Aspects of Science and Faith
THE SIX essays in this issue offer six different approaches to bringing scientific understanding and religious faith together in positive and mutually enhancing ways. we are fortunate to live in an age when scientific understandings of the universe are growing rapidly, and both in medicine and technology are transforming the way we live. The availability of amazing surgical treatments and the almost universal use of mobile phones and computers have become facts of everyday life that past generations could hardly imagine.
Yet science is an ambiguous gift, and it can also lead to the development of weapons of mass destruction and methods of social manipulation that place the existence of the earth itself in peril. It is now more important than ever before to ask about the purposes of scientific research and the values of truth and goodness that good science should preserve. This is where Christian faith has an important part to play in keeping attention focussed on the ultimate values and goals of human life. It is of great importance that faith and scientific research should relate positively in seeking for ways in which these values and goals can be enhanced.
Christian faith – and Professor Basil Altaie’s essay reminds us that Muslim faith too – is centred on the search for a true, enduring, and supreme good. It is based on the belief that such a supreme good exists, that it demands our loyalty and promises that it is possible for us to achieve it. we call this supreme goodness and beauty ‘God’, and Christians find this good expressed in the life and self-giving love of Jesus. It is a love which includes even its enemies, and which dies to self in order that truth and goodness should flourish.
The quest for greater understanding of the physical universe, which often leads to the discovery of new ways of overcoming disease and poverty, is part of the quest for truth and goodness which is the heart of religious faith.
Christians believe that “the word became flesh” – which means that faith is not concerned just with some spiritual, non-physical world. It is concerned with this flesh-and-blood reality of which we are part. To split these worlds apart, either in thought or in practice,
is opposed to the Christian gospel. when Christ ‘saves’ the world, that is not something that just happens after death. As Christ in his human life healed and forgave and renounced vengeance and hatred, so we, his disciples, must do the same. And that means learning what the physical world is like, understanding its basic principles, so that we can make it a place where humans can flourish and find well-being.
The advancement of science, the search to understand our physical world, is today a Christian duty. But it is also our duty to ensure that scientific understanding is used for purposes that are good, for bringing about human flourishing and promoting respect for the value of all human lives. Seen like that, science should increase our awe before the intricate wisdom shown in nature, our sense that there is a purpose set before us, and that there is One who sets that purpose, and who calls us to pursue it with passion and devotion.
The physical as sacrament
It is sad when this sense of objective purpose and goodness is lost. It is not science that causes us to lose it, though physical science has been used by some as a sort of alternative to God. what believers in God have to contribute to our understanding of the world is that there is a moral purpose set before us, that the physical is meant to be a sacrament, an expression and image, of Spirit, and that science is in our day one main way of helping to achieve that purpose. The six essays in this journal address that issue.
Cathriona Russell’s essay suggests that the new scientific view of the cosmos is of a vast emergent process, in which all things are interdependent, generating free and intelligent communities of persons who are able to take some responsibility for its future direction. Humans are only one small part of this process, but they are important enough, Christians believe, for God to reveal the divine nature and purpose in a definitive way in one human life. Science can help us to see the incarnation as one part of God’s purpose for the whole universe.
Michael Fuller refutes the ‘conflict myth’, the claim that science and religion have always been in conflict, and he suggests new ways of integrating science and faith in local congregations. The late Stephen Hawking, to take one example, is sometimes presented as a scientist who has somehow shown that God is not needed to explain the universe. But his position is more complex. He has written that this physical universe is dependent on a reality beyond space and time (the so-called ‘quantum vacuum’) which brought it into being, and which is both rational and necessary (the quantum laws). This is much nearer to traditional views of God than he imagined.
God is an eternal reality beyond space-time on which the universe depends, and God’s being is necessary and rational. God, of course, is thought of as conscious, and it may seem that Professor Hawking denied this. However, he also wrote (because of his interpretation of quantum theory) that there is no ‘observer- independent’ history, and even that “we create history
by our observation”.1 That means that the physical world would not exist as it does without the Physicistsexistence of some ‘observing’ mind. Believers say that there is just one supreme observing (and creating) mind upon which the universe depends, and without which the universe would not exist.
A mistaken idea of God
So the views of physicists like Stephen Hawking and his colleague Roger Penrose certainly go beyond materialism, and are very much nearer to belief in God than they seem to think. This is partly because their idea of God is largely that of a rather arbitrary and authoritarian supernatural being who interferes in the world from time to time and could change anything at all if he wanted to. we Christians have a lot of work to do to dispel this image once and for all. In other words, it is not science which leads some (but by no means all) physicists to deny, or be agnostic about, God. Modern quantum cosmology is actually much more conducive to religious belief than was, for instance, the physics of Isaac Newton – even though Newton was a devoutly religious man.
Basil Altaie corroborates this by distinguishing, as a physicist, between the descriptive mathematical models that we use to understand the physical world (the ‘laws of physics’), and the actual processes that take place in nature (the ‘laws of nature’). It could be said that our ‘laws’ are approximative attempts to capture the regularities of the natural world. They do not capture all the causal influences that are operative in nature, and they omit entirely any reference to the conscious purposes and decisions that are such an obvious part of our human lives. There is room for value and purpose in the natural world, and that is the more personal realm with which the natural sciences do not deal.
Gillian Straine’s essay deals with an important part of this personal realm, examining sets of scientific and personal responses to cancer. She demonstrates how a scientific understanding of cancer can be helpful in making clear its natural physical causes. Yet we still need ways of coming to terms in personal experience with such diseases and finding some sense of meaning in lives that are affected by them. These are very different approaches, but both are necessary if we are to understand the human situation more fully.
Suffering and creation
The scientific world-view helps us to understand a little better why there is suffering and apparent waste in our universe. The laws of nature have to govern the way things go in regular and predictable ways if we are to be able to understand and use them for good. They have to be the way they are to a remarkably precise degree, physicists tell us, if carbon-based intelligent life-forms, like us, are to be generated from the basic matter of which the universe is formed. And they have to allow for the emergence of creatively free action, learning, and discovery that communities of intelligent beings express. In other words, there have to be generally predictable laws and there also have to be ‘random’, or physically undetermined, processes if beings like us are to exist. where this is the case, conflict and suffering will inevitably be part of the cosmic process.
Thus, the basic laws of evolutionary mutation both produce cancer cells, and also the emergence of moral freedom and rational consciousness by processes inherent in nature. when we see this, we see that disease is not intentionally brought upon us by God. It results from the nature of the emergent and creative laws of nature, and also from the misuse of creative freedom by sentient beings. Even God cannot change this if God wants to create beings like us, who are free intelligent agents embodied in and emergent from a physical universe. Nevertheless God, Christians believe, can influence and inspire human creativity to shape this universe for good. And when this physical universe passes away, there can be a ‘new creation’ in which we can find an imperishable life with God. I am not saying that this solves the very real ‘problem of evil’, but science does offer important insights into how and why conflict and suffering may have to be parts of a universe with beings like us in it. william Olhausen’s article on Christian apologetics helpfully outlines the history of theologians’ response to the challenge of science.
Metaphor, literalism and misunderstanding
Finally, Mark Gallagher’s essay explores the differing uses of language in science and religion. Clearly scientific papers are written in technical and dispassionate terms, whereas sermons are often couched in rhetorical and poetic language. But he points out that good science is a creative art, and often depends on metaphors like the ‘big bang’ or ‘black holes’ which can motivate specific lines of research, and which have strong affective resonance. Science is not only a matter of technology. It is at its best an exploration of the incredibly intricate structures of the natural world, and of the capacity of human minds to invent imaginative models which increase our understanding of the world.
One problem that sometimes occurs in modern thought is that religious expressions can be interpreted literally, as though they were scientific expressions. Then they may seem to conflict with science – as in the story of the Garden of Eden which, taken literally, conflicts with the evolutionary accounts given by modern biology. The biblical story, taken metaphorically, carries a profound truth – that there is one Creator of all, that humans must not pursue knowledge without compassion and wisdom, that humanity has a duty to care for the earth (to ‘till the ground’), and that turning away from God leads to spiritual death. Once one sees that these metaphors carry truth, but not in a straightforwardly descriptive way, the problem is resolved.
Modern science helps us to see that God, who creates this universe of billions of stars and galaxies, is even greater and more awe-inspiring than we might have thought. It helps us to see that God cares for all creation, and for whatever beings might exist on other planets. Christ is the eternal word of God, and when the word became incarnate on our planet, this was just part of God’s purpose for the whole universe, that all things, ‘everything in heaven and earth’, should be ‘united in Christ’ (see the first chapter of Ephesians). God’s purposes are wider than we can imagine, and science helps us to see that. what faith enables us to see is that this whole universe exists so that all intelligent beings should be able to share in the nature of God.
we shall be among them, and Jesus is the one who has shown God to us, and through whom God has acted to redeem us from hatred, pride, and greed and unite us to the divine life.
Professor Altaie’s essay reminds us that God does not just care for Christians. God loves all people, and desires that all should be saved (1 Timothy 2,4). Muslims and Christians at their best seek to know and love God. Of course, Christians believe that the eternal Christ is the only saviour of all people, and that this Christ has been embodied in Jesus. But God’s love, expressed in Jesus, is a love that includes all creation, and it may be experienced in many different forms, by Muslims and others as well as by Christians.
A scientific understanding of the universe can bring us to a deeper appreciation of God’s purpose for the whole universe. That does not make God’s revelation to us less important. That revelation remains the place where we learn that God is universal and redeeming love. To learn more about the world God has made is to learn more about how we can mediate that love in action. For that reason science and religious faith should always be partners in seeking to know the ways of God, in the stars as well as in our everyday lives.
Notes
1 See Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design, Bantam Books, 2011.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Keith Ward
was until recently Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. He is a Church of England priest, a Fellow of The British Academy, and a leading writer in the area of the philosophy of religion and its relation to science.