John Polkinghorne: The Christian Faith & Science

Which Side Are You On?
http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-1-which-side-are-you-on

by Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson

September 2, 2011

In the film Nacho Libre, Jack Black plays a preposterous worker in a Mexican orphanage with a secret life as an incompetent professional wrestler. There is a scene where Black and his scrawny wrestling partner assess their competition – two vicious-looking men in the opposite corner. It appears to Black that his life as a wrestler will end immediately in serious injury. He says to his partner, in a horrible Spanish accent, “Pray to the Lord for strength.”

His partner immediately replies, in only a slightly better accent, “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science.”

While that bit of dialogue appears in a comedy film, it echoes statements made in serious conversations throughout the world. Conventional wisdom seems to say that one either believes in God, or one believes in science. There is no third option.

We don’t believe that at all, and neither does the deep thinker we profile in this book. We hope you won’t either, when you are finished reading. Much has been written about faith and science – the history of supposedly major conflicts and minor harmonies between the two; the rational and irrational accounts from people who read just one of the two books set before us – the Bible and the Book of Nature; the condemnation and condescension of one group toward the other. There is a lot of diatribe, but not much dialogue.

We illuminate this issue by writing about John Polkinghorne. We chose this strategy because it involves a story. What we offer is not a conventional biography of John Polkinghorne. We didn’t read his correspondence, interview his family members, students and colleagues, search data bases for public and private records. Instead, we wrote the story of John Polkinghorne, probably the most significant voice in this generation’s conversation about science and religion. But we also unfold some bigger issues. How do we know Truth? How does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith -- prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection? How should people of faith approach science, especially when new scientific discoveries appear to contradict their religious beliefs? To get at those questions, we tell the story of John Polkinghorne.

We conducted many interviews with Polkinghorne. Wherever the book shows a quote from him without an endnote, it came from a personal interview. The interviews occurred from 2007-2010 in the following locations: Quincy, Massachusetts; a monastery in Venice, Italy; the President’s Lodge at Queens’ College (while the president was away) in Cambridge, England; the chapels at Trinity College, Queens’ College, Trinity Hall and Westcott Seminary – all in Cambridge; the parlor of Queens’ College; the Senior Combination Room at Queens’ College, under both his own portrait and that of the Queen; the study in his home in Cambridge; the sitting room in his home; walking from the vicarage to his old parish church in Blean, England; in his car to and from Blean; at the Good Shepherd Church in Cambridge; and in pubs throughout Cambridge.

As if to cosmically underscore the need for this book, when we approached Passport Control at London’s Heathrow Airport for a final series of interviews with Polkinghorne, the officer asked why we were coming to England.

“For a conference at Oxford,” we said.

“What’s the conference about?” he said.

“God and Physics,” we said.

“God and Physics, eh?” He paused and looked at us. “Which side are you on?”

Exactly.

For more on the biographical series by Biologos:

Quantum Leap, Part 1: Which Side Are You On? (Sept 2, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-1-which-side-are-you-on

Quantum Leap, Part 2: Polkinghorne Leaves Physics for the Priesthood (Sept 9, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-1-polkinghorne-leaves-physics-for-the-priesthood

Quantum Leap, Part 3: John Polkinghorne’s Faith (Sept 16, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-3-john-polkinghornes-faith

Quantum Leap, Part 4: John Polkinghorne’s Science (Sept 23, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-4-john-polkinghornes-science

Quantum Leap, Part 5: Polkinghorne’s Faith Challenges (Sept 30, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-5-polkinghornes-faith-challenges

Quantum Leap, Part 6: The Legacy of John Polkinghorne (Oct 7, 2011)

http://biologos.org/blog/quantum-leap-part-6-the-legacy-of-john-polkinghorne

**********

2010 Lecture Series by John Polkinghorne

on the Christian Faith and Natural Theology

http://www.pointloma.edu/experience/academics/schools-departments/school-theology-christian-ministry/h-orton-wiley-lecture-series/past-lecture-series/rev-dr-john-polkinghorne

The Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne comes to us from the United Kingdom. He is truly a household name in the best of Christian academic inquiry, especially as it relates to the intersection of science and faith. For 25 years, he was a theoretical physicist and played a significant role in the discovery of the smallest known particle called the "quark." In 1979 he resigned his chair as Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University to study for the ministry. He was ordained in 1982 within the Church of England - John Wesley's own theological tradition - and subsequently served in parish ministry for 5 years. He then returned to Cambridge to serve as Dean of the Chapel at Trinity Hall from 1986 - 1989, and then President of Queen's College, Cambridge. Dr. Polkinghorne is a founding member of the Society of Ordained Scientists and the International Society for Science and Religion.

His work demonstrates a commitment to both human agency and divine creative activity in the world - both central tenets of Wesleyanism -particularly expressing the conviction that these need not be mutually exclusive, competing allegiances. His work in bioethics, characterized by a commitment to the dignity of human life, as shared by the American Evangelical tradition, renders his contribution to the H. Orton Wiley Lectures as most timely.

Dr. Polkinghorne is chairperson of the Science, Medicine and Technology Committee of the Church of England's Board of Social Responsibility and has helped shape the UK's ethical guidelines pertaining to the responsible limits of reproductive technology, with particular concern for the ethical implications of fertility treatments and stem cell research.

The Search for Truth in Science and Theology

Lecture 1"Natural Theology"
November 15th, 2010
Crill Performance Hall
Download MP3

Lecture 2"Motivated Belief"
November 16th, 2010
Crill Performance Hall
Download MP3

Lecture 3"Providence and Prayer"
November 16th, 2010
Crill Performance Hall
Download MP3

Lecture 4 "A Destiny Beyond Death"
November 17th, 2010
Crill Performance Hall
Download MP3

**********

The Friendship of Science and Religion

An Afternoon with Dr. John Polkinghorne - Part 1 November 14th, 2010

Download MP3

An Afternoon with Dr. John Polkinghorne - Part 2November 14th, 2010
Download MP3

Dr. John Polkinghorne guest speaker in PLNU ChapelNovember 15th, 2010
Download MP3

**********

More Videos on John Polkinghorne -

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=john+polkinghorne+natural+theology&aq=f

**********

  

http://biologos.org/blog/john-polkinghorne-on-natural-theology-part-i

November 27, 2010

Today’s entry is part of our Video Blog series. For similar resources, visit our audio/video section, or our full "Conversations" collection.

Today's entry was written by John Polkinghorne. John Polkinghorne is a British physicist and theologian who has written extensively on matters concerning science and faith, becoming a leading advocate for their compatibility as different ways of knowing. He worked in theoretical elementary particle physics for 25 years before resigning his chair in 1979 to study for the Anglican priesthood. He was ordained in 1982 and served as a priest for several years. Polkinghorne has written many books on issues in science and theology, including Science and Christian Belief (in the USA, The Faith of a Physicist), Belief in God in an Age of Science, and Questions of Truth (with co-author Nicholas Beale). In the United Kingdom, Polkinghorne has been the Chairman of several Committees advising on ethical and social issues related to new developments in science and technology. In 2002 he was awarded the Templeton Prize. John Polkinghorne was one of the founders of the Society of Ordained Scientists and the Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion.

~ ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~  ~

Recently, as part of the H. Orton Wiley Lecture series in Theology on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, California, Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne stimulated students and faculty alike with the brilliance of his mind and the depth of his logic as he led us into thinking about the interaction between science and the Christian faith. We have much to learn by paying close attention to the words of Dr. Polkinghorne. In coming days we’ll discuss various aspects of this lecture series. The first lecture, entitled, Natural Theology, was delivered on November 15th, 2010.

Below, we provide a transcript of the portion that extends from 10:06 to 16:10. This portion describes a very interesting and, we think, extremely helpful way of thinking about intelligent design. Many think that the Intelligent Design Movement is largely an attempt to revive the two hundred year old arguments of William Paley: to take his approach and to place it into the present day world of science. There is no question that the tools of science have shown even more beauty and cause for awe than humankind could possibly have imagined two hundred years ago. That beauty which is all around us informs our worship and enriches our understanding of God. Polkinghorne however, describes a new natural theology, one quite different than that of William Paley. Polkinghorne, I believe, points us to a better and much richer approach to the interface of science and the Christian faith than that associated with the intelligent design movement.

Here is the transcript of Part I of this series. It is provided as a transcript to allow each of us to mull over his words and to think carefully about what he has to say. You are encouraged to listen to the words as you read the transcript in order to be sure you are fully understanding his intended meaning.

Part I Transcript

“William Paley… wrote a book, a famous book, called Natural Theology. Paley’s form of natural theology was an uninhibited appeal to the inspection of the world. He produced the argument from design in a familiar form pointing to the atlas of living beings, surviving and functioning in their environment, pointing to such things as the amazingly complex optical system of the mammalian eye and so on. The existence of these things were manifest demonstrations of the existence of the divine designer who brought them into being. It must have seemed a very persuasive argument.

Indeed many people perceived it that way but of course the rug was pulled from beneath that argument in 1859 when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in which Darwin was able to show how the patient shifting and accumulation of small differences between one generation and the next over very long periods of time could bring into existence the appearance of design without requiring the direct intervention of a divine designer. The key thing that enabled Darwin to have that insight was the realization of deep time and that living things had existed on the earth over vast periods of time and that there was the possibility of slow change in the characteristics of living beings. And that perfused Darwin’s demolition of Paley, essentially producing a disillusionment with natural theology in many theological circles. But we are living in a time when there has been a revival of natural theology. It is not only a revived natural theology …but it is also a revised natural theology. It is revised in two very important ways.

First of all it is more modest in the claims that it makes. It does not claim to talk in terms of proofs of God’s existence, but it talks about insight which suggests the existence of a divine creator…The claim is that theism enables one to understand more than atheism. So the new natural theology doesn’t appeal to truth, but it appeals to what you might call best explanation; that to see the world as a divine creation makes it more intelligible than the opposite deduction: that the world is just a brute fact with no further explanation.

It is also revised because it is not trying to rival science on its own ground. With hindsight we can see that the old-style-natural-theologians like William Paley were actually making a mistake about the relationship between science and religion. They were trying to use religion to answer scientific questions….

Science doesn’t require augmentation from theology or any other discipline in its own proper domain. So the new natural theology doesn’t set itself up as a rival to scientific explanation as the best explanation, but as a complement, as a complementary relationship to scientific explanation —to place that understanding in a broader and deeper context of intelligibility….

So the new natural theology is not part of a war between science and religion, but is a part of a peaceful co-existence of mutual help and exchange of gifts between science and religion.

So if the new natural theology isn’t answering scientific questions what sorts of questions is it answering?.... In particular it is answering what you might call meta-questions. Meta-questions arise in a particular context, and their very character takes you beyond the context of their origin. So the questions that natural theology addresses today are questions that arise out of our experience of doing science but which are not in themselves scientific questions. Science essentially only answers questions of how… They are not scientific questions but they arise out of scientific experience. They are meaningful and necessary to ask and we seek to find answers to them, but if we are do so we will have to look elsewhere—beyond the science. The claim of natural theology is that a theistic belief affords the most natural persuasive explanation of our state of affairs.”

 

 **********

http://biologos.org/blog/john-polkinghorne-on-natural-theology-part-ii

November 29, 2010

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne is widely regarded as one of the most important scholars in the science/religion discussion in the world today. Having been a leading theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, he set this aspect of his career aside in order to become an Anglican priest in the early 1980’s. Following that, he returned to Cambridge as chapel dean, and then became President of Queen’s College. Rev. Dr. Polkinghorne has received numerous honors including the Templeton Prize. In 1997, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

Recently, as part of the H. Orton Wiley Lecture series in Theology on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne stimulated students and faculty alike with the brilliance of his mind and the depth of his logic as he led us into thinking about the interaction between science and the Christian faith. We have much to learn by paying close attention to the words of Dr. Polkinghorne. In coming days we’ll discuss various aspects of this lecture series. The first lecture, entitled, Natural Theology, was delivered on November 15th, 2010. The entire MP3 is available for download here. (Introduction written by Darrel Falk.)

In Part I of this series, Dr. Polkinghorne laid the foundations for what he believes to be a new natural theology. This new natural theology, he says, does not claim to talk in terms of proofs of God’s existence, but it talks about insight which suggests the existence of a divine creator. This new natural theology applies the finding of the sciences along with foundational truths of Christianity to make better sense of the world. The claim, Polkinghorne says is that theism enables one to understand more than atheism. So the new natural theology doesn’t appeal to truth, but it appeals to what you might call best explanation; that to see the world as a divine creation makes it more intelligible than the opposite deduction: that the world is just a brute fact with no further explanation.

In today’s talk, he goes on to look at the first of two meta-questions. These are questions, he says, that arise from science, using scientific tools, but which point in each case to God. The first meta-question he examines arises from the inherent success and beauty of mathematics as a manifestation of the way things are in the physical world. Dr. Polkinghorne suggests that meta-question #1 points to a capital M Mind—the Creator of the universe.

We provide a written transcript of the talk to make it easier to mull over Dr. Polkinghorne’s ideas. We urge you to read the transcript as you are listening to the recording in order to be sure that his main points are sinking in. (Introduction by Darrel Falk.)

Part II Transcript

So here are two meta-questions which illustrate what I’m trying to say. The first question is a question that is so simple that most of us would not even stop to think about it or to ask it, but which I am going to suggest to you is a very significant question that we should think about, that we should ask. It is simply this: Why is science possible at all?

Why can we understand the world in which we live in the deep way that science has made possible for us? Well you might say evolutionary biology would explain that: We’ve got to survive in the world. If we didn’t understand the world, we couldn’t figure out that it is a bad idea to step off of a high cliff and we might not stay around for very long. So the evolutionary process must have so shaped the human brain that we’re able to understand the world. And of course that must be true up to a point. It’s obviously true of our understanding of the everyday world in which we have to survive: Beware of the high cliff. But when someone like Isaac Newton came along and who, in an astonishingly high leap of the imagination, saw that the same force that makes the high cliff dangerous is also the force that holds the moon in its orbit around the earth, the earth in its orbit around the sun and discovers a mathematically beautiful law of universal inverse square law of gravity and in terms of that explains the whole solar system—now that is a human achievement that is going far beyond anything that we need for everyday survival.

Yesterday I quoted from that great and wise man Sherlock Holmes. He was pulling Watson’s leg from the start and he pretended not to know whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth. And of course the good Dr. Watson is horrified at the apparent ignorance on the part of the great detective. And Holmes simply says, “What does it matter? My daily work is that of a detective.” And of course it doesn’t matter at all.

So we all know things that we don’t need to know for everyday life or everyday survival. Human powers to understand the world, to penetrate the secrets of the physical world have proved to be amazingly powerful. Or putting it the other way round, the universe has proved to be amazingly intellectually transparent to our inquiry.

I worked in quantum physics. The quantum world is completely different than the world of everyday and you have to think about it in completely different and counter-intuitive ways. In the quantum world, if you know where something is, you don’t know what it is doing. If you know what it is doing, you don’t know where it is. That’s Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell. That world is cloudy and fitful. It has all sorts of strange properties. In that world, some things sometimes behave like waves, sometimes, like particles, little bullets. Electrons can be in a state where they are both here and there at the same time and so on, and so on.

This is a very weird, very counterintuitive, very strange world. Nevertheless we can understand it; we can penetrate its secrets. The world is amazingly rationally transparent. And the mystery is even more surprising than that because it turns out that the key to unlocking the secrets of the physical world is actually mathematics—mathematics, the most abstract of subjects. It is an actual technique of fundamental physics, a technique that has proved its worth over three centuries of work in the area—to look for theories within their mathematical expression, in terms of beautiful equations. Now some of you will know about mathematical beauty, probably not all of you. It is a rather austere form of the esthetic pleasure, but it is a real form of esthetic pleasure. Those of us who speak that wonderful language can recognize a theme about mathematical beauty. It involves things like being economic and elegant, and being what the mathematicians call deep, which means that if you take a very simple definition, it turns out to have very wide and proliferating consequences. And we have found time and again that the only theories, which by their long term success in explaining what is going on—persuade us that they really are describing aspects of the physical world—are always endowed with this character of mathematical beauty.

The great theoretical physicist, Paul Dirac one of the founding physicists of quantum theory, the greatest British theoretical physicist of the 20^th century once said, “it is more important to have beauty in your equations than to have a fit experiment.” Now he didn’t mean by that that it didn’t matter if your equations fit your experiment; no physicist could possibly believe that. But he meant: okay you have your new theory and it doesn’t seem to fit the experiment. That’s a set back for sure, but there is some possibility that you might be able to save the day. Probably you solved the equation with an approximation and maybe you’ve made the wrong approximation. Or maybe your experiments are wrong—that’s happened more than once in physics. So at least there is some sort of residual hope. If your equations are ugly then in Dirac’s opinion, there is no hope; they couldn’t possibly be right.

Now Dirac’s brother-in-law, Eugene Wigner, who also won a Nobel prize in physics, once said, “Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective?” Why is this abstract subject the key to unlocking the secrets to the physical universe? What brings together the reason within the mathematicians’ thoughts in their minds with the reason without—the structure of the world around us? Why are some of the most useful patterns that the mathematicians can dream up in their studies found actually to occur and to be substantiated in the physical world around them?”

So why is science possible in the deep way it is? Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective? I think it would be intolerably lazy to shrug our shoulders and say, “Well gee that’s the way it happens to be, and it’s very good luck to you chaps who are good at math.” This is a highly significant, highly remarkable fact about the world and we should seek to understand it if we possibly can.

Now when you ask a meta-question like that, there won’t be a knock-down answer. But to me the most intellectually persuasive and coherent answer is simply this: that the reason within and the reason without is because they have a common origin in the mind of the Creator who is the ground of both our mental existence and of the physical world of which we are apart.

We can summarize what I’ve just been saying that as science studies the physical world it sees a world shot through with signs of mind. And I am suggesting to you that you should consider seriously the proposition that it is a capital M Mind, the Creator that lies behind that wonderful order which gives the physicist the order of wonder for the weary labor of their research.

So I think that science is possible actually because the world is a creation and to use an ancient powerful phrase: We are creatures made in the image of our Creator.

**********

 http://biologos.org/blog/john-polkinghorne-on-natural-theology-part-iii

December 18, 2010

In Part II of this series, Dr. Polkinghorne looked at the first of two meta-questions: questions, he says, that arise from science, using scientific tools, but which point in each case to God. The first meta-question he examined arises from the inherent success and beauty of mathematics as a manifestation of the way things are in the physical world. Dr. Polkinghorne suggested that meta-question #1 points to a capital M Mind—the Creator of the universe.

In today’s post, he looks at the second of these meta-questions: “Why is the universe so special?” To illustrate this point, Dr. Polkinghorne presents several examples of how the universe is fine-tuned for life, including the constants of stars and the balance of “zero point energy”. The potentiality for life, the fruitfulness of the universe, as he calls it, is accepted throughout science. The question we must ask ourselves, however, is what is the significance of this fine-tuning.

We provide a written transcript of the talk to make it easier to mull over Dr. Polkinghorne’s ideas. We urge you to read the transcript as you are listening to the recording in order to be sure that his main points are sinking in. (Introduction by Stephen Mapes.)

Part III Transcript - Fine-tuning and the “Fruitful Universe”

Now my second meta-question is a little bit more specific. I ask the question, “Why is the universe so special?” Now scientists don’t like things to be special; we like things to be general, and our natural anticipation would have been that the universe is just a common or garden specimen of what a universe might be like.

But we’ve come to understand a lot about the history of the universe. We know that our universe started 13.7 billion years ago, and it started extremely simple, just an almost uniformly expanding ball of energy, about the simplest physical system you could possibly think about. But a world that started so simple has of course become rich and complex. With you and me, in fact, the most remarkable and complex consequences are its history, at least of which we are aware. The human brain is far and away the most complicated physical system we have ever encountered anywhere in our exploration of the universe.

That fact itself might suggest that something has been going on in cosmic history rather than just one thing after another. But we’ve also come to understand many of the processes by which this rich fruitfulness has come to birth. As we’ve come to understand these, we’ve come to see that though these processes are of course evolving processes, they took long periods of time – the universe was 10 billion years old before any form of life appeared in it, at least as far as we know anyway – and life of our complexity only appeared yesterday.

Nevertheless, the universe is pregnant with life, pregnant with the possibility of life, essentially from the beginning onwards. By which I mean the given laws of nature had to take a very specific, very finely tuned form, if the universe was to have so fruitful a history.

That’s a very remarkable discovery, and let me give you some examples of why we believe that. If you’re going to have a fruitful universe, one of the first things you have to get right is that you have to have the right stars in the universe. The stars are going to have a very important role to play. First of all, you must have some stars that are going to be very long lived, live for billions of years, steadily burning, steadily producing energy which will enable the development of life on one of the encircling planets. We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way very well, and it depends on a delicate balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetism. Electromagnetism is the force that holds matter together. The seats on which you are sitting are held together by electromagnetism and in fact you are held together by electromagnetism.

If you alter that balance a little bit in one direction the stars will begin to burn intensely, furiously, just pouring out energy and they will only live a few million years rather than a few billion years. If you move it a little bit in the other direction they will burn so slowly they will be brown stars and they will not produce enough energy to fuel the development of life. So you have to have a very delicate finely tuned balance between the strength of gravity and the strength of electromagnetic forces in a fruitful universe.

Remember, science takes the laws of nature, takes the given strengths of gravity, the given strength of electromagnetism, uses that to explain processes in the world, how things happen, but it doesn’t explain where those laws of nature come from. They are just brute facts as far as science is concerned.

And the stars have another absolutely indispensible role to play. The stars are the place where the heavier elements essential for life are made in the interior nuclear furnaces. There are many elements that are necessary for life, of which carbon is perhaps the most essential. Carbon is the basis of the long chain molecules, which are the biochemical basis of life. The early universe only makes the simplest elements; it makes hydrogen and helium and it makes no carbon at all. Carbon only begins to be made when the universe, which started uniform, begins to condense and become lumpy and grainy with stars and galaxies. As the stars condense they heat up, nuclear processes begin again in their interiors. And it’s those nuclear processes in the stars that make carbon and the heavier elements. Every atom of carbon in your body was once inside a star. We are people of stardust made in the ashes of dead stars.

And that’s a very beautiful process that takes place in that sort of way. And one of the great triumphs of astrophysics and the second half of the 20th century was to unravel that process. One of the people who did some of the most important work on that was a senior colleague of mine in Cambridge called Fred Hoyle. And they were trying to figure out how to make carbon. They got helium, and if you can make three helium nuclei stick together that will produce carbon, but when you have something as small as a nucleus it is impossible to get three to stick together at one time, they’re just too small.

Ok, so let’s do it step by step. Stick two together gives you berylium. Helium 4 gives you beryllium-8, hope it stays around for a bit, another helium comes along, attaches itself, and bingo, you’ve got carbon-12. That’s the obvious thing to think about but it doesn’t work in the obvious way, and the reason it doesn’t work in the obvious way is that beryllium-8 is terribly unstable. It doesn’t oblige you by staying around long enough to catch that third helium, at least in an ordinary, straightforward way.

But Fred realized that it would be just possible for this to happen if there was a very large enhancement effect, in the trade we call it resonance, occurring in carbon at just the right energy, it has to be the right energy, which would enable that attachment process to catch that third helium much much more quickly that you might have thought, in fact so quickly that some of them would get caught before the beryllium-8 disappeared. It was a very good idea, and he must have felt pretty pleased with himself and he went off to just check in the nuclear data tables of this particular resonance’s energy levels, and it wasn’t in the tables, but he knew it must be there, he’s carbon based life like you and me.

So he rang up some friends in the States, a father and son team who were good experimentalists and he said, “Look, you missed something. There’s a resonance and energy level in carbon that you haven’t spotted, and I’ll tell you exactly where to look for it. I know exactly where this energy has got to be. You go look for it.” And they said, “No, no, we don’t want to do that, we have more interesting things to do.” But Fred was very determined and he bullied them into looking for it and they found it.

Now that’s a wonderful achievement, to predict an energy level in carbon on the basis of how it might have been made in the stars is a fantastic scientific achievement. But it’s more than that. Fred had a lifetime conviction of atheism, realized of course that if the laws of physics had been just a little bit different that resonance wouldn’t have been there, and the possibility of carbon-based life is too significant for it just to be a happy accident in his view, so he says in a Yorkshire accent that is beyond my power to imitate, he said that the universe is a put-up job. Fred didn’t like the word God, and so he said some Intelligent, capital “I” Intelligence, must have monkied with the laws of nature to make carbon production possible. What that could possibly be I don’t know, but the more sensible thing to say is that creation is ordained, that the laws of nature would be such, as to enable the fruitfulness of carbon-based life.

We’ll come back to evaluating that possibility in a minute, but before we do, let me give you two other examples of how specific, how special, our universe has to be for us to be able to be here today to think about. We live in a universe that is immensely big, beyond our powers to imagine really. There are a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy in the Milky Way, of which our sun is just a common or garden specimen, and there are about a hundred thousand million galaxies in the observable universe, of which our Milky Way is a pretty common or garden specimen. So we live in a world that is unimaginably vast, and sometimes we might feel upset by that and think, “What could be the significance of us who are simply inhabitants of a speck of cosmic dust, as you might say, in this vast, vast universe?”

Nevertheless, if all those stars were not there, we would not be here to be upset at the thought of them. Because there is a direct connection between how big a universe is and how long it lasts, and a universe that is significantly smaller than our universe would not have been able to last the 14 billion years, which is the necessary time to produce beings of our complexity. So that’s another condition of the world that has to be right for human beings, or something like human beings, to be a possibility.

One final example, which is the finest tuning of all: quantum theory suggests that there should be an energy attached to space itself. In quantum theory the vacuum, so called empty space, is not just a void. There are things called vacuum fluctuations which occur in a continual sort of seething mass of things coming into being and going out of being all the time. So while there is nothing there that doesn’t mean there is nothing happening. That may sound strange and paradoxical but believe me that’s what quantum theory implies. And of course these happenings, these fluctuations, generate a certain amount of energy, we call it “zero point energy”, and that energy is spread out over the whole of space. So we expect there to be energy associated with space.

And just recently the astronomers have discovered something called dark energy which is driving the expansion of the universe, which is just such an energy associated with space. Well that’s very good, you might say. However, when we estimate, just from thinking about quantum theory, how much energy there should be in space it turns out to be a fantastically large amount, and when we see the amount of energy there actually is per volume in space, it turns out to be very, very small in relation to that expected size. In fact, it turns out to be smaller by a factor of 10^-120. That means by a factor of 1 over 1 followed by 120 zeros. You don’t have to be a great mathematician to see that’s a fantastically small number. So some fantastic cancellation has taken place to turn that big number into the tiny number that we actually observe, and if it hadn’t taken place we wouldn’t be here to observe it because significantly higher energy would simply have blown the whole show apart too fast for anything interesting to happen. That’s the finest tuning that we know in the universe: one part in 10¹²⁰.

So we live in a world that is very remarkably finely tuned, and we have to consider that. And all scientists would agree about what I have been telling you; this is non-contentious. Where the contention comes in is what we might make of that, what is the further significance of it.

**********

http://biologos.org/blog/john-polkinghorne-on-natural-theology-part-iv

January 15, 2011

In the last post of this series, Part III, Dr. Polkinghorne looked at the question, “Why is the universe so special?” He presented several examples of how the universe is fine-tuned for life, including the constants of stars and the balance of “zero point energy”. The potentiality for life, the fruitfulness of the universe, as he calls it, is accepted throughout science. The question we must ask ourselves, however, is what is the significance of this fine-tuning.

In today's final installment from his lecture on natural theology, Dr. Polkinghorne looks at two explanations for the so-called "fine-tuning" principle -- the multiverse theory and the existence of a divine intelligence -- and explains why natural theology alone is not sufficient to make the case for a God who interacts and cares for his creation. To make the case for theism, he argues, we need revelation, God's self-disclosure. This is manifest in various ways, including that which we experience personally through, for example, ethics and aesthetics.

We provide a written transcript of the talk to make it easier to mull over Dr. Polkinghorne’s ideas. We urge you to read the transcript as you are listening to the recording in order to be sure that his main points are sinking in. (Introduction by Stephen Mapes.)

Part IV Transcript

So what shall we make of it? Well I have a friend, a philosopher, called John Leslie, who thinks about these things. And he’s a very interesting philosopher. He does his philosophy by telling stories. He’s what you might call a parabolic philosopher. He tells parables. I find that very helpful. I’m not trained in philosophy, but anyone can get the point of a story. And he’s interested in this fine-tuning of our universe, this special character of our universe. And the way he wants us to think about this is by telling the following story.

You are about to be executed. You are tied to the stake, and the rifles of fifty highly trained marksmen are leveled at your chest. The officer gives the order to fire, the shots ring out, and you find you have survived. So what do you do? Do you just shrug your shoulders as you stroll away saying, “Gee, that was a close one”? I think probably not. So remarkable a fact surely calls for an explanation.

And Leslie suggests there are only two kinds of logically possible explanations for your extraordinarily good fortune. One is, maybe, there are many many many executions taking place today. Even the best of marksman occasionally miss, and you happened to be the one where all fifty missed. There will obviously have to be a lot of executions taking place today to make this possible, but it is at least possible.

But then of course there is another possible explanation of your good fortune. Maybe there was only one execution scheduled for today, but more was going on in that execution than you were aware of. The marksmen were on your side and they missed by design.

Now you see how that charming parable translates into thinking about the fine-tuning of our world. Of course if our world wasn’t fine-tuned, we wouldn’t be here to be even thinking about it. There would be no carbon-based life. But it’s such a remarkable and astonishing fact that it isn’t rational to simply say, “We’re here because we’re here. Nothing to worry about” any more than it is to say “Gee, that was a close one” as you strolled away from the execution. You should look for an explanation if you possibly can.

And Leslie suggests that there are really only two forms of explanation which are possible. One is maybe there are just many many many different universes. Always different laws of nature, all separated from each other, all but our own unobservable by us, and if there is a big enough portfolio of them (and there would have to be a very very large number), if there is a bigger portfolio then just by chance our universe turns out to be the one that has the right laws of nature for carbon-based life, because of course we are carbon-based life living in it. In other words, our universe is no more than by chance a winning ticket in a sort of multiverse lottery. That is the multiverse explanation of what’s going on, of the fine-tuning of our world.

Of course there is another explanation. Maybe there is only one universe, and it is the way it is because it is not any old world; it is a creation that is to be endowed by its Creator with precisely the finely tuned laws and circumstances which have enabled it to have a fruitful history. These seem to be the two kindsof understandings that make fine-tuning intelligible: either the multiverse, or the universe is a creation.

And then the question is: which shall we choose? And Leslie says, and I think he’s right in saying this, he says that as far as fine-tuning is concerned, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. We don’t know which to choose. Each does the explanatory work required of it.

But I think that there is sort of a cumulative case for seeing the world as a creation which I don’t see reflected on the side of the multiverse. I’ve already suggested that the deep intelligibility of the world suggests we should see it as a divine creation with a divine mind behind it. And so that reinforces the notion of seeing the fine-tuning of the world as an expression with a divine purpose behind it. And of course there are also well testified human experience and encounters with sacred reality, of course. So it’s more of a cumulative case for a theistic view for the world that builds up on this side. I don’t see a corresponding cumulative case building up on the multiverse side.

Moreover, of course, it’s not clear without further argument that the multiverse thing simply does the trick. Having an infinite number of things doesn’t guarantee that every desirable property is found among an infinite collection of things. There are an infinite number of even integers, but none of them has the property of oddness. So you have to make some more argument to say that it works in that way.

So that’s another meta-question, which I think receives its most satisfying response and explanation in terms of natural theology, of seeing the world as a divine creation.

In Western metaphysical tradition, there are really two different types of metaphysical tradition, and they differ from each other in what they take as their founding brute fact. Metaphysics simply means a worldview. Scientists sometimes say, “Oh, we don’t go bother with metaphysics,” but that’s absurd. Everybody who has a worldview has a metaphysic. We think metaphysics as inevitably as we speak prose, and the reductionist scientist who say everything is mere matter, nothing but atoms and molecules, is not making a scientific statement, but making a worldview, a metaphysical statement.

So everybody has a metaphysic and everybody has a basic brute fact. And the materialist metaphysic tradition takes the laws of nature, the given properties of matter, as its unexplained brute fact. Somebody like David Hume would suggest that was the right plotting point. And of course a theistic metaphysic takes the brute fact of a divine agent, a divine creator, as its unexplained brute fact.

What I’ve been trying to say to you in the last 20 or 25 minutes is that the laws of nature and their fine-tuned fruitfulness and deep intelligibility have a character that seems to me to point beyond themselves to demand further explanation and makes them unsatisfactory to be treated simply as a brute fact starting point. And that would be my defense of theism.

But now, natural theology, as I said at the beginning, is an attempt to learn something of God by the exercise of reason, by the inspection of the world, by a certain limited source of understanding. And it only appeals to limited kinds of experience -- general experience, the kind we’ve been thinking about – and so it only can lead to limited insight. If you were to give me the maximum success in what I’ve been saying to you this afternoon, it would be as consistent with the spectator God of deism who simply set the world spinning and watched it all happen, as it would be with the providential God of theism, who is of course the God in whom I believe, who not only set the world spinning but who is concerned for that world and interacts providentially in its unfolding history.

So natural theology, even when it’s most successful, can only give you a limited insight into God, and give you a very thin picture of the nature of God. God is the great mathematician or the cosmic architect, something like that. If you want to know more about God, if you want to know, for example, does God care for individual beings? Does God indeed interact with unfolding history? Then you’ll have to look in a different realm of experience, you will have to move from natural theology to the theology of revelation, which appeals to what are believed to be acts of divine self-disclosure in the course of history.

So it’s a limited exercise, but I think it’s an exercise of some value.

[…] I’ll say two things very briefly. I’ve simply been talking about natural theology in terms, essentially, of our scientific understanding of the world, but there is another possible source of natural theology which I think is very important, a different kind of general human experience: personal experience, the experience of value in the world.

For example, I believe that we have irreducible ethical knowledge. I believe that is just a fact, and I know actually about as surely as I know any fact, that torturing children is wrong. That’s not some curious genetic survival strategy which my genes have been encouraging in me. It’s not just some cultural convention of our society, that we choose in our society not to torture children. It’s an actual fact about the world in which we live.

And there lies the question of where do those ethical values come from? And theistic belief provides one with an answer for that, just as the order of world we might see as reflecting the divine mind and the fruitfulness of the world is reflecting the divine purpose, so our ethical intuitions can be seen as being intonations of the good and perfect world of our creator.

And then of course there is the aesthetic experience in the world, and I think we should take our aesthetic experience extremely seriously. I think it’s an encounter with a very important and specific dimension of reality. It’s not just emotion recalled in tranquility or something like that.

And again of course science offers no help for us in these questions of value. If you ask a scientist as a scientist to tell you all he or she could about the nature of music, they would say that it is neural response -- things go off in our brains, neurons fire -- to the impact of sound waves on our ear drum. And of course that is true and this way is worth knowing, but it hardly begins to engage with the deep mystery of music, of how that sequence of sounds in time can speak to us -- and I think speak to us truly -- an encounter of a timeless realm of beauty. I think we should take our aesthetic experience very seriously.

And where do they come from? Where does that aesthetic value come from? And again theistic belief suggests that aesthetic experience is a sharing in the Creator’s joy in creation. So I see belief in God as being a great integrating discipline really, a great integrating insight, perhaps I should say rather than discipline. It links together the order of the world, the fruitfulness of the world, the reality of ethical values, the deep and moving reality of aesthetic values. It makes sense. It’s a whole theory of everything in that way, which is to me, essentially, most satisfying.

Charles Jencks - An Architect's View of Postmodernism

The postmodern architect Charles Jencks gives to us his perspective of early postmodernism as he understood it from the 1980s to the present, based upon his past building and landscape designs, projects, and many books.

Moreover, the Evolutionary map (found below) that he provides in Architectural Review (July 2000) reminds us of the fluidity of "isms" that have washed over our past century of mankind - helping us to re-visualize the ebbs-and-flows that have washed over our souls and across our culturally-bound lives. It tells us of our larger-narratives, our grander-stories, that each of us have had a small part in the making, the creating or the undoing: to those lives around us, to our environment, and to our sense of being, time and place.

For the longer we have lived the more we have found ourselves personally (or impersonally) involved with the many events charted on this map having witnessed those events within our life; some of which we may have had a small part in its construction or de-construction; many others that we didn't. Events that didn't make sense to us at the time but in hindsight fall into place within our mental and communal (corporate) landscapes as we digested, and picked-through, an assortment of ideas, fashions, constructs, and debacles that have embroiled, or enmeshed, us through our lifetimes.

And in many ways, I suspect this blog (along with my poetic writings) have been a small attempt to piece together what I have seen and witnessed through the past decades of my life. And as the map below suggests, it seems that we have been through a lot. Each event or movement affecting us in one way or another, some directly, and others simply glancing off of us. To leave us dangling like a loose-end of thread trying to piece together the larger tapestry of our lives within an intermix of movements and duties that have driven us from morning to evening, sunrise to sunset, searching for solidarity with God, society, family and self. Waking only to hear again a continual garble of symphonies and cacophonous noises unintelligible until collected much later in life to be reviewed in the broader lights of interplay between significant speakers both personally and impersonally by a literary author, a musician, an historian, theologian, or philosopher. As each speaker/presentation interacts with, or intersects, our past-and-present world/era/timelines through the spoken or written word, a sound of music, a convocation, a play or even an authored work itself.

That said, Charles Jencks reviews his life's convocations and vocation revisualizing with us what he has seen and witness within our percolating 20th Century global societies, attempting to capture and build those many separate stories into a variegated set of pluralistic, many-faceted structures and environments that tell the story of our human societies at once complex, unending, restless, searching, evolving. It is the story of us. It is the story of me. It is our grander meta-narratives, our turbulent cultural symphonies and cacophonous noises, our alters of sacrifice and worship, our corporate works of industry and largesse, attributed to the magnificence, the disquiet, even the horror of mankind seeking relevance upon the footlights of life's multitudinous stages and melodramatic operas.

R.E. Slater

October 2011 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"The Century is Over"

Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture

with its attractor basins, by Charles Jencks

Scanned from Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77

"The Century is Over" - Evolutionary Tree of Twentieth-Century Architecture with its attractor basins,

by Charles Jencks, Architectural Review, July 2000, p. 77 - http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/charles-jencks-look-at-modernism.html

Post-Modernism has become an integral part of the cultural landscape after developing for thirty years as a movement in the arts, after being disputed and celebrated. In this witty overview, Charles Jencks, the first to write a book defining the subject, argues that the movement is one more reaction from within modernism critical of its shortcomings. The unintended consequences of modernisation, such as the terrorist debacle and global warming, are typical issues motivating a Critical Modern response today.

In a unique analysis, using many explanatory diagrams and graphs, Jencks reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation. Critical Modernism emerges at two levels. As an underground movement, it is the fact that many modernisms compete, quarrel and criticise each other as they seek to become dominant. Secondly, when so many of these movements follow each other today in quick succession, they may reach a ‘critical mass,’ a Modernism, and become a conscious tradition.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Critical Modernism:
Where is Post-Modernism Going
[Paperback]

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Modernism-Where-Post-Modernism-Going/dp/0470030119/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1318510071&sr=8-3

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 5 edition (June 12, 2007)

More books by Charles Jencks -

http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Jencks/e/B001IOFGR4/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Wikipedia Bio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Jencks

Official Website - http://www.charlesjencks.com/current.html

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What is Post-Modernism?

http://www.amazon.com/What-Post-Modernism-Is%C3%A0-Charles-Jencks/dp/1854904280/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318510579&sr=8-1

by Charles Jencks, Academy Press; 4 edition (June 13, 1996)

Provides a lucid exposition of Post-Modernism in art and architecture.

From the Back Cover

'What is Post-Modernism?' Is it a new world view,or an outgrowth of the Post-Industrial Society? Is it a shift in philosophy, the arts and architecture? In this fourth, entirely revised edition,   shows it is all these things plus many other forces that have exploded since the early 1960s. In a unique analysis, Charles Jencks using analysis and diagrams designed especially for this edition, reveals the evolutionary, social and economic forces of this new stage of global civilisation.

But why has post-modern culture arrived? In an ironic parable, 'the Protestant Crusade'. Jencks uncovers some hitherto hidden origins: the Modernists' abhorrence for all things sensuous and natural, and their zeal for all things orderly and mechanistic. This pseudo-religion led in the 1920s to the famous 'vacuum-cleaning' period, the purgation of values, metaphysics and emotion. In the 1970s it led on to the 'Protestant Inquisition' which inadvertently created the very enemy Modernists feared - Post-Modernism; a Counter-Reformation, the reassertion of worldliness, fecundity, humour and pluralism.

However, more than one tradition emerged and Jencks, distinguishing two types of Post-Modernism (deconstructive and reconstructive) demonstrates that the former is often a disguised form of Late-Modernism. This takes the de-creation and nihilism of its parent to extremes. The main engine that drives global culture today - post-modernisation, the electronic economy and instant communications network - is analysed in its close relation to other 'posts': Post-Fordism, Post-Socialism and the post-national world of trading blocs and unstable nations. Jencks argues that this may result in catastrophe and global governance, or a web of transnational institutions and obligations.

The most radical idea of this challenging book is the conclusion: the notion that the post-modern world does not mean the end of meta-narratives, but something quite different. Belief systems are flourishing as never before and, Jencks argues, "a new meta-narrative, based on the story of the universe and its generative qualities, will soon create a new world view that will affect all areas. It is a story which grows directly out of the post-modern sciences of complexity and is thus both true and mythic."

Jencks other What is...? titles include What is Abstraction?, What is Deconstruction?

An Amazon Book Review

by mlbasquiat 

I have great respect for Charles Jencks as an architect, and as a critic of art relating to such. Therefore the book should be retitled, What is Postmodern Architecture? Or what is everything about Post-Modernism except the art? The main focus seems to be on the industrial world which created the art, rather then the [postmodernistic] art itself. Seems hardly revolutionary or even relevant since everyone and their brother and sister has written on that subject since 1820. I was hoping for something which would address the art, but I was sorely disappointed. The constant focus on the world around the buildings of postmodernism dragged and was inebriatingly dull (It got to the point where the author was forced to contradict himself to make the book interesting).

The focus of Postmoderism was once architecture, however, now the focus has shifted, it seems everyone except the academics know this. [Jencks sections on art and literature are light and misinformed] and I expected more from Jencks, being the great mind of the century that he was. If you want to know anything helpful and relevant pretaining to Post Modernism today, do not read this book. But hey if you want to know about your father's post modernism, read this book!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

2000 July: Jencks' Theory of Evolution,

an Overview of 20th Century Architecture

http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/2000-july-jencks-theory-of-evolution-an-overview-of-20th-century-architecture/8623596.article

7 December 2011 | By Charles Jencks

AR 2000 July − Jencks' Theory of Evolution Diagram

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

Source:

At the start of the twenty-first century, Charles Jencks gives a personal, perceptive and provocative summary of the architecture of the twentieth. Now that the century is over it is time to ask what it meant for architecture. This is a harder question than it first appears. Did Modern architecture, as its apologists claim, triumph over other contenders? What was the relationship of commercial practice to quality - did the best architects lead or only influence the profession? Did good architecture trickle-down or was it dumbed-down? Or did a hundred mini-movements tell the real story of the century; or was it like that of the past, one of spec builders, the DIY industry and self-build?

In terms of sheer numbers the century has been claimed for the shed building, the factory, warehouse and its cousin, the office. In terms of cost airports have won, in terms of prestige museums, in terms of kitsch it has been shopping and mega-malls, but building-counts like body-counts only tell the background story.

The main narrative does not belong to any building type, movement, individual or sector. Rather, it belongs to a competitive drama, a dynamic and turbulent flow of ideas, social movements, technical forces and individuals all jockeying for position. Sometimes, a movement or an individual may be momentarily in the public eye and enjoy media power, but such notoriety rarely lasts for more than five years and usually for not more than two.

It is true that certain architects of the previous century - how strange those words ring for Modernists - were creative forces that lasted for longer. Mies was a power to be reckoned with in the ’20s and ’60s. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Aalto, who with Mies made up the big four, were seminal at more times and Kahn, Stirling, Eisenman and Gehry, the little four, each had two small periods of influence. But even these protean characters, in order to stay relevant and on top, had to reinvent themselves about every 10 years.

The notion that there is a ‘10-year rule’ of reinvention for the creative genius in the twentieth century has been well argued by the Harvard cognitive scientist Howard Gardner in his book Creating Minds, 1993. Subtitled An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham and Gandhi, it is a detailed study of these, the big seven Modernists, and it shows how they often made breakthroughs or underwent creative shifts every 10 years.

In a recently finished book, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, I have found the same pattern in this the Proteus of design. As the Hayward Gallery put it, polemically, in the title of a 1987 retrospective Le Corbusier was ‘The Architect of the Century’. Well, could this be possible - even before the century was over and Frank Gehry given a shot at the title? I think the answer is ‘yes’, as I argue at length and as the accompanying evolutionary tree, or diagram, shows.

One will find Corbu’s presence on this chart at five different points:

• as the leader of ‘the Heroic Period’ of the 1920s;
• as a leading thinker of a new (and rather unfortunate) urbanism;
• as the leader of ClAM and mass housing after the war;
• as a harbinger of Post-Modernism with Ronchamp and the symbolic architecture of Chandigarh; and,
• just at the end of his life, with his Brussels and Zurich pavilions, the forerunner of the High-Tech movement.

No other architect was as creative in different traditions; not for nothing was he seen as ‘the Picasso of architecture’.

But the point of my argument is slightly different than Howard Gardner’s. While agreeing with his analysis, I think one of the important reasons for the demonic creativity of these seven ‘geniuses’ is that the last century was uncommonly turbulent. My diagram, and its tortuous blobs, captures this continual revolution. At any one time the twentieth century architect has had to face three or four competing movements of architecture, respond to changes in technology, social forces, style and ideology - not to mention world wars and such large impersonal forces as the Internet. It was an exhausting century. As the Chinese say: ‘may you be condemned to live in interesting times’.

However beneficent this may be for architectural creativity this has not been healthy or good for the environment. For one thing it has been Gardner’s message - the revolutionary period has been dominated by men, there are very few women among the 400 protean creators I have gathered from other writers. An urbanism both more feminine and coherent would have been far superior to the over- rationalized and badly related boxes that have formed our cities.

For another thing continual revolution, or the constant change of fashion, business cycles, technical innovation and social transformation has meant that architecture, like the other arts, lacks depth and perfection. It is hard to master an art when surfing a waterfall. Nonetheless, that is what the old century has been, a turbulent motion of whirls and eddies; sometime even the whirlpool of Fascist and Nazi architecture going nowhere but down. There are about 100 trends and technical forces shown, and 60 movements, many of them ‘isms’ - Futurism, Expressionism, Brutalism or Metabolism - that became ‘wasms’. Riding these waves as a leader is exhilarating, until the Neo-follower surfs on by.

I don’t mean to be disparaging so much as realistic. The twentieth century produced great architecture but, as Lewis Mumford often noted, with great faults. A critical Modernism, or Post-Modern perspective, must acknowledge these deep problems and face the horrors of the century as much as the triumphs.

The evolutionary tree and its surprising conclusions

Usually when historians look at the recent past they do so with the eyes and taste that rigidly exclude the variety, contradictions, mess and creative wealth of a period, and we applaud them for so doing. All history writing is selective and based on theories of what really matters, and there is no way around this limitation. But there are ways to compensate for perspectival distortion and over the last 30 years I have devised a method, the evolutionary tree, which if it is not completely inclusive is at least balanced in its selective effects.

As can be seen in the classifiers to the extreme left of the diagram, it is based on the assumption that there are coherent traditions that tend to self-organize around underlying structures. These deep structures, often opposed to each other psychologically and culturally, act like what are called, in the esoteric science of nonlinear dynamics, ‘attractor basins’: they attract architects to one line of development rather than another. Why? Not only because of taste, training, education and friendships, but because of type-casting and the way the market forces architects to have an identifiable style and skill. In a word, specialization.

Of course, architects dislike being pigeon-holed as much as do politicians and writers - they too like to claim universality, freedom and openness. But it is the rare architect, such as Le Corbusier or Gehry, who can be found in several different traditions and often they are pilloried for leaving one fold for another. Enough forces conspire to keep the architect ‘on message’, even when they seek, like Post-Modernists, to be pluralists.

What stories does this turbulent blob-diagram tell? In crude terms it reveals some surprises. Most architecture - 80 per cent? - is by non-architects, or at least the result of larger processes that are, artistically speaking, unselfconscious: building regulations, governmental acts, the vernacular, planning laws, mass housing, the mallification of the suburbs, and inventions in the technical/industrial sphere. Le Corbusier in the 1920s, Russian disurbanists in the 1930s and Richard Rogers today try to affect this inchoate area, but like globalization it is mostly beyond anyone’s control.

This high proportion of non-architectural creativity is likely to lessen in the future as more and more of the environment is forced into governmental and planning control, the result of economic and ecological forces. But the ironic truth remains that, in terms of control and mega-planning, the Disney corporation has been more effective than the former Soviet Union and, architecturally-speaking, its results are unselfconscious vernacular pastiche (all-too-consciously applied.)

Another surprise is that a polemical movement may not be the preserve of just one tradition. One would have thought the ecological imperative might have been monopolized by the Activist tradition, but it has been taken up by all of them in different ways. For instance, the Classicists, following Leon Krier, have created an ecological movement known as the New Urbanism. It is based on the tight village planning of a previous area, and it is mostly Classical and Vernacular in style; its green credentials are presented with historicist wrappers.

Then there are Post-Modern versions of green architecture, with SITE, Ralph Erskine and Lucien Kroll; High-Tech versions usually called Eco-Tech (or Organi-Tech); the Biomorphic versions of Ken Yeang. And there is the madly optimistic corporate-governmental version of the Sustainability Movement let by Amory Lovins. His notion is summarized in the oxymoron ‘Natural Capitalism’. Nature and capitalism can walk together in the twenty-first century. He argues, counter to stereotypes, that so many efficiencies and savings can be made that economic and ecological growth can occur at the same time - at four times their current rate! - if only we can think through all systems at the start.

As Oscar Wilde put it: ‘being natural is such a difficult pose to keep up’- and reconciling these heretofore opposed forces is going to take more than a pose, that is, a raft of tax incentives. In any case, the point is that green architectures, in the plural, are coming from everywhere while we might have thought the ecological issue would be taken over by just one or two movements.

The south porch of the Templo de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

A third surprise is that we can see the strange alliances within the self-conscious tradition, usually the mainstream, or what Sigfried Giedion called the ‘ruling style’ of architecture. Up through the 1940s this was mostly a version of Classicism: Edwardian Baroque, Beaux-Arts Classicism, monumental stripped Classicism, or the fundamental Classicism of Gunnar Asplund.

When the Fascists in Italy and Spain, and the leaders of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia self-consciously imposed their version as a state style it squeezed out contending approaches. The diaspora of Modern architects and the waning of other approaches are clear from the diagram: like evolutionary species whose habitat is destroyed they went virtually extinct (or emigrated from Europe and the USSR).

Following sociologists such a David Harvey and David Herf, there is another surprise: I have called these Classical or monumental folk architects ‘Reactionary Modernists’. Like Albert Speer they were just as wedded to technology, economic progress, instrumental reason and the Zeitgeist as Mies, Le Corbusier and Gropius. The fact that they persecuted Functionalists and creative Modernists and adopted reactionary styles and attitudes has obscured the deeper point that they all shared some common assumptions about power, mass culture and mass production.

They were, in effect, disputing some common territory, a point that the diagram reveals especially when Modernism triumphs after the Second World War. The true inheritors of the mainstream were the big corporate Modernists, and they have been so ever since. They only appear small in my diagram because their creativity and influence has not been excessive. In terms of volume of work they have overshadowed the four other traditions.

The evolutionary tree also shows a minor surprise: the way this dominant is constantly attracted back to stripped Classicism, or degree-zero Modernism. Although they are very different, Lincoln Center in New York, and 20 other cultural scenes in America during the ’60s, are in this blood line, as is the Modern Classicism of Robert Stern and Demetri Porphyrios. The Corporate Modernism of Berlin, and even Richard Meier, is not too far away from this ‘strange attractor’. Why? The corporate forces of production and patronage favour an impersonal, abstract, semi-Classical sobriety. Giedion’s notion of the ‘ruling taste’ is usually pulled towards this attractor basin.

But mainstream culture is not always located on this axis. Several important exceptions were when Expressionism, the Bauhaus, and the Heroic Period dominated for a few years in the ’20s, or Post-Modernism did in the early ’80s, or Art Nouveau and National Romanticism did at the start of the century. Hector Guimard in Paris, Horta in Belgium, Mackintosh in Glasgow, Eliel Saarinen and Lars Sonck in Helsinki, and my favourite architect, Antonio Gaudi, in Barcelona - all became momentary leaders of a major public architecture, if only for three of four years.

Gaudi a standard

Here is a point where my bias shows through the evolutionary tree. Nikolaus Pevsner dismissed most of these movements as ‘transitory fashions’ and for Giedion, except for the Heroic Period, they were not ‘constituent facts’. One remembers how Modernist historians, like revisionist Communists air-brushing Trotsky out of photographs, liked to clean up uncomfortable facts. Interpretation and judgment obviously distort all historical selection.

My argument for placing Antonio Gaudi the best architect of the century, even ahead of Le Corbusier, does not rest on his influence, city planning or theoretical contribution. Rather, it concerns his creative brilliance at turning city building and structure into a high art. No other architect managed to get craftsmen, artists and even patrons working together on such a large and complete scale. His works remain the standard of integrating all the arts at the highest creative and symbolic level.

The reason his work has such creative depth is that he took a long time - which other twentieth-century architects did not allow themselves - to innovate at all levels. His architecture exploits all sorts of new structural types - such as the hyperbolic paraboloid - if not for the very first time, then for the most seminal time. He makes such form-types his own by giving them a forceful and poetic expression. Moreover he bends structural rationalism to expressive ends. For instance, where the Italian engineer Nervi makes an ordered art from showing the isostatic lines of force in his concrete ceiling, Gaudi takes the same forces and makes them dynamic - like the straining muscles of an athlete - pushing against each other. Concrete becomes animated, humorous, related to our body and moods.

Beyond this, in buildings such as the Casa Batllo, he uses technological and structural innovations for symbolic, and political, ends - to present the sufferings of the Catalans under the dragon of Castile. Structural and material invention are always means to a larger intention, and it is this overall meaning that gives his work the greatest symbolic depth. It communicates up and down the scales, from the everyday and local to the cosmic. By comparison the work of Mies and Aalto is too abstract, Le Corbusier and Wright too cut off from the language of the street, Eisenman too cerebral, Gehry too formalist.

Left. The lodge and turret of the Parc Guell.Right.
The interior of the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia

To say Gaudi was the architect of the century, however, reveals my partiality towards artistic and symbolic architecture, values that other critics, such as Ken Frampton, do not necessarily share. In an Art Net lecture in London of 1974, I was shocked to hear him dismiss Gaudi as ‘kitsch’ - but Philip Johnson used to dismiss Frank Lloyd Wright as the ‘greatest architect of the nineteenth century’. The evolutionary tree is meant to make such egregious dismissals, as Pevsner, Giedion, Frampton and Johnson are happy to commit, more difficult. Or at least make them feel uncomfortable.

I realize, however, the high placement of Gaudi is a contentious claim that needs more defence than I can offer here. Those who value the perfecting of architectural technique might proffer Mies, Kahn or Norman Foster as the architect of the century. Those who value theory and education might favour Gropius at the Bauhaus or Eisenman because of his design and writing; those who prefer an understated humanism might put Aalto in this role. Many contenders for the top positions re apparent in the weighting I have given the 400 ‘best’ architects.

But my idiosyncrasy of proffering Gaudi actually raises another surprise. In spite of a few disagreements over ‘transitory facts’, most critics and historians of twentieth-century architecture would accept this lift of the 400 and most of the relative weighting. They would argue over the details but, because it is constructed as a composite portrait of what they have written, it is not very contentious.

Perhaps I have exaggerated the recent Biomorphic School (because I think it will be important) but a provocative aspect of this diagram is how conventional is it. We are surprised to find such a tumultuous century so full of stereotype and consensus. Was Modernism really invented to mass-produce opinion and culture on a global scale - what ever happened to its creativity and individuality?

When we look back at he nineteenth century, with superiority, we laugh at the Salon and the conformity of an Academy of taste that could elevate Bougereau and Lord Leighton to such heights. Will the twenty-first century be kinder to the Brit Pack of Damien Hirst and other sensations sanctioned by the Royal Academy; or the 10 000 followers of Andy Warhol? One of the more pleasant aspects of a change in century, and millennium, is that it forces such thoughts of quality and perspective into view. On 1 January 2000 all the most avant-garde artists and Modernists became old hat. The twentieth century is over; interpretation begins!


From the AR Archives

Charles Jencks discusses revivalism in relation to the Getty Museum and asks if we should still indulge in historical simulation from 1978’s February edition of The Architectural Review.

A Leap of Truth, Part 8: Requiring Certainty

 

August 31, 2011

This week we feature the next clip from the upcoming documentary “A Leap of Truth”, directed by filmmaker Ryan Pettey. As Ryan wrote in his accompanying post for the film’s first clip, our goal for the film is to put something proactive on the table to help motivate an elevated conversation above the unnecessary “war” between science and faith. It is our sincere hope that, above all else, the film can become a focal point for some of the big questions that inevitably arise at the intersection of science and faith. We believe Ryan's work will inform faith and enrich discussion.

As Christians, we live by faith. Faith isn’t fanciful or ungrounded; rather the Bible describes it as “being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” (Heb 11:1). The purpose of today’s film clip is not to call into question our confidence in the revelation of Scripture, but to remind us of the importance of recognizing our biases and limitations. We need not live in fear that the Gospel will erode or we will slide into faithless liberalism if we ask questions. Nor should we hang our faith on the Bible somehow being scientifically validated.

To help foster such dialogue, we are once again including several discussion questions with this week’s clip. In the transcript below, you’ll find several prompts that are meant to help viewers dig deeper into the material being presented. Mouse over each highlighted region and a question will appear on the side. We encourage you to "pull up" this page and watch this video with your friends, your churches, your small groups and Sunday School classes, your pastors -- or anyone else for that matter – and take some time to discuss what is being said (and maybe even what isn’t). It is best to think about this in groups. You may not all agree, but you will find yourselves engaged in fruitful and spirited conversation. And it is this kind of conversation that will help move the science and faith discussion forward.

A Leap of Truth - Requiring Certainty

http://biologos.org/blog/a-leap-of-truth-requiring-certainty

Click link above to view video

Is it realistic to hold such a rigid black and white view about something as complex and unfamiliar as the process behind the creation of the universe? Explain.

Do fundamentalist views keep us farther from the truth we seek? Explain.

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “In our contemporary society, people want black and white answers. They want absolute certainty about things. Fundamentalisms, whether the fundamentalism of atheism or fundamentalism of creationism, does offer you the prospect—I think it is a false prospect—of certainty on those terms.”

Dr. Peter Enns: “And you don’t handle ambiguity very well; you need crystal clarity on things. That invites a hyper-literalist mentality that I think has been sort of a partner of Protestant Christianity, particularly in the west in America.

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “The impulse to try to reduce the Scripture to a single meaning comes out of a discomfort with complexity.”

Can one’s understanding of Genesis become an “absolute” for some people? If so, in what sense did they generalize to get down to that specific?

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “Boiling complexity down to something we can hold on to—we by default, I think, do this unconsciously. We can’t just have everything being chaotic and complex. We have to generalize and bring things down, and I think sometimes that what we fail to recognize is that we have done that…we have generalized from the complex to get something that we can then hold on to, and then we think that that is an absolute —‘it is that way; it has to be that way’—not recognizing that we have generalized to bring it down to that way.”

What does Dr. Enns mean by the phrase “using our faith to …make …things happen?” How does that differ from faith in Christ?

Dr. Peter Enns: “We want this sense of coherence where our lives make some sense and we are all after that in different kinds of ways, and we use our faith sometimes to make those things happen.”

Dr. Kerry Fulcher: “It leads to the assumptions that everyone thinks this way, and there are these simple answers to things, and we have always thought this way, and any thought that might move away or question some of those things, you know, we can tag it as liberal or tag it as atheistic. It kind of sets up a culture of warfare, if you will.”

Do you know examples of people who have been in this situation? What is involved in helping them put their faith in Christ back together again?

Reverend Dr. John Polkinghorne: “That sort of fundamentalism is a very brittle position—the slightest crack and the whole thing shatters."

Does a loose understanding of Genesis compromise the truth of the scriptures? Explain.

Dr. Ard Louis: “Really what happens is that people have fear. They are afraid that if they let go of this really tight way of looking at things, then the only alternative is going to be irrationality and lack of control, but that is not true. I think that actually you can let go of this really tight hold, and step forward into richer things, and think about things, and the alternative isn’t just quicksand where you disappear.”

Might God want our life in him to be grounded in faith rather than certainty? Why or why not?

Dr. Chris Tilling: “The Christian gospel does want to give us a sense of confidence in the truth, and that is a very legitimate yearning and desire. But, the earliest Christian writers have always linked that with the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is ultimately a faith statement—it is a truth bound to belief, believing that Jesus rose from the dead—rather than from a scientific description of a certain reality that we can objectify. Then, that becomes not a matter of faith and commitment in truth, but of certainty.”

Could it be that this is why God provides a basis for faith, but not for absolute certainty? If so, why might God prefer good questions even more than good answers?

Rabbi Steve Cohen: “Certainty is where we end up when we lose faith because we are too scared of what we think we know being wrong, and to me, that is the ultimate, that is death. The people here get sick of me saying this, but you haven’t heard me say it so I will say it again, but I say over and over again that I will always prefer a good question to a good answer because a good answer stops the conversation, but a good question gets us talking— that, to me, is a stance of faith.”