Slaying the Dragons

Destroying myths in the history of science and faith

Allan Chapman

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745957234
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Are science and faith, particularly Christianity, inevitably in conflict, as the New Atheists proclaim? Have they not always been so? Weren't early scientists hounded for their discoveries until Darwin burst on the scene and sent faith packing? Not if you look at the facts, says Dr Allan Chapman, who teaches the History of Science at the University of Oxford. History shows us that Galileo was not the victim of Church persecution - nor did Huxley 'win' the debate with Wilberforce. Drawing on contemporary sources, Dr Chapman proves that the history of science and of faith always have been closely intertwined. From the leading scientists of medieval times, many in Holy Orders, to the seventeenth-century Popes who maintained an astronomical observatory in the Vatican, to the Christian people of science today, science and faith have grown up together.

1

Myths, Monotheism, and the Origins of Western Science

For much of the twentieth century, and especially since the 1960s, the Judeo-Christian faith, and Christianity in particular, have been under increasing assault. This assault has come from several directions: from particular interpretations of scientific progress; from certain styles of radical politics, often based on social science presuppositions; from fashionable philosophers and social pundits; and, by the late 1990s, from the media. And one of the great ironies is that while Great Britain has an established church, the Christian faith has become a thing of ridicule and mockery in many circles. National Health Service Trusts have suspended nurses who would not remove crucifixes hanging around their necks, and bed-and-breakfast hotel proprietors and experienced foster parents are threatened with prosecution because they will not countenance certain practices condemned in parts of the Scriptures or permit them to be performed on their private premises (yet a blind eye is not infrequently turned to the customs and practices of non-Christian religions). Indeed, several law-abiding Christians have mentioned to me that if they should utter the word “Jesus” or “Christ” in any context other than that of a joke or a blasphemous expletive, they feel that they would be exposing themselves to accusations of being fundamentalist, narrow-minded, out-of-date, or stupid.

For do not the fashionable “New Atheists” – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, et al. – (so styled by present-day journalists to differentiate them from the Old Guard of atheists, such as Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley) constantly remind us that Christianity is a thing of the Dark Ages; that “science” and “reason” have swept its superstitions away, and that sociology, psychology, neurology, and most of all evolution, have delivered us from such bondage? And as our secular political leaders and promoters of “multiculturalism” constantly tell us, do we not now live in a free, open, equal, rational, and transparent global village society? A society so tolerant that every creed and belief must be respected and lovingly nourished as an expression of our natural goodness – unless, of course, that creed comes from the Holy Bible!

This monumental double-think – a double-think of Orwellian proportions – constitutes one of the biggest myths of the age in which we live: a myth that derives its style of thinking from perversions of scientific thinking, in which the absolutism of Newtonian mechanics is combined with the dogmatic determinism of neo-Marxism, and the directionless moral vacuity of postmodernism.

Indeed, these myths, which form so much of the social geography of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have become so pervasive across much of Western society that many people regard them as natural and unquestioned aspects of modern thought. I remember in my youth, in the late 1960s, being peddled stories of how the free modern world only came into being when brave souls such as Copernicus, Galileo, and the philosophers of the “Enlightenment” had the courage to “stand up” to the church – and often paid dire penalties. Of how poor Charles Darwin had been vilified for daring to present the scientific fact that we all came from monkeys. But as a natural sceptic as far as intellectual fashions go, who has always had a fascination with the nature of myth-making, I became increasingly inclined to treat these socio-myths with caution. As I shall show more fully in Chapter 11, I have always felt that anti-religious scepticism, as a universally lauded instrument of analysis, must itself be regarded sceptically.

But it was when I became an academic science historian that the mythic status of science’s secular, liberal, and liberated roots became glaringly obvious. This first became obvious in my reading. Then, as I began to teach, deliver public lectures all over Great Britain and America, and broadcast, the avalanche of mythology really hit me. For there is nothing like questions from the floor following a large lecture or a public discussion, where the world and his wife are free to put you on the rack and throw their mental brickbats at you, to reveal the sheer magnitude of the mythology that passes for “the conflict between science and religion”. Comments such as “How can an intelligent person believe all that stuff about God and miracles?”, or “As everyone knows, until the Enlightenment the church held science back”, come to me with monotonous regularity.

And this is what has led me to write this book, for reading apart, pretty well every chapter or sub-chapter between these covers is based on matters that have been raised with me by tutorial students, members of the public following lectures, in private communication, or by people who have engaged me in conversation on train or bus journeys. For the subject of religion and its relationship with science is a topic of growing fascination, to Christians, to secularists, and to puzzled folk who don’t know what to think, who stand in awe of the power of science, but who find atheism cold and dead. Without doubt, the passionate, and often virulent, writings of New Atheists, extending from Richard Dawkins back to Bertrand Russell, have been instrumental in fomenting this interest. And while perhaps not read so widely, or evangelized so forcefully, as those of the “New Atheists”, the claims and statements of numerous Christian fundamentalists (that is, strict biblical literalists, especially in their interpretation of Genesis and their rejection of evolution) during the latter half of the twentieth century have also added fuel to the flames of religious assault on the one hand and defence on the other, resulting in bafflement for large numbers of people.

But as I became more interested in the science and religion scrum – for it rarely rises to the orderliness of a “debate” – in the late 1980s, one thing came to grate on my historian’s sense of fact and context time and time again, namely, the proliferation of myths, confabulations, and downright untruths that flew with ever increasing intensity, especially from the New Atheists, against Christian believers. This urban folk mythology or fairy-tale culture of atheism and secularism is the stuff about which this book is written: it is the monstrous regiment of dragons that have to be slain if ever we are going to see science and Christianity in context. Myths as groundless as the one which vehemently affirms that science could only progress once the gargantuan power of “the church” had been successfully challenged and overthrown; and its partner in secularist mumbo-jumbo which asserts that all true scientists must be atheists, for surely a rational scientist cannot believe in God – an assertion still clung to in the teeth of the stark fact that high-profile Nobel Prize Laureates, Fellows of the Royal Society, British scientific knights and dames, and many scientific professors sincerely practise the Christian faith. Indeed, it is such men and women, of differing degrees of eminence, yet all possessing high-powered scientific qualifications, who constitute the membership of such bodies as Christians in Science and the Society of Ordained Scientists (I have had the honour to lecture to both), or are active in the ordained or lay ministry of the Anglican, Methodist, Roman Catholic, or free churches. Jesuits, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Quakers, you name it: you can find highly qualified scientists in their ranks or even in their pulpits. So one pair of myths bites the hard rock of demonstrable evidence early in the story!

Yet I can hear people saying, why are you only talking about Christianity and science? What about other religions? Two factors have to be considered in answering this question. First, the New Atheists are generally careful about which religions they target for the outpouring of their bile. Yes, there is endless ranting against American-based fundamentalist groups, and a constant harping on about the “Monkey Trial” at Dayton, Tennessee, in 1926, with the “by association” flow of ideas intending to imply that Christianity equals anti-evolution, equals biblical fundamentalism, equals anti-science, equals the “Dark Ages”. Yet, at least in legally “multicultural” Great Britain, they are often surprisingly reticent about other religions: scarcely a squeak against Judaism (as opposed to criticisms of the State of Israel), from which Christianity springs, and only rather circuitous generalities against Islam (although, in fairness, Sam Harris and others in America and Michel Ornay in France are more blunt in their opinions of non-Christian faiths). I wonder why this should be so? Could it be analogous to the courage displayed by a well-fed household pussycat relishing play with a cornered mouse, as opposed to the blind terror experienced by the same pampered pussycat when faced with a hungry wolf? Hit one faith, and it obediently apologizes and dutifully goes down; hit another, and it bites back!

But in talking about science as it grew up within the territories of Christian Europe, we have to look plainly and impartially at where that approach to understanding the natural world which we now call “science” actually comes from. For its roots are four-square in the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian cultural tradition. I have long argued, live, in print, and on television, that science as we know it stems from monotheism.

The Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, Polynesian, Chinese, and Meso-American cultures all built up complex and sophisticated systems for making sense of the natural world as they understood it within the context of their environments. All of them developed sophisticated systems of counting, classifying, and recording natural phenomena and celestial–terrestrial correlations, either for calendrical purposes or to arm themselves against future storms, famines, plagues, or political overthrow. Yet all of these cultures were polytheistic, seeing the sky, planets, wind, water, agricultural fruitfulness, or earthquake as the province of the individual members of a pantheon of spirit beings who between them made life good or bad for humanity. Understanding the natural world to an Egyptian or a Chaldaean in 2000 BC, therefore, lay in negotiating one’s way through the erratic behaviour patterns of a large dysfunctional family of spirits who would get you if you put a foot wrong. If, for example, you failed to offer the right sacrifices, or perform the correct rituals, at the ordained time. However much you might record the risings and settings of the stars, or list eclipses, comets, or falling stars, and however much you described the habits of plants, animals, birds, or diseases, this is not what later ages would consider scientia, or organized knowledge. It was, rather, record-keeping for liturgical purposes, or perhaps practical purposes, such as land measurement, administrative efficiency, or commercial reckoning. “Nature” was not conceived of as having an independent existence, but was, rather, an expression of many fickle deities in action, and could suddenly change at the failure of a sacrifice or the omission of a ritual.

Of course things were not much better in Homeric Greece around 1000 BC, where mere humans could easily become the victims of that pack of eternally misbehaving self-indulgent divine brats who lived on Mount Olympus. Profound changes took place in Greece, however, between the days of Thales and Pythagoras, from around 600 BC, to the death of Aristotle in 322 BC. Perhaps this came about through the complex geography of Greece, with its many scattered mountain, island, and valley city-state communities, which made it far less centralized and easily controlled than were the great river flood-plain empires of the Nile, Euphrates, or Indus, where government tax collectors or squads of soldiers could easily enforce the will of the officialdom along an arterial waterway. Certainly, trade organized by independent merchants (as opposed to by the king) across the Mediterranean and the Black Seas generated much more purely private wealth than one found in Egypt or Babylon. Such travel in pursuit of profit taught you about all sorts of things that a river- or desert-dweller would never encounter, such as winds, sea and ocean currents, odd meteorological phenomena, and all manner of strange living creatures. Oceanic travel also taught you that the land disappeared once you got a few miles out to sea, and mysteriously reappeared as you approached your destination, suggesting that you might be sailing around a curve or sphere. Different stars could be seen if you were trading off the south of what would later be called France than if you were off Egypt, while a solar eclipse seen at 9 a.m. in Spain would be seen at noon in Greece, adding to the idea of a round earth, a round sky, and, perhaps, different time zones, in contrast to the flat earth and sky cosmology of Egypt or Mesopotamia.

The geographical isolation of the regions of Greece probably led to a greater cultural individualism. It is not for nothing that the Greeks invented “civic society” and “public consciousness” in the city-state, of which there were well over 158 in Greece by the time of Aristotle.

I would argue that it was from this dynamic cauldron of circumstances that the leisure, thinking space, and resources emerged out of which the arts and sciences were born in Greece. Geometry, after Thales and Pythagoras, opened up a dazzling world of eternal and apparently unfalsifiable truths – such as the properties of triangles, circles, and prime numbers, and the elegant curves that resulted when you cut a cone into angled slices, to produce the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola. Likewise, there was the analysis of the perfect, harmonious proportions in a musical sequence, first studied by Pythagoras, along with the intellectual certainty and elegance of conceptual mathematics (as opposed to mere counting). And then, one encounters that whole raft of philosophical ideas that led to people discussing and analysing the abstract yet immediately recognizable concepts of truth, beauty, justice, reason, and deductive logical propositions. And rather like in our Western civilization today, deriving as it does from that ancient ancestry, much of this was a product of free “market forces”: people with commercially derived cash in their pockets wanting to educate their sons (thereby encouraging teachers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle), patronize painters and architects, improve the amenities of their city, or laugh at a comedy by Aristophanes.

But what, you might ask, has this interpretation of classical history to do with science, religion, and mythology today? Everything, I would respectfully argue, for out of Greece came the social practice of well-funded creative leisure, a necessary preliminary to having the mental space and the freedom to ask questions, challenge orthodoxies, think your own thoughts, and do your own thing – at least, if you were free, a man, and a comfortably off voting citizen of a city-state. And yes, that might have been narrow by modern-day standards of freedom, but it was a lot better than spending your life quarrying granite for Pharaoh or digging irrigation ditches for the priests of Babylon.

And very significantly for future religious thinking, some Greek philosophers, such as Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, were asking by the fifth century BC whether there might be a higher power beyond the gods of Olympus. It was not personalized, but rather some kind of organizing power or principle of order, which might have something to do with why mathematics, logic, and reason made sense. A grand philosophical principle, in fact. Analogous, perhaps, to the Forms, or ideal defining principles which lay behind things, and not only made them make sense, but also enabled the human intellect to identify and even work with them. For a Form, as it came to be spoken of by Socrates and Plato, was that eternal principle which all similar, yet diverse, things share. Each individual cat, for example, differs in a myriad of ways from every other cat, yet they all share a defining characteristic that unites them. This, one might say, is the Form of the cat, or what one might recognize as cattishness, instantly differentiating it from a small dog – which possesses doggishness. Now these Forms are hard to pin down in abstract, yet when you see one embodied, you somehow recognize it in a flash.

Could it be that all these ideal Forms were part of a great pre-existing Logos, or foundational intellectual principle? And might this principle be eternal and unchanging? If this were the case, then one might suggest that certain Greek philosophers mixed their philosophical geometry, mathematics, and logic with their theology, for in this Logos was something resembling monotheism. Perhaps one great, eternal, transcendent, divine rational principle unified not only the whole realm of mind, but went on to connect our human intellects with the Logos itself, thereby enabling human beings to understand and reason their way through the visible and invisible creation.

By the time of Plato and Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, Greeks were even discussing creation itself. Did the cosmos come about, as Plato proposed in his Timaeus narrative, by a divine craftsman imposing order on rough materials in the same way as a potter imposes the Form of a pot upon every vessel he makes on the wheel? Or did it come about, as Aristotle proposes in his Physics, by an Unmoved Mover setting creation in motion? Indeed, it was not for nothing that early Christian theologians would equate this creative Unmoved Mover or Logos with God in Christ Jesus, as did the writer of St John’s Gospel.

But this radical and world-changing insight only emerged when these fifth-century-BC Greek ideas took a new direction as they came to be combined with the vastly more ancient ideas of the Jews. For in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as it would develop, this Greek Logos first revealed himself as “I AM”, or “JEHOVA”, to Abraham in Mesopotamia around 2000 BC as a very personal creator of all things. Indeed, he was not a concept like the Logos, but an eternal, divine, living being who formed the very image of mankind from himself, who gave us our intelligence, and for whom we, and especially those descendants of Abraham who would become the Jews, were the supreme, albeit disobedient, fruits of creation.

Here was something emerging in human experience that left the offering of sacrifices to the Egyptian or Mesopotamian nature spirits way behind when it came to a new, higher kind of theological understanding. And nowhere more so than when that supreme being identified himself so closely with the human race that he had created that he took human flesh in the form of Jesus the saviour.

So here we have that dynamic of creator, giver of life and reason, lifting humanity from the cowering slave caste of the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religions, and affirming us as beings with a value and a divine destiny in our own right. Irrespective of whatever religious beliefs the reader may hold, it is hard to deny two aspects of what I have outlined above. Firstly, it possesses a grandeur and a visionary scope pertaining to the human condition that is unique in the annals of human thought, in its combination of creation, logic, reason, humanity, divinity, love, redemption, and purpose. And secondly, it unleashed a creative dynamic into the world, the tidal force of which still carries us along today. For whether you are a Jew, a Christian, a philosopher, or a passionate atheist, it is this essential dynamic that still provides the ground plan which you will embrace lovingly, or feel you must reject. But it refuses to be ignored.

This, I would suggest, is the origin of monotheism, and without it we would not have that unified concept of nature and its accessibility to human intelligence without which modern science is impossible. For irrespective of where a person may stand today on the creedal scale, it is monotheism that is the father and mother of the concept of a natural world that makes (or appears to make) logical sense.

Yet, these essential intellectual components of monotheism derived from rabbinic Judaism on the one hand and pagan Greek philosophy on the other. Why should it...