In Praise of Natural Philosophy

The title of chapter 2 of Faith and Wisdom in Science, ‘What’s in a Name? Stories of Natural Philosophy, Modern and Ancient’, introduces a discussion of the name-change that the study of nature underwent in the early 19th century.  Here’s a short extract:

‘Scientists’ were not always so called; we know, unusually, that the word was coined around 1830 and probably by William Whewell of Cambridge, England. Before then if any collective expression were used for those who made it their business to examine the heavens, explore the chemical properties of gases or the distribution of different rocks and the varieties of flora and fauna on the Earth, that expression would be “Natural Philosopher”.  The etymology could not be more different: the phrase replaces the Latin scio with the two Greek  words, Philio and Sophia, for “love” and “wisdom”. What happens, we ask ourselves, to our image of science if we replace in our minds its word-label, “I know” with “I love wisdom to do with natural things”?  Instead of a triumphal knowledge-claim we have a rather humbler search, together with more than a hint of delight.  We also have as a goal something deeper than pure knowledge, in the wisdomthat surrounds and supports it.  The idea of wisdom draws on a long history of Greek and Hebrew ideas in which Sophia has been personified to an extent that Scienta never could be – ancient writers could imagine talking to someone called “Wisdom”, but not someone called “Knowledge”! Finally, at the heart of “Natural Philosophy” there is the word for love.  Not nowadays an idea that readily claims association with science, it belonged there once.  I have often seen a smile and an “I wonder …” expression appear on the faces of people who a moment before have claimed to find no interest in the cold, logical inhuman process they imagine science to be, when they begin to think of the new directions in which “love of wisdom of natural things” might take them. 

Little did I suspect when I wrote those words that just a few years later the University of York would appoint me to the first new chair of Natural Philosophy in the UK since Whewell invented the new name ‘scientist’ to cover the increasingly fragmented academic world of the disciplines of physics, chemistry, geology, biology, astronomy, …. It’s an exciting challenge to explore what a natural philosophy for today might look like.

The historic Grossmünster church next to the Theology Faculty in Zürich

The challenge to say something about that also came sooner than expected. This week I was invited to give one of the plenary talks at a conference held in the Theology Faculty at the University of Zürich Science and Theology – Friend or Foe? Organiser Andreas Losch asked me to speak on the title Our Common Cosmos: A Natural Philosophical Approach across Disciplines. The great advantage and delight was to speak directly after University of Queensland history of science scholar Peter Harrison, who has pointed out from a historian’s point of view just how more connected, contemplative, theologically-founded and holistic was Natural Philosophy rather than the Science we know today. It was a natural segue to ask ‘What would a Natural Philosophy look like today had it evolved continuously without the fragmentation and separation that becoming ‘science’ signified, and how might we return there now?’.

History

The charming quad of the Zurich Theology Faculty

We need to look at a little history. Although the ingredients for ‘natural philosophy’ were known and used in the ancient world, and the genre of natural philosophical works in the Latin west under the title of De Rerum Natura enjoyed a regular stream of re-edition from Lucretius and Pliny to Isidore and Bead into the early medieval period, its medieval flourishing was found within the quadriviumof the high medieval schools. For a high medieval account of the purpose of these mathematical disciplines of astronomy, geometry, arithmetic and music we might turn to a classic introduction to the seven liberal arts by English polymath Robert Grosseteste in the early 13^thcentury:

 

Now, there are seven arts that purge human works of error and lead them to perfection. These are the only parts of philosophy that are given the name ‘art’, because it is their effect alone to lead human operations towards perfection through correction.

Two things to note here: firstly that it is the unity of the disciplines that work together, including both the ‘humanities’ disciplines of the trivium as well as the more ‘scientific’ quadrivium; secondly that the practice of the disciplines is to a purpose, embedded within human teleological history – namely the purging of error and leading to perfection of human works. That these works include understanding itself emerges in contemporary passages that describe the ‘scala’ – the ladder of restitution from a dimmed and confused knowledge of the universe. Here is Grosseteste again in his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics:

“Since sense perception, the weakest of all human powers, apprehending only corruptible individual things, survives, imagination stands, memory stands, and finally understanding, which is the noblest of human powers capable of apprehending the incorruptible, universal, first essences, stands!”

The explicit use of the term ‘natural philosophy’, far from fading with early modern science, actually reached its zenith then. The first chair accorded that name was established at Padua for Jacopo Zabarella in 1577, and we should not forget that the full title of Newton’s most celebrated and transformational work (in 1687) was Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

The resonances of the name acquire slightly different referents in the 18^thand 19^thcenturies: within the German speaking world the Naturphilosophieof Goethe, Hegel and Schelling point to a more immersive, embedded and organic grasp of nature than the empirical and analytic tradition of Newton, so that by the time that William Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ in 1834 it was in the face not only of a fragmentation of disciplines we have already noted, but also with a loss of congruity of the older term itself. Notwithstanding, it is striking that neither Maxwell nor Faraday would agree to be classed as ‘scientists’, insisting on ‘natural philosopher’ and as late as 1876, Kelvin and Tait published their Treatise on Natural Philosophy.

 

The Divorce of Poetry and Science

But at the great turning point and departure in the early 19th century there seem to have been other possible futures presented, and other visionaries than Whewell who saw a road into the future in which the resonances of ‘natural philosophy’ would prevail over those of ‘science’. One such was English poet William Wordsworth, who wrote an important and extended piece on the future possible relationship of science and poetry in the third edition of his Lyrical Ballads. Excerpting here:

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.

We may well believe that the mind the wrote the contemplative lines on nature from the bank above Tintern Abbey could also see a future in which poetry would respond to and re-echo the new impressions and glories of science. Yet he knows that this is conditional – there is a tendency of the poetic response of science to remain a private one, while all true poetry must communicate, must travel. For Wordsworth the choice between ‘science’ and ‘natural philosophy’, in so far as the first assumes a form that is private and knowledge-based and the second shared, contemplative and poetic, turns on communication. It depends on the way science and writing work together. I don’t know if the British Nobel laureate and consummate science writer Sir Peter Medawar knew this passage from Wordsworth (though I strongly suspect that he did) but he makes the same point in his Pluto’s Republic:

No one questions the inspirational character of musical or poetic invention because the delight and exaltation that go with it somehow communicate themselves to others. Something travels – we’re carried away. But science is not an art form in this sense – scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel.

There is a second critique of science at work in the Romantic poets, one that has its origin in the horrified reaction, a century before, of William Blake to what he perceived as the desiccated reason of the enlightenment, but which finds most familiar voice in John Keats. Keats writes of science (ironically ‘philosophy’ here) in his long poem Lamia:

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine

Unweave a rainbow.

Keats does not inveigh against science because of its lack of communication or shared engagement, but for what he perceives it does to our idea of the world. It cuts into pieces, excises wonder, banishes agency, chills perception, outlaws all that charms and mystifies. The Romantic polarisation that unleased the centrifugal flight of the sciences and the humanities from each other also divorced science from poetry. We even find it difficult to imagine why someone like Wordsworth could have perceived science and poetry as natural creative partners.

Yet the entanglement of imaginative writing and science had already enjoyed a long and intense relationship by the time they reached the fork in the road that I have been suggested presented itself to Wordsworth. Among the founding members of the Royal Society, for example, the first of the national academies for the sciences, Robert Boyle was responsible for the new styles and forms of writing that would propel the early modern scientific enterprise. And as Notre Dame scholar Stephen Fallon has recently pointed out, the poetic, theological and philosophical resonances between contemporaries Isaac Newton and poet John Milton, run too deep and complex to be coincidental. Into the later 19th century the ‘Transcendentalists’, Americans Emerson and Thoreau and German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, perhaps capture the poetic spirit of a natural philosophy that used a different form of language, more accessible, more open to linguistic forms of creativity and answered to Wordsworth desire that science be an open book to all. Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson on the imagination:

Science does not know its debt to imagination. Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without this faculty. He was himself conscious of its help, which made him a prophet among the doctors. From this vision he gave brave hints to the zoologist, the botanist, and the optician. When the soul of the poet has come to the ripeness of thought, it detaches from itself and sends away from it its poems or songs, a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny which is not exposed to the accidents of the wary kingdom of time.

In the end, cultural evolution took the path, or rather set of paths, that I think we can signpost under ‘science’ rather than ‘natural philosophy’. The poetic connection is lost, the task becomes functionally narrowed into epistemology, the community of scientists becomes a sort of modern priesthood, what they do becomes lost to ‘common contemplation’, and perhaps above all, the ancient tributary of wisdom, of Sophia  or the Hebrew hochma, is forgotten.

The Lost Science-Theology of Wisdom

If a reframed natural philosophy for our times is to be reconstituted, not only must we return to the poetic alternative of the early Romantic period, but to the theological foundation beneath it, which is the wisdom nature poetry of Hebrew tradition (there are so many dualities at play here I am tempted to suggest that the choice of science over natural philosophy was set, not so much by the Romantic followers of Keats and the scientific disciples of Whewell, but by the medieval scholars who identified their scientific sources in the ancient Hellenistic world of Aristotle to the exclusion of the Biblical nature tradition – but that is for another time).

Berlin neo-Kantian Philosopher Susan Neiman has claimed that western philosophy ought to acknowledge that it draws from two ancient sources. One is Plato, but for Neiman (and for me!) the other is simply the Book of Job.

The Book of Job, of all ancient literature, succeeds in articulating in timeless and plangent depth the difference between what human beings consider the world ought to be, and how they find it. Its response, in poetic dialogue of beautifully structured form, but of brutally honest content, has also shocked and offended many of its readers. One of its enduring puzzles is that, when God finally answers long-suffering yet righteous Job’s complaints ‘from the whirlwind’, his Answer seems to by-pass the moral dimensions of Job’s predicament, directing him instead with over 160 questions about the natural world:

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?

Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail,

…

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

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

Now is not the place to repeat the wisdom-theology within Job that urges a questioning search for understanding, and a healed relationship between humans and the natural world. A blogpost that expands on it (but not to the extent of chapter 6 of Faith and Wisdom in Science) is here.  But a ‘Theology of Science’ that responds to this perspective through a New Testament lens can be summarised:

Science is the

• participative,
• relational,
• co-creative

work within the Kingdom of God of healing the fallen relationship of humans with nature.

Strangely, the answers to Wordsworth’s, Humboldt’s and Emerson’s and  perhaps Maxwell’s and Faraday’s requirements for an evolution of natural philosophy, rather than a turning away into ‘science’, were offered many centuries before in a theological context. The invitation to Job and his descendants is contemplative, universal, shared, deeply creative itself.

Towards a New Natural Philosophy

To finish with, let us look forward rather than backward, using these theological, poetic and historical resources  to delineate an alternative history in which natural philosophy assumes a 21^stcentury form. This is not, however, a necessary fiction – the object is also to find a pathway back from knowledge alone to the engagement with nature that is also driven by love and wisdom.

The two leading critiques of science mounted by the Romantic poets, and echoed by late modern commentators as well, are linked. A science that appears to fragment and tear apart or compartmentalise the object has the same effect on its subjects. A holistic science, or natural philosophy, is also a communal one. Wisdom seeks to unite not divide and to build communicative bridges not pull them up.  Natural philosophy therefore needs to develop a polyvalency and inclusivity that even the best current science communication fails to do.

To give an example of what I mean I’d like to quote from a profound remark from the author Andrea Wulf, who won a science literature prize from the Royal Society for her biography of Alexander von Humboldt, subtitled The Invention of Nature. I had the opportunity to speak with her at the award ceremony at the Royal Society in London, where she spoke of the discouragement she had experienced at school in regard to science. Then she said something that made a great impression on me:

Science is a palace with many doors, but at school we only show children one of them. Not all of us can enter through that door – I was one that could not. But I found another door into the palace through researching and writing about the life of Alexander von Humboldt. We need to find paths to other doors for other people.

There are movements of inclusivity – citizen science, the movement to connect schools with research programmes, the new wave of science writing such as Wulf herself, and a personal approach to scientific biography in broadcasting such as Jim Al-Khalili’s Life Scientificon the BBC. But these still do not touch those for whom the mention of science is still a painful one that speaks unnecessarily of personal inability and failure.

Developing a natural philosophy that shares with art and music the notion of a contemplative good for the non-expert, a concept of critical participation of active audience, is a second aspect of a reformed natural philosophy that needs to find new life. Robert Boyle was probably the best known exponent of this ‘Occasional Meditation’ in Britain. It did not outlast the 17^thcentury (unless you count the vestiges in amateur astronomy and ornithology – as well you might), but there are aspects of this permissive lay science at work at present as well.

Third is the essential role of creativity – hidden by the label ‘science’.  One of the saddest personal and repeated experiences I have when visiting schools is to hear from young people that the reason that they have given up on any science is because they saw no room for their own imagination of creativity were they to continue it. An education that purports to include science yet restricts itself to the imparting of a body of fact is no better than an art course that looks at biographies of artists but never allows brush to contact paper. I have spent the last three years researching a new book The Poetry and Music of Science, that takes as its raw material conversations with scientists, mathematicians, artists, composers, poets and novelists, and asks them to talk through the narratives of their most innovative and pleasing projects.  The process of creation is more common to discuss in the artistic than in the scientific world, but when the scientists lower their voices and tell the stories of vision, desire, repeated failure, then the apparent gift of an idea, a new imagined conception of what nature must be like – then the narrative structures of science and art map onto each other with uncanny faithfulness. Much much more needs to be said here, and nuanced into visual, textual and abstract forms of imagination, the role of non-conscious thought, and in particular the entanglement of affective, emotional and cognitive thought in all creative process. Those avenues also belong to a natural philosophical approach to the material world.

Forth, is the poetic structure of science itself, and the comprehension that functional and methodological as well as objective and linguistic ties exist between science and poetry. To take first the structural aspect, if poetry is the creative constraint of imagination by form, then one might ask what could call on a greater force of imagination than the re-imagination of nature itself, and what might constitute a greater constraint than nature as it is observed?

Finally, if it is perhaps hard for the church to recover from a two centuries of being indoctrinated with the narrative that science is a threat to faith and to the community of believers, then perhaps a reformed natural philosophy might more easily be accepted under the correctly perceived heading of gift. For the truth is that science needs the church far more than the other way around. One consequence of the divorce of science from the humanities, its cult of expertise and its hegemony of epistemology is, paradoxically, its newly-suffered optionality. Take the temperature of public and political debates on tense scientific topics, be the subject genetic medicine or global climate change, and you will measure high readings in both the dissemination of untruth, and the propagation of fear. If there are two core values of at least the Christian tradition that are needed now as much as at any other time, they are those of truth and the removal of fear. Yet there is still very little informed public service of debate by the church (a glowing exception is the papal encyclical Laudato Si, but even this has limited reach at local level). A church does not have to come down on one side or other of a scientific or technological debate in order to make a transformational illumination of its process. Let us make sure that we are not the servant in Matthew 25 who buried the talent of science in the ground because he was afraid, when it was meant to be put to use in building the master’s kingdom.

The love of wisdom to do with nature will surely be more powerful to do this than a mere system of knowledge.

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Science is Important in the Training of Church Leaders

Last month the Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science team from St John’s College, Durham University  and the SATSU at the University of York, took this message to The Annual Conference for Theological Educators, 2018 at the Church of England’s Hayes Conference Centre near London.

As well as working to bring top research scientists and church leaders (bishops in the C of E and equivalent levels of authority in other denominations) together in theme-based workshops, and serving policy-makers at the Mission and Public Affairs division in Church House, the ECLAS project has steadily been building up a resource of training material for ordination-training, lay-ministry training and in-service development, to assist pastors, priests and other church leaders in engaging with science in their pastoral, teaching, mission work.

The UK is a little behind the US in some ways on this score – there has been a very successful Science for Seminaries programme running under the auspices of the AAAS (the US equivalent of the British Association for Science) for a number of years now.  The reasons are the same however:

• For too long the Church has been persuaded that science is a threat, rather than a gift, largely as a result of the late 19th century invention of the ‘conflict myth’.
• Christians have largely forgotten that their theological tradition has been responsible for enormous advances in science, including the development of experimental method in the 17th Century in the tradition of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle.
• The result is that the late-modern, socially-determined, anti-scientific and theologically flawed (to say the least) teachings of so-called ‘Creationism’, have taken root quite widely.
• The consequences of confusion for church members with a vocation to science, or seekers outside being put off the good news message of Christ, are extremely serious.
• The voice of reason, truth and rejection of fear-tactics that the church can bring to public dialogue is needed desperately in a current series of debates around science, engineering and medicine. Climate change and genetic medicine are just two examples.
• There is a vast resource of ancient Biblical wisdom that needs to be mined for all of the above, which would represent a much more authoritative grasp of scripture in the task of understanding the relationship between humans, God and nature, than a narrow discussion of Genesis 1, for example.

We know, from research carried out by the ECLAS research fellow, Dr. Lydia Reid, with over 1000 people engaged in church leadership, that science topics occur very frequently in conversation in the course of their regular ministry, but that confidence to deal with them is very often lacking.

Most importantly, the basis for that confidence, a worked-through Theology of Science is pretty-much absent. That is why this was a central aim for the Faith and Wisdom in Science book (and why the project gave a copy to every participant at the conference!). The church does not need to stay on the ‘back foot’ in defence of a science it perceives as outside its domain of knowledge and threatening to its basis of belief, but get on the ‘front foot’ of doing what it does best – thinking and acting how to serve the world in the light of God’s gifts – in this case the extraordinary gift of an ordered universe, and one that humans can learn to understand, on an earth that we can care for.

That is also why we have now provided several classes of digital resource on the project webpages (see below) that seminaries, ordination courses, and bible colleges can use to insert within existing modules, rather than squeeze in extra ‘science’ modules in already-stuffed curricula.

Short Answers to Big Questions  are video-shorts from Revd. Prof. David Wilkinson and Prof. Tom McLeish (the present writer) tackling what the vision of a science-engaged church is, what it can achieve in pastoral and mission service, how we deal with questions of Biblical interpretation and findings of science such as cosmic expansion and evolution.

Lesson Plans are written material for units that can be delivered in 1 hour, 3 hour or longer ‘chunks’ of courses on Bible, church practice, history and more. Each is written by an expert theological educator who is also scientifically-informed, and in many cases practicing scientists. Here is a snippet from a great example – Oxford Diocese Science Missioner Dr. Jenny Brown writes about bringing science into preaching …

Try out some of this material for yourself!  And drop us a line about it at the contact on the ECLAS site!

 

 

 

‘Faith & Wisdom in’, and ‘Let There Be’ Science – go West: Lent Sermons, Pentecostal Theology, a Fallen world and Sacred Nature

It sounded like a good idea at the time … invitations to talk about the ideas in Faith and Wisdom in Science and the new, broader readership, Let There Be Science in Oxford, Malvern, Exeter and Bristol.  Joining them all up would be efficient, wouldn’t it? A good use of time?  Well it was marvellous, but it WAS exhausting!  What made it so encouraging was the deep, broad and insightful questions at each place.  There is a huge thirst in the church, across denominations and styles of theology and worship, to grasp a positive understanding of science as God’s gift, to use for a purpose, and to discard once and for all the pernicious ‘alternative fact’ that science and Christian belief are in conflict!

The long week opened with the start of a Lenten Evensong series on ‘New Reformations’ at St. Mary’s Church , Warwick.  Vicar Vaughan Roberts had spotted me on the web (!) and thought that the ideas looked interesting.  The link to the sermon is here, but the open Q&A afterwards was especially precious. One I recall especially asked why there was not more of an intelligent, Christian voice in the media, refuting the standard and supercilious conflict thesis.  The questioner had a point – and half of the answer is that Christians in scientific positions are just not speaking loudly enough.  Corporately, the Church needs to acquire a voice on science as gift too.  But then that is what the talks, books, and projects like Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science are all about.

Next stop Elim Pentecostal Theological College – Regents College in Malvern. To my eternal shame I had not credited the Pentecostal movement with perhaps the deepest of theological traditions.  This visit proved me wrong.  A nuanced and thoughtful reception of a Faith and Wisdom talk – with a LOT on Job was very thought-provoking (and they bought all the books, necessitating a rush-delivery for Bristol – no chance for Exeter the next day!). Every theological audience I engage with reminds me that we need to think afresh about the Fall in a way consistent with the Genesis, and NT narratives, as well as what we learn from science about the history of the universe.

Exeter Cathedral is launching a series of talks on Science and Faith funded through the Durham Scientists in Congregations initiative. I opened the series with The Continuing Dance of Science and Religion (now on YouTube) (not really my title – as some readers know I’m more for moving in for the embrace). Again a moving series of questions.  One mentioned the problem of young earth creationism.  Although normally reticent about this, and keen not to offend, I am increasingly persuaded that this is part of the church’s problem – we have failed to call out this lie.  It does untold damage within the church (young people forced into unbearable cognitive dissonance between their doctrinaire churches and the science that they love), and outside (anyone who is made to think that they have to swallow a literal 6-day creation in order to be a Christian is not going to think twice if they have any notion of evidence-based thinking).  Enough is enough.  I called on the Bishops to make a public and clear stand.  Heresies are wrong teachings that prevent people entering the Kingdom, and this is clearly a teaching that does just that.  Not in accord with an authoritative and respectful view of scripture, nor of Christian teaching, nor with the whole of God’s gift of science.  That got a round of applause!

Final stop Bristol Christians in Science – talk with slides available here, along with others in the series.  A powerful question on how to make this message with theological roots in Wisdom, Book of Job, Reconciliation and Healing accessible to a secular world.  That is of course the entire task of getting the ‘mising’ narrative of science as the search for wisdom and healing of our relationship with the world, heard broadly.  But starting with the Church is no bad place.  On the other hand, Dave and I were clear in the writing of Let There Be Science that we wanted this to be what moderate secular scientists needed and wanted to hear to explain to others how deeply and naturally human science is.  Several of the positive blurbs are from just those people.  Like all the truest Christian messages, they are welcomed by the world when they are recognised as the water in the desert that is so needed.

 

 

 

Faith and Wisdom in Science in Vancouver – and Harvard

This week I am enjoying my first ever visit to Vancouver to give a series of lectures and discussions on Faith and Wisdom in Science and the ideas and actions that flow from thinking through a Christian Theology of Science.  There are a few science lectures thrown in (in biophysics of protein dynamics – at Simon Fraser University, and the molecular rheology of polymer melts in processing – at UBC), and a final Friday night at St John’s (Graduate) College, UBC, on Medieval Science and the Ordered Universe Project.  Last night saw a fruitful and friendly welcome at Regent College.

The question sessions following the science/theology talks so far have been fascinating

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

and inspiring (the questions that is – I can’t speak for the answers). The central section of the presentations, focussing on drawing resource from Biblical wisdom literature, draws on the close reading of the Book of Job that forms the central chapter of Faith and Wisdom.  So one of the questioners wanted to know about Jesus’ sayings about nature in the gospels, and their significance.  As in the cycles of speeches between Job and his comforters, way before the probing questions of the Lord’s Answer in chapter 38, the gospels, too, are full of nature metaphor and action.  The calming of the waves, the wind-image of the Spirit, the liking of the ‘signs of the times’ to the signs that the coming of the Kingdom is close – all these speak of a relationship with the natural world that reflects the Godly Wisdom of a deep seeing, an inner understanding, and an investment of significance into the material, natural world.  More thinking required here!

Another question searched the dilemma facing the church in sharing both the positive narrative for science and its consequences for an ethical, hopeful and fruitful managing of nature in future.  Given the explicit Creation-Fall-Election-Incarnation-Resurrection-Ministry of Reconciliation-New Creation story within which science and technology make sense as God’s gifts, how is all this worked through in a world that largely does not recognise that big story?  It reminded me of a wonderful question from an atheist sociologist at one of the first ever university-based discussions of the Faith and Wisdom in Science idea: ‘I wish I could share in your vision and hope, but as an atheist I can’t begin to share your assumptions: what can you give me?’

I think that the answer is not ‘nothing’ by any means.  Back to St. Paul and his brilliant summary of the work of the Church – the ‘ministry of reconciliation’ of 2 Corinthians 5.  To talk about our work being that of ‘healing broken relationships’ is something that everyone knows about and everyone wants.  To point to ways in which we can hope to reverse the mutual harm that we and our planet are inflicting on each other, by framing the challenge in those terms, and then by proceeding as one does in the healing of any broken relationship, is a practical way ahead that anyone can buy into.  Replacing ignorance with knowledge, fear with wisdom, and mutual harm with mutual flourishing – this is a framework for political and social care that has already generated practical outcomes, such as the Responsible Research and Innovation policy in the UK and Europe.

I hope to be able to say more about the work that new theologically-generated narratives can do in our managing of science and technology at a Harvard STS-Programme seminar next week (on the day of the US presidential election!), Narratives of Hope: Science, Theology and Environmental Public Policy .  But that is for next week. Today there is more at UBC with Investigating the Deep Structure of Modern Science: the Search for Wisdom.

I am extremely grateful to the Canadian Scientific and Christian affiliation for supporting the visit, and to my kind hosts and organisers for all their tremendous hard work.

NATURE features Christian Leaders and Scientists Project

Nature, the international general science journal, published an article this week about the Christian Leaders in an Age of Science project that I co-lead with Revd. Prof. David Wilkinson, Principal of St. John’s College Durham University. Written by our Project Manager, Revd. Dr. Kathryn Prichard, it’s pithy and personal approach has attracted a long and varied comment stream!

Kathryn tells it how it is from the title on:

Religion and science can have a true dialogue

She begins with a personal account of the sort of activity that senior church leaders (bishops and equivalent) get up to with the scientists at Durham University when we get them all together for a day:

I work for the Archbishops’ Council in the Church of England, and this summer I did something that many people would think is impossible. I sat in a dark lecture theatre engrossed in a computationally generated 3D journey through the Universe. Virtual stars whizzed past and seemed narrowly to miss colliding with my head as we accelerated through galaxies and past exploding stars. I listened to cosmologists speak on research into dark matter, particle physics, the rate at which the growth of the Universe is accelerating and the possibi­lity of multi­verses. I asked questions and they responded.

Read the open-access article itself to find out more!

The comments have been very varied – from the predictable (the article itself anticipates them) vilifying Nature for dropping its standards, to nuanced and personal comments from scientists who are Christians, and have thought deeply about the relation between their faith and their science.  Those that see only negative tensions between religion and science might bear in mind a few sets of ‘data’:

(1) It is historically uncontroversial that religion, and Christianity in particular, served as a stimulus and support for science. Francis Bacon articulates the theological reasons for the rise of experimental science in the early modern era, to take just one key example.  A great collection of reading here is Galileo Goes to Jail – and other myths about science and religion (edited by Ron Numbers)
(2) The ‘conflict’ notion is, for the most part, a historically invented polemic myth from the late 19th century (see the ‘Draper-White’ thesis), constructed for other reasons (the new book Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison is well worth a read for both these points)
(3) The extraordinary scientists throughout history who have found deep motivation from and connections with, their faith to do science, are testimony to the positive support for science at the personal level (Copernicus, Newton, Boyle, Maxwell, Faraday, Born, … to name a very few)
(4) Our project aims at catalysing the potential support for a healthy understanding of science and scientific thinking that the church can give at personal, local and national level, and which is natural for it to do. We’ve seen great examples of churches supporting science festivals, for example. We are working with senior leaders because they tend to come from humanities backgrounds and lack confidence (but not intelligence, learning or enthusiasm) in science. Their meetings with the scientists we arrange under science themes have been transformation for both, time after time.

Perhaps the most important clue to the ways in which a healthy religious life can support science at its core was given by the Nobel Laureate Isidor I. Rabi when once asked why he became a scientist:

”My mother made me a scientist without ever intending it. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’ But not my mother. She always asked me a different question. ‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’ That difference – asking good questions -made me become a scientist!”

As it turns out, ‘Izzy”s mother was displaying the most faithful awareness of her Jewish tradition – for any close reader of the Bible (this ought to include Christians as well of course) is immediately struck by the importance all the writings urge of questions.  One of the tired  and uninformed canards in the science and religion conversation is that the latter cuts off questions in place of acceptance of dogma.  Nothing could be less accurate.  One of the oldest nature-wisdom poems we possess is to be found as ‘The Lord’s Answer’ in the Book of Job. It consists entirely of questions about the workings of the natural world, from the stars to the lightning and snow, to the wild animals and the trees.

The very greatest question, ‘What is Truth?’ appears at one of the most climactic moments of the whole Biblical narrative, in the tense and probing discourse between Jesus and Pilate before the crucifixion. There is no greater gift to those who would seek to know and to understand than a great question.

 

 

 

Take your Vicar to the Lab – and she can bring her Bishop too

The ‘Theology of Science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science leads to a set of consequences for how science might find new resonances and recreation in the media, arts, education and the church (these are discussed in chapter 8 of the book – Mending our Ways, Sharing our Science and Figuring the Future). In particular, once the false mythology of a necessary conflict between science and the church is discarded in the face of actual history, practice and philosophy, and when it is replaced by an understanding of science as God’s gift, then all sorts of possibilities for a positive role for the church in science opens up once more.

An opportunity to experiment with ways that churches can support science and scientists is currently being provided by a large project based at St. John’s College, Durham University, UK.  Funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science has five strands, one of which invites churches of all denominations to submit proposals for projects, costing up to £10 000, under the umbrella title Scientists in Congregations.

The first eight projects have just been announced, as varied in geographical placement around the UK as they are in approach.  From a large cathedral-based project to mount spectacular science exhibits ‘from Dinosaurs to DNA’ in Ely, to café-style debates with scientists on the implications of their work around north Leeds, applicants have used their imagination.  A title that has caught the attention of the media such as Christian Today (and by no means just the Christian media) was Take your Vicar to the Lab.  ‘Why on earth would either you or they want to?’ was the question in the minds of many who heard about it.  It was thrown at me in a live interview on BBC Radio York this morning, and the subject of a rather perplexed article in Computer Weekly.

So why would a vicar (pastor, priest, etc. …) want to ‘visit a lab’? The great Christian thinkers of former ages would have no problem understanding (once they had had explained the concept of a ‘lab’).  Gregory of Nyssa, one of the formulators of the Christian creeds we know today, and the doctrine of the Trinity, writes of the way that our God-given minds evidence themselves by the way they think into to workings of nature.  The deduction of the existence of invisible air, and the cause of the phases of the moon, are just two examples given in his remarkable 4th century treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection.  The extraordinary English 13th century polymath, Robert Grosseteste, later Bishop of Lincoln, saw our re-thinking nature as part of a work of healing a relationship with the world dimmed by disobedience and Fall.  And this very thought can be found at the birth of early modern science in the writings of Frances Bacon.

Talking of Bishops, another strand of the Durham-based project held a conference of senior Christian

Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, Durham University

leaders this week (some of them did indeed sport the purple shirt) considering the science of earthquakes and floods, including the social science of managing their aftermaths.  Together with thinking together about evolution and the human experience of pain, this was theological thinking ‘on the wild side’. A visit to Durham University’s Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience created a productive forum for the church leaders and scientists to talk about the global and cultural pattern of risk, and how local faith communities might work better with international aid organisations.  Practical action, amid the answerless and shared experience of loss – that sounded like a faithful continuation of some of the Biblical wisdom we read and studied together from the Book of Job.

 

So Vicars, Bishops in the lab, yes, and in the earthquake zone, the epidemic and the flood plain, and working along scientists, doctors, engineers and aid workers in mutual service of both God and fellow human being.