Reducing reductionism to irrationality

Francis Crick is best known as the co-discover with James Watson of the structure of DNA and of the hypothesis of the genetic code. This was the beginning of a whole new field of science, molecular biology. Given this scientific success perhaps it is not surprising that Crick was a passionate reductionist. Later in Crick's career he turned to neuroscience and wrote a popular book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul. In it he makes the classic reductionist claim (p. 3):

"You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules"

In response John Polkinghorne writes that Crick's agenda is 

ultimately suicidal. If Crick’s thesis is true we could never know it. For, not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scrap-heap. It also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen… The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. The world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and one of us believes it to be so.

John Polkinghorne, One World, p. 92.

I thank Lewis Jones for bringing these quotations to my attention. They are discussed in more detail by John Lennox, in God's Undertaker: Has science buried God?
On a lighter note, these issues are also discussed here.

A scientist looks at the Nicene creed

I am enjoying reading John Polkinghorne's Science and Christian Belief: Theological reflections of a bottom-up thinker. He takes the Nicene Creed and reflects on it phrase by phase. The book is based on his 1993-1994 Gifford lectures.

Quantum theory is like a drug

I am in Oxford for a conference Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, in honour of the 80th Birthday of Sir John Polkinghorne.

Here is some of the last two paragraphs of Polkinghorne's book Quantum Theory: A very short introduction.

It seems appropriate to close this chapter with an intellectual health warning. Quantum theory is certainly strange and surprising, but it is not so odd that according to it `anything goes.' Of course, no one would actually argue with such crudity, but there is a kind of discourse that can come perilously close to adopting that caricature attitude. One might call it `quantum hype.' I want to suggest that sobriety is in order when making an appeal to quantum insight.

..... Wave/particle duality is a highly surprising and instructive phenomenon, whose seemingly paradoxical character has been resolved for us by the insights of quantum field theory. It does not, however, afford us a license to indulge in embracing any pair of apparently contradictory notions that take our fancy. Like a powerful drug, quantum theory is wonderful when applied correctly, disastrous when abused and misapplied.

The cartoon is from xkcd.

Polkinghorne on emergence in science and theology

At the end of the month I am speaking at a conference Quantum Theory and the Nature of Reality in honour of the 80th birthday of Sir John Polkinghorne, who has done so much to promote a meaningful and scholarly dialogue between science and theology.

As well as giving the talk I have been asked to prepare a white paper (due this friday), Is emergence the nature of physical reality? Consequently, I am wrestling with a chapter The Nature of Physical Reality, from Polkinhorne's 1991 book, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology, which was reprinted in the journal Zygon. Here are a few extracts I am trying to digest.

Abstract. This account of the dynamical theory of chaos leads to a metaphysical picture of a world with an open future, in which the laws of physics are emergent-downward approximations to a more subtle and supple reality and in which there is downward causation through information input as well as upward causation through energy input. Such a metaphysical picture can accommodate both human and divine agency.

Subatomic particles are not only not “more real” than a bacterial cell, they also have no greater privileged share in determining the nature of reality.

.... If apparently open behavior is associated with underlying apparently deterministic equations, which is to be taken to have the greater ontological seriousness—the behavior or the equations? Which is the approximation and which is the reality?

....epistemology and ontology are intimately connected. One can see how natural this view is for a scientist by considering the early history of quantum theory. Heisenberg’s famous discussion of thought experiments, such as the gamma-ray microscope, dealt with what can be measured. It was an epistemological analysis. Yet for the majority of physicists it led to ontological conclusions. They interpret the uncertainty principle as not being merely a principle of ignorance (as Bohm, for example, would interpret it) but as a principle of genuine indeterminacy. In an analogous way, it seems to me to be a coherent possibility to interpret the undoubted unpredictability of so much of physical process as indicating that process to be ontologically open.....

d’Espagnat [who discussed the philosophical implications of quantum theory] does not go all the way with Kant. He insists that independent reality is veiled rather than inaccessible; it is elusive rather than absolutely unknowable.

I am driven to greater metaphysical boldness .... I believe that his cautious invocation of veiledness is, at the least, not inconsistent with the kind of openness about the nature of reality that I am trying to explore.

.... such a world of intertwined order and novelty is just that which might be expected as the creation of a God both faithful and loving, who will endow God’s world with the twin gifts of reliability and freedom....

The correct lower-level description can only provide an envelope of possibility within which top-down causation will find its scope for realization. 

..... God’s interaction with God’s own world can be expected to respect its freedom (including our own). God’s acts will be veiled within the unpredictability of complex process. They may be discernible by faith, but they will not be demonstrable by experiment.