Considering the relationship between science and religion…
by Canon Eric Woods
This article appears days before two of the most important annual Christian celebrations. This Sunday is the Feast of Pentecost – Whit Sunday – and a week later comes Trinity Sunday: the realisation by the first Christians that they couldn’t say all that they meant by the word ‘God’ until they had said, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’.
Let’s start with Pentecost. Some years ago I was invited back to my old college at Cambridge, Trinity, to preach the Whit Sunday sermon at Evensong. I must confess to feeling a bit nervous as I watched the Fellows of the College file in for the service, not least when the Master of Trinity (the ‘Head of House’) took his stall. For I was about to preach the story of the first Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples ‘like tongues of fire and a mighty rushing wind from heaven’ – to the Astronomer Royal!
I need not have worried. Lord Rees is a member of the Order of Merit, a past President of the Royal Society, and one of the most distinguished cosmologists and astrophysicists in the world. And he is also a true scientist – that is, someone with an open, ever-questioning mind. As he told me at dinner afterwards, no scientists worth their salt will ever close their minds to the spiritual dimension of life or creation. And those who say that science has the answer to all the mysteries of the universe are simply arrogant. I suspect that Jesus might have called them, as he did the Pharisees, ‘blind guides’.
Lord Rees went further. “True scientists don’t look for proof’’, he said. “If we had to wait for proof, science would never advance. Instead we look for hypotheses that work. And when we have found a working hypothesis, then we build on that to find another, and another. And it seems to me that Christianity doesn’t need proof either. It just needs to demonstrate that it works – and it does.”
I have been fortunate during a career which has been part academic and part pastoral to meet many scientists who know far more about the world and indeed the universe than I ever will – and who find that knowledge a springboard to faith rather than a barrier. The interesting thing is that they have all been people of great personal humility, whereas those who claim that science has ‘disproved’ religion have not only been extraordinarily arrogant: they have not been proper scientists at all. A little reverence before the mysteries of the universe would do them – and all of us – the world of good.
Problems always begin when either religious people or atheists become fundamentalist, and close their minds to the search for truth. That’s what the so-called ‘New Atheists’ have done, as fervent in their dogmas as any religious extremist. You see, the opposite of faith is not doubt. It is certainty. We all need to be a little humbler before the wonders both of the Cosmos and of God. Then we will start to discover the links between the two!
Not convinced that the new King is anymore suitable than the politicians you mentioned. He was unable from the very beginning to uphold his marriage vows & he does not seem to have been a role model as a parent. I read that in the year before Diana’s death he only saw his sons 30 times. How can one respect him?