Two Years of ‘Faith and Wisdom in Science’? And a question – ‘How did you come to write it?’

I have just returned from a remarkable evening at a small town in the Scottish Boarders called Biggar.  The church there had arranged for an evening community talk and Q&A on science and faith, following the book Faith and Wisdom in Science.  I have given about 40 such talks in the last 2 years, but this was by any measure a rather special one.  the questions went on and on, as did the discussions over the book signing at the end.

Somewhere in mid flow talking about reconstructing a picture of the universe at different lengthscales at a talk on Faith and Wisdom in Science.

 

It makes a fitting staging-post for reflection after 2 years since the book first came out in hardback, and at the point at which the paperback edition is published.

So I have updated the blogsite somewhat.  There is now a special page for media resources (videos and podcasts).  Another one gives links to the reviews of the book that are still emerging in popular, scientific and theological outlets.

Perhaps more usefully there is now a complete online list of the errata that crept into the first imprint and which I am swatting away as readers kindly point them out.

One question from Biggar got me reflecting deeply – a lady wanted to know the process, or processes by which I had come to write the book.  What were my motivations, sources, hopes?  It’s a while since I had tried to draw all those threads together, and I found it a very helpful exercise.

I think that the first reason was nothing to do with the ‘Faith and Science’ question at all. In fact, perhaps the happiest comment about the book was made to me last year by a colleague – ‘Tom, your book – is isn’t really a science and religion book at all, is it?’ Indeed it isn’t!  It’s a science book – or especially an articulation of how science is at the heart of human culture, and has been there in its earlier forms for many hundreds of years.  I realised that I also wanted to know what science was for.  After all – I was going to spend a long time doing it throughout my life, and some idea of the purpose to aim at would be imp0rtant.  But purpose is not a category that sits easily with the way science is talked about.  That is where theology comes in – it is the one discipline still comfortable with the idea of purpose.  I have said before that were one a believer or not, for that reason alone, theology becomes a resource for social teleology!

Then, of course, there was the public discourse of the ‘religion and science’ debate.  Worthy in its own way, I found it increasingly boxed in, and consistently over-apologetic.  The question, explicit or implicit, always seemed to be, ‘can you reconcile science with religion?’  This for me was never the best question, and assumed too much wrong ‘geometry’ of the relationship between the two.  Very few people seemed to be asking the more fruitful question that leads from the issue of purpose – what does science do within the Kingdom of God, once conceived of as God’s gift?  That became the central quest of Faith and Wisdom in Science.

From William Blake’s series of paintings depicting scenes from the Book of Job. Behemoth and Leviathan Wikimedia commons

Then, finally, there was the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament in general, and the Book of Job in particular.  The notion that the tradition of Wisdom constitutes the tributary stream that became science is suggested strongly by the old name for my disciplines, Natural Philosophy – love of wisdom to do with natural things.  But a close reading of Job convinced me.  The wonderful ‘Lord’s Answer’ has to be the most profound nature poem of ancient literature.  It had long fascinated me, and the idea of making an extensive study of Job as a whole as the centrepiece of a book became impossible to ignore. The ‘Nature Trail through Job’ became the central pillar of the book, it’s highest vantage point.  Climbing up to it through an analysis of science as human story, and through creation stories in the Old Testament, it then provided the vision and the material to develop a ‘Theology of Science’ in consequence.

Purpose, science as a humanity, the theology of (not ‘and’) science, and the tradition of Wisdom.  These became the motivations, sources and energies that turned into the book, and which I hope will become much beside as in the church we embrace science as God’s gift, and in society we learn to contemplate it as part of what it means for all of us to be human.

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Einstein and the Biblical Wisdom of Questions

Einstein has had a good month, all things considered. His century-old prediction, that the very fabric of space and time can support waves travelling at light-speed, was confirmed by the LIGO collaboration.  More, the bizarre and horrifying consequences of his theory of gravity, the singularly-collapsed stars that came to be called ‘black holes’ have been directly detected for the first time.  As is now widely known (but how could anyone actually conceptualise the monstrous event?), it was the mutual circling and merger of two black holes that set the gravitational ripples on their billion light-year journey across the ocean of space towards the shores of our solar system.

The events have reminded us of the powerful sense of inspiration that comes from contemplating any of Einstein’s scientific achievements. He showed how to interpret the ‘Brownian motion’ of particulate matter as a conceptual window into the molecular world, once it is understood as the random buffeting of tiny but visible particles from invisible molecules. He re-imagined light as a gas of massless particles, and in doing so opened up

Einstein thought of gravity as a curvature of space (and time) generated by mass

a path to the quantum world of the atom.  He day-dreamed as a teenager about trying to catch a light-beam, a journey of the mind that led him to the universal constant of the speed of light, and to the mutual, relativistic, inter-conversion of space and time.  And of course, he wondered if gravity might better be thought of, not as a force, but as a sort of curvature in the warp and weft of space and time.

What glories indeed! But surprisingly, he never thought of himself as particularly gifted.  Rather he would attribute his success to the prioritisation of the question rather than the answer. ‘The important thing is not to stop questioning.’ was a frequent admonition in one form or another.  A long form of this urging of careful question-crafting attributed to him goes something like this:

‘If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.’

‘What would I see if I caught up with light?’

‘Why cant I tell the difference between being accelerated and being pulled on by gravity?’

‘What is the source of the jiggling motion of tiny dust motes suspended in water?’

‘How can I think of light in the same way I think of matter?’

These are the questions that lead to the greatest scientific discoveries of the last century. The centrality of the creative question is true at any level of scientific endeavour.  I find myself explaining to new PhD students that, although they have got to this point by proving themselves uncommonly adept and finding the right answers, this will be of little use to them now.  They need to learn instead to craft the fruitful question.  That is the central imaginative, creative act of science.

From William Blake’s series of paintings depicting scenes from the Book of Job. Behemoth and Leviathan Wikimedia commons

 

Perhaps that is why I have always been entranced by the ancient long-poem of Natural Wisdom found in the Biblical ‘Book of Job’. It is usually called ‘The Lord’s Answer’, for it is the long-awaited response of Yahweh to the angry Job’s railings that he is suffering unjustly, and that the world is consequently out of joint. But ‘answer’ is in every other way an inappropriate description of the speech.  For it takes the form of a list of questions, posed to the hapless Job, but directed outwards into the manifold mysteries of the natural world.  Here are just a few of the 160 or so:

Who cuts a channel for the torrent of rain, a path for the thunderbolt,

Where is the realm where heat is created, which the sirocco spreads across the earth?

Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loose Orion’s belt?

Can you send lightning bolts on their way, and have them report to you, ‘Ready!’?

Is it by your understanding that the hawk takes flight, and spreads its wings toward the south?

A poem, with each verse a question, each trope probing its own domain of creation: the winds and weather, the sky and stars, the animal world. They are highly potent questions – the containment of flood and lightening is asking about the balance of chaos and order.  The binding of the Pleiades (a tight star-cluster of associated young stars much closer than those of Orion) is motivated by curiosity aroused by observation.  There is indeed a reason that they are closely-grouped.  The pattern of avian navigation holds puzzles for us still, although we know that birds also can register patterns in the stars.  I have often suggested to scientist colleagues that they read through the Lords’ Answer to Job.  Uniformly they respond with recognition that here lies a fundamental human motivation to look deeply into nature that we also share.

In some ways, Faith and Wisdom in Science is an extended scientist’s commentary on the Book of Job. That we would have been called ‘natural philosophers’ two centuries ago, rather than ‘scientists’, is a clue that the story of science begins in the ancient thought-world of ‘wisdom’.  Certainly one of its most luminous themes – the celebration of the creative question – has not dimmed.  Einstein would have approved, but can we, in turn, succeed in passing on the love of the question, including the unanswered question, to our children?

Faith, Wisdom and Gravitational Waves

Thursday this week saw a wonderful gift from a large international team of scientists and engineers to the rest of humankind.  They reported the first detection of gravitational waves following their prediction by Albert Einstein a century before (in Einstein, A., Annalen der Physik 49, 769-822 (1916)] .

The discovery is the first-fruits of overwhelming human imagination, to conceive of such a thing as a wave that travels in the warp and weft of space and time itself, of the extraordinary talent, skill and care taken in building the exquisitely sensitive LIGO detectors, and of the deeply impressive patience, over decades, of researchers willing to devote fruitless decades to the long search in the hope that it will one day open our gravitational ‘ears’ to the sounds of the universe.

The astounding work deserves to be shared and enjoyed widely, and the scientists and science journalists have done an excellent job in trying to do so.  Even so several people have asked me, quite baffled, to explain what has happened.  I have found that the analogy of ripples on a lake works well:

Ripples from a splash in a lake take a while to reach the toy boat at your feet, like the gravitational waves from the black holes.

Imagine that you are standing on the shore of a calm lake.  You have a small toy boat with you that you set afloat at your feet. Then you find the largest stone within reach and heft it away into the lake.  On landing and sinking it creates a large splash a few metres away from you.  Then ripples start to spread out in circles from the entry point, widening and weakening as they travel.  After a few moments, the toy boat at your feet is disturbed by the ripples as they arrive at the shore, and very gently starts bobbing up and down.  The splash is the equivalent of the merging black holes, the surface of the lake behaves like the space between the Earth and the distant galaxy where the black holes dwell, the ripples model the gravitational waves, and the toy boat corresponds to the sensitive laser-beam detectors, which also were caused to ‘bob’ by tiny amounts as the waves passed by.

 

If you understand that, then you have understood everything about the LIGO discovery, apart from the details of the particular space-time geometries of the gravitational waves, and some rather different numbers.  The splash was not metres away but 1.3 billion light years, in a galaxy far, far away.  We know that very simply from being able, thanks to Einstein, to work out how much energy was released at the source, and therefore how far away it must have been to produce the signal strength observed here on Earth.  The wave speed was not a few metres a second, but the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth 7 times a second.  The detector bob was not a few millimetres, but one thousandth of the diameter of a single proton.  The sheer sensitivity achieved by the experimentalists to achieve that measurement is perhaps the most impressive aspect of the whole work.

The opportunity to enjoy, celebrate and contemplate this beauty is an opportunity I looked forward to in Faith and Wisdom in Science (which, coincidentally, appeared in paperback this week).  The story embodies many of the aspects of the cultural narrative of science that I advance there: the long human story of looking into nature and seeing with our minds into its hidden structure, the experience of pain and longing in the often painful process of gaining wisdom about nature, the extraordinary human ability to do this – to reconceive of cosmic structure almost as if we were creating a universe, the experience of the joy of a sort of reconciliation when we do it, the faith in the rationality of the universe and our continuing ability to understand it.  I cannot think of a better example to illustrate how science ought to be thought of as a humanity, rather than in some form of opposition to the disciplines of language, art and poetry.  I found myself writing this brief facebook post on the day itself:

This beautiful discovery is utter human joy. The last time we saw such a wonder was in 1888. Heinrich Hertz detected waves of the electromagnetic field predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field equations of electromagnetism in 1865. Einstein wrote the field equations of gravity in 1915. They have wavelike solutions. It took 100 years to see them. The last 40 or so required men and women to dedicate fruitless decades to this beautiful idea. Today their gift is inestimable. It is a sort of poetry – wild imaginative force that entertains the dance of death between black holes of immense proportion, constrained by the tight form of space time curvature and the displacement of a thousandth part of a proton. Yet we noticed just that. The contemplation of all this is a gift. Thank you my patient, loving, enduring, believing fellow scientists.

There are still some glimmers of hope that there are still human activities that have not entirely been monetarised in our Western society.  There is hope that there may be more if we can learn to draw from the ancient resources of Wisdom thinking for today.  A celebration of ‘natural philosophy’ – of ‘the love of wisdom to do with natural things’ that is the real name for ‘science’ – as a deeply human activity, and a necessary part of our individual humanity, has been enriched this week.

Finally, here are the actual signals detected at the two sites, showing the rapidly increasing and quickening oscillations as the two giant black holes circle each other and merge into silence.  Superimposed on the data are the calculations from Einstein’s equations for general relativity, supposing just this scenario.  The ‘chirp’ song could not be clearer.  Not only have we seen gravitational waves for the first time, but also made the first direct detection of a black hole (in fact of course a pair of them).

The original paper in Physical Review Letters is open-access, very readable, and here. What a gift!

The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,^[c][d]
    before his deeds of old;
²³ I was formed long ages ago,
    at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
²⁴ When there were no watery depths, I was given birth,
    when there were no springs overflowing with water;
²⁵ before the mountains were settled in place,
    before the hills, I was given birth,
²⁶ before he made the world or its fields
    or any of the dust of the earth.
²⁷ I was there when he set the heavens in place,
    when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
²⁸ when he established the clouds above
    and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
²⁹ when he gave the sea its boundary
    so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
³⁰     Then I was constantly^[e] at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
    rejoicing always in his presence,
³¹ rejoicing in his whole world
    and delighting in mankind.

Hymn of Wisdom from Proverbs chapter 8

Earth Scientists, Bishops and Fracking … a heady mix at Durham

David Wilkinson has a succinct way to say it: ‘Learn to see Science not as a secular threat, but as God’s Gift’. From that notion follows everything we are excited about. David is Principal of St. John’s College, Durham University, where I have just emerged, dazed, from a discussion of fracking that brought together theology, oil and gas engineering, earth science theory, local community politics, national policy frameworks, global environmental science and more in a group of bishops and scientists. How on earth did we get to this?

David and I have been working together since I joined the university in 2008 to find ways of helping the church, and the world beyond, to see and work with science in new ways. For some time we have been thinking through this germ of an idea – science as God’s gift – talking with others about it, writing books, working with congregations, graduate students, leaders of churches – more or less anyone who will listen and argue about it.

It’s a central thesis and consequence of Faith and Wisdom in Science, that the church theologically can, and politically must engage deeply with science, technology and their social setting.

It dawned upon us that there is a critical group of influential people that much of the ‘science and religion’ discussion either bypasses or forces onto the back foot: senior church leaders at the level of bishop or their equivalent in other denominations. How could we help these crucial opinion-formers, leaders and enablers to navigate what for many of them is unfamiliar territory (only a small minority have a science background) and yet one that is cited over and again as an area in which the church looks ill-equipped and on the defensive? After all, if ‘natural philosophy’ – ‘love of wisdom to do with natural things’, the more theologically-resonant name for ‘science’ – is really God’s gift, then our whole perspective on it changes. For a start, science would now need theological thinking alongside and in support of it, rather than in opposition or defence. It then follows that the repetitive conflict narrative that all too often glues itself to the ‘science and religion’ debate needs complete reframing. Science becomes a human mandate in continuity with the Biblical story of creation and re-creation, and the church a needed voice in the constructive guiding of the new technologies that offer both promise and risk. Scientists in congregations might even be able to feel wanted and valued, rather than hymn-singers on their day off, and scientists with no church connection at all ought to find natural conversation partners in bishops! That last conclusion is a radical prediction of our hypothesis that simply had to be tested.

But how to set about it? The John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charitable (TWC) trust came (after considerable negotiation, discussion, and a pilot project – all long stories for another time) to our aid. TWC has just funded a four-year programme, supported by both Anglican archbishops and the Archbishops’ Council’s Mission and Public Affairs Division, and based at St. John’s College, ‘Christian Leaders in an Age of Science’. It simultaneously supports five strands of work that explores the radical vision:

(i) a full-time researcher (Dr. Lydia Reid) working with Christian leaders nationally,

(ii) the development of material in the theology and ministry of science for ordinands (it’s handy that Durham now runs the Church of England’s Common Awards through St. John’s College),

(iii) a project manager (Revd. Dr. Kathryn Prichard) stationed in Church House, Westminster, who also co-ordinates a growing network of theological and scientific advice on science to the church’s Ministry and Public Affairs division.

(iv) a ‘Scientists in Congregations’ project sponsoring awards to churches of up to £10k that explore locally the consequences of a theology of science as gift-to-a-purpose.

And fifthly? A programme of 3-day workshops where the bishops and scientists work together – visiting labs, meeting young researchers, hearing about new research, exploring history and theology, thinking though new messages in the media … THAT’s where the fracking discussion happened. Just the first of six – this one on Earth Sciences but later we will be tackling complexity, the brain and mind, cosmology, the evolution of humans … most seem to be sold out already. I can’t wait.

(a modified version of this article was posted on the Church of England’s Website)

Why all those religions? – lessons from the Wisdom of Science

Every so often, social media supports a round of comment picking up on the question of the many faiths and religions there are and have been overtime.  One such ‘poster’ was endorsed recently by the American Atheist organisation (which by the way does wonderful work in support of atheist views in public and political life, including the highly desirable electability of atheist politicians in that most paradoxical of countries).

But here is the post, originating with comedian Ricky Gervais:

What is going on here hides two unstated assumptions that turn the rather silly quote into an aspirational argument for the illogicality of religious belief:

(1) Every religion teaches that it is correct and the other are wrong

(2) Given an object or aspect of external reality, people will have the same narrative concerning it

This is supposed to be strong evidence against any external reality that anyone has ever called ‘God’ because by syllogistic reasoning, the existence of God would activate (2), which is in conflict with (1). However, neither (1) nor (2) is true. I will briefly treat both in the following (though necessarily at greater length than the post itself).  For this is one of the common fallacies of atheism (at least the popular kind) that would be helped by some scientific thinking and experience.

One thing ought to be made quite clear as a preliminary – that the implied claim of the lazy ‘3000 religions’ language is that there are thousands of arbitrarily different religions in existence with essentially no common features. This is not so – the vast majority of the world’s population (which is still in overwhelming majority religiously affiliated) are Christians (31.4%), Muslims (23.2%) and Hindu (15%) [1]. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all root themselves in a common history of revelation beginning with Abraham, share a great deal of scriptural, theological and ethical teaching and practice – and furthermore recognise that in their teaching (see below). Together with basic (Vedic) Hinduism all are mono-theistic and creational. So we are not at all faced with the smorgasboard of random religious proliferation you suggest at all.

So on the substance of (1) the rhetorical sleight of hand here is to force evaluation into a 1-bit ‘right or wrong’ measure. To a scientist, incidentally, this trick rings warning bells a mile off – we never get to be black and white, right or wrong, about the world – we get better or poorer accounts of it, and a sure sign of a desperate move from a weak position is that its proponents start demanding 1-bit status from their opposing theoretical camps. So, as C.S. Lewis once put it [2], ‘If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view’.

The recognition of both truth and value in other religions is also formalised (in those traditions that like to formalise things). The relevant Roman Catholic statement is ‘Nostra Aetete’, for example [3] which contains the following observation: ‘From ancient times down to the present, there is found among various peoples a certain perception of that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events of human history; at times some indeed have come to the recognition of a Supreme Being, or even of a Father. This perception and recognition penetrates their lives with a profound religious sense.’ Islam, too, has a tradition of respect for the ‘People of the Book’ in both Koran and non-Koranic teachings [4] which played out historically, for example, in the degrees of Mohammed on peaceful relations with Jews and Christians onwards.

There is furthermore a long tradition of the philosophy and anthropology or religion that carefully identifies commonalities and differences in religions. The leading-edge original work here is probably best exemplified by Kant (as in so much else) who in his ‘Religion’ identified an inner structure which he called the ‘pure rational system of religion’. This is a common core that speaks, in differentiate language, of the human state of corruption and need of redemption in some form or other [5].

One example of important detail in this tradition of study is the common appearance of the motif of a dying and rising god [6]. This was instrumental in the development of Lewis’ realisation that one could countenance a ‘True Myth’ as a source of a wide mythological tradition – namely the incarnation of God in Jesus, his death and resurrection as the healing move in answer to the (equally commonly felt – see Kant) need of redemption.

Finally I should add that all this is true in personal experience. I have three times now been privileged to be a participant at inter-faith discussion of science and religion held at CERN under the auspices of its former Director Rolf Heuer. These 3-day symposia of discussions between Jewish, Muslim, Janist, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and atheist scholars and scientists have been living evidence of the mutual respect, learning and valuing that is at the heart of a response to God.

That’s probably enough to show how mistaken proposition (1) is. As for (2) hopefully this doesn’t need to take as long. History of science [7], anthropology [8], cognitive neuroscience [9] all show us that consistently a common externality does not give rise to a common internal human experience nor a common narrative in communities. We bring our own experience, stories, symbols, language to bear on the interpretation of the external world both at the level of individuals and communities. So very radically different accounts of external experience with a common source not only may be different but are expected to be different.

Long-exposure photograph of the Milky Way looking towards the centre of our galaxy

Different cultures have as many stories to tell about the Milky Way, rainbows, the nature of animals, the musical possibilities of sound, as there are cultures. As ideas develop, thinking advances, communication enriches, these change to be sure, and in the area we call ‘science’ do converge to some degree. But timescales for this vary radically. In religion I think the timescales are very much longer than in chemistry.

One reason for the divergence of explanatory narrative about experience is that by ‘explanation’ we mean typically by linking one object or mode of behaviour to another. So explanation becomes especially problematic for aspects of experiences reality that are unique (such as consciousness). McGilchrist (op. cit. – a wonderful book by the way) is very good on this. So there is and cannot be an expectation that as unique an entity as God would give rise to a clearly unequivocal narrative across humanity – quite the opposite in fact.

So in conclusion, since both of the assumptions behind the one-liner are demonstrably wrong, as are a number of the implied co-assumptions, it leads us to a very different place than its author and followers think it does. Far from adding weight to any argument that Christianity is incredible, it exemplifies the difficulties that atheism has in accounting for a universal human experience and response, and the disingenuous tactics that its proponent need to deploy, I am sorry to say, to sustain its appeal, ignoring centuries of reflection on precisely the questions it claims as shiny and new and worthy of the little child who points out the nakedness of an emperor.

The Emperor is naked of course – he hangs there, creator of the stars, stripped and suffering on a cross – ‘foolishness to the Gentiles’ [10] and offering forgiveness and life.

You couldn’t make it up [11]

[1] Pew research Centre statistics http://www.pewforum.org/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/pf_15-04-02_projectionstables8/

[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Harper-Collins, New York (2001), p35

[3] http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html

[4] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein (1973). Sufi Essays. State University of New York Press. p. 139.

[5] Kant, Immanuel, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. (1793). George Di Giovanni (trans.), 57–215.

[6] Lee W. Bailey, “Dying and rising gods” in: David A. Leeming, Kathryn Madden and Stanton Marlan (eds.) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (2009) Springer, pages 266-267

[7] J. Brooke and G. Cantor, ‘Reconstructing Nature’, T&T Clarke (1998)

[8] K. Harstrup, Anthropology and Nature, Routledge (2013)

[9] I. MacGilchrist, ‘The Master and his Emissary’, Yale University Press (2010)

[10] St Paul, 1 Cor 1:23

[11] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, once more

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,900 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

A Christian Voice to the question, ‘What is Science For?’

BBC Radio 4 once nearly caused me a nasty road accident. I had foolishly believed that a drive along the A1M might be safely accompanied by the last of a series of panel discussions on ‘Culture in our Times’ (very ‘radio 4’). All very worthy and improving it was too as I recall – until the last few seconds of the programme when the chair cut in with something like, “Do you think that it’s strange that we’ve been debating ‘culture’ for 6 weeks now and haven’t once talked about science?”. One of the panellists came back immediately with: “Oh no! No – we wouldn’t want to be talking about anything as anoraksic as science in a discussion of culture.” This was of course the point at which I nearly lost control of the car …

It so saddens me – what we have done with science: put it in a little box with ‘geeky’ and ‘weird’, and filtered it for

Why is Science not more like Music?

public consumption in a way that no-one can see the art, the imagination, the love, despair, beauty in it – unless they have gone through years of special training. It stuck me recently that if we had done with music what we have done with science, no-one would ever go to hear a real live jazz quintet, or a symphony orchestra, or an opera. They would happen of course – but only in laboratory conditions away from untrained public ears. We might get the tune hummed to us the next morning on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme and a slightly condescending interview by John Timpson with a conductor or bass player, but the idea that ordinary people might appreciate the difficulties of live harmony and counterpoint would be ridiculous; except of course, that we can – because music is at the heart of being human, whether we just enjoy listening, or can play the Brahms violin concerto from memory.

The 60’s social critique Jacques Barzun once wrote ‘Science with us is not with us an object of contemplation’, and he was right. But it could be. As a lover of creativity and art as well as a scientist I have long felt, long known that science belongs in that ‘basket’ of activities that make us human, where we also find story-telling, song, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, philosophy, language, … All of these are ‘with us’ ‘objects of contemplation’. You might say that they all have their own human stories – their own ‘social narratives’.

But right now science doesn’t have a social narrative that ties it to the deeply human and creative – the very idea to some here will sound ridiculous – but this strange divorce has many harmful consequences from which I just want to pick out three – in politics, in education and in religion (so two out of three taboo topics – I’m working on making it three out of three with sex as well but you’ll have to stay tuned for that)

This first is in the area of science and technology-based policy and its discussion in the public area. Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be able to carry on an adult conversation about this in public and in the press? I’m talking about fracking, climate change and global warming, genetic modification, nuclear power, nanotechnology – we might call them the ‘troubled technologies’. Rather than a reasoned debate on of whether and how to take these things forward, people tend to retrench to their initial positions and lob opinions over the parapet. The politics of conflict, usually fuelled by an intransigent ignorance on all parts, takes the place of informed engagement and convergence. Some of my Durham University colleagues in the faculty of social science have been interested in this phenomenon for a long time, and I was fascinated by their careful research, teasing out the hidden narrative structure of some of these debates. In a large project analysing the fraught Europe-wide discussion of potential nanotechnologies, for example, they found that behind and underneath a conversation ostensibly about appraising risk and benefit lay five unseen narratives:

1. Be careful what you wish for
2. Don’t open Pandora’s Box
3. Don’t meddle with sacred Nature
4. They will keep us in the dark
5. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

Philosopher Jean-Pierre DuPuy calls these ‘narratives of despair’: desire, evil, the sacred, alienation and exploitation. It’s not that science doesn’t have a social narrative – it has actually accrued many contradictory and dark narratives such as these – and all the more powerful and damaging for being silent ones. Like sharks circling under the surface on which the public discussion swims, they control the debate by their fear-inducing presence, without having to surface themselves. Did you notice one thing about them? The ancient ones are all pagan, the modern all grimly secular.

Education. I love to visit schools, especially sixth forms – I sometimes go to their general studies sessions to talk about art and science, or science and faith or something like that. And as in all teaching it quickly becomes apparent by the looks in their eyes who the very bright ones are who are engaging critically with every idea, and who I’m having to work a bit harder for … At some point I like to ask those who did not choose to follow science subjects why they didn’t. The struggling ones sometimes say that they found it too difficult, or weren’t ‘good at it’. That’s itself a sad thing – rather than allow a young person to find an appropriate way of engaging with one of the most astonishing of human accomplishments, we manage to engender a belief that they aren’t good enough for it. But the bright ones never say that; they say something like, ‘I didn’t see that science would give me room for my creativity or imagination’. It’s like a knife through my heart – what have we done when we have so mis-told the story of human re-imagination of the entire cosmos, from the life-cycle of galaxies to the intricate chemistry of plant cells, that our children don’t see any room there for creativity? And so very likely they never do. I have come to believe that one of the cruellest things you can ask of a young person is, ‘are they on the science side or the arts side?’ It’s one of those nasty questions that entraps and restricts rather than frees and creates possibilities.

The church has not escaped from its own versions of ‘narratives of despair’ when it comes to science – or even of ‘narratives of conflict’. Although historians now recognise that 19^th century polemics with titles like Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom are just that – un-evidenced polemics without a shred of history behind them, yet the myth of those conflicts lingers on at the same time as the real conflict of ‘young earth creationism’ infiltrates a biblically and scientifically illiterate church. On the surface, above the circling of these two very dangerous submerged sharks, is a Christian church in most places keeping its distance from science.

What we desperately need is a true story to tell about science, one that enables us to understand it within the long cultural history of humanity. It will tell us what science is for – a narrative of purpose – the philosophers would say, a teleology. And that is why, even if we are secular, we look to theology for resources here. Of all the humanities, theology is alone in still comfortably talking about purpose when in all others it has evaporated from modern discourse. Now when I say ‘purpose’, I’m not looking for an answer at the level of ‘it helps us make better aeroplanes’. Of course it does that, but I’m interested in where science belongs in the story of being human, and for an answer that might sit alongside an answer to the question, ‘what is the purpose of music?’ What does science do within the project of being human?

For scientists who are also Christians, this is by far the most important and fruitful question to ask at the nexus of science and religion. As a professor of physics and Anglican lay reader I am always being asked, ‘how do you reconcile science and religion?’ – a question that begs so many false assumptions that I never know where to start. It belongs in the class of ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ questions. I’m not even going to recognise the framing. The real question is the one we can allow ourselves to explore if for once we can get off the back foot of apologetics and on to the front foot of thinking theologically about the world. It is the question, ‘What God’s gift of science do, as a means of work within God’s Kingdom?’

I’ll never forget the unexpected source of my first clue towards an answer to this question of purpose. A post-holocaust atheist Jewish thinker of the stature of Prof. George Steiner might be the last person you would think might reach for Christian theological narrative in a critique of the post-modern humanities! But in his deep and moving short book, Real Presences, he does just that – drawing on the three-day Easter shape of lost-ness and despair, waiting in the ‘not-yet’, and future hope, to articulate the human experience. And within this he talks about the purpose of art, in a simple statement that left me breathless:

Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter.

This is a wonderful idea – that the human is special among the animals because in some strange way we don’t feel at home in the physical space and time within which we live. The world frightens us with its ‘sheer inhuman otherness’. But – ‘Only ART?’ Surely this is exactly what science does – bridging this gulf of inaccessibility, and by observation, contemplation, mathematical reasoning and careful experiment, ‘waking into some measure of communicability’ this strange spiritless stuff around us, and of which we ourselves are made?

Steiner points us to a task of reconciliation with the physical world that needs to be done, and to a long extended story that describes its history, its present and its future. For just this idea of learning to see the world in a new and powerful way –of learning to see it in all its solid fabric of rock and water and ice and space – in the same way as its Creator sees it – lies at the heart of what the Old Testament calls ‘Wisdom’.   Here’s an example – the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ in the Book of Job tells us why it is that God knows the way to wisdom:

But God understands the way to it; it is he who knows its place.

For he looked to the ends of the earth, and beheld everything under the heavens,

So as to assign a weight to the wind, and determine the waters by measure,

A special kind of looking, a special kind of seeing, and measuring – this is the ancient ‘way to wisdom’. This deeply physical book, seeped in Nature imagery from beginning to end, has always fascinated me. At its climax we find what surely must be the most striking of all nature poems from the ancient world – in the form of God’s long-awaited answer to Job’s demands for an explanation of his unjust suffering. It is not the answer we expect, because it takes for form of questions – 163 of them – and all about the natural world:

Were you there when I laid the foundations of the Earth?

Do you know the way to the storehouses of the hail?

Where is the way to the abode of light?

Can you bind the stars of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?

Questions about the areas of science we now call astronomy, meteorology, geology, zoology and more pile up in stunning sequence as Yahweh asks Job to think about how to constitute a creation rich enough and delicate enough to support the complexity of the inhabited skies, oceans and land of the Earth. It’s as if he is saying to the angry Job – yes I can make you the comforting, ordered, world you wish for, the world without storms and floods and earthquakes – but it will be as ordered as a stone, as a crystal – it will be a dead world.

I’ve often suggested to scientist colleagues that they read these chapters from Job – and invariably they come back astonished at the probing imagination behind the text. Now one of the reasons that scientists find the Lord’s Answer to Job so impressive is to do with its very form. For we know that, at the heart of science, is not the so-called ‘scientific method’ with its experiments, tests, refutations and all that. For the ‘method’ would have nothing to work with if new ideas, bold hypotheses, possible worlds, were not first imagined. And the central imaginative, creating act in science is the formulation of the creative question. To those school sixth formers who could not see the creative content of science, we need to ask not ‘can you find the right answer?’ but ‘can you imagine the creative question?’

And to the church we need to say, ‘recognise science not as the secular world’s threat to your belief, but as God’s gift in your service of community, nation and world’. And more than that – recognise that the activity we now call ‘science’ is really only the name of the current chapter in a book that humankind has been writing for centuries, whose earlier chapters were called by other names. Only a century or two ago I would not have been called a scientist, but a ‘natural philosopher’ or – if you like – a lover of wisdom to do with natural things. Perhaps it would be better if we still were to call science by that humbler and older name that contains both love and wisdom within itself, to recognise that science has the ancient story of wisdom as its own story.

Then perhaps we could start to go about our work of healing, of mending, of gently and firmly replacing falsehood with truth – and start to work with science rather than in fear of it, and loving away those fearful narratives of desire, evil and the sacred in nature, with the narratives of reconciliation, of knowledge, of wisdom and of hope.

Being Human with Music and Light and a Fabulous Day

This excellent piece was written by my colleague at Durham, Dr. Giles Gasper, who is Principal Investigator of the Ordered Universe project – our interdisciplinary investigation into medieval science. This is the first report (there will be more!) on the afternoon last week where we sought to bring the science and music of light together in mutual reflection. I’ll post some further thoughts on the thought-shape of this interaction, which brings both intellectual and emotional engagement to the surface and hitches them to each other. What was special for me was the experience of immediate juxtaposition of the joy of understanding and ‘seeing’ more into the structure of light, with the immediate sensation of beautiful musical communication of colour, meaning and life.

Ordered Universe

Saturday 14th saw the first two of four events organised at Durham as part of the Being Human, National Festival of Humanities 2015. Now in its second year, the Festival takes place up and down the country with a cornucopia of events for the public. Big questions, big debates and opportunities to engage with academic research of all sorts and interests. 2015, as well as being for those of a medieval bent a year of octocentenaries for Magna Carta and the 4th Lateran Council, is the UNESCO designated International Year of Light. To celebrate this, and the bigger questions the nature of light raises, Tom McLeish curated a public workshop and concert, which took place at Trevelyan College on the Saturday afternoon. Teaming up with the Institute of Physics, the Durham Singers, and supported by the RVW Trust,  the two events presented a multi-faceted tour of…

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Professor Tom McLeish – Towards a theology of science

Here is a reblog from my recent visit to the University of Queensland Emmanuel College Centre for the Study of Science, Religion and Society. There’s also a rather sharp set of questions over 20 minutes at ABC Radio embedded!

Emmanuel Centre for the Study of Science, Religion & Society

On 15 September Tom McLeish, Professor of Physics at Durham University, gave incredible insights into the breadth of his research in two presentations at the CSSRS.

McLeish spoke at a lunchtime seminar about his recent OUP publication Faith and Wisdom in Science in which he argues that the problem with the contested “science and religion” relationship lies in the conjunction. Neither science nor religion, he contends, does “and”. Instead, McLeish posits a case for the importance of a “theology of science”. In a fresh reading of the book of Job, McLeish argued that science — as the attempt to understand the natural world — is a deeply human and deeply religious activity. Focusing particularly on the passages that detail God’s response to Job in chapter 38, McLeish argued that questions like “canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?” are not only musings…

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A Tour of Creation in the company of Job – towards a Theology of Science

Last Sunday I experienced the great honour of being invited to give the first of a whole term of Sunday Evensong sermons at St. John’s College Cambridge, all on the subject of Science and Religion.  The very interesting remainder of the programme can be found here (where you can also hear audio recordings of the sermons after they are given).  This is what I said, in an attempt to build a Biblical Wisdom foundation for the rest of the series.

Interior of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge

I am doubly grateful for the invitation here tonight – the first reason is rather personal actually and until now has been a secret: during my own Cambridge days I was a member of a very much lesser College Chapel Choir, and every so often I loved to sneak away and come to this place for Evensong – to hear, as it were, how it’s done properly, as well as to be mesmerised by George Guest’s conducting and wonder what magic made it work. I have been reminded of the reason I did that this evening in the most beautiful possible way: Choir, Director of Music – thank you. The second reason I’m so delighted is your imaginative decision to use this term’s Sunday sermons to explore the relationship of science and faith. You have invited some real experts later in the term, and it’s an immense privilege to introduce the series. Getting thinking on this right, you see, – and believe me most public chatter on the topic is nowhere close to doing that – is not just an academic sideshow, but about understanding how to live as humans in a natural world with which we have an increasingly delicate and threatened relationship.

But where should we start? If this were a lecture room I might be tempted to a survey of the torrid landscape signposted ‘The Science and Religion Conflict’. But this is Evensong – the most Biblically-soaked liturgy of the prayer-book. So why not instead begin with the greatest example of ancient writing about the human intellectual engagement with nature? The Book of Job has puzzled, troubled, exasperated and inspired writers and thinkers of many faiths and none for millennia, from Basil the Great to Emmanuel Levinas. I will never forget my own first reading. I like to shock my scientist colleagues by suggesting that the greatest science poem ever written is buried in the heart of the Old Testament Wisdom literature – the ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job from which we heard an excerpt earlier. And when they read it they almost always return with surprise and delight. For here in beautiful, searching, poetic language are the core-questions of what have now become the fields of astronomy, meteorology, geography, zoology, to paraphrase…

… do you know what binds the Pleiades star cluster?

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

can you trace the path of the lightening?

do you know how the eagle navigates her way to the south?

No of course you can’t find the word ‘science’ in a Bible concordance, but if we think for a moment about what science is, what it does for the human condition of initial ignorance and fear in the face of a wild, puzzling and threatening world, and if we think about science as the human activity that meets the need to mend that ragged relationship with nature, we find a key that unlocks creation-writing like this all through the Bible. We also see that, although science in its current form is recent, it is, if you like, the name of the current chapter in a book that humanity has been writing for as long as songs have been sung or prayers prayed, or stories told.

The other reason that scientists respond so radically to the Lord’s Answer to Job, is that we know that the central imaginative move in science is not to find the right answer – but as Werner Heisenberg once put it – to formulate the creative question. I find myself explaining to every new doctoral student who joins my research group in Durham that all the skilful mastery of answering exam questions well, the very skill that brought them to this place, will be of very little help now. Can they, rather, ask the imaginative, the creative question? Do you know the laws of the heavens – and can you apply them to the earth? Such connected cosmic thinking staggers me now as it does when I first read it – and look where that thought led!

So why has ‘The Lord’s Answer’ received such bad theological and biblical-studies press? The critics are, in the main, unimpressed. ‘What sort of an answer is a hundred questions?’ they complain. And in any case – the monologue doesn’t even address Job’s complaint. For his accusation is that YHWH is treating him unjustly – Job’s is a moral issue. He, the epitome of righteousness, after losing family, wealth and health, is suffering inconsolably (and he is not helped by the moralising efforts of his inept friends and their brittle theologies that only the sinful person gets to suffer, while only the good prosper). All God seems to do, when eventually he arrives on the scene, is to ask a bunch of unanswerable questions about nature: to paraphrase the critique – ‘Hey Job! You don’t know where the snow comes from? You any idea what light is? Well, you don’t know nothin’ then do ya? So shut up’. ‘Not the YHWH of the Pentateuch, but a petulant put-down deity’, wrote one critic.

But I wonder – for if you pick up a Bible later this evening and read through those first 37 chapters of Job’s three cycles of speeches with his friends, you will find that nature-talk is threaded throughout that long and increasingly tense dialogue too. In fact there isn’t a natural object, not a tree, not a rock, not a cloud nor a lightning strike, appearing in the Lord’s Answer that has not already appeared somewhere in those early dialogues. And the reason for that is that Job’s accusation, you see, is a double one. He accuses God of being as out of control of the moral world as he is of the physical universe. Both worlds seem to Job to be in chaotic disarray. From chapter 12 he rails against YHWH for the chaos of flooding

He holds back the waters, there is drought; he lets them loose, they overwhelm the earth.

Or from the discourse in chapter 14 plucks from land-erosion a metaphor for despair:

Yet as a mountain slips away and erodes, and a cliff is dislodged from its place, as water wears away stone and torrents scour the soil from the land – so you destroy man’s hope.

So I wonder again – if Job’s trouble is that the universe is out of control, chaotic, unpredictable, destructive, if he is at the sharp end of the realisation of what George Steiner called ‘the inhuman otherness of matter’ – then is it so very inappropriate that when God meets him, that he should invite Job to stand up alongside his Creator and to contemplate how one makes a world? Not an ordered, crystalline, dead world – but a world full of dynamism, of branching life, energy, and intelligence:

When all the angels sang for joy … Job Ch. 38

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? … Who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

Job’s questioning ‘tour of creation’ is a way of helping him understand that neat and ordered worlds are all very well, all very well that is if you have a taste for dead worlds. The messiness of a living physical world is not so very far removed from the messiness of a real moral world – but Job, and those who read faithfully the book that bears his name, are invited to engage with the process of understanding, of healing, of making peace with, both of those worlds.

Once you are attuned to the way creation-stories are used in the Bible, and to the short and compressed form in which they usually appear (Genesis is an exception you see), then you will find accounts of the creation of the natural world throughout Old and New Testaments alike. Paul’s epistles are no exception – and in our second passage this evening we heard one, from the letter to the Romans, that surely has its roots in Joban thinking. Here Paul is reaching the climax of his great systematic exposition of the gospel. Like Job he wants to go to the place of reconciliation – the point at the end of chapter 8, often read at funerals, where nothing, not height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God. But first he has to pass through the messy birth-pangs of a new creation – and here is the vital point for us – it is the relationship of redeemed human beings to the physical creation that conveys hope – listen –

the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

If the consequence of our own reconciliation with God through the cross and resurrection of Christ is that now we, too, can minister reconciliation to others; or to paraphrase Paul, if Christians are now in the business of healing broken relationships, then one of them must be the humble, but troubled relationship between human beings and the natural created world around us. Like all broken relationships, we mend it by working to replace ignorance with knowledge, fear with wisdom, and mutual harm with mutual flourishing. Set in those terms, that begins to sounds like the basis for theological thinking about what science might be for.

It’s so important to ask the right questions. The wrong questions in science just send us round and round in circles; the right ones on a real journey of discovery. ‘Can you reconcile science and religion?’ is an example of the wrong sort of question, respecting neither science nor religion nor history. ‘What does the gift of science do, and what service might it achieve within the Kingdom of God?’ is surely a much better question. It is certainly one that our nature-soaked scriptures being to ask. And I wish you every delight as you work to answer it over the term ahead, and if you are a scientists, within your own calling.