Keswick I: Science and Micah?

Time for a summer break. We decided this year we’d spend part of it at least in Keswick in the English Lake District. It’s a beautiful part of the world only a few hours’ drive from where we live. Sharp little hills interspersed with dark stretches of water (the eponymous lakes). Some of the lakes are big, famous and busy (like Windermere), others are small and quiet. It’s all so picturesque that it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, on a par with the Grand Canyon or Machu Picchu. So here we are for a week.

Mind you, welcome as the grand vistas are from the windows of our rented cottage, they are not really why we’re here. We’re actually here for the middle week of the Keswick Convention. Founded in 1875, this has remained a theologically conservative Bible teaching jamboree, now spreading over three weeks of the English summer. For many who will be here, the centre of activity is the morning “Bible reading”. This year, during the middle week, these will concentrate on what many would consider to be a particularly obscure bit of the Old Testament, the book of Micah. So why “holiday” here rather than on a nice beach somewhere? And how does any of this sort of thing square with my day job?

First of all the Bible reading bit. Yes, reading the Bible, listening to bits of it being explained, thinking about and discussing it, is different to reading the latest research on behavioural inhibitory control (one of the things I’m currently working on). It’s certainly different to reading my own tortured prose as contained in the latest manuscript we’ve submitted for publication (hopefully to appear soon in Experimental Brain Research). But science is what I do. The Bible is much more about who I am. It’s not that the two don’t intersect and interact. Some have argued that these are such separate spheres that there can be no points of contact. But that is not a sustainable position (and neither is it an intellectually honest one). Apart from anything else the, Christian who is also a scientist must be a point of contact between the two.

It’s the Bible that shapes (or should shape) me the person. Funnily enough this has an impact on how I go about the science I do. When I seek to bring to my professional life qualities like honesty and integrity, I do that because those values stem from my faith and are shaped by what the Bible teaches. Note that I’m not claiming that if you have no faith you can’t behave with integrity and honesty; just that such commitments in me flow from my faith. My commitment to science as a way of finding out about certain processes also flows from my conviction that underpinning those processes is God’s power (something I learn from the Bible). By studying them, I’m learning more about Him. This is my version of Kepler’s famous “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” comment.

Flowing the other way, the intellectual rigour that is developed by a training in science (critical analysis, weighing of evidence etc), is helpful when thinking about the Bible. Basic rules of interpretation and analysis apply. I don’t mean it’s a scientific text making scientific claims; it’s not and it shouldn’t be treated as such. But it still has to be approached with due and thoughtful care.

So here we are thinking about Micah. I don’t expect to learn much here this week that will help me understand the pattern of inhibition errors we observe in the eye movement task we’ve been using recently to study healthy ageing. But it’s quite possible that I’m going to learn more about me and how I should be living. Because standing behind the Bible, even the bits I find obscure (like Micah) is the same God who underpins the universe I study in the lab. He is not the distant God of the Deist, a God who stands at an infinite distance as a largely passive observer. He is the intimately involved God, interested in and active in this world, who speaks though His Word, shaping thoughts and lives. That’s why I’m happy to be here this week. I don’t usually get this much time to listen and think (and in such pleasant surroundings). I might even be tempted to comment here the odd thing that I pick up in Keswick about Micah.