinite amount of possible atmospheres that would be poisonous to us - proof of God's work", missing the point that we're a part and a product of the planet, and that any breathing organism that doesn't evolve with the changes in the atmosphere becomes extinct, so that what life we see is inevitably "fine tuned" to the planet, rather than the other way around. (Or to be even more accurate, life and the planet tune each other, as organisms shape the atmosphere as well as the other way around, so we should perceive ourselves as part of the planet). That would hardly be surprising as they're all invented by the same species. Basic guidance like "do unto others as you would have done unto yourself" have probably been arrived at separately in every human culture. Same with the concept of the soul, what's missing when a body dies, usually given to other animals as well when we're living close to nature, but removed from them as we develop agriculture and more sophisticated cultures, and start along the grand religious misconception, only now being corrected by science, of regarding ourselves as separate and magically distinct from our fellow life forms, our relatives. I can tell you one evidence backed truth. Humans invent religions and Gods, they always have, and new ones come up all the time. I'm not going to believe in something someone else invented, whether it's St. Paul, Mohammed, or L. Ron Hubbard. I'm not gullible enough.