Theology and its mojo

I noted previously that the great materialist project that dominated thinking about who we are as persons (and much else) may be, in Mary Midgely’s word, “fraying”(Midgley 2014, 14). This is seen specifically in avowedly materialist attempts, emanating from the neurosciences, to give a rigorously physical/material account of our conscious, internal, subjective, first-person states (i.e. mental states), within a materialist metaphysical framework that claims that not only is this doable, but once done there will be nothing left to say about who/what we are. The problem is, the science is basically confused and the metaphysical claims seem suffused with overreach (for reasons discussed here). But might theology (leaving to one side for the moment what is meant by theology) have something to offer in this space?

First, a step back to what seems like a different time (i.e. the last quarter of the twentieth century). Within the broadly evangelical camp, some, like theologian Joel Green and philosopher Nancy Murphy (both influential voices from Fuller Seminary), viewed science, specifically neuroscience (and explicitly in Green’s case Churchlandian neurophilosophy) as having a role in framing their views of human ontology, requiring a degree of reinterpretation of classic theological texts and teaching (Green 2008, 16). Now it is clearly true that neuroscience has an important contribution to make to our self-understanding (particularly with regard to our present embodied state), but they appeared to hand to neuroscience (or particular implications that were argued to flow from it) an overarching authority, allowing it to be an arbiter of what can, and what cannot, be said. This seems to be complimentary to the approach of other materialists/physicalists who went much further and argued that science in general, and with regards to human human ontology that neuroscience in particular, were able to provide, by themselves, a full understanding of who we are, what the universe is, and what our place in it is. Outside theology, there was a reaction to such claims, which were criticised in the general case as scientism, and in the specific case of neuroscience as “neurohype” and “neuromania” (Midgley 1994, 108; 2014, 5; Tallis 2011; Lilienfeld et al. 2017). Another aspect of the reaction is the claim that in the twenty-first century “[w]e are witnessing a resurgence in substance dualism” partly because “promissory materialism” has not delivered an explanation of everything, including consciousness (Rickabaugh and Moreland 2024, 5–6). Given these observations and the “fraying” described by Midgley, might it be that far from being irrelevant and to be eliminated by the materialist project (claims that emanated from scientists like Crick on one hand, and philosophers like the Churchlands on the other), theology is in a position to make a positive contribution?

If theology is to make such a contribution then “it cannot allow its agenda and suppositions to be determined by current theories of mind or brain any more than than by the prevalent sociological, philosophical, or cultural analyses of personhood”; there needs to be clarity “about what is proper to the theological and scientific fields of enquiry respectively” (Torrance 2004, 213,214). This is a view obviously at odds with, among others, Crick, summarised in the final chapter of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” which had the intriguing title of “Dr Crick’s Sunday Morning Service” (Crick 1994, 255–63). Writing of religious beliefs, rather than theology (but in Crick’s view they surely amounted to the same thing), he asserted that “by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable”; “true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong” (Crick 1994, 258). Hardly a recipe for a fruitful dialogue. But some thirty plus years after this was written neither should it be assumed to be representative (e.g. see Rodzeń and Polak 2025 and the various contributions in the Special Issue they introduce).

Theological anthropology developed in a number of ways during the twentieth century and in one interesting respect it is Karl Barth who figures predominantly and whose influence continues to be important (Anderson 1982, 18; Torrance 2004, 207). Barth grounded his anthropology in christology, a move he characterised himself as “deviating from tradition” (see Skaff 2019, 186). Cortez, who examined the mind/brain debate (including Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism) in detail, claimed that “the significance of this christological shift … cannot be overstated. Indeed a growing number of Christian theologians locate modernity’s inability to understand human nature in the fundamentally misguided attempt to derive a complete picture of the human person independently of the perspective provided by the person of Jesus Christ” (Cortez 2008, 4). With regard to Murphy, Cortez notes that there was a movement in the opposite direction, explicitly working from the implications of the mind/brain debate (configured within a framework provided by neuroscience) to christology, with no consideration of movement from christology to anthropology (Cortez 2008, 5; quoting from Murphy 1998, 23).

Christology is, of course, a theological construct, not a scientific or neuroscientific one. It is examined and developed using theological tools and methods. It can of course all become very technical. But this is just as true of modern science. The relative inaccessibility of the cutting edge of where science is at any one time is not taken to provide a reason for it to be dismissed as untrue or unbelievable just because it is only truly accessible to professional practitioners. For those whose expertise is not theological to make claims about theological constructs being intrinsically unbelievable or irrelevant (essentially claims like Crick’s) out of ignorance about appropriate tools, methods, data, history and so on, would be just as ridiculous. But this is what has been going on for a while and has had far more credibility as an approach than it ever deserved.

For those wedded to the conflict metaphor for the interaction between science and theology, as representing inevitably conflicting ways of looking at reality, such developments within theology (like christological anthropology) will simply be taken to indicate the continuation of the conflict. But the conflict metaphor has long been acknowledged by historians of science as a polemical Victorian myth, albeit with some recent popular proponents (Russell 1985; Harrison 2017). Precisely because christological anthropologies spring from theology doing a theological task using appropriate theological methods, the categories involved are distinct from those of neuroscience. But this also means that they can be related to contemporary debates which are usually configured exclusively in terms of neuroscience and brain functions in interesting ways. It is significant that the incarnation (a thoroughly theological concept) has been argued to be compatible with both physicalism and dualism (two very different approaches to the mind/brain problem) by different proponents in the mind/brain debate (Cortez 2008, 5; see footnote 12). But it takes careful work and thought to relate the incarnational and the neural, and much of this work remains to be done. There are other intriguing convergences between christologcial anthropology and developments in neuroscience. In his discussion of “personhood”, Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas argued for the fundamental ontological importance of “a movement of communion”, where ontological identity is to be found “only in a being which is free from the boundaries of the ‘self’”(Zizioulas 1975). This strongly relational view, which both looks back to Barth and is consistent with the work of a long list of key figures in recent theological anthropology, parallels and potentially compliments developments in neuroscience represented by research into “theory of mind” and social cognition both of which stress the relational (Torrance 2004, 208; Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs 2006; Frith 2008). How deep this convergence goes, also requires work and thought.

In gaining a rounded understanding of ourselves, there is clearly an important role for neuroscience to play. It is able provide information from a third-person perspective about the physical brain mechanisms involved in the generation of human experience (now explicitly including conscious experience), how these mechanisms develop, the ways in which they change as we age and about aspects of what happens when eventually our embodied existence fades. But this information is partial not exhaustive, it generates a particular kind of map guiding our self-understanding. Theology has the role of providing another kind of map for some of the same terrain. The challenge is in aligning the different maps, not assuming a priori that one is right and one is wrong (Midgley 2005).

Materialism is fraying, theology is perhaps getting its mojo back. Just as well. There’s work to do.

Anderson, Ray S. 1982. On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology. Eerdmans.

Brüne, Martin, and Ute Brüne-Cohrs. 2006. “Theory of Mind—Evolution, Ontogeny, Brain Mechanisms and Psychopathology.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (4): 437–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.08.001.

Cortez, Marc. 2008. Embodies Souls, Ensouled Bodies. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology. T &T Clark.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Frith, Chris D. 2008. “Social Cognition.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363: 2033–39.

Harrison, Peter. 2017. The Territories of Science and Religion. Paperback edition. University of Chicago Press.

Lilienfeld, Scott O, Elizabeth Aslinger, Julia Marshall, and Sally Satel. 2017. “Neurohype: A Field Guide to Exaggerated Brain-Based Claims.” In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics. Routledge.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Midgley, Mary. 1994. Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and It Meaning. Paperback edition. Routledge.

Midgley, Mary. 2005. “Mapping Science: In Memory of John Ziman.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (3): 195–97.

Murphy, Nancey. 1998. “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues.” In Whatever Happened to the Soul. Fortress Press.

Rickabaugh, Brandon, and J.P. Moreland. 2024. The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contrmporary Substance Dualism. John Wiley and Sons.

Rodzeń, Jacek, and Paweł Polak. 2025. “Introduction to This Religions Special Issue: Natural Sciences as a Contemporary Locus Theologicus.” Religions 16 (8). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081020.

Russell, Colin R. 1985. Crosscurrents: Interactions Between Science and Faith. IVP.

Skaff, Jeffrey. 2019. “Barth on Theological Anthropology.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, 185–96.

Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Acumen Publishing.

Torrance, Alan J. 2004. “What Is a Person?” In From Cells to Souls and Beyond. Eerdmans.

Zizioulas, John D. 1975. “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (5): 401–47

Barely conscious(ness)

You may not have been conscious of it, but big arguments have been swirling around the issue of consciousness (for the example that prompted this post see here). Science had, then didn’t have and now again has big problems with consciousness. You know an argument is in trouble when its starting point is the denial of probably the one thing we are all aware of (at least when we are awake and healthy) – our consciousness. Descartes was so sure of his that he based his philosophy on it (the famous “I think [doubt] therefore I am”). But you might be surprised to learn that for a good chunk of the 20^th century in science, a good chunk of scientists were convinced that either it did it not exist or if it did, it didn’t “do” anything. They were the behaviourists, represented by B. F. Skinner (he of the infamous box). Consciousness was “nothing but” (ie reducible to) behaviour (by which they primarily meant movement) or propensities to behave. Don’t feel any need to understand any this (a notion which clearly assumes some degree of consciousness on your part!), because such views didn’t last long into the second half of the twentieth century. Behaviourist schemes clearly didn’t work, and the starting point was in any case fatally flawed.

But historically there had been an ongoing struggle to accommodate subjective, first-person, mental states (consciousness) within a thoroughly empirical (scientific) approach to our understanding of ourselves. Those devoted to the nineteenth century theory/myth of the conflict between science (good) and theology (bad), didn’t want to provide any space for the immaterial (whether soul or mind – for current purposes assume that both words name the same thing). But not having a satisfying material explanation for what we are all most aware of was a bit of a problem. If claiming that things like mental states did not exist was not viable, what to do? Well, assuming there was a thoroughly material explanation for our private interior self (potentially another fatally flawed assumption), given the powerful new tools of neuroscience such phenomena had to be explicable in terms of what was going on in the brain (that clearly material lump of stuff inside our heads). So there arose an empirical subdiscipline within neuroscience, that of “consciousness studies”.

Writing 10 years ago in the inaugural editorial of the journal “Neuroscience of Consciousness” the editors credited a 1990 paper by Crick and Koch as marking “the rebirth of consciousness science as a serious exercise”(Seth et al. 2015; Crick and Koch 1990). The publication of the new journal reflected “the maturity of this rigorous and empirically grounded approach to the science of subjective experience”. While they themselves made no claim that this was necessarily the only available approach to subjective experience, such a claim had already appeared in Crick’s book, published the previous year (Crick 1994). Crick and Koch claimed in their paper that “Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness” and avoided a “precise definition”. This, along with other knotty issues, was left to one side “otherwise much time can be frittered away in fruitless argument”, implicitly a criticism of what had gone before. Philosophy (and certainly theology) had had its day. It was now over to science to explain the previously inexplicable, even consciousness (see Chemero and Silberstein 2008). This particular body swerve would prove to be costly.

Now, thirty five years on from the “rebirth of consciousness science”, where stands the project that had reached “maturity” ten years ago? Franken and colleagues recently published the results of a survey of consciousness researchers who attended two consecutive annual meetings of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (established in 1994 and later the sponsor of Neuroscience of Consciousness) to investigate “the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research” (Francken et al. 2022). Among the issues they found “a lack of consensus regarding the definition and most promising theory of consciousness” and “that many views and opinions currently coexist in the consciousness community. Moreover, individual respondents appear to hold views that are not always completely consistent from a theoretical point of view”. Lest it be felt that this is a rather slim basis on which to form a view as to the current state of the field, Seth and Bayne (2022) reported in a recent extensive review that “in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished”. They recommended “the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness” . Franken et al (2022) used ten different theoretical constructs in their survey, Seth and Bayne (2022) identified a “selection” of twenty-two “theories of consciousness” (see their Table 1) which they grouped into four broad categories and Kuhn (limiting himself to “materialism” theories) identified fourteen neurobiological theories, to which he added lists of philosophical (N=12), electromagnetic (7) and computational/informational (4) theories (Kuhn 2024). Confused? Well, it turns out the field of consciousness studies is.

An attempt to follow Seth and Bayne’s advice, using a “large-scale adversarial collaboration” to experimentally compare predictions made by two of the major competing theories of consciousness (“global neuronal workspace theory”, GNWT vs “integrated informational theory”, IIT) recently reported results in Nature (Ferrante et al. 2025; see also the accompanying Nature Editorial). The evidence that emerged partially supported and partially challenged both theories. However, the aftermath is more revealing. In response to the preprint and media coverage of the paper (the actual Nature paper was submitted for publication in June 2023, accepted for publication in March 2025 and published in April 2025) a long list of researchers (including recognised leaders in neuroscience) put their names to an open letter on the PsyArXiv preprint server condemning the exercise as flawed, calling IIT “pseudoscience” and objecting to its characterisation as a leading candidate theory for explaining consciousness at all (Fleming, et al. 2023). Proponents of GNWT also called into question the discussion of the results and the conclusions drawn (Naccache et al. 2025). All of this suggests that what flowed from Crick and Koch’s avoidance of a definition of consciousness was basic conceptual confusion. But many had claimed that this was the problem at the time; this was precisely the charge made against the field by the philosopher Peter Hacker not long after its “rebirth” (Bennett and Hacker 2003, 239–44; see also Hacker 2012). Nobody is sure what it is they’re talking about, and even those who do claim to know what they mean usually agree that the have no way of measuring the “it” they are clear about. So the next time you read a headline about “understanding” consciousness, just be aware – we don’t.

It’s not just the state of the specific scientific sub-field of consciousness research that appears to have problems and confusions. Concerns have emerged from within the wider materialist camp. Some more history is in order. The philosopher Thomas Nagel is perhaps best known for his classic paper “What is it like to be a bat?”; with regard to the problem of consciousness, the philosopher Patricia Churchland called this paper a “watershed articulation” (Nagel 1974; Churchland 1996). The problem which Nagel drew attention to was the one left by the demise of the behaviourists; the “subjective character of experience” (the what-is-it-like-to-be-ness) was not captured “by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental”. Materialist accounts of thinking people left something vital out of the account. So he suggested that what was needed were new studies of the subjective and the mental partially answered in subsequent development of consciousness studies described above.

But that was then, what about now? Advances in neuroscience have definitely occurred. With all that  we know now (all those lovely coloured brain scans, snapshots of what goes on while people think), surely a thoroughly materialist account of us, which leaves the concept of the immaterial (be it mind or soul) lying redundant in its wake, is possible? Or at least given such progress, we should be in a position to see clearly how in principal it might be possible. Writing in 2012, Nagel was, if anything, more concerned than he was in the 70’s. Consciousness remained one of the major sticking points causing his concern: “The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been inferred to explain the behaviours of the inanimate world. Something more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking creatures..” (Nagel 2012, 20). And yet his concerns went beyond the existence of (as yet unexplained) consciousness to the wider materialist project: “The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist world picture seem to me to be real”(Nagel 2012, 22). He did not find theism (the “polar opposite” of materialism) “any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view”, but was having a problem trying to imagine naturalistic accounts that were able to accommodate previously excluded elements like consciousness (or purpose, belief, love and the like). He concluded by accepting as conceivable that “the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations” (Nagel 2012, 128). The philosopher Mary Midgley took Nagel’s argument (along with those made by others) to provide evidence that the “credo of materialism” was “beginning to fray around the edges” (Midgley 2014, 14). Things haven’t improved since.

Does any of this matter? On one level, not really. You are still you, even although there is no scientific explanation for you in material terms. At least no one is now claiming that because of the lack of that explanation “you” don’t exist. Fundamentally, of course, I would be argue that science with its third-party, observational statements, which necessarily leave out of the account things like purpose, hope, love, agency and the like (ie things that really matter to us), can only ever provide a partial account of what we are as “persons” (something most scientist are clear about – usually). As Midgley and many others have argued the argument that only science defines or explains important stuff, including what we are as persons, is a monstrous overreach. Such claims are still occasionally made, but this view too is “fraying”.

But there are of course other sources of data, other (complimentary) ways of reasoning, other views of who and what we are as persons (something I touched on previously). If the materialist program is faltering, these need to be heard again. Wonder what (the decidedly immaterial) God thinks?

[PS: I don't normally provide references to the literature in these posts, but as I happened to have them to hand, I thought it would be churlish not to....]

Bennett, Maxwell R, and Peter Michael Stephan Hacker. 2003. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell.

Chemero, Anthony, and Michael Silberstein. 2008. “After the Philosophy of Mind: Replacing Scholasticism with Science*.” Philosophy of Science 75 (1): 1–27. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/587820.

Churchland, Patricia S. 1996. “The Hornswoggle Problem.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 3 (5–6): 402–8.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Crick, Francis, and Christof Koch. 1990. “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness.” 2 (263–275): 203.

Ferrante, Oscar, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin, et al. 2025. “Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.” Nature 642 (8066): 133–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08888-1.

Fleming, S.M, Chris D Frith, M Goodale, et al. 2023. “The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience.” Preprint, PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78.

Francken, Jolien C, Lola Beerendonk, Dylan Molenaar, et al. 2022. “An Academic Survey on Theoretical Foundations, Common Assumptions and the Current State of Consciousness Science.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2022 (1): niac011. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niac011.

Hacker, P. M. S. 2012. “The Sad and Sorry History of Consciousness: Being, among Other Things, a Challenge to the ‘Consciousness-Studies Community.’” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 70: 149–68.

Kuhn, Robert Lawrence. 2024. “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications.” Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 190 (August): 28–169. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.12.003.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Naccache, Lionel, Claire Sergent, Stanislas Dehaene, Xia-Jing Wang, Michele Farisco, and Jean-Pierre Changeux. 2025. “GNW Theoretical Framework and the ‘Adversarial Testing of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theories of Consciousness.’” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2025 (1): niaf037. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaf037.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83: 435–50.

Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Oxford University Press.

Seth, Anil K., and Tim Bayne. 2022. “Theories of Consciousness.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (7): 439–52. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4.

Seth, Anil K., Biyu J. He, and Jakob Hohwy. 2015. “Editorial.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2015 (1): niv001. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niv001

On “Losing my religion”….

I am a mandolin player. Or perhaps more accurately I should say that I play the mandolin. On this side of the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic, mandolin playing is mainly limited to folk music, although across the Chanel it has long been known as a classical instrument (Vivaldi wrote at least two mandolin concertos). In the US the mandolin has a long and treasured place in country and bluegrass music. But as far as I know there is only one rock/pop mandolin riff that is widely known. Back in the ‘90’s R.E.M. had a hit with the song “Losing My Religion” which starts with it. The song and the accompanying video went on to win multiple awards. You might think that the song had something to do with religion. Perhaps a celebratory atheistic anthem of its newly recognised irrelevance or a wistful retrospective of a now forgotten childhood heritage. But apparently not. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe who wrote the lyric has said that it was actually about unrequited love: “..what I was pulling from was being the shy wallflower who hangs back at the party or at the dance and doesn’t go up to the person that you’re madly in love with and say ‘I’ve kind of got a crush on you, how do you feel about me?’”. Doesn’t take away from the brilliant mandolin riff of course. In any case it turns out religion isn't quite what you might think.

That’s interesting because it often isn’t. The meanings given to the word have changed over time, as often happens. And even if there really is a thing being labelled (in the sense that we also give names to non-things like purple spotted unicorns) this is also likely to change through time and and over space (i.e. being different in different places and spaces). So it is sometimes genuinely difficult to know what is meant when we talk (or even sing) about religion, lost or otherwise. There is nothing new or unique in this; try looking up the etymological history of “nice” – you’ll be surprised. Even broad categories used to identify obvious and necessary boundaries turn out in some important cases to be recent innovations that are neither obvious nor necessary. The rhetorical drawing of contrasts is therefore also tricky. The idea that the categories of “natural” and “supernatural” have always been with us, and we’ve always been clear about what these categories are, crops up in many debates. Indeed it is the supernatural, as distinct from religion or God, that was Dawkins’ main target in “The God Delusion”. He clearly thought he knew what he meant, and that his readers did too.

But the categories of natural and supernatural are relatively recent. And around them there has been more than a little myth-making particularly once they transformed into “-isms” claimed to competing with each other. This particular framing (although not the words themselves) appeared late on in the 19^th century promoted by, among others, T.H. Huxley. Huxley and his ilk then read these categories back into history. Promising (in their terms) pre-Socratic philosophers were identified as being early stalwarts taking their plucky stance against surrounding supernatural beliefs and religious practices. A line of heroes was then traced through that most influential of ancient philosophers, Aristotle. And so down to contemporary debates where science, rationality and naturalism were pitted against religion, faith and supernaturalism, with the implication that we all know which side of the line we (and the intellectual greats of the past) must stand. Except it was never thus and is not so now.

The Greek philosophers, of all schools and stages, were clear that the divine was involved with all aspects of human life and thought, whether for good or ill. For them, “natural” inevitably implied, among other things, divine activity. And Greek science (a much wider activity than what is meant in English by the word today) showed little sign of progress or development away from such notions. Arguably it was actually the rise of Christianity which in some of its forms began to remove the divine from many of the areas of life it was formerly thought to inhabit. Many of the innovators who began to give science the form it has today, from Bacon on, made no great distinction between their thinking as scientists (not a word they would have understood in our sense) and theological thinking. Investigating the world with the tools available was an investigation of the works of God. The success of science  was, to many, not the success of naturalism in the face of supernatural resistance, but actually progress in illuminating and understanding the works of the Creator. No contest here. But something does thereafter seem to have been lost.

A broadly Biblical understanding of everything there was and is was what led to (or at least was the context of) the development of science as we know it today. But a catastrophic narrowing of science seems to have taken place, particularly as it became professionalised and institutionalised. The historian Peter Harrison recently put it like this “Whereas the sciences are sometimes said to be based in curiosity, from the mid-twentieth century that curiously rarely extended to fundamental questions about the metaphysical foundations of science or the intelligibility of the natural world” (Some New World, p328). As a matter of history those “metaphysical” foundations were thought to be Biblical by the majority of the practitioners from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It was Huxley and others, relatively recently, who set up various false antitheses. And they were then highly successful in evangelising for this particular view of our intellectual and scientific history. Once constructed in their terms, loosing the supernatural, indeed losing religion, was not the loss of anything of value. Indeed, it was seen as a necessary and progressive step.

The problem is that we are now living with the consequences of this loss of “who knows what”. And it actually turns out that the most serious consequences are not for religion (in the modern sense) as much for science, politics and culture. Religion appears to be going from strength to strength all over the world. But particularly in Western Europe and the US, wistful noises are now being made in the oddest of corners for what has been lost. And science itself seems particularly to be suffering. 

So if you thought REM was celebrating the loss of religion in the sense of losing the religious, think again. And even if you had been right, it would probably not be something worth celebrating.

All at sea….

One of the more provocative and influential TV series produced about “religion” was aired by the BBC back in 1984. "Sea of Faith" was presented by an Anglican priest and academic, Don Cupitt, who died in January at the age of 90. It was part personal travelogue detailing a journey from orthodox belief to technical atheism and part historical romp explaining (and in some ways excusing) that very journey. Cupitt argued that the journey was inevitable, and he had felt personally compelled to undertake it, but it paralleled one that had been undertaken by society generally. One of the implications (actually explications in large measure) was that for Christian belief either in its individual or collective forms (i.e. the church) to survive in the modern world it had to change out of all recognition. Because, as it turned out, God didn’t exist (and had never existed) as an objectively real being, Jesus was (merely) a great and inspirational teacher (but obviously couldn’t be God), and religion, particularly Christianity, was simply a system of human ethics (rather like other systems of human ethics). I watched the series at the time – I had just embarked on my own journey as a PhD student. Candidly, I wasn’t impressed. Or rather perhaps I should say I wasn’t impressed with the argument (such as it was) and conclusions. Cupitt, as may of his obituaries have noted, was “a charismatic lecturer..an engaging speaker”; “a kind and encouraging teacher” who “never spoke an uncharitable word”. And in both his approach and conclusions he was neither alone not unique. His theological thrust was a familiar one from many whose thinking developed in the 60s and 70s. It was similar in many ways to that of Jon Robinson (of “Honest to God” fame) and David Jenkins (he of “more than a conjuring trick with bones”). Both were, interestingly, like Cupitt (until 2008), members of the Church of England. But rather than slip into Monty Python parody mode (“what’s the Church of England ever done for us?”), I got to wonder whether a misunderstanding of science might have been partly responsible for Cupitt's undoing.

I was intrigued to learn that, like others in theology (Alistair McGrath comes to mind), Cupitt initially set out to study science, originally studying “Natural Sciences” at Cambridge from 1952 to 1954. Science seems to loom large in bringing about the secularisation of (mainly) western thought as well as being a (the?) major reason why orthodox belief is no longer intellectually justifiable. But what he seems to have missed is that science and Christian belief were not seen as competitors by most actual practitioners of science until relatively recently. And the idea that there is an outright conflict between them is now accepted to be an invention of the late nineteenth century. It is mainly because the teaching of science in the English speaking world is so devoid of taking time to set it properly in its historical and philosophical context (to the detriment of many a science student and the scientists that they become) that we’ve had to endure the likes of the New Atheists and their ilk. It may be that Cupitt, having had a similar number perpetrated on him, was directed down what appears to be a false trail ending in the cul-de-sac of atheism. And the influence this then has on his approach to theology is to put him firmly in the camp of the capitulators, those who believe that in the light of the “triumph” of science, theology has to completely redefine its terms of trade. Because science, as it is legitimately practised, only deals in naturalistic and material categories, these are the only ones that are available to theology too. The problem is that theology’s object of study is (or should be) the infinite, immaterial God and his doings in the world. Something had to give. Many in theology seemed to decide, without too much argument, that what had to give was God, or at least anything like the orthodox teaching about God, as revealed in Scripture, debated and developed over 1800 years of providentially guided Christian thought.

To my mind this misunderstands and miss-states science, and it is an abuse of theology (and theologians ought to stop doing it). When I embarked on an experiment in my previous incarnation as a professional scientist I did so by seeking evidence to support or refute my current provisional explanation for the current object of study. In a recent series of experiments for example, the evidence in question was specific data (eye movement timings and such) collected in specific circumstances (the experiment). I was not after any kind of ultimate explanation of everything, and as in any experiment completely ignored lots of interesting phenomena that weren’t the focus of the experiment. In this particular experiment I was interested in a specific aspect of eye movement behaviour, but not really the personal motivation of my participants (beyond the £10 they received for participating). In a different experiment their motivation could have been the focus, but not in this particular one. Neither, as a scientist who is a Christian believer, was I pretending to be uncovering the activity of God in sustaining the particular part of His universe I was investigating, even although I believed (and still do) that He has revealed that He was active in precisely such a way. But neither my hypothesis (the provisional explanation I was investigating) nor my tools were appropriate for examining or explaining the mechanism of His sustaining activity. In fact I do not and did not posses such tools, but based my belief on His revealing the fact of His sustaining activity in His Word. To that extent my belief, like my science, was based on evidence albeit a different kind of evidence obtained in a different way. But there was no clash between these two different aspects of what was going on inside my head as a Christian scientist.

In my view the explanations generated by my particular experiment (to do with the measurement of how we stop ourselves doing things) were valid and useful. Whether this is really true will be demonstrated (or not) by the work of others and until then may be taken on trust or not. What they do not and cannot do is somehow trump what God has revealed about doing or not doing things; that’s a completely different box of frogs. To jump from the very limited perspective of the naturalistic explanations of science and claim that now theological explanations derived from revelation are overthrown is ridiculous. They are different approaches, even when applied to the same phenomena in this one material world.

Time has moved on since Cupitt’s TV series, and there is some evidence theology is getting its own mojo back. Some of the weaknesses of science as a human activity have come more into view (and that’s even before it is misapplied). Cupitt, who was clearly highly educated, intelligent and talented (and for all I know a really nice bloke), should have been able to work out that theology had its own domain and task. Dialogue with, not the hegemony of, science was what was required. But he didn’t get it and it left him all at sea.