Quarks, Chaos and Christianity: Questions to Science and Religion

Crossroad, September 2006. Paper Back. New. If C.S. Lewis were a physicist, he might have written this Book. So goes a marketing blurb-- yet we can well believe it. Until 1979 John Polkinghorne was a theoretical particle physicist and professor at Cambridge University. Now he is an Anglican priest who, in a series of books, has written clearly and sensibly on the relationship between science and religion, modern physics and Christianity. <i>Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity</i> is one of the latest and most introductory of these books--a concise, non-technical primer to this important subject. In it he asks (and answers) questions such as ''Why is the world intelligible?'' ''What about miracles?'' and ''Can a scientist pray?'' To Polkinghorne science and religion are natural friends. In part this is so because both enjoin ''motivated belief,'' because the Christian ethos made possible the practice of modern science, and because our ability to understand the physical world is part of the case for religious belief. In short, Polkinghorne finds within the concepts of contemporary physics (chaotic dynamics, emergent properties, the anthropic principle, top down causality, fine tuning, and cosmology) no proof of God's existence, but rather a friendliness to and coherency with traditional Christianity. 102 pp.