Part X Theology

Part X
Theology

The Trinity and Scientific Reality

JOHN POLKINGHORNE

If God is indeed the Creator of the universe, then it would be reasonable to expect that, to a discerning eye, the dimension of reality that is explored by science might be found to display some pale reflection of the nature of its Creator. However, the intimations of divinity thus conveyed may be expected to be veiled and indirect, and that is why there is need for discernment if they are to be detected. Just as God does not write messages on the clouds for all to read, so the universe will not be found to be full of items stamped “Made by God.” Divine revelation is more subtle than that. What might be expected is that there are certain aspects to the history and nature of the universe as known to science, but not explained by it, which seem too remarkable to be treated simply as inexplicable brute facts and which can become satisfyingly intelligible when viewed in the light of theological insight.

Scientists are motivated in their research by a deep desire to gain understanding, but the restricted character of science’s enquiry means that this thirst for comprehensive understanding cannot be quenched by science alone. The first five sections of this chapter draw attention to a number of aspects of the scientific account of reality which it would be intellectually lazy simply to treat as happy accidents. It is claimed that they can be delivered from that unsatisfactory status by being set in the wider and more profound context of understanding that theistic belief can afford. As the cumulative discussion of these cosmic properties unfolds, it will be argued that the accessible range of explanatory plausibility narrows down from a very general kind of theism into something very like Christian Trinitarian theology. A final section then follows which seeks to argue that the Christian search for truth that led to Trinitarian belief, bears an analogous relationship to science’s search for truth in its own domain of enquiry.

Science has discovered that the universe is endowed with certain remarkable properties. I discuss these in the following five sections.

Deep Intelligibility

It is hardly remarkable that human beings can understand the world of everyday experience, since the evolutionary pressure for survival can be expected to have so shaped the brains of our ancestors that they were capable of making sense of what was going on around them. Yet the human power of scientific understanding far exceeds the requirements of mundane necessity, or anything that could plausibly be considered as a spin-off from such a necessity. There is the subatomic world of quantum physics, remote from direct impact upon our daily lives and requiring for its understanding modes of thought that are completely contrary to those of common sense (see, for example, Polkinghorne 2002). In the quantum world entities can be in states which are an unpicturable mixture of “being here” and “being there.” Light can sometimes display wave-like properties and sometimes behave as if it were a collection of tiny particles, an ambidexterity that lies far beyond the comprehension of mundane understanding. There are the vast domains of cosmic curved space-time, whose geometrical properties are quite different from everyday Euclidean expectation. Yet these counterintuitive regimes have proved to be open to scientific exploration and understanding. The universe is astonishingly rationally transparent to us, exhibiting a remarkable degree of profound intelligibility. Moreover, it has turned out that the key to unlocking the deep secrets of the physical world is provided by that seemingly most abstract of disciplines, mathematics. It is an actual technique of discovery in fundamental physics to seek theories that are expressed in terms of equations that possess the unmistakable character of mathematical beauty. Like all forms of beauty, mathematical beauty is easier to discern than describe, but it is something that the mathematicians can recognize and agree about. This search for beautiful equations is no act of aesthetic indulgence on the part of the physicists. Rather, it has been found to be a heuristic strategy of proven effectiveness, supported by much accumulated scientific experience. It has turned out time and again that it is just such theories that are the ones which will yield the long-term fruitfulness of explanation that persuades us that they truly describe aspects of physical reality. Paul Dirac, one of the founding figures of modern quantum theory, once said that he had made his discoveries by an unrelenting (and, one must say, highly successful) quest for beautiful equations. He said it was a “very profitable religion” to have followed.

Thus science has discovered that the universe is both rationally transparent and rationally beautiful. Cosmic transparency has been the basis of the very possibility of success in fundamental physics, and the beautiful order disclosed has given fundamental physicists the gift of wonder as the reward for their labors. Scientists are happy to exploit the remarkable opportunities that they have been given, but science itself can offer no explanation of their great good fortune. Yet these aspects of physical reality are surely too significant just to be treated as if they were merely incredibly happy accidents. Theological insight can make cosmic intelligibility itself intelligible. The rational transparency and beauty of the universe speaks of a world shot through with signs of mind, and it is an attractive and coherent possibility to believe that this is so because the divine Mind of the Creator lies behind its marvellous order.

Here is a first step in making a connection between physics and theology. In itself it is only a small step, since cosmic intelligibility would seem to be as well explained by the spectator god of deism as by the Trinitarian God of Christianity, but there is more still to be explored.

Intrinsic Fertility

The universe that we observe today sprang forth from the singularity of the big bang 13.7 billion years ago. The very early universe was extremely simple, being just an almost uniform expanding ball of energy. That world has now become very rich and complex, with the human brain the most complicated product of its long history that is known to us. Although it seems that there was no life in the universe until it was about 10 billion years old, and hominid life appeared only yesterday in cosmic terms, there is a real sense in which the universe was pregnant with the possibility of carbon-based life from the beginning. As physicists have come to understand the many processes which turned that initial ball of energy into the present home of saints and scientists, they have come to realize that this fertile history was possible only because the laws of nature – the given physical fabric of the world – took a very specific, “finely tuned” form. A universe capable of evolving carbon-based life has to be a very specific universe indeed, an insight that has come to be called “the anthropic principle” (see Holder 2004 for further discussion). Here, just one example drawn from many will have to serve to illustrate the point. The chemistry of life is the chemistry of carbon, since that element plays a vital role in the structure of the long-chain molecules that are the biochemical foundation of all forms of life. The only place in the entire universe where carbon is made is in the interior nuclear furnaces of the stars. We are all people of stardust, made of the ashes of dead stars. The chain of stellar nuclear processes that make carbon and the other heavy elements which are necessary for life is wonderfully and delicately balanced. If the laws of nuclear physics in our world had been only a little bit different from what they actually are, the chain would have been broken and there would be no carbon and no possibility of carbon-based life.

Science itself does not explain the laws of nature, since it simply accepts them as the given foundation on which to build its explanation of particular phenomena. Yet the fine-tuned specificity of these laws is a fact about the universe so significant that it surely should not be treated as if it too were just a happy accident. If possible, it demands some further explanation. Belief that the universe is a divine creation offers an obvious explanation of why the world is endowed with anthropic potentiality, for that fact can then be understood as an expression of the Creator’s fruitful intention. Those wishing to avoid such a conclusion have been driven to the rather desperate expedient of conjecturing that our universe is part of a vast multiverse, an enormous portfolio of different worlds, all separate from each other and unobservable by us and possessing a great variety of different laws of nature, of which our world is simply one among a trillion. The “explanation” of anthropic fertility is then supposed to be that, simply by chance, our universe happens to be the winning ticket in this vast multiversial lottery. Belief in a Creator seems both more economical and better motivated (for example, it also explains cosmic intelligibility). Yet one must acknowledge that this is again an insight that would be as consistent with deism as it is with Christian theism. However, further consideration of other properties of physical reality will begin to narrow the range of theological plausibility.

An Evolving World

The processes that turned the initial ball of energy into the world we see today have been evolutionary in character. That is to say, they have involved an interplay between the effects of regularity and contingency, necessity and chance. It is a fundamental scientific insight that situations in which true novelty can emerge are always “at the edge of chaos,” regimes where the orderly and the disorderly interlace each other. Too far on the orderly side of that frontier and things are too rigid for anything truly new to be possible. Too far on the disorderly side and things are too haphazard for anything new that emerged to be able to persist. The familiar story of biological evolution illustrates the point. If there were no genetic mutations (only order) there would be no new forms of life. If there were unceasing genetic mutations (only disorder), no species could become established on which the sifting effect of natural selection could be at work. Biological fruitfulness has depended on there being some genetic mutation, but not too much.

It is important to recognize that the operation of evolutionary process is not limited to the history of terrestrial life. The first stars were formed by an evolutionary interaction in which the small fluctuations of density initially present in the primordial ball of energy (a contingent pattern) came, through the operation of gravity (lawful regularity), to be seed sites for the condensation of stars, by a kind of snowballing process resulting from locally enhanced gravitational attraction.

When the Origin of Species was published there were some Christian theologians who from the start welcomed Darwin’s ideas. Charles Kingsley coined a phrase that neatly encapsulates the theological way to think about an evolving world. He said that the Creator, instead of bringing into being a ready-made world, had done something cleverer than that in producing a world so endowed with potentiality that creatures could be allowed “to make themselves” through the processes of evolutionary exploration. It came to be recognized that this picture of creation was fittingly consonant with the Christian understanding that the divine nature is one of love. The Christian God could neither be the indifferent Spectator of deism nor the Cosmic Tyrant who held the whole of creation under tight divine control alone. The gift of love must always include a due degree of independence granted to the objects of love, which are allowed to be themselves and to make themselves. Such an evolving creation is a great good, but it has an inevitable shadow side. Its fertile process lies at the edge of chaos and so there will be ragged edges and blind alleys in its history, as well as great fruitfulness. Genetic mutations will sometimes result in new forms of life; sometimes they will result in malignancy. This insight offers theology some modest assistance as it tries to wrestle with the perplexing problems of theodicy.

The history of an evolving creation is not to be thought of as the performance of a fixed score, decreed from all eternity. It is more like an unfolding improvisation in which both Creator and creatures have roles to play. Seeing creation as an unfolding process leads to a concept of continuous creation, complementing the concept of the Creator holding the world in being through an act of creation out of nothing. Creation is not simply a single timeless act, but it is also a temporal process. The God who is the Ordainer of nature is to be thought of as acting as much through unfolding natural processes as in any other way. It is not the case that if something happened in a way that science is fully capable of describing, then God had no hand in it. The quest for a “God of the gaps” was not only a bad apologetic strategy (always open to defeat by the next advance in knowledge), but was also a bad theological mistake.

The recognition of the fact of continuous creation is the point at which the purely spectatorial god of deism – a once-for-all initiator who then simply watches it all happen – drops out of theological plausibility. There remains, however, the question of whether we can take all that science can tell us with appropriate seriousness and still believe in a God who is providentially active in history, interacting with creation in particular ways that go beyond the general sustaining of natural process. Can we think of God as being involved in the contingent aspects of evolution as well as in the lawful regularity that constrains it? Christian theology uses personal language about God (however stretched that language necessarily is), calling God “Father” rather than “Force,” precisely because it believes that in particular circumstances divine providence acts to bring about particular consequences. The coherence of holding this belief, while taking modern science seriously, is the issue to be explored in the following section.

Causal Structure

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it seemed to many as if the deterministic equations of Newtonian physics implied that the universe is a world of clockwork mechanism, with its Creator simply the great cosmic Clockmaker. There was always something suspicious about this idea, since human experience of choice and responsibility surely indicates that persons are not just automata. However, in the twentieth century the discovery of intrinsic unpredictabilities present in nature, both at the microscopic level of quantum physics and, later, at the macroscopic level of the exquisitely sensitive systems of chaos theory, showed that the universe is something more subtle than a merely mechanical world. The word “intrinsic” is important here, for the unpredictabilities involved are of a kind that cannot be removed by more careful measurement or by more precise calculation. They are properties of physical reality.

Unpredictability might be epistemological or ontological in character. In the former case, it would just be the consequence of an unavoidable ignorance of all the factors involved, which if actually known would be sufficient fully to predict a particular outcome. The fall of a die would be a homely example of epistemic unpredictability. Ontological unpredictability is much more radical in its character, for it corresponds to the presence of real indeterminacy. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, stemming from the thought of Niels Bohr, has this character. It considers the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to be a principle of radical indeterminism and not simply a principle of necessary ignorance. Yet physics itself does not enforce this conclusion. There is an alternative interpretation of quantum theory, due to David Bohm (see Bohm and Hiley 1993), which is fully deterministic, in which uncertainty does indeed arise from unavoidable ignorance of all the causal factors involved. The theories of Bohr and Bohm both lead to identical empirical consequences, so that the choice between them cannot be made on the ground of physics alone, but is a matter requiring also metaphysical decision. Almost all physicists side with Bohr, one of the reasons being that Bohm’s theory, though very ingenious and instructive, has about it an air of unnatural contrivance which fails to make it metaphysically persuasive. The lesson to derive from this quantum controversy is the recognition that while physics constrains our ideas about causality, it is not sufficient on its own to determine them. I have suggested that we should take a similar metaphysical approach to interpreting the unpredictabilities of chaos theory, seeing them as indications of further causal openness in physical process, now present at the macroscopic level (Polkinghorne 1991 34–48). The issue cannot be settled by appealing to the deterministic equations from which chaos theory took its mathematical origin, since we know that classical physics can offer only an approximate account of reality.

The strategy of interpreting intrinsic unpredictability ontologically is a natural one to take for those of a realist disposition in the philosophy of science, for whom what we know, or cannot know, is taken to be a reliable guide to what is the case. To do so does not imply that the future is some sort of random lottery, but simply that there are more causal factors active in bringing it about than those which science can describe in its reductionist terms of the exchange of energy between constituents. It would be natural to suppose that these additional causal factors include the exercise of human agency and divine providential interaction, both taking place within the open grain of created nature. What this discussion certainly shows is that physics has not established the causal closure of the world on its terms alone. This judgment is reinforced by the recognition that the account of causal structure offered by physics is not only metaphysically ambiguous, but it is also distinctly patchy in its character. Often the connections between different regimes are not well understood. For example there is no fully adequate account of how the apparently clear and reliable world of everyday experience emerges from its cloudy and fitful quantum substrate. Microscopic quantum theory and macroscopic chaos theory, as presently formulated, are incompatible with each other. Quantum physics has a scale (giving a meaning to “large” and “small” and set by Planck’s constant), while chaos theory is notoriously fractal in character, looking the same on any scale on which it is sampled. The two theories just do not fit consistently together.

The conclusion is that one can take absolutely seriously all that physics can actually tell us about the causal structure of the universe, without being driven to deny human agency or exclude that providential activity of God within its history to which many religious traditions, including Christianity, bear witness.

Relationality

In the eighteenth century, physical thinking had a strongly atomistic character, but the succeeding two centuries have seen an increasing recovery of the importance of relationality. Among the greatest triumphs of nineteenth-century physics was James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. It relational significance does not derive from its being a field theory, since fields, while spread out in space and varying in time, have a local character in the sense that changes occurring at two separated locations are independent and have no immediate effect upon each other. What was relationally significant in Maxwell’s theory was the intimate linkage it revealed between electricity and magnetism, two sets of phenomena which superficially had seemed completely unrelated to each other.

A unifying trend of this kind has proved to be a continuing feature of physical thinking. Albert Einstein’s discovery of general relativity showed how space, time, and matter form an integrated system in which matter curves space-time and this curvature in turn influences the motion of particles of matter. The Newtonian picture of isolated atoms colliding in the container of absolute space, and in the course of the unfolding of absolute time, has had to be replaced by an altogether more relational account, in which space, time, and matter are joined together in a kind of physical package deal.

The quest for further unification has continued. In the 1960s, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam were independently able to integrate electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force, responsible for such phenomena as radioactive nuclear decay, in a single electroweak theory. Today, most physicists entertain the belief that there is a Grand Unified Theory, capable of combining in a single account all the forces of nature, including gravity, though so far no fully satisfactory theory of this kind has been successfully formulated.

The extreme sensitivity of chaotic systems to the slightest influence coming from their environment means that they can never adequately be considered in separation from that environment. However, the most striking discovery of intrinsic relationality in physics has been quantum entanglement. In the 1930s, Einstein and two young colleagues noticed that quantum theory implied that two quantum entities which had once interacted with each other could, in consequence, be in a state in which they retained a power of instantaneous influence on each other, however far they became separated. This mutual connection is a true ontological effect, producing real change in both entities, and not simply epistemological, revealing something that had always been the case. The entangled particles effectively constitute a single, non-local, system. Einstein thought that this togetherness-in-separation was so “spooky” that it must imply that there was something wrong with modern quantum theory, which he had always disliked. However, in the 1980s, clever experiments demonstrated that quantum entanglement is indeed a property of nature. The instantaneous action-at-a-distance that this implies is not a violation of special relativity, since careful analysis shows that it cannot be used to send information that would permit the synchronization of separated clocks, something that is forbidden by special relativity. Quantum entanglement shows us that even the subatomic quantum world cannot be treated atomistically.

Today a further scientific development of considerable potential significance is taking place through the study of complex systems, treated holistically as integrated entities and not decomposed into their constituent parts in science’s traditionally reductionist manner. Current complexity theory is at the natural history stage of the study of many particular examples and it has not yet reached the mature scientific status of attaining a properly formulated general theory, explaining the underlying source of its diverse phenomena. The systems so far studied are far less complicated than even a single living cell, but nevertheless astonishing holistic properties have been discovered which were wholly unforeseeable from the point of view of a constituent-based analysis. These complex systems display very remarkable self-organizing powers to generate patterns of dynamically ordered holistic behavior (see Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Kauffman 1995). A simple example is provided by Bénard convection. Fluid is confined between two horizontal plates and the lower is maintained at a higher temperature than the upper. In certain well-defined circumstances, the transfer of heat between the two plates is carried by the convective motion of hot fluid, in a process which takes place within an orderly pattern of hexagonal convection cells. This spontaneously structured behavior involves the correlated motions of literally trillions upon trillions of fluid molecules.

The discovery of phenomena of this kind strongly suggests that the traditional reductionist physics based on the exchange of energy between constituents will need complementing by a holistic theory of the behavior of systems considered as totalities, reflecting the fact expressed in the slogan, “More is different” – the whole is more than the sum of its parts. A key concept in this holistic theory, when it is finally formulated, will surely be “information,” meaning the specification of the dynamical pattern of total energy flow in the system. It is a plausible expectation that, as complexity theory comes of age, information will take its place alongside energy as a key category in physical thinking.

The developments briefly outlined above, when taken together, imply the need for scientific recognition that, far from being simply atomistic, “Reality is Relational.” This will come as no surprise to Trinitarian theologians, whose discourse invokes the concept of “Being as Communion” (Zizioulas 1985). Of course, quantum entanglement and the like does not logically necessitate belief in a Creator whose inner nature is the unity of three Persons in one God, but it is strikingly consonant with that belief. In a similar way, information is not identical with spirit, but there is a glimmer of consonant connection between them. A universe for whose understanding information is a vital concept, is one to which the theological concept of the Spirit at work on the inside of creation does not seem wholly alien.

Our exploration of contemporary knowledge of the character of physical reality has been a process which has cumulatively suggested that Trinitarian theology offers a metaphysical setting in which to attain a deep understanding of remarkable cosmic properties that have been discovered by science but not explained by it (Polkinghorne 2004). Intelligibility and intrinsic fertility suggest that a divine Mind and Purpose lies behind the universe. Evolutionary process encourages a concept of continuously unfolding creation. An analysis of causal structure shows that science has not established a degree of causal closure that would deny belief in the reality of human agency and providential action. The widespread importance of relationality is highly consonant with belief in a Trinitarian Creator. The arguments presented have been an exercise in a theology of nature. That is to say, the claim is not that the universe must be thought of as a Trinitarian creation, but that, given this belief, one is in possession of a deeply coherent and persuasive way of understanding the way the world is. The next task is to see how theology can offer from within its own resources a well-formulated defense of its Trinitarian belief.

Trinitarian Belief

Scientists have often found that the world is surprising, manifesting properties that are strange beyond any human power to anticipate. In 1899 any competent student of philosophy could have “proved” the impossibility of anything behaving sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle. After all a wave is spread out and oscillating, while a particle is concentrated and point-like. Nevertheless this is exactly how light has been found to behave, and it is a striking example of the deep intelligibility of the universe that quantum theory has enabled us to make sense of this seemingly paradoxical fact. Nature’s power to correct and transcend our prior expectations should lead scientists to have a natural inclination to humility in their encounter with reality, allowing it to speak for itself, whether they are acting as investigators of the physical universe or as persons seeking to discern what further reality might lie beyond it. Therefore, the natural question for a scientist to ask about any proposal is not, “Is it reasonable?”, for that would rashly presume prior knowledge of the shape that rationality had to take. Instead the natural question for the scientist to ask is one that is at once more open and more demanding, “What makes you think that might be the case?” No proposal is to be ruled out of court from the start, however seemingly counterintuitive, but it will be entertained only if some adequately motivating evidence can be presented in its support. The natural style of thinking for the scientist is what I have called “bottom-up thinking” (Polkinghorne 1994), seeking to be guided by experience in the quest for truthful understanding and not presuming already to be in possession of a sufficient set of clear and certain ideas that could form an a priori basis for the argument. I believe that it is possible to pursue theological enquiry in this bottom-up fashion, and this section seeks to give a brief sketch how this strategy might be used to approach Trinitarian thinking about nature of God, in a manner that should be congenial to a scientist.

The New Testament provides the record of the foundational experiences that led to the Christian movement, but its pages do not contain a carefully articulated statement of Trinitarian doctrine, although there are two isolated verses which have a remarkably Trinitarian ring to them (Matt. 28:19 and 2 Cor. 13:13). What is to be found in the New Testament are records of those experiences and insights of first-century Christians which were to inspire later generations to develop an understanding of the nature of God of a more subtle and complex kind than could be expressed simply by an unnuanced assertion of monotheism. Most of the New Testament writers were Jews, for whom the great affirmation “Hear, O Israel, The Lord is our God, The Lord alone” (Deut. 6:4) was central to their religious belief. They knew that the One whom Jesus called Father is indeed the Creator of the world. Yet, when these writers came to speak of their experiences of the transforming power of the risen Christ, time and again, despite their Jewish monotheism, they were driven to use divine-sounding language about him. The earliest Christian confession seems to have been “Jesus is Lord” (see, for example, Rom. 10:9; 1 Cor. 12:3). Paul calls Jesus “Lord” more than 200 times in his letters, and he can even use language about him which echoes what the Hebrew Scriptures say about The Lord, the God of Israel (for example, compare Phil. 2:10–11 and Isa. 45:23) . While in everyday speech the Greek kyrios could amount to no more than a common courtesy (rather like the English “sir”), in the theologically centered writings of the New Testament, readers would inevitably be reminded that “Lord” was the word that pious Jews used as a circumlocution for the unutterably sacred divine name of God, so that its use as a title was fraught with significance. This impression was surely reinforced by the way in which Paul, in opening his letters, habitually bracketed together God and Christ in the greeting, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:7, etc.). Of course, both writer and readers knew that Jesus of Nazareth was a human being who had been alive in Palestine within living memory, but purely human terms did not seem to suffice to describe their experience of him. At the same time, these early Christians felt a divine power at work within them, which they variously called “the Spirit of God,” “the Spirit of Christ,” or simply “the Spirit” (for example, see Rom. 8:9, where all three terms are used in the same verse). Here there seemed to be a third, and distinguishable, form of encounter with divine reality. One might say that these early Christians knew God in three ways, the Father (Creator of heaven and earth), the Son (God made manifest in a human life), and the Holy Spirit (God at work in their hearts). Yet they also believed that there was a single divine Will and Purpose at work in the world.

The New Testament does not discuss explicitly how these diverse insights into the reality of God can be combined and understood in a coherent fashion. Its concern is to witness to its experience, not to construct a fundamental theological theory. However, later generations of Christians could not leave these matters unaddressed and this led eventually to the formulation of Trinitarian doctrine at the Councils of Nicea (325) and Constantinople (381), and to much further discussion which has continued up to the present day. That is a complex and fascinating story which I shall not attempt to tell here in what could only be an inadequate summary fashion. The important point for the present discussion is that the Trinitarian doctrine of the three divine Persons, united by love in a single divine Nature, did not arise from unbridled metaphysical speculation, but from wrestling with making sense of actual religious experience. The bottom-up thinker should be prepared to give serious consideration to the counterintuitive concept of the triune God, and he or she can do so without incurring the risk of committing intellectual suicide by having to submit to a demand for belief unsupported by motivating evidence.

Theory-making in theology is much more difficult than theorizing in science, essentially because God transcends us while we transcend the physical world. Often theology has to be content with circumscribing the domain in which truth must lie, without being able to offer a detailed map of the terrain. In the case of Trinitarian theology, the Church concluded that it could identify two extreme positions which would not be true to the scriptural witness and to its own worshipful encounter with God. One came to be called modalism, the idea that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simply label different aspects of human encounter with an undifferentiated divine Reality. This view does not seem to do justice to the distinctive and differentiated character of actual Christian experience. A paradigm counterexample drawn from Scripture was provided by the story of the baptism of Jesus, with the heavenly voice of the Father proclaiming the beloved nature of the Son, and the Spirit descending upon Christ in the form of a dove. At the other extreme, the Church rejected a tritheistic understanding that would treat the Trinity as if it were a mini-pantheon of three wholly distinct gods, for the Church’s experience testified to the unity of the divine Will and Purpose at work in creation.

A good scientific theory often reinforces its persuasiveness by offering deeper understanding of phenomena not explicitly taken into account in its initial formulation. Something similar to this can be claimed for Trinitarian theology. If the inner nature of God is constituted by the eternal exchange of love between the three divine Persons, this gives a much more profound understanding of the central Christian assertion that “God is love” (1 John 4:16) than could be afforded by something like the Aristotelian notion of an isolated deity absorbed in the narcissistic contemplation of his own perfection.

It is along the lines sketched in this section that Christian believers can defend their Trinitarian belief as truly arising from a motivated appeal to actual evidence, and this provides for them the resource from which they can offer their response to the question, “What makes you think that might be the case?”

References

Bohm, David and Hiley, Basil J. 1993. The Undivided Universe. London: Routledge.

Holder, Rodney D. 2004. God, the Multiverse and Everything. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Kauffman, Stuart. 1995. At Home in the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press.

Polkinghorne, John. 1991. Reason and Reality. London: SPCK.

Polkinghorne, John. 1994. Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker. London: SPCK.

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle. 1984. Order Out of Chaos. London: Heinemann.