This is a good book, rather dense, but well done.

#2,  I would also recommend Owen Gingerich’s little book, God’s Universe (Harvard University Press, 2006) (Gingerich is Emeritus Professor of Astronomy and History of Science, Harvard); Francis S. Collins’s, The Language of God (Free Press, 2006) (Collins is head of the Human Genome Project), as well as Alister McGrath’s recent scientific theology project, beginning with his The Science of God (Eerdmans, 2004).

Older works to look at would include T. F. Torrance’s numerous works on the relation between science and theology, as well as Stanley Jaki and E. L. Mascall.

Of course, the response comments show that Polkinghorne et al have their work cut out for them.  Says one commenter:

“Every competent biologist agrees the development of life on this planet, including the development of the first living cells, was a natural process. The imaginary magic fairy, or what brainwashed people call God, had nothing to do with it.”

Well, no.  If Polkinghorne et al do not believe that the development of the first living cells was an entirely natural process, then it is not true that “every competent biologist” believes that it is.  Every competent biologist who is also a philosophical naturalist believes that the origin of life was an entirely natural process.  But that is a philosophical and theological position, one that scientists qua scientists are no more competent to address than anyone else.

Polkinghorne is not a biologist, and thus can’t be put in the category of “competent biologist” either.

Well, yes.  As I understand it, Polkinghorne was a particle physicist. McGrath has a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics (does that make him a “competent biologist”?), Gingerich is an astronomer (not a biologist), and Collins is a geneticist (another “competent biologist”?).  I took the point of the remark to be about competent scientists as opposed to benighted religionists, not necessarily that of contrasting the scientific abilities of a particle physicist (like Polkinghorne) with those of a biologist.

Also, Matt Thompson, I think perhaps we were using the word “naturalist scientific process” in different ways.  Both Polkinghorne and Gingerich argue that the physical sciences deal with efficient causality, not formal causality.  Keeping in mind that distinction, to say, as you do, “the doctrine of creation is not inconsistent with a naturalist scientific enterprise,” is not in contradiction with my statement: “Polkinghorne et al do not believe that the development of the first living cells was an entirely natural process.”

Pinsky says that Polkinghorne ascribes to the view called “theistic evolutionism” which Pinsky understands to be what is called theistic Darwinism.  However, Cardinal Dulles in an article called “God and Evolution” in the Oct. 2007 issue of FIRST THINGS says that Polkinghorne “holds that Darwinism is incapable of explaining why multicellular plants and animals arise when single cellular organism seem to cope with the environment quite successfully.”  As I understand him Polkinghorne holds to a teleological view which posits the necessity of divine intervention within the created order.  So, Polkinghorne is saying much more then the doctrine of creation and Darwinsim are not inconsistent.