Faith in Science Education – Wisdom in how we do it

Faith and Wisdom in Science – the blog did take a summer break.  But other things happened.  In particular I had the opportunity to write (at 24 hours notice) an opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper in the UK (published August 14th) on the importance of children experiencing open-ended experimental science while at school.  There is growing evidence that this is enormously beneficial to core science learning, but, as readers of Faith and Wisdom in Science will know, it also touches on a deeply theological nerve.  Becoming reconciled with nature means working with it and observing.  This is something that everyone can experience and enjoy.

The Guardian article as printed is here (it also made the weekly printed Guardian International, to which we have subscribed for years – I was delighted!). But I thought that the full original drafted version, before editor’s cuts, might be interesting to post.  So that follows.  The most important thing is that Job made the final cut!

Science is not just the preserve of stereotypical brainy boffins you see on TV. Speaking to the Times yesterday, head of the British Science Association Katherine Mathieson, said this public image was not helpful and that she’d prefer to “see a few years of genuine open-ended research by pupils, rather than fiddling around with beakers”. She also worries that science is not a topic of common conversation. Rightly so – if we can get our minds around Premier League strategy then complexity is not the issue.’

Mathieson is right to raise concerns. The ability of people to understand the world they live in increasingly depends on their understanding of scientific ideas. Science allows us to learn reliably about nature – if an experimental result does not support a specific idea, then the idea has to be rejected or modified and then tested again. For most people such understanding by imagination and experimentation comes through education. ​Great teachers are the driving force behind the UK’s position as a global scientific powerhouse.

However, overly-tight accountability measures, rapidly changing curricula and burdensome pupil progress monitoring are just some of the enormous pressures on schools that impede creating an environment in which tomorrow’s scientists can learn and grow. Teachers often have to carry out experiments in their own time and beyond the curriculum by joining schemes like our Partnership Grants.

In 2013, a report published by SCORE found that a worrying number of primary students were not experiencing a complete science education due to a lack of resources for practical work, with the average school having only 46% of the equipment needed. The UK is failing to create a scientifically informed society that can confidently hold science properly to account by engaging, enjoying and, yes, criticising it.

Children learn about music by trying their hand at composing a song or joining a jazz trio or string quartet. Others take GCSE Art, where we expect them to try out sketching and use watercolours, mixed-media or creative photography to learn about the subject. Even the most doting relative does not expect these creations to end up in a museum or concert hall, but what they teach our children about the artistic process is essential.

Science should be treated the same way. Humans have always been curious about the natural world and the stuff that makes it up. In the Book of Job, an ancient poem asks why the stars of the Pleiades are bound together, while those of Orion are scattered. Centuries before we formalised the scientific method, we had thoughtful and playful experiments with light, glass and water as well as astonishingly careful observations of the stars. People dreamed up imaginative theories of what might be going on up in rainbows and down inside liquids and solids. It wasn’t always right, but even now science can be a messy business on the path to truth. Why should things be different in 2017?

The Royal Society emphasises ‘experimental’ over ‘practical’ science, where curiosity should go beyond following a simple recipe and people should simply try something – a thoughtful way of looking for answers. We need to reverse recent trends and increase the amount of time and money invested in experimental and problem-solving work in science and mathematics education through access to adequately resourced laboratories and well-trained teachers. To support this activity in primary schools, Brian Cox, the Royal Society’s Professor for Public Engagement in Science, presents a series of video resources to increase teachers’ confidence with experimental science and relate the experiments to the real world. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg7f-TkW11iU11yatk_TcbA2tGH_WLe8d

Before you reach out for your Rousseaus to bash me over the head with, I want to reassure you that experimental science in education complements rather than replaces the learning of core scientific understanding. Sir John Holman found that investigative science improved attainment in core science exams, with greater effect for pupils in less privileged areas. There are other signs of new growth – the new Institute for Research in Schools is right now realising Mathieson’s vision of ‘genuine open-ended research by pupils’.

We currently have many examples of good practice at primary and secondary schools and colleges across the UK. Investing in experimental science in all our schools to help future generations make better sense of the world around them means that one day we will have confident opinions on scientific issues like we do on technical matters like Premier League team strategies.

 

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The Book of Job and Science come alive on Stage!

Imagine the long river of longing, questioning, pain and triumph, that starts from the pen of the long lost author of the Book of Job, and flows to the present day, when human desire to see deeply into the structure of nature takes the form of ‘science’.  Both of the great wisdom poems in Job, the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ of chapter 28 and the ‘Lord’s Answer’ of chapters 38-42 describe reaching out into the cosmos, and deep down into the structure of the Earth with the insight and imagination of mind and eye.  They also grasp the nettle of pain, of the frustration of incomprehension, especially in the face of the chaotic, the unpredictable, the seemingly purposeless.  This is also why science is also so very deeply human – all of life, hope and creativity is there.

Justin Butcher plays Job

Now imagine these two visions – the ancient poetic figure of Job, and that of a modern scientist facing the challenges of the unknown – brought into the same focus, the old longing to understand meeting the severe challenges of physics, mathematics and nature.  Job and his friends circle around each other, around the unanswered questions, and on a stage that circles itself amid a cosmic backdrop of the universe he longs to comprehend, including its chaotic and threatening aspects.

 

Job rails against his comforters

 

 

It was brilliant.  It worked. Job as scientist, Christian, and sufferer, right but also self-righteous.  Felix’ articulation of view of those for whom science is a threat, an inhuman desiccated exercise of the mind that dries up emotion and aesthetic.  And it sparked off wonderful questions and discussion for the panel of four scientists who are also Christians each evening.

Personally, working with Riding Lights and Nigel Forde has been inspiring.  To see some of the themes (and even some of the lines!) of Faith and Wisdom in Science woven into a vibrant dialogue between a modern day Job and his friends, has been a wondrous experience.

It left us all wanting to do more, to help the church embrace science as a gift of God, to support scientists in their calling, to appreciate the interplay of science and art in being human for everyone, to participate in the great work of healing our relationship with nature.

Look out for it later this year or next on a national tour!

Theatre, Science, the Book of Job – and Faith in the Questions

A play based on connections between the Book of Job and science!

This is going to be an exciting week (quite apart from a general election in the UK).  Financial support from the Durham-based Equipping Christian Leaders in an Age of Science project has allowed the development of a one-act play exploring the idea proposed in Faith and Wisdom in Science that the Old Testament Book of Job serves as a fundamental text from which we can trace the questions which today underpin the wonderful human cultural activity that we call ‘Science’.  In particular it takes the essential, and paradoxical, form of questions that is assumed by the ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job in the Biblical book.

A group of us in York have been working with the well-known theatre company Riding Lights and their writer Nigel Forde on the play Counting the Clouds.  To find out more you will really have to get along to St. Michael-le-Belfrey church (hard by York Minster) at 7.30 pm on the evenings of Thursday, Friday or Saturday June 8th, 9th and 10th.  Suffice it to say that the afflicted yet faithful Job is, in the play, a contemporary scientists, and that one of his ‘comforters’ includes a hard-line humanities-trained clergyman for whom science is a spoiler, a destroyer of wonder, and a threat to his faith.  Both have things to learn.

On each evening, the play will be followed by a second hour of panel discussion between the audience and a group of scientists who are also Christians.  It’s not impossible that I will be among them, but so will Steve Smye OBE of Leeds University and the National Institute of Health Research, and others of wide and deep experience.

The event, Faith in the Questions, forms part of York’s current Festival of Ideas, in which there is lots more on art, literature, politics, science, theology and more to entertain, educate and inspire – so get up to York this week, join in the discussion, and experience Counting the Clouds!.

You can find more information on the event and booking here.

 

 

The next scientific breakthrough could come from the history books

Faith and Wisdom in Science refers, within its chapter on the long history of science, to the remarkable 13th century scientific treatises of Robert Grosseteste.  This article, republished from TheConversationUK, says more about what we have learned from him over the last few years.

Giles Gasper, Durham University; Hannah Smithson, University of Oxford, and Tom McLeish, Durham University

The idea that science isn’t a process of constant progress might make some modern scientists feel a bit twitchy. Surely we know more now than we did 100 years ago? We’ve sequenced the genome, explored space and considerably lengthened the average human lifespan. We’ve invented aircraft, computers and nuclear energy. We’ve developed theories of relativity and quantum mechanics to explain how the universe works.

However, treating the history of science as a linear story of progression doesn’t reflect wholly how ideas emerge and are adapted, forgotten, rediscovered or ignored. While we are happy with the notion that the arts can return to old ideas, for example in neoclassicism, this idea is not commonly recognised in science. Is this constraint really present in principle? Or is it more a comment on received practice or, worse, on the general ignorance of the scientific community of its own intellectual history?

For one thing, not all lines of scientific enquiry are pursued to conclusion. For example, a few years ago, historian of science Hasok Chang undertook a careful examination of notebooks from scientists working in the 19th century. He unearthed notes from experiments in electrochemistry whose results received no explanation at the time. After repeating the experiments himself, Chang showed the results still don’t have a full explanation today. These research programmes had not been completed, simply put to one side and forgotten.

New perspectives on old investigations might turn out to be promising routes to radical research. Most current research programmes represent attempts to make incremental advances, nurtured and supported by a conservative system of peer review. But the generation of really fresh ideas requires methods that don’t just rely on linear progression.

Sometimes this non-linearity comes from new experiments or theories. For example, Albert Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905 from studying a series of thought experiments he had devised. The Nobel Prize-winning Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes’s experimental prowess while studying how metals behaved at very low temperatures led to his discovery of superconductivity. But looping back into forgotten scientific history might also provide an alternative, regenerative way of thinking that doesn’t rely on what has come immediately before it.

Collaborating with an international team of colleagues, we have taken this hypothesis further by bringing scientists into close contact with scientific treatises from the early 13th century. The treatises were composed by the English polymath Robert Grosseteste – who later became Bishop of Lincoln – between 1195 and 1230. They cover a wide range of topics we would recognise as key to modern physics, including sound, light, colour, comets, the planets, the origin of the cosmos and more.

Medieval scholar.
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We have worked with paleographers (handwriting experts) and Latinists to decipher Grosseteste’s manuscripts, and with philosophers, theologians, historians and scientists to provide intellectual interpretation and context to his work. As a result, we’ve discovered that scientific and mathematical minds today still resonate with Grosseteste’s deeply physical and structured thinking.

Our first intuition and hope was that the scientists might bring a new analytic perspective to these very technical texts. And so it proved: the deep mathematical structure of a small treatise on colour, the De colore, was shown to describe what we would now call a three-dimensional abstract co-ordinate space for colour.

But more was true. During the examination of each treatise, at some point one of the group would say: “Did anyone ever try doing …?” or “What would happen if we followed through with this calculation, supposing he meant …”. Responding to this thinker from eight centuries ago has, to our delight and surprise, inspired new scientific work of a rather fresh cut. It isn’t connected in a linear way to current research programmes, but sheds light on them from new directions.

Take, for example, Grosseteste’s application of his colour theory to the rainbow, carried out in his final treatise. In explaining the differences of colours between and within rainbows on three axes related to his colour theory, Grosseteste put forward the basis of a coordinate system for colour embedded in nature.

It was only by looking at his discussion of rainbows recreated by modern physics that we could interpret his colour qualities in terms we use today. It’s the medieval equivalent of the way televisions combine coloured light, but written in the clouds with sunlight rather than on flat screens with liquid crystal displays. The finding also resonates with open research questions on why some colours seem closer to others in our perception.

One way of looking at the creative processes at work in this scientific dialogue with the 13th century is that it is just the kind of neoclassical (or neomedieval) science that some have assumed is impossible. We’ve found scientific ideas addressing current thinking in fresh ways in every treatise by Grosseteste we’ve examined so far, proving it’s not exceptional.

History is important. And through our collaboration through time with Grosseteste, we’ve shown it can undermine some of the brittle narratives told about modern science. We may be alone in space with our thoughts of communicating with the intelligence of other civilisations, but we need not be alone in time.

Giles Gasper, Senior Lecturer in Medieval History, Durham University; Hannah Smithson, Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology (Perception), University of Oxford, and Tom McLeish, Professor of Physics and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Durham University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘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.

 

 

 

‘Let There Be Science’- Publication Day!

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

Let There Be Science!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year 10 Quiz Science and Faith

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

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

Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Can a Freethinker Believe in God?

Following an online interview with an interesting organisation called TheFreeThinkTank, they asked me to write an opinion piece for them on the title above.  They had read Faith and Wisdom in Science, and thought that it approached science from a point of view that atheist readers might find more able to engage with than other Christian ‘science and religion’ material. In case readers wonder why this is an issue at all, the ‘Freethinking’ movement has its history in secular and non-theistic thinking, so the expectation within that movement (and of several people I know) is most certainly a NO!  But dig a little deeper and it’s not at all clear that it’s quite that simple….

Here I reblog the essay:

This article originally appeared on The Freethink Tank, on December 1, 2016.

The post-doctoral researcher, who first worked with me as a new-minted junior lecturer, came from Moscow. A theoretical physicist trained in the excellent school of polymer physics at MGU, Tanya was a fearsomely good mathematician and wielded theoretical statistical mechanics with a distinctly Russian flavour. That was scientifically useful – two complementary approaches to a problem are always more powerful than one. We compared other notes too – about our education and our very different experiences growing up in 60s/70s London or Moscow. I was interested and somewhat amused when the topic of teenage rebellion came up. Schooled with a stream of materialist atheism and Soviet cultural history by day – Tanya and her breakaway 16-year-old friends would head off to underground churches by night. Context makes a big difference.

I’m not offering teenage contrariness as an example of ‘freethinking’, but the roots of the freethinking movement also constitute a deliberate departure from a received norm, albeit a more grown-up one. The example of those wicked teen rebels chanting psalms by candle-light might serve to remind us that the expression of freedom is defined by its context, and by its act, not by a foreordained place of arrival.

Degrees of freedom

For any act, including acts of thinking, to be free requires a lack of constraint. The more constraints imposed on a world of thought, the less free will that mind has to explore, create, to think radically. The analogy here is with the sciences of mechanics, or of thermodynamics. For each constraint imposed on a system, there is one fewer ‘degree of freedom’. So my first approach to the question in this article’s title is to explore this physical metaphor of freedom and constraint. According to the Freedom from Religion Foundation (quoted to me by an atheist friend who had been confused that The Freethink Tank had interviewed me and invited this contribution):

‘No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.’

Constraints on conclusions

True enough – a freethinker cherishes freedom in others as much as in herself, and will not make ‘demands’ of conformity on the thought of others. But when the mandatory tone is removed, the Foundation’s statement begins to look like a constraint. The a priori demand that thinking through a world-view should rule out belief in God, constitutes a constraint, a mental removal of a cogitative degree of freedom. More constraints imply fewer degrees of freedom, so imposing a non-theist constraint to thinking achieves the same as any constraint – it makes it less free, not more. The philosopher Bertrand Russell knew that freethinkers do not impose the constraints of conclusions at the outset of their thinking; he insists that freedom of thought is a process, not an end:

‘What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favour, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.’

I could finish here in a flourish of unanswerable logic, but suspect that would be less than satisfactory. Much of the remainder of his 1944 essay The Value of Free Thought is spent pointing out examples of cruelties and enormities of religious power structures, in which he is largely correct, and rehearsing the supposed age-old conflicts between religion and science, in which he is largely mistaken. Russell insists that a theistic stance must be shackling to thought, preserving of harmful prejudice and inimical to the creation of the new. For him, all religion is backward-looking in a world that needs to reach out with hope to the future. He implies that although theism is possible for a freethinker in principle, it ought to be ruled out in practice. I suspect he speaks for most readers at this point, so we need to go a little deeper than the mathematics of constraint to decide whether in practice a freethinker might ever arrive at a belief in God.

Theologically-informed philosophy

Staying with Russell’s great bête noire of Christianity, we might explore the degree to which its worldview shackles or serves freedom of thought. And since the ‘medieval’ church has received more censure in this regard than most ages, let us read from Adelard of Bath – a remarkable 12th-century thinker. After an intellectual pilgrimage to the great Arab schools in Sicily and Asia Minor, he returns to southern England full of passion for a theologically-informed natural philosophy and writes his Questiones Naturales (or Questions on Natural Science) in about 1110. He makes an amusing and fascinating complaint in its preface: ‘… for the present generation suffers from an ingrained fault, that it thinks that nothing should be accepted which is discovered by the “moderns”. Hence it happens that, whenever I wish to publish my own discovery, I attribute it to another person saying: “Someone else said it, not I!”‘. There then follows a book of fascinatingly novel thinking about the natural world of animals, humans, the earth and sky, much of it wildly out of tune with the science of today of course (yet it includes a wonderful account of centripetal gravity on a spherical earth), but very firmly on the questing path that brought us there. Here is a very freethinker, who urges a higher value accorded to the novel ideas that freethinking produces, than he sees in the intellectual world around him. He is one of the generators of the ‘12th-century renaissance’ that galvanised new thinking across Europe and prepared the way for the rise of the experimental method up to the 16th century.

Silent partner of thought

It takes energetic thinkers such as Adelard to motivate the silent partner of thought, namely the will. The great freethinkers have noticed that freedom by itself is not enough – to think into new spaces, to dare explore novel ideas and relations requires an effort, an energy, a release of the will, beyond the ordinary. The great 20th-century thinker Hannah Arendt writes extensively on Will in her magisterial The Life of The Mind. For her, to release the possibility of freedom in thinking requires first the comprehension and direction of freedom in the will. She wrestles with both secular and religious sources of constraint on the will: ‘… the trouble has always been that free will, whether understood as freedom of choice or as the freedom to start something unpredictably new – seems utterly incompatible, not just with divine Providence, but with the law of causality‘. Yet free acts of thought are possible, though much harder and rarer than we might flatter ourselves is the case. Arendt scales the philosophy of thought through Hebrew, Hellenistic and Christian frameworks in the search of a ground for freedom. In the company of Epictetus and St. Paul, of Virgil and the ancient author of the Book of Job, it is with Augustine that she finally draws to a close in the ambivalence of the birth of freedom.

I’ve briefly visited these two thinkers of such different ages, a Christian and secular Jew, not purely to include reminders of the subtle and rich history of thinking informed by theism, nor purely to rebut the accusation that theism cannot look forward to the new, in the way that both Abelard and Arendt clearly do. For they also illustrate another prior need if one is to be free-thinking – a mental scaffolding with which to explore new spaces. Freedom of movement requires footholds – freedom to explore a domain of thought is as important as freedom from impediments.

Mental construction kit

It is this sense of ‘freedom to’, rather than ‘freedom from’, in my own freethinking that led me toward Christianity rather than away from it. It was the rich legacy of ideas, its mental construction kit, that constitute a freedom to think in the categories I needed. There is, for example, more than one perspective on a core idea like divine creation – is this an ancient doctrine that we need freedom from or an energising idea that gives us freedom to think in categories of purpose, or of our own creativity? Is a belief in the resurrection a nonsense of myth and delusion that still shackles too many modern minds or the fundamental source of freedom to hope?

I am a working scientist, but I have also long wanted to conceive and communicate a human narrative for science within culture. I constantly detect that the human core of science has been at best hollowed out and at worst lost in our superficial and materialistic times. Our culture has ‘optionalised’ science in a dangerous and impoverishing way. Working through the history and pre-history of science for this project, I found the need to draw on the theological story of ends, relationships, healing, even to articulate an account of the problem. Belief and a life of thought in God ‘felt like’ it was giving me the framework to make the first foray into the cavernous space of those ideas (that ended up in my book Faith and Wisdom in Science).

Why artificially constrain our freedom to think by padlocking all that possibility away, especially as theism begins to look increasingly subversive of today’s received dogma?

Let There Be Science! – a guest-blog from its first author

I have already said something about the new book for school-age and wider readership that takes the simple message of Faith and Wisdom in Science further.  But Let There Be Science! – Why God Loves Science and Why Science Needs God, would never have even got to the ‘twinkle in the eye’ stage, let alone a finished book, without the vision, energy, wonderfully engaging writing style and encyclopaedic knowledge of scientific anecdotes, of the chief author, Dave Hutchings (I am really the co-author).  As committed to teaching physics as he is to his Christian conviction, and as studied in both, Dave was the ideal collaborator on this project.  I have enjoyed working with him immensely, and learned a great deal.  As a result of the project, we are both even more  convinced that the message that you don’t have to choose between Science and Christianity .

Let There Be Science! comes out with Lion Hudson Publishers in January 2017, and we are very excited that the many ‘blurbs’ we have collected are as positive from atheists as they are from Christians (you can read some on the amazon page). Among other things, this is surely a response to the excitement around science that Dave brings to its pages.  Here is his contribution to the blog:

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Firstly, may I say a big ‘thank you’ to Tom – for inviting me to guest on his blog, for asking me to co-write Let There Be Science, and (in both cases) for taking a risk by associating himself with a previously unpublished jobbing science teacher.

And, with those formalities out of the way (!) it would seem that the most sensible place to start is with an excerpt from the book itself. Here are some words from the preface:

The whole thing is almost depressingly predictable. Each school year, the students I teach find out that I believe in God – either because they have asked me outright or because it has turned up in conversation somehow. From then, I can count it down:

3…2…1…

“But you’re a science teacher!”

It isn’t their fault, of course. Somehow, even before their mid-teens, they think that you just have to pick a side – God or science. Who has told them this?  Science-hating God-people?  God-hating scientists?  

Either way, it doesn’t take long to establish that there hasn’t been much real thought involved in their forming of the ‘it’s either God or science’ conclusion – it has just sort of happened.

This section is not part of the main text of the book; so why choose to use it here rather than something else? The answer is that it highlights one of the key aims of Let There Be Science: to make it very clear that the idea of having to ‘pick a side’ is totally unsupported by the evidence.

In reality, Christianity and Science have walked hand in hand for centuries. To demonstrate this, Tom and I tell stories – stories of success and frustration, of joy and despair, of the ancient world and the modern laboratory – all of which highlight the deep interconnectedness of the biblical worldview and scientific progression.

Time and again, Christians appear right at the forefront of scientific revolutions – frequently attributing their insights to their faith. Should we be all that surprised at this, though, when we take into account that any Christian has previously undergone a personal revolution in their decision to follow Jesus?  After all, what better preparation could there be for tearing up the science rulebook and starting all over again than having done that already with your whole life?

Connections like this – when the practice and priorities of the Christian life link so clearly to the attitudes and habits which produce good science – can be found all over the place. Let There Be Science recounts these profound bonds in all of their diverse glory: the reader should be prepared for tales of levitating frogs; of toddlers and video-gamers solving problems which stumped the experts; of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock doing some Bible study; and of what flipping 92 heads in a row can tell us about earthquakes.

So, buy yourself a copy whilst they are still available; and relax if you were worrying about which side to pick, because – as all of these stories will go on to show – you don’t have to!

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1st Annual Edward Delaval Lecture in Physics

Here I am with host Andrei Zvelindovski of Lincoln University at the most recent public lecture from the Ordered Universe project

Maths & Physics News

On the 16th of November 2016 Professor Tom McLeish FRS from Durham University, UK, delivered our 1st Annual Edward Delaval Lecture in Physics.  The lecture is named after Edward Delaval FRS, a ‘physics hero’ associated with the Doddington Hall near Lincoln.  Tom gave a fascinating talk about the English polymath of the 13^th century Robert Grosseteste, who was  Bishop of Lincoln. A lively discussion and answers to questions from the public after the lecture made 1.5 hours fly without  notice.

After the lecture. L-R: Professor Tom McLeish FRS and Professor Andrei Zvelindovsky, Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics.

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