Science and Religion do mix

Speech at the Faraday Institute Advisory Board Dinner 2012

Thank you very much indeed for inviting me to join you. It’s a great honour … and I feel totally out of my depth! Fortunately Denis gave me a start by suggesting I share a few thoughts about science and faith challenges that face my Church and its parishioners at the moment, so here goes.

The fact is that the main thing is still the main thing. A much better Bishop, Paulinus, back in the seventh century, didn’t just dine out with local nobility, he converted them over dinner. According to Bede, who was I suppose the Faraday of that age, he pointed to a sparrow flying through the hall, and compared its flight to their lives. For a moment it is comfortable and all seems secure; but before and after, it is in the grip of the storm and the great unknown.

Where do we come from? The debate about origins. Who are we now? The debate about sexuality and personal identity. Where are we going? The debate about evolution and the meaning of life. Those have always been the big issues, and they still are.

They are of course addressed week by week in our liturgy and preaching, but often with very little reference to their scientific hinterland, and I suspect that by and large there is a sort of collusion between preachers and parishioners to keep it that way.

Sheer ignorance is not, I think, the biggest issue (although scientific literacy like religious literacy is a long-term concern). Half the diocese must have seen Brian Cox on the TV over Christmas. And at a more serious level we have many in this area who are well-qualified in both science and religion. Few of them take extreme and exclusivist positions, as do few of the unchurched scientists I meet. But the rhetoric of Dawkins and co, and the general disinterest of the media in mediated positions, leaves us feeling uncomfortable and disabled from friendly debate. So I see a deficit in both public theology and public science; and a need to foster public conversation for parishioners and non-parishioners alike that is neither polarised nor patronising.

Let’s stay with Cox and the origins agenda for a moment. Did you know that a journalist once accused him, with his permanent smile and earnest poetic language, of coming across like a vicar? Surprisingly, as a confirmed atheist, he didn’t reject the comparison. To quote Cox himself,

“There is common ground between the scientific approach to the world and the religious approach which is that, in both cases, you have noticed that there is something beautiful and worth understanding and that’s much more important than not noticing.”

Cox is of course hard on those who close down enquiry by taking a young-earth Creationist stance. But I can be too. And the real issue round here is not, I suggest, atheists vs fundamentalists, but how to address the irony that at the moment atheist scientists are doing rather better than believing bishops at going on TV and speaking about wonder and awe, and the deep meaning of life.

I applaud the work that the Faraday Institute has been doing through, for instance, Test of Faith, to up our game here. And our dioceses are just beginning to wake up to the fact that they have focussed so much on developing “ministry” that their adult education has nearly evaporated. Time I think to work together more to tell the Big Story of life to anyone who will listen in as professional and winsome way as possible: to out-narrate our antagonists, not out-gun them.

And to do it with a Cox-like smile, open to new insights, and confident enough in our own basic beliefs not to be threatened by them. It’s where public science and public theology meet, if you like, and where I hope we can help each other to be even more adventurous in going public about it and getting our story across. Keep badgering us bishops to do more about it!

But on now to the bird in the hall: to our experience of life in the present and the issues of identity and sexuality that concern many people today, and are a particular challenge to the Anglican Church.

We happen to be meeting on the Feast of the Epiphany. I want to suggest that this gives us a particularly helpful way in to what is a difficult topic. Epiphanies are showings. In the theological and literary tradition they are where two stories intersect, where the things of this world are shot through with the things of the beyond, and they are often the turning point of the story. James Joyce’s Dubliners was for instance explicitly conceived as a sequence of fifteen such events.

In them we are taken into the territory of wonder and mystery, and new meaning emerges. Accompanying people to their threshold is a key part of the work of the church – and whether it is through worship, or the sacraments, or the scriptures, or silence, or the awe of the universe, we see time again that as people encounter the Other their lives are transformed for good. Research too, in my experience, may be 99% perspiration but usually hinges on the 1% of inspiration, the sudden insight, often out of the blue, that sets its direction.

Closed doors are the enemy of epiphanies, the blockers of transformative insight. So my second suggestion, as we address the vexed issues of sexuality and identity, is that we can make common cause across the science-religion divide to keep the doors open, to oppose fundamentalist positions which close down the questions, and then close down the answers. And more positively (since just opposing fundamentalism breeds a sort of fundamentalist liberalism of its own) to sponsor new spaces in which such open discussion can take place.

It’s not an easy path to tread. One of my first experiences as a bishop was the so-called Indaba process at the Lambeth Conference, which deliberately tried to create such dialogue, – and was roundly attacked from all sides for not coming down on any of them. Discussion is something this Institute does rather well, but issues to do with homosexuality may prove challenging even for us: so how might we go about it?

I think that both theologians and scientists have something to bring to the table here to create a dialogue that could just possibly draw in others too. On the theology side a relatively new discipline called Scriptural Reasoning, in which people of various faiths expound their scriptures together, might prove a useful model for explorative exposition. To be more specific, when the Lambeth Bishops picketed Parliament I was given a copy of the Poverty and Justice Bible, with all the relevant verses highlighted. Far more than any to do with sexuality. So just how do biblical teachings on justice and sexuality speak to each other?

Then from the science side, we have been quite fleet-footed in relating the Biblical accounts of Creation to our scientific theories about the origins of the universe. Could we read across some of that sophistication to build up an equal expertise in dealing with a verse such as “male and female he created them”? And just what is the current science anyway about male and female? I for one, even though I am relatively conservative on this issue and happy to live within the Church’s guidelines, see it as essential that genuine scientific insights are factored into and not out of our theology.

So – are there ways in which the Institute could use its breadth of experience to underpin a more creative debate in the church than the one I fear we may end up having? I pray for epiphanies!

And now finally on to endings and evolution.

Evolutionary theory describes how things evolve: that is obvious enough. But it also keeps on pushing towards saying why they evolve, whether that is in ways I approve of, as with Simon Conway Morris, or in ways I do not, as with Dawkins.

Now what I know about evolutionary biology could be written on the back of a stamp, but I have read a bit about the middle ages and thought it might be worth teasing you for a moment and reminding you that a teacher like Aquinas would have worked with what I think is a more developed theory of causation going back to Aristotle than the one a deterministically-minded scientist might deploy now.

The theory distinguishes four sorts of cause, that it calls material, formal, efficient and final. Imagine Michelangelo carving the statue of David. The statue becomes what it is because of the marble material it is made from, because of the form of David it is being shaped into, because of the actions of Michelangelo in carving it, and because Michelangelo also needed to fulfil his commission, make some money and win fame.

The point is that none of these sorts of causes are necessarily privileged over the others, and all are in play together. This is why the commonplace that science talks about the how of life and theology the why is useful at first, establishing that there is more than one story going on; but can then be dangerous, when we implicitly put an E into it the word story and imply that the ordinary world we live in is scientific and Godless, while beyond it is another dimension, an extra storey with an E, where God is and science does not reach – which is lousy theology and probably lousy science too. We need to show all the stories are part of one Big Story too.

So I cheer when Simon Conway-Morris reintroduces the second cause into the evolution debate, suggesting that organisms converge towards certain forms, and indeed the fourth cause when speaks up for teleology. But I am particularly cheered because in doing this he prepares the ground for a rapprochement between the scientific method and matters of purpose and worth.

What is at stake is a shared story, a shared understanding of what counts as good and worthwhile and worth committing ourselves to for the sake of the common good. A dessicated theory of evolution, as indeed of origins and identity, prevents us from building a public narrative that combines scientific realism with social values.

As we emerge from the modernist world that left the markets to determine not just value but values, which seems madness now, and also the post-modernist world that pretended we could just all play our own ironic game, which now seems banal, there is an increasing need to establish just what we mean by the common good and the values or virtues that underpin it – and why. If there is one thing our parishioners are really worried about it is what will become of them, their prosperity, their children, their future, as the so-called Big Society looks set to be a very sick society indeed, dying of its previous consumption.

I am doing the little bit I can to create conversation around this subject – there is a big event planned for February – and I wonder and would like to leave you wondering what part the professional scientist and an Institute such as the Faraday can play in such a public debate. To take one example where a start has already been made (I remember Sarah Coakley’s paper to this Institute following the work of Nowak): can an evolutionary theory of altruism convince? Can we say that it presents an evolutionary path, a future that is both natural and beneficial to all? Could we therefore even say that it was good?

Michael Faraday, for whom the Institute is named, had a profound sense of the god-given order of things and in both professional and personal life was tireless in working for the public benefit, the common good. It is good to be here in his name tonight, and I would like if I may to honour him with a toast: Michael Faraday!

Filed under: Uncategorized