Language, Science and Religion
Delivered on Sunday 31 January 2010 in St George's Chapel
1 Kings 17:8-16; Mark 1:21-28
This year 2010 sees the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The Society was founded in November 1660 with the express purpose of, as they put it, the 'promoting of Physico Mathematicall Experimentall learning'. At that first evening there were twelve men, one of them was Robert Boyle, and another, the man who gave the first ever Royal Society Lecture, Christopher Wren, the same Christopher Wren who, as a little boy, would have played in our own Cloisters, for his father was Dean of Windsor. For partly that nostalgic reason but more because of the great importance I attach to scientific and religious dialogue, I have decided to put together a mini-series of three sermons, on matters that take their origin from exactly that kind of dialogue. So that was all by way of introducing the whole. Let me now start with the first of the parts.
Our readings this morning were fantastic. On the one hand we had the story of the never ending supply of flour and oil, while on the other the story of Jesus and the man with the unclean spirit. They are fantastic stories in at least two senses: they are excellent stories, they are fantastic; they are also somewhat unreal, perhaps beyond credibility, they are in this way also fantastic. What is it that makes the modern mind so unwilling to enter into the strange new world of the Bible? Why is it that we hear stories such as these and unconsciously regard them as fantastic? The answers are Legion. The one that I am most interested in for our current purposes, however, is the one that concerns the interface between science and religion.
For some time now there has been a great debate about the proper nature of any interchange between science and religion. On the most positive front there are those who believe that the two disciplines work together. On the neutral front there are those who use the grand phrase 'non-overlapping magisteria' or NOMA for short, to promote the view that science and religion are just doing different things and simply have no area of overlap. Along these lines you may have heard Galileo's comment (or rather a line he quoted from a Cardinal) 'The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heaven goes'. And then on the most negative, most aggressive front, there are those who believe that science and religion are in conflict. There are, in truth, plenty of supporters for each of these three positions but you wouldn't know it without a good bit of digging around. The media - whether in daily newspapers, on television, or in popular book publishing - thrives on the notion that there is a bitter war ensuing between these great disciplines. And moreover, that war will have only one winner - science. This constant bombardment over the last hundred years or so has led to a loss of public confidence in religion. But the conflict model may not be as truthful as we have been led to believe.
The story of the conflict model begins in earnest with the books of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. Both men were writing in America towards the end of the nineteenth century; both men were highly influential. Draper's book, A History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, went through 50 different printings and is still readily available today. White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom was less often printed but more highly regarded. I say more highly regarded but neither book - the historians tell us - presents anything like a cogent argument. These books, like many others in the field, even those written today, were constructed on the mistaken assumption that throughout history there were two distinct and identifiable camps, one for scientists and the other for theologians.
Let us take a moment to look at each of these two supposed camps in turn. We begin with science. Isaac Newton was a great scientist, perhaps the most famous scientist of all time. And yet while at the start of the eighteenth century he as president of the Royal Society, he would never have considered himself a scientist. The word didn't exist in seventeenth and eighteenth century England. Newton was instead proud to call himself a natural philosopher. The difference is not just in a name. If you were to ask what a natural philosopher studied you might be surprised to learn that the scope of the study was defined by a set of books written by Aristotle: books on physics, meteorology, mineralogy but also dreams and the soul. Natural philosophy, in short, was the study of physics and the soul. Knowing this, you can now see just how bizarre Newton might have considered Draper's and White's concept of conflict or warfare between religion and science. In fact Newton was a deeply religious man; he was a natural philosopher precisely because that study was about God and about God's universe. In one of his letters he puts it this way:
We see the effects of a Deity in the creation and thence gather[,] the Cause and therefore the proof of a Deity and what are his Properties belong to experimental philosophy.
That sense of natural philosophy speaking to religion in a supportive manner can be found right across the gambit of Western natural philosophers. Read Newton, read Hooke, read Boyle; it is there. Yet things are, as you might expect, more complicated than that. Natural philosophers did not form camps, they did not exist as clones of each other, any more than members of the Church of England, members of the Labour Party, or members of Arsenal Football Club, all hold the same ideas and principles. Every natural philosopher had their own background and their own motivations. Newton was a unitarian - not terribly keen, in other words, on the doctrine of the Trinity. His unitarian theology explains why he was so interested in force and a universe almost entirely devoid of matter. Boyle would come at it from another angle, Hooke still yet another. Each natural philosopher would bring to the table their own theological agenda; each natural philosopher would have their own world view.
So when did 'science' take over from natural philosophy? The word was invented in 1833 by William Whewell. The concept was further developed by Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Huxley and it found its popular expression in the works of Draper and White. In a way this new word gave life to the professional study of nature. Still, one thing is for certain, our modern day scientists, much like their forebears, the natural philosophers, do not have a party line. They are men and women of intelligence and integrity; people whose work is undoubtedly coloured by their own theological understanding. And I claim this in full knowledge that there are indeed scientists who think of themselves as atheist; that, in my opinion, is a considered theological position.
Enough of science, let us move to religion. Without risk of contradiction I can say that religion has had a much longer history than science, at least science as we know it, but it is no less complicated. 'Religion' in the sense that we use the word, if there is a single sense, was a child of the European Enlightenment. Whatever the New Testament might say about Jesus being the only way to the Father etc etc, religion was only conceived as a systematic entity with the Enlightenment. Augustine, perhaps the greatest of the Church Fathers, thinks of religion as a word to describe the relationship between God and his people; religion was a purely relational term. And then for nearly a thousand years the word fell into disuse. It got picked up again, rather briefly, by Thomas Aquinas. This hugely prolific writer devotes no more than a few paragraphs to religion. When speaking of religion he was thinking of our outward expression of faith, our means of worshipping God. Somehow or other, I think of Augustine and Aquinas as speaking or religion in much the same way as I now speak of piety. It was only with with the discovery of new worlds and therefore new ways of relating to God, that the word 'religion' came to used as we use it today. Creeds became the essence of 'religion'. True religion now had less to do with a commitment and more to do with the propositions to which one gave intellectual assent. And by extension, we then began to speak about Islam, Judaism and Heathenism.
But as with 'science' the same problem befalls 'religion'. We are inclined to think of 'religions' as being monolithic enterprises, clearly defined and radically different from each other. Yet, religious people do not live out their lives in this way. You need only think of what it is to be an Anglican - consider the multitude of variations in belief and practice. The belief that 'science' and 'religion' exist as single coherent entities is simply false. Given that this is the assumption behind the conflict model, we can also say that the conflict model is false. I have to say, mind you, that the 'working together' model and the independence model are fail for the same reason, they begin from the same false assumption.
So, if I'm claiming that the popular models are wrong, how should science and religion enter into dialogue. My point is simple. The words, the categories, are misleading. There is no single thing called 'science'; there is no single thing that bears the name 'religion'. There are, however, people. And every person has a view about the world they live in and the object or objects of their worship. They want to know that rain falls downward, that at the flick of a switch light appears, that antibiotics cure infection. But they also want to know about their heart's desire, to reflect on ultimate meaning, and to understand something of the unspeakable love that creates out of nothing.
The conversation, the dialogue, that takes place needs to place more emphasis on the complexity of people, and how they allow their scientific and religious understandings to mingle and cohere. For myself, I am glad to know about cosmology, quantum physics and technology, but I also want to know about miracles and the forces of good and evil. Some of the things I know allow me to control some of the very small piece of the world in which I live, most of the things I know inform me that there is so much more to know, so much beyond my comprehension, beyond my experience, beyond my desire. To imagine that God became man and lived among us, is my starting point for conversation. I wonder where you start.
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