Islam, Christianity and Science: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

One of the questions I am often asked at Faith and Wisdom in Science discussions is along the lines of, ‘What do other religions say about such a theology of science?’.  Even if I have persuaded the questioner that the ‘conflict narrative’ is inapplicable to christianity and science, except by construction, the thought behind the question is often that other religions must percieve science as a sort of threat.  The religion most commonly suggested at this point is Islam.

I have just returned, by coincedence, from Paris, in a week marked by thoughts of Islam and conflict.  I was there as an external advisor to a French science committee of the CNRS (the main French national science funding body), but had the opportunity of witnessing at first hand the solidarity of the Parisiens in their determination that the atrocious gunning down of satirical journalists, a police officer, and shoppers in a Jewish supermarket should not escalate into violent community divisions.  It was an impressive and moving experience.

The juxtaposition of science, conflict and a religious response of reconciliation reminded me of the ‘homework’ I had set myself and others in the final chapter of Faith and Wisdom when I look at its consequences.  We found that science has a theological human purpose of participating together in reconciling humanity to the material world – and that far from being in confict with religion, it is that outworking of the story of God and creation that speaks of the relationship between humankind and nature.  One of the consequences of the ‘new geometry’ of faith and science is the hope for a new strand of dialogue between faith traditions themselves.  I found that in Islam (and in Judaism and more) wherever thinking was not hidebound into doctrinal power-structures, there was the same theological embracing of science rather than a flight from it.  The Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal has written of Koranic sayings that speak of human freedom to share in the task of creation – a very close idea to the participative relational theology of Biblical ‘Wisdom’ writings.

The 12th century Cordoban muslim philosopher Averroes

This should not surprise us if we reflect for a moment on the debt that the rise of medieval and early modern science owes to the scholarship and natural philosophy of the great Islamic thinkers Avicenna (Ibn-Sina, 980-1037), Averroes (Ibn-Rushd,1126-1198), Al-Kindi (801-873) and others, in the early medieval period.  The extraordinary early science advances made by the English 13th century polymath Robert Grosseteste, which we are uncovering in the Ordered Universe project at Durham, drew essentially on Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and other texts. Not only the Aristotelian emphasis on the observation of nature, but also the quest to deepen our understanding of nature beyond Aristotle, and a theological motivation for doing so, all re-energised European thinking via the Islamic tradition of Pesia, North Africa and Spain.  An instructive example occurs in the route from Aristotle’s linear, and physically unsupported, ordering of colours from black to white, and Grosseteste’s full three-dimensional colour space.  It was Averroes who, in his de sensu, motivated a theory of colour with a higher number of degrees of freedom by suggesting that colour arose from the double nature of material transparency and light itself.  In the 13th century we see Christian scholars reading Muslim commentators and scientists, themselves reflecting on Greek, pagan, authors – and making transformational progress in our  knowledge of nature and in the very direction of science.

A very influential thinker, transformational physicist and devout Muslim I might have referred to in the book is Nobel prizewinner

Abdus Salam, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1979

Abdus Salam.  He drew not only his motivation to do science from his muslim faith, but also descibed how his experience of doing theoretical physics shed light on his reading of the Koran.  At one point in his  Nobel Prize address, Salam quoted the Koranic verse:

Thou seest not, in the creation of the All-merciful any imperfection, Return thy gaze, seest thou any fissure? Then Return thy gaze, again and again. Thy gaze, Comes back to thee dazzled, aweary.

 

He commented:

This, in effect, is the faith of all physicists; the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze.

But he did not stop at that point.  He drew from this one of the other great lessons that also emerged in Faith and Wisdom:

I am saying this, not only to remind those here tonight of this, but also for those in the Third World, who feel they have lost out in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, for lack of opportunity and resource.

Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity. On this occasion, let me say this to those, whom God has given His Bounty. Let us strive to provide equal opportunities to all so that they can engage in the creation of Physics and science for the benefit of all mankind. This would exactly be in the spirit of Alfred Nobel and the ideals which permeated his life. Bless You!

This is still a future hope – that the deeply human need to reconcile our understandind with the material world – the endeavour we now call science – can be opened up to everyone.  In developed countries exclusion arises from inequitable or uninspiring education, from a media and press that stigmatise and isolate science.  Elsewhere there are still economic exclusions.  Sadly there is also damage done to the enjoyment of science everywhere in the world from a failure to understand that science is a theological gift and mandate, rather than a threat.  Both Christianity and Islam suffer from containing some within their communities who sustain the severe and damaging error of literalistic misunderstanding of scriptures.  In both cases the perverse doctrine of ‘young earth creationism’ denigrates science as well as doing violence to their own holy writings.  Yet that, too, though unwelcome, is a shared challenge.

At a time when reconciliation is as starkly urgent as at any we can recall, rediscovering science as God’s gift looks like a project that people of Abrahamic faith and beyond should embark on urgently.

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Medieval Lessons for the Modern Science/Religion Debate

I have been asked to write a book chapter on this topic following a workshop in the Ordered Universe interdisciplinary series on medieval science. For some reason I thought that a summary might make a suitable Christmas blog post: it’s a season when we look back (a long way) into the past for strength and guidance in the here and now. 800 years back to the time of Robert Grosseteste does not seem so immense a leap right now.

A 14th century image of Robert Grosseteste as Bishop of Lincoln

Grosseteste (depicted adjacent) was a deeply scholarly man, a teacher to the Oxford Franciscans in the 1220s, and Bishop of Lincoln from 1235.  During the period from 1225 to 1235 (probably) he wrote a series of about a dozen works on scientific topics: light (De luce), colour (De colore), the rainbow (De iride – he was the first to identify refraction as the driving phenomenon of rainbows).  You can find out much more about Grosseteste and his scientific work at the ‘Ordered Universe’ blog linked above.  This is a project where we bring the skills of medieval scholars, latinists, historians, philosophers, theologians and active scientists today, all to bear on analysing these treatises, their texts, and the scientific logic within them.  It’s fascinating!

It’s also an important exercise for the themes of Faith and Wisdom in Science, because it evidences the theme of the book that science has a much longer history than we usually credit it with.  Perhaps, rather, the activity we now call ‘science’ is the name of the current chapter in a book of human engagement with nature that has many many previous chapters.  The 13th century was certainly an important one.  And not only because of the early science it contains, but also because of the theologically-derived underpinning purpose behind a human attempt to understand the physical world.  As I argue in the book, we just dont have a purpose for science today (apart possibly for a very narrow and instrumental economic one).  So mining more ancient wisdom, while not applicable immediately in our own age, is likley to be a fruitful exercise, and a fascinating one.

I think that there are five chief ways in which this 13^th century master, and his intellectual and theological milieu, can assist in escaping our current impasse. I have called these: (1) the disruption of damaging myths, (2) the long history of science, (3) a cultural narrative for science, (4) a unified vision and (5) a relational and incarnational metaphysics. We next discuss each thread in a little more detail.

 

1 Disruption of Damaging Myths

As has already been noted, a common meta-narrative of the history of science in both public media and (at the least) school education, is that nothing remotely resembling science existed before the early modern period (or the late 16^th century). According to this story, before Galileo and Newton any philosophy of the natural world was clouded with magic, alchemy, superstition, and – worse of all – the dogma of theology[1]. There are other sub-narratives that emerge – that the scientific method is entirely modern, that medieval thinkers’ chief goal was in any case to recapitulate the thoughts of the classical philosophers and not to move beyond them, that the medieval church repeatedly suppressed innovative thinking in general, and that ‘theology’ and ‘science’ were indistinguishable in the medieval world of scholasticism. Grosseteste’s scientific corpus serves as an immediate gust of fresh air to remove such flimsy cobwebs of reconstructed history.

The shortest of the scientific treatises, the De colore (on colour) is enough on its own to remove credence in such a fiction. As I and others had explored in depth elsewhere[2], the De colore represents a piece of work that a modern scientist would recognise as being in continuity with, though naturally distant from, questions posed and methods pursued today. Grosseteste does not allegorise or mystify colour; he does not accord any supernatural powers of transformation to it; he writes no explicitly theological material in his treatment at any point. On the contrary he treats colour as a perceived property of the natural world.

Color est lux incoporata in perspicuo – the opening line of the treatise – introduces the conjecture that colour is an emergent property of light and matter. He then identifies the different colours of objects as betraying the activity of different lights (characterised by the variation of two quantities of greatness – multa/pauca – and clarity – clara/obscura within materials characterised along a third dimension of purity – purum/impurum). There is to this day an unsolved problem in cognitive psychology of the apparent ordering, continuity and perceptive proximity of colours [3]. Grosseteste prepares the ground for an approach to this issue by creating an abstract theatre of colour space. He is also working in a highly mathematical way (though this has not always been recognised in the secondary literature on the De colore). The numbers of possible colours and their contingencies are calculated in terms of the combinatorics of his three bipolar qualities. Never explicit, but strikingly obvious to mathematically equipped readers of his and Aristotle’s theories of colour, is that in developing a three-dimensional colour space between the opposing poles of black and white, he is going far beyond the Philosopher.  Grosseteste insists that per experimentum (whether by thought or in action is beside the point here) one only reaches all possible colours by the variation of three independent quantities. The treatise does not represent a mere recapitulation of ancient thought, but goes far beyond it in imaginative theory as well as in mathematical complexity and observational relationship.

Within this short text of 400 Latin words we find, in this reading, a recognisably scientific approach to the mathematical modelling of an observed physical phenomenon. Naturally it is of its own time, not of ours – we now understand the origin of the three-dimensionality of colour to have its origins in the three types of photosensitive cone cells in the human retina, not directly in the properties of light or materials. But the core characteristic of science is not to be found in the answers it holds pro tem, but in the questions it poses, the way it goes about answering them and in the direction of intellectual travel. In this sense Grosseteste is in continuity with questions and methods in colour science today. If that were not true, it would be hard to explain why a team of scientists encountering this work in detail, and the related treatise on the rainbow, the De iride, were immediately inspired to create some new science. They recast the physical optics of the rainbow, and the perceptual framework of human colour vision, to show that even in contemporary terms, Grosseteste was correct in asserting that colour space can be both spanned and mapped by ‘the space of all possible rainbows’[5]. Remarkably, this analytic work, required originally to establish whether the colour space of the De colore was indeed equivalent to the perceptual space used today, led to the discovery of a new mapping for the space in which the coordinate system is inspired by the spectral characteristics of rainbows.

 

2. A long History of Science

A second aspect of our deconstruction of the ‘modern science’ myth requires some comment: it is one thing to show that Grosseteste and his contemporaries were working in a potential logical continuity with science today; to show that this is also an actual historical continuity with it is another. It may never be possible to retrace the full pattern of reception of his scientific corpus. These treatises, remarkable as they are, are not as widely referred to as the Hexaemeron and Psalm commentaries, for example. Yet nearly two generations after their probable first writing, Roger Bacon had grounds to acclaim Grosseteste as the greatest mathematical genius of the century. The conceptual continuity of his geometric optics and work on the rainbow, with those of Bacon, Theodoric of Freiburg, the Prague school of the 15^th century, and onwards to Newton’s own Optics, strongly suggests that historical transmission of his science accompanies the conceptual possibility.

But whatever the detail and extent of their later adoption and development, Grosseteste’s scientific works are testament to the longer continuity of a human intellectual story that we now call ‘science’, but which went by other names in earlier ages. It might better be termed ‘natural philosophy’ in the 18^th and 19^th centuries or even ‘natural wisdom’ in antiquity. A vital thread is that of a developing story – natural philosophers are consciously drawing from ideas of the past, but building on and correcting them. Our evolving understanding of nature has a history, with a more occluded past, a present mixture of partial understanding and of open questions, and a hoped-for future of clearer insight.

If the 13^th century is marked by the dawn of the first concepts in experimental method, then in Grosseteste it also represents a clear new departure in the ubiquitous application of mathematical thought to natural science. From our modern perspective, it is hard to imagine an intellectual milieu in which this would not seem natural. But that is because we do not share the same sharp dualism of the perfect and imperfect inherited philosophically from Plato and cosmologically from Aristotle. Grosseteste himself comments on the Posterior Analytics that we are able to do with mathematics that which God is able to do with physics – that is to deduce conclusions from axioms within a closed system. We do have access to the fundamental axioms of mathematics, but only the Creator has that access in regard to nature. Our task is to arrive at those axioms inductively from observations of their consequences. Such human predicament of incompleteness is a consequence of our dwelling in the sublunary world of imperfection. Now, while is it natural that (perfect) mathematics applies to the structure and motion of the (perfected) spheres above that of the moon, it is by no means clear that it will be as commensurate with the (imperfect) realm of the elements. To assay a mathematical analysis of sublunary nature is therefore not only a critical, but a bold, step. Yet it is one that Grosseteste takes in each of his scientific treatises. In spite of the unavailability of advanced algebraic notation of any kind, he is able to compute, for example, abstract vectors combinatorially in his three-dimensional colour space. Perhaps more impressive is the continuation of his discussion of colour in the De iride, in which he considers the conceptual space of all possible rainbows. Though not immediately apparent as such, this high degree of abstract and structured thinking is highly mathematical.  In re-thinking Aristotle in critical ways, and in advancing mathematical tools to conceptualise the structures that lie behind the superficial perception of phenomena such as colour, Grosseteste partakes in both the reception and advancement of a much longer story of science than typically frames discussions of religion and science today.

 

3. A Cultural Narrative for Science

Perhaps the most striking contrast between Grosseteste’s intellectual world and ours can be found in our differing teleology. Cultural narratives are able to generate purpose, or equally, to proclaim purposelessness. So, while he knows why he is exploring the natural world, and develops a strong sense of purpose in doing so, we have in our own time lost any such propelling meta-narrative. In late modernism a faint echo of a human reason that we do science remained, but only in an instrumental narrative of national economic prosperity. In a post-modern atmosphere of suspicion around all overarching stories, that too (possibly healthily) has withered.

There are both simple and more sophisticated strands within Grosseteste’s motivations to engage in natural science. On a delightfully childlike level, at one point in his commentaries on the Psalms, he reflects that, if the Bible chooses to convey truth to its readers through the illustrations of natural objects (trees, clouds, falling leaves etc.) then it behoves us to discover as much as we are able concerning them, simply in order that we might better understand the scriptures. An application of this very direct thinking appears in an explanatory note accompanying his edition of John Damascene’s De Fide Orthodoxa. Two chapters in the earliest manuscripts at his disposal concerned scientific topics that ostensibly had no contact with the theological substance of the work as a whole. Earlier editors had sometimes omitted them for that reason. But Grosseteste reinstates both, explaining that:

“These two chapters, namely the 24^th about seas and the 25^th about winds, are omitted in some Greek manuscripts; perhaps because they did not seem to contain a theological subject. But according to truly wise men, every notice of truth is useful in the explanation and understanding of theology.”

We see immediately the impressively connected philosophy of knowledge that drives his studies. Although he is perfectly able to distinguish theology and science (again, there was no age – certainly not the 13^th century – in which they were ‘indistinguishable’), he takes the two as mutually dependent in at least illustrative ways. He maintains a clear distinction between theological and scientific writing, but within an implicit and deep connectivity. So although we find no explicit theological introductions or conclusions to the scientific works, this is because their theological task speaks for itself. For an explanation of deeper connection between the silent theological framing of his natural philosophy, and the science itself, we need to turn to the philosophical works. In the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (of Aristotle) Grosseteste places a more sophisticated theological philosophy of science within the overarching Christian narrative of Creation, Fall and Redemption. Employing a Boethian metaphor for the effect of the Fall on the higher intellectual and spiritual powers (in descending hierarchy those of understanding, memory, imagination) as a ‘lulling to sleep’ by the weight of fallen flesh, he maintains that the lower faculties, including critically the senses, are less affected by fallen human nature than the higher. Human understanding (aspectus) is now inseparable from human emotion and loves (affectus); the inward turning of the latter now dulls the former. However, there is an avenue of hope that the once-fallen higher faculties might be re-awakened: engaging the affectus, through the still-operable lower senses, in the created external things of nature allows it to be met by a remainder (vestigium) of other, outer light. So a process of re-illumination can begin once more with the lowest faculties and successively re-enlighten the higher:

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

Human engagement with the external world through the senses, necessary because of our fallen nature, becomes a participation in the theological project of salvation. Furthermore, the reason that this is possible is because this relationship with the created world is also the nexus at which the human seeking is met by divine illumination. As a central example, the ‘physics of light’ grounded in the cosmogony of the De luce informs a ‘metaphysics of light’ as a vehicle to become a ‘theology of light’.  The teleological – purposeful –  employment of scientific investigation as an instrument of human participation in a reversal of the effects of sin in the fall, is an idea that itself reawakens in the early modern period, especially (but by no means exclusively) in Francis Bacon [4].

 

4. A Unified Vision

Reading Grosseteste from a scientific perspective excites resonances with a class of thinkers for whom a unified map of the world has the highest value. Einstein is perhaps the most celebrated modern example. The prime motivation for his Nobel Prizewinning work on the photoelectric effect was not a central attack on that problem – it is in any case a corollary to the paper [5] – but a desire to develop a thermodynamic account of light. Similarly, relativity arises, not from a direct analysis of time and motion, but from an attempt to overcome an uncomfortable incommensurability between late 19^th century electromagnetism and mechanics.

A similar passion for a single vision has already emerged in our examination of the De colore and De iride – taken together with the De luce these works replace a fragmented universe of coloured objects by a unified theory of the activity of light within body to generate the phenomenon of material extension that in turn produces the phenomenon of colour. Furthermore, the abstract geometry of colour itself works as a unifying mathematical framework in all of its occurrences, arising from the product of internal properties of materials and of light.

Perhaps more remarkable is the completely original unification that Grosseteste makes, at least by implication, in the De luce, of the superlunary and sublunary cosmic regions. For Aristotle, as we have seen, the universe contains two incommensurate and separate realms in which, for all time, both nature and physics are different. The imperfect spheres of the elements sustain vertical motion, mixing, disease, while above the moon all matter is perfect, crystalline and all motion circular. There is not even a temporal connection between the two regions, since this separation has been the case for all time. The cosmogony of the De luce is not only a remarkable application of Aristotelian physics taken in a critical vein to overthrow an Aristotelian cosmos without beginning, nor is it just an impressively clever theory of origins. It also demonstrates how the same creative force of light (in its two forms of lux and lumen) and its action of rarefaction and compression on matter, can give rise to both superlunary and sublunary regions within a single process of structure development, itself determined by a uniform set of properties. Grosseteste explains that the inward progression of lumen, together with its successive perfection of the spheres, is eventually weakened through distance from the firmament and through the work it needs to do in passing through all the underlying spheres. Below the orbit of the Moon, there is insufficient power within the field of lumen to form any further perfected spheres, so what materials remain – the elements – are compacted but left unperfected. Today we would term this process a ‘symmetry breaking’: the operations of a uniform physical process on a system that originally possesses a state of symmetry, breaks that symmetry by creating two regions in different states. A detailed computational study of the physics in De luce has confirmed that such a programme can be taken further than the text alone is able to, using tools unavailable before the invention of the calculus [6], but translating only Grosseteste’s own physics into the computational mathematics.

 

5. A Relational and Incarnational Metaphysics

There is another purpose evident in Grosseteste’s thought behind the re-engagement of the human mind with the inner structures of the cosmos, one that is independent from the post-lapsarian invitation to re-awaken fallen minds. This second strand is important to him, for one of his great theological questions concerns an alternative history – one in which there is no Fall from grace. In the De cessation legalium he asks famously An Deus esset homo etiam si non esset lapsus homo? The question of the incarnation in such an unfallen world has corollaries – in particular would we be doing ‘science’ in such a world? Is there, in other words, a motivation for natural philosophy that goes beyond the restoration of a mind once perceiving nature clearly, but now clouded and dulled? Although the text does not address this question directly, it points in very strong directions that parallel Grosseteste’s conclusion that there would indeed have been an incarnation of God in an unfallen world, and that his relationship with human and non-human creation maintains a directional narrative even without its disastrous first turn.

Grosseteste points out, once again driven by the primacy of his unifying principle of light, that the human body communicates with all corporeal natures (‘communicat in natura’) because of the way light is incorporated into all elements by its reflection from the heavenly bodies. All of the rational soul of humans, the sensitive souls of animals and the vegetative souls of plants share both the same indwelling of constitutive light, and the composition of the elements. He entertains a very early insight into the material way in which humankind is, literally, earthed into creation. An even more impressive account of such material connectedness across the cosmos is found towards the end of the De luce, and is worth quoting in full:

 

And it is clear that every higher body in respect of the luminosity begotten from it is the species and perfection of the following body. And just as unity is potentially every following number, so the first body by the multiplication of its luminosity is every following body. Earth, in contrast, is all higher bodies by the collection in it of the higher luminosities. Thus, the poets call it “Pan” (that is,“All”) and it is named Cybele as if cubele from the cube (that is, from solidity); because it is the most compressed and dense of all bodies, it is Cybele and mother of all the gods, for although all higher luminosities are brought together [in earth], they have not come forth in it through their operations, but it is possible that the luminosity of any celestial sphere you please be drawn out from earth into act and operation, and so from earth, as if from a kind of mother, any god will be procreated.

A modern version of this sentiment was made famous by the scientist and communicator Carl Sagan, drawing a material communication between human and cosmic materiality not from light, but from the atomic generative properties of stars:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star-stuff.”

For both writers there are real, material reasons that connect us to even the most distant objects in the universe. The difference is in the material detail: Grosseteste deduces them from the structuring properties of light, Sagan from the unique environments within the cores of stars, where alone heavy elements can be manufactured. In spite of the efforts of thinking such as this, almost poetic in the connective and emotive force of its idea, the deeply relational cultural context that it suggests for science has not taken root.

 

The Lessons

Transforming these themes into needful narratives for a healthy science today needs the refractive process of theology in context.  But there are living themes that do offer a healing path to the current troubled story of science. The long story of natural wisdom, a high expectation of human ability and responsibility, a balance of practical an intellectual wisdom, the enduring of difficulty, an accommodation with uncertainly, a celebration of the question, and the exercise of love – these are some of the lessons we can begin to draw from a deep engagement with medieval science. They are far from irrelevant to our time. Very much more than a fascinating period in the early history of science, the 13^th century and its thinkers, of whom Grosseteste is the prime example, speak with wisdom we urgently need to rediscover.

 

[1] R Numbers (ed) Galileo Goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion (2010) Harvard University Press

[2] Greti Dinkova-Bruun, Giles E.M. Gasper, Michael Huxtable, Tom C.B. McLeish, Cecilia Panti and Hannah Smithson, “Dimensions of Colour: Robert Grosseteste’s De Colore; Edition, Translation and Interdisciplinary Analysis, (2013) Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts

[3] Wuerger, SM , Maloney, LT and Krauskopf, J (1995) Vision Research, 35 827-835.

[4] Peter Harrison, (2007) The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, Cambridge

[5] A. Einstein (1905) Annalen der Physik 17 (6): 132–148.

[6] R G Bower et al., (2014) Proc Roy Soc A, 470, 20140025

Are ‘Science’ and ‘Religion’ conflicting world views?

Sergio Graziosi speaks for many when he articulates his bemusement that I continue in maintaining that the ‘conflict thesis’ represents a category error. He says that they are two ‘world views’ that cannot coexist.  But science is not, of itself, a ‘world view’. It is, as he rightly says, an evidence-based methodology by which the thinking and acting emergent blobs of person-forming matter called humans reconstruct and understand the material workings and structures of the universe.  The two competing world views are not ‘religion’ and ‘science’, they are ‘atheism’ and ‘theism’ – together with the multiple branchings of narrative that belong below both headings.

Whether one’s world view is theistic or atheistic (or agnostic) does not affect in broad terms what science is and how we do it.  In either case what we now call science is the current chapter in a long long human story of curiosity and exploration of the material world.  It is true that the information arising from science can inform one’s worldview.  An example of a change in the light of such evidence is philosopher Anthony Flew’s change from an atheist to theist worldview, largely in the light of new evidence from modern physics (and some latterly perceived weaknesses in arguments for atheism).

What science is not able to do is provide its own narrative of purpose. What I argue in Faith and Wisdom in Science is that we urgently need to discover a teleological story for science – what is it really for in human terms.  The commonly enshrined statements by governments, that we do science (and so fund it) purely for economic benefit just won’t do.  This is also why I want to situate science together with music, art, literature (only in the sense that these are all activities deeply at the heart of what it means to be human, not that they all provide evidence for worldviews in the same way, or that they share methodologies).

Theology is is one human activity very well suited to discussions of purpose – the ‘what are we here for’ sort of questions.  Such a discussion naturally feeds into choices about ethical decisions in science and technology.  Of course the outcomes of a discussion on what is science for, in the light of a thestic worldview, might well contradict those from an atheist one, but they cannot possibly contradict science itself, as Graziosi claims, as science doesn’t discuss its own purpose at all, any more than music discusses why we make music.

The question of consistency of natural law is, of course, an issue of faith in any world view.  Yes we believe as scientists that the laws of physics as far as we know them apply at all times and places, but they might not.  Evidence might grow, for example, that the gravitational constant, well.., isn’t.  In the early universe we know (we believe…) that ‘the laws of physics break down’ and we have no idea what replaces them at the Plank scale.  So there is plenty of precedent within science for a discussion of how ‘regular’ laws of physics are.  Nor, on the other hand, does a theistic worldview necessarily hang on a capricious deity that suspends law at will.  But there is, of course, a long history of discussion about the way that the very existence of comprehensible physical law points to the existence of a mind behind that law, and the universe itself.  Again, whether God changes the laws of physics in ‘miracles’ or not is a discussion within a theological community of different views. It is not an ‘incompatibility’ between science and religion.

Finally, it isn’t true to say that there are no methodological links between religion and science. My own approach to Christian belief, for example, has been a decision to explore the ‘hypothesis of living life in the light of God’ in the light of evidence. Of course there is no knock-down proof of either the existence, or the non-existence of God. But then not being able to prove things is a very familiar predicament for a scientist! This is not the time or place to expand on this approach to belief, but if I did I would identify three strands of evidence: (1) The connection of the Judeo-Christian story with the human experience of evil; (2) The historical events around Jesus; (3) The experience of transformation in quiet humble lives that I witness all the time. Note I am not saying that this is a scientific methodology, but that in following it I do not think that I am being inconsistent as a scientist in my approach to a wider framing of where persons, purpose, hurt, healing and hope come from.

Talking, and not talking, about God in ‘Faith and Wisdom in Science’

The best return on writing the book comes in the regular opportunities to discuss the ideas with all sorts of people – at public lectures, university seminars, church events, schools … I cant say I have a favourite.  And the best of all that is when it is time for questions.  There are always fresh ones (as well as some familiar but ever-interesting themes).

A recent and memorable evening was held at St Mary’s Primrose Hill in North London. A very warm welcome, wise chairing by host Revd Mark Wakefield (who has also blogged the event here), and a very mixed audience launched a long and fascinating discussion.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

One questioner wanted to know why ‘I had not mentioned God’ in my introduction.  Actually that wasn’t quite correct – we had looked at the central “Lord’s Answer” in the Book of Job, where Yahweh finally answers Job’s complaints with a surprising question-tour of the natural world. But the point was that we had talked about the ‘science and religion’ question a lot without much explicit talk of God.

A simple answer is that one can talk (and live) implicitly about God all the time without using ‘God-language’ – it’s also a deep answer.  The Apophatic tradition in Christian theology has a lot to say about not saying too much about God.  Associated at its root with the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (probably 6th century) who was quoted extensively by Thomas Aquinas, it develops the idea that the correct approach to an understanding of God is to affirm what he is not, rather than to attempt to say what he is.  God is beyond all referents that we can comprehend. Since Aquinas, a definition of ‘Theology’ that I have found most helpful is not, ‘the study of God’, but ‘the study of everything in the light of God’.  To suggest, as does St. John (1 Jn 5v1) that ‘God is light’ is to suggest that we should not look at him, but at everything by the light that he provides.

There is Biblical precedent for a ‘looking away from God’ too.  Throughout the Old Testament, as the ‘biblical library’ moves from Pentateuch through Wisdom to Prophecy, explicit references to ‘God’ by any of the Hebrew uses reduces.  Famously, there are no mentions of God at all in Esther or in the Song of Songs.  But these two books are full of the light on life that comes from the context of a covenant faith.

Science, too, is a human endeavour (like the racial politics of Esther or the celebration of erotic love of the Song) that doesn’t need explicit God-talk to progress, but which is enormously helped by recognising the covenant context.  As I argue in Faith and Wisdom in Science, it is just these theological resources that science needs to reconstruct a healthy social narrative for what it does.  To say that science is a deeply religious activity does not mean that we need to talk about God in the lab.

A Discussion with Pupils at St Peter’s School, York on Open and Closed thinking, and Death

I was reminded last week of the wonderful and challenging experience of discussing with bright, energetic and thoughtful 17 and 18 year olds.  It’s also refreshing: they think of unexpected things, bring the emerging values of their generation into play, and best of all are deliciously unregarding of any ‘authority’ that, say, a public lecturer at their school might have in anyone else’s eyes by being, for example, the lecturer!

It was the first time I have had the pleasure and honour of giving a lecture at the school that has given our own children so much over the last few years (and with which we also share the street we live on). St. Peter’s have built up an enviable series of public lectures on all possible topics – well attended by people from all over the city and further afield.  My invitation came, not from the physics department on this occasion, but from politics (Mr. Ben Fuller). This was very pleasing – yes Faith and Wisdom in Science is of course about science, but it is motivated by the great need for a new way of framing and cherishing science politically and culturally in our society. To politics was right.  Not that we didn’t spend a little time ‘diving down’ the lengthscales of the world into the chaotic, Brownian motion dominated of vibrating molecules and self-ssembled structures of life….

Somewhere in mid flow talking about reconstructing a picture of the universe at different lengthscales.

But as always the best bits are always in discussion afterwards.  Some moving questions from the audience – including one from a physician.  He asked if the ‘Theology of Science’ I had been urging we think about – one that sees science  as our God-given task to heal our relationship with the world – might help loosten our knotty problem with death.  His concern was that death has become a pathology to be postponed or avoided at all costs among his patients (apart from, it seems, the community of nuns he looks after, who get very excited about it and almost envious of those of their sisters who get there first…).  We talked about the way that Wisdom includes a coming to terms with our finiteness and reconciling us to the physicality of the world, together with the hope of a renewed one.  All questions but one were open, explorative, pushing us all further than the material of the talk – just what the Book of Job does!  The only closed-minded and convergent question was: “Did I believe in the virgin birth (of Jesus)?”

The question of closed and open mindedness was to be the topic of half an hour afterwards with a group of senior pupils who had kindly been helping steward the evening.  Surely Science was all about keeping an open mind, changing it in the case of evidence, reaching a belief after all the finding out?

Senior pupils (and others) gather round for a serious debate

Surely Religion knows what it wants to believe beforehand, then argues towards it, whatever the evidence? That last description made me think of some very poor science I have come across.  We talked about that experience, and worked our way to seeing that a fear of challenge to our preconceived ideas is a common human attribute, and that in all things we grow when we are open to the new.  We also recognised that all journeys need starting points.  Scientists make hypotheses – sometimes wild ideas that they would like very much to be true, and without which a scientific idea never gets started.  But the vital ability is to know when you were wrong and change your mind.  An openness to the unanswered question becomes a way to travel hopefully.  So it is with Christianity too. The staggering unanswered questions about nature in the Book of Job, as well as the hundreds of others all through the Bible, give to any alert reader the strong impression that openness to questions is at the heart of its worldview and message.  Some of those questions take the whole human story to answer.

A Response to a Thoughtful Skeptic (on Science needing Theology)

I was very interested, as the author of the initial post, to read a heartfelt and thoughtful blog, here, by Sergio Graziosi  in response to the short piece on TheConversationUK about Faith and Wisdom in Science.  Perhaps some responses I posted on his would also be helpful to readers of this blog.

First, I am aware that for many if not most people ‘science’ and ‘theology’ don’t seem to mix – but I have found that this is because of assumptions made through unfamiliarity ‘from the inside’ of both.  This is particulary true of perceived methodologies.  Of course the methodologies of two different aprroaches to the world dont have to be the same, BUT – it just isn’t true to say that religious belief is “ungrounded”- nor is (as Popper showed long ago) that science can be “verified”.  So we need a much more nuanced and informed approach.

That is why I’ve written a whole book about it.  The conversation piece was really just a flag to that and suffers from the universal difficulty of restating a 100000 word message in 800. So anyone who really needs to get a grip on this does (I know this sounds like a commercial – it really isn’t- I’m not going to make a profit on the book!) need to read Faith and Wisdom in Science (I don’t have any copies to give away though any thoughtful reader here certainly deserves one – but I can give them a 30% discount code to use on the OUP website: AAFLY6).

But this might help. “Theology” is not “the study of God” as I use the term. It’s “the study of everything in the light of God”. This is a standard usage actually. But perhaps that helps explain why I think that to ask “are science and theology compatible?” is a category-error before the question is out of your mouth. Theology is the intellectual exploration of an entire world view, so encompasses everything – including science and why we do it. Hence the idea of a “theology of science”.

Minor aside: this will worry you if you think that theology is all about doctrine and authority structures. But it isn’t. That’s religious power-bases and I want nothing to do with that (any more than with scientific power-bases which is are corruptions that also exist). True theology works within our current frame as “authoritative” in the sense of “paradigmatic” but openly and flexibly.

Here’s the rub – science also needs to talk about everything. So there can and should be a ‘science of theology’ or ‘science of religion’. Indeed Daniel Dennett has called for more of this, and rightly so.

I am therefore saying NOT that “science and theology are compatible” NOR that they are in conflict (both are category errors), but that in our narrative world they are “of each other”. Sounds like the logical equivalent of an M C Escher picture? So be it. We need better catogories of the relation between them.  Our language gives us the wrong geometry of discussion – Graziosi talks several times of “bridging the gap” between theology and science (and says that it is not possible to do it), but what if they nested inside each other?  What if theology could help resource for us the culutral reason to do science?  I spend a long time in Faith and Wisdom in Science pointing out the desperate need for a narrative that ties science deeper into our human communities of purpose.  Theology is really good at purpose. Scinece doesnt really “do” it.

As I say in the book and hint at in the TC piece, the other way to approach this is historically, where the (often explicitly) theological discourse of the purpose of science becomes very clear (Francis Bacon is a prime example). So Graziosi is also historically wrong in claiming that the “New atheism” has delivered our modern, permissive, society.  Actually this has its roots in the enlightenment, and that (contrary to much popular belief) is rooted not in a rise of secularism that somehow occluded religious obfuscation, but in the clearest of Christian theological motivations for understanding nature.  Not only Bacon, but Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Wren, the list goes on… all had explicit theologies for the science they were doing.  Peter Harrison has shown this in staggering scholarly detail over many years, in The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science, for example.

A few final points on the Templeton funding.  FIrst, as an academic and additioanlly as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of a research intensive university, I would never approve or accept funding from any organisation that inflected, filtered, biassed or controlled in any way the findings of a research project they funded.  All funders have a declared sphere of interest – resaerch questions they will fund and things that they wont – and Templeton is no exception.  But they do not determine the answers.  People might also want to check winners of the Templeton prize – several are self-declared atheists or agnostics.  Many colleagues also funded by them (including some in the same funded teams as me, are atheist).

We have lost a social grasp of what science is FOR. That’s what I want to recapture. And as far as I read either history or current cultural discourse on a global canvas, any hope of a purely secular answer to this urgent question is a no-hoper!

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.