Faith and Wisdom in Science

"This is another book by an eminent and distinguished scientist. Tom McLeish is professor of soft matter physics at the University of Durham. This is a book which, in many ways, is doing a similar job to Andrew Steane’s, but with a rather different approach. When he was thinking about theology and science, he was struggling with what you would say about theology and struggling with what you could say about science. Then he realised that the problem was not with either of those words, but with the word ‘and.’ He uses the metaphor of a tennis court. You’ve got the two halves of the tennis court and you could label one of them theology and the other one science and you could imagine two rather inexpert players trying to knock the ball over at each other and the coach is standing there at the side, trying to get each of them to return the ball when they hit it. Most of the time, the ball either goes out of the court or into the net. The problem is this net. He wants to remove it. He wants to say it’s all one court, it’s all one sphere of activity, it’s all one sphere of endeavour. Although you mustn’t pretend they’re the same—there are distinctions in the kinds of questions you ask, and the methodologies you use for addressing those questions—nevertheless, he wants to remove the net. And he wants to replace the ‘and’ with ‘of.’ He wants to talk about a theology of science. There’s a chapter in the book called the theology of science. You get the best sense of that from the chapter that precedes it, which is his reflections on the Book of Job. The book is worth it for that chapter alone. Job would have been a fantastic scientist. He didn’t have the mathematics that we have, he didn’t have the instruments we have, but out of the whirlwind God asks him well over 100 different questions about the material world—mainly the animal world, but not only. They’re all fabulous questions. In the context of these big ultimate questions Job is a very rich book. Tom McLeish discusses that very question in that chapter. He disagrees with probably the majority of commentators, who would say that what God says to Job out of the whirlwind does not answer Job’s questions. Tom McLeish faces that square on, he even disagrees with one of the leading scholars in the field, David Clines. But it’s not a one sentence, knockdown answer. And I don’t think these ultimate questions lend themselves to that. If you’re asking for an answer to the question, ‘Why do innocent people suffer?’ if someone said, ‘I can give you a one sentence, complete answer to that question,’ I would treat it with great scepticism. I don’t think it’s the sort of question that lends itself to a simple, formulaic answer. In our book we use the metaphor of a ‘slipstream’, which also occurs in a peloton in a cycle race like the Tour de France. One of the things that can occasionally happen—and it’s distressing and painful when it does—is you get what they call a ‘chute’—the French for a fall. To maximise the benefit of the slipstream of the rider in front, you try and close the gap up as much as possible, sometimes within a few centimetres, but then the wheels can touch. You can use that metaphor for what sometimes happened, that in the desire of science to maximise the benefit from the slipstream of ultimate questions, the temptation to get too close can be very strong. If the wheels do touch—by which I mean trying to make science answer religious questions or vice versa—then you can get a chute in which everyone falls over. Most of these chutes got rather exaggerated and became legendary with time. One of them would have been in Greece, when Socrates was made to drink hemlock. He was accused of denying the validity of the Greek gods. He was accused of saying the sun was not a God, but a fiery ball, to which his reply was: ‘I think you’re confusing me with Anaxagoras, because that is what he said.’ In fact, Anaxagoras’s books were on sale in the Theatre of Dionysius at the time. But that was not enough to save Socrates from compulsory suicide. “Socrates was accused of saying the sun was not a God, but a fiery ball. His reply was: ‘I think you’re confusing me with Anaxagoras’” Another example would be the Galileo case. Over time the story has become distorted and exaggerated. Galileo was another a complex character. He was quite capable of being tactless and he got into trouble as much for his tactlessness as for his science. Although he was put on trial, he was never sent to jail. The issue was more about whether or not Galileo was allowed to teach these things. Within 12 years, here in Oxford, John Wilkins, the warden of Wadham College, published a book on cosmology and the title page had Copernicus and Galileo as his two heroes, with Kepler peeping over Galileo’s shoulder. So within 12 years a strong churchman and scholar who formed an experimental club here in Oxford has written a book advocating the Copernican model."