GroshLink

When I have time, I would like to pick up this new piece by the scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne. For now I'll satisfy myself with the Crouch's Books & Culture review. Here is a piece I found of particular interest, after having spent a summer considering intelligent design (ID) as part of a faculty discussion group:

For Polkinghorne the developmental nature of both life and the cosmos are simply a natural consequence of the Creator's gracious gift of freedom to the created order. Howard van Till, another physicist-turned-theologian, describes the universe as displaying "robust functional economy," meaning that the universe was created containing the fertile complexity needed to develop the astonishing array of life we observe, without requiring further supernatural input.

None of this necessarily rules out the fundamental contention of intelligent design—that certain aspects of life are too complex to have arisen without the guidance of a designer. Yet it does reveal how limited id's scope really is. On the one hand, ID attracts hostility from the scientific establishment because it seems to undercut science's hopes of understanding the workings of chance and necessity in the world. On the other hand, the only Designer of which ID can speak is little more than a shadowy cosmic Engineer, ready to intervene with clever solutions to problems, but whose ultimate intentions are unknown and, within the scope of ID theory at least, unknowable. Polkinghorne's Trinitarian account of a freely developing universe, on the other hand, can fully accept science's understanding of reality while also making much more specific claims about the nature of the world's Creator. That Creator turns out to be a loving Economist, a kind of endlessly resourceful Alan Greenspan, who creates and sustains an wondrously fruitful, free world.

Creates, sustains, and redeems—for perhaps the most notable and moving aspect of Polkinghorne's recent work is his attention to the stringent implications of current cosmology. Our universe, no less than our own bodies, is truly "in bondage to decay," inexorably descending into cold and lifeless disorder, albeit on a timescale of billions of years. Its ultimate futility poses a radical challenge not just to secular optimism but to any theology, such as process theology and its close relatives like panentheism, that has no place for the Creator's transcendence of creation. If "the world is God's body," in the phrase that is popular among certain ecologically concerned theologians, God is terminally ill.

It is here that resurrection becomes such a vital theological category. "The antidote to apocalyptic pessimism," Polkinghorne writes, "is the fundamental Christian picture of death and resurrection; a real death followed by real and unending new life, in which what had died is restored and transformed in order that it may finally enter into its 'true glory'." Not only bodies and souls but the cosmos itself will be rescued from bondage.