What is Science?

Sermon preached at All Hallows by Laura Smith on 30 March 2003

(Part of a Lent series on Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Social Sins)

Good morning — it’s a privilege to have the opportunity to contribute this morning. I think it is important that we make opportunities to share our thoughts with each other within our community, so I hope I’ll be able to offer some useful reflection on science without humanity and knowledge without character. I certainly think it’s proving useful to reflect on Gandhi’s Seven Deadly Social Sins during this Lent period.

I’m not very good on church protocol, despite a lifetime of attendance. I think I’m trying to tell myself something! However, I think it’s the norm for people to preach on the readings.

But have you seen the Gospel? — I thought someone must be having a joke! I know there is merit in being a fool for Christ, but standing here as a scientist preaching on the loaves and the fishes, and Jesus walking on water, is a tall order.

I’ve had all my books out, studied my Newtonian physics, refreshed my quantum mechanics, and all I’m left with is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle … I’m really uncertain whether Jesus had enormously huge feet, so spreading his mass and increasing his buoyancy, or whether the sea of Galilee has water with peculiarly strong intermolecular bonds between the polar groups … So maybe we’d be on better ground with the beautiful reading from Proverbs:

Listen! Wisdom is calling out.
Reason is making herself heard.
‘Listen to my excellent words; all I say is truth;
Lies are hateful to me.’

I find the reading from Proverbs to be one of fantastic hope: we are part of a creation infused with wisdom, a wisdom which is at the very base of our being and which will immensely enrich us when we connect with it.

Part of that connection may be what Gandhi was referring to as knowledge with character.

This morning I’m going to try to look at one way in which we develop and apply knowledge, that is through our study of the natural world, i.e. science. I’ll look at the framework within which we conduct science and the way that contributes towards the situation where I think we are, as a society, shockingly accepting of the development of science without humanity.

So, what is science?

Science is simply the study of nature, the natural world.

If science is the study of nature, the implication of this is that the way we see nature has a crucial bearing on the type of science we do. This is an idea to which I’ll return in more detail in a few minutes.

Science can and should take us to a place where we exclaim ‘how wonderful creation is’.

Science is an intellectual adventure.

Science can lead us to an intense appreciation of the beauty of nature. It is this very intensity of appreciation of the beauty of nature that worried thinkers such as Augustine. He was really worried that people would be drawn into worship of the created rather than the creator. He warned that it would be very easy to mistake the sign for the thing signified, the lesser for the greater beauty.

It was feared that the beauty of creation (and to that we could add the excitement of the intellectual adventure of science) could end up attracting the human mind to itself.

But, I believe, science can in many respects illumine our minds, open our eyes to that which is praiseworthy in the creation. Science with humanity can help us feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

In the context of this Lent series it is important to ask ‘how will we know if science has humanity?’ … The answer is that it will benefit those on the margins, those without power; compassion will be evident in its application.

The role of religion in connecting humanity with nature

Both science and religion are about awe and wonder. While they are connected, we see — as the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart perceived — nature as grace.

Science then becomes the study of grace in nature.

Such a perspective most surely puts boundaries on the level of exploitation that can accompany scientific exploration.

Religion is not, of course, the only way in which to connect with and reverence nature. In nature I would include the non-living environment, as well as ourselves and all living beings with which we share the earth. However, it is one way.

It is one way through which we can play our part in reflecting upon and accepting responsibility for debate.

One way to ensure the science which fills our lives is challenged to connect with the humanity which is often pushed to the margins of our lives.

Science is an intellectual joy, but it is not inherently knowledge with character. Indeed, C. S. Lewis painted a stark picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the purely objective application of scientific knowledge:

At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god. Man himself is akin to the gods. The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe, first of its gods, then its colours, smells, sounds and tastes … As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account; classified as our senses, thoughts, images and emotions.

The separation of science and religion

So how have science and religion, a route to connect with our humanity in God, become so separated? And what are the consequences of the separation?

They began connected as natural theology.

Ideas of worlds where they are still connected do pop up in literature, such as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

Both parties have played their part in the separation of science and religion, which I think is on the whole a divorce welcomed by both.

I’ve already mentioned that Augustine encouraged the separation of nature and religion. Later, in the 18th century, proponents of this separation came from a different viewpoint; they were keen to see the liberation of reason from the powerful oppression of the Church.

Enlightenment thinkers believed that human reason was endowed with all the resources needed for the ennobling and advancement of the human race.

The fruits of this separation were indeed a flowering of science and a host of highly significant advances in science and technology.

Since that time many writers and scientists have been advocates of the benefits of keeping science a religion-free zone.

The Victorian Winwood Reade wrote in 1872:

When Man first wandered in the dark forest, he was Nature’s serf … But as time passed on, he made stone his servant; he discovered fire; he domesticated iron; slew wild beasts or subdued them; he made them feed him and give him clothes. He became a chief surrounded by his slaves.

Central to Reade’s thesis is that nature must be disenchanted, evacuated of any concept of spiritual or religious significance, before it can be harnessed to human progress. He continues:

We can conquer Nature only by obeying her laws, and in order to obey her laws we must first learn what they are. When we have ascertained, by means of science, the methods of nature’s operation, we shall be able to take her place to perform them for ourselves … men will then master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves … manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect; he will then be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as God.

Here we have a clear justification for the enslavement of nature by science and a spelling out that, for this to take place, science should be unhitched from religion.

Another vociferous proponent of the need to unshackle science from any influence of religion is the popular scientist Richard Dawkins. To quote:

It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, ‘mad cow’ disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.

I doubt whether Dawkins would be much impressed by today’s Gospel stories.

As I have alluded to, the separation was pretty much by mutual agreement. The Protestant revolution was certainly keen to see a separation of God and nature, a connection which it could see only as a damaging link with paganism and the influence of the Goddess; instead the proper focus of Christians was deemed to be the relationship between God and man.

So with the Enlightenment and beyond, science, if not nature, flourishes and believers can concentrate on the proper focus of their spiritual journey, their direct relationship with God. So what’s the problem? Everyone seems to be happy in their separate corners.

But what we must now turn our minds to is appreciating what some of the consequences of unhitching science and religion are.

As pointed out by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov …

If God is dead, everything is permissible.

In other words, with the desacralization of nature and its study, science, we can change the way we interact with the planet.

If there is nothing sacred about nature, we can take from its resources, scar the features of the Earth and dump our waste with impunity.

If there is nothing sacred about the beings on the Earth, we can use our scientific knowledge for the development of drugs for diseases such as HIV within a framework which fully intends to exclude over 90% of those requiring treatment, on the basis of inequalities in wealth.

The separation of science from religion may have freed us up to explore ‘reason’ unhindered, but it has also unhinged us from one way in which moral and ethical checks could be made on what we do with science.

In place of any other forum, we institute government bodies such as the Human Embryology and Fertilisation Authority. However the HEFA finds it difficult to do more than make rulings on the legality of particular situations which arise out of applications of science … so when Diane Blood wanted to conceive using the sperm of her dead husband, the HEFA ruled this illegal because he hadn’t signed a consent form … was this really the only issue which needed to be considered?

The HEFA was again brought in when it was ruled legal to separate the little conjoined twins Mary and Jodie last year, overriding the wishes of the parents of the twins.

It seems incomprehensible to me that we have got to a situation where as a society we are content to substitute legal rulings for any real forum in which to discuss the humanity of these difficult situations.

Rather, as we have with the reporting of war, we get sucked into obsessing about legality and what is technically possible; not ‘is this a humane way to behave?’ but ‘is this a scientifically feasible proposition?’.

Perhaps the way we teach science also plays into this development of science without moral responsibility which can so easily become science without humanity.

In my science lessons we dissect, extract.

We learn how to manipulate and control nature.

We study facts and present them as truth, we portray a reductionist, mechanistic view of the world which is helpful only in ensuring absolutely that we have science without humanity, knowledge without character.

We must ask, and teach children to ask, ‘are some forms of science moral or immoral?’.

Corruption by power

In the time of the great scientist Galileo, power lay firmly in the hands of the Church, and any scientific thinking which might challenge the power of the Church was brutally suppressed.

Things have changed. In the face of a church with little power, science can now proceed unhindered by church oppression.

Has this brought us science with humanity? Does it allow us to fully become who we are? What has been the legacy of this shift away from the sacredness of nature?

Perhaps the ultimate expression of science without humanity was the Manhattan project, a 4-year-long project with a budget of $2.2 billion dollars and a workforce of 100,000 people.

The project leader was Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant theoretical physicist. Oppenheimer was Jewish in his beliefs and strongly drawn to left-wing politics, making several donations to the Communist party. He had relatives who suffered under the anti-Semitic laws in Germany. Sounds like an OK sort of a bloke.

Yet the fruition of Oppenheimer’s work came on 16 July 1945 in the New Mexico desert when an atomic bomb, named Trinity, exploded with a force equivalent to 18,000 tons of TNT. (What goes through their minds when they need to link terms like Trinity, awe and liberation with death and destruction?)

As he watched the Trinity test, Oppenheimer is famously remembered for his somewhat prophetic quote from the Bhagavad Gita:

Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.

Jesus said ‘I am come that you might have life’; the ultimate expression of big science remains ‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds’.

In later years Oppenheimer went on to say ‘In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.’

Surely this is exactly the kind of sin that a few years earlier Gandhi had warned against … brilliant intellectuals developing and overseeing the use of the ultimate in weapons of mass destruction; knowledge without character, science without humanity.

‘If God is dead, everything is permissible.’

We have the science to reduce toil, reduce starvation, reduce inequalities in health and life expectancy. Our great social sin is that we have allowed the control of science and the application of science to develop without reference to humanity, we have allowed the rich to be raised higher and the poor to be pushed lower in the modern world. We see the fruits of this science without humanity rain down on the people of Iraq today.

In part this has come about by allowing the economically and politically powerful to gain control over the development and application of science.

The widespread propaganda that the production and consumption of goods have no external effects is seriously in error, ignoring exploitation of workers, pollution and depletion of the Earth’s resources; our consumerist ethos takes us way beyond the ecological carrying capacity of the Earth. I was reading recently that, on average, each of us consumes 300 carrier bags of resources a week to sustain our lifestyles.

Not all of this is due to science, but is enabled by science when it is disconnected from humanity. It powers economic and social injustices and fuels conflict across the world.

We need to challenge it.

I believe that despite the corruption of big science, we have a duty to use our gifts of intelligence and curiosity to continue scientific study of our world for the benefit of all.

We need to find ways to challenge the power base that controls most scientific research .We need to include all stakeholders, valuing the ‘extended facts’ (values, intuition, and beliefs) which they will bring to redeem post-‘bomb’ science.

The solution — challenge the power base

Challenges to the power structures gripping science come from several different directions, and they are our hope for developing a culture in which science with humanity can flourish.

Whilst some challenges undoubtedly come from within the scientific community itself, much more radical insights are offered by those working on sustainability and intermediate technology, by feminist thinkers and by non-Western perspectives.

Feminist scholars are challenging more than just the gender bias in areas of study, they are presenting a vision which offers hope of a much more human-centred science. Feminist-driven science would see a shift away from conventional focus on objectivity, it would take into account the perspectives of non-scientists and other ‘outsiders’ such as environmentalists and non-Western cultures.

Christianity too has a role to play

Christianity needs to repent of its role in the desacralization of nature and turn with humility to relearn the wisdom of the past.

As Thomas Merton taught, ‘every non-two-legged creature is a saint’, so before we change their genes, destroy their habitats, eliminate them from existence, let us learn from peoples in touch with the true sacredness of nature, the Buddhist tradition, the native peoples of North America, the aboriginal people of Australia, the Bushmen people of the Kalahari.

We must challenge our own consumerism, which is the engine which drives the science without humanity movement. We need science which is not about wish-fulfilment for those with the biggest bank balances.

If nature is grace, a blessing, a gift of unconditional love, as Meister Eckhart taught, there really are severe limits on how far we can screw it! In our quest for knowledge with character we could perhaps do well to reflect further on the insights of the Christian mystics.

Julian of Norwich, referring to the start of the universe, adds to our understanding of the creation with her vision that we have been loved from the beginning …

The creation of the universe is grace and blessing.

This truth adds to the fantastic vision of the universe which science gives us.

Genesis does not contradict the scientific view of creation as seen by any thinking person, but again puts us in touch with wisdom which should lead us to act for the integrity of creation.

Genesis tells us that, having created the world, God saw that it was good — not OK, not useful, not the postmodern nightmare of nature without any intrinsic value, but good — that’s the key point of the story for me. This is just the point that we need to hear today.

We need to hear about the sacredness of the planet, how it got here, how we can preserve it, and how it is blessing us. We need to know the story of the trees, the story of the animals, the story of humans, the story of food, the story of illness and death. Science has a place in the telling of these stories, but we must make sure that the motivation to control and exploit is bombarded by moral awareness.

Science gives us insights which we must infuse with compassion, intuition and imagination. Science can open up for us the riches of nature and a wonder at the creativity underlying all things.

When science and spirituality converge, they expand our lives. Science with humanity rather than avarice can enrich and improve the lives of all. In such a world, to which we must set our hearts and minds, we will witness

social justice

ecological integrity

evolution as a creative process, an expression of our ongoing connection with God the sustainer.

Such science will contribute to the vision of Jesus that he came that all might have life and have it in abundance, rather than a science which stands weeping on the sidelines proclaiming ‘I am become death.’

This page was last updated on Sunday, 30 March 2003

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