Let there be Science (eBook)

PREFACE

Dave

The whole thing is almost depressingly predictable. Each school year, the students I teach find out that I believe in God – either because they have asked me outright or because it has turned up in conversation somehow. From then, I can count it down:

3… 2… 1…

“But you’re a science teacher!”

It isn’t their fault, of course. Somehow, even before their mid-teens, they think that you just have to pick a side – God or science. Who has told them this? Science-hating God-people? God-hating scientists?

Either way, it doesn’t take long to establish that there hasn’t been much real thought involved in their forming of the “it’s either God or science” conclusion – it has just sort of happened. A few simple questions expose the truth that they have ended up believing it without really knowing why. I suspect that it is because someone, somewhere, has been doing the media-based equivalent of shouting aggressively at whoever happens to be nearby – and that my students, like everyone else, have picked up the echoes and settled for that.

What might happen, though, if we stopped with all the shouting? What if we just talked, and listened? Might Bible-believing Christians have something to say to scientists that is not just interesting, but actually beneficial to real-world science? Might scientists have something to say to Christians that could help them live out their day-to-day faith more powerfully?

Even in those questions, we see a false split, for there is no need for an individual to be one or the other. There are many scientists who are also committed Christians. The shouters, of course, don’t want people to know this, and especially not to think about it; which is precisely why they shout. The problem, however, is that it is a fact, and facts are powerful things – they need to be dealt with.

Yet how can this be done, and done well? The temptation is to join in as loudly as others have – but that is only really likely to make things worse. Shouting sets people up against each other and breaks down both conversation and thought. A handful of teachers encouraging a handful of students to think the God-science issue through more carefully might make a small difference, but it certainly won’t bring about wholescale change.

Is there, maybe, a way that we can let all the echoes die down slightly and start afresh? Can we give everyone – students, scientists, priests and pastors, and none of the above – a new beginning? Might they be gifted the chance to start thinking, in an environment that permits even the gentler voices to be heard, about how God and science relate to each other?

It was with questions like these working their way around my head that I found myself, a few years ago, listening to a lecture on Astrophysics. The talk – “Black Holes, White Holes and Worm Holes” was expertly delivered by Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a legendary figure in physics, known best for her discovery of pulsars. Had justice been done, in fact, she would have a Nobel Prize for it – but, as we will go on to see in this book, the world of science yields up just as many failures and missteps as any other. It was at this lecture’s after-party (yes, there really was one) that I first met Professor Tom McLeish.

I had just been having a discussion with Dame Jocelyn about God – thankfully, she is most certainly not a shouter – so my mind was already on such things when Tom walked over and mentioned a book he had just written. It was about Christianity and science, he said. I find myself thinking of this as a divine encounter of some sort – I bought a copy and, in the ensuing months, some wonderful answers to my wonderings about fresh starts began to emerge. To see why, and to get a little more background, it only seems fair to hand over to Tom himself…

Tom

For several years, this scientist and Christian had, like Dave, become increasingly frustrated at the amount of defensive writing in “science and religion”. The ever-present, “How can you reconcile the conflict between science and faith?” seemed to start from the wrong place, and assume all the wrong things. I wanted very much to think out loud more about questions that went along the lines, “What is science for in God’s great project?”

Implied in this “science within Christian belief” approach were two other necessary things. We would need to listen to the great thinkers about the natural world throughout history, especially those whose love of the natural world evidently sprang from their faith. Excitingly for science, this “long view” also shows that it is much more deeply human than the “science is modern” view that I had been sold as a student. It also meant a fresh approach to the Bible. While the book of Genesis is a wonderful document about God’s creation and covenant, it dawned on me that it doesn’t contain the Bible’s simplest creation stories, nor the most important material on how to think about nature. That seemed to be in the less well known (and much less talked about) “Wisdom” books. Special among them is the even less-well-read Book of Job, whose probing celebration of the natural world I love. That all lead to the book, Faith and Wisdom in Science – the one Dave went and read.

I wrote that first book with a graduate reader in mind – its language comes from the university world I inhabit and work in day to day. But the message and ideas – that we can think Biblically about science as God’s gift, as a talent to turn into many-fold returns as the world, and that this can transform the way we think about science – can be chewed-on by anyone. In particular I had realised that Faith and Wisdom in Science had serious consequences for education and the media. Andrew Hodder-Williams from Lion Hudson (incidentally an old school friend) had approached me about writing for a wider readership, including those of any age who may not have studied or embraced either science or faith in any meaningful way. I just didn’t think I would be able to do it very well. I needed a co-author. If only I could find, say, a school science teacher with a gift for writing and who shared my passion for science within God’s Kingdom…

Dave and Tom

The result of this, hopefully, is a book about what we might be able to hear underneath all of the shouting. It is a book about what Christianity says about science, and about what science says about Christianity – all through stories of interest to readers of all faiths or none. It seeks to pick up on what has, all too often, been drowned out by the noise: that science flows naturally from the Christian worldview, and that it always has.

How sad it is that this extraordinary relationship has been almost completely lost in inaccurate or over-emphasised tales of the prejudices, mistakes, and terrible deeds that have sometimes arisen in the name of either faith or science. For every disaster, there are a multitude of remarkable success stories, nearly all of which seem never to be told.

It is time, now, for this to be remedied. The Bible’s message speaks of a God who loves science and of a science that needs God. Again and again, this has been proved to be true in the real world of physics, chemistry, and biology. This is a book about those instances and the wonderful message which is threaded through each of them: that science is a gift from God, one with unlimited potential for good, and we are all to treasure it greatly, whether experts or not.

Great things can happen in relationships whenever people are prepared to stop shouting. Maybe, one day, things could be different in classrooms, laboratories, churches, and pubs. Perhaps we can become a society that thinks and talks about facts, and not just echoes. That the Big Picture of Christianity and the practice of modern science weave together beautifully is, putting it simply, true.

So, let’s seek out these two – science and faith – in all of their fullness, and rediscover that beauty ourselves.

Tom

I’d like to thank Dave for taking this project on and for writing mostly everything (the reader should know this). We’d both like to thank Andrew Hodder-Williams, Jessica Scott, and especially Becki Bradshaw at Lion for their encouragement and hard work. The most loving supporters of projects like this as well as the most sensitive critics are the close family who also have to put up with it; without all that from my wife Julie and our children this wouldn’t have happened.

Dave

Since I have never really done anything like this before, I have very many people to thank. Tom, Becki and Andrew have, I feel, taken a risk in working with a newbie like me, and I am hugely grateful for that. Their advice and patience has been much needed. My wife, Emma, has taken much of the brunt of the book – having to read countless excerpts, put up with my absence, listen to my ramblings and humour me almost constantly. She has done this whilst also looking after a toddler (Bethany) and a baby (Chloe), although they have probably caused her fewer difficulties than I...