Doing Science for God Tom McLeish in Scripture Union Encounter with God Notes Oct-Dec 2015
Jackie stood at the front of church, eagerly answering the minister’s questions about her coming gap year. A trainee placement at a Christian medical mission overseas had excited the interest of the congregation, who had asked Jackie for regular prayer letters and also promised support. Her friend Jill sat towards the back, listening. Like Jackie, she had been a faithful member of the church youth group for many years and was also about to leave to take up new challenges – in her case a degree course in physics at a university, for which she had worked really hard. She wondered if the same invitation to share her life’s new chapter with the church would ever come. Perhaps next week?
Of course Jackie is going to do something just as wonderful as Jill, and of course not all churches are as choosy about how they validate their young peoples’ callings – but I daresay that for some this exposes a sore place in our theology and practice. Do we really see science as potentially valid a Christian calling as mission service? If not – then why not? Is it because we see it as a threat? When so many of the shrill attacks on Christian belief from the so-called New Atheists are made in the name of science, it is perhaps hard not to worry that science is itself to blame. Yet many of today’s scientists are believers, and the origins of modern science were strongly, indeed explicitly, based on a Christian worldview. As a scientist and a Christian myself, I have often wondered why the church seems to have forgotten this, quietly parking it in the pew next to Jill.
Christian Thinking about Science
Getting a Christian mind around science in our churches is important. We need pastorally to affirm people like Jill (and her professors!) and also to tackle the apologetic work that refutes the outworn narrative that science and Christian belief are in conflict. We also need a grasp of science if there is to be a wise Christian voice in our public and political challenges. New technologies, energy, medicine and global sustainability need serious public discussion with a strong ethical foundation. Nuclear energy? Genetically modified food? What do we think? How do we begin to think in a biblically informed way?
Nature in the Bible
Part of our problem is that particular sections of the Bible seem to have become exclusively pinned to the science-religion corner. Our attention is repeatedly directed, for example, to conflicted interpretations we have heard around the creation story of Genesis 1. – but how many of us have had teaching on, or have seriously studied, the creation stories of Proverbs 8, or of Psalms 33 and 104? Have we wondered why the great prophets Jeremiah (in ch 10) and Isaiah (in ch 40) refer to the structures of the created natural world to sound their warnings or trumpet their hopes? Have we noticed just how often mountains, trees, the earth’s teeming life, clouds, storms, lightning, jewels and metals from beneath the ground and the stars above – are called on over and again as the biblical authors are inspired to tell the story of creation, salvation and how to be God’s people? Have we taken to heart what Paul might be thinking of when in Romans 8 he insists that ‘the whole creation has been groaning’ 8.22 towards its liberation from decay? There is a lot of Bible writing about nature and our place in it.
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Where is the realm where heat is created, which the sirocco spreads across the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrent of rain, a path for the thunderbolt? ...
Who cuts a channel for the torrent of rain, a path for the thunderbolt? ...
I have found the Old Testament wisdom books especially helpful in getting to grips with the purpose behind what I am doing as a scientist. As I read, it dawned on me that the question we ought to be asking is not so much, ‘is there a way to reconcile theology and science?’ as ‘what is the Bible’s theology of science?’ It isn’t a historically confused question, for the notion that science is confined entirely to the modern era is one of our damaging misunderstandings. I prefer to think of ‘science’ as the name we give to the current chapter of a story we find ourselves in, one that has many previous chapters that tell the tale of our God-given project to understand and work with creation.
Questions in Job
The sparkling summit of biblical wisdom-writing about nature has to be the Lord’s answer to Job (Job 38–42). I often suggest to scientist friends that they read this ancient poem of questions, questions, questions...
Where is the realm of the dwelling of light, and as for darkness,
where is its place?
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Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?
Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail,
Or have you seen the arsenals of the hail,
They usually return delighted with its beauty and by its use of questions to take the reader on a tour though the phenomena of light, weather, astronomy, geology, zoology, botany and more. For scientists know that formulating the really creative questions is much more important and imaginative than finding the right answers. The context of God’s long-awaited speech to Job is important too. Job’s complaint is that he has been treated unjustly – and that God is as out of control of moral law as he is of the chaotic cosmos of storms and floods. The Lord’s answer points Job, and us, to the world’s wildness.
Like the best teachers, God leads his pupil to think things out for himself. He puts Job (quite astonishingly) in the place of creating a universe and asks him how he would command a living universe rather than a calm, but dead, one. The swirling waters and jagged lightning put me in mind of some of the science I do, where the most delicate structures of order (such as cell membranes) emerge in a self-assembled way from a completely chaotic seething jumble of molecules in motion.
A Lesson from Bede
In a typical week I pass through Durham Cathedral on my way from one university department to another. I invariably think there of the Venerable Bede, whose tomb lies in the west-end chapel. Famous for writing the first post-Roman history of England, this extraordinary and devout Christian scholar of the seventh century also wrote a wonderful science book, On the Nature of Things. He explained why he wanted to give his students such an account of the heavens, the earth and its contents. Bede’s purpose was that they might not be frightened or ignorant of nature, or impute supernatural motivations to natural hazards, but instead that they understood that God had in wisdom created the world with its own internal operations.
This little book, written so long ago, helps to interpret the even more ancient nature wisdom of Proverbs or Job, for it reminds us to see the biblical story of creation and salvation in terms of relationship. If Paul can summarise our calling as ‘the ministry of reconciliation’, 2 Cor 5:18 then perhaps our task when we do science is to contribute to the reconciliation of humankind and the natural world. Like all damaged relationships, it starts from a position of ignorance and fear – with a potential to harm and be harmed – but it should not stay that way, any more than relationships between nations should. Turning from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge, from fear to understanding and from exploitation to fruitfulness sounds like the task of the kingdom to me.
It suggests how science can serve in our own ministry of reconciliation.
