A chasm … that cannot be bridged?

These days, not being a cosmologist, materials scientist or molecular biologist, the only bits of “Nature” I read with any expectation of understanding are the editorial, news and comments sections (although this blog post points to an exception). Commenting on a planned meeting between a group of families affected by Huntington’s disease and the Pope, the following sentence from this week’s editorial caught my eye: “There is a chasm between religion and science that cannot be bridged”. And it was further stated that it is the Vatican’s traditional philosophy that “the scientific method cannot deliver the full truth about the world” (Nature Editorial, 18^th May 2017, 545:265). Hmm. Where to start?

Let’s start with the assertion of the existence of this unbridgeable chasm. Note that it is an assertion rather than the conclusion of a carefully constructed argument, or a hypothesis supported by any kind of evidence. It is not an assertion that would be have been supported by pioneers like Kepler, Newton, Boyle or Faraday or for that matter contemporary scientists such as Francis Collins, John Gurdon or Bill Newsome (do a web search on the names if they’re unfamiliar). Now of course all of these folk could be just plain wrong. The fact that they are likely to reject a proposition does not make it untrue. But with all due respect to the Nature leader writer who asserted the existence of the chasm in the first place, she (or he), while having a background in science is unlikely to have the experience and insight of those listed above. For my own part, I don’t claim any great insight either. But I am a scientist and I don’t accept that such a chasm either must exist, or does exist in any meaningful way.

What is probably rearing its head here is the conflict metaphor for the relationship between science and religion. This is the notion that science and religion compete for the same explanatory territory, but do so in fundamentally different ways, with different conclusions and therefore inevitable conflict. It’s a fight with a winner and a loser. Actually, some claim that the fight concluded some time ago, with science the clear winner, and the obscurantist forces of religion decisively routed and driven from the field. These notions, while they have been around for a while, are more recent than you might think.  Colin Russel, the historian of science, argues that the conflict metaphor was pushed as part of deliberate campaign by the likes of T.H Huxley in the second half of the 19^th Century (see Russell's excellent “Cross-currents” for a discussion). Huxley, along with a relatively small group of fellow belligerents interpreted the history of science up to that point as a fight with religion; since then others have happily promulgated the same view. But both in Huxley’s own day, and today, this was only one way to see the relationship between religion and science.

Science has actually often attracted those who are committed to God’s revelation in His book (the Bible), who also wish to study his handiwork in the created order using science as a tool. There are occasionally tensions between the two, but by and large the book of God’s words, and the book of God’s works complement each other. Indeed there is often an interplay between the two. And where the tensions look more like contradictions, these are often to do with the fallibility of our science or our theology. Interestingly, from the outside, the tensions often look a lot worse than they are. So an atheist scientist, with no great interest in Scripture, might misquote and misapply Scripture to claim a major problem where none exists. It is equally possible to conceive of scientifically uneducated and uninterested believers claiming that some scientific discovery has to be rejected because of an apparent contradiction with the Bible. In both cases, a proper understanding of both the Scripture and the Science often dissolves the “contradiction”. So where is the chasm? There isn’t one.

Occasionally those who are scientists and believers (while I mainly mean Christian believers, the same applies to others) are accused of thinking in one way in the lab and in another way at worship and of keeping these two areas of thought separate.  And I don’t deny that I’ve come across this phenomenon, although not for a while, and not usually on the part of professional scientists. But it’s neither necessary, nor is it particularly healthy; and I reckon this it’s not sustainable in the longer term. I’m the same person whether I’m trying to work out why we get multimodal distributions of fast eye movement latency (the subject of a paper that I hope will appear soon) or why Jonah so misunderstood the God who called him to go and preach in Nineveh. Rationality is required in both cases to make progress. If pushed, and you asked me which of these two puzzles is most important to me, I’d say the later. But for the following reason:  science is what I do; my faith is about who I am. As a professional scientist, one day I’ll retire and put away my eye tracker. But I won’t be retiring as a Christian. This is why my faith (by which I mean the content of belief rather than the act of believing) is more important to me than my science. And the science is for now; faith is for eternity.

This brings me to one of the important distinctions between science and (Christian) faith. John Polkinghorne (originally a particle physicist, but who then trained for the ministry and became a theologian) wrote “Many scientists are both wistful and wary in their attitude towards religion. They can see that science’s story is not sufficient by itself to give a satisfying account of the multi-layered reality of the world (Theology in the Context of Science, p84)”. Science’s success stems from carving off bits of the universe that it can get to grips with. But it is a mistake to insist that this is all there is, or that this is the only kind of stuff that matters. It’s folly to believe that scientific explanations are the only ones that a true or valid. While a pigment chemist and colour psychophysicist could legitimately tell you a lot of interesting things about the Mona Lisa, that’s not all there is to say on the subject. And not all of the pertinent information you would need to “understand” the Mona Lisa  is scientific information.

So it’s not just the Vatican that thinks that the scientific method can’t deliver the “full truth” about the world. There are many scientists, including many non-religious ones, who believe this too. Certainly, this one does.