‘Let There Be Science’- Publication Day!

Here it is – the short, broad-readership, story-filled book about why God loves science and why science has always been stimulated, supported and has flourished within a worldview in which people seek to serve God.

Let There Be Science!

Like its background text, Faith and Wisdom in Science (good for further reading by the way), it’s main task is to blow away the myth that science and orthodox Christian faith are in any necessary conflict now, or at any time in history.

On the contrary, we find that throughout the ages, the faith required to do science, that our minds might just be up to the job of perceiving the inner structures of the universe, as well as its cosmic glories, is motivated by the same ‘Faith’ that dares to suppose that those very minds reflect in some way that of their Creator.

Furthermore, we find that the reason to do science is also theologically grounded.  Historically, the great scientists at the start of the early modern period when experimental science got off the ground, had a worked out theological reason for acquiring knowledge of the natural world.  To take just one example, Johannes Kepler, whose calculations following Tycho Brahe’s new observations of the planets identified for the first time the true structure and dynamics of the solar system, said:

Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts… and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life

Science is hard, sometimes painful – new ideas get stifled if they go against the grain, our confused minds find many false avenues to waste time down, experiments and calculations go wrong.  Yet this very painful ‘harvesting’ of knowledge about nature is strongly resonant with the mandate we understand humankind has from the Bible in Genesis chapter 3:

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

though the command to name the animals and birds – where names stand in for a knowledge of their natures – was not rescinded. We find, as in Faith and Wisdom in Science, God in conversation with humankind about nature once more in the wonderful Book of Job.  Here, the essential ingredient of science – the creative question – is celebrated and explored in the great ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job in chapters 38-42.  Just read a taste of this agenda-setting text from chapter 38:

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?
    Can you loosen Orion’s belt?
³² Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons
    or lead out the Bear with its cubs?
³³ Do you know the laws of the heavens?
    Can you set up God’s  dominion over the earth?

³⁴ “Can you raise your voice to the clouds
    and cover yourself with a flood of water?
³⁵ Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
    Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
³⁶ Who gives the ibis wisdom
    or gives the rooster understanding?
³⁷ Who has the wisdom to count the clouds?

And now here what a great scientist such as Werner Heisenberg says about questions:

In the course of coming into contact with the empirical method, physicists have gradually learned how to pose a question properly. Now, proper questioning often means that one is more than half way towards solving the problem

So why do so many people, and especially sadly, so many young people, think that they have to choose between science and Christian (or any) faith?  Sadly the answer is because of misrepresentation and a covering over of truth by all sides:

• The ‘conflict myth’ was really set off by two books in the late 19th century by Draper and White.  Little read today and historically discredited, their polemic nonetheless lies underneath many peoples’ thinking.
• Bad history, such as representing the Galileo affair as the clash of science with religion (when it can’t have been – all those involved on both sides were Christians and the arguments were almost entirely scientific ones) serve to bolster the impression of conflict.
• A recent (20th century), theologically bad, way of interpreting the Bible that assumes that it gives us shortcuts to scientific answers, rather than setting out our task, has had terrible effects.  For example, the pitting of ‘The Bible’ against ‘evolution’ is quire wrong.

Here we have just a taste of the work we need to do, and when we’ve done it, what then?  Perhaps Heisenberg has more advice for us:

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you!

By all means raise a glass with Dave and me to the wide and healthy readership of Let There Be Science (already in the Amazon top-5000 and top 3 for science and religion after just a day!).

Better still – do come along to Waterstones York (tell them you are coming) at 7pm on Tues February 21st to here Richard Staples of BBC Radio York talk with me and Dave about the book – and have a glass or what have you as well!

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Year 10 Quiz Science and Faith

No better way, I think, to start the Faith and Wisdom in Science New Year than by spending a day with school pupils.  I am always very grateful to be invited by Michael Harvey and his colleagues to participate in any God and the Big Bang events, and Thursday saw us at Abbey Grange School in Leeds.  As ususal, the day ran with an entire year group, working with religious studies and science teachers together (when we can) and offering talks, science labs, and discussions on Christian Belief and Science.

This time Michael suggested we offer prizes for the best questions posed at the Q&A at the end – and what better (hmmm…) to offer than pre-publication copies of Let There Be Science, the new book that talks, with teenage school pupils especially in mind, of the reasons that one does not need to choose between science and Christian faith.

Questions

Some great questions too!  What about, ‘Would intelligent life on other planets not pose a problem for Christian theology – why would it be fair for Jesus to visit the Earth and not elsewhere?

This one won a prize.  It pushes at the apparent specificity of the Earth, and human beings, in an incomparably vast universe whose size seems to draw value away from our provincial and diminutive backwater, and also to pose this problem of inappropriate favouritism. Interestingly, my colleague David Wilkinson at St Johns College Durham has written a book about the theology of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

There’s lots to say – and lots of resonance with the Bible’s Book of Job, which among other things cautions, in the ‘Lord’s Answer’, Job to think of human beings as the pinnacles of creation, but points to the alien creatures of Leviathan and Behemoth as more wonderful still… But this is also not a new problem.  An incarnation in Palestine in AD30 is in many ways as specific and ‘irrelevant’ to 21st century London, for example, as a visit to a small planet at the unfashionable end of the Galaxy’s Western Spiral Arm might be to an inhabitant of Andromeda (until we collide that is).  Yet encounters with the risen Christ are as relevant, revolutionary and real there and then as they were as recorded in the closing passages of the Gospels.  Read David’s book for more…

Another thoughtful one – What evidence would you give, scientific and philosophical, in support of Christian belief?

It’s an important one as one of the current myths floating about media, schools and conversations is that Christian belief is unevidenced dogma and so conflicts with science methodologically.  I tend to be personal in answering this sort of question and point to my main five reasons for belief:

• A universe that is comprehensible by minds
• The New Testament events and the need for an explanation of the consequences of what they claim was the resurrection of Jesus.
• The account that Christianity gives of the observation that there is a non-relativisable thing called ‘evil’ (non-relative ethics in a system can only be defined with regard to a context outside that system)
• A personal experience of encounter with a Person in being a Christian
• The experience of thousands of humble, unnoticed, kind, people whose distinctiveness and love they themselves attribute to their following Jesus

Probably there ought to be a long Faith and Wisdom in Science blog that expands these and adds to the list in a ‘long apologetic’ of some kind.  Possibly titled Why I am not an Atheist or some such.

The last question was more or less Why do you do this?  The answer is not to insist that the pupils should believe in God – this is their road and their choice.  But it IS to quash the demonstrable and pernicious lie that Science logically implies atheism, that you have to choose between Christianity and Science. God loves science -it’s his gift, so nothing could be further from the truth.