THE GUARD ROOM at Lambeth Palace was the setting for a high-powered seminar this week to debate “the contributions of science and faith to a socieity that values understanding”.
The intention was to help recover confidence in the possibility of a fruitful dialogue. So 46 scientists, philosophers, media correspondents, and representatives of faith communities gathered on Tuesday at the invitation of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Dr Williams began the conversation by lamenting the split between “hard” knowledge (factual, clear, and objective), and “soft” knowledge (fuzzy, subjective, and value-based). He claimed that religious people had been pushed to the soft side of this division, and creationism was the result, as they had struggled to shore up their faith with apparently “hard” evidence.
In the current climate, this split prevented understanding, Dr Williams suggested. Both science and faith must engage with a richer account of what counted as knowledge.
The shadow of Richard Dawkins hovered over the seminar, and indeed, 27 minutes into the seminar, his image appeared as a PowerPoint slide in the first of three presentations by academics. The Cambridge palaeontologist Professor Simon Conway Morris introduced him in the context of a critique of extreme Darwinism.
He argued that On the Origin of Species, in spite of its brilliance, had produced a corrosive legacy, which led to the kind of anti-Semitism associated with Joseph Goebbels.
The destruction of William Paley’s benign universe by the theory of natural selection had made it difficult for science to connect with nature as whole. Yet this was what was most needed in our time. As an example, Professor Conway-Morris spoke of music as a universal phenomenon.
In the second presentation, Dr Conor Cunningham, Assistant Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at Nottingham University, accused Professor Dawkins and other “new atheists” of disguising their nihilistic philosophy under a self-contradiction. They claimed to describe nature, but a vigorous reductionism, which dissolves the complexities of nature into meaningless spasms between forces and objects, ends up destroying any meaningful notion of nature itself.
He argued that a Dawkins-esque universe is dangerous, not because it can succeed in excluding God, but because it really could succeed in abolishing humanity, free will, the notion of being a self, the ability to speak as an “I”, colour, description, and ethics. There would be no justice, because there could be no wrongs; no violence, because the only distinction recognisable to science was the distinction between pure matter and agitated matter.
Professor Celia Deane-Drummond, Director of the University of Chester Centre for Religion and the Biosciences, looked for common ground between science and faith. Wonder at the universe was a driving motivation for many scientists, she said. But wonder was ambiguous; both science and faith needed wisdom in the application of the knowledge each provided. There could be no romantic return to pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, attractive though these were.
Too many questions were raised by the presentations for a structured debate, and a random bunch of responses were plucked from the floor.
Other agendas opened up. There were two representatives from the House of Lords, and two MPs. How could science and faith engage more productively with those who frame legislation on sensitive issues such as stem-cell research? Neither offered much help to those who had to produce pragmatic solutions to modern dilemmas.
There was surprisingly little about God, but much discussion of what it is to be human. There were no conclusions, but an air of confidence. As one Roman Catholic commented over lunch, it was a significant marker of a readiness of some Christian academics to come out of the closet on behalf of a religious world-view. It could not have happened 20, or even ten, years ago.
The Revd Dr Angela Tilby is Vicar of St Bene’t’s, Cambridge.
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