IT IS almost a century since Science, Religion and Reality, a seminal collection of essays edited by Joseph Needham, was published in 1925. When we recall 1920s Christian history in the West, perhaps our minds leap to the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, or to political engagements of the Church. During this boom period of physics, however, we find forgotten gems of Christian thought in engagement with the sciences.

Science, Religion and Reality was the first in a series of ground-breaking inter-war writings from unexpected and invaluable figures. Needham’s collection includes the marvellous essay “The Domain of Physical Science”, by Arthur Eddington. The impact of the writings of Eddington, James Jeans, Needham, Michael Pupin, and others during this era was remarkable, and has been credited with saving the faith of many scientists who felt forced to choose between science and fundamentalism.

The fine work of C. S. Lewis blew away the competition when it came to apologetics shortly afterwards, but these ghosts of science past have an important but largely forgotten place in the dialogue on faith during this period.

Within two years of Needham’s work, Eddington wrote The Nature of the Physical World, which sold in vast quantities and gave pause for thought to those questioning both Christianity and the new world of physics. Three years later, the BBC commissioned its first symposium on science and religion, which included the voices of Eddington, Pupin, and Huxley. Staggering in its depth and impact, it still contains gold to be mined.

CONFLICT also bred productivity. These were the days of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian; the magazine The Freethinker was wildly popular under the leadership of Chapman Cohen, as well as the humanist contributions of Orwell, Wells, and Shaw. Russell and Cohen both wrote hit pieces that took aim at Eddington for encouraging the optimism of the Church through his scientific writing.

Eddington countered Russell by writing Why I Believe in God: Science and religion as a scientists sees it, which again attracted the ire of Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook was a direct shot at Eddington and Jeans. Jeans and Eddington sparred often themselves, and their competition spread to popular publications. Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe merged popular astronomy with philosophical and theological reflection, and was the first of many such works that he produced.

Edward Arthur Milne was younger than Eddington and Jeans, but this did not deter him from arguing with both over matters of astronomy and astrophysics. He also used his public platform as a Cambridge scientist, however, to communicate his faith to the public. Shortly before his untimely death, he published his greatest reflection, Modern Cosmology and the Christian Idea of God.

THESE treasures are criminally under-appreciated for their brilliant writing and historical impact. These three outstanding Cambridge physicists are obscured in time by the brilliance of Einstein, Durac, Heisenberg, and others; and yet, in any other era, they would be much greater appreciated.

Their willingness to reflect publicly on the theological questions posed by the new physics enriched the dialogue over science and religion at a time when fundamentalism was making the most noise.

The general public understanding of physics was overthrown by general relativity, and then confounded by quantum physics. It needed the skilled writing and brilliant mind of an Eddington or a Jeans to translate this to the common folk, and then to articulate the enormous questions of meaning that followed such a chaotic overhaul of our place in the universe. That this work was best done by religious thinkers was monumental in both its importance and timing.

Georges Lemaître deserves special mention here as the first to pose the “Big Bang” in his 1927 paper. Along with Alexander Friedmann, he applied Einstein’s equations to the universe, and formed the theory of the primeval atom, a “day without a yesterday”.

As a Roman Catholic priest from Louvain, he worked under Eddington at Cambridge. It was Eddington who arranged translation of Lemaître’s papers, before writing The Expanding Universe in 1931, the first English popular book on the Big Bang, complete with theological questions. Although Lemaître had his run-ins with both the Pope and the Church over what this meant for science and religion, history cannot ignore the priest’s part in the history of science.

The New Atheist narrative paints the scientific revolutions as sweeping away the credibility of faith. A closer glance backwards reveals a very different picture, beautiful in its nuance and full of interesting characters of whom we see little today.

On closer inspection, the New Atheist narrative fails at the first hurdle. The inter-war boom of physics is full of magnificent thinkers and theorists who not only possessed the minds to participate actively in the world-changing research, but were also not afraid to acknowledge their faith publicly as they went about it.

We would do well to acknowledge them, and to enjoy their extraordinary work today, for the good of the science-religion dialogue.


Samuel McKee is a researcher and associate tutor in the history and philosophy of science at Manchester Metropolitan University.