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 and Wisdom in Science goes Down Under

I am at present enjoying a warm, stimulating and rich visit to several universities and colleges in Australia and New Zealand at the invitation of ISCAST (Christians in Science and Technology) and the University of Otago.  At each stop there is a chance to discuss the Faith and Wisdom in Science approach to a theology of science, and also present research on biological physics and on the Durham and collaborators project on medieval science, at relevant departments and centres. ISCAST have a page listing all the events in Australia here, so I wont list them again.  But  in Otago I will be talking about Interdisciplinary research as well as a Public lecture on the Faith and Wisdom in Science theme in their Centre for Theology and Public Issues.

I had a remarkable first 3 hours in Australia.  The flight landing at 6am gave me a few hours for a breather with my affable host the ISCAST President Alan Gijsbers.  We took off to the glorious Westerfold Park in greater Melbourne – ‘would you like to go find some kangaroos?’.  And here they are looking alert and somewhat suspicious of my close and stealthy approach (stealthy for a clumsy pom that is) just before they took off.  The mother with pouched joey bounding as ably as the large males in the group earns every admiration.

Then we walked on to a bridge over the river Yarra, within the park.  Conversation continued as we gazed down towards the muddy waters.  Then there was an intriguing and oddly-shaped dark swimming animal right below us on the surface. ‘Oh look Alan – there’s a platypus’ I commented, not expecting much interest.  After all this WAS Australia and we HAD just seen a mob of kangaroos on land, so on water ….  Alan exploded with astonishment.  He has lived here for a number of years that it would be impolite to specify and this (photographed by him as it dived) was the first ever sighting by him of one in the wild.

Such good fortune has stayed with me so far during the trip in continued sightings of and conversations with rich and rare Australian human wildlife.  The questions and discussions at presentations of the wisdom approach to a Theology of Science have been as insightful as they are stimulating, from the Alan Day Memorial lecture in Melbourne, to a Tabor College Public Lecture in Adelaide, or an Emmanuel College lecture within the Centre for the Study of Science Religion and Society.

The discussion has been deepened by questions that will challenge a lot of further thinking:

• What does a wisdom theology of science say to inform a responsible policy of forestry management? (think about it – this is a GREAT question to bring the strands together into a practical focus, and posed by Richard Gijsbers, former forester himself).
• Does the ‘faith and wisdom’ critique of natural theology open up a new way to understand Karl Barth’s approach to the relation between theology and creation?  (I had previously absorbed a rather naïve view that Barth is not strongly relevant to a science faith dialogue, but this was hasty)


With Richard Gijsbers in the forest talking environmental theology in situ!

• Does the relational and invitational interpretation of the Lord’s Answer to Job add any insight to the way it might have been read in Hebrew context?  (Now this is a vital question, but a hard one as we don’t really know what the historical context was, though the exile is a good start…)
• What is the role and meaning of ‘fear’ in the reconciliatory work between humans and nature?

This and more should keep this channel hot for a while.  And we still have Sydney and all of the New Zealand leg to go. More anon I should think.

The Faith and Wisdom in Science Story in Three Steps

It’s proving a very interesting summer thanks to two invitations to give lectures

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

and discussions on the material in Faith and Wisdom in Science over three consecutive sessions, rather than squeezing it all into one evening.  The first, in June, was from the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies (WYSOCS) to deliver the input for their annual study weekend.  The second is from York Minster, to give their annual series of three summer lectures.  The first happened last month, the York Minster series has one more to go (so you can still come!).

I’ve found the opportunity to let the story of the thinking behind the book ‘breathe’ rather more spaciously very stimulating, and satisfying.  The narrative is less rushed, preparatory material can be enriched, and – best of all – we can devote almost the entire second lecture to a good wallow in the Book of Job and its wonderful nature poems, painful questions and search for Wisdom.

The WYSOCS audio files can be found here, for those with the patience to hear them, and I will be posting the slides on the Minster web site in due course. The three-section structure for FaWiS goes something like this:

1. A historical summary of relation between science and religion
2. The search for Wisdom: Creation stories in Psalms and Proverbs, and the Book of Job
3. Through the New Testament and towards a Theology of Science

The first hour and discussion can set the scene – how did we get into this mess?  We look at Tertullian’s infamous ‘What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem?’ outburst in Against Heretics but in the context of a thinking perfectly able and willing to recruit Stoic logic to his Christian purposes.  Another contrast is the wonderful Gregory of Nyssa whose On the Soul and the Resurrection contains a beautiful forth century therapeutic application of scientific thinking at his sister Macrina’s deathbed.  A little more ‘myth-busting” taking in the scientific advances of the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, for example, take us to the early modern acceleration of science – and its explicit (Baconian) Christian teleology.  So we find the ‘conflict’ narrative to be a social construction of the 19th and 20th centuries that creates havoc with the social context of science, and in the church.

What we need, then, is a dose of Wisdom – and we turn to the strand of creation stories in the Bible for a taste of writing about human relationship with the nature in the ancient world.  The 20 creation stories in the Bible get a brief overview, as well as their purpose.  They are used ubiquitously as bridge texts between present trouble and future hope.  Psalm 33 is a prime example.  We also review them from a structural perspective – their common features of ordering, of setting boundaries between land and sea, heavens and the earth, laying foundations, and finally  the role of Word in the creative act.  The short creation story from Ps33 runs:

6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the people of the world revere him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

This takes us into Job, with the structure of circling dialogues, each invoking nature imagery to illustrate Job’s great double accusation – that God is as out of control of the moral law as he is of the natural law.  Injustice flows like the wadis – dry one day and in uncontrolled and destructive spate the next. The Hymn to Wisdom of Job 28 points us towards the wisdom of perceptive searching and seeing into the natural world by weight and measure (this is the Wisdom of God) and towards YHWH’s answer in chapters 38-40.  This is not the ‘petulant put-down’ of some critical readings, but a teacher’s questions of a pupil or debating adversary – and they lead Job into the position of how one creates a world of fruitfulness, life, and humanity, “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the Earth …”.

So by the start of the third session we are building up a picture of a theology of science that is old, deeply embedded into the human, takes a responsible stance as God’s co-workers, is reconciliatory of our relationship with nature.  We are called to replace a relationship characterised by ignorance, fear and harm with one filled out with knowledge, wisdom and mutual flourishing.  That is what God’s gift of science is all about – not a threat to faith, but a gift of talents to exercise it in obedience and humility.  We can spend some time on consequences for public shared science, education, the media, the political debate of science based issues such as climate change, fracking, genetic medicine, that as things are get stuck in immobile oppositional negative narratives of despair.

The longer breath of presentation seems to elicit a deeper vein of question as well.  At WYSOCS I was pressed, for example, on the ‘no prior boundaries’ conclusion – that the Biblical material asks us to take responsibility for what we do and do not do with our knowledge of the world.  So it is not a priori evident that we should not, for example, deliberately manipulate the human genome.  But nor is it obvious that we should just because we can.  In every case we need to take wise, theologically informed, participative, reconciliatory discussion into the public square.  Was there an occasion when there was an experimental piece of research I wanted to do, but which I felt was a theological no-go area?  As a theoretician myself, I am blessed with not finding myself in this position!  However, I am aware of, and was involved in, a discussion with an academic ethical advisor to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK about a project aimed at scoping a geo-engineering technology.  It was stopped, and I agreed, because there had been very inadequate public consultation and involvement of the ethical issues, unintended consequences and plan for further public debate, as well as a possible conflict of interest.  It had been framed in an ‘engineers and scientists know best’ narrative.  This is a good example of the application of theological thinking, but in a secular context, to the benefit of our relationship with nature.

More questions and initial directions of answers from WYSOCS and the Minster lectures over the summer!

An Easter-Week Expression of Hope for Faith and Wisdom in Science

Easter-time seems a good moment to draw back the curtain a little bit on some big words with theological resonance that bridge between the practice of science (or of life in general for that matter) and the foundation of faith.  It also records an interesting question put to me in the discussion-time following a recent James Gregory Lecture at the University of St. Andrews (which you can see, including the discussion, here).   I was asked, ‘Why haven’t you talked at all about God? I was expecting you to do that in a lecture on Science and Religion!’.  The odd thing was that I had the impression that I had been talking about God all the time – after all, a Theology of Science based on the deep Old Testament Wisdom books, intrepreted through a New Testament lens (that’s the academic soundbite folks) could, I thought, hardly be interpreted as godless.  But perhaps the questioner had a point.  After all, much of the OT wisdom sayings also take an implied or implicit presence of God rather than an explicit one.  Some analyses of the Book of Proverbs, for example, even divide the sayings into ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’.  The Book of Job, my textual centrepiece in Faith and Wisdom in Science, depends for its narrative thrust on the absence of God for most of its course.  Without the silence of the voice of Jahweh for the first 37 chapters, the ‘Voice from the Whirlwind’ in chapter 38 would lose some of the ‘frisson’ that Job scholar David Clines describes accompanying his every reading.  It is, perhaps, too easy to assume the same silent voice when talking about the theology of science – in which God is always implied but mostly in the background.  There is one very good reason for this.  Silence from and about God allows human activities to proceed within a secular setting.  Science may have had Christian roots in the past, and as I claim theological underpinnings in the present, but these must not appear to make it exclusive as a human enterprise.  But for a Christian (or Jew or Muslim – see chapter 8) we need God to step out from the shadows of the cave. Time to roll back the stone!

‘Faith’ itself, is of course one of the big words we need to talk about.  As I explain in Faith and Wisdom in Science, ‘faith’ (with a small ‘f’) is a commonplace requirement in the methodology of science.  Early in the life of a scientific idea it will be too underdeveloped and too weakly-supported by data to stand up against the established theories, however cracked they might be.  The proponents of a new idea, usually still in ostensible contradiction with observation in some cases at least, must exercise ‘faith’ that it will come good, that the inconsistencies will be ironed out one day, that further insights into the structure of the new idea will render it more plausible and stronger rather than weaker.  I went through this experience myself in the early years of a new theory of how polymer (plastic) liquids behaved.  It challenged existing orthodoxy and received considerable oppostion.  It’s detracators were able to point to experiments that our new idea totally failed to account for.  Under a strictly Popperian methodology of science it ought, refuted, to have died at birth. Yet the way that it made sense of so much of the rest of the phenomena of ‘elastic liquids’ from their molecular structure persuaded some of us that it was on the right track.  In the early days this wasnt really rational thinking.  We had just developed a ‘love’ for our beautiful baby theory and we had ‘faith’ that one day it would grow into a more powerful scheme that accounted for the present gaps as well.  And so it proved, after 20 years or so.

This linked activity of such faith in and love of new ideas within the progress of science is a central source of energy for its growth.  I discuss this at a little more length in chapter 7 of Faith and Wisdom, thinking about the much more significant story of the Copernican Revolution.  Of course at first sight this ‘faith with a small f’ looks rather different to the religious form of ‘Faith with a large F’ that characterises, for example, orthodox Christian belief.  But I am not convinced that they are so very far apart. Mark Twain’s (allegedly) classic definition of ‘believing things  you know aint so’ is amusing but doesnt work as a faithful account of Faith.  Belief in the Easter affirmation ‘Christ is risen!’ is more than an assent to historical events in 1st century Palestine (on the basis of arguably fair evidence for history in the ancient world, but flimsy if they were recent).  It is a recognition that the other big Easter word – Hope – has its source in a living Person who can be encountered, and who can transform with love and healing in communities today as vibrantly as he did then.  Hope is also, and always unreasonably, at the heart of science.  We carry on doing science because we hope that by it we will come to understand how the universe works.  We hope to see below the surface of phenomena into the logic, the symmetry, the layers of emergent structures of complexity, that this breathtakingly beautiful world supports. Nothing in the philosophy of science gives any a priori reason that we might expect to be able to do this.

In short we hope to heal our current ignorance and flawed relationship with nature, replacing it by one characterised instead by knowledge and wisdom. The resurrection is ultimately the source of all hope, including the hope that drives the humblest aspect of our calling to be menders of broken relationships – the task we call ‘science’.

A Sermon on “The Search for Wisdom for Today” Job 28 and Colossians 1:15-23

I know that a few readers of the book and this blog put regular effort into both giving, and listening to talks/sermons in churches.  That forum is one of the key places where the strand of a new confidence in science urged on the church in Faith and Wisdom in Science can begin.  I had the good fortune last week to be invited to preach at the annual Commemoration of Benefactors Service at Durham Cathedral.  The occasion brings town, region, cathedral, schools and university together. Durham and its environs is well known both as an ancient seat of medieval scholarship and wisdom.  It is also known for coal-mining (active until a generation ago). So Job 28 seemed a good starting point.  Here it is in full:

The north view of the massive norman nave of Durham Cathedral seen from Palace Green.

It’s a wonderful privilege to be here, literally at the transept of our two intersecting and neighbouring communities of Cathedral and University. How humbling to meet in this shared space of study, contemplation and worship of unutterable beauty that we have jointly inherited from centuries of generous forbears.

I have in the past week taken two visitors from overseas around this place (I never let them leave Durham without a Cathedral tour, naturally), one from Greece, one from Mexico, and again it was they not I who voiced the impression of learning and wisdom seeming to permeate the stones and hang in the air from the centuries of scholarly and holy strata laid down by our predecessors. We have much wisdom to be thankful for.

It’s a good thing, because wisdom, or the urgent need for it, seems to have become a repeated theme in our time.  Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes has called it, ‘the cry for wisdom in late modern culture’. Less academically, I’ll admit to a fondness, before his passing, of Alastair Cook’s weekly radio broadcast ‘Letter from America’. One I recall vividly followed a vigorous debate in Senate and Congress over a possible military intervention in the Middle East. Cook recalled the reflections of an elderly Senator who confessed that it wasn’t so much the dominance of either hawks or doves that troubled him, but the lamentable shortage of owls.

From the perspective of the arts, TS Eliot cries out in the chorus of his play ‘The Rock’

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the Wisdom we have lost in Knowledge?

Where is the Knowledge we have lost in Information?

Even our friends at University College London have launched a university-wide research theme called ‘From Knowledge to Wisdom’ (I hope that at Durham, this drive lies within all our research themes!).

Well we stand between our two of oldest and wisest benefactors, Cuthbert – of whom a fellow monk records that they ‘drank from heavenly wisdom together’, and Bede – one of whose famous prayers addresses Christ as the ‘Fountain of all Wisdom’.

The tomb of the Venerable Bede in the west end Gallilee Chapel of Durham Cathedral

So let us, in their company, take a look at perhaps the deepest, most foundational, surprising – even humorous – passage on Wisdom in the whole of the Bible.

The 28^th chapter of Job sings with a new voice into the spiralling and tense arguments and accusations of this extraordinary book. Job, a rich and righteous man has lost family, wealth, heards, house and even his health. He sits, scraping his sores and tormented by his so-called friends. For their brittle religious world views can only explain his suffering by supposing it to be divine retribution for sins – and they choose to let him know it. He feels the injustice keenly and demands vindication, yet they become increasingly personal in their accusations. A terrible climax is reached in the previous chapter (27) – then comes this unexpected theme …

Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place where gold is refined.

Iron is taken from the soil, rock that will be poured out as copper.

An end is put to darkness, and to the furthest bound they seek the ore in gloom and deep darkness.

A foreign race cuts the shafts; forgotten by travellers, far away from humans they dangle and sway.

That earth from which food comes forth is underneath changed as if by fire.

What on earth is going on? Indeed, what under the earth is going on? The text takes us down a mine shaft! (This has to be a favourite Durham Bible passage). It muses on the special human ability to dig down and so see the Earth from beneath – the precious stones glinting in the miners’ lamplight, the seams of gold and silver. Not even the falcon’s sharp eye can perceive all this – the hidden sources of rivers.

The passage actually condenses a theme that runs right through the book alongside that of unjust suffering – it’s about the way we fashion our relationship with the physical world around us. It concerns where we go – ‘there is a path…’, what we see – ‘unseen be eye of falcon’, what we understand – ‘bringing to light what is hidden’ and what we do – ‘they split open channels in the rocks’.

Some translators have found this language so powerful that they have turned the subject of this deep seeing from humans to God. But as a scientist I see in this a fitting metaphor for what we do – there really is an astonishing human ability to explore nature from beneath its surface and to understand its workings.

It is only at this point that the hymn admits its true subject

But where is wisdom to be found? And where is the place of understanding?

Humans do not know the way to it; it is not found in the land of the living.

In a comical game of hide and seek we look for wisdom in all the land – no, not there – at the bottom of the sea – no, not here either. Perhaps significantly we follow the wisdom trail to the opulent markets of Cush and Ophir. Old Testament scholar Carol Newsome notes the measure of their wealth – five different words are used for gold in as many verses! But wisdom is not to be found in the marketplace.

Finally the writer ‘draws back the curtain’ and reveals why God knows the way to wisdom.

Divine wisdom begins with a new deep way of seeing – ‘He looked to the ends of the earth’

Divine wisdom is numerate – ‘to assign a weight to the wind, the waters by measure’

Divine wisdom finds ways of channelling nature’s forces, not suppressing them – ‘he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderbolt’

Divine wisdom participates in what Paul Fiddes has called ‘Seeing the World and knowing God’ – it becomes an invitation to us to follow in Wisdom’s way of living. Wisdom is not an object we could possess, nor an accumulation of precepts and aphorisms. It is a way of seeing into the world, a way of serving creation, a way of partnering with each other and with our Creator.

It is a bright vision, and one that sacred or secular communities badly need. But in the light of the shrill voices of intolerance growing once again, the contradiction between our almost limitless technology yet inability to manage its consequences, our media-fuelled world as empty of wisdom as this vision is full of it – in the light of all that is it not a hopeless one?

Our New Testament reading tells us why this is not so, how, when all around is dark, it is not hopeless – any more than, as it turned out, Job’s state was hopeless even at his own lowest point.

Here St. Paul writes to the early church in Collossae – using the same subject matter as in the Hymn to Wisdom, but transformed. Here are again all created things, here the visible and the hidden things both, here also the aching need to reconcile all that is broken in the world. But now, in the same transept that draws all these together, in the place that the Book of Job assigned to Wisdom, Paul sees Jesus.

And the reason that this gives him hope is not that the darkness and death that threaten never come, not that the task of living as part of a complex and troubled world is not painful, but that because of Christ’s entering all this, going through death but into the new life of the resurrection, hope turns from wistfulness into solid reality.

That is why Bede, who knows his astronomy in the eighth century so much better than most of us do today (he knew all about the wisdom of seeing deeply into creation by measure..), called Christ not only the fountain of wisdom but also the Morning Star. It isn’t because the planet Venus shines with an attractive and pure light, although it does. It is because it orbits the sun at a closer distance than the earth, so is never more than 45 degrees or so from it in the sky. So when Venus rises as a morning star, although at that point the sky is still as dark as at midnight, and there is no other sign in heaven or earth to show that day is coming, yet the one who gazes upon this one light, and through wisdom grasps its significance, knows that, against all other evidence, yet day is nonetheless almost at hand – they can hope for it, and act upon it, as solid reality

We finish with a prayer composed of Bede’s words:

O Christ our Morning Star, Splendour of Light Eternal

Fount of all wisdom and shining with the glory of the rainbow

Come and waken us from the greyness of our apathy

And renew in us your gift of hope. Amen

The Tradition of Wisdom for Today: a Relational Theology of Science

“Do you have wisdom to count the clouds?” asks the voice of God from the whirlwind, within the stunningly beautiful catalogue of nature-questions in the Old Testament Wisdom Book of Job. I have become increasingly convinced that it is with this text where all Biblical explorations of our exploration of the natural world much start, balancing as it does both the light and the dark sides of the world; the sunrise and the hurricane, the known and the unknown. If discussions of science and religion sometimes get bogged down in Genesis, perhaps that is because they have not made the preparatory journey through the rich material of the Wisdom books. Their nature-writing also contains a collection of creation-stories. They use simpler language and metaphors than the developed Genesis texts speaking of creation by setting in place boundaries and foundations, demarking the heavens and the earth, order and chaos. The tradition reaches its zenith in Job.  Scientists of all faiths and none are invariably impressed by their first reading of “The Lords’s Answer” (Job 39-42) with its ancient exploration of the stars, meteorological phenomena, the living world, and strange unknown beasts. God’s final answer to Job’s complaint that the Creator is as out of control of moral justice as He is of the workings of creation itself, has a striking and unusual form: each verse is a probing question. Surely more of an invitation to think and to observe than a mere put-down, they direct Job out of himself and into the world around him. Perhaps therein is the deepest connection to science – we know that our fundamental creative step is to frame the right question, not to jump to the next neat answer.

I have long hoped to take a scientist’s personal reading of Job, and other Wisdom texts, as the starting point to make the case for science as a deeply human and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. In Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014) this starting point has inspired a journey towards modern science that visits stories from medieval, patristic, classical and other Biblical sources along the way. Writing in the North-East of England I have, for example, found delight in the scientific writings of our local 7^th century scholar, the Venerable Bede.

The Venerable Bede’s tomb in the Galillee Chapel of Durham Cathedral

Not only a great early historian (famously the author of An Ecclesiastical History of the English Speaking Peoples), Bede sees his calling to expound wisdom as a Christian scholar to include an account of the workings of nature so that people should not be afraid of it, but should understand.   In his account of natural phenomena, De Natura Rerum, he even corrects Pliny the Elder’s wrong theory of the hydrological cycle, identifies the influence of the Moon as the principle cause of the tides, and ventures a natural explanation of earthquakes as subterranean instabilities. The book whose current chapter we call ‘science’ has many previous episodes. Taking such a ‘long view’ of the history of science with its roots in Biblical wisdom, I wonder whether much of the current ‘science and religion’ debate operates within a wrong assumption about the narrative relation of science and religion. The activity we now call ‘science’ maintains continuity within human culture as old as any story, art or artefact.

A close reading of modern science from the perspective of ancient wisdom tradition unearths a second damaging, hidden assumption – that ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are culturally separated not only by time but by the domains in which they apply. Discussion of ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ and its variants, for example, seems inconsistent with the fields themselves. It adopts a geometry of their interrelation which is inconsistent with their own desire to speak about the whole of creation. A narrative approach, by contrast, is able to develop an approach to science (or in its more ancient form natural philosophy – the ‘love of wisdom of natural things’) that can draw on theological and cultural roots.

The narrative journey of wisdom soon picks up recurring themes that begin to weave a theological background for science. Although the Bible doesn’t speak in modern scientific terms, it does reflect over and again on our human relationship with nature – the foundation on which science builds. At each point wonder and responsibility come together – and the meeting is often painful.  From the thorns and briars of Genesis 3, to the destructive earthquake and floods of Job, the terrifying deconstruction of creation in Jeremiah’s prophecy (Ch4) and even the groaning of all creation in Romans 8, we are reminded that Bede was right – we do need to mend our relationship with nature. Following this theme of pain in human confrontation with nature constitutes one way to develop a ‘Theology of Science’ (rather than settling for conflict, truce or separation between Theology and Science). In doing so we recognise that both scientific and theological worldviews must be ‘of’ each other, for each must speak about everything that is. Theology must speak of science, not just to it.

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

A ‘theology of science’ embraced fully within mission, teaching, worship, prayer and practice also urges the church to drop any perspective which identifies science as a threat, but rather assume one that sees it at the heart of our human calling to live as agents of healing and hope within the natural world. The approach through Biblical wisdom in both Old and New Testaments can begin to add color to what a ‘theology of science’ might mean. There are seven strong ideas that reappear worth summarising here:

(1) a linear history from creation to new-creation – learning about nature is one aspect of our story that makes the future different from the past;

(2) the astonishing human ability to understand matter – seeing deeply beneath the surface of phenomena is what God himself does, and calls us to follow;

(3) the association of Wisdom with knowledge of nature introduces a duality that then drives a careful consideration of science with technology – we have a responsibility to work in fruitfulness with the world rather than exploit it;

(4) the pain of the human-nature relationship reminds us that, like all callings, engaging with nature under God’s authority will not be easy – at its simplest level it affirms that doing science is hard;

(5) the tension between order and chaos is ever present – as well as one reason for the pain of the storm and the earthquake, it also reminds us that a perfectly ordered, crystalline world is a dead world;

(6) the central role of questions affirms the risky and open journey – and the humility of living as learners;

(7) the exercise of love needs to be present – both in dealings with the natural world and among the community of disciples who answer God’s invitation to Job and those who follow to seek answers to its deep questions.

Each of these seven themes finds continuity and application with science today and its role in society. For example, the ancient theme of chaos motivates a closer look at statistical mechanics and its consequences for science-theology studies (so building on the more usual topics of cosmology or quantum mechanics). Again, the idea of doing science as an expression of love initially appears strange, but is actually an honest experience that might do much to demystify science and reveal the deeply human commitment it draws on.

A condensed statement of this ‘Theology of Science’ draws on St Paul’s masterly summary to the first-century Corinthian church of the entire Christian calling he shared with them: ‘we have the ministry of reconciliation’. If the business of Christianity is the healing of broken relationships, as St. Paul would have us understand, then when we do science, perhaps we are expressing a ‘ministry of reconciliation with nature’. Like all damaged relationships which we start ignorant and fearful, and lead to hurting both parties, the vision is of ignorance replaced by understanding, and exploitation and harm by work within wisdom. Surprisingly, science becomes a deeply religious activity – it finds a locus within a religious worldview, not opposed or outside it.

There are urgent lessons for the church from Biblical wisdom and a long human story of science: thinking through the purpose of science within the calling of the people of God might equip the community of believers better to deliver a distinctive voice into the troubled public world of science and technology. There are important decisions to make, and make soon, on the political process of decision-making in science and technology, our relationship with the global environment, our ability to manipulate the genetic code. There are better ways of treating science in education and in the media, and healthier narratives by which both religious and secular communities can celebrate and govern science, than those that currently dominate the public forum.

Understanding science to be situated within a larger, Biblically-informed, theological project of healing and reconciliation shows that, far from fearing its consequences, the church can embrace it as one of God’s greatest gifts and callings.

This post is modified from a recent piece for the daily Biologos blog

Faith and Wisdom in Science Discussion Blog: an invitation

The book Faith and Wisdom in Science brings a number of themes and ideas together to make its suggestion that we can and should reframe a long, human, cultural narrative for science.  It suggests that our inability to sustain a reasoned public and political conversation about troubled technologies, and our concerns with science policy, science education and the way science is portrayed in the media, all point to the lack of a deep narrative that supports the place of doing science and being human. It suggests that ancient wisdom literature is a place to look for a wellspring for the “missing narrative” and exemplifies the Book of Job, as a starting point.  This move opens a new way into science and religion questions, and in particular appeals to the need for a theology of science.  It suggests that science can be understood both theologically and anthropologically as the work of reconciliation of a broken relationship between the human and the material world.

Cricial responses have emerged already from public launch events at universities and other fora in the UK and the US, which have sparked some very interesting discussion.  In the hope that some of these responses might be shared more widely, and perhaps even some of the open questions in the book followed up, this blog invites postings from readers.  If I have anything to say in response I will try to say it!

The idea is that some of the original discussants at launch events for the book leave posts of their points on the Comments and Replies page of the blog.  Those and my replies will constitute an updated record of those discussions.  I will post further developments of the Faith and Wisdom in Science story on the home page.