I grew up in the country and in a Christian home. My parents were regular worshippers at our local Anglican parish church and, since I was a well-behaved child, I accompanied them willingly from an early age. No particular provisions were made for children, but we had a vicar who was a skillful preacher, able to make biblical passages come alive, and I used to enjoy listening to him. I absorbed Christianity through my pores. Religion was obviously important to my mother and father, but they were people who did not naturally talk much about it and I received little in the way of formal religious instruction at home. When I was about eight an aunt of mine let me have a little book of private prayers that I had found lying around in her home, and I used these regularly and somewhat secretly.
I am, therefore, a cradle Christian. I cannot remember a time when I was not in some way a member of the worshipping and believing community of the church. The figure of Jesus has always been central for me, and no view of reality would begin to be adequate that did not fully take the phenomenon of Christ into account. I have not been given the gift of an untroubled faith—I sometimes think that Christianity might be too good to be true—but when that mood is on me I say to myself “Well, then, deny it” and I know that I could never do that. Christ’s side is one on which I have to take my stand.
When I was fourteen, we moved from Somerset to Ely and I went to school in nearby Cambridge. The Perse School, which I attended, was small and very academic and for the first time I encountered clever boys who did not believe in God. We used to argue, but my faith survived that and a subsequent spell of national service in the Army before coming up to Cambridge in October 1949 to study mathematics at Trinity College.
In my first week as an undergraduate I was taken to a Freshers’ Sermon preached on behalf of the Christian Union. The preacher used the story of Zacchaeus’s meeting with Jesus as he passed through Jericho on the way to his death at Jerusalem, as the basis of a challenge to respond to Christ right now, to take this unique opportunity. I was strongly moved and went forward at the end among a crowd of those who wished to make a decision for Christ. For some years afterwards I would have spoken of this as my “conversion,” but I now understand it as a moment of deeper Christian commitment along a pilgrimage path that I was already treading.
There followed a number of years of close involvement with the Christian Union. I have mixed feelings about that time. The conservative evangelical Christianity that I embraced so wholeheartedly gave me certain gifts I continue to value and seek to retain: the importance of a personal commitment to Christ and a love of scripture. Yet it also promoted a narrow view, both of the varieties of Christian experience and of the relevance of general culture. There was a kind of defensiveness, even fearfulness, in the face of sources of truth not guaranteed as “sound.” Nowhere was this more apparent than in its treatment of the Bible. I have found it immensely enhancing for my own use of scripture to be able to recognize its human and cultural character, while still discerning its inspired and normative status. The Church of England is such a broad, comprehensive church that its members are always being invited to identify themselves as adherents of one particular party or another. Today I find it difficult to choose a label for myself, but “catholic” would certainly be part of it. I value greatly the sacramental life and the accumulated insights of the Christian tradition. I feel most spiritually at home on the occasional visits I am able to make to a small community of Anglican nuns (the Society of the Sacred Cross) living a Benedictine life in the Welsh countryside.
My undergraduate studies at Cambridge were in mathematics. I had chosen the subject because I was good at it and liked getting things right, and also because my mathematical imagination had been kindled at school by an outstanding master who taught me. At the university, I got interested in how one could use mathematics to understand the deep structure of the physical world, so that when I embarked on a Ph.D. in 1952 it was in the area of theoretical elementary particle physics. This was the beginning of a long career as a physicist that lasted till 1979. It was an exceptionally interesting period in the development of my subject since it spanned the long struggle, by means of experimental discovery and theoretical insight, that eventually uncovered the quark level in the structure of matter. My own work was very much on the mathematical side of this great collaborative enterprise and I attained a modest degree of professional success, becoming Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University in 1968 and being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.
Nevertheless, I had long thought that I would not remain in particle physics all my life. The subject was always changing in response to new ideas and new discoveries. When one was young, this state of intellectual flux was exciting; it became somewhat more tiring as one grew older. In mathematical thinking, most of us lose in middle age the flexibility of mind that is a characteristic of youth. We can still do the old tricks but it becomes harder to learn or to invent new ones. I had seen many senior colleagues get somewhat miserable as the subject moved away from them. I resolved I would leave physics before physics left me. I felt I owed this, not only to myself, but also to the young workers in the large research group I was privileged to lead. As my fiftieth birthday approached, and as a particular era in particle physics came to a close with the establishment of what is called the Standard Model, I realized the time had come for me to go. I was not leaving physics because I had in any way become disillusioned with it, but I had done my little bit for the subject and now it was time to do something else.
I like being with people. I value the eucharistic life. I had some experience of being a lay reader (an unordained local preacher). These considerations encouraged in my mind the idea of a possible vocation to the Anglican priesthood. Fortunately, my wife Ruth concurred—it was necessarily a joint decision. The next step was to have my vocation tested and considered by a selection committee, a collection of wise and experienced people appointed by the church for that purpose. They too concurred, and I was subsequently grateful, not only for that decision but also for the care with which I felt it had been taken.
So October 1979, just before my forty-ninth birthday, saw me a beginning student at Westcott House, a small Anglican seminary in Cambridge in the liberal catholic tradition. I was the oldest person in the House, older than the Principal even! It was very odd becoming a student again—I found out how much more difficult it is to listen to a lecture for an hour than to give one—but I had a lot to learn during my two-year course. Perhaps the most important lesson of all I learned was to value the Daily Office, the round of morning and evening prayer and praise, psalmody and scripture, which it is the obligation of an Anglican priest to recite faithfully. It provides the spiritual framework for my life today.
Just before I went to Westcott, a theologically knowledgeable friend of mine suggested to me that I should read Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. I had done a little desultory theological reading on and off over the years, but this was perhaps the first substantial theological work that I had read with serious attention. I was deeply affected by it, and Moltmann has been one of the major theological influences on me ever since. I can understand the criticisms that some make of the occasionally rather uncontrolled exuberance of his writing, but for me he is a person of exciting theological ideas that span the two horizons of the biblical witness and the demands of the century of the Holocaust.
I cared for physics, and I continue to do so, but I have come to realize that theology grips me much more profoundly than science ever did. Yet the personal paradox is that I shall never be able to become a professional theologian. I do not have the time or opportunity to recapitulate that long apprenticeship and involvement with a worldwide academic community that is the indispensable requirement of becoming a fully fledged practitioner. I do not think this means that I have nothing to contribute to theological thinking, but I am aware of my limitations. I cannot claim to be more than a scientist with serious theological interests. I have to say that I wish I knew a few more theologians who have serious scientific interests. The interdisciplinary field of encounter between the scientific and theological worldviews, which has been my predominant intellectual interest in recent years, calls from all its participants for a certain acceptance of risk and a certain charity toward the efforts of others with different backgrounds.
On ordination, an Anglican clergyman spends three years in apprenticeship to the parochial ministry. It is called serving one’s title and I did mine in perfectly ordinary parishes in Cambridge and Bristol. Once licensed to go solo, I became Vicar in charge of a large village parish outside Canterbury. All in all, I did five years in this kind of work. In addition to preaching and taking services, it involved a good deal of wandering around, knocking on doors, and drinking cups of tea with people who were in some sort of trouble, such as illness or bereavement. The Church of England is a national church with a responsibility to the whole community. Only a minority of those I visited were in any way active participants in worship.
I enjoyed this life very much, but of course there were intellectual aspects of me that were not greatly exercised in the course of it. I had thought originally that I had left the academic world for good, but I gradually came to recognize that thinking and writing about science and religion were part of my vocation, the particular way in which I might serve the Christian community. When an unsought opportunity came in 1986 to return to Cambridge as the Dean of Trinity Hall (a job equivalent to being the parish priest of that academic “village”), I decided, after some thought, to accept it. Three years later, I received an equally unexpected invitation to become the President of Queens’ College, Cambridge (the Head of the College, but not its Chief Executive, rather a kind of eighteenth-century constitutional monarch in its society). This essentially secular job was possible for me because Queens’, like all the ancient colleges at Cambridge, has a religious basis as part of its foundation. I continue to exercise a degree of priestly ministry as I share with our Dean in celebrating the eucharist and preaching in the College Chapel.
My main intellectual activity is writing. I love the task of composition, the search for as clear a way as possible to convey what I want to say. The late Bishop John Robinson of Honest to God fame (who ordained me a priest) once said to me that he could not think without a pen in his hand. I knew at once what he meant. As one reads and thinks, ideas buzz around in one’s mind. It is the act of writing that causes this flux of thought to condense into some coherent thread of argument. I write all my manuscripts in scribbled longhand because, when the structure really begins to form, I cannot type fast enough to keep up with myself.
My first book in the science and religion area arose out of my experiences on leaving physics. I could not quit right away, for I had obligations to my graduate students that had to be fulfilled through an orderly withdrawal. In the eighteen months it took me to wind up my scientific affairs, I had quite a few conversations with colleagues over a cup of coffee in some laboratory canteen as they asked me what on earth I was up to. Mostly, they were probing my reasons for Christian belief. In half an hour or so I could no more do justice to that theme than I could have conveyed to an arts friend, on a similar timescale, my reasons for belief in quarks. I decided I would put down on paper what I would have said if I had had a few hours at my disposal. The result was a small book with a grandiose title: The Way the World Is. There isn’t a great deal of explicit science in the book (the first publisher I approached rejected it on those grounds), but it exemplifies in a simple way a conviction that runs through much of my writing: that religious insight, like scientific insight, depends upon the search for motivated belief. The title was intended to convey that idea of rationally grounded understanding, rather than constituting a ridiculous claim to total metaphysical adequacy!
I did not have time for writing when I was a curate learning the trade, but as I wandered round the streets of my working-class parish in Bristol, I used to think about the similarities and differences of science and religion and what they had to say to each other about the one world of human experience. When I came to Kent as a vicar, part of the arrangement was that I should have a chance to write, and this enabled my thoughts to crystallize into One World, a survey of the scene that has proved a fairly steady seller.
I have never been able to see more than a book ahead, and I did not then envisage writing a trilogy of little volumes on the topic of science and religion. However, the other two offerings followed in fairly quick succession. Science and Creation is mainly concerned with two themes. One is the revival, as I see it, of natural theology in the modest mode of proffered insight based on the very structure of the laws of nature themselves, which seem, in their deep rational beauty and intelligibility and in their “finely tuned” anthropic fruitfulness, to point beyond science to a more profound Reality. This is an insight that is particularly appealing to someone whose scientific experience has been in fundamental physics. Biologists see a messier and more ambiguous picture of the process of the world, and the second theme I tried to address was that of an evolutionary world “making itself” in an unfolding act of continual creation, necessarily precarious and costly in its character. Here I was helped by the thoughts of my seniors, Ian Barbour and Arthur Peacocke, and by W. H. Vanstone’s wonderfully insightful Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, another book that I had read early in my theological studies and that has remained an abiding influence.
In chapter five of Science and Creation, I began the tentative exploration of a theme that has recurred in much of my subsequent writing: that we should seek to understand the relationship of mind and matter as being that of complementary poles of a single “world stuff” in flexible and open organization. The task of a proper understanding of this metaphysical issue is far beyond my modest capacity (or that of anyone today, I believe), but I have come to think that the insights of so-called chaos theory may offer a clue to a useful direction in which to wave our hands in cautious speculation.
I propose that the undoubted unpredictabilities of these exquisitely sensitive physical systems should be treated, not as unfortunate signs of epistemic ignorance, but as sources of ontological opportunity. Coining the phrase “Epistemology Models Ontology” as a slogan of scientific realism, I suggest that the ontology of deterministic equations aligns poorly with the epistemology of intrinsic unpredictabilities and that it should be replaced (as almost everyone does in the case of quantum uncertainties) by a more subtle and supple ontological account. This leads eventually to the notion of an enhanced range of causal principles in which the “bottom-up,” bits-and-pieces, energetic causality of physics is supplemented by the operation of “top-down” causality of a nonenergetic, pattern-forming kind that might be called “active information.” I suggest that this is how we act in the world and that it is consistent to suppose that God interacts with creation in this mode also.
My first sustained attempt to discuss divine action was in the third book of the trilogy, Science and Providence. Here I also took up a theme to which I have returned in later writing, the consideration of how God relates to time. Although contemporary science affords no satisfactory account of the basic human experience of the present moment, my view is “so much the worse for science!” I reject a block universe account and assert the true temporality of the world. Since God knows things as they really are, I believe that this implies that God knows creation in its temporality. In my view, there must be a temporal pole to the divine nature in addition to an eternal pole (an idea that I accept from the process theologians while rejecting a number of their other proposals), and that even God does not yet know the unformed future.
My writing has been characterized by a succession of short books. I think and read about a topic and then reach a stage at which I have to try to set down what I think about it. This seems to result in a series of volumes of just over a hundred pages. I try to write with all the intellectual seriousness and scrupulosity I can muster, but I do not write in an overtly academic style. This is a deliberate choice; I decided early on that my target audience should be twofold: the educated unbeliever whom I am wishing to persuade of the rationally motivated credibility of Christianity, and the educated believer whom I am wishing to persuade to take science seriously and to enhance Christian understanding by so doing. I do not think these aims are inconsistent with also seeking to offer some intellectual input into the interaction between science and theology.
After the trilogy, I found I wanted to return to some themes I had touched on earlier and discuss them in greater detail. This resulted in Reason and Reality, whose chapters seek to consolidate the consideration of how scientific and theological thinking relate to each other, the role of natural theology, and a number of issues including more discussion of how to interpret chaos theory.
The invitation to give the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1993 encouraged me to write what is my longest book to date. Rather exasperatingly, it has different titles on the different sides of the Atlantic: Science and Christian Belief/The Faith of a Physicist, but at least it has the same subtitle: “Theological Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker.” The idea was to weave a discussion of Christian belief around phrases selected from the Nicene Creed, using arguments based on a bottom-up movement from experience to interpretation. Scientists know that the world is strange and exciting, beyond our prior powers of anticipation, and they are open to unexpected insights provided they are based on evidence to show that this is indeed the case. The lectures are an exercise in that search for motivated belief that is so central to my own thinking. In a sense, they are a much more developed account of the program I attempted with The Way the World Is. The final chapter discusses a theological problem that is much in my mind, of how we are truly to understand the interrelationships of the world’s great faith traditions so obviously concerned with a common spiritual realm but so obviously making clashing cognitive claims about its nature. This unresolved diversity contrasts perplexingly with the universality of scientific understanding that has spread so readily across the globe.
After the Giffords I needed a holiday, but I love to write, so I dashed off a chatty book about science and religion, which I called Quark, Chaos and Christianity. It is rather a favorite of mine.
My valued colleagues Ian Barbour and Arthur Peacocke have also given Gifford Lectures, and comparison of the three sets reveals both many common themes but also some interesting divergences of method and conclusion, mostly relating to the question of how great a degree of conceptual autonomy has to be claimed by theology and to what extent it can harmonize its thinking with scientific patterns of understanding. In attempting the delicate task of a comparison between the three of us, I have concluded that there is a spectrum, which I characterize in Scientists as Theologians as running from consonance to assimilation, in which Barbour is near the integrationist end, I am near the conceptual autonomy end, and Peacocke is somewhere in between us.
I think that the science-and-theology debate is currently in an interesting phase in which the action has to some extent moved away from the obvious border areas of natural theology and the doctrine of creation into a closer engagement with central Christian questions such as Christology and eschatology. The bottom-up thinking that characterizes scientific thought has something to offer here, not as a uniquely effective method of doing theology but as a possible source of insight, comparable with the particular insights offered, in their very different ways, by black or feminist theology.
I do a fair amount of public speaking about science and religion. I quite often end a talk by saying that I am both a physicist and a priest and that I believe that I can hold these two aspects of me together, not only without compartmentalization or dishonesty, but also with a significant degree of mutual enhancement. It is to that task that I seek to devote my current endeavors.