As we have mentioned in previous chapters, men of science who would have identified themselves as Christians have been the norm over the centuries, and while there were perhaps fewer in the twentieth century, they are far from a rarity today, especially in the light of such bodies as the Society of Ordained Scientists and Christians in Science. In the earlier days of science, and even discounting the numerous monk–priest scientific thinkers of the medieval centuries, one had astronomers of the standing of Nicholas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Pierre Gassendi, and Isaac Newton. Then there followed Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s law fame), Michael Faraday (electrical physicist), William Buckland and many other Victorian geologists (a good number in holy orders), Abbot Gregor Mendel (founder of genetics), James Clerk Maxwell (mathematical physicist), and Sir Arthur Eddington and Father Georges Lemaître (both twentieth-century cutting-edge cosmologists). And these are only a selection of the illustrious dead, without reckoning those alive today.
Yet I hear the atheists say – and not without historical justification – “Of course they were ‘Christians’: everybody was a ‘Christian’ in the past. They were ‘Christians’ because Christianity was the norm, respectable, and the dominant culture.” Of course, this argument might apply to people who routinely went to church or chapel on Sunday mornings, but it does not by any means explain those who actively, and openly, advanced Christian enterprises, and made their faith known through their writings and teaching.
On the other hand, as we saw earlier in this book, the idea of non- or anti-religious thought is far from new, and has a lineage going back through the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries to the Middle Ages and to classical Greece, and even those Old Testament folk who are said to have declared, “There is no God.” For atheism, and probably agnosticism, is as old as the hills, and one thing I hope this book does is expose the myth that it is in any way new or radical.
Yet what all too often irritates the secularists is the phenomenon of the scientist who is also an ordained priest or monk. Quite simply, they are living, breathing affronts to the “intellectual freedom equals throwing out religious dogma” school of myth-makers, and I have come across some convoluted explanations for the ordained scientist phenomenon that so misunderstand the intellectual and the spiritual vocation as to be quite absurd.
Take, for example, Gregor Mendel, the Augustinian monk with an academic scientific training from Vienna, who became abbot of his religious house at Brno (formerly Brünn) in Czechoslovakia. He was a man whose life combined prayer, liturgical devotion, teaching, serving the poor – and discovering the mathematical basis of genetic mutation and establishing those scientific principles which would be remembered as “Mendel’s law”. Yet I have heard it publicly stated by an eminent freethinking scientist who should know better that Mendel really became a monk as a way of securing funding for his science! For how could a real scientist believe all that religious nonsense? But what this analysis ignores is dates: Mendel became a monk at the age of twenty-one in 1843, after first studying at Olmütz University, and a priest in 1847. Yet it would not be until 1866 that he published his research on plant hybridization and his famous law. All the evidence suggests that Mendel saw no conflict whatsoever between his science and his deep Roman Catholic faith – even after reading Darwin! And then he became Abbot of Brno in 1868.
On the other hand, what about the modern world, where the prevailing culture is not consciously Christian, and not infrequently is anti-Christian? No one can accuse a modern scientist who takes Christianity seriously, or is perhaps an agnostic friend of Christianity, of simply swimming with the current. Yet there is no shortage of such people around. In Oxford and Cambridge alone, I know science dons in astronomy, medicine, biology, genetics, physics, and engineering who are practising Christians, some serving in various capacities of ministry in their local churches, as well as those scientists active in Christian apologetics.
And this, I suspect, is only the tip of the iceberg of Christian professional men and women of science across the rest of British, American and other universities. The diocesan director of ordinands of an English Anglican cathedral diocese told me not long ago that there were always professional scientists presenting themselves for training for the non-stipendiary and lay ministry – people who would serve as full priests or readers in their parishes, but would continue to work as scientists in their “day” jobs, using their professional salaries to provide their livelihood. This same director said that there tended to be more candidates from the physical sciences than from the biological, and that one biological sciences candidate was even known to have received mocking remarks from colleagues in his lab when he let it be known that he wanted to train as a priest. So much for “freethinking” tolerance!
Yet this is only within the Anglican and Protestant churches. In the Catholic tradition there have been Jesuit scientists going back to the founding of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century, and I have been proud to share lecture platforms at both scientific and religious meetings and conferences with Jesuit scientists. They are a tough, clever, no-nonsense breed, highly informed and excellent debaters, often with a mischievous sense of humour. I give these “Js” full marks. I was also told by an Orthodox Christian friend about his visit early in 2010 to a group of desert monasteries in northern Egypt. It appeared that these religious houses had more young men applying to become monks and take up the enclosed religious life than the monasteries could actually accommodate. The monasteries, it seems, now had a policy of admitting only men with sound, generally practical, professional qualifications, in such disciplines as medicine and engineering science. For the Coptic monks and their Christian houses, in addition to prayer and study, provided free medical, welfare, and technical services for the local Bedouin and other communities – irrespective of religion.
And two of my most interesting research students at Oxford were men in their early forties whom I used to nickname my “Reverend Doctors”, for that is precisely what they were. Before coming to do further postdoctoral work at Oxford, they – one a Dominican friar and the other a Roman Catholic priest – had taken doctorates in biochemistry and mathematical physics respectively, and had already worked in academic research in those fields. And without wishing to repeat what might by now sound like a tedious litany, none of the above scientific men and women that I know can quite understand what the atheists’ problem is. For science and faith, far from being in conflict, seem to dovetail together perfectly because – wonder of wonders – the universe makes sense! While science answers the “how” questions, religion answers the “why” questions: the universe in all its dimensions works through a set of marvellous mathematical laws that the human mind has come to fathom out. But why those laws are as they are is beyond science to explain. It all harks back to my discussion in Chapter 13: can, or cannot, an honest thinking individual accept the idea of a supreme, transcendent being as a reality?
I would like to draw this section to a close, however, by touching upon two points that have appeared earlier in this book. The first of these is what has always struck me as the intellectually elite aspect of modern secular atheism. It is, in many ways, a creed for the well-off, well-educated, comfortable, and secure, who can perhaps view struggle and hopelessness with a kind of stoical detachment, rather like Lucretius or Seneca. And while I know there are atheists who can regard their imminent decease with a philosophical detachment, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, whose courage and intellectual honesty I admired enormously, I suspect that atheism has very little indeed to offer to the vast majority of the poor, distressed, mentally ill, and suffering. The New Atheists might see religion as a crutch – well, what is wrong with crutches? If you happen to have a broken leg, a crutch will stop you falling over. And if, by extension, you have a broken life, a belief in God can serve the same function.
Of course, this pragmatic use of religion is no proof that God exists in abstract philosophical terms, but what cannot be denied is that a belief in God can be an enormous strength in adversity. And the more adversity he gets you through, the more you are likely to realize that he, like your hospital-issued crutch, is not an abstract concept, but is real. The same goes for Marx’s notion that religion is no more than the “opium of the masses”. Without pain-killing drugs, many of which have been isolated from the narcotic Papaver somniferum, or sleep-inducing poppy, life would be considerably more hellish than it is already!
Indeed, the disparaging dismissal of God as a mere crutch, or religion as no more than an opiate, really derives from the “perfecting mankind”, “Enlightenment” school of thinking discussed in Chapter 13. As such perfectionists argue, must we not break free from superstitious supports so that man- and womankind can achieve their full dignity and destiny? Like some Romantic era re-rendering of the Prometheus myth?
Yet just as crutches and opiates can get us through accident, trauma, agony, and crisis, and make it possible for us to go forward and lead fuller and more meaningful lives, so can a firm belief in a God of love.
My second point is, if evolutionary genetics are predominantly concerned with a drive towards individual and species survival, why do we seem to spend some of our most enjoyable hours squandering our energies? Especially on non-survival activities such as devouring junk food in front of the TV? Or compulsive sports training? Or even religion? For endless TV-watching and overeating are likely to make you so obese and brain-dead that you regard sex as unappealing, back-breaking work, while obsessive sport can leave you so exhausted that you go out like a light upon your first contact with a bed. And as for religion: well, what conceivable survival advantage can loving your enemies and devoting your best energies to helping life’s losers give you? Let us be brutally honest: in pure survival terms, why not let the poor starve and the sick die, for these disadvantaged, damaged, or genetically substandard specimens are only taking up resources that the strong, dominant types could seize to help propagate their own genes.
So is there, perhaps, more mythology than substance in the atheists’ reductionist analysis of the human condition?