Part of something bigger…..

This weekend, we here in this United Kingdom are celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee. She is our longest reigning monarch, celebrating 70 years of faithful service. While the anniversary actually fell on 6^th February, this is the weekend of the holidays, pageants, parties, a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s, and so on. She is a remarkable woman, has been a remarkable head of state, and that is why many are reflecting (and remarking) on both her role and her rule. Among them was Matthew Parris in today’s Times. I’ve mentioned before my liking for Parris’ columns. But now he’s beginning to worry me.

He begins his column discussing termites of all things, because they illustrate the power of the collective. This leads him on to the human and national collectivism that was demonstrated in the pandemic. But that was a moment of coming together quite out of character with times in which division and dissension have been, and are, to the fore. What therefore can unite us Brits? It is this that brings him to her Majesty, and her role as not just a figurehead, but as a powerful uniting figure. And her appeal is, well, remarkable. Even republicans find her, if not the institution of monarchy, admirable. Interestingly Michelle O’Neil, the First Minister Elect of the Northern Ireland Assembly, wrote  to the Queen recently, expressing her admiration and gratitude. I have no doubt that she was being sincere. But remember, she is a republican who wants to see NI out of the UK and joined to the Irish Republic. The paramilitary group that gave birth to her political party murdered the Queen’s second cousin (and mentor to Prince Charles) Lord Mountbatten during the “Troubles”. O’Neill’s letter tells us something about both women, but certainly is an indication of the wide admiration that Her Majesty generates. But Parris’ main point is that this admiration also tells us something ourselves.

He asserts in his piece the following: “Like it or not, implanted within each of us is an inchoate craving for something…”. I find myself in agreement with him here. He is not claiming any original insight. His point is that we are looking for a unifying figure, we are looking for something (or someone) to “draw us together”, to bring us together into a “something bigger” beyond our individual selves. We identify the Queen as the figure who can do this, egged on by admiring commentary from abroad (even from the French President). Of course, we may be imputing to her qualities she does not in fact have. And Parris fairly points out that those often mentioned attributes of hard work and sense of duty are manifest by many other public servants who are unsung and unnoticed. We just don’t know, most of us, what she’s really like. And yet, because of the way we are apparently made, we latch on to her, and invest in her our respect, admiration and hope. Of course there is a problem. Inevitably, she is only a temporary occupant of the throne. Just this weekend, we have all been reminded of her frailty (she is after all 96 years old) as well as her remarkable reign. And this raises the question for Parris as to who comes next and whether they (or rather he) will be able to fulfil the same role. As it happens, he’s fairly optimistic.

But there is something very odd going on here. Why are we “made” with a desire to be united around someone (anyone) who can only ever succeed on a temporary and imperfect basis? He seems to be almost channelling Augustine at this point, an avowedly Christian writer whom he has certainly read. After all, Augustine opens his famous “Confessions” by writing: “..you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Confessions 1.1). Parris has observed our “instinctive need to be part of something bigger than ourselves” as manifest in our coalescing around our “dutiful monarch”. He can’t explain it; but Augustine could. Augustine’s point was that we were made to know the God who created us, but by nature and practice we have become estranged from Him. And yet there are these strange echoes hinting at how we really are beneath how we appear in day-to-day life. One of these is the desire to believe in and belong to something bigger than ourselves. This sort of instinct that has been derided by materialists since the dawning of the enlightenment as a myth and a frailty just will not curl up and die. It keeps popping up in strange places and phenomena. But none of the God-replacements we turn to are able to ultimately fill the hole left by our denial of Him. Some are just wholly unsuitable and harmful. Some, while good in themselves (like our Queen), and performing a legitimate function (as she has done superbly), don’t really answer our deepest longings and needs. These can only be met with and in the God who made us and sustains us.

Of course dear Matthew will have none of this. He seems to feel a need to remind us in his column that he is a “Christian atheist” as well as “an agnostic about royalty”. Both are easy to forget; he sounds fairly keen on royalty and appears to be rigging on a Christian theme. But you really can’t be any kind of Christian and an atheist without so draining and redefining the word “Christian” (which he really does spell with a capital “C”) of its meaning that it becomes useless. As an adjective I suppose the word might bear some weight, but then it only rates lower-case c. The form he uses reveals a lot. Because it is clear that its meaning rests in the one whose title it contains, and that title is highly significant. “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah” – God’s chosen servant. As it turned out, God Himself in the form of Jesus. So “Christian atheist” suggests a degree of confusion that is never nice to observe in someone of clear intelligence and insight who’s getting on. Hence my worry.

Whether recognized or not, we are part of something bigger. At its heart is not (respectfully) the Queen of the UK and Commonwealth, as amazing as she is, but the King of Kings (and Queens). She apparently recognises this, and knows that she serves in a greater kingdom for a greater King. We could all usefully learn from her example.

The Faith in Science

The blogosphere is a big and diverse place. There's all sorts of stuff out there (and here). One could spend one's life navigating it and responding to what one finds; there are things to enrage, engage or intrigue. I recently came across a blog post in the New Humanist blog written a while ago by Mark Lorch (Chemist and science communicator at the University of Hull) entitled "Can you be a scientist and have religious faith?". For obvious reasons this piqued my interest given that this is a question that seems to keep coming around, and is one that I've examined from time to time in my own humble corner of this vast landscape.

His post has an interesting starting point: "... I could never reconcile what I saw as a contradiction between the principles of the scientific method and faith in a supernatural god." Let us leave to one side the issue of whether "the scientific method" is real thing; Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar had his doubts (see his essay on "Induction and intuition in scientific thought", Pluto's Republic). Also of interest is his observation that, as a professional scientist in a University, he is surrounded by other scientists who have "religious faith". And not merely a formal or perfunctory commitment to religion. He's on about honest to goodness, fundamental, bible-believing type faith of the sort that really outrages the evangelical "new atheists" that Terry Eagelton refers to collectively as "Ditchkins". So here's some data indicating that I'm not particularly atypical and my views are not really out there (always a comforting thought). I'm not claiming that I'm typical, just that Christians who are "proper" scientists are not extinct or even on the endangered list (at least not yet). You would get quite a different impression form some quarters.

There were of course comments in the blog that were at first less welcome, if only because they seemed to betray a lack of thought and research. For instance: "Ultimately faith is the knowledge that something is true even though there is not evidence to support it...". There may be faith of this sort out there, but this is not the faith that the Bible writers call for, or that Christian believers exercise. Christian faith is a response to evidence. Yes it is a response that involves, at a certain point, a degree of trust, but that's no different to life in general and science in particular.

Starting with Francis Bacon, Lorch arrives at the conclusion that "without ever realising it, I too have a deeply-seated faith in my own (scientific) belief system." Glory be! Sense at last. Notwithstanding the problems with his definition of faith above,  I welcome his honesty about his own thought processes. The problem is, it's worse than he thinks (if faith being involved in science is a bad thing). One reason for his conclusion is the conviction that in science a thing called "induction" is involved. This appears to be a sound way of moving from observations/facts/results to new knowledge. But it turns out, no one really has an explanation for why it works when it works. But it does appear to work, so he's happy to stick with it, in the absence of convincing evidence. Hence, exercising faith. To be fair, I don't think this mysterious process of induction is why science works, and neither did Medawar (hence his essay on the subject). But there are other foundations on which science rests which we understand even less than "induction" and yet we're prepared to press on regardless. Take two examples: nature's uniformity and the principle of reproducibility.

I beaver away in my lab in Liverpool, collecting and analysing data, finding out stuff about vision and eye movement. Once I've completed a series of experiments, I write them up, and submit them to a scientific journal. The journal organises other scientists to review what I've written, there's usually a bit of back and forth, and eventually the journal agrees to publish my report of my endeavours. If we've all done our jobs, science creeps incrementally and imperceptibly forward, just a bit. We assume that what I've done in Liverpool could be done anywhere else (ie replicated) and as long as I've been honest and accurate) the result will be the same. This is because of the uniformity of nature. The same material and physical forces and processes that operate in my lab in Liverpool, operate in New York, Tokyo or Mumbai. But this uniformity, on which science rests, hasn't been established by some grand experiment, it just "is". It's assumed. But it's fundamental to the whole process. We take it as an article of faith.

And this business of reproducibility is interesting too. Now it turns out that you could replicate my experiments without too much difficulty. It would cost a little bit of money (but not too much because I'm a bit of a cheapskate), some time and a bit of skill. But nothing too taxing. Nevertheless, rather than do this, people are prepared to take on trust that I've done what I've said I've done, and the result are sound. So, rather than repeat my results, they build on them and do something slightly different and new, to make another small advance. But what about an experiment like the one that established the existence of the Higgs boson? That took billions of euros, thousands of scientists, and large chunks of continental Europe. Are we waiting until another Large Hadron Collider is built before we accept the result? No, we take CERN's results on trust. We exercise (reasonable) faith. And, all of this in the presence of what some in science are talking about as the reproducibility crisis; when this type of faith has been abused by the unscrupulous or occasionally outright fraudulent.

My intention is not to undermine science in any way. It's simply to pint our that like most other areas of life, faith is key to it, not incidental. So, a double standard is applied by those who would like to bash my Christian faith, and claim that on the basis of science I must be suffering from some kind of reason deficiency. It turns out I'm neither alone, nor am I deluded. Mark Lorch appears to agree.