10. Christian Faith In The World Of Science
10 CHRISTIAN FAITH IN THE WORLD OF SCIENCE
The belief that science and religion are in conflict is so ingrained in the public mind that perhaps we should go back to the time when this point of view was first put forward, for it was not always so. The great discoverers and practitioners of modern science were Christian believers. But it was chiefly in the nineteenth century that some of the most godly, righteous and eminent people in Britain, and Europe generally, saw science replacing religion as the guide for governing society. Science would be the one avenue for reaching reliable truth upon which humanity could rely, now and in the future. There was a deliberate effort in many ways to proceed down that avenue of science.
We think especially of T. H. Huxley, one of the committed propagandists of the view that science would replace religion. We may recall the famous debate between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in Oxford on 30 June 1860 when the British Association for the Advancement of Science was in town. Seeking to score a point against Darwin’s disciples, the Bishop of Oxford unwisely baited Huxley by enquiring whether he would prefer to think of himself descended from an ape on his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side. According to legend, Huxley replied to the provocation saying that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a bishop. Wilberforce was supposed to have been ignominiously put to flight. But recent research on the original minutes of that meeting show this version of events to be inaccurate, a complete caricature of what actually happened. Wilberforce was actually present not as a bishop but as a biologist and he made a number of important points which Huxley accepted.
However, it was Huxley’s great triumph in getting the body of Charles Darwin buried in Westminster Abbey that signalled the start of a new and widely held confidence that science held the key to humanity’s future. Part of that confidence lay in the idea of progress. I am told that St Pancras Railway Station in London was built to look like a cathedral precisely to make the point that it was in human progress that the future would lie.
It was an idea that developed in the eighteenth century but which was a carry-over from the biblical vision of history as a meaningful story, as distinct from the religions of Asia. History there was not seen as a significant story, but as an area of shadows and illusions. For a thousand years the Bible had taught Europe to see history as a continuing series of events suffused with meaning. And what happened in the eighteenth century was that this meaning of history was to be found not in our journey towards heaven but towards heaven on earth and a truly glorious future for humankind. Until about 1914 – at the time of the First World War – it was taken for granted that endless progress was the meaning of history and that science was its engine.
It was, of course, into that concept of progress that the idea of evolution fitted so neatly. When Darwin espoused the theory of natural selection by way of the survival of the fittest, this provided, what you might call, a mechanistic, mechanical interpretation of progress. The worldview that dominated the nineteenth century was that of a mechanistic picture. The world was conceived as a vast machine where the movement of atoms, governed by the theoretical laws of gravity and momentum, would provide an explanation for everything.
And so the theory of the survival of the fittest and natural selection provided a mechanical explanation for progress and that was translated into the social Darwinism of the nineteenth century, which in turn led to those social policies about which we now weep: the Poor Laws and all those other devices which ensured that by ruthless competition the weak would be eliminated and the strong would not only survive but succeed at the expense of another’s failure. It is a comforting view of history because we are the survivors and consequently the most fitting and adaptable and therefore, by implication, the ultimate meaning of history. It is a most satisfactory, convenient and attractive way of understanding history.
Behind the nineteenth century stands the great Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the so-called ‘Age of Reason’ or the ‘Age of Enlightenment’. After centuries of darkness, it was believed the light had begun to shine. Societies could now get rid of traditions, religions and superstition, and with the aid of science, see the world as it really was.
Two things influenced this dramatic intellectual conversion in eighteenth-century Europe. One was the legacy of the religious wars. For most of the seventeenth century the soil of Europe was soaked in the blood of Christians fighting one another over their interpretations of the biblical story. That experience made the intelligentsia of Europe sick of the whole business of religion. The second positive influence was the emergence of the new science of the seventeenth century, especially the science represented in the cosmology of Sir Isaac Newton, the English mathematician and physicist, whose work was the greatest single influence on theoretical physics until Einstein.
In contrast with the fanaticism of the religious wars, there now emerged a picture of reality that was entirely rational and comprehensible. Newton’s laws seemed to have provided an explanation for everything, from the movement of the planets to the falling of an apple. It was an intelligible vision of reality requiring no faith, no divine revelation and no miracles. You could see how it worked if you put your mind to it; anybody could. Given a proper education, everyone could be united in this rational, clear interpretation of the human situation. This new era – the Enlightenment – carried the ideas, education, science, technology and the political institutions of Europe all over the world and from this flowed that great phenomenon called ‘civilisation’. At that time one did not speak of different ‘cultures’ as we do now. The idea of ‘cultures’ in the sense of differing societies first appears in the English language in the late nineteenth century. Previously there were no different ‘cultures’, merely more, and less, civilised people; and the business of the civilised was to help the less civilised up that ladder. Essentially, civilisation was the acceptance of this rational and entirely clear understanding of the whole human condition provided by this new science.
So one views the past beyond the eighteenth century into the seventeenth where the birth of the new science occurs. And we come to the momentous question: Why? Science, after all, is only another word for perceived or believed knowledge. I shall return later to that point, but the idea that science is a different kind of knowledge, that it is an absolute knowing of a quite special quality, is the way this word is curiously understood in ordinary language.
Why did this happen in Western Europe, primarily Northern Europe, and not elsewhere? After all, the sciences of Greece, China, ancient Babylonia and the Arabs, were in most ways far ahead of anything in Western Europe. The Chinese had printing, the magnetic compass and explosives long before we had them. And the brilliant mathematics and astronomy of Ptolemy, of the early Greek astronomers, and of course of the Arabs, was far ahead of anything in Western Europe. So why did this kind of science develop in Western Europe and not in those more ancient and, in many ways, more advanced cultures? The answer is both complicated and fascinating.
To answer this question in its most simple terms, the ancient science of Greece was carried over into the Arab world and developed into the brilliant Arab civilisation of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was based on the philosophy of Aristotle, which saw the ultimate realities in terms of first cause and final cause, the thing that started the whole universe off and the purpose for which it existed. Everything else was to be deduced from that, so one begins with these fundamental metaphysical realities and deduce from them what must be the case.
But the other great strand in the Western world was the biblical strand because for more than a thousand years the Bible was the only book, for practical purposes, that Western Europe had. It was the biblical story that shaped the mind of Western Europe and made Europe a distinct society and not just a peninsula of Asia, which from a geographical point of view is what it is.
It was the coming through of the translation of the great Aristotelian classics and the ancient science of Euclid and the Greeks, those translations first into Arabic and then Latin in the twelfth century, which created those tremendous conditions that eventually produced the Renaissance. The biblical story had a different way of understanding the universe. The Bible gave us a picture of the world as something that was created but which at the same time was contingent.
Let me attempt to explain. The biblical picture of the world was that it was the creation of a rational God and therefore was in principle comprehensible to the rational mind. One of the first principles the early Christian theologians had against Aristotle was that because the universe was the work of a rational God, and because we have been given a reason which reflects the rationality of God, the universe was therefore comprehensible in principle.
Furthermore, and here there is the sharp distinction from Aristotle, because the universe was a creation and not an emanation – as Indian philosophy would say – people had to find out for themselves how the universe actually was. We cannot deduce the nature of the universe from our knowledge of God; we have actually to examine it and find out how it is and how it works.
Indian philosophy has seen the ultimate wisdom as something to be found by the mystical contemplation of God so that our mind and the mind of God are in tune with each other. But with the biblical basis one had to proceed in a different way. The universe, being a creation of God, had a relative independence, a relative autonomy. It was not just part of God. It was not simply an extension of God, but a separate distinct reality and therefore one had to find out for oneself how it worked. So there was the basis for the whole experimental method of science, which lay at the basis of the development of modern science.
We shall come back to that a little later in looking at some of the earlier origins of science. But it is most interesting that right back in the fifth and sixth centuries in the school of Athens, which was both the great centre of Greek science and the centre of the best Christian catechetical instruction, a Christian philosophy of science developed there which quite specifically contradicted Aristotle on some of these essential points.
I referred to the mechanistic view of the universe, which dominated the nineteenth century, but now in the twentieth century science speaks a different kind of language. Scientists write about the history of nature, which of course would be incomprehensible for Newton. The cosmos has a time arrow. The famous second law of thermodynamics, said to be one of the most unshakeable foundations of science, states that in a closed system there is an irreversible movement towards randomness. To give the simplest example of what that means; if you put a cup of hot coffee in a cold room, the coffee will get colder and the room will get slightly warmer and that process cannot be reversed unless you introduce a new element into the room, perhaps a gas cooker. Within a closed system everything runs down towards entropy, towards randomness and if the universe is a closed system, as Newton taught, then the second law of thermodynamics is the last word and the universe has a direction.
That is something quite contrary to the popular understanding of science in the nineteenth century. There is now no longer a mechanistic view of the universe. We do not have absolute space and time as with Newton. Since Einstein the only absolute is the speed of light and everything else – including space and time – is relative to the speed of light, which is the one constant.
Since the development of quantum physics we know that the universe is not something the observer simply looks at from outside, as Descartes taught. Instead, there is an interaction between the observer and the observed, so that in many ways the coherent, confident, clear mechanistic view of the universe which dominated nineteenth-century thought has been broken down.
We are now in an era, if I am not mistaken, when there is an increasing amount of scepticism about science. The book by journalist Brian Appleyard called Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man (1992) created a furore at the time. The Times laid on a big conference in London and many scientists went along and vilified him. But the essential thesis of his book was that while science had achieved marvels for the human race it had done something to the soul. It had made us something much less than we were. It had reduced us.
I think I am right in sensing a considerable amount of scepticism today. There is the feeling that science is primarily understood as a means to power rather than as a path to wisdom; after all, an enormous proportion of all the work of scientists in the world today, surely over 90 per cent of it, is done in the interests of developing either military or industrial power. Do people now think that science is a way to wisdom and will answer the questions of what things are worth doing? Or is there increasing scepticism, as shown by the last two annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science which started off on defensive notes? In 1993 they asked how more students could be persuaded to go into the science faculties in the universities because enrolment was falling off. In 1994’s speech, the president urged: ‘Science is a good thing. Please don’t bash it.’ And of course there is the whole development of things like astrology and the New Age, and all kinds of irrationality, flooding into our present society.
So we are now in a different position from that of the nineteenth century. If we return to that century and its attack on religion, we have to consider several ways where it can be shown that this attack was based upon misunderstanding. The mechanistic picture of the universe was a prime example of reductionism, of trying to explain things in terms of less than their full reality. The prime example of that would lie the project of the great French astronomer Laplace, a contemporary of Napoleon. We are often told the story of Laplace presenting his cosmology to Napoleon, who in turn said, ‘I find that you have not made any mention of God in your cosmology’. Laplace replied, ‘I had no need for that hypothesis.’
One of the most famous affirmations of Laplace was that if one could know the position and direction of movement of every atom in the universe one would know everything there was to know, including the entire future of the universe from here to infinity. Now that is an extreme statement of the mechanistic view. But, of course, it is absurd because the Laplacian mind which knew the position and direction of every atom in the universe would in fact know nothing except an enormously complicated mathematical equation – because to know the atoms of which a thing is made is not to know the thing itself.
To know the atoms of which a flower is made is not to know the flower. The idea that really to know a thing is to know the smallest parts which comprise it is an illusion. To know the smallest parts of which it is composed might be of valuable help in coming to know it, but we do not know it except as the total reality that it is.
A simple example would be to take the precise image the nineteenth century loved to take, the image of the machine. How does one know the fullness of what a machine is? A machine depends for its operation on the laws of mechanics and you can explain the breakdown of a machine by discovering a defect in its mechanism, but you cannot explain what a machine is by simply examining its mechanism. One does not know what a machine is unless one knows what it is for. To suppose that an understanding of its mechanics brings an understanding of the machine is absurd.
But one could carry this point further, both down and up – as we saw in . The mechanism of the machine depends upon the constitution of the metal parts of which it is made, which in turn depend upon the chemistry of its steel, brass and copper, and whatever else there is. But mechanics cannot be reduced to chemistry. Mechanics depends upon chemistry, but chemistry will not enable you to understand mechanics. Furthermore, the combinations of elements which form the chemicals that we deal with depend upon the atomic structure of the molecules which make up those materials.
But you cannot reduce chemistry to physics. The chemical formation of anything depends upon the structure of its atoms and sub-atomic particles, which is the field of physics. But chemistry cannot be reduced to physics nor can you eliminate physics for the sake of chemistry. Mechanics cannot be replaced by chemistry. And to take it a step further up, an animal is, from one point of view, a machine. Its movement depends upon the mechanical working of its bones and muscles, but you cannot reduce biology to mechanics. You may be able to explain the collapse of an animal by a mechanical failure in its bones, but you cannot explain an animal simply by understanding the mechanics of its physical structure. Reductionism is sometimes called ‘nothing-buttery’. A flower is nothing but a collection of atoms. The mechanistic understanding of the universe is a prime example of reductionism. But that is still quite widely practised. The great biologist Francis Crick, who discovered the DNA molecule, said he hoped to reduce biology entirely to physics so that all biological functions will be understood in terms of their physical causes.
The case of the machine clarifies the point that you do not understand a machine simply by understanding the physical, chemical and mechanical elements which make its functioning possible. As stated earlier, you do not understand a machine unless you understand the purpose for which it exists; you may understand the causes that make it operate, but you cannot understand the purpose for which it exists. For that there is only one way: either to ask the designer of the machine to tell you or to ask someone who has been told by the designer of the machine and therefore knows how to use it. This is because purpose, until it is realised, is hidden in the mind of the one whose purpose it is and it is not available for inspection.
The great conviction of the Age of Enlightenment was that one could forget about traditions, religions, superstitions, revelations and the rest, and that simply by the observation of the facts and rational organisation of these facts, one could discover what was the case. To take a simple example, if you are walking along the road and find piles of cement and a cement mixer and people with bricks and so forth, you know something is being built. How do you discover what is being built? There are just two ways, and only two, to find out. One is to stand around in the street until the building is finished. You can then inspect it and conclude rationally that it is a school. The other is to ask the architect and he will tell you and you will have to believe him. In other words, revelation.
If we are talking about the cosmos rather than a school, then the first alternative is not available. We shall not be around when it is finished. So if this cosmos has any purpose there could be no way of knowing it unless the one whose purpose it is reveals it. And if you exclude divine revelation as a source of knowledge you have excluded in principle the possibility of any rational knowledge for the purpose of the universe.
The next consequence which flows from this is relevant to our situation. If you do not know the purpose for which a thing exists, the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ cannot be used in relation to it. It might be good for one purpose but bad for another. When I was a boy there was a great Scout jamboree in Liverpool and about the same time a new substance had been unleashed on the world, said to be edible, called ‘shredded wheat’. One day this shredded wheat was issued as rations for all the jamboree troops and after breakfast there was a complaint in the camp office from a representative of the Nigerian Scouts, who exclaimed, ‘These pan scrubbers are no use!’ If the purpose for which a thing exists is not known then there is no rational way in which it can be called ‘good’ or ‘bad’. If there is no public doctrine about what the purpose of human life is, about what human beings are for, then there are no rational grounds on which you can say that some kinds of human behaviour are good and others bad. It is simply a matter of personal opinion.
That is one point that has to be made about the nineteenth-century mechanistic understanding of the universe. This leads to others. I have been talking about different levels of understanding where there is a hierarchy of levels with physics at the bottom going up through chemistry, mechanics, biology and sociology.
But there is one particular level that has a special significance for us and I can illustrate it in this way. If you are sitting in a room talking about Joe Bloggs and Joe Bloggs suddenly comes into the room, you know that you have to stop that conversation or else start a new one where you talk to Joe Bloggs and he has a chance of talking to you. There has to be a break because the way in which we know a person as distinct from knowing about a person, involves a different type of reasoning from the way in which we come to know a thing. In the case of knowing things, or knowing about a person who is not here, we of course use our reason to dissect, analyse and discuss. We are in control of the situation.
If we are trying to discover what makes a frog jump, we can put the frog on the table and dissect it and we are in total control of the situation. We put the questions and decide on the experiments, so we are in charge. But if we are trying to get to know a person, then we know that we are not in that situation. We have to use reason in another way and be prepared to listen and be questioned ourselves. We cannot determine for ourselves the course of the discussion. It is not entirely in our hands. It is a different kind of knowing.
As we pointed out in an , in many languages there are two words for these two kinds of knowing. In French it is savoir and connaitre. Savoir is to know about things, and connaitre is to know a person. In German the corresponding words are wissen and kennen but in English we have only the one word, but we know there are two different ways in which our minds work when we are in these differing situations.
A person can of course be the object of analytical examination. A neuro-surgeon may be said to get to know the patient on whom he operates in an intimate way but we know perfectly well that the way in which the surgeon comes to know the patient is quite different from the way a friend or a lover gets to know that same person. There are two ways of using reason in these two situations. Both have their proper place but must not be confused. If the cosmos embodies some purpose and that purpose is the purpose of the One who is its Creator and Sustainer – because otherwise it could not have any purpose – then there is only one way to know that purpose. And that would be by opening ourselves up to the possibility that the One whose purpose it is makes it known to us.
In talking about these levels of understanding, it is important to repeat the point that each has its own proper authority. Chemistry cannot take over physics and neither can mechanics take over chemistry, and so forth. Similarly the personal level of knowing cannot take over the impersonal way. Both have their necessary place and autonomy; they are not to be confused. But neither are they to be completely separated.
If we look at the actual way in which science works we know that it cannot begin its work except by acts of faith. One has to accept the given data and the scientific tradition in which one is apprenticed. As the great St Augustine said, ‘I believe in order to understand.’ Nothing can be understood without an initial act of faith. A later thinker, in more detail, explained: ‘I believe, in order to act, and I act in order to understand.’ But nothing is understood without an initial commitment of faith.
If one then proceeds to examine the way in which science really works, and here a lot has been written by philosophers of science in recent years, one sees how so much depends upon the faith commitment, the personal commitment, of the scientist to the task in hand. Science does not begin with a sort of clean slate as the Enlightenment proposed. The Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, wanted to wipe the slate clean of the traditions of the past and start from the beginning with the facts.
One of the great pioneers of the rise of modern science was Francis Bacon, who advised his contemporaries to forget the so-called ‘universals’ of medieval philosophy, the principles with which Aristotle began, and to collect facts. But Einstein said much later: ‘What you call facts depends upon the theory that you bring to them.’ There can be no recognition of any fact except on the basis of the way you have already learnt to understand the world. This involves the way you have learnt to use language, concepts, images and models – and the way you have been trained as a scientist to accept the scientific tradition of understanding.
But the important point about Bacon’s movement, which has shaped all science since, was that he excluded the concept of purpose. Aristotle had sought to understand the world in terms of its initial and final causes: what started everything off and what its purpose was. Aristotle claimed that in understanding this, you understood the world.
Bacon eliminated the concept of purpose; he did not accept it as a category of explanation. He accepted the concept of cause. If the universe is to be understood entirely in terms of the cause-effect relationships which link one thing to another, then you can discover how it works and can interfere with its workings to make it work the way you want. In other words, purpose can be imposed upon it. But if the concept of purpose were to be excluded from the category of explanation then the consequent conclusion, in the memorable words of Bacon, would be: ‘Knowledge is power.’ Science becomes essentially a means for power, for intervening in the world of nature to make it serve humanity’s purposes. But it excludes, in principle, the question: ‘Were there purposes for which things existed before I began to impose my purposes upon them?’
Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian physical chemistry scientist (1891–1976) to whom I am very much indebted for all this, answers the question in this way: when we recognise a problem, we have an intuition of a pattern of harmony, beauty, coherence, order – that somewhere in this chaos there is a pattern out there and it summons us to find it. The scientist thus responds to a call from something beyond us. It is significant that at the heart of science itself, there is some extraordinary sense, even if it is not acknowledged, of the presence of something which is there before us.
Why do scientists talk of the love of truth? What does it mean? Does it not mean that there is some beloved and beautiful entity out there that calls us forward and summons us, even at the cost of great struggle, to find this hidden harmony and coherence? Indeed, without that passion, science would never have grown and survived. As we all know, committed scientists have spent their lives attempting to solve problems which have often led them into blind alleys. Many have wasted their lives on lost causes such as perpetual motion or the philosopher’s stone. But science could not have proceeded without that personal, indomitable passion of the scientist to find that hidden and illusive reality.
Back, now, to that nineteenth-century attack on religion. Why did it happen? The idea that science is a special kind of knowledge distinct from our perceived knowledge, that science makes available to us a sort of truth more reliable than the truth available to us from the experiences of life, is an illusion. Science is not a separate kind of knowledge; it grows from our generalised knowledge. Science is the attempt to formalise knowledge, ideally in such a way that it can be expressed by mathematical equation. But the sum total of knowledge that can be so formulated is limited.
For example, a young child learns to ride a bicycle without falling off. But to understand the mathematical formula involved in knowing how to turn the wheel of the bicycle at exactly the right angle to avoid falling off is irrelevant. The mathematical physics is irrelevant. A child can ride a bicycle by learning an unconscious technique which has nothing to do with learning a mathematical formula. There are vast areas of life where we know an enormous amount more than can ever be expressed in a precise mathematical formula, so that one of the great illusions that lay behind that attack was the idea that science was a separate kind of knowing. It is not. It is a part of a much wider area, what Polanyi calls ‘tacit’ knowing.
I was reminded of this when I had to register the loss of my suitcase at an airport in London. I had to report its exact description. I found it extremely difficult to do so in a way that anybody else would recognise it. If my suitcase had arrived among two hundred other bags on the carousel, I would have known it immediately. But I cannot express all that knowledge with the precision of a scientific definition.
That would be an illusion. Only a small part of our knowledge can be so expressed, and science is simply part of our total understanding. The separation on our university campuses of the science faculties, against the other faculties, as though they were a quite different kind of human knowing, is based upon an illusion. But it is an illusion which has had undesirable consequences for our culture.
So the position is now very different from that of the nineteenth century. We now face an attack upon science, the growing irrationality of our world and the enormous popularity of astrology. It seems that no popular newspaper can succeed without a section on astrology. The growth of the New Age movement, while it encompasses elements of good, contains a vast amount of irrationality. Go into any bookshop today and ask for something on theology and you will often be directed to a section on the occult. This is common. I think that so far from having to defend religion from the attacks of science, the task of the church in the twenty-first century is going to be to reaffirm the foundations of science so that we may be saved from the floods of irrationality pouring over us. In the past, after the sixth century, for example, science was almost obliterated. It could happen again.
That recurring phrase in the Old Testament is good to go back to: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ Much Old Testament literature is called wisdom literature by scholars. It occurs in Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and so on. Much of it is common sense from the wisdom traditions of Egypt and other countries surrounding Israel. There is much we can learn by common sense. But occasionally in that wisdom literature this sentence is thrown in: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ If the ultimate reality which lies behind all the experience of this cosmos that we have, is a personal reality, God, not only the Creator of the world but the One who is constantly calling us to an increasingly deeper understanding of it – then the heart of the search for truth will be the fear of the Lord.
I always return to that wonderful piece in Job 28 where there is a description of the marvels of human technology. There is that picture of the miner working in the depths to extract gold and precious minerals from the earth with great descriptions of technology – and then: ‘But where shall wisdom be found?’ And then come the words: ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ If that is so then we must accept that one of the immense tasks of the church in the twenty-first century will be to affirm the validity of science against those who attack it. And to remind the generations to come that it is the fear of the Lord that is the beginning, and end, of wisdom.