http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=122252
Christians should build on the historical roots of their engagement with science and its vindication of faith, argues
Denis Alexander
ARE science and religion friends or foes? Much depends on who is
answering the question, and where. The sociologist notes the sharp
divisions in contemporary society in the United States, where science
and religion are dragged into polarised political discourse. The 40 per
cent or more of Americans who espouse creationism ensure that a large
segment of the scientific community in the US remains hostile towards
religion, ably assisted by the New Atheists who invest science with a
secularising ideological rhetoric.
Meanwhile, historians of science highlight the important part
that a Christian world-view has played in nurturing the emergence of
modern science. Christians within the science community have always
thought that science and faith are good friends anyway. As the historian
Professor John Hedley Brooke has said recently, it is unlikely that
Isaac Newton, for example, would have understood the question.
Newton, as with so many of the Christian natural philosophers of
the Early Modern period, regarded his scientific exploration of the
world as all of a piece with his theology. He wrote: “There exists an
infinite and omnipresent spirit in which matter is moved according to
mathematical laws.”
The very concept of a “scientific law” emerges out of Christian
theology. Newton spent more time studying his Bible than doing
science, and saw no separation between the two.
SCIENCE started with the Greek philosophers, was developed in the
Islamic world, but received its modern contours in Europe. Here,
Christian natural philosophers established the disciplines that
scientists practise to this day — people such as Robert Boyle, one of
the founders of modern chemistry; the astronomers Kepler and Galileo;
and natural philosophers working in the physical sciences, such as
Michael Faraday. The 1663 charter of the Royal Society declares that its
activities shall be devoted “to the glory of God the Creator, and the
advantage of the human race”.
For centuries, science and natural theology in Britain remained
closely wedded. It was not until the late 19th century that they began
to go their separate ways — not because of Darwin, but because of the
professionalisation of science.
Some scientists, as they now increasingly called themselves,
undertook a vigorous campaign to wrest from the Established Church the
power, money, and intellectual prestige that they saw as rightfully
belonging to their newly independent profession. After the parting of
the ways, it became easier in the 20th century to promote the idea that
science and religion were foes rather than friends.
But it is hard to keep long-term friends apart for long, and, by
the latter half of the 20th century, scientists were climbing new peaks
of discovery — but then finding that the theologians were already there,
albeit using different types of language to describe the mountains.
A new natural theology was born that drew attention to the
exquisitely finely tuned physical constants that enable the universe
both to exist and be fruitful for life. Big Bang cosmology gave a
remarkable new insight: far from being insignificant dots in a vast
universe, it turns out that we are all made of stardust, and the
universe has to be this old (13.7 billion years) in order for us to
exist.
Evolutionary history was revealed not as a random drunken walk
that might have ended up anywhere, but as a tightly constrained
search-engine seeking out design space. Platonic biological ideas that
had been quietly ushered out of the back door with the rise of Darwinism
in the 1860s, started coming back through the front door, but this time
flying the Darwinian flag. As Martin Nowak from Harvard commented
recently in the journal
Nature: “My position is very simple. Evolution has led to a human brain that can gain access to a Platonic world of forms and ideas.”
THE new natural theology does not, like the old one, seek so much
to derive the existence and even characteristics of God by inferences
from the physical world, but rather to see the properties of the
universe as making more sense when viewed as the creation of a God who
has intentions for the universe in general, and for humankind in
particular.
Meanwhile, scientists, philosophers, and theologians have been
working on new models in which discourse between science and religion
can be carried out with clarity. The two approaches speak of the same
reality, using complementary narratives that address different kinds of
question.
Ask “Why are you driving to Edinburgh?”, and I could give several
types of answer: “Because Henry Ford invented cars;” “Because the car
engine obeys the laws of physics;” “Because I’m going to a conference.”
Likewise, science and religion provide different but
complementary perspectives on the same reality, a high-octane mix of
distal/proximal and how/why forms of explanation. Friends need to
understand each other’s language if they wish to stay friends.
Christians, of all people, have cause to celebrate science, and
the friendship between science and faith. Those who would prefer them to
be foes need some gentle reminding that it was Christians who helped to
get modern science off the ground in the first place. The Christian
world-view helped to establish the assumptions now taken for granted by
the worldwide scientific community: the intelligibility and consistency
of the properties of matter that render them accessible by rational
minds; the idea of scientific laws; the experimental method; the
Baconian passion to make science useful.
Christians celebrate science because it reveals more of the
wonders of God’s good creation, and because of the opportunities it
gives to love our neighbour.
Friends can stay good friends by frequent
reminders about how they first met, and about what they have in common.
The priority now is for science and religion to work together as
friendly partners in healing a broken world.
