Science and Providence

Internationally renowned priest-scientist Dr. John C. Polkinghorne examines whether a personal, interacting God is a credible concept in today's scientific age. Encouraging the belief that there is a compatibility between the insights of science and the insights of religion, this book, previously published in the United Kingdom, focuses on the viewpoint that the world is one in which both human beings and God have the freedom to act. A modern understanding of the physical world is applied to questions of prayer and providence, such as: Do miracles happen? Can prayer change anything? Why does evil exist? Why does God allow suffering? Why does God need us to ask him? God's involvement in time is considered, from both a temporal and an eternal perspective. The roles of incarnation and sacrament are discussed in terms of whether or not they have a credible place in today's worldview. And the Final Anthropic Principle (FAP) is presented, with its attempt at a physical eschatology, showing it to be an inadequate basis for hope. Real hope can reside only with God, Polkinghorne concludes. "We do not have to choose between the God of the Bible and the God revealed in the pattern and structure of the physical world. A clockwork world of mere mechanism could only be the endlessly spinning system kept in place by the God of deism. The world discerned by modern science has an openness in its becoming which is consonant not only with its being a world of which we are actually inhabitants, but also a world which is the creation of the true and living God, continually at work within its process."