Arthur Peacocke - Peacocke's views, Implications of Peacocke's theology

Biophysical chemist and clergyman, born in Watford, Greater London, UK. He studied at Oxford, and was later appointed lecturer in biophysical chemistry at Birmingham University (1948–59). During the 1950s he was a co-researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the newly discovered double helix of DNA, and then joined the faculty at Oxford (1959). His interest in religion led him to theological study, and he gained a degree in 1971, making him the only person in Oxford's divinity faculty to hold dual doctorates in science and theology. In 1971 he was ordained a member of the Anglican clergy, and two years later became Dean of Clare College, Cambridge. In 1986 he founded the Society of Ordained Scientists, a mainly Anglican organization for working scientists. Returning to Oxford in 1984, he ran the Ian Ramsay Centre for the study of science and theology until 1988. He published many books on the creative interaction between science and religion, including Theology for a Scientific Age (1990), God and the New Biology (1994), and Paths from Science Towards God (2001). He received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 2001.

Peacocke is perhaps best known for his attempts to rigorously argue that Evolution and Christianity need not be at odds.

Peacocke's views

Arthur Peacocke describes a position which is referred to elsewhere as “front-loading”, after the fact that it suggests that evolution is entirely consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful God who exists throughout time, sets initial conditions and natural laws, and knows what the result will be.

Process as immanence

The process-as-immanence argument is meant to deal with Philip Johnson’s contention that naturalism reduces God to a distant entity. It shows us that “God is the Immanent Creator creating in and through the processes of natural order.” (473, original italics) Evolution is the continuous action of God in the world. (474)

Chance optimizing initial conditions

The chance-optimizing-initial-conditions argument runs as follows: the role of chance in biological evolution can be reconciled with a purposive creator because “there is a creative interplay of “chance” and law apparent in the evolution of living matter by natural selection.” (475) There is no metaphysical implication of the physical fact of “chance”; randomness in mutation of DNA “does not, in itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends of manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and eco-systems.” (476) Chance is to be seen as “eliciting the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed ab initio.” (477)

Random process of evolution as purposive

The random-process-of-evolution-as-purposive argument is perhaps best considered an adjunct to the process-as-immanence argument, and a direct response to Johnson’s continued references to evolution as “purposeless.” Peacocke suggests “that the evolutionary process is characterized by propensities towards increase in complexity, information-processing and –storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness… the actual physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualized and instantiated is contingent on the history of the confluence of disparate chains of events, including the survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred.” (478)

Natural evil as necessity

The natural-evil-as-necessity argument is meant to be a response to the classic philosophical argument of the Problem of Evil, which contends that an all-powerful, all-knowing and beneficent God cannot exist as such because natural evil (mudslides which crush the legs of innocent children, for instance) occurs. Peacocke contends that the capacities necessary for consciousness and thus a relationship with God also enable their possessors to experience pain, as necessary for identifying injury and disease. God is said to suffer with His creation because He loves creation, conforming the deity to be consistent with the Christian God.

Jesus as pinnacle of human evolution

The Jesus-as-pinnacle-of-human-evolution argument proposed by Peacocke is that Jesus Christ is “the actualization of [evolutionary] potentiality can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity….

Implications of Peacocke's theology

This framework, and particular aspects of Peacocke’s argument, are at work in a number of positions actually taken by various Christian denominations. evolution, but we subscribe to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation, so we believe God created the universe and all that is therein, only not necessarily in six 24-hour days, and that he may actually have used evolution in the process of creation.” Similarly, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., in a 2002 resolution by the 214th assembly of the church, stated: “…the universe, as God’s free creation, has a genuine autonomy given to it, within the providence of God, so that the structure and the history of the universe can only be known by means of an empirical inquiry of nature itself….