That the universe is ordered, and that such order can be perceived, and its inner structures imagined, has profound theological significance, according to theoretical physicist Dr Tom McLeish, Fellow of the Royal Society and Inaugural Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of York in England. Professor McLeish, a Christian, whose recent books include Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014) and The Poetry and Music of Science (OUP 2019), here argues that the ‘conflict’ between science and faith is an invented illusion that melts away when the history and present experience of scientific imagination are considered seriously.
‘Science and religion are incompatible.’ Such is the confident claim of many media voices, from humorists to philosophers, writing in popular mode. Yet I wonder what this statement might even mean, long before I can begin to think of whether it is true. In what sense is being a Christian and a scientist (a double vocation that I share with many others) ‘incompatible’? Does it, for example, carry the same the sense in which my computer’s current operating system is ‘incompatible’ with the hardware of my old laptop? Well, obviously no – there are many very successful scientists who also profess a Christian faith, some very much in the public eye such as the Director of the US National Institutes of Health and 2020 Templeton Prize-winner Francis Collins. Our mental systems don’t seem incapable of booting up either to worship or to the work of science.
Perhaps the ‘incompatibility’ refers to the much-repeated story that history is witness to a centuries-old ‘conflict’ between the church and science, in which ecclesiastical authority is supposed continually to have suppressed new scientific knowledge. Yet no serious historian of science holds this view today, whatever their personal faith commitments. This ‘conflict’ or ‘warfare’ narrative of science and faith was, as we have known for a while, quite literally and very sadly a ‘conspiracy theory’ invented in the mid-nineteenth century by a few protestant authors, with anti-catholic axes to grind. The ‘history’ to be found in John Draper’s widely-read volume History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874), for example, still shapes the way we misconstrue the medieval church as suppressing new knowledge.
The truth lies elsewhere – for the strides in astronomy, optics and medicine made in the 12th-14th centuries in Europe and drawing on centuries of Islamic development of science - included the solving of the problem of the rainbow, the invention of spectacles, and the development of new surgical techniques. Oh, and by the way, no-one who thought about the shape of the world at all thought that it was flat. The medieval astronomical texts that we have were not only clear about a spherical earth, but about how we know it is a sphere. In some ways our own secular age is much less scientific than earlier ‘ages of faith’.
Is there, perhaps, an incompatibility of method? Does a scientific way of learning about the world run against a life of ‘faith’? Is it ‘faith’ and ‘fact’ that are so opposed? Yet here as well, the history of our thinking provides more clarity. For, as the scholarship of historian Peter Harrison has definitively shown, the development in the 17th century of what we now term ‘experimental method’, the core of a great deal of science performed today, relied on the counterintuitive and revolutionary content of a Christian theology in the hands of Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and others.
We tend to think as obvious this fruitful way of isolating small and simplified little parts of nature in order to learn about general behaviour. But stated that way, it is clearly anything but, and took centuries to imagine. How could we expect any artificial and simplified construct like an ‘experiment’ to teach us anything about wild and complex nature? The key step to seeing that it might do just that was to grasp fully the theological notions of human fallenness and divine grace – flawed humans are also modelled in the image of God and redeemed into a stewardship and care of creation. Only the gloriously counterintuitive combination of real failure of humanity, yet uplifted by grace, opened the insight that small-world creations of our own might restore a deep insight into created nature always intended for us. That was the theological vision that drove the development of modern science itself.
That the universe is an ordered place, and that such order can be perceived, its inner structures imagined, and even modelled by the marvels of mathematical representation, has profound theological significance. The sense in which the universe reflects, and can be grasped by minds, is the first clue that Mind might reasonably be behind it. And to see science as a gift from God to equip humans for a purpose in creation-care is to see even more clearly the meaninglessness of the ‘incompatibility’ narrative.
It does mean, of course, that the church has no business seeing science as a ‘threat’, and every business receiving the discoveries of science as gifts in themselves. The story of the Bible in both Old and New Testaments has much to say about our relationship of care to the natural world, but as to how that world works is posed to us as a question, without short-cuts to the answers. ‘Do you know the laws of the heavens, and can you apply them to the Earth,’ asks Yahweh of a humbled Job, as he is taken on a whistle-stop tour of the universe (in Job chapters 38-42).
One of the reasons, then, that science appears to occupy such an opposite pole from that of faith, is that its publicly-presented image has had effaced from it the essential role of scientific contemplation, and the role of the imagination. Not only can the mandate for science be enriched though a Biblical lens in terms of a vocation to humans to be reconciled to the material world, but there are also common practices in faith-traditions and scientific process, that have been forgotten. I well recall a moving moment in a large conference at which a Nobel Prize winner interrupted his lecture to look out at the audience of hundreds of mostly young scientists. He then expressed his increasing worry that the growth of computer-based technology around experimental techniques was preventing them from the practice of spending hours on end simply peering through their microscopes. He implored them to do this regularly, paying careful and extended attention to what they see, but maintaining an openness of receptivity, not prejudicing their vision with any expectation. The resonances with Christian contemplative tradition are unmistakable.
A strong counter-cultural voice at the turn of the 18th to 19th centuries, who did understand these connections, belonged to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Although it was Coleridge who insisted that the opposite of ‘poetry’ was not ‘prose’, but ‘science’, it is clear that he meant by this only the dreary assembly of fact and mechanism that science and science education had already become under the aegis of its national institutions.
A closer look at, for example, his long collaboration in both poetry and chemistry with Humphrey Davy at the Royal Institution, or his collaboration with William Wordsworth on the Lyrical Ballads, with its strong invocation of science as a potential source of poetic song, indicates that he believed that the opposite could be true. At Davy’s invitation, Coleridge lectured on Poetry and the Imagination at the Royal Institution in 1808. Far less well-known than his early poetry, written at the end of the 18th century with its well-deserved reputation, are Coleridge’s writings that spring from theological and philosophical reflection over the first decades of the 19th. His own experience of the creative imagination was fed both by the science he loved (he read Newton’s Opticks in its entirety), and also a powerful, even shocking, personal revelation through the contemplation of Moses’ encounter with God at the burning bush (Exodus chapter 3). He writes in chapter 13 of his Biographia:
The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and primary agent of all creation as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.
As Malcolm Guite has pointed out in his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Coleridge restores the original, and eternal co-existence of subject and object, whose divorce had been codified by Kant, in the theological insight that humans, created in imago Dei are ourselves both created and observed object, and living, creating and participating subjects.
In a remarkably prescient insight, Coleridge is not writing here of the imagination that science or poetry require to perceive the hidden inner structure to nature. Rather, this is an account of ‘mere’ sensory perception itself – his ‘Primary Imagination’ whose power draws from the projected energies of Creation itself. But once this is understood, the connectivity between the proceeding, and cousinly, secondary imaginations of both science and poetry is laid bare. The greatest of all early modern astronomers, Johannes Kepler, would have understood – he who contemplated the humble glory of ‘thinking God’s thoughts after Him.’
Science both proceeds from, and responds to God. It is both gift and vocation. And scientists belong within the church as members who can both receive and give of their gifts in the special form of service and wonder that enables us all to join the hills, and the trees of the field, in worshipping our common Maker.
Professor McLeish delivered the 2021 Boyle Lecture on Rediscovering Science as Contemplation. You can watch it here: https://www.issr.org.uk/the-boyle-lectures/video/