A Christian Voice to the question, ‘What is Science For?’

BBC Radio 4 once nearly caused me a nasty road accident. I had foolishly believed that a drive along the A1M might be safely accompanied by the last of a series of panel discussions on ‘Culture in our Times’ (very ‘radio 4’). All very worthy and improving it was too as I recall – until the last few seconds of the programme when the chair cut in with something like, “Do you think that it’s strange that we’ve been debating ‘culture’ for 6 weeks now and haven’t once talked about science?”. One of the panellists came back immediately with: “Oh no! No – we wouldn’t want to be talking about anything as anoraksic as science in a discussion of culture.” This was of course the point at which I nearly lost control of the car …

It so saddens me – what we have done with science: put it in a little box with ‘geeky’ and ‘weird’, and filtered it for

Why is Science not more like Music?

public consumption in a way that no-one can see the art, the imagination, the love, despair, beauty in it – unless they have gone through years of special training. It stuck me recently that if we had done with music what we have done with science, no-one would ever go to hear a real live jazz quintet, or a symphony orchestra, or an opera. They would happen of course – but only in laboratory conditions away from untrained public ears. We might get the tune hummed to us the next morning on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme and a slightly condescending interview by John Timpson with a conductor or bass player, but the idea that ordinary people might appreciate the difficulties of live harmony and counterpoint would be ridiculous; except of course, that we can – because music is at the heart of being human, whether we just enjoy listening, or can play the Brahms violin concerto from memory.

The 60’s social critique Jacques Barzun once wrote ‘Science with us is not with us an object of contemplation’, and he was right. But it could be. As a lover of creativity and art as well as a scientist I have long felt, long known that science belongs in that ‘basket’ of activities that make us human, where we also find story-telling, song, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry, philosophy, language, … All of these are ‘with us’ ‘objects of contemplation’. You might say that they all have their own human stories – their own ‘social narratives’.

But right now science doesn’t have a social narrative that ties it to the deeply human and creative – the very idea to some here will sound ridiculous – but this strange divorce has many harmful consequences from which I just want to pick out three – in politics, in education and in religion (so two out of three taboo topics – I’m working on making it three out of three with sex as well but you’ll have to stay tuned for that)

This first is in the area of science and technology-based policy and its discussion in the public area. Have you noticed that we don’t seem to be able to carry on an adult conversation about this in public and in the press? I’m talking about fracking, climate change and global warming, genetic modification, nuclear power, nanotechnology – we might call them the ‘troubled technologies’. Rather than a reasoned debate on of whether and how to take these things forward, people tend to retrench to their initial positions and lob opinions over the parapet. The politics of conflict, usually fuelled by an intransigent ignorance on all parts, takes the place of informed engagement and convergence. Some of my Durham University colleagues in the faculty of social science have been interested in this phenomenon for a long time, and I was fascinated by their careful research, teasing out the hidden narrative structure of some of these debates. In a large project analysing the fraught Europe-wide discussion of potential nanotechnologies, for example, they found that behind and underneath a conversation ostensibly about appraising risk and benefit lay five unseen narratives:

1. Be careful what you wish for
2. Don’t open Pandora’s Box
3. Don’t meddle with sacred Nature
4. They will keep us in the dark
5. The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

Philosopher Jean-Pierre DuPuy calls these ‘narratives of despair’: desire, evil, the sacred, alienation and exploitation. It’s not that science doesn’t have a social narrative – it has actually accrued many contradictory and dark narratives such as these – and all the more powerful and damaging for being silent ones. Like sharks circling under the surface on which the public discussion swims, they control the debate by their fear-inducing presence, without having to surface themselves. Did you notice one thing about them? The ancient ones are all pagan, the modern all grimly secular.

Education. I love to visit schools, especially sixth forms – I sometimes go to their general studies sessions to talk about art and science, or science and faith or something like that. And as in all teaching it quickly becomes apparent by the looks in their eyes who the very bright ones are who are engaging critically with every idea, and who I’m having to work a bit harder for … At some point I like to ask those who did not choose to follow science subjects why they didn’t. The struggling ones sometimes say that they found it too difficult, or weren’t ‘good at it’. That’s itself a sad thing – rather than allow a young person to find an appropriate way of engaging with one of the most astonishing of human accomplishments, we manage to engender a belief that they aren’t good enough for it. But the bright ones never say that; they say something like, ‘I didn’t see that science would give me room for my creativity or imagination’. It’s like a knife through my heart – what have we done when we have so mis-told the story of human re-imagination of the entire cosmos, from the life-cycle of galaxies to the intricate chemistry of plant cells, that our children don’t see any room there for creativity? And so very likely they never do. I have come to believe that one of the cruellest things you can ask of a young person is, ‘are they on the science side or the arts side?’ It’s one of those nasty questions that entraps and restricts rather than frees and creates possibilities.

The church has not escaped from its own versions of ‘narratives of despair’ when it comes to science – or even of ‘narratives of conflict’. Although historians now recognise that 19^th century polemics with titles like Andrew White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom are just that – un-evidenced polemics without a shred of history behind them, yet the myth of those conflicts lingers on at the same time as the real conflict of ‘young earth creationism’ infiltrates a biblically and scientifically illiterate church. On the surface, above the circling of these two very dangerous submerged sharks, is a Christian church in most places keeping its distance from science.

What we desperately need is a true story to tell about science, one that enables us to understand it within the long cultural history of humanity. It will tell us what science is for – a narrative of purpose – the philosophers would say, a teleology. And that is why, even if we are secular, we look to theology for resources here. Of all the humanities, theology is alone in still comfortably talking about purpose when in all others it has evaporated from modern discourse. Now when I say ‘purpose’, I’m not looking for an answer at the level of ‘it helps us make better aeroplanes’. Of course it does that, but I’m interested in where science belongs in the story of being human, and for an answer that might sit alongside an answer to the question, ‘what is the purpose of music?’ What does science do within the project of being human?

For scientists who are also Christians, this is by far the most important and fruitful question to ask at the nexus of science and religion. As a professor of physics and Anglican lay reader I am always being asked, ‘how do you reconcile science and religion?’ – a question that begs so many false assumptions that I never know where to start. It belongs in the class of ‘have you stopped beating your wife yet?’ questions. I’m not even going to recognise the framing. The real question is the one we can allow ourselves to explore if for once we can get off the back foot of apologetics and on to the front foot of thinking theologically about the world. It is the question, ‘What God’s gift of science do, as a means of work within God’s Kingdom?’

I’ll never forget the unexpected source of my first clue towards an answer to this question of purpose. A post-holocaust atheist Jewish thinker of the stature of Prof. George Steiner might be the last person you would think might reach for Christian theological narrative in a critique of the post-modern humanities! But in his deep and moving short book, Real Presences, he does just that – drawing on the three-day Easter shape of lost-ness and despair, waiting in the ‘not-yet’, and future hope, to articulate the human experience. And within this he talks about the purpose of art, in a simple statement that left me breathless:

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

This is a wonderful idea – that the human is special among the animals because in some strange way we don’t feel at home in the physical space and time within which we live. The world frightens us with its ‘sheer inhuman otherness’. But – ‘Only ART?’ Surely this is exactly what science does – bridging this gulf of inaccessibility, and by observation, contemplation, mathematical reasoning and careful experiment, ‘waking into some measure of communicability’ this strange spiritless stuff around us, and of which we ourselves are made?

Steiner points us to a task of reconciliation with the physical world that needs to be done, and to a long extended story that describes its history, its present and its future. For just this idea of learning to see the world in a new and powerful way –of learning to see it in all its solid fabric of rock and water and ice and space – in the same way as its Creator sees it – lies at the heart of what the Old Testament calls ‘Wisdom’.   Here’s an example – the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ in the Book of Job tells us why it is that God knows the way to wisdom:

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

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

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

A special kind of looking, a special kind of seeing, and measuring – this is the ancient ‘way to wisdom’. This deeply physical book, seeped in Nature imagery from beginning to end, has always fascinated me. At its climax we find what surely must be the most striking of all nature poems from the ancient world – in the form of God’s long-awaited answer to Job’s demands for an explanation of his unjust suffering. It is not the answer we expect, because it takes for form of questions – 163 of them – and all about the natural world:

Were you there when I laid the foundations of the Earth?

Do you know the way to the storehouses of the hail?

Where is the way to the abode of light?

Can you bind the stars of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?

Questions about the areas of science we now call astronomy, meteorology, geology, zoology and more pile up in stunning sequence as Yahweh asks Job to think about how to constitute a creation rich enough and delicate enough to support the complexity of the inhabited skies, oceans and land of the Earth. It’s as if he is saying to the angry Job – yes I can make you the comforting, ordered, world you wish for, the world without storms and floods and earthquakes – but it will be as ordered as a stone, as a crystal – it will be a dead world.

I’ve often suggested to scientist colleagues that they read these chapters from Job – and invariably they come back astonished at the probing imagination behind the text. Now one of the reasons that scientists find the Lord’s Answer to Job so impressive is to do with its very form. For we know that, at the heart of science, is not the so-called ‘scientific method’ with its experiments, tests, refutations and all that. For the ‘method’ would have nothing to work with if new ideas, bold hypotheses, possible worlds, were not first imagined. And the central imaginative, creating act in science is the formulation of the creative question. To those school sixth formers who could not see the creative content of science, we need to ask not ‘can you find the right answer?’ but ‘can you imagine the creative question?’

And to the church we need to say, ‘recognise science not as the secular world’s threat to your belief, but as God’s gift in your service of community, nation and world’. And more than that – recognise that the activity we now call ‘science’ is really only the name of the current chapter in a book that humankind has been writing for centuries, whose earlier chapters were called by other names. Only a century or two ago I would not have been called a scientist, but a ‘natural philosopher’ or – if you like – a lover of wisdom to do with natural things. Perhaps it would be better if we still were to call science by that humbler and older name that contains both love and wisdom within itself, to recognise that science has the ancient story of wisdom as its own story.

Then perhaps we could start to go about our work of healing, of mending, of gently and firmly replacing falsehood with truth – and start to work with science rather than in fear of it, and loving away those fearful narratives of desire, evil and the sacred in nature, with the narratives of reconciliation, of knowledge, of wisdom and of hope.

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

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

Interior of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge

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

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

… do you know what binds the Pleiades star cluster?

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

can you trace the path of the lightening?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do Creation Stories do in the Bible?

Earthrise captured by the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968.

One of the central themes of Faith and Wisdom in Science is the rich seam of creation-story material in every genre of Biblical literature, yet the strange paradox that, apart from some notable exceptions, this is largely ignored in the mainstream science/religion discussion.  As a further damaging consequence, when that debate ever resumes its close Mercurial orbit around the well-trodden turf of Genesis 1 and 2, interpretation of those texts become distorted without the foundation of creation story material in Psalms, Prophets and supremely the Wisdom books.  Since I claim that all this material is fundamental to answering a theological question about what science is for, as an essential prelude to how we govern and use science in our time, a close study of the whole Biblical picture of our relationship with nature assumes supreme importance in the church today.

A previous post, The 20+ Creation Stories in the Bible, did not much more than list some of the material that needs to be brought together in an healthy Bible-study program on creation.  That post pointed out that Genesis has by no means the monopoly on creation stories.  There are fundamental alternative images and language used in, for example, Proverbs 8 and Job.  Ah! The wonderful Book of Job! I drew attention to the reception of the creation story tradition in the New Testament genres of Gospel and Epistle too.  But there is more, of course, to say here.  We need to think about the role creation-stories play in the Biblical narrative, where they occur, in what moods and what the achieve.

Take Psalm 33. It follows hard on the heels of the penitential Psalm 32 (When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all the day long – 32v3).  The last verse of Ps32 and the first of Ps33 have turned this backward looking reflection on transgression and decay into an exhortation to praise, but it remains at this point a command.  There is no source of transformational energy to effect it. The narrative is moving towards the closing verse of Psalm 33: We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.  But in order to reach that closure, the psalmist needs to chose a path that goes by way of a creation story:

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses

its important to note that all the fundamental components of a Biblical creation story are here: the formation of boundaries, the ordering of chaos, the action of Word.  All this is embellished and formalised in the Genesis narratives, but the essentials are all in these shorter accounts in Song and Wisdom. The point here, however, is that the story of Creation, rather than just standing at the beginning of time as a monument to the first moment, becomes a bridge from despair to hope.  This active transport of the contemplation of the creative act through the process of healing and redemption, the bridging from fall to new creation, is ubiquitous when you have once recognised it.  The delightful, playful Wisdom-generated creation story in Proverbs 8 serves the same purpose.  Like Psalm 33, it answers a ‘call’ (this time not a call to praise but a call to wisdom) but lacking in the source of power to realise it, by unleashing the energies of God’s creation itself to create hope, and a direction towards the enacted Wisdom of the rest of the book of Proverbs.

The great creation story in the Lord’s Answer to Job (Ch 38)

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me if you understand.

Who marked off its dimension? Surely you know!

Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set,

or who laid its cornerstone while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?

serves the bridging need once more.  It resolves the tangled and angry impasse of the cycles of dialogues between Job and his comforters (who are of course rather accusers), expands the creation motif into a panoramic tour of the entire created order, but eventually takes Job to a place where both his body and his mind can be healed.

The New Testament visits Creation and our painful present relation to it in just the same way.  Romans chapter 8 cannot reach its goal of nothing separating God’s servants from their maker except by way of All Creation groaning until the sons and daughters of God are revealed.

The Johannine ‘signs’ may, at least partially, be understood in this light. After the feeding of the 5000 in John chapter 6, redolent with the symbols of the Exodus, the people want to make Jesus king, but by force. Nature itself illustrates this out-of-joint-ness with a terrifying storm that threatens to overcome the disciples in the Galilean fishing boat.  But, bringing three mighty Biblical strands together in one action: (1) a recollection of the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14); (3) a recreation and re-bounding of water in a new physicality (Psalm 93); (3) a fulfilment of the cosmology of Job (Job 9v8), Jesus walks to them across the waves. And the boat immediately reaches its destination (Jn 6v21).

Our relationship with created nature today features science at its heart.  But the role of this relationship, and its Great Story, has not changed.  Mending our ways with creation is still the bridge between the ignorance, fear and waste of our past, and to a future of knowledge and wisdom.  This is what makes a theology of science to urgent to work through and work out.

The Faith and Wisdom in Science Story in Three Steps

It’s proving a very interesting summer thanks to two invitations to give lectures

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

and discussions on the material in Faith and Wisdom in Science over three consecutive sessions, rather than squeezing it all into one evening.  The first, in June, was from the West Yorkshire School of Christian Studies (WYSOCS) to deliver the input for their annual study weekend.  The second is from York Minster, to give their annual series of three summer lectures.  The first happened last month, the York Minster series has one more to go (so you can still come!).

I’ve found the opportunity to let the story of the thinking behind the book ‘breathe’ rather more spaciously very stimulating, and satisfying.  The narrative is less rushed, preparatory material can be enriched, and – best of all – we can devote almost the entire second lecture to a good wallow in the Book of Job and its wonderful nature poems, painful questions and search for Wisdom.

The WYSOCS audio files can be found here, for those with the patience to hear them, and I will be posting the slides on the Minster web site in due course. The three-section structure for FaWiS goes something like this:

1. A historical summary of relation between science and religion
2. The search for Wisdom: Creation stories in Psalms and Proverbs, and the Book of Job
3. Through the New Testament and towards a Theology of Science

The first hour and discussion can set the scene – how did we get into this mess?  We look at Tertullian’s infamous ‘What has Athens got to do with Jerusalem?’ outburst in Against Heretics but in the context of a thinking perfectly able and willing to recruit Stoic logic to his Christian purposes.  Another contrast is the wonderful Gregory of Nyssa whose On the Soul and the Resurrection contains a beautiful forth century therapeutic application of scientific thinking at his sister Macrina’s deathbed.  A little more ‘myth-busting” taking in the scientific advances of the medieval Islamic and Christian worlds, for example, take us to the early modern acceleration of science – and its explicit (Baconian) Christian teleology.  So we find the ‘conflict’ narrative to be a social construction of the 19th and 20th centuries that creates havoc with the social context of science, and in the church.

What we need, then, is a dose of Wisdom – and we turn to the strand of creation stories in the Bible for a taste of writing about human relationship with the nature in the ancient world.  The 20 creation stories in the Bible get a brief overview, as well as their purpose.  They are used ubiquitously as bridge texts between present trouble and future hope.  Psalm 33 is a prime example.  We also review them from a structural perspective – their common features of ordering, of setting boundaries between land and sea, heavens and the earth, laying foundations, and finally  the role of Word in the creative act.  The short creation story from Ps33 runs:

6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathers the waters of the sea into jars; he puts the deep into storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the people of the world revere him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.

This takes us into Job, with the structure of circling dialogues, each invoking nature imagery to illustrate Job’s great double accusation – that God is as out of control of the moral law as he is of the natural law.  Injustice flows like the wadis – dry one day and in uncontrolled and destructive spate the next. The Hymn to Wisdom of Job 28 points us towards the wisdom of perceptive searching and seeing into the natural world by weight and measure (this is the Wisdom of God) and towards YHWH’s answer in chapters 38-40.  This is not the ‘petulant put-down’ of some critical readings, but a teacher’s questions of a pupil or debating adversary – and they lead Job into the position of how one creates a world of fruitfulness, life, and humanity, “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the Earth …”.

So by the start of the third session we are building up a picture of a theology of science that is old, deeply embedded into the human, takes a responsible stance as God’s co-workers, is reconciliatory of our relationship with nature.  We are called to replace a relationship characterised by ignorance, fear and harm with one filled out with knowledge, wisdom and mutual flourishing.  That is what God’s gift of science is all about – not a threat to faith, but a gift of talents to exercise it in obedience and humility.  We can spend some time on consequences for public shared science, education, the media, the political debate of science based issues such as climate change, fracking, genetic medicine, that as things are get stuck in immobile oppositional negative narratives of despair.

The longer breath of presentation seems to elicit a deeper vein of question as well.  At WYSOCS I was pressed, for example, on the ‘no prior boundaries’ conclusion – that the Biblical material asks us to take responsibility for what we do and do not do with our knowledge of the world.  So it is not a priori evident that we should not, for example, deliberately manipulate the human genome.  But nor is it obvious that we should just because we can.  In every case we need to take wise, theologically informed, participative, reconciliatory discussion into the public square.  Was there an occasion when there was an experimental piece of research I wanted to do, but which I felt was a theological no-go area?  As a theoretician myself, I am blessed with not finding myself in this position!  However, I am aware of, and was involved in, a discussion with an academic ethical advisor to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK about a project aimed at scoping a geo-engineering technology.  It was stopped, and I agreed, because there had been very inadequate public consultation and involvement of the ethical issues, unintended consequences and plan for further public debate, as well as a possible conflict of interest.  It had been framed in an ‘engineers and scientists know best’ narrative.  This is a good example of the application of theological thinking, but in a secular context, to the benefit of our relationship with nature.

More questions and initial directions of answers from WYSOCS and the Minster lectures over the summer!

Laudato Si – Reflections from Faith and Wisdom in Science

Last week Pope Francis published his widely anticipated encyclical Laudato Si.   It is a considered yet impassioned plea for new attitude and action towards our planet and environment – ‘Care for our Common Home’.  It is adressed not just to Catholics or the wider Christian communion, but to everyone. Immediate comment was almost universally warmly receptive, though tended to focus on particular statements or to extract highlighted ‘soundbites’ from within the lengthy sweep of its 186 pages. But its great strength is to be found in the very breadth and depth that the Encyclical allows itself. Before suggesting changes of political and personal attitude and behaviour, Laudato Si surveys a Biblically-informed theological discussion of science, technology and our responsibility to nature. Since this is also the essential foundation of Faith and Wisdom in Science, I rather think it the task of this column to look hard at the theology of science that the encyclical builds on, before reacting to its recommendations.

The very title of the document, and of course the author’s assumed pontifical name, are both taken from the founder of the movement to which he belongs – St. Francis of Assisi. The endearing honesty of the message is stamped on the introductory pages, which remind us of Francis’ especial love of nature, of all creatures, and the human care to which God entrusts the world. The very language of ‘Brother Sun’ and ‘Sister Earth’ prepares us for the deeply relational thinking that pervades the document, which later (§65 and §66) identifies the vital ‘relationship of human beings to the world’ as a broken one, as damaged as those with our neighbour and with God. The language used of this relationship with the natural world is

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

covenantal and reciprocal throughout. In Faith and Wisdom I found just this astonishingly profound category of relationship to emerge from the Wisdom tradition of the Old Testament – Job, for example, is assured that his anger and suffering, and also his questioning of nature itself, can become a pathway to a time when he is ‘in covenant with the stones’. Biblical affirmation of the goodness of physical reality, and our vital relation to it, really is that strong.

Francis likewise takes a Biblical reading informed by the Wisdom tradition to move away from a naive opposition of science and faith. On the contrary, he draws on science explicitly to inform theology: ‘the best scientific research available today touch[es] us deeply and provide[s] a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.’ (§15). That itinerary passes, as it did symbolically for Job, and as it does for St. Paul’s reflection on our relation with creation in Romans chapter 8, though a necessary pain: ‘Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.’ (§19) If Francis feels pain, and also anger, at the current misshapen framing of that relationship as one of exploitative domination (‘Clearly, the Bible has no place for a tyrannical anthropocentrism unconcerned for other creatures §68), he expresses continual hope that a new and very different approach might follow (‘Instead, our “dominion” over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship’ – §116). This is authentic Biblical encounter with the natural world – there is only one place in Old or New Testaments where human relationship with nature is not within the context of pain, and that is within the hope of the new creation (Revelation 22).

The Faith and Wisdom story reaches yet more radical conclusions of our responsibility to use scientific knowledge with wisdom, identifying humans ‘in the image of God’ as participative co-creators in a universe which has not finished the work of creation. This is a vital point – we have the care of something growing and developing, not simply of a finished product. We

Self-assembly of molecular structures (Barrett group, McGill University)

are able to harm a future, not just deform a present. Laudato Si draws on a remarkable passage from the celebrated medieval thinker St. Thomas Aquinas to explore and apply this idea. It might even be called a ‘theology of self-assembly! In his Summa Theologica Thomas illustrates the phenomenon of natural emergence: “Nature is nothing other than a certain kind of art, namely God’s art, impressed upon things, whereby those things are moved to a determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give timbers the wherewithal to move themselves to take the form of a ship” (§80). The world is pregnant with possibility. I wonder what Thomas would make of today’s theories of self-assembling cell-membranes, an example I used in Faith and Wisdom to illustrate how the apparent chaos of the molecular world is necessary for order and a structure to emerge.

The science and the theology of Laudato Si work powerfully together. Under the surface of its language lie not only the analytic toolkit of science, which informs us of the dominant human causes of global warming, but also the integrative, holistic methods of complexity and the science of systems. The rain-forests are the ‘lungs of the planet’ (§40); A fully interdisciplinary approach is needed to address the ‘deepest problems of the global system’ (§111). Both science and faith create global communities – and an attentive reader will not miss the explicit acknowledgement of reflective contributions from church leaders in Japan, Brazil, New Zealand, Bolivia, USA, Paraguay, Germany, Canada and more. Sufi and Jewish thought is welcomed as well as Christian. This is connectivity embodied as well as urged.

There are of course places where I hesitate to affirm everything Francis says. I rather wish he had said explicitly that science is a gift of God, rather than the one-stage removed ’emerged from the gift of creativity’. But disagreement in some p art will be true of most readers. But living with those differences is also part of living and serving together in a connected and responsible way.

Laudato Si is not only a thoughtful document, it is a beautiful one. It is stern – it needs to be. It is painful. But it is not depressing or despairing. The prayers with which if finishes are full of praise and resurrection hope. It is surely right to suggest a song as we take on the urgent task of mending our ways, rediscovering simplicity, caring for the poor, receiving and using science as God’s gift, and stewarding our world for those who come after us.

An Easter-Week Expression of Hope for Faith and Wisdom in Science

Easter-time seems a good moment to draw back the curtain a little bit on some big words with theological resonance that bridge between the practice of science (or of life in general for that matter) and the foundation of faith.  It also records an interesting question put to me in the discussion-time following a recent James Gregory Lecture at the University of St. Andrews (which you can see, including the discussion, here).   I was asked, ‘Why haven’t you talked at all about God? I was expecting you to do that in a lecture on Science and Religion!’.  The odd thing was that I had the impression that I had been talking about God all the time – after all, a Theology of Science based on the deep Old Testament Wisdom books, intrepreted through a New Testament lens (that’s the academic soundbite folks) could, I thought, hardly be interpreted as godless.  But perhaps the questioner had a point.  After all, much of the OT wisdom sayings also take an implied or implicit presence of God rather than an explicit one.  Some analyses of the Book of Proverbs, for example, even divide the sayings into ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’.  The Book of Job, my textual centrepiece in Faith and Wisdom in Science, depends for its narrative thrust on the absence of God for most of its course.  Without the silence of the voice of Jahweh for the first 37 chapters, the ‘Voice from the Whirlwind’ in chapter 38 would lose some of the ‘frisson’ that Job scholar David Clines describes accompanying his every reading.  It is, perhaps, too easy to assume the same silent voice when talking about the theology of science – in which God is always implied but mostly in the background.  There is one very good reason for this.  Silence from and about God allows human activities to proceed within a secular setting.  Science may have had Christian roots in the past, and as I claim theological underpinnings in the present, but these must not appear to make it exclusive as a human enterprise.  But for a Christian (or Jew or Muslim – see chapter 8) we need God to step out from the shadows of the cave. Time to roll back the stone!

‘Faith’ itself, is of course one of the big words we need to talk about.  As I explain in Faith and Wisdom in Science, ‘faith’ (with a small ‘f’) is a commonplace requirement in the methodology of science.  Early in the life of a scientific idea it will be too underdeveloped and too weakly-supported by data to stand up against the established theories, however cracked they might be.  The proponents of a new idea, usually still in ostensible contradiction with observation in some cases at least, must exercise ‘faith’ that it will come good, that the inconsistencies will be ironed out one day, that further insights into the structure of the new idea will render it more plausible and stronger rather than weaker.  I went through this experience myself in the early years of a new theory of how polymer (plastic) liquids behaved.  It challenged existing orthodoxy and received considerable oppostion.  It’s detracators were able to point to experiments that our new idea totally failed to account for.  Under a strictly Popperian methodology of science it ought, refuted, to have died at birth. Yet the way that it made sense of so much of the rest of the phenomena of ‘elastic liquids’ from their molecular structure persuaded some of us that it was on the right track.  In the early days this wasnt really rational thinking.  We had just developed a ‘love’ for our beautiful baby theory and we had ‘faith’ that one day it would grow into a more powerful scheme that accounted for the present gaps as well.  And so it proved, after 20 years or so.

This linked activity of such faith in and love of new ideas within the progress of science is a central source of energy for its growth.  I discuss this at a little more length in chapter 7 of Faith and Wisdom, thinking about the much more significant story of the Copernican Revolution.  Of course at first sight this ‘faith with a small f’ looks rather different to the religious form of ‘Faith with a large F’ that characterises, for example, orthodox Christian belief.  But I am not convinced that they are so very far apart. Mark Twain’s (allegedly) classic definition of ‘believing things  you know aint so’ is amusing but doesnt work as a faithful account of Faith.  Belief in the Easter affirmation ‘Christ is risen!’ is more than an assent to historical events in 1st century Palestine (on the basis of arguably fair evidence for history in the ancient world, but flimsy if they were recent).  It is a recognition that the other big Easter word – Hope – has its source in a living Person who can be encountered, and who can transform with love and healing in communities today as vibrantly as he did then.  Hope is also, and always unreasonably, at the heart of science.  We carry on doing science because we hope that by it we will come to understand how the universe works.  We hope to see below the surface of phenomena into the logic, the symmetry, the layers of emergent structures of complexity, that this breathtakingly beautiful world supports. Nothing in the philosophy of science gives any a priori reason that we might expect to be able to do this.

In short we hope to heal our current ignorance and flawed relationship with nature, replacing it by one characterised instead by knowledge and wisdom. The resurrection is ultimately the source of all hope, including the hope that drives the humblest aspect of our calling to be menders of broken relationships – the task we call ‘science’.

More Questions from Sheffield: Science of Theology, Fall and Cure for the Earth

A second set of questions from the discussion of Faith and Wisdom in Science at All Saints Ecclesall

All Saints parish church, Ecclesall, Sheffield

resonated with each other somehow:

• If you are advocating a Theology of Science, what about a Science of Theology – what does that look like?
• In a Christian theology, might the tension between Order and Chaos arise from the Fall?
• If a pastor’s lot is the ‘cure of souls’ might not the scientist’s be ‘cure of the Earth’?

As I say in the book, I thnk that the right (if rather radical) way to express the relationship between science and theology is that they are ‘of each other’.  This is an uttlery different way of framing the relationship from the classical alternatives of Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, Integration due orignally to Ian Barbour (who is, of course, largely responsible for getting the whole field of ‘science and religion’ going, so is to be hugely thanked and admired).  It comes closest to ‘integration’ but is not really that – there really are large potential tensions – but the point is that this is not beause they claim competitively common ground.  This is a mistake that the young earth creationists make when they claim that the Bible works as a scientific document.  It is much more powerful than that – it is a mandate for doing science in the first place. No, the tensions come because each of science and theology wants to hold a meta-discourse over the other one.  So Theology wants to say something (a lot) about why we do science.

FMRI scans of the brains of people at prayer. The same areas are used as those when talking to a loved one. No surprises of threats there for a Christian!
See neubaur_2013_prayer_neuroimaging.png

In the same way, science wants to investigate theology and religion in all sorts of ways.  Neurologically – what happens in religious activity and experience? Anthropologically – what social consequences are there for early religious structures and are they advantageous? Archaeologically – what is the historical status of the Old Testament texts? Psychologically – and so on. Daniel Dennett has written at most depth about a call for a scientific investigation of the benefits (or otherwise) of religion in his book Breaking the Spell, so I didnt think I needed to write so much about ‘that way around’ in Faith and Wisdom.  But I think that believers have nothing to fear and everything to gain from such an illumination of science (see the neurological functional magnitic resonance images to the left, where the brains of patients at prayer evince heightened blood flow in the same areas as when talking with a loved one, reported here).

The Fall has traditionally thrown a long philosophical shadow on Christian philosophy of the mind.  I have elsewhere talked about the medieval motivation for progressing science beyond Aristotle,  The idea that before the Fall of Genesis chapter 3, humans had perfect knowledge of nature is not strictly biblical, but a later Patristic interpretation or perhaps embelishment of the consequences of ‘eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.  It appears in Grosseteste in the early 13th century, and in the early modern period in the Organum of Francis Bacon.  If both our minds are darkened, and the world rendered more chaotic, as a result of human sin and a failure to look after it, then there are indeed deep consequences for what science must do.  In particulat for Bacon, early modern science was experimental because our senses were all that remains of a hierarchy of faculties, of which they are the lowest, which enable us to perceive nature’s inner workings.  Out task, part of the great commission, is to rebuild the lost knowledge we once had.

But to what purpose? That is where I like the idea of the ‘Cure of the Earth’. In a few words it points to the theological foundation of science, and of the technology with which science partners.  Later this week I will be examining a PhD thesis on a theology of technology.  I am looking forward very much to this.

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!

What’s the Story? And why all the Theological Baggage? – Grilling the book at TORCH from all sides

The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) is currently running a series of events on Humanities and Science. At the intersection of this programme with their regular ‘Book at Lunchtime’ seminars, on February 11th an Oxford based panel of three disciplinary experts shone their critical torchlights on  Faith and Wisdom in Science.

Perspectives from English Literature (Prof. Sally Shuttleworth), History (Prof. John Christie) and Physics (Prof Ard Louis) proved a sharp and effective way to touch on critical aspects of the book. For all of them both positive responses and critical questions turned on the central theme of narrative. Should we, and how can we understand science itself and narrative? And as the book itself asks, where can we find and deploy a constructive cultural narrative for science that might unlock some of the current misrepresentations and political tangles around science and technology in the public forum? Louis referred to the ‘lament’ that science is not a cultural possession in the same way that art or music is, and urged the advantage of telling the messy story of real science practice. Christie sketched the obscured historical details within the stories of Galileo and Newton,

Galileo Galilei

and of the Biblical basis for Frances’ Bacon’s vision for modern science, which serve deconstruct the worn old myths about confrontation of science and religion. Shuttleworth welcomed the telling of the stories of science as questioning and creative, yet suffering the fate of almost always being wrong.

Faith and Wisdom in Science sets out to explore what resources Judeo-Christian theology can supply in constructing a social narrative for science – one that might describe both what science is for, and how it might be more widely enjoyed. It draws on history to claim that the project we now call ‘science’ is in continuity with older human activities by other names; ‘natural philosophy’ in the early modern period and in ancient times just ‘Wisdom’. The theology of science that emerges is ‘participatory reconciliation’, a hopeful engagement with the world that both lights it up and heals our relationship with it.

But is theology the only way to get there? Are we required to carry the heavy cultural baggage of Christian history of thought and structures? Shuttleworth recalled George Eliot’s misery at the dissection of the miraculous as she translated Strauss’ ‘Life of Jesus’ at the dawn of critical Biblical studies. Yet Eliot is able to conceive of a rich and luminous narrative for science in Middlemarch:

“…the imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space.”

Eliot’s sources are T.H. Huxley, J.S. Mill and Auguste Comte, and of course her partner G.H Lewes,  They are by no means theological (Comte had even constructed a secular religion). Perhaps this is an example of an entirely secular route to science’s story? Yet her insight into science as a special sort of deep ‘seeing’ also emerges from the ancient wisdom of, for example, the Book of Job. In a parallel and contemporary book Seeing the World and Knowing God, Oxford theologian Paul Fiddes also calls on the material of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes to challenge the post-modern dissolution of subject and object. Participatory reconciliation emerges for both theologian and scientist motivated to draw on ancient wisdom for modern need. Was Eliot, and will all secular thinkers in the Western tradition be, in some way irrevocably connected to these ancient wellsprings of our thinking?

An aspect of the ‘baggage’ most desirable to drop, according to Shuttleworth, is the notion that scientists are a sort of priesthood. Surely this speaks to the worst suspicions of a mangled modern discourse of authority and power. Louis even suggested that the science/religion debate is really only a proxy for this larger and deeper one. Perhaps the first-temple notion of ‘servant priesthood’ is now too overlain with the strata of power-play to serve as a helpful metaphor for how we go about enacting the story of science.

But science needs to rediscover its story, and it is only by acknowledge that its narrative underpinnings must come from the humanities, that it is going to find it.

Newcastle Phil and Lit: Technology and Heidegger

This week the redoubtable Newcastle Philosophical and Literary society, in partnership with Newcastle College, extended a very warm and hospitable welcome to a Faith and a Wisdom discussion in their current series entitled ‘On the Edge’ (we were ‘On the Edge of Faith’).  It’s so heartening to see these highly civilised organisations dedicated to thinking, learning and discussion still flourishing in the heart of our great cities, selling out on a wet and cold February Thursday.

the question time was very impressive and also challenging.  We had managed to cover

Newcastle Phil and Lit library

a little science (Brownian motion of signalling proteins – an example of order out of chaos and a reflection on our human ability to see below the surface of nature), some science history (Grosseteste’s extraordinary cosmogony in his 1225 De Luce) and a decent look at the hymn to wisdom in Job 28 in the search for material in support of a deep narrative for science.

‘Might the apprentice conflict between science and religion stem from technology rather than science itself?’ Wondered one questioner. I think that the thrust here is that science itself is not inherently threatening, as it ‘lights up the world’ rather than ‘changes the world’.  Indeed, as John Hedley-Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor point out in theirs Gifford lectures ‘Reconstructing the Universe’, 18th and 19th century chemistry was especially challenging theologically as it was (at that time) far more than physics or biology, the science that changed the world.  And doing this touches the raw nerve of that deeply reactionary ‘playing at God and trespassing on sacred nature’ narrative that plays out even today as an underlying driver of debate around technology.  However, I don’t think that historically the role of technology over against science holds up as a catalyst of confrontation.  It was not developing technology that Draper and White invoked in their 19th century polemics that painted for the first time the backdrop of conflict on the stage of science and religion.

A second questioner challenged my reference to Heidegger as a philosopher incompatible with the Bible.  In fact I was also accused of mentioning only this one philosopher – grave omission indeed at a ‘lit and PHIL’.  But I checked that we had in fact also discussed Arendt and Aristotle during the evening, so I hope we made our quota.  Actually I had referred to him as another thinker who echoes the theme of ‘hiddenness’ of the world (in his Being and Time).  This is not of course to endorse all his thought, much of which has been accused as obscurantist. His membership of the Nazi party during the 1930s and the war years will also always be a stain on his reputation. However, there is no reason to ignore everything that such a serious thinker has said, in spite of his faults. Arendt herself drew heavily on his ideas in describing the alienation from nature in her ‘The Human Condition’.

Now I am of course realising that there is a connection between the two questions. Heidegger was a philosopher deeply concerned with how we live in a technological society.  But perhaps he lacked the roots of ancient wisdom that the book of Job mysteriously urges us towards in its reach towards today’s world from such very different times.