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As I’ve often noted on this page, one of my most important endeavors is to strike a balance between science and religion; fact and the spiritual; known and the unknown.  Rarely do I come across such a perfectly balanced view as I have tonight in my weekly newsletter from American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith.  Krista Tippett has written a wonderful essay summarizing her conversation with John Polkinghorne, a heretofore unknown to me physicist and theologian.  I was instantly drawn in to her essay and became increasingly more interested in Polkinghorne as I read on.  I have yet to listen to the interview, but I encourage everyone to do so.  I think this gentleman has much to say about reason and religion.

Polkinghorne takes the Genesis stories, the biblical accounts of creation, seriously. But he points out that these are lyrical, theological writings. They were not composed as scientific texts. The early Christians, he says, knew this, and only in the later Medieval and reformation times did people begin to insist on literal interpretation. To read a work of poetry as a work of prose, he analogizes, is to miss the point.

Drawing on the best of his scientific and theological knowledge, Polkinghorne believes that God created this universe. But this was not a one-act invention of a clockwork world. God did something “more clever”: he created a world with independence, a world able to make itself. Creation is an on-going act, Polkinghorne believes, one in which the laws of nature make room for choice and action, both human and divine. He finds this idea beautifully affirmed by the best insights of chaos theory, which describes reality as an interplay between order and disorder, between random possibilities and patterned structure.

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