Chaplain’s Note

I’m looking forward to Science Week. It’s like Christmas for chemists or Passover for physicists! Though some people are a little surprised to hear a Chaplain speaking about science (despite one of our Assistant Chaplains, Mr Persson, being a Science Teacher). Perhaps we still have not healed the wounds from the Galileo episode in the seventeenth century. In that drama, Galileo was condemned by the medieval Church for his scientific activity, and his scientific work was banned. This act has served to heighten a sense that there are two different realms, the realm of faith or religion, and the realm of reason or science.

The Galileo trial is generally regarded as a black eye for the church. The popular impression is that Galileo’s plight was the result of blind conflict between dogma and fact, between faith and science. A closer scrutiny of the historic debate reveals that his scientist contemporaries were as hostile to Galileo’s discoveries as were the bishops. Galileo challenged the “orthodoxy” of science at the time, as well as the church. It wasn’t merely the bishops who refused to look through his telescope. His fellow scientists were equally reluctant to take a peek.

Galileo said, “I can prove that the earth is not in the centre of the solar system by means of my telescope. Before now, we were unable to examine this with the eye, but now we can.” Galileo said to the princes of the church, “Look through this telescope and see if I’m not right.” The church leaders refused to look because they had already set in concrete a dogma that said that the earth was the centre of the solar system. The princes said, “We don’t care what the telescope says. You must be wrong because the Bible says that the earth is the centre.”

But the Bible does not say that the earth is the centre of the universe. The debate was not between God and Galileo, as the church princes insisted; it was between the Ptolemaic astronomers and the Copernican astronomers. Unfortunately, the church rulers had put their blessing upon an earlier scientific model that they should not have blessed. They got egg on their faces when they tied the Ptolemaic system with divine revelation and eventually had to confess that they were wrong.

As a result, the church lost credibility and a growing rupture occurred between church and science, a rupture that is utterly foreign to biblical Christianity. In the final analysis, it was not a conflict between the Word of God and the word of Galileo.

All truth meets at the top. A Christian will say that the highest source of truth is God’s divine revelation in the Scripture, what theologians call “special revelation”. Yet the Bible is not the only source of revelation. We may have in the Bible one source of information about reality, and in nature another source of information about reality. There is what we call “general revelation,” and it comes to us from nature. The Bible itself speaks of it. We hear in Psalm 19:

1 The heavens declare the glory of God;

    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

2 Day after day they pour forth speech;

    night after night they reveal knowledge.

What is known from nature can supplement what is known from the Bible. What is true in science will ultimately undergird that which is true in religion. The Bible may provide information that is not obtainable from nature (what moral values should I have?) and, vice versa, nature may supply data which we have no knowledge of from the Bible (how to create antibiotics).

But those two sources of information won’t conflict with each other if we understand them aright.

Historically, an example of a healthy attitude toward science and revelation was found in Sir Isaac Newton, the brilliant physicist and mathematician, who revolutionised our understanding of the universe with his laws of motion and universal gravitation, forever changing the course of scientific inquiry. He did not live in fear of contradicting his faith through the study of the world. He said that the activity of the scientist is to think God’s thoughts after him. Newton’s was a humble, as well as a careful approach. He understood that all truth meets at the top.

Science does not equal atheism. Perhaps the best proof for this in the number of Christian scientists, historically and in the present. See if you recognise some of their names: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Pascal, Joule, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Pasteur. Or scientists today like Dr Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project who worked at the cutting edge of the study of DNA. Or John B. Goodenough who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 for his work at Oxford University which made possible the development of lithium-ion batteries (the ones in our phones and laptops). Goodenough joins a long list of science Nobel laureates (Chemistry 72.5% and Physics 65.3%) who identified as Christian.

When we oversimplify theology or oversimplify science, we encounter many difficulties between the two. Science is a complex enterprise. So is theology. Their relationship is to be studied closely, deeply and with humility to then discover an ultimate harmony between them. Science and theology are both at their best when they are at their humblest. That’s when learning begins.

So, when the time comes, I wish us all a happy science week, as we grow in our understanding of the universe and ourselves, and therefore God, as we explore the questions that our curiosity raises with the methodology that science provides.

Rod Farraway
Chaplain