Science, contemplation, theory, and theology: from Boyle to McLeish

 I really enjoyed watching the 2021 Boyle Lecture, given by Tom McLeish, "The Rediscovery of Contemplation Through Science."

A paper based on the lecture is here. I have extracted a few choice quotes below. 

McLeish suggests that there are four “wrong turns” concerning "science and religion" that occurred with the scientific revolution and the rise of a modernist worldview.

1. (1)  A turn from human contemplation of nature as subjects fully immersed in the world, toward an illusion of perfect objectivity.

2. (2)  A turn from the appreciation of imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, in partnership with reason, to an elevation of reason alone.

3. (3)  A turn from science as a shared cultural experience, to a restricted, professional, and institutional expertise.

4. (4)  A profound misreading of the Book of Nature—that traditional metaphor of the natural world and our epistemological relation to it as “God’s Second Book.” 

5. If we are to understand science theologically, I will propose that we should rediscover how to read the world, not as prose, but as poetry.

He makes a subtle point drawing on his experience working as a theoretical physicist on soft matter. At this point in the video, he gives a physical illustration of this in terms of modeling polymers [molecules that are very long chains of atoms].

1. The glorious paradox is that by negotiating our entropic relationship with the world, by formally knowing less in this way, we can arrange to understand more.

McLeish has discussed the Old Testament book of Job extensively in his wonderful book, Faith and Wisdom in Science. Here he states

1. Job, like modern science, needs a re-orientation in his relationship to an apparently chaotic cosmos more than he needs anything else.

2. In the long question-form poem, Yahweh points Job to his co-creating imaginative task to reach behind the surface of the world, into the ice, out to the star-clusters, onward to light itself. It remains a great pity that mainstream scholarship has tended to interpret this most healing and affirmative of texts as a form of petty divine put-down.

3. The textual encounter of Job, where the Creator, a human image of that Creator, and created nature meet, feeds our task to fashion a theologically conceived framing of science. Surprisingly to those attuned to the old “natural theology,” this re-orientation is entirely opposite to that tradition. It urges us not to look on the natural world for signs of God, nor through it as a window onto some dim divine image, but to learn to look on nature with God’s eyes, aligning our servant gaze with, not at, the divine.