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Science and Religion

Once upon a time, an issue of the Parish Magazine included a fascinating and delightfully written article by Dr Heather Brooks about microbiology, the subject she teaches at university. With considerable distress, however, and with pardonable rage, you will notice that she also takes a totally unmerited swipe at moi, your beloved Vicar - and hers too! So (just to worm my way out of trouble and back into favour!) let me try to explain myself a little in the following paragraphs.

or centuries what we now think of as science and religion were one and the same thing. The spiritual and material worlds belonged together as they still do in the traditional outlook of what we like to think of as ’primitive peoples’ such as the Native Americans or the Maori - not to mention the Chinese and Japanese! According to their traditions the rocks, animals and plants are not just material objects - they have spirits too, and harmony between ’them’ and ’us’ is essential for our life both here and hereafter. And of course there is a hereafter. For them, reality is never to be confined merely to what can be perceived by the senses or understood by the merely logical mind.

But slowly a great schism formed in western thought. We were curious - and very properly so. Philosophers like Aristotle decided to investigate the reality (material, spiritual or whatever) in which they lived. Such investigations could be simply intellectual like mathematical logic, or based rather more on the experience of the five senses like a laboratory experiment.

And as the centuries rolled by Aristotle’s successors believed that they had come to understand reality with ever greater accuracy and clarity. Please note that I’m not talking here just about scientific exploration: I’m including philosophical inquiry as well. This confidence in the means by which such understanding was gained - scientific experimentation and/or rational thought - led more and more people to believe that only those things which could be investigated and proved by such means were truly real.

Thus two great philosophers, Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century and David Hume in the eighteenth, held the existence of a personal God to be literally incredible. And all this was long before Charles Darwin and his fossils. But Darwin & Co. had a very important part to play. While the ’man in the street’ could hardly begin to understand the arguments of Spinoza and Hume, he could grasp the significance of Darwin’s famous fossils. Not only did they prove that Darwin was right, they also proved that the Bible was wrong.

God, however, is not mocked. In a way which might surprise both Hume and Darwin the boot is now on the other foot. Some years ago one of the most resolutely atheistical of British philosophers, A.J. Ayer - author of Language, Truth and Logic, the book which ’proved’ that talk about God was essentially meaningless - was succeeded as Professor of Logic at Oxford by Michael Dummett, the man he himself said was the greatest philosopher in the English-speaking world: and Professor Dummett is a devout Christian convert who goes to mass every day. Even the late great atheist Bertrand Russell’s daughter Katharine, herself no fool, has become an enthusiastic Roman Catholic.

Then there is the former professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge, John Polkinghorne, who retired from his professorship in order to become an Anglican priest. For him such a thing would have been possible at least in part because of the huge scientific revolution in the last century or so. What with Einsteinian physics, Quantum theory and the rest, and even some very heavy revision of Darwin’s theories, fings ain’t what they used to be. The universe is no longer seen as ’The Majestic Clockwork’ which can be explained by scientific experiments and rational thought. On the contrary, both scientists and philosophers are acutely aware of the mystery of it all in a way in which they were not a hundred or so years ago.

The real problem is now the good old Man in the Street. By and large he hasn’t caught up. Even Men in the Street like Dr Brian Edwards and Professor Lloyd Geering are being left behind. The myth that only what we know through the five senses or through rational thought is real is just that - a myth. So Humpty Dumpty is slowly being put together again as scientists and others demonstrate more and more clearly that ’matter’ and ’spirit’ are all part of one great reality. And someday even theologians may join scientists in their new and greater understanding - and with the poor old Man in the Street tagging along too!