John Polkinghorne Q & A 

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How can there be any meaningful interplay between physics and religion? It is said that the universe was written in the language of mathematics, yet the bible is a mere collection of words. Therefore how can there be any meaningful interplay between physics and religion?
Preliminary Response: Both Mathematics and The Bible are – at one level – collections of symbols. But some symbols, if correctly interpreted, give a deep understanding of reality (eg e= mc²).
All religions seek to provide insights into the deepest levels of reality, so it is almost inevitable that there will be some interplay between the truths of physics and the truths of religion.  But equally, they are addressing very different domains of discourse – religion necessarily involves persons and the relations between them, whereas physics seeks to be impersonal.  Therefore the direct interplay will be sporadic. In John’s book Quantum Physics and Theology – an Unexpected Kinship he explores some of the remarkable parallels: deep reality often turns out to be very different from what common sense would suggest. The Trinity and wave-particle duality both seem “impossible” but end up being the only coherent way to account for all the relevant data in their respective fields.
John adds: Mathematics and words are both means for expressing concepts.  In thinking about how science and the Bible relate, it will be the conceptual level that is important.  I believe they have a complementary relationship.

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The God Part of the Brain? I just read your book, "The Way the World Is."  I found it to be an outstanding treatment of how science and religion an compliment each other. I know you have written books more recently and I look forward to reading them. 
  Are you aware of a book by Matthew Alper, "The God Part of the Brain"?  In his search for God he found answers in the scientific work done by Newberg and L'Aquila, "Why God Won't Go Away."  They were two neurosurgeons who discovered that during prayer, meditation, and spiritual experiences, a specific part of the brain in involved. 
   I think your beliefs would complement theirs to answer a lot of theological and historical question.
Preliminary Response:  Thank you for your appreciative email which I will pass to John. I don’t know if he is aware of “The God Part of the Brain” – I am not.  
  There is a lot of research on the way in which different parts of the brain interact with mental processes, but is almost never turns out to be as simple as “an X part of the brain”  because even if one region of the brain is heavily implicated many other regions are involved as well, and the overall behavior of the brain is almost certainly a function of “global” patterns which are not at all well understood.  The “Premise” of the book that “For every physical characteristic that is universal to a species, there must exist some gene or set of genes responsible for the emergence of that particular trait.” doesn’t inspire enormous confidence: all human beings are less than 1km tall and this is not because of genetics.  It’s also pretty clear that belief in God is not a physical characteristic.  It must be true that certain brain functions are involved in belief in God (as indeed they are in belief in other minds or ability to do mathematics) and it may well be true that some people are genetically more likely to believe in God/other minds /do maths than others.  This has very little to do with whether the belief in God/other minds is true.  
  From what I can see on the web, Apler is a self-educated screenwriter and his book has been described as “a loopy riff on [Evolutionary Biology]’s standard explanation of religion” so I’m not very optimistic about its intellectual quality.

John adds:  I'm glad you found The Way the World Is helpful. You might try Quarks, Chaos and Christianity next. I do not know the book by Alper that you mention, though I do know something about the work of Newberg and d'Aquili. It is interesting but limited.  We are embodied beings and all our activity has a bodily component.  When I do physics, a part of my brain lights up; when I meditate on God another part of my brian lights up. This is not at all surprising and, in itself, it implies nothing very significant about science or religion. 

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How can mind  function unless it is physical: maybe made of Dark Matter
1. How can mind invisibly function in the visible physical realm, unless it is also physical?
2. Is it possible that some aspects of Dark Matter might account for this – there could be DarkChemistry, DarkBiology, and even DarkHomoSapiens?
Preliminary Response: To respond to (2) first: since no-one knows what Dark Matter is, almost anything is possible.  But Dark Matter is subject to gravity – that’s how we deduce that it is there.  Therefore any abnormal increase in the density of Dark Matter (such as would be associated with a putative DarkHomoSapiens) would presumably have measurable gravitational effects.  This rules out many obvious ways in which there might be a DarkHomoSapiens. And the whole area is so speculative that it is scientifically impossible to address meaningfully.
(1) is indeed a difficult problem, and the basic answer is “nobody knows”.  However the fact that nobody knows how something happens doesn’t imply that it doesn’t happen: if it did Science, as we know it, would be impossible*.   The proposition:
  (P1) that “anything that interacts with something physical must be physical”
is clearly a metaphysical position for which there can be no scientific evidence – unless it is used as a definition of  the term “physical” which is admittedly tricky to define, but would then make the assertion vacuous.   However there are serious problems with (P1). To mention just a few:
a. It is clear that mathematical constructs (like Fermat’s Last Theorem) are not physical, but many theorems have consequences in the physical world
b. It also seems clear that propositions (like  F.L.T. or P1 above) exist, and although they can be represented in the physical world, their existence is not conditional on any particular representation.  The whole of logical thought depends on the fact that there can be many different representations of the same proposition or idea, so it’s pretty clear that ideas are not physical.  Yet it is also clear that ideas influence behaviour, and that the physical world can influence ideas.
c. Insofar as we know anything, we know that we have a mind and that our mind can influence our behaviour, although the existence of other minds, like the existence of God, can not be “scientifically proven”.  Minds have ideas, and  it’s pretty clear that Minds are not, in themselves, physical. Of course our mind is closely bound up with our brain, but the very fact that we can use such language shows that the mind and the brain are not logically identical. If it were true that (for example) “your mind is completely determined by your brain” this would be an empirical fact.  But it seems logically impossible to devise an experiment that could demonstrate this.
d. Lucas’s Theorem (due to John Lucas) proves that, if some human minds are capable, in principle, with the aid of a sufficiently powerful computer, of understanding a Gödel Proposition in any deterministic logical system, then at least those minds cannot be completely modeled by any deterministic logical system.  This provides strong evidence that minds are not logically determined by their brains.
  John (Polkinghorne) uses the phrase “active information” and points out that modern science strongly suggests that the behaviour of complex systems is under-determined by normal physical laws.  He also advocates “dual-aspect monism” under which object have both physical and mental aspects.  There are hints from the work of leading evolutionary scientists like Simon Conway-Morris and Martin Nowak that the processes of evolution (in the broadest sense) have a role in intermediating between “active information” and “physical stuff”. It seems likely that these questions will be better understood in 20 years – although it seems very unlikely that we will ever fully understand the relationship of the mind and the body.
* This was actually a big issue at the dawn of modern “Natural Philosophy”.  Locke famously wrote that he "suspect[ed] that natural philosophy is not capable of being made a science" – words that many people today would find incomprehensible.
John adds: Dark matter is important cosmologically but I do not believe that it helps us understand the nature of mind (after all, it is matter and it is invoked to understand the nature of galaxies).

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Divine Interaction - an objection Having reading some of John's work about his theory of divine interaction with the world, I understand his theory to be more or less the following (an admittedly brutal summarization): taking critical scientific realism as a starting point, one moves on to hold the epistemology and ontology are very close, if not exactly the same. Thus, when one encounters epistemologically unpredictable systems a la Prigogine, he can suspect them to be ontologically indeterminate and thus a possible point of divine interaction.
   However, the theory hinges drastically on the equation of epistemology and ontology and its application to these types of systems. I believe Arthur Peacocke once asserted (either in a book or video interview) that although the systems in question are epistemologically indeterminate, they are still ontologically determinate and thus not fit for locating a divine-world interaction point (he went on to espouse his theory of top-down causation on analogy with the mind-body relation). Indeed, it seems to me that Polkinghorne's theory is vulnerable to these types of assertions that epistemologically indeterminate does not equal ontologically indeterminate, and I am wondering how either you or Dr. Polkinghorne respond to them?
Preliminary Response: John takes the critical realist view that “epistemology models ontology”.  It is always possible that a system could be epistemologically indeterminate and ontologically determinate, but it is very hard to see how one could get adequate evidence that this was the case.  Remember that is part of John’s worldview is Dual-aspect monism and the view that things in the universe behave like machines in wholly predictable ways only when you have set up experiments very carefully to ensure that they do so (and even then there is always the rider “except in exceptional circumstances”.  However carefully the experiments in SLAC are set up, they won’t behave well in an earthquake.  Having in my 20s & 30s been a computer scientist and been involved in actually trying to make electronics behave like a machine, I always think the idea that “everything in the universe is a machine” is rather ludicrous.
   Asynchonous analogue systems are always going to have indeterminacy.  Consider an And-gate which will give an output of 1 if input A and input B are 1 and 0 otherwise.  Suppose A goes from 0 to 1 at t=0 and from 1 to 0 at t =x. Suppose that B goes from 0 to 1 at t=y. A simple continuity argument shows that there will be a critical interval of values of y (y₁-y₂ say, probably somewhere near x) whereby if y<y₁ the gate will output 1 and if y>y₂ the gate will output 0 but within this interval it is uncertain what the gate will output (at least within a defined time period). Similar arguments apply to the amplitudes of the signals. If the system is sufficiently complex (far below the complexity of the brain say) then there will be situations where the effects of such uncertainties, however tiny, will grow exponentially. 
  Peacocke was of course a biochemist so didn’t have to grapple with these issues at first hand.
John adds: Physics by itself is not sufficient to determine the nature of causality (the fact that there are deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of quantum theory makes the point) but it requires also an act of metaphysical decision, which has to be defended for metaphysical reasons.  I choose the realist option of aligning epistemology and ontology, not least because it affords the best metaphysical option to accommodate adequately both human agency and divine agency.  It is important to recognise that the idea of top-down causality is not unproblematic and its plausibility requires and analysis of caustal structure to ensure that there is a genuine openness to allow its operation in addition to bottom-up effects.

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Stenger and Hitchens I was wondering if you have read two books: God, the Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, by Victor J. Stenger. And the second: God is not Great: The case against Religion by Christopher Hitchens. I would like to know what you think of these books. Has Prof. John Polkinghorne read them? Could you let me know and tell me what he thinks? Has God been discredited in these books? Are they persuasive?
Preliminary Response: No, but I have seen Stenger’s presentation on his website and I have heard Hitchens speak on the topic.  Stenger and C Hitchens both seem to generate a lot more heat than light. 
Hitchens doesn’t even pretend to be a scientist or a philosopher. Stinger did some marginally useful scientific work but his claims are far too dogmatic. As for his suggestion that Anthropic Fine tuning is a non-problem because of his simplistic program MonkeyGod that purports to simulate universes and “show” that anthropic universes are commonplace, I know of no serious cosmologist who takes this seriously. Martin Rees’s “Just Six Numbers” is a good guide to the real science.
John adds: I have read several of the books expressing the current outburst of militant atheism, but not the two you mention.  My impression is that they are polemical rather than presenting reasoned arguments of a truth-seeking kind, and that they largely depend upon attacking caricature distortions of religious belief.

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Maurice Wiles I have just been reading the essay on divine Action by JCP in the book 'Religion and science', published in 1996.  I realise that this is not very recent, but still felt impelled to write this.
In the essay he is very dismissive of the view of Maurice Wiles (which I strongly share) that God creates and sustains the world and that that is all we need to say - God's action in the world is both prior and constantly present in everything that is.
JCP dismisses this as a "detached and indifferent a deity".  But there is no reason whatsoever for thus categorising the God in whom Wiles ande I believe.  She is not only our creator, he is a close and caring presence, sharing our struggles in the world he has made .  The only adequate theology of evil is one that recognises that in some ultimate (and obviously difficult) it is a part of God's world and that it will be finally transformed.
This understanding of God in no way dodges theodicy: God is ultimately responsible for the Holcaust, for children suffering, for all pain and distress. 
On petionary prayer he seems to want to have his cake and eat it. We can do it - but it is really "your will be done", as indeed I believe.
At least in that essay JCP seems unable to move outside traditional Christian ideas.  Does he really think that using the simplistic language of "God who raised Jesus from the dead" is still possible – he must know complicated and difficult such a statement is.
It may be that there are parts of tghe site where this is all dealt with.  If so, I shall  be delighted to be pointed to them.
Preliminary Response I don't have a copy of that essay to hand, and I have not read Wiles*.  However John does comment on Wiles in some other books.
  We of course agree that "God creates and sustains the world", but this does not mean that we are compelled to Deism.  The Christian God clearly interacts with Creation in specific and decisive ways, most importantly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  John suggests that Wiles's deistic account arises from a feeling that the integrity of modern science would otherwise be breached, and that the modern understanding that the Universe is not merely mechanical makes this stance un-necessary.
  On prayer, the question is not whether it should end "thy will be done" but whether God actually listens to His creatures and considers their wishes and requests.  As Jesus pointed out, a loving God does not ignore the pleas of those He loves. Deists may think otherwise of course.
  The question is surely not whether someone is "able to move outside traditional Christian ideas" but whether there are sufficiently compelling reasons to reject, modify or re-interpret the clear teaching of the church on certain topics.  On evolution for example it was immediately apparent to many Christian theologians (though not all) that this was not incompatible with Christian teaching even though it meant that parts of the Bible could no longer be read in their apparent "literal" senses.  John's views on omnipotence and omniscience differ importantly from the traditional teachings on these topics.  But in many other cases, the retreats and compromises that seemed necessary to liberal theologians in the 60s and 70s can now be seen to be wholly un-necessary, and indeed leading to a sub-Christian account of various key issues.
  There have always been difficulties about the Resurrection - Paul and his contemporaries knew perfectly well that people didn't normally return from the dead (although of course Resurrection doesn't mean resuscitation) - but if you can't use language like "God who raised Jesus from the dead" it is hard to understand in what real sense you are a Christian theologian.  And since modern science shows us a world in which over 90% of the universe seems to be made of "Dark Matter" and "Dark Energy" of whose constituents we have no idea, it is blindingly clear that there is far more to reality than the tiny fraction (partially) understood by science.
* Nor did I realise until I looked him up that his son is the brilliant mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem.
John adds: I knew Maurice Wiles and respected him as a Christian thinker, but I think he was mistaken in taking a 'single action' view of God's creative act. We use personal language about God (Father not Force) however stretched it must be, precisely because we believe that God does particular things in particular circumstances as part of a divine particular care for particular creatures.  The many issues you raise, such as the resurrection, demand a careful and detailed response.  If you want mine, you will have to read at least a book or two, for example by Gifford Lectures "Science and Christian Belief" (in N America, "The Faith of a Physicist")

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Randomness and Creation I am a Christian professor on an American campus. I am continually hearing that the fact that the sub-atomic world is random and this fact denies a God as creator. My question is, “what effect would a structured or organized sub-atomic world have had on creation.” As water has unique properties that are necessary, is it possible that a random sub-atomic world is what makes creation possible?
Preliminary Response: First of all, the word “random” is somewhat slippery and hard to define.  In the context of Quantum Mechanics (QM), we can take it as meaning “there is no physical way to predict with certainty the outcome of an observation (where the effects of QM are appreciable)”  This of course does not say that there may not be other, non-scientific factors at work in influencing the actual outcomes.  So it is perfectly possible that God might “fix” the outcomes of these uncertain observations in such a way as to conform with the overall probabilities given by the laws of physics.  However the idea that God tinkers with reality to hide the true nature of the world seems highly implausible, and both John and I are much more inclined to believe that the indeterminacy of the fundamental physical laws reflects a deep fact about the nature of the Universe: that God has created it with real freedom inherent in the deepest level of creation.  This seems to be part of God’s answer to the seemingly insoluble problem of “how can an omnipotent creator create a universe in which beings are free to choose to love Him and each other”.
It’s worth raising a couple of warning flags here: although the observations from measurements are probabilistic the Dirac Equation, which governs how the wavefunctions evolve over time, is deterministic. This is one of the factors that leads to the notorious “measurement problem” of QM to which there is no agreed philosophical or scientific answer (Roger Penrose for example has a conjecture that it involves gravity).  John and I (and most working scientists) favour the “Copenhagen Interpretation” which essentially accepts that, in some undefined way, a “measurement” is a fundamental operation which forces the wavefunction to choose which state it falls into. However the “many worlds” interpretation, which suggests that there are an unbounded number of other universes in which the measurements just come out differently, has a growing minority of adherents – and seems to appeal particularly (though by no means exclusively!) to atheists and admirers of science fiction.  The implications for such ideas as moral responsibility are mind-boggling.
To focus on your specific question: great scientists like Newton and Maxwell had no difficulty in combining a deep Christian faith with the idea that the fundamental equations of nature that they were elucidating were deterministic. However if the Laws of Physics were really fully deterministic then it is very hard to see how true freewill could exist  though again many philosophers argue for a “compatabilist” view that freewill and determinism can go together, but this is not very compelling and seems to us to be motivated by a desire to evade the dilemma that physicalism denies freewill.  However the “randomness” ,or more precisely “uncertainty”, that seems to be at the heart of the physical world does make it clearer how true freedom and freewill could emerge.  This is especially true if you combine the uncertainty at very small scales with the effects of chaotic dynamics which can magnify the effects of very very small changes as complex systems develop over time.
John adds: Modern science has come to recognise that the processes that can give rise to genuine novelty have to be ‘at the edge of chaos’ where order and disorder, chance and necessity, creatively interlace.  Otherwise things are either too rigid for anything really new to happen, or too haphazard for novelty to be able to persist.  The intrinsic unpredictablities of quantum mechanics and chaos theory can be seen theologically as gifts of a Creator whose creation is both orderly and open in this way

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Quantum Vacuum and Zero Energy I have noticed on several forums and discussions, including some of the Q/A, that there is talk ot the universe emerging from a "quantum vacuum". Some persons will say that though it consists of energy, the energy is actually zero because the negative and positive balances out. Is this true and isn’t it simpler to say that the quantum vacuum is itself a result of the big-bang? thanks.
Preliminary Response: At the present state of knowledge, any statements about “before the big bang” are inevitably conjectural and/or metaphysical.  It is certainly interesting that, on current formulations, the positive and negative energies seem to balance out arithmetically, though given the great uncertainty of the nature and identity of the Dark Energy and Dark Matter that seem to be the major components of the Universe, that cannot be regarded as a totally robust finding.  However the Quantum Vacuum is not “nothing” but an incredibly rich structure, teeming with possibilities and energy (William Blake would have loved it).
It’s a bit more natural to talk about a Quantum Vacuum existing before Big Bang than vice-versa, but in the topsy-turvy world of cosmology, especially with the rococo speculations of String Theory, almost any language crops up somewhere in the discourse.  And it’s almost all highly speculative.

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Something from nothing, and the Anthropic Principle How can we say that in the beginning there was nothing and then there was something when there was nothing from wich the something could come out from? It seems impossible for the big bang to happen without the aid of God. There was not even the the potential for the beig bang before it was said to be made actual; it is simply a logically impossible supposition, that something can explode out of nothing.
 Second, are you aware of the arguments of the anthropic principle? Do you think that Dawkins defeates it in the God Delusion? What do you make of what he says, and what is exactly the force of the anthropic principle, could you elaborate?
Preliminary response:    There are certainly grave difficulties for Atheists in the Big Bang, which is one reason why it was resisted for so long.  They tend to reply that you have to assume something - why not that (or the Laws of Nature/ the Quantum Vacuum/ an infinite series of Big Bangs etc..)  The Anthropic principle is a big topic which John (and I) have explored extensively.  Dawkins certainly doesn't defeat it in TGD, indeed one recalls the comment of John Barrow: “You have a problem with these ideas, Richard, because you’re not really a scientist.”

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What about intelligent design? Has John's thinking evolved from such thinking or is his thinking different all together?
Preliminary Response: The basic problem with ID is that God is never spoken of as a “designer” in the Bible: He is Creator and Father and a Father does not “design” his children.
It seems that Evolution is one of the principles, like Gravity, which God has used to create the Universe: there is no more a conflict between Evolution and Creation than between Gravity and Creation.
John adds: ID also makes a scientific claim of identifying molecular biological systems of irreducable complexity, but I do not believe it has made its case.  It is not enough to consider a single system in isolation, since evolution works in an improvisatory way, coopting what has been useful for one purpose to help acheive another.  ID also seems tacitly to make the theological mistake that God, who is the creator and sustainer of nature, would not be conetent to work through natural processes, which are as much expressions of the divine will as anything else.

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Entropy: I have a question for the Rev Polkinghorne about entropy.
I have two starting premises: (so that you can tell me if these are in error!)
1.  According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, a closed system tends towards disorder.
2.  Observation reveals a universe of beauty, pattern, complexity and order, particularly in the natural world, where pattern appears to emerge at every level.  (actually I'm wondering if this is true. There is certainly chaos as well... but perhaps it's fair to say that even chaotic systems tend towards pattern and order.. although is this just about reducing energy?)
  I've been interested in these ideas in considering the 'warfare theodicy' proposed by many (most? all?) open theists.  I guess you would describe yourself as an open theist? (or something similar)  Do you believe in a world at war? Are there aspects of the universe that support these 'warfare' ideas? (as I believe quantum mechanics appears to support openness)  I've been interested in what it means to live in a 'fallen world' - in a world which at the physical level is not how it was intended.  But yet a world in which God is always at work revealing himself and working out his purposes.
  For example, the two effects I've described above appear to battle against each other.  The 2nd Law tells us that disorder should increase, but yet order and pattern emerge everywhere.  It sounds like a cosmic battle in some ways, although I realise this a simplistic way of understanding both aspects. As I understand it, the physical universe runs in a way that means that everything eventually runs down and everything is reduced to disorder and randomness, (however, I understand that there's nothing 'spooky' or arbitrary about the Laws of Thermodynamics, they just describe how energy works).  But it is amazing that the universe is beautiful and bright and that animals and plants tend towards order and complexity. Why do these appear?
  I'm not primarily interested in making an argument from design, etc.  My main interest is in the idea of a world at war, and what that could mean in the physical universe. 
  I wondered if you had any insights on these things.  I studied physics only to undergrad level and clearly my scientific understanding and description is very clumsy.  Have you written about these ideas in any of your books?
Preliminary Response:  I'm not familiar with "warfare theodicy" and a quick google leaves me little the wiser. Although cosmic warfare is certainly a fairly important theme in the Bible, it is hard to see it as much help in theodicy.  To answer "Why does God allow evil and suffering" with "because there is Cosmic Warfare with the Powers of Evil."  doesn't seem to get very far unless there is a good answer to: "why does God allow the Powers of Evil to wage Cosmic Warfare" – which John and I find "deeply puzzling". It is in fact tempting to see "the Powers of Evil" as emergent properties of the evil caused by mis-applied human freewill, although this is highly speculative.
  There are some puzzles about the 2nd law, but the standard answer to how living systems can increase order is that they increase order locally at the expense of greater disorder (technically, higher entropy) globally.  So for example plants take the very low entropy of photons from the sun and turn it into low entropy life and high entropy gasses.  We are only beginning to understand how higher order "emergent" properties come into being (Stuart Kaufmann did some pioneering work on this, there is fascinating work under way by Martin Nowak about how evolutionary dynamics leads, under suitable conditions, to cooperation and order, and Denis Noble has been developing the philosophical implications of systems biology) and there is little doubt that a deeper understanding of what John has called "active information" is one of the key challenges of the 21st Century.
John adds: Modern science has come to recognise that regimes in which truly novel consequences can emerge are always "at the edge of chaos", that is: their circumstances are such that order and disorder, chance and necessity, interlace.  Hence there is an inescapable shadow side to great fruitfulness.

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The idea of Satan, or the Devil. While I realize many thoughtful Christians (like C.S. Lewis) believed in demons and the devil, and it's in Scripture, the concept has become difficult for me to swallow. The "red guy with a pitchfork" is a poor conceptualization, I know, but so is the idea that all human actions of "evil" on this planet are somehow the end-products of his or his invisible minions' tempations.  Any thoughts on a solid, modern understanding (not medieval or Dante-esque) of who the devil is would be helpful (why I feel the need for clarification on this matter is anyone's guess).
Preliminary Response: It's very hard to know what to think about Satan, Demons and Angels.  The Bible says little about them.  Angels seem to be spiritual beings who worship God but are occasionally sent to be His messengers on earth.  The Biblical picture of Satan (which means "the Accuser" in Hebrew) seems to vary: in the prologue to Job (Job BTW is, roughly, a Play and not intended to be "factual", but it is one of the most profound books in the Bible) he's a kind of rogue courtier but Jesus talks about him as the fundamental quasi-personal influence behind much of the evil in the world.
  When Jesus says, to Peter "Get behind me, Satan, for you do not judge according to God's ways, but men's" (Mark 8:33 & par) he is not suggesting that Peter is "possessed" by the Devil or that Peter is not making these very prudent suggestions for his Master's safety of his own free will. He seems to be saying that Peter is unwittingly falling in with Satan's designs.  So describing Satan as the ultimate "force" behind the sin in the world does not mean that humans are absolved of their responsibilities. But the Bible is clear that there is a cosmic struggle going on and not just a human one.
  It's tempting to use the language of Chaos Theory here and make the analogy between Satan and a "Strange Attractor" which is a dynamical path (of non-integer dimension) that is not necessarily actually reached by other dynamical paths in the system but whose existence and characteristics influence the behaviours of the dynamical paths that come near it.
John adds: All I would add to Nicholas's helpful response is that when one considers a terrible event like the Holocaust, there are of course human factors at work (the wills of wicked men, the social sin of unquestioning obedience to the state, ordinary people's compromises and cowardice), but the weight of evil involved is so great that I myself cannot rule out the influence of some form of evil spiritual power at work.  Where such a power came from and why it is allowed to operate are, of course, very perplexing questions.

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What about James Lovelock's ultra-frightening new prediction on the effects global warming will have on the human population within the next 60-some years. As I'm sure you know by now, he has predicted that upwards of 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century and what's left will be trying to stay alive near the north and south poles. Your opinion on these warnings and how, as Christians, we should feel about it would be much appreciated.
Response: the "Revenge of Gaia" predictions appear to be scaremongering, although it is very hard to be certain of anything long-term.  It is very clear that climate change is a serious problem, and that radical solutions will be required, some involving social changes and some involving large-scale applications of technology.  For example, Lovelock has also proposed a very interesting approach to helping "global cooling" with wave-operated pumps. Christians should be engaged in these issues, without succumbing to the Neo-Paganism that elevates the Environment into a Godess.  Anything that poses serious risks to the lives of millions, or billions, needs to be taken seriously as part of our duty to be stewards of God's world.

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Samaritans: I read your article, "The Truth In Religion," which appeared in the TLS and I would like to comment on a side issue that you mentioned in it.  You wrote: "When it [Dawkin's book] asserts that Jesus’ call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan), the only support quoted for this highly questionable statement is a book written by an anaesthesiologist."
  Perhaps you might consider reconsidering you reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan?  In his book, History of the Samaritans (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992), Nathan Schur writes:  "The process of drawing apart [of Samaritans from Jews] was certainly a very gradual one…In spite of some nasty name calling from both sides and some violent action on part of the Hasmonean rulers, the responsible Jewish halakhic authorities continued to regard the Samaritans from certain points of view still as Jews till late into the second century AD…Jews still joined the Samaritans in one of their last uprisings against the Byzantine government in 556 AD.  Thus the process of estrangement was a very slow one, spread over many centuries and completed only a millennium after it had started."
  In my own article, Samaritans, Jews and Philosophers.  Expository Times 113:5: 152-6 (2002), I wrote: "A Jewish writer would never mention a Samaritan as an example of a gentile or generic human being.  It is true Jews and Samaritans had their differences and conflicts.  So did the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of biblical Israel.  The relationship of Jews and Samaritans to each other was quite dissimilar to that holding between Palestinians and Israelis.  A better (yet still obviously imperfect) historical analogy might be to the relationship between Anglicans and the Church of Rome. 
If Jesus had intended to overthrow the particularity of Leviticus, he made a poor choice in speaking of a 'Good Samaritan'.  If only Jesus had spoken of a good Greek or idolater!  Then it would be reasonable to speculate that he meant, in this particular story, to call for a universal ethic of love."
  If you would like, I can email a copy of my complete article to you. I should mention that more generally speaking, I am in agreement with your criticisms of Dawkins & co.
John says: I’m interested in your scholarly comments on the Samaritans.  However I think that Jesus’s choice of a Samaritan in the parable implies that he would have been seen as in less than a brotherly relationship to the Jews. As to the contra Dawkins point, the admonitions in the Torah to care for the stranger seem enough to make the point that he is wrong to assert that there is no real concern for non-Jews.

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Embryonic stem-cell research. I am only newly acquainted with Dr. Polkinghorne, having heard him speak today at Belmont University in Nashville TN.  He was brilliant (stardust!) and I am filled with wonder.  After the lecture he allowed a few questions.  One had to do with the morality of embryonic stem cell research.  Dr. Polkinghorne answered by discussing at what point an embryo becomes a human person (at 14 days I think).  I would like to ask how the love principle – that God created a universe which allows beings to be and make themselves – would address this issue.  If the potential for human life exists in the embryo before 14 days, should love allow it to become?  I look forward to further exploring your website and reading his books.
  Thank you for your good work,
John says: The embryo is human life from the start, and deserves high moral respect because of that, but I do not think that initially it has the absolute ethical status of personhood.

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Apparent wastefulness of natural selection Does the apparent wastefulness of natural selection go some way to discrediting the idea that God is loving and merciful?  How can a God of life allow a creation to develop where so many species die in, often, horrific and protracted suffering?   I appreciate the idea that life was given the freedom to "make itself" but still the developmental process that leads to sentiency seems nonsensically brutal.
Response: Well “species” don’t suffer. Clearly some higher animals do, although we must avoid the “pathetic fallacy” of attributing human feeling to non-humans.
  The problem of pain – even when we eliminate the doubtful cases - is a real and serious one.  But no-one has ever suggested a better way than Natural Selection to allow life to “make itself” indeed some suggest that it is the only possible way.

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Vastness of the universe Does the sheer vastness of the universe make the inference of God based on fine-tuning less compelling?  Couldn't one argue that God wasted a lot of space (no pun intended) in order to create life?
Response: The size of the universe is essentially a function of its age.  And we need enough time to create 2nd generation stars, and then for life to evolve. So c14bn years seems about right.  In many respects there is no real difference between 14,000 years, 14m years and 14bn years: they are all immense to us, and all equally comprehensible to God.
The fine tuning is of course about the fundamental constants of nature, which (as far as we know) are the same throughout the universe.

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Experiment as basis for post-Aristotelian philosophy The Wikipedia article about you includes this sentence, with reference to your philosophical outlook: "Because scientific experiments work very hard to eliminate extraneous influences, he believes that they are thus highly atypical of what goes on in nature."
My question is:  Would you agree that at about the time of the Reformation, the synthesis with Aristotelian thought which had previously been achieved by the Christian church through the work of, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, was disrupted, not only with respect to the old Aristotelian certainties’ (the sky wheels around the earth, bodies fall under gravity at a constant velocity etc.) but also with respect to the Aristotelian theory of knowledge, i.e. “when from many notions gained by experience, one universal judgement about similar objects is produced” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1 Chapter 1, translation in Ackrill 1987)  Isn’t the epistemological basis for the empiricism of Locke and later Hume just this ‘atypical’ probing by experimenters, from Bacon and Galileo onwards? And isn’t it most likely that the scepticism of Hume, and later Kant and twentieth century positivism (which I think we both dislike), a response, not to anything in the new philosophy which necessarily replaced Aristotle, but to the severe pressure put on it by a society which includes religious believers who insist on retaining ideas (e.g. that mind can exist independently of brain) for which there is no objective evidence?
Preliminary Response: I don't want to get drawn into Aristotle and Locke.  But I don't think there has ever been severe pressure put on science by religious believers - until Darwin almost all the great scientists were religious believers and it's really only in the 20thC that this has not been the case - although of course there are many great 20th and 21st C scientists who are religious believers as well.
It is obviously self-refuting to hold that "you should only believe in ideas for which you have objective evidence" and it is clearly logically possible for the mind to exist independently of the brain (otherwise AI would be impossible by defintion) - the actual relationship between human brains and the minds associated with them is certainly intimate and certainly un-clear.
John adds: I agree that science considers a particular kind of experience (impersonal) encountered usually in special circumstances (experiments).  If you want to know what I think about epistemology you could read Ch 2 of Science and Christian Belief (SPCK) aka The Faith of a Physicist, and for my assessment of the acheivements of physical science, ch.2 of Exploring Reality (SPCK)

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Mandel experiment In your opinion, does the Mandel experiment carried out at the University of Rochester, in which the mere threat of obtaining information about which way the photon went, favour either of the two alternative explanations of the collapse of the wave packet, ie the apparatus itself causing the collapse, or the possibility of our being able to track the photon's path?
john says: My personal view is that the Mandel experiment illustrates the counterintuitive character of quantum theory but it does not require commitment to a particular interpretation.

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What can people believe and still be Christians? I have read some of the questions and answers on this site and found them rather disappointing. You seem to be trying to reconcile the differences between science and religion by concentrating on what scientists and religious believe. I think this approach misses the point. Both scientists and religious believe astounding, wonderful and counterintuitive things. There really is no conflict here. Where the huge gulf lies is in the reasons for belief.
  Leaving aside such esoterica as string theory, scientists require evidence whilst religious sometimes seem to make a virtue of believing the unlikely in spite of the evidence. This is where the true difference lies and it is a very profound one.
 Speaking for myself I find the scientific viewpoint immensely more satisfying. If I want a sense of the numinous I would rather get it by contemplating the implications of quantum entanglement than by thinking about angels. My sense of wonder is only increased by the fact that I could go to any suitably equipped lab and see the Aspect experiment performed whereas I doubt you could show me an angel. (I suppose this analogy is not exact, you could show me some phenomenon for which you thought the most likely explanation was angels. I would probably be forced to disagree with you)
 What I did find interesting about the site is that it made me realise that I don’t actually know what Christians do believe. You yourself seem to have some quite traditionalist beliefs about judgement and salvation and yet you have a sophisticated understanding of evolution and believe it to be true. I have never met a Christian who actually understood evolution before and I suspect your position (and even more so that of John) is an unusual one.
 So I finally come to my question. What can a person believe and still belong to the set of Christians. Is the Rev.Ian Paisley a Christian? Is the Pope? Is your unbelieving Bishop Spong? There is clearly a very wide set of beliefs encompassed here! Much wider than you would find for example in a group of people who called themselves “Zoologists” or “Physicists”
 I suspect you are going to say something along the lines of a Christian must believe the Nicene Creed. I am afraid that much as I would like to I do not. I understand what it means, I learned it in childhood and I now consciously and of my own free will reject it. The flames await. How does this sit with your conscience?
Preliminary Response: The issue is not "what must a Christian believe" but "in whom must a Christian believe".  Christian faith is not belief in a set of abstract propositions but faith in a living God. Christians must believe and trust in Jesus Christ.  Now if you believe and trust in someone you will generally believe what they say and do what they ask: it is therefore very hard to see how someone who does not believe that the resurrection actually happened (say) could really be a Christian.  Historically, as you say, people have tried to delimit the range of theologically acceptable beliefs by the Nicene Creed, but the truth is that only God knows whether someone really believes and trusts in Jesus.
  Clearly all human beings are misguided to some extent, and in my personal view probably Spong is more misguided than Rev Ian Paisley who is more misguided than the Pope (even Catholics BTW don't say that the Pope is infallable always). It is not my business to draw dividing lines - except to say that unquestionably the Pope is a Christian, and I know of no reason to doubt that Ian Paisley is.  You can of course be a Christian and a very mistaken theologian.  Almost all mainstream Christians in Europe accept evolution as we accept gravity - of course we don't accept that evolution implies atheism a la Dawkins any more than we accept that Newtonian Mechanics implies atheism a la Laplace.  Of the founders of modern evolutionary theory, Mendel, Fisher and Dobzhansky were all Christians and today at least three of the world's most important contriubtors in this area: Simon Conway-Morris, Francis Collins and Martin Nowak are quite visible Christians.
  It is a fundamental category mistake to contrast "Scientists" and "religious" - you might as well contrast "Scientists" and "women".  It may be true in some cultures that scientists are much less likely to be adherents  to organised religions than the general population, but that's rather beside the point: they have historically been much more likely to be female.
  Christians don't contemplate Angels much - we do contemplate God a lot. Quantum entanglement is, from our perspective, a bit like a beautiful lake - wonderful indeed, but even more wonderful if you also can contemplate the sea and understand the relationship between them.
John adds: I believe that religious faith is as much concerned with truth sought through motivated belief as is science. though the kind of motivations appropriate are necessarily different in character in the two cases. Religious motivations are more akin to the sort of motivations that lead us to trust our friends, that is they are attained through trusting rather than testing. If you want to see a fairly detailed exposition for my reasons for accepting Christian belief you might read Science and Christian Belief (in N.America entitled The Faith of a Physicist)

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Moses and Genesis What do you make of this verse? John 5. Jesus said:
46 For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote about me. 47 But if you don't believe his writings, how will you believe my words?"
Moses is credited with writing Genesis.
Surely if we regard his writings in Genesis 1-11 as mere myths or allegories then we're not respecting the Word? Genesis 1-11 is foundational to the whole Bible. Christianity is fact based, not myth based... isn't it?
Preliminary response: Two points which I hope clarify things:
a. (minor point) the concept of authorship was not the same in NT times as it is now.  When Jesus says (or suggests) that Moses wrote Genesis he is not asserting that Moses personally wrote every word - we know that there was a whole process of editing and authorship which builds on Moses and it is quite clear that Moses is not the "author" of Exodus etc.. because he is in the 3rd person (unlike Isaiah). It is a bit more like a standard textbook (say Copinger and Skone James on Copyright).
b. (major point) we are not saying that eg Genesis 1 is a "mere myth" - we are saying the Genesis 1 is using symbolic language of a particular kind to express deep truths which cannot be expressed better any other way.  If I write down f = ma (let alone any more complex equation) I am expressing a deep truth using symbolic language of  a particular kind, and to understand what I am saying you need to understand the meaning, in this context, of the symbols involved.  If someone said that I was asserting that "fry" meant the same as "mary" I would explain that they had misunderstood the way in which I was using these symbols.  And if this person retorted that I was saying that  f = ma was merely symbolic I might gently point out that all language is symbolic, the question is what kind of symbols and in what context should they be understood.
 To say that Genesis 1-11 is true does not mean that "if someone had pointed a hidden video camera at the situations and persons described, what this camera would have recorded is identical to what a rather literal-minded 20th century reader would have expected."  The Bible is much more like a portrait than a photograph (clearly the concept of a photo simply didn't exist in Biblical times) and what good portraits do is to portray the inner reality of a character: they often differ markedly from what a photograph would show of the scene, but this does not make them a less true portrait than a photo would be.

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Conflict between science and religion We want to address the conflict between science and religion. Recent books have heightened the drama....how do we maintain the integrity of both systems of thought? And do these systems have to remain separate towering institutions with a feeble bridge between them, or can we hope to have an intellectually honest theology that integrates both?
Preliminary response:  There isn't a conflict betwen science and religion (at least the Christian religion) and there never has been - indeed on the contrary almost all the pioneers of modern science were  Christians or Jews and this is far from accidental.
There is, of course, a conflict between Atheism and religion, and one type of Athesm, having abandoned Materialism (which collapsed under its own contradictons) now adopts Physicalism and tries to use the prestige of Science to bolster this arguably self-contradictory worldview.

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Limited omniscience? I am a Christian and a middle school science teacher. It is a humble credential, but nevertheless one which encourages my interest in John's writings; to date I have read Exploring Reality and found that I was blessed by it.
 I wonder if you could briefly explain why you find it necessary that God should limit his omniscience in order that we have free will? I know that it is addressed in the book I mentioned, and I suppose I could reread that part and try to digest it, but as it didn't quite take the first time, I thought I would seek an authoritative audience for my own musings, such as they are.
  Thinking of time as a dimension, I imagine it unfolded, from God's perspective, in an instant at the moment of creation. I don't really feel an awe for deep time anymore than I do for the vastness of the universe, because it occurs to me that each only appears enormous because of our limitations (i.e.- the cat seems small to us but large to the flea). We are experiencing only the present moment, and similarly only the part of the universe near us, which our senses can perceive. But God sees it all at once, no? Even with our own limits, we can scan a small room in an instant, but we may choose to focus on something of microscopic proportions instead, using appropriate equipment. The latter, for me, is a picture of God's interest in us, as demonstrated by the stories in the bible, and our personal testimonies. The caveat is that we cannot completely focus on the room and the microscope slide at the same time, because of both our experience of time as being linear and having one direction, and the limits of our senses. We must first observe one, then the other, with the previous moment seeming to have escaped us. Conversely, God has no such limit!
  So I picture that God has moment to moment interaction with us His creation, and yet it is all unfolded before Him at once, just as, uniquely, he can view and consider the micro and macroscopic simultaneously. So long as, as necessitated by our natures, we have the opportunity to respond to Him, or choose not to, in what is for us the present and only "in-play" moment, I don't see why His unlimited omniscience would violate free will, or His covenant with us.
Preliminary Response: What I think we can say clearly is that if it is necessary for God to limit His omniscience in order that we might have freewill then He will have done so.
The basic problem is whether time is inherently linear or branching. If it is "fixed" whether or not Al will marry Bet on 1 July 2010 then Al and Bet have no choice in the matter and therefore, on most natural interpretations of free will, no free will about it. There are philosophers who try to argue that freewill is compatible with determinism but I don't find their arguments at all convincing.
It would seem that from a "God's eye view" future events must be "fixed" because even if no human knows what will happen God does.  But this only works if we interpret Omniscience and meaning "knowing everything that can be known" rather than "able to know anything that can be known if you choose to do so" and indeed the 2nd definition is the only one compatible with God's omnipotence.  Indeed we now understand in basic physics that the very act of observing something necessarily changes the outcome.
Of course nobody really knows how time appears to God, and it may well be that these speculations are hilariously misconcieved from God's point of view.  All we can know for certain is that the reality will be more wonderful and infused with love than our conception, and that God, having laboured mightily so that we can be free to choose to love, will not have carelessly undermined the whole enterprise.
John adds: My argument is not that God's not knowing the future is essential to guarantee free will, but that a world that can contain freely choosing beings must be open to the future so that it is a world of true becoming. The argument then is that God will know that world truly, ie according to its actual nature, that is in its actual becomingness. The consequence is a divine choice to engage with time and not know the detail of the future. This seems to me very much the way the Bible speaks about God's chosen relationship with creatures. Nevertheless these matters are contentious and our understanding limited. The view of God knowing the whole of temporal history 'all at once', which you sketch, has had many supporters, including Augustine and Aquinas, so you are in good company.

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Incarnation and Evolution. 1) The incarnation is the observable term of the activity of God acting as One. Could this not be compared to the activity of light which travels as a wave, yet registers as particles? (Although, I wonder, if the particles reveal in the wave function of light anything comparable to the properties of the Trinity). 
2) Accepting that matter can evolve into self-conscious beings, and excluding a thoroughgoing determinism on the one hand, and the separation of grace and nature on the other, can we not say that the potential for selfconsciousness inherent in matter is its spiritual component?
Preliminary Response: 1) Yes up to a point, but God acts all the time in His Creation - the Incarnation is in some respects an intensification or crystallisation of His normal actions in the Person of His Son.  Indeed as many people have noted, the Signs/Miracles of Jesus are often things that God always does, but intensified and speeded up.
2) Yes up to a point, but John's position is (I think) that "matter" and "consciousness" are two aspects of a single underlying reality (he calls this Dual-Aspect Monism) It's not quite that matter evolves into consciousness, rather more that beings evolve, composed (materially) of matter but with a set of hyper-complex organisations so that eventually these beings have consciousness. After all it is not the matter in our bodies that is conscious.

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Creation, Evolution and Evil I have read The God of Hope and the End of the World, which I found very inspiring. I’m trying to come to terms with changing from being a Creationist to an Evolutionist, but I have one thing I just can’t understand. If God is good, how can God put a world into being that is not perfectly Good. I always understood Evil as the result of free will, but if evolution is true, then there was evil before free will. I’ve seen similar questions on this forum, but they don’t really answer my question. I heard about the Irenean theodicy (but haven’t read about it) which suggest all Evil in the world will be ‘transformed’ into eternal Good for all creation. I think John agrees with this theodicy, but I have difficulties praising a God who allowed evil into this world (although I can see that if God is Perfect and eternal, everything/everybody who is not God is not perfect and not infinite, until being ‘unified’ with God). Believing that all evil will once disappear forverer, does however, in my opinion, not release God of his responsibility for allowing evil into this world in the first place. As I look at it now, evil in a darwinist world suggest a dualistic God, who created both good and evil, and is hence both good and evil. That would not leave much room for the Christian God. I hope you can shed some light on this.
Preliminary Response Thank you for your question and comments.  Of course we believe in Creation - Evolution is like Gravity, it is part of how God creates the world, allowing his creatures the freedom to come into being to learn to choose to love Him.
 The Problem of Evil is a serious one, and I'm not sure that it makes much difference whether one is "Creationist" or not.  We cannot "solve" it in this simple note but perhaps a few thoughts help:

1. We know God loves us and we know there is Evil in the world. He must have a good enough reason for allowing this, but there is no reason why we should know what it is (see Job, Plantinga etc..). So the following suggestions by no means exhaust all the possibilities.
2. Much of the Evil is directly or indirectly the result of human sin - ie falling short of the Glory of God. In addition to the obvious ways in which this is true (Murder etc..) biological death was apparently in the world long before Adam and Eve, but death can only be Evil if there are morally conscious beings.  And perhaps to someone in perfect loving union with God would not feel the pain of separation nearly as much as we do.  This is not to deny the terrible reality of death, but to affirm that it is not final.
3. The Evil which is not the result of human sin seems to be the result of the workings out of the natural laws of physics (eg earthquakes) and biology (eg viruses).  It may well be logically necessary to have such laws in order that beings can emerge who are free to choose to love.  And surely a universe without freely given love but without pain would be worse than one with both.  The New Creation at the "end of time" is possible only and precisely because the people in it have lived through the present creation and have freely chosen the path of love.
4. We know that God doesn't merely allow suffering as a passive spectator, but suffered himself on the Cross. He carries our sorrows, and redeems them.
5. I don't really think that the Irenean Theodicy you mention is enough - it is indeed true that "the sufferings of the present time are not worthy of being compared with the Glory that shall be revealed" but that's not the whole truth. There must be a sense in which these sufferings are necessary, and perhaps points 1-4 give some hints about this.  But "now we see through a glass, darkly".

I hope this helps and will see what John has to add.
John adds: My thinking on the perplexing problem of evil is very much along the line's of Nicholas's reply. There is a chapter on evil in my Exploring Reality (SPCK/Yale) which you might care to look at

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The Resurrection - a Prank? I have read John Polkinghorne's defence of the authenticity of the resurrection in his book "Exploring Reality" and I must say that I find it very unconvincing. He says that Jesus died a dishonourable death and that one would have expected that to be the end of it but today we have all heard of Jesus. John Polkinghorne believes that this could only be the result of something momentous, ie the resurrection. This doesn't follow. All that was necessary was for the disciples to believe that Jesus was resurrected not for him actually to be resurrected.
  The first point is the empty tomb. John Polkinghorne says that there are two possible explanations: either Jesus was resurrected, or the disciples took the body. The latter can't be true in his view because men don't die for what they know to be a lie. I would agree with that but John Polkinghorne has presented us with a false dichotomy. On the one hand is the idea of a resurrection, on the other is the idea of a conspiracy by the disciples. A third possibility is that a single person, a follower of Jesus or even a prankster, might have taken the body and then not told anyone about it. John Polkinghorne seems to think that for the body to be removed, the disciples must have got together and decided among themselves to take the body and perpertrate a deception. That wasn't necessary. One person, acting alone, could have taken the body and as far as everyone else would have been concerned the body had disappeared inexplicably.
  At first this would just have been a mystery but it would have been the perfect seed for future developments. Reports of "sightings" of Jesus would now follow and the idea would grow that perhaps he had come back to life. The absolutely crucial point is that the earliest account in the Bible, in Mark, simply reports that the tomb was empty and does not mention any sightings. Reports of sightings come later. It could be argued that the sightings were so convincing that no one could doubt that Jesus had returned from the dead. This isn't the impression that I get. The sightings sound vague and incoherent; rather like modern day sightings of ghosts and UFOs. Of course, those people who claim to have seen ghosts and UFOs seem utterly convinced and I'm sure the disciples were equally convinced. And that's how it started.
Preliminary Response: I’m sorry I can’t find my copy of Exploring Reality at present so I can’t respond on the specific argument John makes.  Clearly, as with any other historical phenomenon, there are an enormous number of conceivable explanations. Jesus could have been abducted by aliens.  However I think you need to explain not merely the fact that the tomb was empty but the fact that the disciples were so utterly convinced that Jesus had risen again, and that they had seen him, and this utterly bizarre idea didn’t simply die out but, despite severe persecution, eventually became the mainstream view of the western world and is still held by c 2bn people.
  Given that the tomb was empty and the body could not be found (which must be so because neither the Romans nor the Jews could produce Jesus’s body, which would have stopped Christianity in its tracks) there are clearly 4 possibilities:
1.      God removed the body – as per the Resurrection.
2.      The disciples removed the body.
3.      Jesus was not really dead and removed himself – some kind of resuscitation.
4.      Some unknown 3rd party removed the body.

We agree that 2 is deeply implausible. The main problem with 3 is that Jesus would have then been deliberately deceiving the disciples in such a way as to lead to their deaths.  So we are left with (4).  But there are grave difficulties:

1. This does not at all explain the fact that the Disciples were utterly convinced that they had seen, walked, talked and eaten with the Risen Jesus. No-one was remotely expecting anything like the Resurrection (so the idea that it might have been dreamed up as an “explanation” of the empty tomb is fanciful – the disciples would have inferred, as indeed Mary of Madgalene did, that someone had taken the body away).  The idea that the resurrection is a later Christian belief is simply wrong: look at 1 Corinthians 15 which was written some time around AD54 – Mark (probably written in the 60s) doesn’t mention the resurrection appearances because everyone knew about them, but not everyone knew about the life of Jesus before the Resurrection.
2. Grave-robbing was not unknown but deeply counter-cultural. No pious Jew would do it.  What was the supposed motive for this action?
3. Anyone who had removed the body could have earned themselves an enormous reward from the Jewish and/or Roman authorities by producing it – it would have stopped Christianity in its tracks.
4. There seems a vast disproportion between cause and effect.  The emergence of Christianity is by any standards one of the pivotal events in world history.  It is not inconceivable that it was caused by a prank that misfired.  But can you think of any other remotely comparable examples of major historical events caused by pranks?

Of course if you already know for certain on other grounds that God does not exist then (4) is your best shot: the result is highly unlikely but unlikely things sometimes happen.  But I’m sure you can see why anyone who gives a high prior probability to the existence of God will consider (1) far more plausible.
Response from questioner: Thank you for your considered reply.You say that if I assume that God doesn't exist then I will automatically rule out the possibility of the resurrection. Actually I don't assume that He doesn't exit; I just believe that He doesn't intervene. John Polkinghorne has written eloquently about the order and regularity of the universe as a reflection of God's nature. I would regard a miracle as an ugly violation of this order and regularity. You could say that I am prejudiced against the possibility of miracles but I don't think my attitude would be very different from yours. If you heard a report of a dead man coming back to life in a small village in Africa or China, for example, I think your first response would be to assume that it was very unlikely to be true. The fact that you believe in the possibilty of miracles wouldn't alter this.
  You are sceptical of the idea that a third party might have taken Jesus's body from the tomb, saying that would be deeply counter-cultural. I agree that it seems a very perverse thing to do but people do do perverse things. What are the chances of someone removing a body from a tomb? Very small. What are the chances that, if a body is missing from a tomb, then the reason why it is missing, is that someone has taken it, given that the alternative is that the body came back to life? Quite high I would say. If some deranged person took the body then it's unlikely that he would come forward just to refute Christian claims. I don't know why you say that he could have come forward and received an enormous reward. As John Polkinghorne says in "Exploring Reality" Christianity was quite a small sect to begin with. I don't think the authorities would have been too interested in refuting it at that early stage. And remember that the body would have quickly decomposed, so if it was going to be brought forward it would have had to be done quickly.
  The real question then is about the authenticity of the resurrection sightings. Could people really have come to believe so passionately that Jesus was risen if the sightings had just been delusions? And could two billion people believe it today if was based on a delusion? The answer to the second question is that it makes no difference whether the resurrection was real or not. Let's assume it was real. Suppose that the risen Christ appeared to a small group of people whose job was then to go out and convince the world. How would they do this? I find this difficult to understand because I find the creating of any new religion hard to understand. How can a small group of people convince millions of their beliefs? It has happened plenty of times. It happened with the founding of Islam which we both consider to be false. All we can say is that the convincing of vast numbers of people is no guarantee of truth.
  So what about the original resurrection sightings? You say the idea that the resurrection was dreamed up as an explanation for the empty tomb is fanciful. I don't imagine that they encountered the empty tomb and immediately thought that Jesus had come back to life. The empty tomb simply allowed the process to begin that would lead to a belief in the resurrection. Remember that the vast majority at least of Jesus's followers were illiterate. They didn't have the knowledge that we take for granted. They believed that epilepsy was the result of demonic possession. They would have been incapable of explaining unusual experiences in terms of hallucinations or neurological malfunctions. They lived in world of spirits and magic. I have to say as well that the idea of the resurrection occurring as a mistake is less fanciful than the claim that when Jesus died on the cross there was an earthquake, graves were opened and the bodies of saints got up and started walking about.
John adds: “I think the single prankster is not credible.
The earliest written testimony to the appearances is 1 Corinthians 15. When Paul says he told them “what he himself had received” I think that is clearly a reference to conversations immediately following his Damascus Road conversion, which takes things back to within 2-3 years of the crucifixion. It is puzzling that the manuscript tradition of Mark does not give an account of the appearance in Galilee, twice foretold in the Gospel (14.28, 16.7) but he must have believed it happened.”
and I add:  I don’t want to get into long correspondence, but I’d offer three observations:

1. There are major differences between the rise of Islam and that of Christianity. There are perfectly reasonable secular explanations for why a conquering warlord who also claims to have divine revelation should attract loads of followers, and why his successors who were also conquering warlords should have extended their territories. Most Islamic countries (with the important exception of Indonesia) became Islamic by conquest.  By contrast it is very hard to see a credible secular explanation of how Christianity could have spread in the first 3-4 centuries, and in the many important historical and contemporary cases where it was not spread by conquest (eg England, Germany, Russia, China, South Korea).
2. How did the disciples convince people? By the power of the Holy Spirit.  As you say, it’s jolly hard to see how they could have done it any other way. They didn’t have swords, armies, only truth.  Look at what Pliny found.
3. The fundamental problem is that what people consider “likely” is conditioned by their background assumptions and worldviews. Given Christianity the likelihood of the resurrection experiences of the disciples etc… is 100%. Given Deism or Materialism/Physicalism it is not 0%, because there are always alternative conceivable explanations (time-travelers or aliens could have abducted the body and planted false memories in the disciples) but to my knowledge no-one has ever suggested an explanation for these facts that is based on any evidence whatsoever. Is there any example of a prankster causing such a major historical event?  Is there any example of a comparable “mass delusion”?  What it boils down to is that, if the likelihood of these experiences is say 0.01% given Deism then if your prior probabilities of Christianity and Deism/Physicalism  are 1% and 99% then your posterior probabilities after considering this evidence should be reversed (ie 99% Christianity 1% Deism/Physicalism)

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Theistic Evolution and Christian Ethics. For some time now, I have been keeping up with the various arguments that attempt to reconcile evolution with Christianity. While there are powerful existing arguments dealing with it strictly on a scientific level, I'm left feeling rather concerned over certain ethical implications. One person that comes to mind was the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, whose ideas are undoubtedly antithetical to Christian morality. Should Christians simply accept evolution as science but refrain from becoming social Darwinists? Can a Christian who accepts evolution still take Christian living as seriously as the early church did? Does it put restraints on traditional Christian ethics, such as caring for the poor, sick etc..?

Preliminary Response Indeed Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest" and other bogus attempts to make a secular religion out of Evolution should be resisted. Darwin himself was dead against them as well. It is only the scientific aspects of evoultionary theory that should be embraced.  Remember that people like Laplace (and others far less distinguished) tried to do the same with Newtonian Mechanics - and no-one now thinks that Gravity is incompatible with Christianity
John adds: I agree with Nicholas's very good and short reply. I might add: True altruism exceeds kin altruism. Darwinian thinking on its own is ethically inadequate, as Richard Dawkins acknowledges on the last page of The Selfish Gene

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Time and Eternity As a scientist and a Christian, I have always found the relationship of eternity to the finite but unbounded spacetime of our universe to be very confusing.  If the eternal time that God inhabits carries on along some sort of linear path like our time appears to (i.e there is a “before” and an “after” in heaven, which would appear to be the case from reading Revelation), then surely it is impossible for an infinite amount of this time to have passed prior to the beginning of our universe?  Is this something to do with our perception of time?
  Could it be that the time of our universe sits in relation to all of eternity like a finite line superimposed onto an infinite axis?  If so, does God sit at all points on this infinite axis at the same time?  If so, then surely he must know every single instant of our spacetime at the same time, much like someone looking at a sheet of paper with an entire story written on it.  If God created this sheet of paper, then how can the characters in the story be said to have a mind of their own?
 I could do with some help with unboggling my mind!
Preliminary Response: The relationship between our perception of time and God’s is necessarily obscure to us.  The old idea that God must be Eternal and hence not perceive time at all has been superseded by the realization that it is more Biblical to see a Personal God truly engaged with other creatures in a way that respects their freedom to choose.  However before the creation of the Universe there were no clocks so the concept of “an infinite time before” creation does not really apply.  Any loving creation of Others entails a kenosis whereby the Creator limits his inherent powers to allow the Others freedom. It may be that God has created a Universe in which whether a specific event occurs at a specific time in the future is un-knowable even by him.  It may equally be that God has created in Universe in which He could observe future events if he wanted to (which would cause the indeterminacy of the future event to collapse into determinacy) but that He chooses not to in order to give His creatures freedom.  Both of these possibilities show how God’s Creation does not entail a lack of freedom on our part.
John adds: You might find it helpful to look at Ch 6 of Exploring Reality. I think it is important to recognise that divine eternity is a special state of timelessness and not just an endless form of temporal existence. Preliminary Response: There is no conflict between Creation and the science of Evolution, any more than Creation and astrophysics.  The Bible says God made the stars - it is not interested in the scientific details of quantum physics etc...   God creates through the operation of His faithful principles which we partially discern in scientific laws.  One of the reasons for this seems to be that we are then able to gain a deeper understanding of His creation, and to be His "fellow-workers".
  Now in reading the Bible we have to understand what God is trying to tell us at each point, and what kind of writing we are reading.  It is obvious that the Bible does not intend us to take all the details of the creation account literally, because the details are different in Genesis 1 and Genesis 3.  If I say f=ma I don't mean that "fry" means the same as "mary".  As you know as a mathematician, in order to communicate anything deep you need to use appropriate symbols: this does not make what you say "symbolic" in the sense of "untrue" but in order to understand what is being said you always need to understand what the terms used mean.
  Of course the Theory of Evolution is no more a definitive description of reality than the Theory of Gravity.  Just as ideas about gravity have advanced and changed considerably since Galilleo, so ideas about Evolution continue to advance. In particular it is clear that there is a lot more going on than the simplistic and rather dogmatic views of classical neo-Darwinism might suggest. In particular the fact that evolution uses "random" processes doesn't mean that the results are random or that God is incapable of directing the outcomes: indeed it looks as if it is precisely the fact that the outcomes are under-determined at the physical level that allows God to nudge the processes without breaking His own laws.
  To touch breifly on your other points:

1. Original Sin is spiritual not biological.  When we make moral choices that turn us away from loving union with God the biological facts of pain and death have different spiritual implications.
2. It seems unlikely that Noah's Flood is meant to be taken entirely literally. But science now shows that there have been a number of catastrophic flood events (incl the Med and the Black Sea) and "the whole earth" in Hebrew doesn't need to mean the whole planet.
3. Presumably if humans had lived together in a perfect loving community loving God and Neighbour then we would all speak one language.  But at some point, falling away from this (due to arrogance and greed) led humans to become dispersed. That is what Babel is about.
4. I don't think the other problems are at all serious. Technological progress is somewhat exponential and cumulative - and although we take things like writing and agriculture for granted now they are pretty amazing innovations that depend on a great deal.  As for the population - until recently this was limited by "Mathusian" processes.

John adds: If God is the God of love, his creation cannot just be a puppet theatre in which the divine Puppet-master pulls every string. There will be the gift of some due form of independence to creatures to be themselves and to 'make themselves'.  The evolutionary exploration of Gog-given potentiality seems to me to fit in well with this understanding.  You might find it useful to take a look at Theology and Science.