The Real is the Relational

In expounding on the coherence of Trinitarian theology with contemporary physics, Polkinghorne notes htat “it is striking that so methodologically reductionist a subject as physics has pointed us in this relational and holistic direction. This tendency is surely reinforced by chaos theory’s discovery that at the macroscopic level of physical process there are many systems that are of such exquisite sensitivity to the details of their circumstance that they cannot be properly isolated from the effects of their environment. The slightest disturbance will totally change their future behaviour.”

The discovery of the relationality of the universe might force a re-vision of what we have thought of as the laws of nature: “the detailed character of the laws of nature that we have formulated on the basis of isolatable experimentation is no more than what one might call a ‘downward-emergent’ approximation to some more holistic account of physical reality, so that what we presently believe we know is only really valid in the special circumstances that an effective degree of separation is a good approximation to the situation.”

He sums up with a gloss on Zizioulias: Not “Being as Communion” but “Reality is relational.”