Integrating Christian and academic lives

A wonderful little book, Why Study? Exploring the Face of God in the Academy has just been published by the Fellowship of Evangelical Students in Singapore (IFES).
In each chapter, a Christian academic describes their personal journey as they aim to integrate their Christian and academic lives. Fields covered include history, law, engineering, sociology, biology, ...
Most of the authors are from Asia.
I wrote one of the chapters,  Living as a follower of Jesus and a Physicist. I thank some friends who gave many constructive suggestions on a draft.

The target audience is Christian undergraduates who are beginning their studies.

I welcome any comments on my chapter, bearing in mind the target audience.

I hope this book will stimulate similar ventures from other parts of the world, and for different target audiences. For example, it would be great to see an African version and an Australian version. I would also like to see a version for non-Christian audiences and for faculty audiences.

A critical review of John Lennox's God's Undertaker

Recently I was asked to review John Lennox's book, God's Undertaker: Has Science buried God?
I chose not to because there is already a helpful detailed review by Denis Alexander, former director of the Faraday Institute, published in Science and Christian Belief. He is much better qualified than I to discuss biology. I reproduce the review below.

I agree with the criticisms. I would not recommend the book, particularly because there are much better books available. Some I recommend at the bottom.

 I wish I could give an equally warm recommendation for God’s Undertaker by John Lennox, but this is unfortunately more problematic. This is very much a book in two halves. In the first 75 pages, the author gives a generally good overview of the limitations of science and the fact that science itself is unable to address the really big questions of life, such as why something exists rather than nothing, and why science itself is possible. Lennox points out that science itself was nurtured within a Christian world-view and there is nothing intrinsically ‘naturalistic’ about science, suggesting that the term ‘methodological naturalism’ is unhelpful as a way of describing the scientific enterprise, for all scientific descriptions for the theist are, by definition, descriptions of what God has done and continues to do. The author’s critique of reductionism, presentation of the inherent intelligibility of the universe and discussion of the anthropic principle are well presented, amply illustrated with useful quotes, and contribute to a strong first half of the book. 

It is once the author moves from the physical to the biological sciences in the second half (58% to be precise) of the book that things start to go seriously downhill. Lennox begins to build up a picture of ‘atheistic evolution’ as a purely ‘naturalistic process’ and it soon becomes apparent that it is Darwinism which is the main target. The term ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) is introduced without definition, so it is only as the chapters progress that it becomes clear that the author is using the language of ID in the same way as its US proponents, such as Dembski and Behe. As with these writers, Lennox exaggerates the alignment of the biological theory of evolution with naturalistic philosophy (two very different things), in order to highlight Darwinism as a target for religious attack. The author’s own advice given earlier in the book, to see the whole created order as reflecting God’s design, is somehow lost in this second section, where the possibility that God might choose to bring about biological diversity through the process of evolution, as maintained by those holding to both mainstream science and theology, is oddly ignored. 

Many of the traditional creationist and ID red herrings litter this second section. ‘It can be highly dangerous to think outside the evolutionary box’ (97). Really? I can think of no better guarantee for someone’s future career in the biological sciences than to publish a solid peer- reviewed paper that challenges a cur- rently held theory: it is every scientist’s dream scenario. But to publicise one’s doubts about a well-established theory in any branch of science without the solid backing of good papers in reputable journals is of course dangerous for one’s career, and rightly so, for criticism without evidence or justification is always a risky path to pursue in academia. 

Unfortunately Chapter 7, ‘The nature and scope of evolution’, presents a smorgasbord of misrepresentations and straightforward errors, too long to list here. The peppered moth story has been up-dated by Michael Majerus (2007) and its evolution remains a good exemplar of natural selection in action. The idea of natural selection is not a ‘tautology’, nor is it in the same class as ‘Freudian psychology and astrology’ (102); it is a theory with real explanatory power. Natural selection is not about the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’ (103), but about reproductive fitness, which is not the same. The terms ‘microevolution’ and ‘macroevolution’ are not being ‘increasingly used’ (106); if anything the reverse is the case as the advent of genomics is leading to their decline with the realisation that some species are virtually indistinguishable morphologically but are genetically very distinct (like the worms C. elegans and C. briggsae, which have 800 unique protein- encoding genes each out of their complement of 20,000, and last shared a common ancestor about 100m years ago). Yet the author cites in support of his points on micro/macroevolution rather ancient literature, one (long discredited) citation even dating back to 1942. (107). The fossil data are misrepresented and the ‘model sequences’ of speciation found in the fossil record are far more impressive than the author seems aware: in particular, the evolution of the tetrapods from fish, the evolution of mammals, the evolution of the whale (a mammal that returned to the sea from land via Pakicetus, Ambulocetus and the fossil whale Basilosaurus which retains a complete mammalian hind limb), the evolution of elephants and horses, the evolution of turtles and many other examples besides. Nor in this volume do we hear of speciation in plants by polyploidy; the chromosomal inversions that have led to speciation in insects such as mosquitoes; ring speciation events (as in the Herring Gull and Californian salamanders); nor anything of the remarkable cichlid speciation of the African great lakes. The author even questions common descent, when the inheritance of ‘fossil’ genetic sequences in our genomes in the form of pseudogenes, retroviral insertions and transposons, together demonstrate our own common ancestry with the apes beyond any reasonable doubt. 

The last few chapters of God’s Undertaker are devoted to a discussion of the origin of life and of information. The author is only too aware of the dangers of the ‘god-of-the-gaps’ type of argument, but believes the origin of information to be a ‘gap in principle’ in contrast to a ‘gap in knowledge’. It is not clear why this should be the case. The mathematical arguments presented here in an attempt to demonstrate that the origin of biochemical information is ‘impossible in principle’ are deeply flawed because they are based, like so many of Dembski’s arguments, on the premise that proteins or long stretches of DNA self-assemble by a purely chance process. But no one believes that, so the arguments represent tilting at windmills, the assumption being that the stages leading to living matter occurred incrementally; it is pre- cisely how those incremental changes were preserved and reproduced that rep- resents one of the fascinating research challenges of the origin of life field. Indeed, there have been some remark- able advances in the field over the past decade, though there is no doubt at all there is a huge current gap in our scien- tific knowledge at this juncture. Does that matter theologically? It would seem odd if some theological conclusion hinged upon our current scientific ignorance about something. The author suggests that ‘design’ is the answer, but the answer seems vacuous in explaining any- thing or in generating a research pro- gramme. Perhaps this century, perhaps the next, the knowledge gap will slowly close, and surely Christians should see that ‘closing’ as part of our glad worship to the God who is the author of the whole created order, not as a threat to a poorly founded argument for God’s existence. 

The antipathy to Darwinism that is still displayed by some Christians, even by some academics like the present author, whose book appears to present some form of episodic creationism, is truly puzzling. For as Francisco Ayala points out, there is a great irony in the observation that supporters of ID and creationism agree with writers such as Richard Dawkins that evolution equates with atheistic materialism. It would surely be much more fruitful for people of faith to baptise the evolutionary account of origins into the biblical doctrine of creation, which is, after all, what Christians have been doing since 1859.

A critical review of Lennox's more recent book, Seven Days that Divide the World is here.

So what books would I recommend?
I list some here, in order of increasing level of sophistication.

User's Guide to Science and Belief by Michael Poole

Unnatural enemies: an introduction to science and Christianity by Kirsten Birkett

The Language of God by Francis Collins

Creation or Evolution: do we have to choose? by Denis Alexander

The Science of God by Alister McGrath

A highly creative engagement of science and theology

Tom McLeish is a Professor of Physics at Durham University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Next week, Oxford University Press is publishing his book Faith and Wisdom in Science. It looks like a refreshingly new and constructive approach to exploring the relationship between science and theology. Here is are some of the book highlights from the publisher website.

• Communicates science from within real stories over a timespan of millennia
• Argues that science can be a deeply religious activity
• Takes the most significant Biblical book for science to be Job (rather than e.g. Genesis)
• Takes the most significant science area for thinking about science and meaning/purpose as Statistical Mechanics (rather than e.g. Quantum Mechanics or Cosmology)
• Insists that rather than debating "science and theology" we need both "science of theology" and a "theology of science"
• Readers will be able to use suggestions practically, whether in church, politics or university

McLeish recently gave a seminar, related to the book, at the Faraday Institute. Here is a summary of the talk from Ruth Bancewicz and you can watch it here.

An article in The Conversation puts the book in the context of broader social debates.

I thank Leigh Trevaskis for bringing this to my attention.

Questions for reading Genesis

A home group at our church recently went through the Test of Faith video series. People found it helpful and stimulating.
To follow up this past week we looked at the first three chapters of Genesis.

First we watched an excellent video Science and Genesis from Biologos.
Then we read Genesis 1-3 and discussed the following questions:

How do these chapters describe God?

How do they describe the natural world?

How do they describe humanity?

How do they describe the relationship of God with humanity?

How do these chapters fit into the rest of Genesis?

How do these chapters relate to the rest of the Old Testament?

How do these chapters relate to the New Testament?

What literary genres are present here?
Poetry, history, parable, myth, law, science, journalism, polemic?

What do I learn about thinking and acting in a manner that is pleasing to God?

These questions are adapted from the book of Tremper Longman III, How to read Genesis (IVP, 2005)

Moltmann's journey to Jesus

 Science and Christian Belief has a fascinating article by Jurgen Moltmann, "From Physics to Theology - a personal story". It is based on a Faraday Lecture at Cambridge which you can watch here [Search under Moltmann]. He recounts living in a British POW camp without any hope and feeling shame for what Germany had done.

Then I read Mark’s Gospel as a whole and came to the story of the pas- sion. When I heard Jesus’s death-cry: ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ I felt growing in me the conviction: there is someone who understands you, who is with you in your crying to God, and who felt the same forsakenness that you are living through now. I began to understand the forsaken Christ, because I knew he understood me. He was the divine brother in need, the companion on the way who goes with you through this ‘valley of the shadow of death’, the fellow sufferer who carries you in your pain. I summoned up the courage to live again and was slowly but surely seized by a great hope for God’s ‘wide space where there is no cramping any more’. This perception of Jesus did not come suddenly overnight, but it became more and more important for me. I read the story of the passion of Christ again and again and discovered my little life story in his great story.

Moltmann on science, theology, and the military

The latest issue of the journal Science and Christian Belief has a fascinating and stimulating article by Jurgen Moltmann, "From Physics to Theology - a personal story". It is based on a Faraday Lecture he gave at Emmanuel College (Cambridge, not UQ!) earlier this year. You can watch the lecture here.

Moltmann first gives the very moving story of how as teenager in the German army he ended up in an English POW camp searching for redemption, hearing the Gospel, and starting to read theology. I will post some of that later.

He then moves on to discussing Francis Bacon's notion that "[scientific] knowledge is power". He then makes the poignant observations:

Gaining power was, and is, a modern motive for the exploration of na- ture, but it is a very dangerous one. The twentieth century saw the politicisation of science as fascist and communist ideologies took possession of the sciences. The twentieth century also saw the militarisation of science during two world wars and the cold war that followed. The twenty-first century has brought us the economisation of science. Knowledge is not only power, but profit as well. These interests are alienating pure science from nature. Do we want to know nature for its own sake, seeking truth and correspondence with nature and finding what we have in common with nature? If so, the sciences are better preserved in fellowship with theology, than in the service of politics, economics and the military.                                                                     

Why would a scientist be a Christian?

A group from my church is going through the Test of Faith video series. I think it is an excellent introduction to exploring the relationship between science and Christianity. Much of it is based on interviews with leading scientists who are Christians and some theologians who have backgrounds in science.

The website also has some excellent resources.
I liked this brief interview with Simon Conway Morris (Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology at Cambridge University) about why he is a Christian.

Videos of Faraday Institute lectures and seminars

The latest newsletter from the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge has an interesting and impressive item.

we were amazed to notice that our seminars and lectures, which only began to be posted on the University of Cambridge video and audio web-site a little over a year ago, were viewed 250,983 times during 2011, making us the 7th most viewed entity within the University. See http://tinyurl.com/7a3vvjj for further details. To put this in perspective, there are 92 University Institutions contributing to these outputs, including Cambridge’s 31 Colleges, as well as academic departments and other Institutes. The stats do not include the number of views from our own web-site which is hosted by St. Edmund’s College.

Christianity is not an explanation

The latest issue of Science and Christian Belief has a nice review by Denis Alexander of Terry Eagleton's book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution. The book is a robust critique of the 'New Atheists' Ditchkins [Dawkins+Hitchens] by another atheist, one of the world's leading literary critics [see my earlier post]. I particularly liked this quote from the book that the review mentions:

[Dawkins] also has an old-fashioned scientific notion of what constitutes evidence. Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places, Christopher Hitchens makes much the same crass error, claiming in God Is Not Great that “thanks to the telescope and the microscope, (religion) no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.

Science and religion in the non-western world

This post is partly motivated because in October I will be in India co-teaching two courses for the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Details of the course in Kerala are here. It is my second trip to India and I am looking forward to learning more about how the whole science-religion discussion is framed in a non-western context. My wife has started reading the (secular) book, India: a Portrait by Patrick French [There was a helpful review by Aravind Adiga in the Observer (Guardian)].
French claims (p. 368):

Religion and science never went their separate way s in India in the way they did in Europe in the eighteenth century. There was no intellectual division, because Hinduism was too amorphous to be challenged or threatened by any new scientific discovery. If anything, advances in human understanding of the laws of nature might chime with the abstraction of Hindu philosophy, in which time has no beginning and no end.

I wonder whether the last sentence just reflects western liberal sentiment which sometimes  claims harmony between modern physics and eastern religion (e.g. The Tao of Physics), whereas a hard-nosed examination finds conflict (e.g., the universe did have a beginning and time has a definite direction).
That said, I get the impression that non-Westerners are more open to a spiritual dimension and the existence of God (or gods).

A Christian scientist looks at the challenge of global climate change

On monday night Professor Bob White is giving a public lecture at Emmanuel College
Why care for the environment? The Challenge of Global Climate Change”

The above video features a brief interview with him on the subject. It is interesting that floods are one of the biggest killers in the world and that a one metre increase in sea level will have a devastating effect on Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations on earth.

Bob White is also co-author of the book Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable living.

Can you see the forest or only the trees?

My article Emergence: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is now available on the Test of Faith website.

Can you see the wood for the trees?

I have finished my first draft of the resource article on emergence for Test of Faith.
I welcome feedback.

Article on emergence for Test of Faith

Test of Faith is a major initiative of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge. It consists of an excellent film, book, and course material which discuss the issue of the relationship between science and Christianity. It is particularly oriented for use in small groups in churches. Check it out!

There are additional resources. One of the Short articles is Darwin's Test of Faith: Lessons from a Victorian agnostic by Nick Spencer. It gives a really nice discussion of how the faith that Charles Darwin "lost" with the death of his daughter was a faith based on the rationalistic ordered natural theology of perfection of William Paley which could not entertain suffering in perfection. This is in contrast to a cross-centred faith that involves the suffering of Christ on the cross and is beyond completely rational explanation and understanding.

They have asked me to write a Short article on the issue of emergence. It is meant to be at a basic level, accessible to high school graduates. I worked on it today. Hopefully I will post a draft for comment this week.

Update: the final version is here.

An event I wish I could attend

On Friday 19th November The Faraday Institute at Cambridge has a  public lecture which will take the form of a Public Discussion between the literary writer and critic Professor Terry Eagleton and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on the subject "Responses to the New Atheism."
Eagleton is a prominent atheist who has made stinging critics of the "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins. I wrote an earlier post about him recommending reading the New Testament.

Creation history or creation of a history?

It is popular folklore that 150 years ago in Oxford there was a watershed event in the history of the relationship between science and Christianity: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate about Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species.
At the Polkinghorne 80th birthday conference this week in Oxford we were given copies of two recent articles by the Oxford historian Allan Chapman from the Oxford Magazine, "Monkeying about with History: Remembering the `Great Debate'  of 1860?" and "Aping our Ancestors: how the `Great Debate' of 1860 was invented". [Unfortunately, I cannot find copies online].

The first article notes that there are no surviving records of the actual content of the debate and reviews documents from the period that show that it actually generated little discussion at the time. Hence, it is not clear that it really was a watershed event.
The second article reviews the historical background of the emerging struggle between the "Grand Amateurs" of British science who were often clergyman and privately funded [e.g. Wilberforce and Darwin] how the debate and the new generation of "professional" scientists [embodied by Huxley] who aspired to work in secular institutions and receive government funding for their research. Decades later, for the purposes of the political agenda of the latter camp [embodied in the X-Club founded by Huxley] a mythical version of the debate where science triumphed over religion seemed to have served a useful polemical purpose.

In 2001 John Hedley Brooke, previously Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, at Oxford gave a nice lecture on the same topic at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.


History always seems to be more complicated than we would like to think.

Did theology hinder or help the birth of modern science?

Most scholars, whether Christian or not, would agree that the Christian world view created an environment that helped rather than hindered the birth of modern science.

Alfred North Whitehead was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century. He wrote:

Without this belief, the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is . . . the motive power of research - that there is a secret, a secret which can be revealed. When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of the faith in rationality..... My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, as an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

1925a. Science and the Modern World. (Vol. 55 of the Great Books of the Western World series)

It should be pointed out Whitehead was not a Christian, as discussed in this article. He had no funeral.

I came across this Whitehead quote in Denis Alexander's wonderful book, Rebuilding the Matrix: Science and faith in the twenty-first century. There is a very helpful chapter on The Roots of Modern Science. Hopefully, I will write more on that later...

The painting is by Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury "Galileo Galilei in front of the Inquisition in the Vatican 1632."

McGrath on Calvin and science

Alister McGrath recently gave a seminar at the Faraday Institute for science and religion in Cambridge, Calvin's contributions to the emergence of modern science. He pointed out, it was Calvin’s particular way of handling Scripture that was important in allowing natural philosophy to pursue its exploration of God’s universe without being distracted by the idea that the Bible was given to teach science. As Calvin wrote in his Commentary on Genesis, remarking on Chapter 1:

“Nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.”

You can listen to (MP3) or watch the lecture (streaming) from the Multimedia page of the Faraday Institute.

Test of faith materials available down under

Test of Faith is a new resource (Book, DVD, Study guide, and Leaders Guide) which explores major issues about the relationship between science and Christian faith. It is now available in Australia at Koorong books

A test of faith to be launched at The Royal Society

The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge will launch a new video Test of Faith (the trailer can be viewed here) at The Royal Society London next monday July 13th. The launch will feature a talk by one of the contributors to the documentary Professor Sir John Polkinghorne FRS. Other contributors include Francis Collins, Alister McGrath, and Sir John Houghton.