7 The natural sciences: friends or foes of faith?
The natural sciences: friends or foes of faith?
The relationship of the Christian faith to the natural sciences has long been a concern of mine. The main issue we shall explore in this chapter is whether the natural sciences are locked in mortal combat with religion. This viewpoint has long been discredited by serious scholarship, and I regard it as indefensible historically or philosophically. However, it continues to find an afterlife in the writings of the new atheists, especially those of Richard Dawkins,1 as we shall see.
My love affair with the natural sciences began when I was nine or ten. The night sky seemed to me overwhelmingly beautiful, and I longed to explore it further. I ransacked my school library for books on astronomy and even managed to build myself a small telescope so I could observe the moons of Jupiter. Around the same time, a great-uncle who had headed up the pathology department at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, gave me an old German microscope which allowed me to investigate another new world – one of intricate detail. It still sits on my study desk, a reminder of the power of nature to enthrall, intrigue and provoke questions.
One particular question troubled me greatly: What was life all about? What was its meaning? While in my teens, I had absorbed an uncritical atheism from writers such as Bertrand Russell. Atheism was, I believed, the appropriate worldview for a scientifically informed person such as myself. The natural sciences had expanded to inhabit the intellectual space once occupied by the derelict idea of God. There was no need to propose, let alone take seriously, such an outmoded idea. God was a baleful relic of the past, revealed as a delusion by scientific advance.
So as I reflected on the scope and power of the sciences, I gradually came to the view that there was no meaning to life. I was the accidental by-product of blind cosmic forces, the inhabitant of a universe in which one could speak only of direction, not of purpose. It was not a particularly appealing idea, but I found solace in the thought that its bleakness and austerity were certain indications of its truth. It was so unattractive that it just had to be right. I must confess to a certain degree of smugness at this point, a sense of intellectual superiority over those who found solace and satisfaction in their belief in God.
Yet questions remained. As I continued to examine the night sky, I found its silence disturbing. I used to enjoy looking through my small telescope at M31, the famous nebula in the constellation of Andromeda, which is bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. But I knew it was so distant that the light now leaving the nebula would take two million years to reach Earth, by which time, obviously, I would have died. I began to reflect on the troubling brevity of human life. What was the point of anything? The poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s lines from ‘The Brook’ seemed to sum up the human situation:
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever.
However, I remained obstinately convinced that the metaphysical severity and existential dreariness of this position were confirmations of its truth. Nobody would believe this morose and morbid stuff because it was attractive; therefore they believed it because it was right. It was axiomatic that science demanded atheism, and I was willing to be led wherever science took me.
I continued working at mathematics, physics and chemistry, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry (where the sciences, interestingly, were still referred to as ‘natural philosophy’). At that stage, most people gained admission to Oxford in the seventh term of the sixth form. I heard that I had won a scholarship to Oxford in December 1970, but was not due to begin student life until October 1971. What to do in between? Most of my friends left school in order to travel or earn some money. I decided to stay on and use the time to learn German and Russian, both of which would be useful for my scientific studies. Having specialized in the physical sciences, I was also aware of the need to deepen my knowledge of biology. I settled down to an extended period of reading and reflection.
After a month or so, having exhausted the works on biology in the school science library, I came across a rather small section I had never noticed before. It was labelled ‘The History and Philosophy of Science’ and was heavy with dust. I had little time for this sort of stuff, tending to regard it as uninformed criticism of the certainties and simplicities of the natural sciences by those who felt threatened by them. Philosophy, like theology, was just pointless speculation about issues that could be solved through a few decent experiments, was it not?
By the time I had finished reading the school’s somewhat meagre holdings in this field, I realized that, far from being half-witted obscurantists who placed unnecessary obstacles in the relentless place of scientific advance, writers such as Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn were asking all the right questions about the reliability and limits of scientific knowledge, even if their answers seemed to require much further discussion. These were questions that I had not faced thus far, relating to the underdetermination of theory by data, radical theory change in the history of science, the difficulties in devising a ‘crucial experiment’, and the enormously complex issues associated with determining what was the ‘best explanation’ of a given set of observations. These issues crowded in on me. They muddied what I had taken to be the clear, still, and above all simple waters of scientific truth.
Things were rather more complicated than I had realized. My eyes had been opened, and I knew there was no going back to the childlike attitude to the sciences I had once enjoyed. Secretly I wished I could recover the beauty and innocence of that stage: indeed, I think part of me dearly wished that I had never come across the ‘History and Philosophy of Science’ section at all! But I had tasted forbidden fruit and had to enter further into this secret garden of knowledge. Though I did not come to believe in God because of the new insights I gained, an important barrier to faith was removed – namely, the idea that we must be able to prove our beliefs with certainty.
October 1971 finally arrived and I began my university studies. Up until that point, I had assumed that when science could not answer a question, there was no answer to be had. I now began to see that there might be limits to the scientific method, and that vast expanses of intellectual, aesthetic and moral territory might lie beyond its compass. If science could not explore them, then other ways of gaining access to these realms would have to be found. And, having been forced to abandon what I now realized to have been a somewhat naïve scientific positivism, it became clear to me that a whole series of questions I had dismissed as meaningless or pointless had to be examined again – including the God-question.
I began to comprehend that the natural world is conceptually malleable. Nature can be interpreted, without any loss of intellectual integrity, in a number of different ways. Some ‘read’ or ‘interpret’ nature in an atheist way. Others ‘read’ it in a deistic way, seeing it as pointing to a creator divinity, who is no longer involved in its affairs. (God winds up the clock, then leaves it to work on its own.) Others take a more specifically Christian view, believing in a God who both creates and sustains the universe. One can be a ‘real’ scientist with or without being committed to any specific religious, spiritual or anti-religious view of the world.
This is the view of most scientists I speak to today, including many who self-define as atheists. Unlike their more dogmatic atheist colleagues, they can understand perfectly well why some of their colleagues adopt a Christian view of the world. They may not agree with that approach, but they are prepared to respect it. For example, Stephen Jay Gould, whose sad death from cancer in 2002 robbed Harvard University of one of its most stimulating teachers and a popular scientific readership of one of its most accessible writers, was absolutely clear on this point. The natural sciences – including evolutionary theory – were consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief.2 Unless half his scientific colleagues were total fools – a presumption that Gould rightly dismissed as nonsense whichever half it were applied to – there could be no other responsible way of making sense of the varied responses to reality on the part of such intelligent, informed people.
When I realized that a love of science allowed much greater freedom of interpretation of reality than I had been led to believe, I began to explore alternative ways of looking at things. I had been severely critical of Christianity, but had never extended that same critical evaluation to atheism, tending to assume that it was self-evidently correct. During October and November 1971, it became obvious to me that the intellectual case for atheism was rather less substantial than I had supposed: indeed my doubts about its intellectual foundations began to coalesce into a realization that atheism was actually a belief system, whereas I had somewhat naïvely assumed that it was a factual statement about reality. At the same time, I was discovering that Christianity was far more robust intellectually than I had ever imagined. I had some major rethinking to do, and by the end of November, my decision was made: I turned my back on one faith, and embraced another.
It did not take me long to begin to appreciate the intellectual capaciousness of the Christian faith. Not merely was it rationally and evidentially well grounded; it was also enabling and enriching. Here was a lens which enabled reality to be brought into sharp focus; a source of intellectual illumination which allowed me to see, in the world of nature, details and interconnections that I would otherwise have missed altogether. The Christian faith both made sense in itself, and made sense of things as a whole.
In September 1974 I joined the research group of Professor Sir George Radda, based in Oxford University’s Department of Biochemistry. Radda was then developing a series of physical methods for investigating complex biological systems, including magnetic resonance approaches. My particular interest was developing innovative physical methods for examining the behaviour of biological membranes, which eventually extended to include techniques as different as the use of fluorescent probes and antimatter decay to study temperature-dependent transitions in biological systems.
But my real interest was shifting elsewhere. I never lost my fascination with the natural world. I just found something else rising, initially to rival it, and then to complement it. What I had once assumed to be the open warfare of science and religion increasingly seemed to me to represent a critical yet constructive synergy, with immense potential for intellectual enrichment. How, I found myself wondering, might the working methods and assumptions of the natural sciences be used to develop an intellectually robust Christian theology? And how could I properly explore this possibility?
In the event, I decided that the best way forward was to cease active scientific research, and become a theologian. I was determined, however, to be a theologian who was up to date in his reading of the scientific literature, especially in the field of evolutionary biology, and who actively sought to relate science and faith. I had no time for the ‘God of the Gaps’ approach, which attempted to defend the existence of God by an appeal to gaps in scientific explanation. While an undergraduate at Wadham College, I had come to know and respect Charles Coulson (1910–74), Oxford University’s first professor of theoretical chemistry, who was a vigorous critic of this approach. For Coulson, reality as a whole demanded explanation. ‘Either God is in the whole of Nature, with no gaps, or He’s not there at all.’3
As I reflected on the cognitive implications of the Christian faith, I came to see that there is a high degree of intellectual resonance between the Christian vision of reality and what we actually observe. This led me to become interested in the field of natural theology, which I do not interpret as an attempt to deduce the existence of God from a cold, detached observation of nature, but rather as the enterprise of seeing nature from the standpoint of faith, emphasizing the importance of belief in God in explaining the ‘big picture’. What I have in mind here are the overall patterns of ordering which are discerned within the universe – those things that are either too big or too odd for science to explain.4
For example, I came to appreciate that the explicability of nature was itself astonishing and required an explanation in its own right. I was not alone here. Albert Einstein pointed out back in 1936 that ‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility’. The intelligibility of the natural world, demonstrated by the natural sciences, raises the question as to why there is such a fundamental resonance between human minds and the structures of the universe. Why should we be able to make sense of the world at such a deep level? It seems to confer no obvious evolutionary advantage! But it is surely one of the most exciting things about the Christian faith that it creates intellectual space for the natural sciences, by articulating a vision of an ordered reality which is open to study by a human mind shaped in the ‘image of God’.
A further example of ‘big’ and ‘odd’ things about the universe that seem to demand an explanation are what are now widely described as ‘anthropic phenomena’.5 The language of ‘fine-tuning’ has increasingly been found appropriate to express the idea that from the moment of its inception, the universe appears to have possessed certain qualities conducive, at this point in cosmic history, to the production of intelligent life on Earth that is capable of reflecting on the implications of its existence. Nature’s fundamental constants turn out to possess reassuringly life-friendly values. For example, the existence of carbon-based life on Earth depends upon a delicate balance of physical and cosmological forces and parameters, which are such that were any one of these quantities to be slightly altered, the balance would be destroyed and life would not exist. While these phenomena do not represent a ‘proof’ of the existence of a creator God, they are clearly consistent with the view of God encountered and practised within the Christian faith. The observation of anthropic phenomena thus resonates with the core themes of the Christian vision of reality.
Yet it is impossible to reflect on the natural sciences and faith without being aware of some of the challenges that appear to arise. In the remainder of this chapter, I would like to consider briefly five of the more common concerns.
1. The alleged ‘warfare’ of science and religion
Richard Dawkins persistently portrays science and religion as being at war with each other. This leads to the conclusion that scientists who believe in God are nothing more than collaborators or traitors. Sadly, these views remain widespread in popular scientific culture, which still suggests that the Church imprisoned and tortured Galileo for his views on the heliocentric model of the solar system, that medieval Christians thought the Earth was flat, and that the Church fought against painless childbirth in the aftermath of the discovery of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform.
Historians of science have long since discredited this ‘warfare’ model of the relation of science and religion, as well as most of the alleged evidence in its support,6 pointing out that the truth is far more complex than this simplistic stereotype suggests. Yet it seems to be integral to Dawkins’ defence of his atheism in The God Delusion. Surely it’s time for the new atheism to move on and catch up with current scholarship.
2. A failure to understand the Christian notion of ‘God’
Scientific atheists often challenge Christians to ‘prove’ the existence of God, as if Christians understand God to be an object within the world – such as an additional moon orbiting the planet Mars, a new species of newt, or an invisible unicorn. Perhaps they think Christians imagine God to be like an Olympian deity, sitting on the top of Mount Olympus, waiting patiently to be discovered. Of course, for the Christian, God is not an ‘entity’ alongside the other entities in the world but rather the source, ground and explanation of all that exists. God is the creator of all things, not a member of this class of things.
One of the more puzzling features of Dawkins’ new atheism is his apparently unquestioned assumption that the theist’s inventory of the universe simply includes one extra (and totally unnecessary) item that is absent from an atheist’s list. This universal inventory must be open to verification by scientific methods. And as the existence of this God cannot be scientifically proved, it is to be dismissed as having vanishingly small probability. Dawkins does not believe in such a God. But then, neither do I.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is noted for his emphasis that words have multiple meanings and significations. What a word means needs to be determined by the way in which it is used. Dawkins understands one thing by the word ‘God’, and I understand something quite different. The new atheism conducts its polemic against a notion of God that bears little relation to that of Christianity. Christians will not find their faith shaken by evidence or arguments which make assumptions they do not share and consider to be completely wrong. The atheist ‘critique’ of Christianity at this point amounts to little more than a circular argument concerning the internal consistence of atheism, rather than a considered engagement with what Christians believe about God.
3. The smuggling of metaphysics into science
When properly and legitimately applied, the scientific method is religiously neutral – neither supportive nor critical of religious beliefs. This means that scientific atheists have to spin science in certain ways, in order to maintain their core dogma that science disproves religion. And since the scientific method clearly does not entail atheism, those who wish to use science in defence of atheism are obliged to smuggle in a series of non-empirical metaphysical ideas to their accounts of science, and hope that nobody notices this intellectual sleight of hand.
Let us explore this point by looking at the superb recent study The Music of Life, written by the noted Oxford systems biologist Denis Noble,7 who developed the first mathematical model of the workings of the human heart. Noble analyses a passage from one of Dawkins’ best-known books, The Selfish Gene (1976), setting out the gene-centred approach to evolutionary biology, which was then gaining the ascendancy in evolutionary biology.8
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.
Note how Dawkins represents genes as active agents, in control of their own destiny, and ours.
So what in this passage can be proved from observation, and what is metaphysical speculation? Noble notes that empirically verified facts are restricted to the short statement that genes ‘are in you and me’. The rest is speculative. Noble then playfully rewrites Dawkins’ prose, smuggling in a totally different set of metaphysical assumptions.9
[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.
On this reading, humans are in control of the situation. We are active; genes are passive. Dawkins’ position has been inverted.
So what in Noble’s discussion is scientific? As before, the only thing that can be evidentially confirmed is that genes ‘are in you and me’. The rest is speculative, and lies beyond empirical investigation. Dawkins and Noble see things in completely different ways. They both cannot be right. Both smuggle in a series of quite different metaphysical assumptions. Yet their statements are ‘empirically equivalent’. In other words, they both have equally good grounding in observation and experimental evidence. So which is right? How could we decide which is to be preferred on scientific grounds? As Noble observes, ‘no-one seems to be able to think of an experiment that would detect an empirical difference between them’. The real problem in the field of science and religion has to do with the smuggling in of atheist metaphysical assumptions, which the sciences themselves neither demand nor legitimate.
4. Science and religion exist in explanatory competition
The new atheism takes a dogmatically positivist view of science, holding that it explains (or has the potential to explain) everything, including matters traditionally regarded as lying within the religious realm. Science and religion offer competing explanations. One day, science will triumph, and religious explanations will fade away. There cannot be multiple explanations of the same things, and only the scientific explanation can be valid, claim the new atheists.
Yet this is a very nineteenth-century way of arguing, resting on a failure to think critically about the nature of scientific explanation. Neuroscientist Max Bennett and philosopher Peter Hacker have explored the ‘science explains everything’ outlook that Dawkins and others espouse, and found it seriously wanting.10 For example, scientific theories cannot be said to ‘explain the world’ – only to explain the phenomena which are observed within the world. Furthermore, Bennett and Hacker argue that scientific theories do not, and are not intended to, describe and explain ‘everything about the world’ – such as its purpose. Law, economics and sociology are examples of disciplines which engage with domain-specific phenomena, without in any way having to regard themselves as somehow being inferior to or dependent upon the natural sciences.
The real issue has to do with levels of explanation. We live in a complex, multi-layered universe. Each level has to be included in our analysis. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology – to note only four sciences – engage with different levels of reality, and offer explanations appropriate to that level. But they are not individually exhaustive. A comprehensive explanation must bring together these different levels of explanation, in that (to give an obvious example) the physical explanation of an electron is not in competition with its chemical counterpart. My Oxford colleague John Lennox, who is a mathematician and philosopher of science, uses a neat illustration to make this point. Imagine a cake being subjected to scientific analysis, leading to an exhaustive discussion of its chemical composition, and the physical forces which hold it together. Does this tell us that the cake was baked to celebrate a birthday? And is this inconsistent with the scientific analysis? Of course not.
We see here the important scientific principle of different levels of explanation, which supplement each other. This principle can easily be explored from everyday life. Consider a performance of your favourite piece of music. This can be described scientifically in terms of patterns of vibrations. Yet this perfectly valid explanation requires supplementation, if it is to account for the full significance of the phenomenon of music and its impact upon us. Similarly, there is far more to a great painting than an analysis of its chemical components, or the physical arrangement of its elements. Scientific and religious explanations can thus supplement each other. The problems start when scientists get religious or theologians scientific. For example, ‘creationism’ is widely regarded as an example of a religious movement claiming scientific traction.
At a very simple level, we could apply this approach as follows. A scientific description of the world describes how it arose from an initial cosmological event (the fiery singularity of the ‘big bang’), which led, over a long period of time, to the formation of stars and planets, creating conditions favourable to the origination and evolution of living creatures. No reference is made, or needs to be made, to God. The Christian will speak of God bringing the world into existence, and directing it towards its intended outcomes. For some, this process involves direct divine action; for others, it involves God creating and working through natural forces to achieve those goals. Yet each of these accounts supplements rather than contradicts the other.
5. Belief in God is a delusion caused by ‘memes’
Richard Dawkins first introduced the idea of the ‘meme’ back in 1976. Towards the end of his The Selfish Gene, he argued that there was a basic analogy between biological and cultural evolution: both involve a replicator. In the case of biological evolution, this replicator is the gene; in the case of cultural evolution, it is a hypothesized entity, which Dawkins called a ‘meme’. For Dawkins, the idea of God is perhaps the supreme example of such a meme. People do not believe in God because they have given long and careful thought to the matter; they do so because they have been infected by a powerful meme, which has somehow ‘leapt’ into their brains.
Yet has anyone actually seen these things, whether leaping from brain to brain, or just hanging out? The real debate, it must be noted, has nothing to do with religion. It’s about whether the meme is a viable scientific hypothesis, when (to mention the most obvious problems) there is no clear operational definition of a meme, no testable model for how memes influence culture and why standard selection models are not adequate, a general tendency to ignore the sophisticated social science models of information transfer already in place, and a high degree of circularity in the explanation of the power of memes.
More recently, in The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins sets out the idea of memes as if it were established scientific orthodoxy, making no mention of the inconvenient fact that the mainstream scientific community views it as a decidedly flaky idea, best relegated to the margins. The ‘meme’ is presented as if it were an actually existing entity, with huge potential to explain the origins of religion. Dawkins is even able to develop an advanced vocabulary based on his own convictions, of words such as ‘memeplex’. Daniel Dennett also makes extensive use of the idea in his ‘new atheist’ manifesto, Breaking the Spell (2006). It is fascinating that the intellectual case for new atheism depends so heavily on the idea of the meme. Yet it is a deeply flawed idea, with decidedly awkward consequences for this supposedly ‘scientific’ approach to atheism.
To further illustrate the difficulties of this approach, we may consider Dawkins’ characteristically bold statement: ‘memes can sometimes display very high fidelity’.11 This is a credal statement posing as a statement of scientific fact. What Dawkins is doing is to restate an observation in his own theoretical language, which is not spoken elsewhere within the scientific community. The observation is that ideas can be passed from one individual, group or generation to another; Dawkins’ theoretical interpretation of this observation – which is here presented simply as fact – involves attributing fidelity to what most regard as being a non-existent entity. We see here an example of what most of its critics regard as the greatest failing of memetics: its ‘achievements’ are limited to simply redescribing a host of phenomena in memetic terms.
Furthermore, neither ideas nor cultural artefacts can conceivably be said to be, or to contain, a self-assembly code. They are not ‘replicators’, as required by the accounts of cultural transmission and development offered by Dawkins and Dennett.12 Indeed, since there is no compelling scientific evidence for these entities, some have playfully – though not without good reason – concluded that there might even be a meme for believing in memes.
One telling indication of the failure of the ‘meme’ to garner academic support can be seen in the history of the online Journal of Memetics, launched in 1997, arguably at the zenith of the cultural plausibility of the meme.13 The journal folded in 2005. Why? The answer can be found in a devastating critique of the notion of the meme, published in the final issue of this ill-fated journal.14 Dr Bruce Edmonds made two fundamental criticisms of the notion of memetics, which undermined its claims to plausibility in the scientific community.
1
The underlying reason why memetics has failed is that it ‘has not provided any extra explanatory or predictive power beyond that available without the gene–meme analogy’. In other words, it has not provided any ‘added value’ in terms of providing new understanding of phenomena.
2
The study of memetics has been characterized by ‘theoretical discussion of extreme abstraction and over ambition’. Edmonds singles out for special criticism unrealistic and over-ambitious attempts, often developed in advance of evidence, ‘to “explain” some immensely complex phenomena such as religion’. Yet for many of its more fanatical advocates, this is precisely the point of memetics – to explain away belief in God.
Edmonds ends his incisive dismissal of the meme with its obituary: Memetics ‘has been a short-lived fad whose effect has been to obscure more than it has been to enlighten. I am afraid that memetics, as an identifiable discipline, will not be widely missed.’
The importance of this observation will be obvious. As we noted earlier, two of the leading works of the new atheism make an appeal to the ‘meme’ an integral part of their scientific case for arguing that belief in God can be explained away (most scientists would prefer to say ‘reductively explained’). Yet the notion of the meme turns out to be highly speculative, and is significantly underdetermined by the evidence. It remains to be seen what the long-term implications of this excessive reliance on such a ‘a short-lived fad’ (Edmonds) will be for atheist apologetics.
Conclusion
It is important that the Christian Church engages our scientific culture, positively yet critically. The scientific method, when properly applied, is no enemy of faith. The problems begin when enthusiastic atheists start smuggling in their own presuppositions, hoping nobody will notice; or when enthusiastic Christians start believing that science challenges core beliefs or essential ways of reading the Bible, and circle their wagons defensively. The reality is rather different, and much more interesting. The Christian faith offers us a robust intellectual vantage point, which makes sense of the historical origins and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences. Far from being a challenge to faith, the sciences – if used rightly and wisely – might even become a gateway to discovering the glory of God.