NATURE features Christian Leaders and Scientists Project

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

Kathryn tells it how it is from the title on:

Religion and science can have a true dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience, Durham University

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

 

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

What is Science For? Answers in the entire Bible (not just in Genesis)

Try Googling ‘Science and Christianity’ – the next word in the auto-suggest list is ‘conflict’. Hit return and the first page of titles includes the questions, ‘Are Science and Christianity at War?’ and ‘Has Science Disproved God?’  When I was asked with others to participate in this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival Debate, we were given the by-now-predictable title of ‘Can Science and Faith Co-exist?’ Do I sound a little tired already of facing the continuous barrage of such questions (or rather of the same question posed in a thousand different ways)?  Yes, I admit that I do, and am somewhat enervated as well, for they are so monotonously posed that I believe that in the church we have now been persuaded that this is the only question that one can ask about science and faith.

The ‘can you reconcile…?’ question assumes that Christian (and other religious) belief is prima facie in some sort of boxing match with science, and that our only real task is the apologetic one of fighting back from the ropes, if we are lucky still to be on our feet.  The question takes for granted that science is a threat to Biblical belief, and that Christianity is a threat to science.  None of this is true – neither the assumptions behind the question, nor the primary significance of the question itself.

For a long time I have wanted to think about a much more important question. As both a Christian and a scientist since my early adult life, the ‘can you reconcile …’ question has simply been a non-starter – on the level of ‘have you stopped beating your wife?’ – it simply begins with the wrong assumptions.  Having experienced the human ability to do science, to uncover and understand something of the inner structure of the world, as God’s gift, among the many other gifts that follow from his supreme one, there was always a deeper, and much truer question to ask: ‘What is Science For within the Kingdom of God?’  Or, in other words, within God’s great project of creation, incarnation, redemption and the renewal of creation, what part does the gift of science play, and to what purpose? In other words, ‘What is Science For?’

If we are continually embroiled in the apologetic defence of the (within the family of faith) non-question of conflict, then we never allow ourselves the space to dig deep into Biblical material, theological reflection, and critical evaluation of our experience that needs to be the mark of people ‘transformed by the renewal of [our] minds’ (Rom 12:1). Perhaps that is also why the ‘science and faith’ debate is so little engaged with a wide resource of scripture. There is a lot said about the first chapter of Genesis, to be sure, but not so much from the many other narratives of creation throughout Torah, Wisdom, Prophets and the New Testament too.  Here seems to be a project: what does the whole testimony of scripture say about the purpose of science, and what would be the consequences of such an exegesis for the practice of Christian and scientific communities today?

Of course, consulting a concordance for the word ‘science’ is not a great idea. That does not, however, mean that our question is anachronistic, just that we need to know what science itself is at a deeper level.  Fortunately we do not need to look historically back very far for clues, for only a century and a half ago I would not have been called a ‘scientist’, but a ‘natural philosopher’ – or, unpacking the Greek etymology, a ‘lover of wisdom to do with nature’.  Before going any further, you could even try this on your science-suspecting friends and colleagues.  Replace the implied knowledge claim of ‘scientist’ (a Latin-derived claimer of knowledge – ‘scio’ – I know) with the softer Greek, and you might find that more people warm to the idea that we might be engaging with nature in a search for wisdom within the context of love.  The historical truth that science emerges from love and wisdom for nature speaks of it as a relational activity.  So, rather than look up ‘science’, let us ask where in the Bible we are asked to think about the human relationship with the created material world.  Immediately the texts pour forth like a river.

The first thing to notice is the frequency with which the creation story is told and retold: take a moment or two to look up a few places where the narrative refers back to God’s act of creating the world: Proverbs 8, Psalm 19, Psalm 33, Psalm 104, Isaiah 40, Isaiah 45, Jeremiah 10, Hosea 2, John 1 are just a few of the places where different language, a rich variety of metaphor, or fresh pictures are used to remind God’s people that it was their Lord who laid the foundations of the Earth, separated the land and the sea, spread out the heavens. The delightful and playful creation account in Proverbs 8 begins the story of wisdom – here she (Sophia) is a little girl at the feet of the Creator, playing with the rivers and mountains. The profound prologue to John’s Gospel contains a deliberate echo of the creation stories that begin with ‘in the beginning’, and in a brilliant stroke of prophetic insight identifies the Hellenistic creative and ordering principle of logos with the incarnate Christ.  More is true: creation stories are used to a purpose.  Creation stories, wherever they occur in scripture, tend to form bridges from a position of hopelessness and lost-ness to a renewed hope.  So the great recapitulation of creation in Isaiah 40 leads directly to the announcement of the One coming to redeem Israel. Psalm 33 takes a (brief) journey through the creation of the cosmos to take the psalmist from despair to hope.  Blink and you miss them- some of these accounts are very short, which in turn tells us just how developed the two Genesis creation stories are (in chapters 1 and 2), but brevity does not imply insignificance.  Human relationship with the physical creation is also a growing theme in these recurrent motifs – the celebration of the wisdom of the farmer who knows which seeds to plant at what season is the focus of Isaiah 28; we don’t just sit back and contemplate physical creation, we engage with it.

Perhaps the most profound of all the wisdom scriptures, in its description of our relation with the natural world, is the enigmatic Book of Job.  I have never tired of losing myself in this wonderful book since first I fell captive to what must surely be the greatest poem of natural wisdom in all ancient literature – the so-called ‘Lord’s Answer’ of chapters 38-42.  Here, for the first time since the prologue, the Lord finally appears to Job in answer to his repeated demands for vindication and admission that his suffering is unjust.  But rather than tackling Job’s complaints head-on, Yahweh takes the man on a journey through all of creation, and at every waypoint asks him a question:

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind, by William Blake

Have you journeyed to the springs of the sea?…..

Where is the way to the abode of light?….

..From whose womb comes the ice?…

..   Do you know the laws of the heavens?

And can you apply them to the earth?

Scientists to whom I have recommended the reading of these chapters have always come back astonished – for here are the foundation questions of the sciences we now call ‘meteorology’, ‘oceanography’, ‘cosmology’, ‘astronomy’, zoology’. More than that, as all working scientists know, the vital step in all successful science is not the finding of the correct answer (in spite of the years of schooling that would have us believe so) but the formulation of the creative question.  Einstein, Heisenberg and many others have noted this.

Strangely, ‘The Lord’s Answer’ has received some tough criticism in the scholarly literature. On the one hand it is charged with irrelevance – Job is concerned with the moral issue of the suffering of the righteous, not the provenance of the snow or the lightning. On the other, God is accused of the petulant put-down – of suggesting by his list of unanswerable questions that Job is ignorant and should cease his complaining.  Neither objection holds on close reading, however.  For one thing, the entire Book of Job is replete with nature imagery.  All the animals, plants and phenomena referred to in the Lord’s Answer have already been invoked in the three cycles of discourses between Job and his friends over the first 37 chapters.  Job’s complaint is in fact a double one: he accuses God of allowing chaos to reign in the natural world just as much as he does in the moral world:

What he destroys will not be built, whom he imprisons will not be freed.

He holds back the waters, there is drought; he lets them loose, they overwhelm the earth. (Ch12)

As for the reason for God’s appearance, far from diminishing Job, he is invited to ‘stand up’ and debate on Yahweh’s level, as in a courtroom. The vital context for the long questioning poem is the earlier ‘intermission’ to the cycle of discourses in chapter 28 often called the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’.  Mysteriously beginning down a mine, following the miners as they ‘dangle and sway’ on their ropes, looking up at the earth from beneath, the author wonders that of all the creatures, only human eyes are able to see the inner structures of the earth in this way.  Then the depths of earth and sea are questioned on where wisdom can be found – without avail.  The Hymn ends with identifying wisdom as a divine way of seeing:

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

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

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

 

I find the picture of the miner’s eyes peering into the deep structure of the world from the glimmer of a lamp to be a faithful metaphor for science itself – that part of culture that develops our gift of seeing beneath the surface of phenomena in the light of observation, imagination and reason. Coming from Durham, where I work, it is also particularly significant – the former mining communities around the city still know Job 28 as ‘the miners’ prayer’ – and it appears in stained glass in Easington Colliery parish church.  But there is more, for the close of the chapter indicates that it is in just this ability that we are made in the image of God as regards Wisdom, for this ‘deep seeing’ into the world is what Wisdom is, and what the Creator does.

Seen through a New Testament lens, a calling to heal a broken relationship with the world, by replacing ignorance with understanding, fear with wisdom and mutual harm with fruitfulness, looks like the fruits of the gospel of truth. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Cor5:7):

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ – new creation;

The old has gone, the new has come!

All this is from God, who reconciled himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ

The ‘ministry of reconciliation’ or, more simply, ‘healing broken relationships’ is what the gospel announces. It’s a great soundbite for what Christianity means, because everyone knows about broken relationships.  We are able to participate in God’s ministry of healing because the relationship upon which all others depend has been healed by Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection.  In this he is ‘reconciling the world (kosmos) to himself’ – that is the physical and natural world as well as the people in it.  One of the most surprising and glorious aspects of the gospel is that God calls us to participate in this work.  Perhaps the most humble of all broken relationships is that between human beings and the natural world.  Like other cases, it shows its flaws by beginning in ignorance and fear, and in the propensity for mutual harm (we have long known that nature can harm us, but it is only in the last century that we have discovered just how much we can harm nature too).

Take the ancient invitation to Job, and thereby to all who follow him, to engage in a deep and questioning way with the natural world, together with the Pauline ministry of reconciliation, and perhaps we have the beginnings of a Biblical answer to the question, ‘What is Science for within the Kingdom of God?’ In a small way, mending our relationship with the creation is just what a redeemed and loved creature made in God’s image might be expected to do.  Seen in that light, far from being a threat to faith, science becomes one of the most holy tasks one could imagine.

 For further development of these ideas, see Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014, paperback 2016).

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

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

Interior of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge

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

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

… do you know what binds the Pleiades star cluster?

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

can you trace the path of the lightening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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