Belief in God in an Age of Science by John Polkinghorne Yale 133pp, £14.95 in UK
`I see his face in every flower", ran the holy ditty of Joseph Plunkett familiar to most Irish Catholics of a certain age. It is easy to be sniffy about it today, but in its time it was a convincing proof of God's purpose and design in the world. For those who already knew the truth, it was as compelling a proof as the scholastic version handed down by Thomas Aquinas.
The origin of the universe, the point of suffering, the ordering of our relations with nature, with animals and with each other - all the chaotic bits of our past and future were capable of explanation, even if we couldn't quite fathom it. We knew that God was not only the designer and purpose of it all, but that he intervened in our particular lives in response to prayer and sacrifice.
Along came Darwin and blew the house down. There is no purpose in nature, no design of the finished object. Most shattering of all, we humans are not at the apex of the tree of life. We are merely a branch in an untidy shrub, unique in our level of consciousness as other branches are in other attributes, but not the end, the centre, or the goal of creation. To cap it all, the neo-Darwinian revival of the past few years is now joining with the neuro-sciences to vent the idea that the content of our consciousness has evolved like other chance products of natural selection. The mind is just our word for what the brain does. Our values, our moral principles, our art and creativity are explicable as the consequence of random mutations and environmental conditions.
Can religion co-exist with the confident march of science? It is a question which challenges believers in every age, and John Polkinghorne is ideally placed to answer it for ours. An ordained minister of the Anglican church and an eminent particle physicist and former Professor of Physics at Cambridge - if anyone can rebut the triumphalist claims of some contemporary empiricists it is Polkinghorne.
He sets himself a formidable, if not impossible, task. He is not prepared to redefine religious belief in the subjective terms of other theologians who regard the divine as "simply an internalised symbol for individually chosen value". This makes Christianity immune to challenge by science, but in Polkinghorne's view it evacuates it of its content.
For Polkinghorne, there is purpose and design out there, which our minds can discover and not just fabricate. And God does intervene in the world, not just stand idly by paring his nails in sublime confidence in his artistry. Yes, but how do we know? Most of Polkinghorne's book is devoted to trying to demonstrate the compatibility between scientific method and theology, and he makes heavy reading of such an unlikely proposition.
There is much play on the superficial similarities between the two disciplines, intended to insinuate a more substantial overlap and identity. Science and theology are both in the business of Truth, they both display similar periods of confusion, revision, consolidation. So why does science work and theology doesn't? Polkinghorne's reason is that scientists have the language of mathematics to describe their physical world, while "theology has no words adequate to encompass the mystery of the divine nature".
This will have Richard Dawkins gloating in anticipation of his next onslaught on religious belief. For Polkinghorne's book reveals exactly the inadequacy of the attempts to defend religious belief on scientists' territory which have been Dawkins's bread and butter for decades. It is replete with the recourse to what he calls the argument from incredulity - the "vast Cosmos", the "wonderful order" of the universe" . . . it "beggars belief" that all this is a chance by-product of the struggle for life. "I cannot believe that values simply came into being when hominid brains had acquired sufficient complexity to accommodate such thoughts."
Neither can most of us, but we need more than Polkinghorne's incredulity or Plunkett's wonder if we are to furnish the scientific evidence on which Polkinghorne rests the argument of his book.
He also relies too heavily on the limitations of the scientific method to buttress the claim for the explanatory power of theology. Here the author makes great play of chaos theory and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to show that the natural order itself reveals a degree of indeterminacy which scientists can never correct. This is presumably so. But how does it advance the case Polkinghorne makes for theology - that it can explain the world just as scientists do? This is the old God of the gaps. Since science cannot explain everything, the gap is opened for theology to explain something. One could as plausibly make such a case for astrology.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics in the graduate programme in International Peace Studies at the Irish School of Ecumenics