Features
Physics and the final frontier
John Polkinghorne
Is there a scientific argument for an afterlife? Theoretical
physicist
John Polkinghorne constructs a case for a human
destiny beyond death –
and finds grounds for Christian hope.
Every story that science has to tell ends
ultimately in decay and futility. This is due to the second law of
thermodynamics which says that, without external intervention, a
physical system will become increasingly disordered. The reason is
statistical. There are many more ways of being disorderly than of
being orderly, so that entropy (the measure of disorder) inevitably
increases with time.
We all know that we are going to die on a timescale of tens of
years and the cosmologists tell us that the universe itself will
eventually die on a timescale of many tens of billions of years. As
it continues to expand it will become progressively colder and more
dilute, so that all life must eventually disappear from everywhere
within it. The distinguished theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg
notoriously said that the more he understood the universe, the more
it seemed to him to be ultimately pointless.
Weinberg is a staunch atheist, with only the ‘horizontal’
scientific story of the unfolding of current physical process to
tell. I believe that there is also a ‘vertical’ theological story
to tell, of the Creator’s everlasting faithfulness. This story is
the sole, and sufficient, ground of the hope of a destiny beyond
death, both for ourselves and for the universe.
This is exactly the point that Jesus made in his argument with
the Sadducees about whether there is a human destiny beyond death.
He reminded them that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
commenting incisively ‘The God, not of the dead, but of the living’
(Mark 12:18-27). The point is a powerful one.
If the patriarchs mattered to God once, as surely they did, they
will matter to the faithful God forever and will not be cast aside
at their deaths like broken pots thrown onto a rubbish heap. And,
as a Christian, I believe that this faithfulness which is stronger
than death has actually been demonstrated within history by the
resurrection of Jesus, as the sign and guarantee of what awaits all
of us beyond history.
DIS/CONTINUITY
But can we make sense of the notion of a human existence beyond
death? A little thought shows that this requires the satisfaction
of criteria of both continuity and discontinuity. It really must be
the individual patriarchs who live again and not just new persons
given the old names for old times’ sake. This requires a degree of
continuity between life in this world and life of the world to
come. Yet there would be no point in making the patriarchs live
again simply for them to die again, so there must also be a
criterion of discontinuity.
In much Christian thinking the carrier of identity beyond death
has been seen as the human soul, conceived in a Platonic fashion as
a detachable spiritual component, released at death from entrapment
in the body. Today, considerations such as the effects of brain
damage on personality, and our evolutionary kinship with animal
life, convince many of us that this dualist picture of human nature
as a combination of distinct and separable body and mind is
unpersuasive. Instead, human beings are a kind of package deal,
psychosomatic unities, with mind and body complementary aspects of
a single integrated nature. This idea would not have surprised most
of the writers of the Bible for, in the famous phrase, Hebrew
thinking regarded humans as being ‘animated bodies’, rather than
‘incarnated souls’. We are not apprentice angels awaiting release
from the flesh.
THE REAL ME?
Have we then lost any notion of the human soul? I do not think so,
but the idea will have to be reconceived. What we are looking for
is ‘the real me’ and it is almost as difficult to know what that
may be within this life as it might be beyond it. What makes me, a
bald and elderly academic, the same as the schoolboy with the shock
of black hair in the photograph of long ago? It might seem that
material continuity is the answer, but in fact that is an illusion.
The atoms in our bodies are changing all the time, through wear and
tear, eating and drinking, and I am atomically distinct from that
young schoolboy.
What is the true essence of my continuing personhood is hard to
express with any precision, but it must be something like the
almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern (memories,
dispositions of character, relationships, etc) carried at any one
time by the atoms then making up my body. The soul is this dynamic
‘pattern’, not a detachable spiritual component.
The idea has some resonance with ideas just beginning to be
developed within science as it starts to study the behaviour of
complex systems treated in their totalities and not simply
decomposed into their constituent parts. These systems are found to
display astonishing powers of spontaneous self-organisation,
creating holistic patterns of behaviour unforeseeable in terms of
the properties of their constituents. Holistic ‘information’ is a
concept that, I believe, will prove fundamental to a proper
understanding of physical reality.
RE-EMBODIED PATTERNS
This ‘pattern that is me’ will dissolve at death with the decay of
my body, but it is a perfectly coherent belief that the faithful
Creator will not allow it to be lost, but will preserve it in the
divine memory. This in itself would not amount to a life beyond
death, for I believe that it is intrinsic to human beings that we
are embodied, so that a true destiny beyond death requires the
reimbodiment of that ‘pattern’ by a divine act of resurrection. The
true Christian hope is not a kind of spiritual survival, but the
resurrection of the body.
This reimbodiment will have to be in a new form of ‘matter’ with
different properties from the matter of this world and thus
released from bondage to decay. This is the criterion of
discontinuity. Scientifically it seems perfectly coherent to
believe that God can bring into being a form of ‘matter’ endowed
with such strong self-organising principles that it is not subject
to the thermodynamic drift to disorder that characterises the
matter of this world. However, this idea raises two further
questions.
The first is to ask why, if the ‘matter’ of the world to come is
to be free from transience and decay, did God first create the
matter of this world of mortality? Putting it more bluntly, if the
new creation is going to be so wonderful, why bother with the old?
I believe that the answer lies in the recognition that the divine
creative purpose is intrinsically two-step.
First, creatures must be allowed to exist at some distance from
their Creator, as finite beings free to be themselves and to ‘make
themselves’ (the theological understanding of the evolutionary
exploration of potentiality) without being totally overwhelmed by
the naked presence of Infinite deity. This veiling of deity is why
the character of the old creation is evolutionary, a world in which
the death of one generation is the price of the new life of the
next. However, God’s final purpose is eventually to draw creatures
into a freely-embraced closer relationship with their Creator. That
will be the world of the new creation. This world contains
sacraments, covenanted occasions in which the veil over the divine
presence becomes thinned; the world to come will be totally
sacramental, fully diffused with the revealed presence of God. That
is why the character of its physical ‘matter’ will be so
different.
THE SEED EVENT
The second question is where will this ‘matter’ come from? I
believe that it will be the transformed matter of this world. God
has a purpose for the whole of creation and all creatures will
participate in the new creation in appropriate ways. Human destiny
beyond death and cosmic destiny beyond death lie together. The new
creation is not God wiping the slate clean and starting over again.
It is not creation ‘out of nothing’, but creation ‘out of the old’.
For the Christian, the paradigm is the resurrection of Christ. The
Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transform of his dead body –
that is why the tomb was empty. The resurrection is the seed event
from which the new creation has already begun to grow.
So what will the life of the new creation be like? People
sometimes say that, though they would like a lot more life than we
get in this world, they would not want to live for ever. Eventually
it would get too boring. If the life to come were just a matter of
sitting on a cloud and endlessly chanting ‘Alleluia’, that might
well be so. But the life beyond death will be the endless
exploration of the inexhaustible riches of the divine nature,
progressively unveiled. It will be a world of redemptive
process.
I think that humans are intrinsically temporal beings and there
will be ‘time’ in the world to come as well as ‘matter’. Part of
that redemptive process will be judgement and purgation, both
hopeful words if understood correctly.
Judgement is not appearing before a testy celestial judge, eager
to condemn, but a coming to terms with the reality of our lives,
including the dross that has accumulated in our characters, from
which we will be cleansed by the action of purgation by divine
grace.
There is clearly much speculation in what I have been trying to
say. In many respects, of course, we shall just have to wait and
see. Nevertheless I think that this tentative exploration has a
valid point. It is important not to lose our nerve in believing in
a destiny beyond our death. Fundamentally the issue is whether the
universe truly makes sense, not just now but always, or whether it
is ultimately pointless, as Weinberg thought. Whatever the details
may prove to be, Christian belief affirms that the creation is
everlastingly significant, resting this belief on the twin
foundations of trust in the faithfulness of God and the
resurrection of Christ.
John Polkinghorne