Chaos theory and divine action

The question: Can science explain everything?

Whether or not science can explain everything is a question that was never far from the minds of a large group of theologians and scientists who met in Oxford last week. They'd assembled to celebrate the 80th birthday of John Polkinghorne, the professor of mathematical physics who made his name for his work on quarks, now an Anglican priest, and author of many books on science and religion. Moreover, it turns out that the question of science's limitations is intimately linked to Polkinghorne's much misunderstood account of God's action in the world.

The challenge is to avoid concocting a "God of the gaps" – a deity whose action occurs in the gaps where scientific explanations apparently fall short. The best known example of this is probably the bacterial flagellum. Advocates of intelligent design have argued that these whip-like devices for locomotion can only be explained by divine intervention because of their supposed "irreducible complexity". The trouble is that science progresses. What can't be explained in one decade is often explained in the next. Gaps get filled, and so God gets squeezed out.

Polkinghorne has been accused of advocating a God-of-the-gaps approach too. He has been taken to argue that chaos theory offers a way of understanding divine action, by virtue of the mistaken assumption that chaos theory paints a picture of an indeterminate world: if it's impossible to forecast the weather next week with any degree of accuracy, then perhaps that points to a pervasive randomness in the physical world, which God might exploit to divine advantage.

But that's not his idea, as Nick Saunders pointed out at the conference. As Polkinghorne knows better than most, the equations of chaos theory do, in fact, yield tightly causal results. The issue at stake in chaos theory is rather that you need to know the initial conditions of any system to an astonishingly high degree of accuracy to make accurate predictions. In practice, that's impossible to achieve. In other words, chaotic systems are not indeterminate, but underdetermined.

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