Is Science Fatally Flawed?

This week’s Faith and Wisdom in Science event took the discussion to the Parish of St. Luke’s Grayshott, where vicar Moray Thomas had managed to fill the village social club (excellent beer) with more than a hundred young, old and in-between.  As usual, a very stimulating question-time, including a well-posed challenge to the question of other faith-traditions in the ‘participative-healing’ theology of science.  As that issue has been partially addressed by an ealier post on Islam and Science here, I thought I ought to comment on another challenge, which was put rather differently to others over the past year.

The accusation was that the positive view of science as a good gift to be used wisely, but one that really does give us growing insight into the natural world, is fundamentally flawed, that science is permanently doomed to be on the wrong track because of its blinkered purview.  By implication, in this gloomy assessment of science, it can have nothing to do with the Kingdom of God.  It might have someting to do with the deployment of earthly power structures, of the domination of an intelligensia, of a sort of mind-control.  It is most certainly not the the joyous, unexpected wonder that we can, for example, understand the delicate weave of colours in a rainbow, or conjour up on our minds the molecular bonding structure of water in its various forms of ice-crystal.

A New Force

Now it is important not to confuse a view that science is fatally wrong with the simple, everyday, observation that science is wrong about some things most of the time.  The discovery that we can begin to grasp something of, for example, the structure of atoms, is wonderful because it is so difficult.  We can do it, but it takes centuries, many different minds with their own

π+ decay through the weak interaction

perspectives, many false starts and wrong-headed ideas, flashes of hopes dashed by decisive experiments, before light dawns.  My questioner conjecured. that science is ignorant of an entire force field that it has ignored, yet which affects, among other things, the structure and properties of water.  This is actually a very instructive example, since there are force fields that untial very recent history were unknown to science. The ‘Weak Nuclear Force’ was first proposed to exist by Enrico Fermi in 1933, and was understood properly as a symmetry-broken aspect of the electro-weak force by Glashow, Salam and Weinberg in 1968.  For many years its existence as a fundamental force field was contested – and its carrying particles, the W and Z bosons were not directly detected until 1983.  Should there be a new force field yet to be discovered, there simply needs to be significant weight of experimental evidence and some form of theoretical concept that allows a predictive approach to further experiments, and what was once outside science will become part of its accepted wisdom.

All you need is love…

So before 1933, and arguably before 1983, science was ignorant of an entire force field.  Did that make it fatally flawed? Was skepticism such as it was within the science community unwarrented suppression of challenging ideas? I argue in Faith and Wisdom in Science that, on the contrary, the weakness and implausibility of young ideas in science needs the exercise of love towards them on the part of their proponents.  The theological insight that our relationship with the natural world is one that starts with ignorance and fear and makes a long and arduous journey towards knowledge and wisdom is well-illustrated by the metaphors of thorns and briars of Genesis chapter 3 and even of the pains of childbirth in Romans chapter 8.  Being wrong does not make science flawed, it is part of the painful journey to understanding that underscores science as the deeply human activity it has always been, and the highest of our imaginative projects.

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Christian Voices in the Contempory World: at All Saints Ecclesall in Sheffield – Humble Science?

Gary Wilson, vicar of All Saints in celebratory mood.

If Lent is a traditionally a time for deprivation of comfort, hard discipline and resisting temptation then it must be a wise church, if a particularly determined one, that invites a ‘Faith and Wisdom in Science’ evening of talk and discussion as part of their Lent course. So it was that the vicar of All Saints, Ecclesall, Gary Wilton invited me to lead an evening for a lively, attentive and challenging group of about 170 as part of their Lent course ‘Christian Voices in the Contempory World’.  Perhaps approproately also, we spent a fair bit of time in the Book of Job, a story of anger, pain and penitance as well as the most profound ancient text I know that treats the relation between humankind and the material world around us.

Actually I had first met Gary in 2012 at a conference on dialogue between Science and Religion that he was arranging as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s representative in Brussells for CERN.  The Director of the great European particle physics facility, Rolf Heuer, had requested the three-day meeting, since repeated, as part of CERN’s responsible engagement with the global public.  That meeting, bringing scientists and theologicans, some believing some not (in both camps) and representing Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism, was extremely interesting.  A fair bit of the material on different religions’ approach to science derives from pointers given to me at that meeting (in chapter 8 by the way).

The Sheffield evening was no less stimulating. After the talk, we covered two sets of three questions from the audience.  They both fitted together in interesting ways.  The first (summarised) set was:

1. How can lay people really engage with science in a meaningful way?
2. Can Narrative act as a way into science?
3. Do we not need scintists to show more humility?

I think that these belong together because one of the offputting things about science is the way that scientists tend to assume the role of unassailable expert when we communicate science.  It needs to be said much more often that scientists make mistakes over and over again – it is hard to re-imagine the world and find ways  of seeing into its deep working structure.  We get closer all the time, but the difficulties and the slip-ups ought both to keep us humble, and to remind us that we need all the help we can get.  I still believe that the musical analogy I use in Faith and Wisdom in Science has some value here.  Just as musicians need the many ways in which audiences give them feedback in performances, so scientists need to listen to the reception of their work.  We should not underestimate the intellectual ability of non-experts to think about and question science (this is continually done in the mind-numbingly slow and superficial presentation of science on television).

One way of doing this is indeed to work through the narrative of a science story.  I think that no-one has done this better than Bill Bryson in his A Short History of Nearly Everything.  The twists and turns, the disappointments and delights, the characters and the catastrophes of science are all there.  Underlying the book is also the desire, born in a lay person with no science background, to grasp at some idea of the deep human need to understand why the sky is blue.  But crucially it also drives at a knowledge of how we now understand such things.  I think  that more along the lines  of Bryson’s approach, together with an expectation that lay audiences can and will help scientists to think more imaginatively, and an emphasis and development of the poetry and play of science, may recover lost ground.  Humility is indeed a good place to start.

More from Ecclesall in the next post!

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

Science Policy from Wisdom: A Worked Example in GM Technology

Faith and Wisdom in Science is that we are missing a ‘cultural narrative’ for science that would support a positive and balanced public ownership and discussion of new technology.  Evidence of the lack is the entrenched and oppositional conflict around public debates of ‘troubled technologies.  I also quote from work by philosopher Jean-Pierre Depuy (2010) and others (Davies and Macnaghten 2010) who have identified profoundly negative narratives at work in such debates around nanotechnologies, three of which have ancient roots:

• Pandora’s Box
• Be Careful for What You Wish For
• Sacred Nature

The ‘missing narrative’ implicit in this work  and also explicitly appealed recently by Bruno Latour (Latour 2011),  needs urgently to be discovered and explored.  I have suggested an interdisciplinary approach to a third narrative resource – that of the ancient wisdom literature. After hearing from Depuy that Pandora is alive and well in discussions around nanotechnologies, and from Latour that theology is needed to lead technology back to its environmental responsibility, perhaps this does not seem impossibly strange. I have developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science the substance and consequences of a scientist’s reading of the timeless and remarkable Book of Job elsewhere (McLeish 2014), but its worth will only be proved in application.

An opportunity to do this arose recently in a fascinating research project run from Durham University investigating the complex communities invovled in GM technologies in Mexico, Brazil and India and their interactions.  The GMFuturos project (PI Prof. Phil MacNachten, Manager Dr Susana Carro-Ripalda) carried out extensive interviews with farmers, consumers, scientists and politicians in all three emerging countries, in all of which the development of GMOs has been troubled in very different ways.  Just as in the case of nanotechnologies, we might anticipate that deadlocked discussion and impasses of suspician stem in part from the implicit presence of underlying and incompatible narratives about our relationship with nature.

The book of Job in the Old Testament wisdom literature is a text deeply and continually concerned with the natural world, and within its device of legal debate between contested voices (those of Job, his ‘comforters’ and ultimately that of God himself) creates an area in which different accounts can engage. The text offers six differentiated views of human response to the natural world that emerge from its complex discourse. I have previously remarked how striking it is, both how closely they map onto the narrative categories of the nanotechnology analysis in general.  As a first step in showing how an ancient wisdom tradition might serve first to analyse, then to assist, a current technological debate, here is an attempt at showing how the narratives of Job (five of which closely parallel the full Depuy set)  serve  as categorising tools when listening to the plural voices of GMFuturos:

(1) Enshrining retributive moral law. The well-known accusation of Job’s comforters is that the suffering he has undergone must have resulted from his own wickedness (or from that of others closely related to him). In this brittle (and ultimately condemned) view, nature provides unequivocal returns on investment – good for good and harm for harm. But this closely parallels the narrative of exploitation. It surfaces today as well: in the GM Futuros research with Mexican actors, fears surfaced of genetically altered food being ‘not good’ that it will ‘case harm and problems’ and that such consequences are due to human greed.

(2) Eternal Mystery. Invoked in the text as a device to silence Job’s demands for justice as inappropriately arising from a darkened mind, this is an ancient form of the ‘kept in the dark’ narrative that frames nature as forever hidden and human ignorance as a permanent state. It is of course profoundly antithetical to natural philosophy and science, yet it still surfaces today. Even in the scientific communities we interviewed, there was expressed a doubt that we understand enough of the genome (of, e.g. maize) to be confident about modifying it.

(3) Book of Nature. This form of the narrative of the sacred endows nature with coded messages for humans to read. In Job, natural phenomena are appealed to metaphorically in support of moral standpoints. We learn from nature but we do not attempt to modify our teacher. So an articulate voice, from a consumer’s association in Mexico, advocated learning from the barriers to gene transfer that nature has enshrined.

(4) Uncontrolled chaos. The view of nature as capricious and out of control is that of the unjustly suffering Job himself. Essentially the root lies in the text of the link between the moral and cosmic worlds; Job’s accusation is that God allows wild and damaging excesses in nature (the storm, the flooded wadi, the earthquake) as he does of the moral sphere (innocent suffering). One professional group we interviewed in India spoke of the inability to control nature, ‘Something, anything, can happen…’ even appealing to ancient (Mahabharata) mythology in support of their warning

(5) Object of worship. Unfamiliar to the modern world, this response to nature is also only hinted at in the text, where Job denies “kissing his hand to the moon”. But intransigent modern denials that such a reaction is ever an issue today look less convincing when arguments appeal, even implicitly, to the narrative of ‘sacred nature’. ‘We reject the approval of Bt brinjal. We traditionally save our own seeds and consider them as sacred’ affirmed an Indian farmer in our study.

(6) Way to wisdom. There is another response to the natural world that the ancient text on Job describes in a way that differs radically from all the foregoing in its radical openness, and in its elevated view of both human responsibility and human potential. I have elsewhere called this narrative the ‘Way to Wisdom’ (McLeish 2014). It draws on a coherent dualism of knowledge paired with insight into nature, whose historical arcs connect with contemporary science and technology. However it brings these strands of understanding Nature’s structures and wisdom in using them, in much closer and more complex relationship than the linear and unidirectional framing currently exemplified in national science policies and strategies. It also affirms that it is deeply significant of human nature to interrogate and to husband the world. Bringing into life as yet unrealised potential within nature is not necessarily an inappropriate ‘playing God’, providing that it is not driven by an anthropocentric avarice. The essential rebalancing, in this radical narrative, of a purely exploitative manipulation of the world is provided by the twin imperatives of an ethics of human responsibility and an aetiology that centralises and prioritises the wellbeing of the world before the wealth of human beings. It provides a worked answer, rooted in very long tradition, to Latour’s call for a ‘servant mastery’ in relation to the environment. Some of the more thoughtful reflections of scientists as identified in the GM Futuros research represent a path that balances openness to the new with recognition that care is needed to avoid unanticipated consequences – so in Brazil, for example, we heard, ‘it is necessary to use technologies in an integrated and combined manner. The exclusive use of a specific technology can lead to imbalances’, yet, ‘Genetic Modification is seen as allowing for the indefinite extension of human intervention in nature.’

The challenge is to create a functional contemporary connection between an approach that draws on the ‘Way to Wisdom’ and the process of policy-creation around troubled technologies such as GMOs. The potential to break the current forms of deadlock evinced in all the examples of GMFutoros, no less that in the current UK and EU, is provided by its doubly-radical content. On the one hand it makes a positive affirmation that human intervention in nature can be both a good, and supportive rather than destructive of the human condition. On the other it challenges and ultimately condemns any framing that makes its principle goal the material benefit of people, in this case, the ‘feeding of the world’ narrative. This must be secondary to a deliberate prioritisation of a sustainable world. Introducing a set of principles built on such values within a fraught contest between ‘technological progressive’ and ‘ecological conservative’ voices sides with neither. It contains fundamental directions that both will embrace, yet presents both with severe challenges as well. But, like all third views, it also diverts the deadlocked opposition characteristic of all discussion that has been reduced to a simple dualism.

Such are the potential benefits of reframing the value-structure of debate around an explicit, rather than implicit, set of underlying narratives. But any implementation begs severe questions of process and definition. How should the prioritisation of ‘responsible care’ for nature be articulated, weighted and defined? How can a language of negotiable underlying narrative be developed, and deployed? How can the different levels of discussion and consultation recognise multiple levels of motive that play out, whether we make the explicit or not, and in particular how can a positive narrative such as the ‘Way to Wisdom’ be led to engage with, for example, ‘Pandora’s Box’ in a way that unlocks a real deliberation about new technology rather than an entertaining sideshow? If nothing else, we need to create a deliberative framework that recognises the sterility of any idea that all that needs to be discussed is the level of risk.

 

Bibliography

Davies, S. and Macnaghten, P. (2010) ‘Narratives of mastery and resistance. Lay ethics of nanotechnology’. NanoEthics, 4, (2): 141-151

Dupuy, J-P. (2010) The narratology of lay ethics. Nanoethics, 4: 153–170

Latour, B. (2011) Love your monsters: Why we must care for our technologies as we do our children’, in T. Nordhaus and M. Shellenberger (eds.) Love your monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Breakthrough Institute, pp. 17-25

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.