The following is Rev. Polkinghorne's speech, transcribed.

   Theism is under pretty heavy attack these days from some of my colleagues in the scientific world, for example, Richard Dawkins back home in England, and you have your corresponding figures over here in North America. The burden of their rather intemperate remarks very often is religion is simply fantasy. It is fairy tales, really, and they claim that belief in God is about as irrational and ill founded as belief in the tooth fairy.

    Alister McGrath, who was actually at seminary with me, in his robust little book called The Dawkins Delusion — which is a response to Dawkins’s The God Delusion — points out that very few people are converted in adult life to belief in the tooth fairy, but a significant number of people are converted to belief in God in their adult life, so there can’t be quite an exact correspondence between the two. In fact I think there is no correspondence what ever between the two. We have to make a response to that, and the response that we have to make is to insist that the question of truth, and the unblinking encounter with reality is as essential to religious exploration as it is to scientific exploration. The question of truth is essential to religion.

    Religion can do all sorts of things for you. It can comfort and strengthen and inspire you in life, and indeed in the approach of death, but it can’t really do any of those things unless it is actually true. So that the question of truth is absolutely essential. And religious people are people who should be, and in many cases are, prepared to be clear-eyed in their encounter with reality. In fact, I think some of the clearest-eyed people I know are actually religious, in the technical sense of being monks or nuns living a religious life in that sort of way. They may be living a somewhat confined life in the cloister, but they are certainly very open-eyed in relation to what is going on in the world. And that is I think the essential promise of open theology that it is prepared to look at the world, see what the world is like, and to take the world on its own terms in that sense. And when we do that, of course, we see a very strange and mixed sort of picture of the world in which we live.

    On the one hand there is much which is beautiful and fruitful in the scientific story about what is going on in the world, about the structure of the world in which we live, and about the cosmic history of the world in which we live. I worked in theoretical physics and a word that is absolutely essential in the conversation of theoretical physicists, yet absolutely never appears in the formal papers which they write for journals like the Physical Review, an absolutely essential word in the experience of physicists is “wonder.”

     Doing research in physics, like most worthwhile activities, has its pretty fair share of routine, has its pretty fair share of frustration, as the good ideas in the morning prove less persuasive in the cold light of the afternoon. It’s hard work, and the reward that we get for it are the occasional and deep experiences of wonder at the rationally beautiful, or rationally transparent structure of the world that is revealed to our enquiry. So we live in a world that is wonderful in its structure, and has being astonishingly fruitful in its history.

     The universe as we observe it started in the singular events of the big bang some 13.7 billion years ago and it started extremely simple. The very early universe was an almost uniform expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you can think of. That world that started so simple has now become very rich and complex with you and me, actually, the most complicated consequences of its evolving history, at least that are known to us.

    Holmes Rolston writes books about science and religion. In one of his books he says, “When an astronomer looks through a telescope at a distant galaxy, he or she should remember that the most complex system in the whole universe that we know about is six inches this side of the eye piece, inside the skull of the astronomer.”

    The human brain has 1011 neurons, about the same number of stars there are in the Milky Way, and about 1014 connections between them. It is a fantastically complex system. So the world that started as a ball of energy is now the home of saints and scientists. That’s an astonishingly fruitful history, and raises the question that maybe there is something happening in the course of that history. That’s the one side of the story, but there is of course another side of the story. The world is not only rich and beautiful and fruitful, but it’s also messy. It is full, for example, of blind alleys. The biological history of life is full of extinctions and catastrophes of one sort or another. We live in a world that is not only fruitful, but it is also full of suffering and there is a connection between the two.

    So the picture we have of the world is a strangely ambiguous picture. In human experience we have, I think, quite deep human intuitions of hope. A book I am very fond of is Peter Berger’s little book A Rumour of Angels, which some of you will know, which takes every day events and says, “Stop a minute; think about them. Don’t take them at their surface value. Think what’s going on in them.” And I suggest when you do that you will sometimes find a very deep “signals of transcendence,” as he calls it, lying there.

    One of his stories is a child wakes up in the middle of the night. Parent goes to comfort the child; the parent says to the child, “It’s all right.” And Berger says, What’s going on there? Is that a loving lie, on the part of the parent, given a world that has cancer and concentration camps in it is not manifestly “all right” in a straightforward sense. But nevertheless that is an assurance that the parent needs to give to the child as far as that child’s growing up into full humanity.

    That is no loving lie, for we have intimations of hope, although we know we live in a world which is subject to transience and decay, a world of inevitable death. So if we look open-eyed at the universe we see this curious combination. We see a problem of evil in the world, and we see a problem of good in the world. And where do they both come from, and how they are reconciled with each other? I think in particular the questions of theodicy the problems of wrestling with the strangeness of suffering experienced by persons in the world is absolutely central to the issue of credible religious belief. We all know what the problem is. God is almighty and loving — whence comes disease and disaster, as Epicurus said a long time ago? And I think that that’s the problem, the theodicy problem, is the one that holds more people back from religious belief than anything else and troubles those of us who are religious believers probably more than anything else.

    So we see a world which has a cosmic history which is not consistent with being interpreted as the unfolding of a perfect plan, complete in every detail. But equally it is not consistent with a world which is just a concatenation of random events, one damn thing after another, as one might say. We live in a world which seems to have signs of meaning, and signs of frustration and meaningless. And what are we to make of that? Open theology suggests to us that we should think of the world neither as the perfect unfolding of an already eternally-written history, nor as a meaningless world, but as something much more like unfolding improvisation, in which the Creator and creatures interact in an unfolding process, in which each have their parts to play and each have their independence in playing their parts.

    And taking science seriously can help us, I think, to adopt that position and follow it through. Science helps us in that way through that insight of science which some people think is actually the point of conflict between science and religion, and that is, of course, is science’s insight that the process of the world is an evolutionary process. It is a process that involves an interplay between chance and necessity, words which we have to be sure we know what they mean. “Chance” doesn’t just mean the capricious acts of the goddess Fortuna; chance in this context simply means happenstance. This happens rather than that. The range of possibilities that might happen in the world vastly exceeds what there has been time actually to occur, even in 13.7 billion years of cosmic history. So there is a contingency in the world, and that’s what chance means. But equally, of course, there is a degree of regularity in the world as well. The world is not just a swirling cauldron of chaos, and it is the interplay between chance and necessity, between contingency and regularity, between happenstance and reliability that actually produces the fruitful process of the world.

    Scientists like to say that novelty emerges in those regimes which are characterised as being at “the edge of chaos.” That is to say regimes where both order and disorder, chance and necessity, if you like, interlace with each other. If you are too far on the regular side of that divide, things are too rigid for anything really new to happen. You can get rearrangements of what’s going on in the world. You can rearrange bits of Lego in the world, so to speak, but you can’t create new bits of Lego. It’s just too rigid. Equally, of course, if you’re too far on the haphazard side of things, then nothing new that comes into existence will persist. It will fade away as soon as it comes into being. And so it is that it is very delicate, creative balance between chance and necessity at the edge of chaos that produces the fruitful process of the world. And that means that there is this interplay, and that means that there is a world that is fruitful, a world that theologically we can interpret as a world in which creatures are given by the God of love the gift of freedom, the gift of freedom to be themselves and to make themselves.

    There is a historically-ignorant caricature of what happened when Charles Darwin’s great book The Origin of Species was published in 1879, the caricature picture, which is still propagated in the media, and so on, is that when Darwin’s book was published, all the scientists in view were shouting, “Yes, yes, yes” and all religious people, including of course particularly the obscurantist clergy, shouted, “No, no, no.” And that was the final parting of the ways between science and religion. That’s not at all what happened. There were doubts and difficulties on both sides and in both communities. A lot of scientists found it very difficult to accept Darwin’s ideas. In particular where did these small variations, which were so important to the theory of natural selection, where did they come from? And of course Darwin didn’t know the answer. Ironically the answer had — I can’t remember the date or the timing; it was either just about then, or just before or just after then — had been discovered by an unknown monk in the Augustinian Abbey of St. Thomas in Brno called Gregor Mendel, who was able to discern through experiments with plant breeding the elements of genetics. It wasn’t until that was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century that Darwinism became the picture of evolution through natural selection, became scientifically widely persuasive, and widely accepted in the scientific world.

    So there were doubts on the scientific side. Sir Richard Owen, who was the greatest comparative anatomist of the day, never accepted Darwin’s ideas, partly from scientific bias, and partly, I think, from professional jealousy. And on the religious side there were people who from the start welcomed Darwin’s insights, for telling us something about how the Creator chose to the structure and bring about the unfolding history of creation. In North America Asa Gray was a key figure in that respect. Back home Charles Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman and also of course a novelist, coined the phrase that perfectly expresses the theological way to think about the evolving world. He said, “No doubt God could have snapped the divine fingers and brought into being a ready-made world, but God had chosen to do something cleverer than that in bringing into being a creation in which creatures could make themselves.”
   
     The process of evolution is the shuffling exploration of happenstance, bringing to birth the fruitful potentiality with which the laws of nature have been endowed. That’s a very positive view of evolution. It’s a view, I think, that’s very consistent with our Christian belief because the creation of the God of love will surely not be simply a divine puppet theatre in which God pulls every string. It will have some appropriate gift of freedom to enable the creatures to be themselves, and to make themselves, and I think that, in my view, an evolving world of that nature is of greater good than a ready-made world would have been. It is a greater good, but it has a necessary cost. It is taking place at the edge of chaos. That means that the water of chaos is always lapping around, and there will therefore be blind alleys and malfunctions as part of that exploration of potentiality, and that gives us some help, I think, thinking about the presence of natural evil in the world, the presence of disease and disaster in the world.

    Science helps us in that respect by pointing out how creativity happens. You see we all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation we would have done it better. We would have kept all the nice things, sunsets and flowers, and that sort of thing, and we would have got rid of all the nasty things, such as disease and disaster. But what science tells us about how the world works, what the process of the world is like, is that those sorts of things are inextricably intertwined with each other. You can’t pull them apart and keep this lot and throw away that lot. There’s an inescapable shadow side to the fruitfulness of creation that is part of the open unfolding process of the world. You see that in a whole number of different illustrations; let me just give you a couple of them.

    The engine that has driven the fruitful process of biological evolution here on Earth — turning a world for two billion years was simply the world of bacteria into the world that we see today — the engine that has driven that process is genetic mutation. It is the mutation of germ cells that produced new forms of life. But if germ cells are going to be able to mutate to produce new forms of life, and the world is not a magic world (and the world is not run by a capricious, divine magician) then it is inevitable that somatic cells, body cells, are also going to be able to mutate. And when that happens, sometimes that will produce malignancy. You can’t have one without the other. So the fact that there is cancer in the world is obviously an anguishing aspect of the world, at which we can rightfully feel disturbed and indeed angry at times, but it is not something that a God who is a little bit more competent, or a little less callous, could easily have removed. It is a necessary cost of a world in which creatures are free to make themselves as new forms of life, just evolve in that sort of way. In other words the presence of cancer is not something gratuitous.

    And just to take another example of a slightly different kind: Of course we have tectonic plates on the Earth’s surface, and sometimes when some of those plates slip, they produce severe earthquakes, or, if they’re under the sea, tsunamis. So you might say well wouldn’t it have been a good idea if God had arranged the plates in such a way that the earth had a completely solid crust and there were no plates to slip. But the answer is, “No it wouldn’t,” because although the slipping of tectonic plates produces earthquakes in that way, it also allows mineral materials to well up from the interior of the Earth and replenish the surface of the Earth. So again you see you have this interweaving of things that are fruitful with things that are destructive. As I say, I don’t think for minute that removes all the difficulties and perplexities that we feel about the occurrence of disease and disaster of natural evil in the world, but I think it is small but genuine offering that science has to make to theology, and then, of course, very congenial to an open theology which sees the world as an unfolding process, in which these processes have to be enabled by the flexible edge-of-chaos structure of the world in which we live.

    It seems to me that there is a great promise in open theology. It seems to me that it takes these things seriously, it is something that we can defend and commend in our society, and in doing that we can show that we are not unaware of the strangeness of the world, we are not unaware of either the world’s richness or the world’s bitterness, which are both aspects of the way things are, and we able to take that absolutely seriously and hold that in creative interaction with our understanding of God’s actions in the world, and of God’s will for the world. It seems to me that that picture of unfolding world, a process in which God engages with, is very consistent, for example, with the way that the bible portrays God’s relationship to creatures and to creation. The Bible portrays — the Hebrew Scriptures portray — God’s continuing reaction with the unfolding history of God’s people, Israel. It portrays that, of course, in sometimes frankly anthropomorphic terms. I mean I was thinking this morning that Hebrew Scriptures are bold enough to speak several times the fact of God changing God’s mind. So God says to Hezekiah, “You are going to die,” and Hezekiah says, “No, no, no, I don’t want to die,” and God says, “OK, you can have 15 more years of life.” I mean obviously that’s openly anthropomorphic, but at least the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is not a God who is outside of history, lackadaisical or is not engaged with the ongoing history. Very much the contrary, it seems to me.

    Of course in the New Testament we see God’s engagement with history being demonstrated in a unique and profoundly significant form, in the Incarnation, the birth of God’s Son and His taking human life, a birth under Augustus and a death under Tiberius.  You can hardly have a greater engagement with history than is portrayed in these episodes of the Incarnation. And that’s where I find the deepest and most profound and moving Christian answer to the problems of theodicy, because the Christian God is not a God who is a benevolent spectator, above the suffering of the world, the travail of Creation, looking down, however compassionately, on the strange history of Creation, but God has been a fellow participant in that history, a “fellow-sufferer who understands” in Whitehead’s celebrated phrase. In the cross of Christ we see, I think, God in the incarnate Son stretching out the divine arms to embrace, and share in the suffering of the world. And that seems to me an extraordinarily profound and uniquely Christian response to the problem of suffering, and is very much part of making Christian belief at least possible for me. It is a very important part of me.

    And also, of course, open theology can take perfectly seriously our intuitions of hope. The world history may be much more like an improvisation, not conforming to a fixed score, but we have every reason to believe and trust that God will resolve the great themes of Creation by achieving God’s purposes even if they are attained through contingent paths. And I think that those hopeful expectations will be fulfilled. And ultimately, of course, I see the whole of Creation sharing in the Resurrection life that has been manifested already in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

    Open theology seems to me, frankly, credible, because it is resolutely realistic about the world’s history. It’s concern is no fanciful fairy story, no sort of consoling, unrealistic, sentimental theme. It faces the strangeness of the world, but also faces the faithfulness of God. It sees the world in which there is undoubtedly death – death is real – death is a real separation, but it is not the ultimate reality. The last word lies not with death, but with God.

    So I think open theology is a theology for our time, and indeed for all times. I think it is a theology of great promise. I think it is certainly the theology to which I commit myself and which I wish to commend to you. I think that’s all that I want to say.