New Directions for Science and Religion

There is no such thing as a conflict between science and religion, and this is an essay about it [1]. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an abundance of good recent writing in that vein from historians, sociologists and philosophers as well as scientists themselves. Readers still under the misapprehension that the history of science can be accurately characterised by a continuous struggle to escape from the shackles of religious oppression into a sunny secular upland of free thought (loudly expressed by a few scientists but no historians) can consult Peter Harrison’s masterly The Territories of Science and Religion (OUP 2015), or dip into Ron Numbers’ delightful edited volume Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Harvard UP 2009).  Likewise, assumptions that theological and scientific methodologies and truth-claims are necessarily in philosophical or rational conflict might be challenged by Alister McGrath’s The Territories of Human Reason (McGrath 2019) or Andrew Torrance’s and Thomas McCall’s edited Knowing Creation (Torrence 2018). The late-Victorian origin of the ‘alternative history’ of unavoidable conflict is fascinating in its own right, but also damaging in that it has multiplied through so much public and educational discourse in the 20^thcentury in both secular and religious communities. That is the topic of a new and fascinating study by historian James Ungureanu Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (2019). Finally, the concomitant assumption that scientists must, by logical force, adopt non-theistic worldviews is roundly rebutted by recent and global social science, such as Elaine Eklund’s major survey, also published in a new book Secularity and Science (OUP 2019).

All well and good – so the history, philosophy and sociology of science and religion are richer and more interesting than the media-tales and high-school stories of opposition we were all brought up on. It seems a good time to ask the ‘so what?’ questions, however, especially since there has been less work in that direction. If Islamic, Jewish and Christian theologies were demonstrably central in the construction of our current scientific methodologies, for example, then what might such a reassessment imply for fruitful development of the role science plays in our modern world? In what ways might religious communities support science especially under the shadow of a ‘post-truth’ political order? What implications and resources might a rethink of science and religion offer for the anguished science-educational discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the emerging international discussions on ‘science-literacy’?

I want to explore here directions in which we could take those consequential questions. Three perspectives will suggest lines of new resources for thinking: the critical tools offered by the discipline of theology itself (even in an entirely secular context), a reappraisal of ancient and pre-modern texts, and a new way of looking at the unanswered questions and predicament of some post-modern philosophy and sociology. I’ll finish by suggesting how these in turn suggest new configurations of religious communities in regard to science and technology.

 

Applied theologies – a critical teleology

The humble conjunction ‘and’ does much more work in framing discussions of ‘theology and science’ than at first apparent. It tacitly assumes that its referents belong to the same category (‘red’ and ‘blue’), implying a limited overlap between them (‘north’ and ‘south’), and it may already bias the discussion into oppositional mode (‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’). Yet both science and theology resist boundaries – each has something to say about everything. Other conjunctions are possible that do much greater justice to the history and philosophy of science, and also to the cultural narratives of theology. A strong candidate is, ‘of’, when the appropriate question now becomes, ‘What is a Theology of Science?’ and its complement, ‘What is a Science of Theology?’[2]

A ‘theology of …’ delivers a narrative of teleology, a story of purpose. A ‘theology of science’ will describe, within the religious narrative of one or more traditions, what the work of science is for. There have been examples of the ‘theology of…’ genre addressing, for example, music (Begbie 2000) and art (Wolterstorff 1997). Note that working through a teleology of a cultural art by calling on theological resources does not imply a personal commitment to that theology – it might simply respond to a need for academic thinking about purpose. Begbie explores the role music plays in accommodating human experience to time, for example, while Wolterstorff discovers a responsibility toward the visual aesthetics of public spaces.  In both cases we find that theology has retained a set of critical tools that address the essential human experience of purpose, value and ethics in regard to a capacity or endeavour. Intriguingly, it appears that some of the social frustrations that science now experiences result from missing, inadequate or even damaging cultural narratives ofscience. Absence of a narrative that delineates what science is for leave it open to hijacking by personal or corporate sectarian interests alone, such as the purely economic framings of much government policy. It also muddies educational waters, resulting in an over-instrumental approach to science formation.  I have elsewhere attempted to tease out a longer version how a long argument for what a ‘theology of science’ might look like (McLeish 2014), but even a summary must begin with examples of the fresh (though ancient) sources a late modern theological project of this kind requires.

 

New thinking from old – ancient, medieval and early modern sources

The cue for a first wellspring of raw material comes from neo-Kantian Berlin philosopher Susan Neiman. In a remarkable essay (Neimann 2016) she urges that Western philosophy acknowledge, for a number of reasons, a second foundational source alongside Plato – that of the Biblical Book of Job. The ancient Semitic text offers a matchless starting point for a narratology of the human relationship of the mind, and the experience of human suffering, with the material world. Long recognised as a masterpiece of ancient literature, Job has attracted and perplexed scholars in equal measures for centuries, and is still a vibrant field of study. David Clines, a leading and lifelong scholar of the text, calls Job‘the most intense book theologically and intellectually of the Old Testament’ (Clines 2014). Inspiring commentators across vistas of centuries and philosophies, from Basil the Great to Emmanuel Levinas, its relevance to a theology of science is immediately apparent from poetic ‘Lord’s Answer’ to Job’s complains late in the book (ch38v4[3]):

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Where were you when I founded the earth?

Tell me, if you have insight.

Who fixed its dimensions? Surely you know!

…

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?

Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail?

 

The writer develops material from the core creation narrative in Hebrew wisdom poetry – as found in Psalms, Proverbs and Prophets – that speaks of creation through ‘ordering’, ‘bounding’ and ‘setting foundations’ (Brown 2010). The questing survey next sweeps over the animal kingdom, then finishes with a celebrated ‘de-centralising’ text that places humans at the periphery of the world, looking on in wonder and terror at the ‘other’ – the great beasts Behemoth and Leviathan. The text is an ancient recognition of the unpredictable aspects of the world: the whirlwind, the earthquake, the flood, unknown great beasts. In today’s terms, we have in the Lord’s Answer to Job a foundational framing for the primary questions of the fields we now call cosmology, geology, meteorology, astronomy, zoology, … We recognise an ancient and questioning view into nature unsurpassed in its astute attention to detail and sensibility towards the tensions of humanity in confrontation with materiality. The call to a questioning relationship of the mind from this ancient and enigmatic source feeds questions of purpose in the human engagement with nature from a cultural depth that a restriction to contemporary discourse does not touch.

Drawing on historical sources is helpful in another way. The philosophy of every age contains its tacit assumptions, taken as evident so not critically examined. A project on the human purpose for science that draws on theological thinking might, in this light, draw on writing from periods when this was an academically-developed topic, such as the scientific renaissances of the 13^thand 17^thcenturies. Both saw considerable scientific progress (such as the development of geometric optics to the level of the final solution to the problem of the rainbow in the first, and the establishment of heliocentricity in the second). Furthermore, both periods, while perfectly distinguishing ‘natural philosophy’ from theology, worked in an intellectual atmosphere that encouraged a fluidity of thought between them.

An instructive and insightful thinker from the first is polymath Robert Grosseteste. Master to the Oxford Franciscans in the 1220s, and Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 to his death in 1253, Grosseteste wrote in highly mathematical ways about light, colour, sound and the heavens. He drew on the earlier Arab transmission of and commentaries on Aristotle, yet developed many topics well beyond the legacy of the ancient philosopher (he was the first, for example, to identify the phenomenon of refraction to be responsible for rainbows). He also brought a developed Christian philosophy to bear upon the reawakening of natural philosophy in Europe, whose programmes of astronomy, mechanics and above all optics would lead to early modern science (Cunningham and Hocknull 2016).

Manuscript illustration of Robert Grosseteste

In his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (Aristotle’s most detailed exposition of his scientific method) Grosseteste places a sophisticated theological philosophy of science within an overarching Christian narrative of Creation, Fall and Redemption. Employing an ancient metaphor for the effect of the Fall on the higher intellectual powers as a ‘lulling to sleep’, he maintains that the lower faculties, including critically the senses, are less affected by fallen human nature than the higher. So, re-illumination must start there:

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![4]

Human re-engagement with the external world through the senses, recovering a potential knowledge of it, becomes a participation in the theological project of healing. Furthermore, the reason that this is possible is because this relationship with the created world is also the nexus at which human seeking is met by divine illumination.

 

Theological Imagination at Work: the Experimental Method

 The old idea that there is something incomplete, damaged or ‘out of joint’ in the human relationship with materiality (itself drawing on traditions such as Job), and that the human ability to engage a question-based and rational investigation of the physical world constitutes a step towards a reversal of it, represents a strand of continuity between medieval and early modern thinking. Francis Bacon’s theologically-motivated framing of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ in the 17^thcentury takes (though not explicitly) Grosseteste’s framing as its starting point. As framed in his Novum Organum (Bacon 1887 edn.), the Biblical and medieval tradition that sense data are more reliable than those from reason or imagination) constitutes his foundation for ‘experimental method’. The rise of experimentation in science as we now know it, is itself a counter-intuitive turn, in spite the hindsight-fuelled criticism of ancient, renaissance and medieval natural philosophers for their failure to adopt it. Yet the notion that one could learn anything general about the workings of nature by acts as specific and as artificial as those constituting an experiment was not at all evident, even after the foundation of the Royal Society. The 17^thcentury philosopher Margaret Cavendish was among the clearest of critics (Cavendish 1668):

For as much as a natural man differs from an artificial statue or picture of a man, so much differs a natural effect from an artificial, …

Paradoxically perhaps, it was the theologically-informed imagination of the medieval and early modern teleology of science that motivated the counter-intuitive step that won against Cavendish’s critique.

 

Philosophy and Sociology of Post-modern Difference – the need for reconciliation

Much of ‘post-modern’ philosophical thinking and its antecedents through the 20^thcentury appear at best to have no contact with science at all, and at worst to strike at the very root-assumptions on which natural science is built, such as the existence of a real world, and the human ability to speak representationally of it. The occasional explicit skirmishes in the 1990s’ ‘Science Wars’ between philosophers and scientists (such as the ‘Sokal-affair’ and the subsequent public acrimony between physicist Alan Sokal and philosopher Jacques Derrida) have suggested an irreconcilable conflict (Parsons 2003). A superficial evaluation might conclude that the charges of ‘intellectual imposture’ and ‘uncritical naivety’ levied from either side are simply the millennial manifestation of the earlier ‘Two Cultures’ conflict of F.R. Leavis and C. P. Snow (Snow 1959), between the late-modern divided intellectual world of the sciences and the humanities.  Yet in the light of the long and theologically-informed perspective on the story of we have sketched, the relationship of science to the major post-modern philosophical themes looks rather different.

Kierkegaard and Camus wrote of the ‘absurd’ – a gulf between human quest for meaning and its absence in the world, Levinas and Sartre of the ‘nausea’ that arises from a human confrontation with sheer, basic existence. Derrida and Saussure framed the human predicament of desire to represent the unrepresentable as différance. Arendt introduces The Human Condition with a meditation on the iconic value of human spaceflight, and concludes that the history of modernism has been a turning away from the world that has increased its inhospitality, so that we are suffering from ‘world alienation’ (Arendt 1998). The first modern articulation of what these thinkers have in common, an irreconcilable aspect of the human condition in respect of the world, comes from Kant’s third critique (Kant 1952):

Between the realm of the natural concept, as the sensible, and the realm of the concept of freedom, as the supersensible, there is a great gulf fixed, so that it is not possible to pass from the former to the latter by means of the theoretical employment of reason.

Kant’s recognition that more than reason alone is required for human re-engagement with the world is echoed by George Steiner. In his short but plangent lament over late-modern literary disengagement with reference and meaning Real Presences (Steiner 1989) looks from predicament to possible solution:

Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter

Steiner’s relational language is full of religious resonance –  for re-ligio is simply at source the re-connection of the broken. Yet, once we are prepared to situate science within the same relationship to the humanities as enjoyed by the arts, then it also fits rather snugly into a framing of ‘making accessible the sheer inhuman otherness of matter’. What else, on reflection, does science do?

Although both theology and philosophy suffer frequent accusations of irrelevance, on this point of brokenness and confusion in the relationship of humans to the world, current public debate on crucial science and technology indicate that both strands of thought are on the mark. Climate change, vaccination, artificial intelligence – these and other topics are marked in the quality of public and political discourse by anything but enlightenment values. Philsopher Jean-Pierre Depuy (2010), commenting on a Europe-wide project using narrative analysis of public debates around nanotechnology (Davies 2009), shows that they rather draw on both ancient and modern ‘narratives of despair’, creating an undertow to discussion of ‘troubled technologies’ that, if unrecognised, renders effective public consultation impossible. The research team labelled the narratives:

(1) Be careful what you wish for – the narrative of Desire,

(2) Pandora’s Box – the narrative of Evil and Hope,

(3) Messing with Nature – the narrative of the Sacred,

(4) Kept in the Dark – the narrative of Alienation,

(5) The rich get richer and the poor get poorer – the narrative of Exploitation.

These dark and alienated stories turn up again and again below the surface of public framings of science, yet driving opinion and policy. The continuously complex case of genetically modified organisms is another example (McLeish 2015). None of these underlying and framing stories draws on the theological resources within the history of science itself, but all do illustrate the absurd, the alienation and the irreconcilable of post-modern thinking.

Small wonder, perhaps, that Bruno Latour (Latour 2008) writing on environmentalism, revisits the narrative of Pandora’s Box, showing that the modernist hope of controlling nature through technology is dashed on the rocks of the same increasingly deep and problematic entangling with the world that prevents our withdrawal from it. But Latour then makes a surprising move: he calls for a re-examination of the connection between mastery, technology and theologyas a route out of the environmental impasse.

 

Practicalities and Practice

What forms would an answer to Latour’s call take? One is simply the strong yet gentle repeating of truth to power that a confessional voice for science, and evidence-based thinking, can have when it is resting on deep foundations of a theology that understands science as gift rather than threat. One reason that Katherine Hayhoe, the Texan climate scientist, deploys such a powerful advocacy in the United States for taking climate change seriously, is that she is able to work explicitly through a theological argument for environment care with those who resonate with that, but whose ideological commitments are impervious to secular voices.

There are more grassroots-level examples that demonstrate how religious communities can support a healthy lay engagement with science. Local movements can dissolve some of the alienation and fear that characterises science for many people. A group of local churches in Leeds, UK, recently decided to hold a community science festival that encouraged people to share their own, and their families’ stories, together with the objects that went with them (from an ancient telescope to a circuit board from an early colour TV set constructed by a resident’s grandfather). A diverse movement under the general title of ‘scientists in congregations’ in both the US and the UK has discovered a natural empathy for science as a creative gift, rather than a threat to belief, within local churches (see examples). At national level the last five years has seen a remarkable project engaging senior church leaders in the UK with current scientific issues and their research leaders. In a country with an established church it is essential that its voices in the national political process are scientifically informed and connected. Workshop participants, including scientists with no religious background or practice, have found the combination of science, theology and community leadership represented in their mix to be uniquely powerful in resourcing discussions of ethical ways forward, in issues from fracking to artificial intelligence.

A relational narrative for science that speaks to the need to reconcile the human with the material, and that draws on ancient Wisdom, contributes to the construction of new pathways to a healthier public discourse, and an educational interdisciplinary project that is faithful to the story of human engagement with the apparently chaotic, inhuman materiality of nature, yet one whose future must be negotiated alongside our own. Without new thinking on ‘science and religion’ we risk forfeiting an essential source for wisdom today.

This essay was first published on the Aeon public philosophy website

References

Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 314

Bacon, Francis (1887) Works, edited by J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. Volume III

Brown, W. H, (2010) The Seven Pillars of Creation, Oxford: OUP

Begbie, Jeremy (2000) Theology, Music and Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cavendish, Margaret (1668) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy(Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) (E. O’Neill, Ed.) (2001). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clines, David (2014) World Bible Commentaries: Job Thomas Nelson pubs., Nelson, Vol. 3.

Cunningham, Jack & Mark Hocknull Eds. (2016), ‘Grosseteste and the pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages’, New York: Springer

Davies, Sarah, Phil Macnaghten and Matthew Kearnes (eds.) (2009), Reconfiguring Responsibility: Deepening Debate on Nanotechnology, Durham University, chapter 12

Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, (2010) The Narratology of Lay Ethics, Nanoethics 4153-170

Harrison, Peter (2015) The Territories of Science and Religion, University of Chicago Press

Kant, Immanuel (1952) [1790], Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 11

Latour, Bruno (2008)“It’s development, stupid !” or: How to Modernize Modernization, in Postenvironmentalism. Jim Procter ed.,MIT Press

McGrath, Alister (2019) The Territories of Human Reason.Oxford: OUP

McLeish, Tom (2014) Faith and Wisdom in Science.Oxford: OUP

McLeish, T.C.B. (2015). ‘The search for affirming narratives for the future governance of technology: reflections from a science-theology perspective on GMFuturos’, in Governing Agricultural Sustainability, Eds. P. Macnaghten and S. Carro-Ripalda Routledge, Oxon

Neimann, Susan (2016),The Rationality of the World: A Philosophical Reading of the Book of Job, ABC net, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/philosophical-reading-of-the-book-of-job/11054038

Numbers, R. L. (Ed.) (2009) Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and ReligionCambridge: Harvard University Press

Parsons, Keith (ed.) (2003). The Science Wars: Debating Scientific Knowledge and Technology, Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY USA

Southern, R.W.  (1992) Robert Grosseteste; the growth of an English mind in medieval Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Torrance, A. B. and McCall, T.H., Knowing Creation, Grand Rapids: Zondervan (2018)

Snow, C. P. (1959 [1998]) The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Steiner, George (1989) Real Presences, London: Faber and Faber

Ungureanu, James (2019), Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburg UP, 2019)

Wolterstorff, Nicholas (1997) Art in Action; Toward a Christian Aesthetic, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm, B. Eerdmans

 

Notes

[1]With gratitude to Stephen Shapin for inventing this important genre of opening lines.

[2]We will not be considering the second of these in the current chapter, but it encompasses the anthropology and neuroscience of religion, for two examples

[3]We take quotations of the text from the new translation and commentary by Clines (2014)

[4]Robert Grosseteste Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, quoted in R.W. Southern (1992) Robert Grosseteste; the growth of an English mind in medieval Europe, Oxford: Clarendon Press p167

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Medieval Meets Modern Cosmology at Harvard

In one of my roles, I am co-investigator for the ‘Ordered Universe’ project, an interdisciplinary collaboration that brings scientists and medieval scholars together in the study of the innovative science of the 13th century. I am also lucky enough to chair the Harvard-UK Knox Fellowship Committee, which awards 2-year postgraduate fellowships to Harvard across all subjects. Once a year I get to visit the new (and not so new) fellows at Harvard in rather more relaxed settings than their London interview.

Harvard Yard was looking rather gorgeous in its fall colours:

While in town, I also went to see some astronomers: the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics lab holds a Thursday lunchtime bag lunch seminar where four people give short talks. The seminars are well-attended by about 100 astronomers from all over Boston.

The Harvard-Smithsonian lunchtime seminar in full swing with a talk on 21st century astrophysics, following Tom’s talk on 13th century cosmology. Note that the scientists are still there.

On this occasion one talk (mine) was on a rather old (c. 1224) theory of a Big Bang origin of the cosmos, contained in Robert Grosseteste’s treatise De luce (On light). For a lecture by a real cosmologist on this topic see Durham astronomer Richard Bower’s talk here. Grosseteste does an extraordinary thing in the De luce, using Aristotelian physics to counter Aristotle’s belief that the universe could have no temporal beginning. Instead, Grosseteste supposes that a point of light expands into a giant sphere, ‘the size of the world machine’, taking matter with it, until it can be rarefied no further. Following that the light, in new guise, propagates inward, forming the nested planetary spheres as it goes. It is a marvellously mathematical theory of how a medieval geocentric cosmos might have come into being, and as an example of the scientific imagination, is hard to better.

The Harvard cosmologists were fascinated to hear about some of the medieval history of their subject, and had interesting questions about the scientific community then, and the way that written records were disseminated.

Prof Owen Gingerich with Flamsteed’s star catalogue

Later that afternoon I had the immense privilege of visiting the one-man Harvard institution that is Professor Owen Gingerich. He owns a personal collection of early modern astronomical texts, and some earlier manuscripts as well. Here is Owen with a prized member of his collection – one of the few surviving copies of first Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s star catalog, edited by Edmond Halley, but most copies destroyed by Flamsteed. This, surviving, copy is heavily redacted in Flamsteed’s hand (can you make out the falsum est on the bottom corner?) ! Owen has also spoken and written extensively on the positive relationship of science and Christian faith. He tells his story on the Biologos site here. Owen wrote a wonderful ‘blurb’ for my book with Dave Hutchings, Let There Be Science, which puts the Faith and Wisdom in Science ideas and message into language suitable for high school pupils .

Owen wrote of Let There Be Science:

“How doe scientists interact with the Cosmos as God’s creation? Here is an unexpected interlacing of fascinating science stories with an even larger framework of Biblical understanding. A really thoughtful and wide-ranging encounter.”

Behind this actually lies a lengthy exchange Dave and I had with him on the historical importance (or otherwise) of the brightnesses of Mercury and Venus, before telescopic observations of them!

The final astronomical joy was a meeting with leaders of the Harvard Black Hole Project, partially funded through the John Templeton Foundation, of which I am currently a trustee. Philosopher and historian of science Peter Galison gave me a signed copy of the ground-breaking short-wave radio image from the Event Horizon Telescope – capturing the monster black hole at the heart of active galaxy M87 (below).

What would Robert Grosseteste have thought about the notion of a Black Hole, on the one hand a perfectly singular point such as he imagined at the patio-temporal beginning of his own cosmology, but on the other hand a place where all information, all logos, is lost forever (probably … but that is another story!)?

(Blog adapted from one written for the Ordered Universe project blog)

In Praise of Natural Philosophy

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

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

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

The historic Grossmünster church next to the Theology Faculty in Zürich

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

History

The charming quad of the Zurich Theology Faculty

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Divorce of Poetry and Science

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

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

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

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

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

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine

Unweave a rainbow.

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

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

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

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

The Lost Science-Theology of Wisdom

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

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

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

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?

Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail,

…

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

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

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

Science is the

• participative,
• relational,
• co-creative

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

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

Towards a New Natural Philosophy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Religion isn’t the enemy of science: it’s been inspiring scientists for centuries

God’s scientific lesson for Job.
William Blake

Tom McLeish, Durham University

Take notice of any debate in the media and you’ll see that science and religion are, and always were, at loggerheads. Science is about evidence-based fact, religion is about faith-based belief.

But repeating statements endlessly in the media doesn’t make them true. The actual entanglements of religious tradition and the development of science are far more interesting than the superficial conflict common today – and far more important. And rethinking how we view the relationship between science and religion could help give scientific thinking the wider public support it needs.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
Wikimedia Commons

The history of scientific thought is closely linked to that of religious thought, and with much more continuity than discontinuity. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle effectively set the Western template for studying the natural world in the 4th century BC. Most of his hugely influential scientific works were lost to Europe after the Roman Empire collapsed, but were developed by Muslim Arab thinkers like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) from around 900AD to 1300AD. Early Islamic figures were responsible for very rapid progress in a number of scientific fields, notably maths, medicine and the study of light (optics).

When Aristotle was reintroduced to Europe in the 12th century, his scientific work had a great influence on medieval scholars, who were invariably thinkers within a church, synagogue or mosque. A key example is the 13th-century Oxford theologian and later Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste, who was also a pioneering early scientist. He presented a vision for how we might obtain new knowledge of the universe, the dawning of the first notions of experiment, and even a “big bang” theory of the cosmos and a concept of multiple universes.

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Read more:
Our latest scientific research partner was a medieval bishop

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Yet underneath Grosseteste’s work lies a much deeper and developing philosophy of nature. In a commentary on Aristotle’s Posteria Analytics, he describes a uniquely human propensity he calls (in Latin) “sollertia”. By this he means a sort of intense and perceptive ability to look beyond the surface of the material world into its inner structure.

This is remarkably similar to our approach to science today. Isaac Newton described his science as “seeing further than others”. For Grosseteste, our sollertia comes in turn from being created in the image of God. It is a theologically motivated task that contributes to the fulfilment of being human.

Francis Bacon.
Wikimedia Commons

When 16th-century philosopher Francis Bacon argued for a new experimental approach to science, he drew explicitly on such theological motivations. As the historian of science Peter Harrison argues, the scientific pioneers who followed Bacon, such as Newton and chemist Robert Boyle, saw their task as working with God’s gifts of senses and minds to recover a lost knowledge of nature.

Taking this history lesson seriously helps us see just how ancient the root system of science is. Insisting that science is a purely modern advance does not help the important process of embedding scientific thinking into our wider culture. Forcing people to separate science from religion at one extreme leads to damaging denials of science if faith communities can’t integrate the two.

Biblical science

In fact, science also has roots in ancient Jewish history that are as influential as the ancient Greek precedents. Philosopher Susan Neiman recently argued that the Biblical Book of Job should be understood as a foundation pillar of modern philosophy alongside Plato. This is because Job deals head-on with the problem of an apparently chaotic and fitful world, alien to the human predicament and unmoved in the face of suffering. And this, Neiman claims, is the starting point for philosophy.

It might also be the starting point for science, for Job also contains at its pivotal point the most profound nature poem of all ancient writings. Its verse form of questions is also striking to scientists from all ages, who know that asking the right creative questions – rather than always having the correct answer – is what unlocks progress.

So God asks Job:

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?

In all, the book contains as many as 160 questions from the fields we now know as meteorology, astronomy, geology and zoology. The content of this timeless text has clearly steered the story of science for centuries.

Faith communities urgently need to stop seeing science as alien, or a threat, but rather recognise their own part in its story. The influence people of faith have on society through their relationships can then be hugely supportive of science.

To give one current example, the Church of England has recently cosponsored a major national project, Scientists in Congregations. This encourages local churches to stimulate communities’ awareness of current scientific issues that affect society, such as the growth of artificial intelligence.

By embracing and supporting science, in turn, religious communities can contribute important perspectives on how we use it in our global future.

Tom McLeish is speaking at an event entitled The Science of Belief, organised with the Royal Society at the British Museum on January 26, 2018.

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.

 

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.

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.