Decades ago, when I initially began writing about science, I would often ask the scientist I occurred to be quizzing no matter whether he or she believed in God. (I possibly began reading Richard Dawkins at about the identical time). I stopped performing so fairly quickly, since a surprising quantity of distinguished researchers cheerfully volunteered that they had been active Christians with a part within their churches.
I should not have been shocked. At that time, people today who never ever usually gave religion a thought still got married in a church, sang carols at Christmas and were buried by a vicar. There have been bibles in each hotel space. A lot of of us went to church schools, not due to the fact they were “better” schools but mainly because they were there. We learned about metaphysical poets and physical chemistry and the four gospels and Charles Darwin and believed absolutely nothing of it.
Newton and Faraday were additional than typically devout readers of the scriptures, there was a long English tradition of the cleric-experimenters and vicar-naturalists and Einstein invoked God even when he didn’t believe in him. Religion was an inertial force: it was just there, like football and Shakespeare
As Tom McLeish points out in this wealthy, crowded and discursive book, there are a multitude of historical, cultural and anthropological reasons to explore science and theology as aspect of a single cultural “city”. He doesn’t acquire the argument that religion is about turning untested belief into truth: science, he points out, also makes claims that turn out to be false. “Good science is arguably about being false in a constructive way that requires us nearer to truth.”
In Faith and Wisdom in Science, McLeish delivers a picture of science as a questioning discipline nested inside a a great deal older, wider set of queries about the world, as represented by the searches for wisdom and a superior understanding of creation in the books of Genesis, in Proverbs, in the letters of St Paul, in Isaiah and Hosea but most of all in that excellent hymn to earth program science recognized as the Book of Job.
For those who haven’t opened Job not too long ago, this is the story of the wealthy man topic to an experiment staged by God and Satan: an oligarch who loses his camels, his cattle, his tents, his young children and his servants and ultimately the integrity of his personal skin. Job sits on a dung heap, covered with boils, and debates his condition with a set of disputing comforters who inform him it is possibly all his own fault. God, concealed in a whirlwind, puts in an look with some cogent questions, some of them about the meteorology of the Middle East.
McLeish makes use of a new translation but I quote from the Authorised Version:
Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath engendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?
Whoever wrote these lines was considering as significantly about the hydrological cycle as about poetry or theology. McLeish’s achievement is to show that these and quite a few other verses reflect a tension in between chaos and order that underpin all sorts of phenomena investigated by contemporary science, which includes of course meteorology, but also cometary ellipses, pendulums, gels and jellies, the crystallisation of snowflakes, earthquakes, hourglasses, dunes and the force chains in a pile of sand.
“The precise pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding each living cell in the realm of biology … all this beauty and order becomes each attainable and predictable for the reason that of the chaotic world underneath them,” he writes, and considering the fact that he is a soft matter physicist as nicely as pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of Durham, he need to know.
So for him (and for me) Job becomes not just a sublime contemplation of life’s discomfort and beauty but also a excellent opening statement of all the glorious puzzles of the planet, the solar technique and the distant stars. It isn’t science as we know it now. But it poses all the inquiries that scientists now discover.
McLeish has no patience with Young Earth Creationists and other people today in “the dark cells of ignorance” who think the bible provides a story that is actually accurate. Even so, this 267-page book is not necessarily straightforward to read. I named it wealthy and crowded: in just a couple of pages he discusses the arguments against religion by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Peter Atkins and Christopher Hitchens he invokes Tom Paine, the poet Keats and the old argument by Bryan Appleyard that science is somehow dehumanising he considers the debate in between CP Snow and F R Leavis about the “two cultures” a lecture by George Steiner and the famous hoax by Alan Sokal, the American physicist who composed some academic gobbledegook and got it published in a severe sociological journal.
He examines Gregory, the 4th century bishop of Nyssa and his sister Macrina, the Venerable Bede of the 8th century in Jarrow, and Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln in the 13th century, all of whom posed scientific concerns. “First, performing science is incredibly old,” says McLeish. “Second, performing science is a deeply human activity … actual science can take place at an elderly woman’s bedside, in a medieval bishop’s residence and on a sailing ship anchored by Van Diemen’s land just as substantially as in a modern university laboratory.”
He has a lot to say about Brownian motion, peptide molecules and the strange behaviour of jelly also about science education, government policy, academic pressures, the public understanding of science, the differing demands and rewards of science and technologies, the invocation of Frankenstein and Pandora’s Box as metaphors for scientific discovery, and the often distorting stories we inform ourselves about science and scientists.
These involve the tips that scientists are “messing with nature” and that scientists make up a priesthood intent on maintaining the rest of us in the dark. No a single can accuse McLeish of messing with nature, or of keeping any of us in the dark. Some will find the book too crowded, practically indigestibly so. My guidance is: take it slowly. It has a lot to present.
Tim Radford’s geographical memoir The Address Book: Our Location in the Scheme of Points is published by Fourth Estate
