‘Following the Science’ – thoughts on Knowledge and Wisdom

We hear a lot about ‘following the science’ in these pandemic-days. As someone who has ‘followed science’, and tried to practice it, for most of my life, this media soundbite intrigues me. But the biographical sense means something rather different. ‘Following science’, for scientists, is that lifelong, tantalizing glimmer around the corner that comes from insight, imagination and curiosity, a guide in the dark labyrinth of our present ignorance to the next step of understanding. Science itself doesn’t tell us which hunch to follow up next, but it will tell us when we emerge into the light. More prosaically, we will know when a vaccine works, but not in advance which candidate to choose.

Sir Francis Bacon

So ‘following science’ is not to make it our master. Francis Bacon, the 16^thcentury philosopher once said that, ‘Money makes a good servant but a poor master’. As an influential promoter of early experimental scientific method, he might well have said the same about science. Knowledge on its own is a poor decision maker. We also need wisdom.

As well as a devoted follower of and participant in science, I confess to being an equal fan of wisdom. One of the reasons that I find the Judeo-Christian tradition of knowledge attractive is that it is paired, throughout the Bible, with the urge to gain wisdom as well, and never to deploy knowledge without it.

The place where this message is loudest of all must be in the Old Testament Book of Job, according to Berlin philosopher Susan Neimann, a book as important as Plato. As for so many of us at the present moment, the book’s protagonist, the righteous and upright Job,  cries out for a reason that he is suffering terrible illness and loss. The whole cosmic fabric seems to be falling apart around him and descending into chaos:

Yet as a mountain slips away and erodes … so you destroy human hope

Job rails at God.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

God’s answer, when it comes, is unexpected. For far from taking Job into some moral debating chamber, he is taken on (literally) a whirlwind tour of nature’s wild side: the ice and seas, the dawn light, star-clusters, lightning and the life cycle of wild animals. At the same time God declares Job to have been right, and others who interpreted his suffering as a punishment, to have been wrong.

 

 

This Wisdom is to learn to live alongside the necessary wildness of nature, rather than just to rail against it. But it goes hand in hand with our miraculous human ability to uncover the material structure of our world, to understand it, and to care for it. That’s using science wisely.

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A Week of Wisdom: an Epiphany Post

Last Sunday was Epiphany in the western Christian Church Calendar, and this the ‘First Sunday of Epiphany’. It’s the time when congregations are reminded about St. Matthew’s account of the ‘Magi’ from the east (not three, not kings, no camels mentioned …). From the start of chapter 2 of the gospel:

“After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem ² and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.”

Here is the non-christmas-cardy 6th century Ravenna mosaic portrayal of the Magi (alright, there are three) from the church of Apollinare:

The Ravenna Mosaic of the Magi

‘Magi’ is perhaps, as in the translation above, left untranslated. ‘Wise men’ is in the right direction, but the term is not necessarily gendered, and it comes from another time and place to ours, where astrology was a serious proto-science and Zoroastrianism the cohesive framework of thought. Matthew 2 is therefore one of the places in Christian scripture and tradition where attention is drawn to the high value placed on wisdom from traditions, that ‘God is bigger that Israel’, that Wisdom overspills Judeo-Christian tradition (Another strand came a little later with the recognition that much in Ancient Greek learning was a gift of ‘common grace’).

An Ancient Wisdom Text

The lectionary readings from the week have drawn both from the central place that Wisdom has in the Bible, and hinted at the way that it (or ‘she’ – when Wisdom is personified she is Sophia) can be found in foreign, as well as familiar places, be visiting the apocryphal book of Baruch. Ostensibly the work of the prophet Jeremiah’s servant at the time of the Babylonian exile of Israel, it was most probably written later, toward the end of the 2nd century BC.

But what concerns me is not so much its date, but its context and content. In a time of trouble, worry, fear for the future, concern that irreparable damage has been done though foolish national decisions – “there is open shame on us today, …, because we have sinned against the Lord” (Baruch 1:15 – are you with me so far?), Baruch sings a different song:

⁹ Hear the commandments of life, O Israel;
give ear, and learn wisdom! …

¹⁵ Who has found her place?
And who has entered her storehouses? 
¹⁶ Where are the rulers of the nations,
and those who lorded it over the animals on earth; 
¹⁷ those who made sport of the birds of the air,
and who hoarded up silver and gold
in which people trust,
and there is no end to their getting; 
¹⁸ those who schemed to get silver, and were anxious,
but there is no trace of their works? 
¹⁹ They have vanished and gone down to Hades,
and others have arisen in their place.

²⁰ Later generations have seen the light of day,
and have lived upon the earth;
but they have not learned the way to knowledge, nor understood her paths,
nor laid hold of her.   …

²⁹ Who has gone up into heaven, and taken her,
and brought her down from the clouds? 
³⁰ Who has gone over the sea, and found her,
and will buy her for pure gold? 
³¹ No one knows the way to her,
or is concerned about the path to her. 
³² But the one who knows all things knows her,
he found her by his understanding.
The one who prepared the earth for all time
filled it with four-footed creatures; 
³³ the one who sends forth the light, and it goes;
he called it, and it obeyed him, trembling; 
³⁴ the stars shone in their watches, and were glad;
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them. 
³⁵ This is our God;
no other can be compared to him. 
³⁶ He found the whole way to knowledge,
and gave her to his servant Jacob
and to Israel, whom he loved. 
³⁷ Afterwards she appeared on earth
and lived with humankind. 

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

These excerpts from chapter 3 are remarkable, for the echo both in structure and content another song to someone in trouble, from the Book of Job, and one that I comment on at some length in Faith and Wisdom in Science. It’s Job’s ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ of chapter 28. There, too, is a search for wisdom as a lost treasure. there too its absence from the caves of the deep, or from the marketplace of gold and silver. But both Baruch and Job agree that true Wisdom can be found by human beings astonishingly in the same way that the Creator found it –  ‘by understanding’, and in particular understanding the natural world. Here are the closing verses (24-28) of Job 28:

God understands the way to [Wisdom], and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens.
When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters,
when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm,
then he looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it.
And he said to the human race,
“The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.

Science as Therapy

The contemplation of, and growing understanding into nature was wise and therapeutic of Job, a lesson learned by whoever Baruch was in later years. The thread of the healing power of reconnecting the human with the material world in perceiving its structures and workings is one that drove natural philosophy for centuries if not millennia. It inspired one of the great philosophical texts to appear from anywhere in the first millennium AD, Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. This wonderful tour of natural wisdom, written when its author was in prison under a death sentence, was one of the primary sources for the scientific imperative of the early universities in the 12th century. It is quoted everywhere.

A modern descendent of Boethius in our own times can be found in former science correspondent of the Guardian, Tim Radford. As the preface to his new book tells us, so distressed was this worthy gentleman by the political events of 2016, and their significance, that he decided to illuminate his personal darkness by thinking, and. writing, about physics. What Baruch, Job and Boethius tell us is that this is not ‘escapism’, it’s what you do with science. It’s what it’s there for. Radford’s The Consolations of Physics, is a marvellous testimony to the gift of peace, that the love of wisdom of natural things (that is what ‘natural philosophy’, the old words for ‘science’ mean after all) can give us.

We need to get science out of a box that says ‘shiny hard things for experts only’ and into the open basket of familiar and friendly things that we pick up to comfort, as well as to. challenge and enrich us, all of us.

New Directions for Science and Religion

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

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

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

 

Applied theologies – a critical teleology

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

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

 

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

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

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Where were you when I founded the earth?

Tell me, if you have insight.

Who fixed its dimensions? Surely you know!

…

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?

Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail?

 

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

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

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

Manuscript illustration of Robert Grosseteste

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

Since sense perception, the weakest of all human powers, apprehending only corruptible individual things, survives, imagination stands, memory stands, and finally understanding, which is the noblest of human powers capable of apprehending the incorruptible, universal, first essences, stands![4]

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

 

Theological Imagination at Work: the Experimental Method

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Practicalities and Practice

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

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

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

This essay was first published on the Aeon public philosophy website

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

More on ‘The Poetry and Music of Science’ – Contemplative Creativity and Being made in the Image of God

 

As I posted last time, one of my great joys is the opportunity to visit sixth-form classes to take a general studies sessions on the history and philosophy of science. I am often impressed by the students’ critical abilities and intelligence, but also wondered why at least some of the really bright ones choose not to study science at this level. Far too often I get answers along the lines of, “I didn’t see any role for my own creativity or imagination.”  At this point I know that something has gone terribly wrong in the message young people are receiving about science – that it is simply a body of ‘facts’ to learn, a set of known questions with right ‘answers’. Yet working scientists know that without imagination there can be no progress in science at all, and that  formulating the right questions, not answers, is the central and critical step in our inspirational calling to ‘re-imagine the universe’.

What seems to have happened is that what I would now call the ‘second half of the scientific method’ – that is the way that we test our ideas when we have had them, has dominated all discussion of the way science is done, so that the first, and more important half has been effectively silenced. There may be no formal ‘method’ for having the ideas or formulating the hypothesis in the first place, but that does not diminish the essential importance of ideation.

I determined to explore where the threads that bind science to the creative imagination had become unraveled. This led to a long journey into its history, philosophy and theology, but I decided to begin simply by asking colleagues to tell me the story behind their most cherished idea or discovery. I didn’t want the polished results and the covered tracks, but the unvarnished truth of how science is actually done, from biophysics to materials science to astronomy. They gave fascinating accounts of curiosity, initial trials, chance encounters repeated frustrations and, in fortunate cases, illuminations that often seemed to come effortlessly, as ‘gifts’, and during moments of rest or mental relaxation.

I felt enabled to reflect more deeply on my own experiences of seeking, and sometimes finding, scientific ideas in the imagination—the macromolecular picture that began as a dance in my mind’s eye; the long-sought structural geometry of a two-phase fluid that came in a dream; the sudden and simultaneous realisation of what a polymer network was doing as a colleague and I glanced at each other and shared the same thought… I also asked the same questions, as a sort of ‘control’ of artists, composers, poets and writers.  Would their stories of creativity differ markedly from those of the scientists? The first remarkable (for me) discovery from those conversations was that, just as the scientists tended to be shy about the inspiration phase of their work, so the artists were a little coy at first about just how much experiment, re-working, encounter with material constraints, they themselves experienced in their own work. I have often hears scientists say of, say, novelists, ‘it’s all very easy for you – you can make your characters do just as you please; we have to get things right!”. Nothing could be further from the truth. It turns out that thinking of creativity as the outward and explosive force of the imagination being met and formed into something true and beautiful by the world’s constraints, is just as true a generalization of science as of art.

The new book, The Poetry and Music of Science, began to take shape – here I write a little more about the story of its writing. I thought at first that it would begin with an account of scientific creation, followed by material from conversations with the artists, composers and writers, motivating a final discussion of the similarities and differences. Yet this structure proved impossible to impose. Dividing scientific and artistic creativity along the ‘Two Cultures’ lines in this way just wasn’t faithful to the experiences I was hearing about, nor to the rare but occasional accounts of creativity in science and the arts, such as the physiologist William Beveridge’s 1950 book The Art of Scientific Investigation, which deliberately echoes novelist Henry James’ earlier The Art of the Novel. Instead, science and art seem to share three imaginative modes, which I have called the visual, the textual and the abstract.

The first is the realm of visual art, and of visual conception in science from cosmology to biophysics. Visual thinking is so powerful that it endows us with our normal metaphor for understanding itself – ‘I see!’ Plato thought that vision itself was an ‘extromissive’ process – that visual rays from our eyes alight upon objects and allow us to perceive them. I have come to hesitate before criticizing such old and ‘unscientific’ ideas hastily: modern neuroscience teaches us just how much we create what we think we see. That is after all what ‘Bayesian inference’ means. Seeing is indeed a creative process, and arguably science itself can be defined as an extension of our visual perception. Theoretical science creates internal vision in our ‘mind’s eye’ into the smallest biological cells or out into the processes at the heart of distant galaxies; experiment enhances our vision directly with microscopes and telescopes. There are close parallels between scientific imagination and expressionist art, where the viewer’s plane of focus is perpetually redirected between the two ‘planes’ of the canvas and the world behind it. And much mathematical conception is essential visual.

The second mode of imagination employs words and text, rather than image. The story here begins with the coincident but not coincidental origin of the experimental method and the literary novel. We find Daniel Defoe writing the ‘experiment’ of Robinson Crusoein the same mode as Robert Boyle’s new style of scientific writing, and even claiming that the novel was an authentic record of diarized events. Margaret Cavendish, the great natural philosopher of the late 17^thcentury, chooses a novelistic ‘science fiction’ setting – in her Blazing World–to mount her most serious critique of the new ‘experimental philosophy’.  The mutual entanglement of imaginative writing and science continues from Newton and Milton, via Goethe and Humboldt, to Coleridge and Davy. Then in Wordsworth we find an almost prophetic glimpse into two possible futures, one in which science grows to inspire the great poetry of the future, and another in which its structures, powers and beauties fail to achieve a universal cognizance, and so retreats into an exclusive world of the technical and abstruse. Sadly the latter future seems to be the one we have inherited, for now at least.

The first page of the printed score of Hayden’s Creation (Novello edn.) – a musical depiction of chaos.

The third imaginative domain is the miracle of the wordless, picture-less worlds of music and mathematics.  At the point at which there are no images and no words left to us, and when we expect a conceptual vacuum, there we find these transcendent wonders. An assumed connection between music and mathematics has become a commonplace, but I do not think we really understand it. The occurrence of numbers in both is really a misleading commonality – the numerical is not the core essence of mathematical structures; nor is it at the centre of musical creativity. The family relationship becomes clearer at the deeper level of harmonic patterns and sequences of music, and at the partially resolved architectures of mathematical reasoning. To discover this requires not only a broad panoramic gaze over the fields, but also deep-dives into the creation of particular examples. Sitting at the feet of scholars in literature, music and mathematics has been one of the most satisfying experiences of the project – one pay-off for example was the privilege of working with Durham musicologist Julian Horton over an analysis of my favourite piece of music, Robert Schumann’s Konzertstück for four horns and orchestra. Not only does this musical glory deserve a published structural analysis, but the epoch of its writing coincides with the fragmentation of disciplines in the 19^thcentury that runs parallel with a silencing of conversation on imagination in science.

Detailed examination of the three imaginative modes also uncovered a truth that may be uncomfortable to some: thought and emotion are inseparable in all stories of creativity. In our late modern world we pretend that cognition and rationality can be divorced from the affective currents in our minds. It turns out that David Hume was attuned to this deception – maybe this is one reason that Einstein, so aware of the vital imaginative energies of science, read him with such avidity. But the last era that saw a wide, communicated and nuanced contemplation of creative impulses turns out to be the medieval. Anslem, Grosseteste and Aquinas knew, surely through longer, deeper and more unhurried internal gaze than we habitually permit ourselves, that emotions are not just pinned to the start (desire) and end (joy) of the creative process, but weave their way throughout the stages of conception, trial, retreat, incubation, inspiration, and refinement.

That very structure to the creative process leads to the slow dawning of another realization – that in the human miracle that brings structure and beauty into existence where there was nothing before – there is a great narrative. Christopher Booker is one of those writers who have attempted a categorization of the ‘great plots’ of all human stories. He lists the love story, the great battle of good and evil, the journey home among other ur-stories of literature and experience. But the human story of creation seems to be another, although missed out from such lists. It is the ultimate romantic adventure – all creativity begins with a desire reach a dimly-perceived goal, whether that be a sonnet on a visage or the science of vision. There is surprise on the meeting of unexpected constraints, whether of oil-paint on canvas or of observational data. The frustration and despair at inability to progress is shared by those experiencing writers’ block as much as wrong predictions of an experiment. The resignation of time spent fallow, the moving on to other matters when all seems hopeless, is shared by composers and chemists, but so is the occasional joy when the wonderful and under-researched subconscious creative processes of the human mind throw up solution strategies at the most unexpected moments. I did not expect to have to read my way into the literature of narrative analysis, or of left and right brain lateralization, but it turns out that an account of creativity is impossible without them.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

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

The final surprise for me was the suggestion of a new task – to account for the deeply-felt human purpose in bringing the new into being. There is a teleology in creativity. Here the discipline of theology is unique in brining its critical tools to bear on illuminating the deepest seam of all. The drive to bring order out of chaos, to seek for beauty and understanding where dullness and ignorance lay before, draws on deep roots within our religious traditions. The study of creativity is another way in to seeing that to ask ‘how one reconciles’ science and religion, is profoundly the wrong question. Until the last century or so, the moral and purposive framing of natural discovery has been assisted by the traditions of contemplation and theology. I was led once more to sources such as the incomparable Book of Job, found buried in the central pages of the Old Testament, that contains such jewels as the ‘Hymn to Wisdom’ in which human insight into the deep material structures of the world is compared to the unique vision of the miner into the underground structures of the Earth. The ‘visual mode’ of scientific imagination turns out to possess very old roots. Job links knowledge of the world to the heart of wisdom itself, and the ability of humans to see deeply into the structures of the world as an aspect of sharing in the divine. There is insight here into the Biblical mystery of the Imago Dei – the idea that human beings are in some sense ‘in the image of God’. How this extraordinary idea is to be interpreted has spawned theological debate down the centuries, but one way to think about it that brings the huge potential, yet great responsibility of homo sapiens into focus, is through creativity itself. We, too, create, and so alter and grow the world around us.

Thinking about creativity in this way leads to serious consequences for how we teach science at school or share it in public, and for how we train our researchers, even in entirely secular contexts. I  cannot recall a single discussion during my own formation as a scientist of what practices, disciplines, rhythms of work and relaxation, types of reading or directions of thought might encourage that vital visit from the scientific muse. When challenged about this, many colleagues expressed doubt that anything can be said. As traditionally formulated, the scientific method describes only the second phase of the process—testing ideas. There is no method, it is claimed, for having ideas. But this does not imply that there is an absence of any possible advice. We know that innovation rarely emerges from exposure to narrowly conventional thinking. This is why interdisciplinary conversation is so important. Time spent talking across boundaries causes ideas to spark over the highly-charged disciplinary gaps, shocking us into new modes of thinking. Furthermore, those ‘aha’ moments—which more than one scientist has told me are what they live for—never come when the conscious mind is busy. They are the product of the unconscious winnowing of apparently fruitless weeks of labour into fresh thought. They will never come unless we give them the space to do so. Hence the need to alternate hard work with experiencing liminal moments of changing mental space.

It is my great hope that we can move the public history of scientific ideas back onto the track that Wordsworth, Goethe and Humboldt enacted in their own inspirational prose and poetry. To do this we will need to talk more openly about the creative process in science, its groping in darkness as much as its illumination, its contemplative practice as much as its generation of understanding, its way to wisdom as much as its path to knowledge.

 

The Poetry and Music of Science

In this month’s blog, I write about the story of a new book, out in March 2019 with OUP, The Poetry and Music of Science. It follows from one of the consequences of a ‘theology of science’ articulated in Faith and Wisdom in Science – that of the ‘healing of the academy’. If the first is my ‘not a science and religion book’, then this is my ‘not the two-cultures book’. Here is how it happened, once upon a time ….

 

‘I just didn’t see in science any room for my own imagination or creativity.’

Not just on one occasion, but repeatedly have I heard this from young students bright enough to have succeeded at any subject they set their minds to. Yet it doesn’t take an Einstein to observe that without the essential first step, without a creative re-imagining of nature, a conceiving of hypotheses for what might be going on behind the perceived surface of phenomena, there can be no science at all. Einstein did of course have something to say on the matter, in his book with Leopold Infeld:

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Every scientist knows this, but for two centuries we have fallen largely silent about it, preferring instead a narrative about the ‘empirical method’ or, ‘the logic of scientific discovery.’ Science education is full of it, favouring the presentation of results, rather than the human stories of wonder, imagination, failed ideas and those glorious and uninvited moments of illumination that thread through the lives of all who actually do science. Our media mouths the same message – ‘there is no room for imagination in science’ assured the presenter of a TV documentary on computer science, face to camera. No wonder my young colleagues became disillusioned.

If scientists are somewhat shy about their experiences of imagination, then I found that the artists, writers and composers I spoke to needed the same patience (and similarly the occasional drink) to draw them out on their repeated need to experiment. Scraping the paint from the canvas, re-drafting the novel for the tenth time, rescoring the thematic musical material is, as every artist knows, the consequence of the material constraints that creativity meets unanticipated. The artist, too, makes hypotheses about how her material, words or sounds will achieve the goal in mind, however indistinctly conceived. The historically simultaneous birth of the English novel and the experimental method in science turns out to be no coincidence. Without making the naïve claim that art and science are in any sense ‘doing the same thing’, the similarities in the experience of those who work with them are remarkable. They need digging out because they become obscured by scientists shy of talking about imagination and artists about experiment.

The project of listening to anyone who creates, be it with music or mathematics, oil paint or quantum theory, and the creative power of the constraints they encounter, became itself the project of a book. Yet in a strange obedience to the pattern of its material, the originally-imagined plot of The Poetry and Music of Science refused to play out. Juxtaposed catalogues of creation in science and art, followed by an extended ‘contrast and compare’ essay, increasingly failed to do justice to the material. Historical and contemporary sources were telling a very different story about creative imagination, one that did not divide across the worn-out lines of ‘The Two Cultures’. Instead, a pattern of three ‘modes’ of creative expression seemed more faithful.

Visual imagination is, of course, the chief source for the artist, but the same is true for many scientists, from molecular biology to astrophysics. Astronomy is the provider of the original projective perspective. If the observer of a painting is asked to re-create a three-dimensional world from a representation or impression on a two-dimensional canvas, then the task of ‘seeing’ the universe from the picture that we call the sky, bears clear structural resemblance.

A second mode is textual and linguistic. The entanglement between science and the written word in prose or poetry may possess a principle knot at the birth of the novel, as we have already noted, but its story is a much longer one. It also has an ‘alternative history’, envisioned by Wordsworth (and surely Goethe and Humboldt before him) in which

The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us.

With notable exceptions (such as R S Thomas and occasionally W B Yeats in poetry, and the ever-present fluttering trespass of Vladimir Nabukov’s beloved butterflies from his scientific work into his novels) this early-Romantic vision has sadly yet to be fulfilled, and is surely frustrated by the very desiccated presentation of science with which we began.

Imagination’s third mode appears as both pictures and words fade away. For there, when we might have expected a creative vacuum, we find instead the wonderful and mysterious abstractions of music and of mathematics. This shared space is surely why these two have something in common – it is surely not their superficial sharing in numerical structure that links melody and harmony with mathematical structure, but their representational forms in entire universes of our mental making.

The 40000 year old ‘Lion Man’ ivory (Museum of Ulm)

When a journey has taken one to as numinous a place as this, it is but a short step to recognise the need for theological thinking to make sense of it all. The anthropology and cognitive neuroscience of creativity is fascinating, the one taking as to the stone tools of our distant ancestors at the dawn of humanity, the other to the delicate balance between the analytic left hemisphere of our brains and the integrative right. The philosophical tradition is equally rich, discovering, for example Levinas’ suspicion of the ‘visual’ mode for its implied distancing, preferring the ‘musical or auditory’ for its immersion of subject in object. But theology seems to be unique in maintaining possession of the critical tools necessary to tease out the role of purpose in human creativity. Both the artistic and scientific modes of re-imagining nature seem to have been part of what drives humans to be human for as long as the records of those attempts have survived. It is the rich tradition of understanding humans themselves as some form of living ‘image’ – the Imago Dei – that does justice to the experience of deploying creativity to a purpose. George Steiner wrote in his Real Presences:

Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter
I could say precisely the same of science.

Does the Size of the Universe Prove God Doesn’t Exist?

A good colleague of mine at my University of Durham’s philosophy department, Dr. Emily Thomas, recently posted a short essay with this title on the (wonderful) academic multi-disciplinary blogsite TheConversation. It’s had a great number of readers, one of whom was me. I like most of what Emily writes, but this time, as she knows, I had a rather strong negative reaction! So I thought I would write a little about this question on the Faith and Wisdom in Science blog, as it is clearly important for a good number of people.

A massive computer simulation of the cosmic web of Dark Matter, Gas and Galaxies from the Eagle Project 300 million light years across- itself only a 30th of the diameter of the observable universe

Here is the short version:

• Yes the Universe is ‘mind-bogglingly big’ (thanks Douglas Adams) on the scale of the human being (see image and caption above)

but

• No, that does NOT imply in any way that the ‘Christian God’ is less likely to exist

because

• The argument confuses the two distinct categories of scale and significance (the old ‘size matters’ problem)

and

• Is, as typical of arguments from philosophers and scientists today that they believe impact on Christian theology, based on a level of triviality of theological learning and sophistication that makes me blush to read it.

So, just a little more on that.  The confusion of scale and significance is an easy one to make – we are overawed by size, vastness, immensity. Of course we are. But that is a visceral reaction not a cognitive one.  I hesitate to illustrate the point, but we do not ascribe a greater significance to a mountain than to a human baby simply because the first is 7 orders of magnitude larger than the second.  One of the special abilities that humans have is to identify meaning and significance, and to associate that with narrative place and relationship.

To take a more cosmological example, we do not know how common life is in the universe (yes Drake equation, Fermi and all that – another time perhaps – but we really have no idea because we don’t yet have a process for the origin of life).  We might be alone or the galaxy might be teeming with life.  But whichever of those turns out to be the case, the microscopic and special event or events that start a tree of life on its way are extraordinarily significant, yet vanishingly tiny in time and space, compared with the 13 billion years, and light years of the cosmic T and R. Another vital point rides on this – namely that in order to have had enough time to manufacture heavy elements in the first generation of stars since the Big Bang, and to evolve a second generation of stars, planets and life since then actually requires a universe the size of ours.  So the length scale of the cosmos and the human scale are physically and causally related, it turns out.

Thirdly, those who take the line that the largeness of the universe rules out a theology of specificity have forgotten that even our notion of scale ordering is conventional.  Physicists, mathematicians, chemists and molecular biologists are used to thinking in ‘reciprocal space’.  Its the space in which the diffraction patterns of molecular structure dwell, the realm of the Fourier transforms, of the photon fields in theoretical physics.

X-ray diffraction pattern of Beryl in reciprocal space (Bruno Juricic)

The figure shows an example.  The point is that descriptions of reality can be made either in ‘real space’ or reciprocal space, in which the information on large objects is held in small places, and vice versa.  In many ways, physics looks more natural in this space.  If we were to apply the ‘large matters’ mantra in a view of the world through reciprocal space, then we would be led to favour the small, the detailed, over the large.  Of course I am not advocating that automatically any more than its opposite, merely pointing out that the ascription of large or small numbers to objects in the world is conventional, so cannot carry any philosophical weight at all.

Finally we need to do out theology just a little better.  Yes of course there is a strong strand of the particular and special in Judeo-Christianity.  Israel, Moses, election, … and supremely the incarnation.  But that is not the only strand.  From the oldest texts there is alongside this an decentralising narrative as well.  Readers of this blog will at this point not be surprised that we are going to go to the Book of Job for a reminder of the warning not to be exclusively anthropocentric about the world.  For the pinnacle of Yahweh’s creation as displayed to Job in the ‘Lord’s Answer’ is not the human, but the sublime and ‘other’ creatures of Leviathan and Behemoth (from Job chapter 40):

¹⁵“Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you  and which feeds on grass like an ox.¹⁶ What strength it has in its loins,  what power in the muscles of its belly!¹⁷ Its tail sways like a cedar;  the sinews of its thighs are close-knit.¹⁸ Its bones are tubes of bronze,    its limbs like rods of iron.¹⁹ It ranks first among the works of God, yet its Maker can approach it with his sword.

Even the later and highly-developed Genesis 1 creation narrative does not stop with humankind, but reaches its climax with the Sabbath, God’s rest, where He is central.  Jesus takes up the non-anthropocentric theme at several points in the Gospel narrative.  It’s not ‘all about us’.  A number of theologians have explored this theme – Christopher Southgate’s book The Groaning of Creation is a good starting point for a discussion that goes back to Aquinas and further.

So in conclusion, the findings of modern cosmology turn out to balance the place and significance of humans in much the same way that the Judeo-Christian narrative does.

It’s not the size, it’s what you do that matters, and who you are.

The Lord Answering job out of the Whirlwind by William Blake

Faith in Science Education – Wisdom in how we do it

Faith and Wisdom in Science – the blog did take a summer break.  But other things happened.  In particular I had the opportunity to write (at 24 hours notice) an opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper in the UK (published August 14th) on the importance of children experiencing open-ended experimental science while at school.  There is growing evidence that this is enormously beneficial to core science learning, but, as readers of Faith and Wisdom in Science will know, it also touches on a deeply theological nerve.  Becoming reconciled with nature means working with it and observing.  This is something that everyone can experience and enjoy.

The Guardian article as printed is here (it also made the weekly printed Guardian International, to which we have subscribed for years – I was delighted!). But I thought that the full original drafted version, before editor’s cuts, might be interesting to post.  So that follows.  The most important thing is that Job made the final cut!

Science is not just the preserve of stereotypical brainy boffins you see on TV. Speaking to the Times yesterday, head of the British Science Association Katherine Mathieson, said this public image was not helpful and that she’d prefer to “see a few years of genuine open-ended research by pupils, rather than fiddling around with beakers”. She also worries that science is not a topic of common conversation. Rightly so – if we can get our minds around Premier League strategy then complexity is not the issue.’

Mathieson is right to raise concerns. The ability of people to understand the world they live in increasingly depends on their understanding of scientific ideas. Science allows us to learn reliably about nature – if an experimental result does not support a specific idea, then the idea has to be rejected or modified and then tested again. For most people such understanding by imagination and experimentation comes through education. ​Great teachers are the driving force behind the UK’s position as a global scientific powerhouse.

However, overly-tight accountability measures, rapidly changing curricula and burdensome pupil progress monitoring are just some of the enormous pressures on schools that impede creating an environment in which tomorrow’s scientists can learn and grow. Teachers often have to carry out experiments in their own time and beyond the curriculum by joining schemes like our Partnership Grants.

In 2013, a report published by SCORE found that a worrying number of primary students were not experiencing a complete science education due to a lack of resources for practical work, with the average school having only 46% of the equipment needed. The UK is failing to create a scientifically informed society that can confidently hold science properly to account by engaging, enjoying and, yes, criticising it.

Children learn about music by trying their hand at composing a song or joining a jazz trio or string quartet. Others take GCSE Art, where we expect them to try out sketching and use watercolours, mixed-media or creative photography to learn about the subject. Even the most doting relative does not expect these creations to end up in a museum or concert hall, but what they teach our children about the artistic process is essential.

Science should be treated the same way. Humans have always been curious about the natural world and the stuff that makes it up. In the Book of Job, an ancient poem asks why the stars of the Pleiades are bound together, while those of Orion are scattered. Centuries before we formalised the scientific method, we had thoughtful and playful experiments with light, glass and water as well as astonishingly careful observations of the stars. People dreamed up imaginative theories of what might be going on up in rainbows and down inside liquids and solids. It wasn’t always right, but even now science can be a messy business on the path to truth. Why should things be different in 2017?

The Royal Society emphasises ‘experimental’ over ‘practical’ science, where curiosity should go beyond following a simple recipe and people should simply try something – a thoughtful way of looking for answers. We need to reverse recent trends and increase the amount of time and money invested in experimental and problem-solving work in science and mathematics education through access to adequately resourced laboratories and well-trained teachers. To support this activity in primary schools, Brian Cox, the Royal Society’s Professor for Public Engagement in Science, presents a series of video resources to increase teachers’ confidence with experimental science and relate the experiments to the real world. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg7f-TkW11iU11yatk_TcbA2tGH_WLe8d

Before you reach out for your Rousseaus to bash me over the head with, I want to reassure you that experimental science in education complements rather than replaces the learning of core scientific understanding. Sir John Holman found that investigative science improved attainment in core science exams, with greater effect for pupils in less privileged areas. There are other signs of new growth – the new Institute for Research in Schools is right now realising Mathieson’s vision of ‘genuine open-ended research by pupils’.

We currently have many examples of good practice at primary and secondary schools and colleges across the UK. Investing in experimental science in all our schools to help future generations make better sense of the world around them means that one day we will have confident opinions on scientific issues like we do on technical matters like Premier League team strategies.

 

Faith and Wisdom in Science in Vancouver – and Harvard

This week I am enjoying my first ever visit to Vancouver to give a series of lectures and discussions on Faith and Wisdom in Science and the ideas and actions that flow from thinking through a Christian Theology of Science.  There are a few science lectures thrown in (in biophysics of protein dynamics – at Simon Fraser University, and the molecular rheology of polymer melts in processing – at UBC), and a final Friday night at St John’s (Graduate) College, UBC, on Medieval Science and the Ordered Universe Project.  Last night saw a fruitful and friendly welcome at Regent College.

The question sessions following the science/theology talks so far have been fascinating

Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014)

and inspiring (the questions that is – I can’t speak for the answers). The central section of the presentations, focussing on drawing resource from Biblical wisdom literature, draws on the close reading of the Book of Job that forms the central chapter of Faith and Wisdom.  So one of the questioners wanted to know about Jesus’ sayings about nature in the gospels, and their significance.  As in the cycles of speeches between Job and his comforters, way before the probing questions of the Lord’s Answer in chapter 38, the gospels, too, are full of nature metaphor and action.  The calming of the waves, the wind-image of the Spirit, the liking of the ‘signs of the times’ to the signs that the coming of the Kingdom is close – all these speak of a relationship with the natural world that reflects the Godly Wisdom of a deep seeing, an inner understanding, and an investment of significance into the material, natural world.  More thinking required here!

Another question searched the dilemma facing the church in sharing both the positive narrative for science and its consequences for an ethical, hopeful and fruitful managing of nature in future.  Given the explicit Creation-Fall-Election-Incarnation-Resurrection-Ministry of Reconciliation-New Creation story within which science and technology make sense as God’s gifts, how is all this worked through in a world that largely does not recognise that big story?  It reminded me of a wonderful question from an atheist sociologist at one of the first ever university-based discussions of the Faith and Wisdom in Science idea: ‘I wish I could share in your vision and hope, but as an atheist I can’t begin to share your assumptions: what can you give me?’

I think that the answer is not ‘nothing’ by any means.  Back to St. Paul and his brilliant summary of the work of the Church – the ‘ministry of reconciliation’ of 2 Corinthians 5.  To talk about our work being that of ‘healing broken relationships’ is something that everyone knows about and everyone wants.  To point to ways in which we can hope to reverse the mutual harm that we and our planet are inflicting on each other, by framing the challenge in those terms, and then by proceeding as one does in the healing of any broken relationship, is a practical way ahead that anyone can buy into.  Replacing ignorance with knowledge, fear with wisdom, and mutual harm with mutual flourishing – this is a framework for political and social care that has already generated practical outcomes, such as the Responsible Research and Innovation policy in the UK and Europe.

I hope to be able to say more about the work that new theologically-generated narratives can do in our managing of science and technology at a Harvard STS-Programme seminar next week (on the day of the US presidential election!), Narratives of Hope: Science, Theology and Environmental Public Policy .  But that is for next week. Today there is more at UBC with Investigating the Deep Structure of Modern Science: the Search for Wisdom.

I am extremely grateful to the Canadian Scientific and Christian affiliation for supporting the visit, and to my kind hosts and organisers for all their tremendous hard work.

NATURE features Christian Leaders and Scientists Project

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

Kathryn tells it how it is from the title on:

Religion and science can have a true dialogue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

..From whose womb comes the ice?…

..   Do you know the laws of the heavens?

And can you apply them to the earth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ – new creation;

The old has gone, the new has come!

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

That God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ

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

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

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