Words Worth Noting - May 1, 2022

“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist