Faith and Science
In the Gospels, there is a story about some religious scholars who tried to prove to Jesus that there cannot be resurrection from the dead.  They were Sadducees, the custodians of the Jerusalem Temple and its traditions and ceremonies.  Their logic sounds very strange indeed to us – they told a story of a woman who married and was widowed seven times.  She then died.  “Now then”, they said to Jesus, “at the resurrection, whose wife will she be of the seven husbands, since all of them were married to her?”  To their way of thinking, a married woman could only have one husband at a time, and if there was some sort of resurrection and life after death, she could still have only one.  As she had seven proper husbands, they thought that proved there could be no resurrection and life after death.  They had started with what they believed their sacred Scriptures, the Torah or Law, said and reasoned from it in what they thought was a logical way.  However, it is not their argument, but Jesus’ reply, that I particularly want to share with you and reflect on:

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” (Matthew 22:29)

I sometimes think Jesus would say much the same to those who insist you should “believe science” and reject the Bible, and to those who say you should “believe the Bible” and reject science.  There are, of course, plenty of people who passionately believe in the rightness of one or other position, with its particular ways of thinking and reasoning.  I find neither satisfactory.  As a lot depends on what social forces and what studies have shaped our lives and thinking, so I’ll share a little of my own background.   

I grew up in a family which was not churchgoing, though it was one where we were encouraged to appreciate the mystery, beauty and sacredness of life.  When it came to big questions of good and evil, and the meaning in life, I think of our sharing as having an atmosphere of respectful agnosticism.  However, in time I became increasingly convinced that we could go beyond that agnosticism.   When a first year university student, I became convinced that the historical person, Jesus, is the human expression and embodiment of the great principle of being behind the universe.  I also became convinced that, whatever resurrection might mean, it made plenty of sense that Jesus transcended death itself.  Such convictions led me to commitment to Christ, and I have been part of Christian communities ever since.  When thinking about God, I have grown to cherish the ancient insight which occurs in the narrative of Moses meeting God in the burning bush.  When Moses asked God God’s name “God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am’ ”(Exodus 3:14).  “I am” of course is part of the verb “to be”, calling us, like Moses, to hold our distance in awe before the One who is the very mystery of all being. God is named in many ways in the Bible, sometimes by how people felt they experienced God, and always within the limits of human language.  In his teaching on prayer, Jesus emphasises the personal and relational in God, referring to God as Father, and then immediately teaches words which, to me, mean, “may God’s name, however named, be held in sacred awe” or in older English, “hallowed be your name”.

As I have shared in Christian communities over the years, I have felt the most important things in life centre on relationships, with other people, with our environment and with God.  For Christians, the central relationship which guides and interprets all others is relationship with Jesus.  It can be thought of as a living answer to Jesus’ question: “who do you say that I am?”  This touches all of life, and if you have a scientific interpretation of how the universe is, then that too has to be part of the relationship.

When Christian people try to convince me that the whole dynamic universe, and life itself is all explained by the Bible Creation stories and happened in a few thousand years, I accept that this is how belief is for them.  However, for me it would deny a vast amount of coherent quantitative observation and interpretation.  My position on this has been formed in forty years of thinking and working in physics and geophysics.  Millennia ago, a psalm writer spoke of the heavens declaring the glory of God.  No doubt his observations included the night sky, with no particle or light pollution to dim that magnificent sight.  To look at it through the lenses and mirrors of modern instruments, and think of the stars and galaxies, the gas clouds, their dynamics, and indications of a multi-billion year history also raises profound questions of meaning.  For many of us, this too declares the glory of God just as much or even more than in ancient times.  The psalmist also said to God, “what are humans, that you care about them?”  To deal with the evidence of evolution of the planet earth, of life, and of humans, and most recently human consciousness and culture also raises profound questions of meaning.  I like the way Paul Davies, a physicist who asks such questions in precise ways, puts it: “The most intriguing thing is why are we here asking ‘Why are we here?’”  For me the answers are never going to be captured in words alone.  Rather it is a programme, a lifetime of relationship, exploring the meaning of life in relationship to the person of Jesus Christ, to other people, to the whole of creation and to God.  Scientific understanding, I believe, is like a wide open window through which we can look in wonder and imagine a little more of the power of God.

It is only in the last six years that I have been able to settle down to encounter the Bible and Christian tradition in greater depth.  In particular, I have greatly enjoyed being a student at the United Theological College, sharing with the staff and students there.    Remember where I started, with what Jesus said to those Sadducees so long ago, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God.” I have written a little about science and the power of God.  What about the Scriptures?

I believe busy modern Christians face a peculiar cultural danger, and that is to assume that the Bible works rather like a science text-book, from which we can read face-value facts that God has revealed, and then follow one-line reasoning to tell us with certainty answers to questions about life, and what God is like, and how God acts.  This approach does give results quickly, and it does seem to offer certainty.  However, unless we engage with Scripture in multi-dimensional ways, respecting them as ancient literature formed among people of a different age and culture, as well as seeking with openness to hear God speaking to us through them in our particular cultures and situations, we are in considerable danger of ending up with closed views and of cutting ourselves off from those growth-producing conversations that are central to relationships.

One aspect of being a scientist, and certainly a physicist, is a driving curiosity to see how different things relate to each other.  Some of the brightest physicists work on attempts to derive Theories of Everything (known as TOEs) and Grand Unified Theories (known as GUTs).  They seek unified theories of the elementary stuff of the universe –things for which we use words like particles, fields, strings and superstrings.  This work goes hand in hand with high energy experiments, the most recent of which has been described by popular media (but not scientists, as far as I am aware) as looking for the “god-particle”.  As well as giving insights into the elementary stuff of the universe, this search also gives insight into cosmic beginnings and cosmic evolution.  However, what I shall call the grand narrative of evolution builds on, but goes beyond these theories and insights.  It brings together data and interpretations across many disciplines, giving a continuous and coherent story from those cosmic beginnings (maybe 15 billion years ago) right through to the rise of human reflective consciousness and the development of human culture.  It is a narrative that tells us of the interdependence of all life on Earth, and the finely balanced interactions of all life with the land, sea and the atmosphere.  In particular, it is the underlying framework for understanding the peril of our present situation, where global warming is the latest and most serious sign that present human activity is simply unsustainable.

Many Christians (and other religious writers too) are exploring the interface between the grand narrative of evolution and Christian faith and tradition.  Their work is part of the age-old tradition of bringing Christian ways of thinking into conversation with the knowledge and ways of new cultures.  So what sort of directions is this going in?

Perhaps the most obvious place to start this is on how God creates. Assuming evolution, the universe is in a continuous state of change.  What is emerging at each stage is often not inevitable, but one possibility amongst several.  Under conditions such as on our planet, there is a continuous creative tendency towards more complexity, and at some stages what has emerged could not have been predicted from what had gone before.  This is most strikingly so for humans, where barriers of being have been crossed and each of us is endowed with a measure of freedom and choice, opening for us cultural evolution, which drives change far more rapidly than biological evolution.  This is our dilemma and our peril; it is integral to our humanity, but our cultural evolution is impacting the global environment at such a rate that evolutionary changes in other species simply cannot keep up (with few exceptions, such as viruses and bacteria).  The word “ecology” comes from the Greek word oikos or household.  We are not doing global housekeeping well, and are increasingly finding our home less friendly for us, and more excluding of other creatures.

Interpreted against Christian understanding, God is creating in and through evolutionary processes.  We are here, asking fundamental questions about our existence, because God’s evolutionary creation processes have made us this way.  Perhaps human creativity, together with the whole dimension of decision making, and the moral dimension of discerning good and evil, partly reflects the Biblical insight that humans are made in the image of God.

Once evolution is seen as God’s creative pattern, we have to reassess suffering and death.  Without death, creation through evolution simply would not happen.  We have to ask questions about “sin” and “alienation from God”.  Are the activities we are engaged in and often unwittingly caught up in creative or destructive?    

How does Jesus Christ fit in to all of this?  The New Testament has two powerful sections that speak of Jesus Christ as being in some sense intimately involved in the formation of the universe (John 1:1-18 and Colossians 1:15-20).  Thus the human Jesus is understood to be the embodiment of the being of God the Creator.  This ancient vision of the Cosmic Christ may be interpreted in ways that transcend the great gulf between the cultures and cosmologies of the first and twenty-first centuries.  The Biblical creation stories understood God as delighting in creation, and affirming the fundamental goodness of creatures.  This confronts us with the question: How can we say we love God, and yet not treat with love and respect what God delights in?    

Then we turn from the Cosmic Christ – Christ in Creation, to the historic person of Jesus the Christ.  His life and death take us into the timelessly difficult questions of suffering.  His suffering and death tells us God is intimately present in all suffering and death, and the resurrection of Christ speaks to us of hope and new creation.

There are many ways in which this Christianity- Science conversation goes on.  It can be much more than an exercise of the mind.  For some people, it is fundamental to their growth in Christian faith, and life-changing in their relationship to God in Christ, to other people, and towards all creation.  It can and does occur wherever  scientific understandings lead people to stand in awe before the power of God, and where people are also prepared to understand that the Scriptures are deeper, more complex, more beautiful, more human, and more revealing of God than they might ever have imagined.