True Scientists, True Faith

Some of the world's leading scientists reveal the harmony between their

R J Berry

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857215413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Twenty of the world's leading scientists explain how their science enhances their faith and their faith undergirds their science. Atheistic campaigners continue to claim that science and faith are incompatible. The contributors to this book show the utter falseness of this claim. They come from a range of Christian backgrounds and all are orthodox believers, but significantly, they are all also distinguished scientists, from a variety of disciplines. Each of them gives their own account of how their science and faith intersect and interact in their personal life and thought. The contributors include: - Francis Collins, Human Genome Scientist - R.S (Bob) White, Professor of Geophysics, University of Cambridge - Alister McGrath, Professor of Science and Religion, Oxford True Scientists, True Faith combines selected essays from two preceding volumes, Real Science, Real Faith and Real Scientists, Real Faith, with new contributions from another five eminent scientists.

Chapter 1

Science, Faith, and Making Sense of Things

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Alister McGrath was born in Belfast and was a convinced atheist until going to university. He read Chemistry at the University of Oxford and earned a DPhil in Biochemistry before switching to Theology and subsequently being awarded a Doctorate in Divinity and a Doctorate of Letters. He served as Oxford University’s Professor of Historical Theology from 1999 to 2008, before moving to King’s College London as Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education until 2014. He is presently Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford. He has written widely on the relationship between science and the Christian faith, including two widely read critiques of the ideas of Richard Dawkins – Dawkins’ God (2004) and The Dawkins Delusion (2007). His most recent book is Emil Brunner: An Appraisal (2014).

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Real scientists do not believe in God! This sound bite will be depressingly familiar to those who have struggled through the endless digressions, exaggerations and misunderstandings found in Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion (2006). It is a viewpoint that can only be sustained by the relentless use of selective attention and turbo-charged shock-and-awe rhetoric, rather than evidence-based argument. Yet it is a view that many in Western culture seem prepared to accept as the wisdom of our age. As Karl Marx once pointed out, the constant repetition of something that is fundamentally untrue creates the impression that it is trustworthy and reliable.

Dawkins seems to regard the intrinsic atheism of the natural sciences as self-evidently true to all except those who are congenital idiots, or whose minds have been warped and infested by the debilitating notion that there exists a God who might be interested in us and our wellbeing. Perhaps this may help us understand his anger, intolerance and arrogance at the persistence – some would say resurgence – of belief in God, when the secularizing prophets of the late 1960s and early 1970s foretold its inevitable death.

Dawkins is modest in the provision of autobiographical detail. However, if I have understood his account of his own conversion to atheism, the pivotal element of the process was a growing belief that Darwinism offered a far superior account of the nature of the world than anything based on an appeal to God. Dawkins’ discovery of Darwinism began during his time as a student at Oundle School, and was consolidated during his study of zoology at Oxford University. The natural sciences thus acted as a catalyst for his deconversion from what appears to have been a somewhat anaemic form of nominal Anglicanism.

Now, all of us are prone to see our own personal histories as somehow disclosing a broader pattern of things, or the deep structure of reality. Beliefs that we personally find to be compelling must be so for all. Unsurprisingly, those who don’t fit the pattern are seen as dangerous. They tend to get dismissed as oddballs, idiots, or psychotics. Why? Precisely because they are a threat to the credibility of the simplistic creed they refuse to accept. For what Dawkins regards as a universal, normative pattern is nothing more than one possible intellectual option among several, each of which have found their supporters over the years. In this essay, I shall tell my own story, and leave it for my readers to decide whether it has wider significance.

My love affair with the natural sciences began when I was nine or ten. I was overwhelmed with the beauty of the night sky, and longed to explore it further. I ransacked my school library for books on astronomy, and even managed to build myself a small telescope to enable me to 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 explore another new world. It still sits on my study desk, a reminder of the power of nature to enthral, intrigue, and provoke questions.

One of those questions troubled me greatly. While in my teens, I had absorbed an uncritical atheism from writers such as Bertrand Russell. Atheism was, I believed, the natural resting place 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 what was life all about? What was its meaning? 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 but not purpose. It was not a particularly appealing idea, but I found solace in the idea 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, and a feeling 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, a famous nebula in the constellation of Andromeda which is bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. I knew that it was so distant that the light now leaving the nebula would take 2 million years to reach earth. By that time, I would have died. The night sky thus became a sombre symbol of the troubling brevity of human life. What was the point of it? 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 severity and dreariness of this position were confirmations of its truth. It was axiomatic that science demanded atheism, and I was willing to be led wherever science took me.

And so I continued working at mathematics, physics and chemistry, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford University to study chemistry. At that stage, most people gained admission to Oxford in the seventh term of the sixth form. I learned that I had won a scholarship to Oxford in December 1970, but was not due to begin my studies until October 1971. What was I 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 therefore settled down to begin an extended period of reading and reflection.

After a month or so of intensive reading in the school science library, having exhausted the works on biology, I came across a section that 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. What was the point? Yet by the time I had finished reading the somewhat meagre holdings of the school in this field, I realized that I needed to do some very serious rethinking. Far from being half-witted obscurantism that placed unnecessary obstacles in the relentless path of scientific advance, the history and philosophy of science asked all the right questions about the reliability and limits of scientific knowledge. And they were questions that I had not faced thus far. Issues such as the under-determination 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 devising what was the “best explanation” of a given set of observations crowded in on me, muddying what I had taken to be the clear, still, and above all simple waters of scientific truth.

Things turned out to be rather more complicated than I had realized. My eyes had been opened, and I knew there was no going back to the simplistic take on the sciences I had once known and enjoyed. I had enjoyed the beauty and innocence of a childlike attitude to the sciences, and secretly wished to remain in that secure place. Indeed, I think that part of me deeply wished that I had never picked up that book, never asked those awkward questions, and never questioned the simplicities of my scientific youth. But there was no going back. I had stepped through a door, and could not escape the new world I now inhabited.

By the time I arrived in Oxford in October 1971, I had realized that I had a lot of rethinking to do. Up to that point, I had assumed that, when science could not answer a question, there was no answer to be had. I now began to realize that there might be limits to the scientific method, and that vast expanses of intellectual, aesthetic and moral territory might lie beyond its compass. I would later find this idea expressed by Peter Medawar, in his excellent The Limits of Science (1984). Emphasizing that “science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon”, Medawar distinguished between what he termed “transcendent” questions, which are better left to religion and metaphysics, and scientific questions about the organization and structure of the material universe. With regard to these latter, he argued, there are no limits to the possibilities of scientific achievement. So what about the question of God? Or of whether there is purpose within the universe? Medwar was clear: science cannot answer such questions, even thought there may be answers to be found:

That there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer… I have in mind such questions as:

How did everything begin?

What are we all here for?

What is the point of living?

I could no longer hold on to what I now realize was a somewhat naïve scientific positivism; it became clear to me that a whole series of questions that I had dismissed as meaningless or pointless had to be examined again – including the God-question.

Having set to one side my rather dogmatic belief that science necessarily entailed atheism, I began to realize 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 atheistic 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. One can be a “real” scientist without being committed to any specific religious, spiritual or anti-religious view of the world. This, I may add, is the view of most scientists I speak to, including those 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’re prepared to respect it.

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.¹ The natural sciences – including evolutionary theory – were consistent with both atheism and conventional religious belief. Unless half his scientific colleagues were total fools – a presumption that Gould rightly dismissed as nonsense, whichever half it is applied to – there could be no other responsible way of making sense of the varied responses to reality on the part of the intelligent, informed, people that he knew.

The real problem is that, 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. Dawkins is a master of this art. In his superb recent study The Music of Life,² the Oxford systems biologist Denis Noble took a passage from Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene,³ and rewrote it, retaining what was empirically verifiable, and inverting Dawkins’ somewhat questionable metaphysical assumptions. The result dramatically illustrates the ease with which non-empirical assumptions can be imported into scientific thinking.

First, consider Dawkins’ original passage, which sets out a gene-centred approach to evolutionary biology, which was then gaining the ascendancy. Note how agency is attributed to genes, which are portrayed as actively controlling their destiny. I have emphasized what is empirically verifiable:

[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.

In rewriting this, Noble moves away from any idea that genes can be thought of as active agents. Once more, I have emphasized what is empirically verifiable:

[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.

Dawkins and Noble see things in completely different ways. (I recommend reading both statements slowly and carefully to appreciate their differences.) They both cannot be right. Both smuggle in a series of quite different values and beliefs. Yet their statements are “empirically equivalent”. In other words, they both have equally good grounding in observation and experimental evidence. So which is right? Which is the more scientific? How could we decide which is to be preferred on scientific grounds? As Noble observes – and Dawkins concurs – “no-one seems to be able to think of an experiment that would detect an empirical difference between them.”

Let me return to explaining my own change of mind on the relation of science and faith. Having 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 it. While I had been severely critical of Christianity as a young man, I had never extended that same critical evaluation to atheism, tending to assume that it was self-evidently correct, and was hence exempt from being assessed in this way. During October and November 1971, I began to discover that the intellectual case for atheism was rather less substantial than I had supposed. Far from being self-evidently true, it seemed to rest on rather shaky foundations. Christianity, on the other hand, turned out to be far more robust intellectually than I had supposed.

My doubts about the intellectual foundations of atheism began to coalesce into a realization that atheism was actually a belief system, where I had somewhat naïvely and uncritically assumed that it was a factual statement about reality. I also discovered that I knew far less about Christianity than I had assumed. It gradually became clear to me that I had rejected a religious stereotype. I had some major rethinking to do. By the end of November 1971, I had made my decision: I turned my back on one faith, and embraced another.

It did not take me long to begi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Alister McGrath: Science, Faith, and Making Sense of Things
• 2. John Houghton: A God Big Enough
• 3. Andrew Briggs: And Information Became Physical
• 4. Chris Done: From Spock to the Supernatural
• 5. Colin Humphreys: Can Science and Christianity Both Be True?
• 6. Simon Stuart: Reflections of a Christian Working in Science and Conservation
• 7. Francis Collins: What Do You Believe, Doctor?
• 8. Ghillean Prance: A Talent for Science
• 9. Monty Barker: Man – Dust with a Destiny
• 10. John Wood: From Nanotechnology to Macro-Organizations – Engineering Atoms and More
• 11. Andy Gosler: Surprise and the Value of Life
• 12. Jennifer Wiseman: Inspired by the Heavens
• 13. Sam Berry: Genes, Genesis and Greens
• 14. John Wyatt: No Easy Answers
• 15. Bob White: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Other Catastrophes
• 16. Simon Conway Morris: One Impossible Thing Before Breakfast: Evolution and Christianity
• 17. David Raffaelli: Inconvenient Truths
• 18. Denis Alexander: A Different Drum-beat
• 19. Rosalind Picard: Building Technology with Emotion
• 20. Donald MacKay: Science and Christian Faith Today
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index of Bible References
• Index