Questions of Truth - Key Themes and Ideas

Key Themes and Ideas

The book grew out of questions generated at a website organized to communicate Polkinghorne's ideas. It groups selected questions under seven topics:

1. Leading Questions gives an overview of Polkinghorne's views on nine questions, including science and religion, the existence of God, and atheism.
2. The Concept and Existence of God begins with "Can God's existence be proved?" and addresses The God Delusion, omniscience, predestination and the Trinity.
3. The Universe considers the Big Bang, the Anthropic Principle and a Theory of Everything.
4. Evolution starts with "Is evolution a fact or a theory?", discusses Intelligent Design, which is deemed an unfortunate use of language and a theological mistake, and explores whether the mind can be explained by evolution.
5. Evil suggests that "The evil that is not the result of human sin seems to be the result of the workings out of the natural laws of physics and biology" and considers the Devil, cancer and Original Sin.
6. Human Being suggests that Adam and Eve refer to the first spiritually conscious human beings, that the soul is something logically distinct from the body but not a separate physical entity, and that conscience is "our deepest understanding of right and wrong".
7. Religion begins with "Is atheism a form of faith?", suggests that "For each part of the Bible you have to ask what kind of writing it is and what God is trying to tell us through it", and considers the Resurrection and that "God will not force us to accept his love ... will save everyone he can - no-one will be excluded because God did not want them."

Each question is followed by the responses of Beale and Polkinghorne, sometimes as a single answer and sometimes by the two authors individually. Its three appendixes constitute a third of the book:

• Anthropic Fine-Tuning draws on Martin Rees's book Just Six Numbers to illustrate the point that if the fundamental constants of physics were slightly different then no intelligent life could exist in the Universe. It then considers Multiverse ideas and especially Lee Smolin's Cosmological natural selection, which, it suggests, has problems from physics and evolutionary dynamics. It also discusses notions of complexity and improbability.
• Brain and Consciousness suggests that "pretty much everything in the universe has a physical aspect and an informational aspect, neither of which is more foundational than the other", and that informational entities like the Mass in B Minor cannot be considered as material objects. It proposes that "your body and your mind are different aspects of you", and that the inherent uncertainties of neuron firing mean that the brain is not fully deterministic.
• Evolution begins by pointing out that since Augustine Christians have not taken the Genesis creation accounts "literally", and that key developers of the current theory (e.g. Mendel, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Simon Conway-Morris and Martin Nowak) have been Christians, suggesting that there is no conflict between Christianity and evolution, that small genetic changes can have big effects, that genetic determinism is mistaken, and that there are evolutionary benefits to religion.