NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’

John Bowker

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/23

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/23

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Bowker Title: Professor

Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Religious Date and place of birth: 30th July 1935, Studies London, UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: teacher Methodist then Anglican priest Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 09/06/16 (track 1-2), 30/06/2016 (track 3), 04/08/16 (track 4-5)

Location of interview: Interviewees' home, Cambridge

Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash

Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel

Total no. of tracks 5 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 6 hrs. 41 min. 51 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

John Bowker Page 1 C1672/23 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me please when and where you were born?

I was born at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and my birth date is the 30th of July 1935.

And as much as you can about the life of your father?

My father was originally going to be a physicist, a scientist, at Manchester, but his family were a very strong Methodist family in the north-west of England, and he became a Methodist minister. He came to Cambridge, where he played lacrosse for England and did a tour of America, which was rather eccentric in those days, unusual anyway. He then went to India for some time, in Madras, or Chennai as it now is, and there, he got the sense that the interpretation of Christianity was important, but far more important was to educate, help the education of Indians so that they would be able, competently and with enthusiasm, run the independence of India, which he was certain, even, we’re now back in the inter-war period, was right and necessary, and was certainly going to come. And he got involved a bit in that. He met people like Ghandi and C F Andrews, and, was a great enthusiast for Indians taking over responsibility for their country, their lives and so on. He came back to this country and was a Methodist minister, I think, Chippenham or somewhere like that. But found that after the experience in India he did not welcome the control that the local chapels had over their ministers, so that they couldn’t confront the local congregation, and therefore he ceased to be a Methodist minister and became an Anglican priest, and was vicar in a newly-established parish in Barking, and also in the East End of London. Then came the war, and he was actually the first Anglican vicar to volunteer as a chaplain for the Army, although, in his Methodist days he had stood on Tower Hill with Donald Soper and Dick Sheppard of St Martin’s fame, making speeches in favour of pacifism and no war and no rearmament and so on, but he, the problem for him was, as it has remained for many of us, if you become aware of immense evils being done by authoritarian governments, there comes a point where you have to say, do you resist these or do you not resist at all? And that’s always a fundamental dilemma for, for Christians. So, he went off into the Army, and was in North Africa John Bowker Page 2 C1672/23 Track 1 and Italy. And then when he came back he became the vicar of a parish near Oxford, and, he was there actually then until he died.

[03:57] What did he say about the decision to move from the ambition to study physics to, to not doing so?

That, physics was at that time immensely exciting. I mean Manchester and Rutherford, I know Rutherford moved on, but Manchester was, it was a very exciting place to be. And I think he was captivated by the excitement of discovering what in effect were entirely new worlds. The world as he had grown up, with a picture of the world and the strong Newtonian laws, and, the determinism that seemed to be implicit in it, suddenly just, dissolved. And it was partly the dissolution of the dominant Newtonian view, and he was well aware of the, Kelvin’s two clouds, and so on, and he, he knew what the questions were, and, that, you could say, was more exciting, or should have been perhaps. It wasn’t so, because he suddenly realised that the imaginations and the world pictures of the sciences, while there is immense continuing reliability, say, in the Newtonian laws, nevertheless, the sciences are always approximate, provisional, corrigible, and often turn out to be mainly wrong from a later point of view. And he imparted that to me, and it’s remained a sort of, stamp on my life, that it must be all about informative statements under this subjectivity of, of, it’s one point of view, and they often do turn out to be reliable. So it’s remained a fascination for him, and he passed it on to me. How does it come about that the sciences produce these amazing consequences? Not just in technology and so on, but I mean the, the insights and the transformations of medicine, so on, so on, so on, they produce these immensely exciting, exhilarating discoveries, on the basis of what turns out, in many respects, to have been wrong, that the foundations change, though not all together, I mean, foundation’s the wrong word perhaps. The roots turn out to have been planted in ways that turn out not to be compatible with where we’ve got to now. And so, the question has always remained, it was Veihinger’s Als Ob question, the ‘as if’ question, you, you investigate the world as a scientist as if such and such is the case, and yet you’re investigations turn out often to contradict the very foundations that you were operating on the basis of. So that’s John Bowker Page 3 C1672/23 Track 1 remained an interest to me. I mean how do we get things wright when we start from such corrigible positions?

[07:06] And did he, did he then go into his decision not to, to study, the reasons for favouring something else?

Yes, I think he found an equal excitement and challenge in the way in which people have to form their lives and live their lives under immense pressures and constraints. And therefore, he found the attempt to be alongside people to be even more important than discovering how the cosmos is.

[07:43] Thank you. Did you know the paternal grandparents?

Yes, I did. Because, as we’ll no doubt get to, I lived with my grandparents for a bit, on one side, my mother’s side. On my father’s side, there was a grandmother, but, whom I met, but I can’t really remember her.

Thank you. Could you…

I incidentally knew my great-grandmother. I was taken to see her in 1941. She was ninety-one. And I didn’t know what a great-grandmother was, and she was very Victorian, and when her husband died, she dressed herself in black like Queen Victoria, but the whole room was dressed in black, everything was draped in black, the pictures were still draped in black. And apparently, I was told this later, I don’t remember this bit of it, I remember meeting her, I was told, go and give her a hug, but I didn’t know who she was, and I apparently went up to the aspidistra draped in black and gave it a hug. But her uncle had actually been present as a farrier at the Battle of Waterloo, so we’re going back with one, you know, I’ve shaken the hand of somebody whose uncle taught her how to ride a horse who goes back to Waterloo. And I’ve always been intrigued by these long arcs of time where you can meet somebody whose uncle was present at the Battle of Waterloo.

John Bowker Page 4 C1672/23 Track 1

[09:26] Thank you, that’s fascinating. Could you do something similar for the life of your mother?

The life of my mother is, is more difficult, because I really don’t remember her, because she died when I was five, and, I really have no memories of her at all.

The next question, then, is for you tell me about the maternal grandparents, the death of your mother and living with them.

Yes.

That’s connected?

Yes. They lived in Devon, and, what happened was that, we had, we were in London, and our house and all the possessions were destroyed by a bomb, actually before the Blitz, so-called, proper, actually started. It was a sort of stray bomb dropped by a German plane on its way back to Germany, and it… So, my father was already away, as a chaplain, in the Army. We went to various relatives. Eventually we ended up with these grandparents in Devon. So, I don’t have too many memories of, of life before that time, you know, I’ve just got odd memories. But it meant, it was an absolutely disastrous start to life for me, because, my mother died, it was a botched operation, she shouldn’t really have died as a result of it, but she did die. And, so I was with grandparents, and they couldn’t cope, so I was put into boarding school at the age of, about six and a half. And that is not a good start to life. In fact, I started to learn the Greek alphabet before I started to learn the English alphabet, because the teachers left in the school were, the old men who weren’t young enough to go into the war, and so, you know, they started to teach us alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta and so on. And of course, as a child you don’t think this is odd. It’s just what people do when you go to school. It was, it, it could not possibly have been a more catastrophic start, and not least because the headmaster of the boys’ school liked spanking boys, and I, my earliest memory, almost, is, I can still see the pattern of the carpet where he was spanking me. And there was a matron, or, he had jammed the chair against the door, and wedged the door, and she was banging on the door, John Bowker Page 5 C1672/23 Track 1 because she knew perfectly well what he was doing. But, fortunately he didn’t do any more, which I suppose some men might have done. So this was a catastrophic start to life, and has had immense consequence, as you can imagine.

[12:38] The house being hit by the bomb, did that come after your mother had died in…?

No, before. And then we went down to Devon, and that’s where she was in the local hospital, and it wasn’t… You know, the local cottage hospitals were very good for some things, but not for quite large operations, and she just didn’t survive it.

[12:59] What are the few fragmentary memories you have, then, of time before the move out of London?

Railings of the park, and then they were taken away. I have a memory of walking by railings and liked running, you know, as children do. And I do remember that they were taken away, fairly early on in the Second World War, I don’t know whether it’s ’39 or ’40, but, pretty early on. I can remember paths that I used to walk on, not anything around them but just the actual pattern of the paths used to intrigue me, I loved the interconnection of paths. And that’s remained influential, and maybe that’s why I remember them, because I’m now, and always have been, really concerned and interested in the interconnectivity of various aspects of the, the world or of life and so on, that, the interconnection, the intercommunication of systems is, is a major interest of mine, which helps to explain a great deal in the religious world.

Do you remember anything at all of time spent with your mother?

No.

Could you tell me, then, about time spent with your maternal grandparents, following the move to Devon?

John Bowker Page 6 C1672/23 Track 1

I don’t remember them terribly well. I mean, just odd incidents. I remember the games I used to play in the garden. It was a small, ish, well, I don’t know, these days probably pretty large, but it was a walled garden, and you could invent, you know, train rides in it, and run around, and it being a train. I remember it had a marvellous, they had a marvellous feather bed, a very old-fashioned feather bed which, it has its own sort of comfort and warmth about it which is nice. I remember sliding down the banisters on my stomach. They had a very very large house and a long mahogany banister, and sliding down. And I had my belt on, and it scoured the banisters all the way from top to bottom. And, I didn’t get into trouble. I never understand why. I would have been furious.

[15:13] Now, your father was away at war, and your mother had died. Do you… You’re five years old. So, I mean, the response to that is that of a five-year-old. But do you remember anything of the, of your reaction to the death of your mother in the absence of your…?

No. I mean, obviously it had a catastrophic effect. I have an older sister, she’s two and a half years older than I, and she remembered that I would just lie on the floor, absolutely screaming and kicking my heels on the floor and so on. I’ve no memory of it at all. So, I mean, you can’t… Well, there have been many, many, many worse beginnings to life for so many young children, as there are now. Imagine what it’s going to mean in future years for these children of the refugees, many of them coming on their own. So, I’m not being sorry for myself, people have suffered far worse. All I can say is, it’s an absolutely disastrous start, way to start life. And nobody chose it, I mean, obviously these things happen, it wasn’t chosen.

What are your… You went to a boarding school about the age of six and a half. Your sister, did she stay with the grandparents?

She… No, she was also in a boarding school. And of course, one remembers how much we tried to keep in touch. I mean, later on, in the war, she was at a boarding school, I suppose about, five to ten miles away, and I remember, in those days children could cycle anywhere, there were no risks, no traffic, no, nothing of that John Bowker Page 7 C1672/23 Track 1 kind, I used to cycle over and stand at the fence of her school, hoping I might see her. But it didn’t happen.

[17:19] Do you remember your father coming back from…?

Yes, from Italy. Yes, in 1944. I was looking out of the back bedroom window, and I suddenly saw this figure in uniform standing on the doorstep at the back door, and that was, yes, that’s one of my other vivid memories, as you can imagine. I can see every detail of it, sort of frozen in time.

What, can you describe those details?

Well it… No, it was the details really of his uniform, the way he was standing. I mean the picture is there.

Yes. And could you , then, tell the story of you sort of coming to know him presumably?

It was very difficult. He suffered immensely through the war. I mean, all his principles and beliefs had been focused on not rearming, on pacifism, and that’s why he had stood on Tower Hill. And… But he felt it was his responsibility in terms of looking after people, and helping them to go, and, he was mainly in a casualty clearing station, and that is not a good experience, to put it very mildly indeed. And like many of those who went through the war, he would never talk about it, couldn’t bear to do so. And it made him extremely, I think, really, quite often very seriously depressed in days when depression wasn’t taken so seriously as it is now. So he was very difficult to, to talk to, to get to know. I didn’t really talk to him very much. So, he was very conscientious. He did a good job. And… But I can’t really remember having any profoundly serious conversation with him at all in fact.

Where did you go during school holidays?

Well, this was at the very beginning of the war. We would go to the grandparents. John Bowker Page 8 C1672/23 Track 1

And… OK, we’ll come back to your father, then, in a moment. What memories do you have of time spent with grandparents in the period before you go to boarding school, and in holidays after you’ve been sent away?

I don’t remember anything very much in, in detail. I mean I just remember a fairly happy time playing games in the garden. I really don’t remember. I mean there were other cousins, there were lots of their family around, but, I don’t remember them, and I never kept in touch with them afterwards.

What did you play with indoors? You’ve talked about the walled garden. Do you remember playing with toys or…?

I remember being taught mah-jong, which was a fashionable game. I couldn’t tell you how to play it now [laughs], I’ve no idea. But, generally speaking, no, I don’t remember. I don’t remember.

And then, with this difficult relationship with your father, did you nevertheless spend time with him, so you have memories of doing things with him?

Yes. I mean, for example, after you did National Service, you had to either go onto the reserve and do sort of, TA camps and, and that kind of thing, or you could help in the Army Cadet Force, and I helped in the Army Cadet Force, and he was actually a chaplain to the Army Cadet Force in Berkshire. In those days the villages south of the River Thames were in Berkshire; they’ve been now been subsumed into Oxfordshire. So we, I, yes, we went away on these summer camps together, and, had a drink together, if you see what I mean, in the mess, and this kind of thing. But it wasn’t a warm relationship at all. I mean he wasn’t, there was no anger or arguments, in fact in a sense it might have been better if there were there were. But, we just, in a sense we got along together, if you know what I mean.

[21:48] Did you talk about his religious belief and practice?

John Bowker Page 9 C1672/23 Track 1

No. I had to listen to it often enough. Because of course we went to church, as everybody did in those days: well not everybody, but a lot of people did in those days. There was nothing else to do on Sunday in the years immediately after the war. I mean it was changing, but Sunday was still a day of rest. And, so yes, we went to church.

So this would have been in school holidays?

Yes. Yes.

When you were boarding, you were boarding full-time?

Yes. And terms were much longer.

And, what was the nature and extent of your own religious faith as a younger child?

Conventional. I mean we just, went to church because everybody did. I mean particularly if your father was the vicar, I mean you, you, one might have had a rebellion. But certainly I had the usual teenage, perfectly commendable, thought that this was just ridiculous. I even began to write the usual teenage adolescent novel, The Man Who Lost His God. And it actually got to about the end of chapter one, but it didn’t go much further.

[23:19] Could you tell me, then, more about the first school, the first boarding school? Presumably…

I can’t really. I can… I don’t really remember it, except that incident. I can remember having my first experience of seeing where the rain ended. It was raining on one side of the playground but not on the other side of the playground, just for a moment, as it moved. And I thought, that was interesting, that there are boundaries to things, even when they’re moving. [laughs] I think that’s about my only memory.

John Bowker Page 10 C1672/23 Track 1

So you don’t know whether, from your own memory, or from what other people have told you about yourself at that age, whether you were particularly interested in certain subjects, or good at certain subjects?

No. You just did what was set before you.

Do you remember anything at all about your relations with the other… You’ve mentioned this one negative relationship, negative relationship with the head teacher?

Yes.

What about relations with other boys at the school?

I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember any kind of, bullying of any kind whatsoever. But I don’t… I don’t remember being unhappy either, except in the general sense. I was obviously pretty unhappy over what had happened, you know, the whole world had disappeared. But I don’t remember any particular unhappiness at all. I don’t remember very much about it.

And finally on this stage, or any sense of being like or different from the other boys?

No.

[24:53] When and where was the next school?

Well, the next bit that I remember was actually… There may have been something I don’t remember. But the next bit of my education was actually that, my father, before he was being posted overseas, I don’t know what his motivations were, but let me put it in a slightly oblique fashion, because I don’t know what his motivations were, but I think, guessing, he realised that he was leaving his children with ageing grandparents who couldn’t last much longer, and he actually got married again. And he married the art teacher in my sister’s school, and, she had a friend who, another, a friend with another family, who was also a teacher. And, we went to Leominster in John Bowker Page 11 C1672/23 Track 1

Herefordshire, and they taught us at home, which was probably my salvation I would think. Because, there was a thing called the PNEU, I think it was, that stands for the Parents’ National Education Union, or something like that, but I can only remember the initials, PNEU, and they supplied materials and, books, writing books and, you know, paper and so on, and a syllabus. And these were both two experienced teachers. So, they were… I mean it was, it felt unstructured, it clearly couldn’t have been, but, they took us on, and there were, not my sister, she stayed at the school where she was, but, there were, there was myself, and there were two other daughters, and then some other children came to join in this home school. And that was a really extraordinarily good experience, because, it gave me time to get back on my feet in a context that I could trust. I mean the problem of all that early stuff is that I couldn’t rust anything or anybody, anything that looked good, my feeling, and this stayed with me afterwards, it was just going to be taken away again. So, this was, as I say, psychologically it must have been a, a crucial step in helping me, at least to survive. [laughs]

[28:00] Do you remember anything of your intellectual development here, or academic development?

Well, I remember that we would, I anyway, would read absolutely anything. Apparently I was very precocious in reading, because I do remember when, just before my father got married again, and, at that time before posting, this was in Newquay in Cornwall where there were great gatherings of people going to be posted, I can remember being sat at the kitchen table with the Daily Telegraph reading the progress of the war. And you had, you had all these maps that you put the little flags in. This was in 1941. I know this is 1941 because it was, the Russian, the German invasion of Barbarossa and Russia, but this was the drive towards the Crimea. So I was learning all these names like Kiev and Rostov and… [laughs] Apparently I read very very fast, and very very early. I don’t remember the exact details or how old and so on, but… So I… Because there weren’t many books around. So that, anything, I would read absolutely anything. I still can remember reading The Life of Alcibiades. I mean imagine that when you’re seven years old. [laughs] But of course, any book that was lying around. And this I think was what first gave me an interest in John Bowker Page 12 C1672/23 Track 1 understanding the, the scientific exploration of the world. There was, my father had got a lot of science books left around, that had survived the Blitz, probably they were in my grandparents’ house, I guess they were. Anyway, they were there, so, I began to read. And of course, some of the ones that were left were much more historically rooted. They weren’t up-to-date scientific textbooks. I remember reading Jupp on Darwinian evolution, which was a sort of memory of, of what it was like to be actually knowing the chap, and then, all the other people, like Huxley involved. And I got interested in the fact that they could have arguments, and it wasn’t absolutely clear that one side was right and the other wrong, but you had to find reasons for the arguments. I do remember that very clearly, that you had to find reasons for the things that you were saying. Apparently I was very, very irritating to my sister especially, because if ever anyone said anything… I mean, in those days everybody had meals at the same table, at the same time, and if anyone said anything at the mealtimes, I would say, ‘Yes, but why are you saying that?’ apparently. [laughs] Nearly drove her insane. But, so I got interested in the fact that, the more obvious things seemed to a particular person and put forward with dogmatic vigour, whether it’s religious or scientific, one needs to pause and ask oneself, yes, but is there anything that you would allow to count against that? I mean this is long before I had ever heard of Karl Popper. [laughs] And so that’s always remained an interest to me, and indeed I sometimes have said, the only thing we can ever really teach people in a university, we teach them bits of things about things and, but the only thing we really teach that matters is, always to put question marks in the margin, whether of your own work or thought or writing or other people’s thought and work and writing. Always allow the possibility that you might be wrong, or that you haven’t got enough evidence for what you’re asserting. So yes, I mean, I read absolutely anything that there was, and bits of old newspapers, and… I suppose eventually, that’s why, one of the only bits of advice I ever, ever give, or gave, to an undergraduate was, keep a commonplace book. Much easier to do now, because you just tap it in I dare say. I don’t use these things, can’t, because I can’t see enough. But I’ve got rows of little red/black books where I would note down anything that caught my fancy. Anything that seemed to me, a headline that seemed to me interesting. But equally I would write into these little red books, anything I was reading. I remember writing out the first time I came across stochastic theory, and I actually wrote it out. [laughs] Not the whole thing, I mean, these pages. Writing it out sort of fixes it somehow. So, I would John Bowker Page 13 C1672/23 Track 1 do that, and, I think that’s the sort of magpie mind. I can’t bear to think of things going to oblivion. So, I always used to put in huge long footnotes to my books. I think, one of my first books was called The Sense of God, sociology, anthropology, psychological theories of the origin of the sense of God, and the footnotes just go on and on. Because, part of it was going backwards, so, I wrote it in here in Cambridge, and of course there’s the, all the papers of J G Frazer in Trinity, and I would go in and look at the origins of anthropology and a lot of, of Tylor’s stuff, and so on, here. I couldn’t bear to think it was going to go to oblivion, so I would sort of, copy it out, and it would go into a footnote. I think that’s the effect of the war and all the destruction. You just can’t bear to think this is just going to go to oblivion. Well it is, so, you know, should stop worrying, shouldn’t I?

[34:35] When you say that ‘apparently I was a very wide-reader,’ and ‘apparently I was very irritating,’, who, who has given you these reports of…?

Oh my sister. Because we remain close. She’s still alive, and, she even survived, just three weeks ago she was at a junction and a white van just came out, smashed into her. The car’s a complete write-off. And she wasn’t hurt at all. She said to me, that’s funny, I was talking to her this morning, just finding out how she is, it’s only just a short time ago, she said, ‘You know, I don’t know how I survived it.’ She said, ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ she said, ‘if the airbags had worked and gone off, I’d have died of fright.’ [laughs] But, so yes, we, we’ve always been close, and kept an eye on each other. We’ve lived geographically far apart, but we’ve sort of, kept an eye on each other.

[35:32] Could you then take us on from, from the home school to the next school?

Yes. Well that was, this was after the war, in 1945. I was still very much a problem child in the sense that I was obviously very unsettled disturbed, and go into sort of, great anger fits. So I was taken to see a psychiatrist in, or a psychotherapist, I don’t know what it was, but, anyway. And he advised a prep school in the Cotswolds. And, so I went to the, to this prep school in the Cotswolds, which was, again a very John Bowker Page 14 C1672/23 Track 1 very good school. It was, fairly small, about 100 boys, but immensely relaxed. And it also believed very much in, in boys participating and trying things out. It was extremely good at endorsing rash and random experiments [laughs] in life. But it was a very safe environment, which is obviously what I needed.

Could you say some more about those two things? In what way, in what way was the environment safe, in what way did it seem to you safe?

That it was very isolated. I mean that might sound a very bad thing now, it probably would, but it was, it was isolated in the sense, geographically isolated. But on the other hand, there were a lot of these sort of schools around in those days, so there were things like, games which are relatively easy for boys to play at and fairly easy to sort of, excel at in that very limited context, so that, there were things in the, you know, physical things to do that were, had a purpose and a goal and so on. And, it was safe also in the sense that, the war was over. I remember very clearly seeing the first Gloster Meteor jet flying over. So, the war so to speak was a very real memory, and it was clearly, it was exciting to see the first jet. Well I mean it wasn’t the first jet; it was the first jet I had seen. And I remember the excitement of that. But I mean by safe, I think, that the, the staff were very very consistent and reliable, and, they taught well, I think, looking back on it. Two of them at least came back from the Army, from the war, and took up teaching again. [pause] In terms of the sort of, the experimental things, we, there was a lot of acting, a lot of drama, and we were encouraged to, you know, write our own, no doubt very mediocre, but write our own plays and, and act them out. There was a lot of encouragement of, of doing your own writing, writing your own poetry, writing your own stories, and, and so on. But there was also huge encouragement, it wouldn’t be allowed to be done any more, to build things. I mean, there were large grounds, this is what I meant by the security, and that you were safe in the grounds. You didn’t, I don’t know that we were, but it didn’t feel as if there were any threats around. So we were encourage to build our own tree houses, and it didn’t matter if they came down and you came down with them. I mean, I don’t remember any serious injuries [laughs], so, it was a… That’s what I meant by the sort of experimental thing, intellectual experimenting, but also physically, in games, and building things and so on. 1947 was a very very severe winter. My memory is that the whole of the Lent term, the snow was on the ground. I John Bowker Page 15 C1672/23 Track 1 don’t suppose it was, but most of that Lent term. We were in the Cotswolds. So we had to build our own toboggans, and we had to go out and, and find the wood, and find the means to, to make them. And if you could make your own toboggan, surely we had some lessons, but all I remember is, we were always on these hills on these toboggans. That’s what I mean by the encouragement to try things out. And again, the reading that you were encouraged to do was, extraordinary.

[40:33] Any teaching of science at this stage?

Yes. Rudimentary. I suppose it all was rudimentary. It was particularly on the, the very very rudiments of physics and biology, the only two bits I remember. And I don’t remember the detail of what we were taught. But I do remember, there was a film that was going around in those days, wasn’t there, of… I can’t… It was a… I think it was a National Geographic film. I don’t know. But it was, it was… I think it was a, it was probably a Christian-based one, because I think a copy was given to a lot of schools, and I don’t think this was done by the Department of Education in those days. And that caught my imagination. It was a film about, the cosmos really. It was beautifully done, dramatically done anyway, and I can’t remember the name of it, but, I did see a bit of it not that long ago, about four or five years ago. It was in a documentary about something else, and I thought, ah, yes, I remember that. And that excited me, that one could, not only begin to understand that bit about how the world was, and how we came to be here, and so on, but that actually, it was dramatically beautiful, and inviting, and this sense of invitation, that the cosmos offers an invitation to enter into it with perception and discernment and understanding, I’ve never forgotten that, just watching that film. And that’s certainly stayed with me.

Might it have been called Cosmos?

I don’t know.

[42:30] In the school itself, how was, how was Christianity presented?

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Again, dramatically, and in many ways experimentally. [pause] It was my first experience of what I’ve now come to understand much more in terms of the neurophysiology and the brain behaviour, it was very Anglican, High Church, but not in a precious sense. In a very, practical sense, that, every other Sunday the main classroom, it was just a large house but the main classroom, must have been a drawing room once or something like that, was turned from the classroom into a chapel. And, the… It was the old thing, the first time I experienced it, was, why there are so many boys holding the candle. It’s not the boys holding the candles, it’s the candles holding the boys, which you will have heard many times. But that actually was what was done. Pretty well everybody had something to do in the ritual. So I could tell you more about why there is incense, or why there are candles, or why people make the sign of the cross, or why people do things, I could tell you infinitely more about that than what they were doing, what they believed in while they were doing it, the beliefs, the intellectual, the, the credo side of it, it was almost nonexistence, I mean just taken for granted. It was put into practice. And the great advantage was, I remember one of my friends there was the son of the composer Sumsion, who was the organist at Gloucester Cathedral, and that connected the school to Gloucester Cathedral, it’s in the Cotswolds. So, the Bishop of Gloucester used to come at least once a term and celebrate High Mass, using the non-Anglican language no doubt. Every Rogation Sunday we’d do a procession all round the old Rogation Day processions. It was entirely, in that sense, ritualistic. And, that has stayed with me. Because I think that the, and we now know from the brain research, that in fact that’s, it’s ritual that stays with people, not the teachings they either accept or don’t accept, or forget, and so on. And that never goes away, you can’t erase it in the brain, for better or for worse. So that, when I wrote about the failures of liturgical revision in the Church of England, so I know better than others, I pointed out that these liturgical revisions are done entirely by highly verbalised people who change the words, and try to get the words, you know, back to some ancient tradition, in the Roman cases back to the original Latin, the Masses early on, and they ignore entirely what you do. There’s just one small paragraph saying what you do in worship is important, but they don’t go any further. So we end up with a particular frustration by Roman Catholics in the English- speaking world because the translations are so frightful, they couldn’t possibly be worse. They’re made by people who do know Latin, and think that to get as near as you can to the Latin and transpose it into English is what you mean by liturgical John Bowker Page 17 C1672/23 Track 1 revision. So it goes back to those early days at the prep school, where it was great fun. Religion was enormous fun. So, I couldn’t tell you what I believed in those days, but I can tell you what I did. [laughs]

[46:42] So, that implies, then, that you… I mean did you, did you yourself pray at times when you weren’t sort of involved in this sort of communal ritual?

In an elementary sense, because we were told to. It wasn’t prayer as I… Of course it couldn’t be. It wasn’t prayer as I would understand it now, but it was, the usual thing, kneeling beside your bed and saying, ‘God, please look after…’ and, a list of names. And that continued. It became a kind of, mark of discipleship, particularly in National Service days, did you say your prayers kneeling by your bed? I certainly did not. Nor had I for a long time before that. But, these are the wrong understandings of prayer in my view.

Well, in what way was it a mark of discipleship?

Well, were you prepared, against the mockery and the yells and the so on of everybody else in the barrack room, were you prepared to say your prayers. And make it obvious that you were saying your prayers. That’s what I meant by it. But when I was in borstal, I used to get up half an hour early, partly so I could get a shave before all the basins were taken by other people, I used to get up half an hour early to go and say Morning Prayer in the chapel in the borstal.

This comes later.

Later, yes.

[48:28] OK, so, so could you take us through this… Have we got through this school? I mean, do you move through this school to the end, in…?

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Yes, I stayed there till… I changed school fairly late. I was, what was I? I was, fourteen I think by, just, I was, just before my fourteenth birthday I went to my next school. But it gave me, it left with me also the sense that you, you really can have fun. You know, like under obedience, which prep schools and other schools in those days were, OK, so you have to keep the rules, but in a sense, the rules, again, supply this security, you know exactly where you are. I mean you don’t behave well all the time [laughs], obviously, but, you, you knew what the structure was, and it was not restrictive, as I think people today would think it must have been. Of course it was in one sense, it stopped you doing certain things. It also set the boundaries so you could do things out of the, outside the boundaries, you know, with great daring and so on. But actually, the real thing was that when you had got the boundaries, it sort of set you free, it liberated you to just get on with doing things that you enjoyed doing. So, my main memory of that school, this is why I think it was so important for me, were of really, really good things to do. We used to go on great expeditions in those days, so, really began to see the world around you, and, I remember the, going to the Cheddar Gorge and, and things. How did this get here? What’s the history of this, this place that we’ve arrived? So it may not have answered questions, but it, it showed you, began to encourage you anyway, to say, there are questions to be asked here, and there might be answers if you go on looking. That was my main memory of what they did then, more than the details of, you know, the, how do you decline the, you know, the third kind of noun in Latin and so on. Oh I can still do that, but…

Who was taking you on the school expeditions?

Oh well, the teachers would take us, the headmaster particularly. And one got in these very old buses which were… I remember on one, actually going down to play a cricket match at Shepton Mallet, and, the bus went too fast round a corner, and, I said, I said, ‘Ooh, that was a severe corner.’ And the headmaster said, ‘That’s an interesting word.’ He picked up that it wasn’t the usual… I mean it’s not a very interesting word, but it wasn’t a usual word, and he, that single thing made me think, I must try to be fairly careful in my language, try and push the boundaries of, of language out a bit. But we went down to Gloucester to see, in those days the touring teams in cricket would play the counties. They don’t now, it’s, too much money involved in other forms of cricket. But in those days, I remember we went down to John Bowker Page 19 C1672/23 Track 1

Gloucester to, to see the 1948 Australian team with Lindwall, and Miller bowling, and again, you see that was, it was just fun to be there. And so, that’s… It was, that’s my overwhelming memory, is, is invitation to fulfil your curiosity. Don’t just be curious and then stop; go on, and, and go further. We were put in for national writing competitions and so on, though some of us could hardly write at all.

Do you remember what the psychologist that you had seen before you were, you know, the psychologist who recommended this school…

No, I don’t remember.

Anything about that introduction?

No. No, I don’t remember it at all. I do remember that we went to Birmingham, and in those days there was a, there was a firm called Kunzle Cakes who made delicious cakes, and that’s what I remember about that. I don’t remember what he said at all.

And do you remember any details of the, of the teachers at this school, of their, of their sort of, appearance, characters?

I can remember, yes, I mean, I can remember what they looked like certainly, yes. But, I mean not in any memorable sense. Like, I mean there they were, and one was with them for four years, so… I do, I remember what they looked like, but I don’t remember any kind of interaction with them, except in these school occasions; it wasn’t just the classroom, it would be games, or these expeditions and so on. [pause] But there was no hint of any of that kind of bad experience I had had in the other school, none at all.

[53:55] And when you were going home in holidays, where was home now? I mean we’re…

Well now it was in the, in Steventon, this village in Berkshire.

And, your, this was your father… John Bowker Page 20 C1672/23 Track 1

Who was the vicar of the parish.

Living with his second wife.

Yes.

The art teacher.

Yes. Yes.

OK. And, then, are there things that you remember doing with them, at this stage of your life, as an older child?

Well, I was, there was rationing going on, food was fairly, well very scarce. I remember the despair when bread was rationed and so on. So, this was country living, and, yes, I can certainly remember digging for, not for victory but for peace, and just digging for hunger. We grew a lot of things, we had pigs, chickens, indeed, they went so far as to have their own incubator, it was almost a kind of, chicken farm almost. [laughs] And used to pass the chickens on to parishioners who were in the same sort of need of, having a few more eggs. So, certainly I can remember the sort of, horticultural mini-industry almost that went on. But other things, no, because, of course we lived together, and we listened to the wireless together, which was very important in those days. We did, they did have given to them by their, my grandparents, they had an old 78 record player; of course one listened to the very few 78 records there were. I remember the Eroica symphony being played repeatedly, just happened to be the records they had got. We didn’t buy any records or anything. Never went away on holiday, or never went on holiday full stop. And didn’t want to. There was so much to do locally. And it was an interesting village. It used to be the terminus of the Great Western Railway and the two great houses, one was the manager’s house at this end of the London, from Paddington, line, and the other was a huge hotel this end. And then, people caught the coach to Oxford. And, so the old coach road I remember, and you used to find things just lying around, like coins and so on. So, it was all very small, very local. Certainly there were, there was a woman John Bowker Page 21 C1672/23 Track 1 in the village who had gone to Oxford in the car once, and that was twelve, thirteen miles away. She had never been anywhere else in her life. She had just, you know, you read about these people, but, we were actually living with them. This was still, very few of them, and of course the world was changing. My mother, my stepmother, used to recall how she saw Grahame-White make the first flight in Kent, sort of wobbling over the Kent apple trees and so on. So the world was certainly changing. But still, as always, this cultural lag the whole time, and that kind of experience made me realise that we needed to respect the past far more in the history of science than we really do. That we think we’ve moved on, and now we’re giving the up-to-date account, and the past, yes, it’s, it’s curiosity interest, you know, this is how they thought the clouds were made in the old days, but actually they were often using the best language available at their time, in their time, to tell us, really important things. [57:54] One of the great tragedies of, well many tragedies of the modern world more serious than this, but one of the cultural tragedies is the way we’ve converted the word ‘myth’ into a word meaning false, or, nonsensical. It’s just become a standard. Yet myth is a treasure house, giving us insight into the conditions that were forming the beginnings of the Western way of doing science. And our son exemplifies the importance of this, because, he loves Latin and Greek, he won the Greek prose prize at Cambridge, turning English into, into…. He just loves the language. But he’s also… And he teaches Latin and Greek. But he’s also a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and he has done really good work on the way, what Aristotle was, for example, because he wrote the Meteorologica, was really trying to talk about, in the language available to him. And when you penetrate it, you don’t dismiss this as, well, of course they didn’t know better. It doesn’t mean they got it right, at all, from our point of view, you know, but just, equal nonsense. But they gave you a perception into what they were observing. And so, he was able to do really interesting work on particular values in Greece as a result, and infer from the surviving data of people using mythological language why certain events had happened as they had happened in the past, because of the weather conditions. Now that’s a very elementary example. But it means that, I have always had a deep respect for the pre-scientific languages with which people were actually talking very often about the same subject matter. Indeed, my wife is a historian, and, she had to remind me in our early days of marriage, ‘Do not reduce your ancestors to a height of two foot six.’ So, that came out of all, all that John Bowker Page 22 C1672/23 Track 1 living in, a kind of frozen time capsule. Of course it wasn’t entirely, but, there were no cars around, or very very few, but there were buses, so you could catch a bus, every hour, to Oxford, and that kind of thing. It was just, just, made me realise that you don’t… You want to move into the present if you have to go to the dentist, but in other respects, you’re wise to respect the way in which they try to make sense of the circumstance with the resources available to them, whether intellectual or practical or whatever.

Imagining yourself in this environment, who do you tend to be with?

Do you mean, who do I see myself most with?

Yes, who did you tend to be with?

Well I had some, you know, friends I used to play games with. But, generally I was, I was far too isolated. I liked being on my own with, taking the dog of a walk, and I would walk, you know, for miles and miles, because I loved being in the countryside and, exercising the imagination I suppose I was. So I, I don’t… I mean, I imagine myself with the family so to speak. But, we didn’t go anywhere very much. I mean we went to Oxford to the theatre, and, occasionally to the cinema.

Were you by this stage getting any greater insight into the sort of character of your father, or the…?

Only an awareness, not insight, an awareness that the war had, had devastating effect. He wasn’t the same person that I remembered, you know, only, three or four years before, who had gone off to the war, and, he came back a very different person.

[1:02:28] Could you, then, take us to the next school? Is it St John’s?

Yes, that’s correct. [pause] In some… That was a much more frightening place, in the sense that it was very hierarchical. There were some very very good teachers there though. It was, the hoard that was… It was a matter of survival. But John Bowker Page 23 C1672/23 Track 1 fortunately there were good teachers there, and, they were very encouraging in terms of lending books, or lending time, or giving time. I remember one who thought that I could write Latin proses in a very interesting way, and, he spent a lot of time helping me to read people who at that stage were beyond me, like Tacitus I remember being very difficult. I mean it eventually became a set book and one could do it. But he was very very encouraging in saying that, ‘Don’t just read these people. Try and write like them.’ So that, one would write proses in the style of, Cicero, or in the style of the, Livy and so on. And then of course one got to write in Latin and Greek verse, and that was, I still find, an absolutely fascinating challenge. It makes you think. That again is another of the cultural tragedies, that the classics have so far disappeared. In my view, not because I was a beneficiary but I think they are… You can’t fudge in Latin and Greek. It’s not that you’re ever going to use them. I mean someone has made the case for Latin and Greek, well you’ll understand the construction of English words a bit better. That’s not the point. It’s, you’ve got to be absolutely precise. And it is, or was, one of the best trainings for a scientist. When you think back to the nineteenth century, most of the great scientists were fundamentally grounded in at least elementary classics. Hort, who was at Trinity here, was well-known in Christian circles, because Westcott and Hort wrote the first really good critical edition of the Greek New Testament. He was an examiner in the Zoology Tripos. It wasn’t that you had to do one or the other. And he was, I had to read his letters, the surviving letters, because I had to do a lecture on Hort for his bicentenary or centenary or some such occasion, and, I was, and that was the first time this point had struck me that he said that, the point about having started having to learn Latin and Greek, was that it gave you such a precise attention to the detail of what was there before you. And he said, ‘That’s what was important when I came to look at plants and animals.’ And, there’s a truth in that. I mean it sounds totally absurd, but, there is a truth about the discipline of, you’ve got to get the case, it needs to agree, you’ve got to get the verb in the right mood. It’s nothing to do with its usefulness. It’s to do with the way the mind realises that you can’t guess, well, I used to guess most of the time [laughs], but, you’re not wise to guess. You have to go through the discipline of attention to the rules of what you are studying. And, that remains the case. I remember somebody in this university who became a very very skilled technician in computers, I mean, not just technician, but he could put things right. He really got, the university when it went over from the great old volumes of, John Bowker Page 24 C1672/23 Track 1 in the catalogues, he helped solve problems as they started to digitise the, the catalogue. He was an absolutely superb biochemist. He had got his PhD, he became a research fellow at one of the Cambridge colleges, and was doing really, really good, esteemed and applauded research. And I remember him saying to me that, he moved over to computers because it was far more challenging and interesting than doing biochemical research. Because, he found that doing that research, you knew where the boundary had got to, the tide so to speak had got to, and then you just did the next sort of, logical thing after it. And anybody, he said, of course it’s wrong, anybody, you know, can do that, if they’ve got to the edge, they’ll know what the next step has got to be, and there will be an interest in seeing how it’s solved, but it’s dull. So he moved to computers because, the problems, particularly of, say, digitising a university library [laughs], are far more unexpected. Now I think, you see, that the link between what I was saying about the classics and the sciences is that the classics teaches you to be patient and logical, and see what the next step has to be, if you’re going to get a correct solution. So, although I sound rather nostalgic and romantic, I actually think it’s a very serious point, and by losing these fundamental, it doesn’t have to be Latin and Greek I dare say, though they happen to be very good, because they’re so complicated, and need a disciplined mind. We made a great mistake in regarding them as not useful, because they don’t help the economy.

[1:09:05] Thank you. So that’s the education in the classics at St John’s. What else do you remember of the academic side of the school?

On the academic side. The science was actually very, much weaker. It was way back, you see, we’re back in, what are we? 1949. I mean that’s quite a lot of years ago, it’s sixty years ago isn’t it? Or something like that. Classics was still dominant. You had to be good at classics if you were going to make progress towards university. And the sciences were, very much on the margins. You had to choose between biology and Spanish I remember. I mean it’s just, unbelievable now. But, it did its work. It wasn’t inspiring. And, there were other, there was much better teaching in things like languages and, history and so on. So that’s in a sense a, a disappointment. It was a sort of, Cinderella subject. It sounds weird to say that now, but it, in that school anyway, at that time, it was. John Bowker Page 25 C1672/23 Track 1

Were you, outside of school, continuing to read in science?

Yes. Yes. That was a consequence of my father. So, yes, certainly it was, he had… But they were all books, but, you know, they were still, raised questions, and I could see the point of the questions. But I couldn’t possibly answer them, because, I wasn’t being taught in a way that would make it possible.

[1:11:11] You said this was, at the beginning of this section, that it was about survival, the hoard. Can you talk a bit more about relations with the other boys?

Yah, I mean I had very good friends. And, I, I don’t despise the school at all. I mean I even became a governor at one point, because I wanted to make sure that no other boy should ever suffer so much as I did. [laughs] I mean that’s a dramatically over- exaggeration, but I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to go through the experience that we all went through. It wasn’t just me. I mean it was just, it was the wrong system, the wrong way to bring up children. Tremendously hierarchical, as I said earlier. You know, layers of authority, and, sports. I, I read the prospectus for the school one holiday, and I noticed in the prospectus that it said, listed the games that were on offer, and it included golf. So I went back to my housemaster and I said, ‘I’ve seen in the prospectus it says I can play golf. I want to play golf.’ He said, ‘Well we don’t do that here.’ And I said, ‘Well it says in the prospectus that you do.’ [laughs] So, he said, ‘All right then. If you want to play golf, you will play golf.’ And I went out every afternoon when there was a games afternoon, playing golf, whether it was snowing or, or raining. And I, so I got quite good at golf. So, I was already at some distance from the hierarchy of the school. I didn’t want to succeed in the school on the school’s terms. But I wasn’t a particular rebel. I, I was just, sort of, a rather detached observer, trying to keep out of sight.

When you say that you became a governor later, I know you said it was partly exaggeration, but, when you became a governor to prevent others going through what you had gone through, what was it that you were remembering?

John Bowker Page 26 C1672/23 Track 1

I think the hierarchical authoritarian structure. It needed to be, well not dismantled, but, it had to be changed. So, I remember when I was on the governing body, arguing strongly that girls should be let into the sixth form. I mean, the school’s now co- education, obviously, but, all these battles have to be won. And… Because I thought they would, I mean, sort of, soften… I don’t suppose it would, I suppose girls can be as horrid as boys, can’t they. I’ve never met any who are actually yet, so I’m still looking. [laughs] But, no, it was, it, just the structure of the thing, it was just taken for granted that, this was the hierarchy, and this was the way authority was exercised, and there was all stupid things like, sort of, fagging and so on. But, I just thought the whole thing was wrongly built, the structure was wrong. It was that that, I suppose always, I’ve remained from there, I’ve always tried to keep emphasising that evil doesn’t just operate through individuals and their decisions to do bad things to other people; structures can have evil within themselves, quite apart from which individuals happen to inhabit them. So, that’s been a very strong note in my subsequent work, and is, it’s a fairly obvious sociological observation. But, it… So I’ve expressed it in the, this recent, this recent book of mine, the thing that, with all the child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, and people coming forward, they don’t do it so often now but in the early days they did, they would say, well you always expect a few bad apples in a barrel. But my worry from these school days was, supposing the whole barrel was constructed to make the apples go bad. And that’s what I meant by gaining insight from the structure being wrong. It wasn’t particular individuals, or particular boys. I mean we were all in the system together. It was that the whole system was designed to encourage senior boys to exercise and assert authority over younger boys. And it, it wasn’t sexual or homosexual. I don’t doubt that that went on, but it wasn’t that. It was that the structure was wrong. And it was, people without really thinking about it, acted in those ways, because that’s the way the structure was built. To question it was very difficult. I mean, the days were going to come very very soon when, you know, If and the famous films were made. But they hadn’t been made by then, and, after the war I think, everyone was just exhausted and just sort of got on with the next bit of life really. Certainly the rationing was troublesome. [laughs]

So in this unfavourable system, what did you see happening, what kinds of evils were happening as a result of this structure?

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I think it was the obedience expected of the lower orders exercised to the authority of the, the senior orders. It wasn’t so much the teachers. I mean you would just take it for granted that if they tell you to do something, you’d do it. I mean that is a part of it, but that wasn’t… It was the way some particular senior boys would exercise the authority that the system conferred upon them. And it’s the system of running the institution that worried me.

What did these boys do, then, that were, the boys…?

You couldn’t do anything. They couldn’t do anything. I mean they just, got on with it, very unhappily.

So, it was both the senior and the junior boys who were unhappy in…?

I don’t… Yes. Well I think the, the senior boys had been through it, obviously, and maybe psychologically they liked imposing unhappiness on others. I don’t know, [laughs] I never analysed them. It was just, the whole thing just didn’t, wasn’t working as… You see, my early school, you remember I used the word happiness. There was no such happiness there. I don’t really remember much happiness in the, in my senior school, at all. You just got on with it.

And do you remember unhappiness, in your case?

Not particularly. Just, not liking it. It wasn’t being unhappy. It was, I think the system also, you see, this terrible public school suppression of emotion. The stiff upper lippery and so on. That comes from many sources, but that reinforces it. You don’t express feelings.

[1:18:49] And, where had you got to in terms of your own religious faith and practice at this stage?

Well I remember we were set an essay once in the sixth form on, five proofs for the existence of God, and of course they meant ‘the’ Five Proofs for the existence of God. John Bowker Page 28 C1672/23 Track 1

But I didn’t realise that. So I started inventing proofs for the existence of God. And I got into immense trouble, because I produced six. And, I was told I was impertinent. [laughs] Funnily enough, slight digression, but, my wife was very close indeed to a famous Catholic philosopher, theologian, called Jacques Maritain, who was a great friend of the Pope, and we used to go and stay in Kolbsheim where he had his holiday. By then he was a little brother in Toulon, Les Petits Frères. And, he and Mari would talk very much about, he hoped she would write the biography of his wife Raïssa who, the famous Raïssa Maritain. I didn’t see much of him, but I remember once he, we went into the, we were living in one of these French chateaux, we went to this dining room, and all the shutters were closed, very dark, and, he sat at one end of the table, I sat at the other, and he asked me what I was doing at that time, and I was writing The Sense of God at that time. And I said, ‘Well, you know, it’s very strange, but it seems to me that, it’s adding up to a sixth proof of the existence of God.’ And he looked up, and he, he was very old, and grey hair, and he shook his old head very gently and he said, ‘I’ve done the sixth proof. You can have the seventh.’ [laughs] So anyway, yes, I was… We had compulsory chapel, and, it didn’t mean anything in terms of intellect or emotion. So, I can remember… We must have had dozens of sermons. The only sermon I can remember is Lady Tweedsmuir, who was the widow of John Buchan, you know, of Thirty-Nine Steps fame, came and preached a sermon at Easter, and I remember she talked about a daffodil. But what she said about the daffodil, I couldn’t possibly tell you. So that, my involvement, if I can put it like that, with God, was entirely… It can’t have been entirely. It felt at the time as though it was an intellectual issue, a problem, is there a God or not? That’s why I say, you know, the man who lost his God. So, I had no fervent or emotional commitment to belief at all. But I picked up from some people that there was more going on here than what was going on in the chapel [laughs], or, going to church at home which we had to do. There was something going on here that had more to it than these incidentals. I remember we were sent out one afternoon a week to go and visit old people, and, I remember we were sent to… Whether it was an outpost of the Chelsea Pensioners. I remember he had a scarlet uniform, or jacket, but whether he was a Chelsea Pensioner, I couldn’t say. I mean this is down in Surrey, so… But anyway, he was a veteran of Mafeking. And, he actually taught me, I think I must be the last surviving person who was taught how to ride a penny-farthing bicycle by a veteran of Mafeking. [laughs] He taught me how to get on; never taught me how to get off. So it was a John Bowker Page 29 C1672/23 Track 1 painful learning experience. He talked about Mafeking, and, he said that, in some ways it wasn’t as severe as it was later written up to be, being there wasn’t quite so severe. They did have more food, and the Boers, although they had one raid, using a ditch or something where they were a bit scared, that, he said, really, we actually didn’t ever feel that we were going to die there. So I then asked him about, what did it feel like to think you might die, or something like that, you know. And, it was then he talked about, the companionship of God which was expressed through the bonding, the companionship of the people within the encampment, well the town of Mafeking. And so, we talked actually quite a lot about, what would that mean, what does friendship, what does companionship mean? Why bring God into it? And, his answer there, which I can’t remember the words of, but in effect I can certainly remember what he said, was that it raised our condition and our circumstance out of just being in Mafeking with the Boers threatening to kill us. And I said, ‘Well do you think, then, you know, you’re going to go to Heaven if you were killed?’ He said, no, it wasn’t at all about looking for something after death. It was the fact that in that situation, God seemed to be the strength that formed the friendship. And it was that phrase, the strength that formed the friendship, that stuck with me. Because suddenly I saw, this isn’t a matter of individual propositions and individuals ascending or descending from them. There’s something going on here which is changing the nature of the experience. So one could have experienced it one way, but one was experiencing it in another way. And that remained with me as very very fundamental. How do we change… How do we form, and how do we change, the pictures, our imaginations, of what’s going on, in such a way that the circumstance can be transformed in a new direction? Now obviously, you can form pictures that will transform circumstances in a totally, what I would regard as malevolent and evil way. I think to have a picture of a pure Aryan race… And I don’t need to fill in the rest of the sentence. So I’m not saying pictures are great things just by being pictures. I’m saying that there are some that transform things in a good direction as well as in an evil one. And then the issue becomes, how do you test the pictures? How do you go about doing that, in the sense, you know, you know, you might have a picture of, oh, I’m not too sure, say, one of, Kelvin’s two clouds, say, I’m not too sure about this. How are we going to deal with this? And you might do a Michelson-Morley experiment and, try and get the Newtonian thing rescued. But on the other hand, you might think, no, this is hinting at a different world, and suddenly we’re into quantum mechanics. That’s the sort of John Bowker Page 30 C1672/23 Track 1 conversion I think that happened to me. It’s what sorts of pictures do we form when we inherit things from the past, like the veteran of Mafeking, suddenly feeds something in which you hadn’t expected. I was thinking, you know, well, heroics and, die for your king, or queen, and country. You know, I was expecting that kind of conversation. It wasn’t that at all. And suddenly I realised that the way we form our pictures, our imaginations, absolutely crucial. I mean, to the individual, but actually crucial in society. What shared pictures, what shared imaginations, are we going to trust and not mock? So this is why I regard as cultural tragedies the way we trash the, the pictures of the past, without asking, but what were they trying to represent? Like, God as the, the form, the friendship that transforms the situation. I mean you could say, how ridiculous, which is what so much of the modern world does of the past. I mean, [laughs] how could they ever have believed that? It’s nonsensical. It may be. But I want to understand where the picture came from, how it was formed, and what it did for people in their circumstance. And then, as I said a moment ago, then what is important is, how do you test the picture? You may… You know, how do you destroy the picture, if necessary? Which it often is. So that’s why so much of my work, for example the little thing I did just recently on God, a very short introduction, the whole theme of the book is change. How are the religious imaginations of, inverted commas, ‘God’, ‘Deus’, ‘Brahma’ and whatever, how are our imaginations formed, shared, but then tested? And tested if necessary to breaking point. And the dilemma of religions is, they mistrust the change bit of it. Because the cultural lag thing that we were talking about earlier means that… But these pictures have worked, many of them were revealed by God. We can’t change them. And suddenly we’re in a real crisis.

[1:29:25] Do you remember, other than speaking to this survivor of that situation, do you remember other cases where speaking to other people, interaction with other people, sort of tipped you off, there was more going on in religion…

Yes.

…practice, or, a set of intellectual propositions?

John Bowker Page 31 C1672/23 Track 1

I suppose, yes… Oh well certainly yes I don't suppose. Talking to the grave digger in our local parish church in my father’s parish, you know, another veteran, he was in the First World War, I mean being entranced by, he said, 'they got the suet for a Christmas pudding, but hey had nothing to cook it in. So, two of them took off their long johns, tied up the ends, and they steamed the Christmas suet in their long johns to make a Christmas pudding in the trenches.' That stuck with me. But, there was a wisdom, a wisdom, in his attitude to… They dug every grave of every… I remember a very close friend of mine in the village died of a, a very, he was my age, so he was very young when he died. I don’t remember what the illness was. I remember he went very yellow, so you’d think it was a sort of jaundice-related thing, before he died. And I remember he was the first person who said to me, in a very Berkshire accent which I wouldn’t attempt to imitate, I mean I would say it’s a… you know, ‘Why has he died,’ you know, the usual questions that you do in your teenage years, why has he died so young? What’s going on here? Is there a God who allows this to happen? And he was the first person who said to me, ‘Why do you think that time is measured by the dates on all these stones around us?’ And it was a stumbling way of saying, who decides what’s the worthwhile quantitative measure of time? It might be one second, it might be eternity. Well I can’t say eternity. I remember writing the entry for my Oxford Dictionary of World Religions and it reads, ‘Eternity. Not a long time.’ Which I thought was rather clever at the time. But anyway. I mean he, what he was raising was, who decides what is the appropriate measure of time to say, that’s good, or that’s bad? Where do we get our evaluations of the length of time from? That’s been very important to me subsequently. So, fragments of conversation, or people, I mean I used to love just sitting on the edge of the grave while he was digging it, and just listening to him, but… So people, yes. But they weren’t religious professionals, if I can put it like that. I don’t think I can think of anyone. [pause] I must have been confirmed. I can just remember my Confirmation. It was a very snowy night, and, we thought we were going to have to spend the night in the church. But, all I can remember of my Confirmation classes, I mean this is going back to my prep school, was, we used to have to go up to the local vicarage, have the Confirmation classes, three of us, and when we ran back, we were always at a particular house, it was a lodge actually of a large house, used to throw stones at the windows, you know, the way children do. Of course we did it every week, at night, at the same time. [laughs] So about the fourth time we did it, we were, we were caught. John Bowker Page 32 C1672/23 Track 1

That’s about all I can remember of my Confirmation. But what you can remember is not necessarily as important as what actually happened. I’m back to the distinction between ritual and creed. And therefore, what happened by being in the process, surely had a much more profound influence on me than I can identify or articulate.

[1:33:29] What was the general… You’ve really given us an impression of your view of religion and religious practice at this time. Was there a sort of, general view among the boys about the value or status of religion? Was it something that they talked about, or, you know, was a feature even-?

I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about belief or religion at all. I’m not a teacher or a… I mean it just happened. The whole school was, I think it was a school for the sons of the clergy, which was the only reason I was there. I mean it just happened, the same that church happened on Sunday. Surely there were people there who didn’t believe a word of it. [laughs] But it wasn’t talked, not by me anyway, and I never heard anybody talking about it.

And was religion ever talked about in relation to science, or the other way around?

No. No. [pause] The only thing I can say was that, there was no sense that there was any contest or, or conflict, that science was giving an account of the universe, but religion was telling how God reaches into our, no doubt immature, lives, and makes a difference to them. There was never, I mean nobody believed, that I can ever remember hearing. I mean there were, we did RE classes, or, it wasn’t called that, I can’t remember what it was called. Nobody believed that the world was created in, six days. We were always taught that it was one of these, the stories that helps us to understand our own relationship to the universe and to God. I don’t know that I ever thought that it did, but, I mean that’s, that was the… It wasn’t that the Bible was, with a capital T or something, True, and that science would either have to fit in with it or be thought to be wrong. I mean there is a Muslim in that, well, Voices of Islam, who actually does say that. I mean I was pressing them on evolution and the Qur’an, and Adam, and genetics, and he just says, well, if genetics does demonstrate that we couldn’t have come from two parents like that, I would just have to say that the John Bowker Page 33 C1672/23 Track 1 genetics is wrong. But now, there was never, I never encountered that, it never came up. I don’t know if that was exceptional, but… So, I have never felt myself to be having to defend science against, say, religious fundamentalism in those early years, but the other is true also. I never felt that I had to defend my understanding of, of Christianity or something, against science. It just, never occurred in those terms, not to me anyway.

[1:36:44] Thank you. What were your thoughts about what you wanted to do in the future at the stage when you are thinking about and then going on to do A Levels in the upper part of this school presumably?

Well, in the, when I was thinking of what I was going to do and where I was going to go, I didn’t actually think out anything. This sounds, you won’t believe it, it’s so naïve. We were naïve. We were terribly isolated, insulated, in these big public boarding schools. There were very few day boys even making contact with the outside world. Never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go to a university. I mean, it’s ridiculous, it’s so naïve. It just, nobody had ever raised any other possibility. So, I just thought, that’s the way the world is. You grow up, you go to a couple of schools, do your National Service, and go to university. So I didn’t think about it at school. I believe there was a careers chap there, but I don’t think I ever talked to him. What did I think I might do? I wanted to do something that would involve writing. And I thought the only probably thing that that could be would be journalism, which was still a big industry in those days. So, that’s as far as I had gone really. I thought that I, the only thing that I could make a decision about was that I would try and do as well as I could at the subjects that were set before me, but, I didn’t really choose the subjects. There were choices, I said, you could choose biology or Spanish, but, nobody chose Spanish though. [laughs] They’re not real choices. So, I mean I was just, so naïve and ignorant. We had no experience of the world at all.

And so, what were your, your A Levels?

I did Classics, and, I ended up with… I mean, what were we doing? Used to do AS Levels in those days, but they would count as, I think they counted as O Levels. I’m John Bowker Page 34 C1672/23 Track 1 not sure they were even called that back then. But, you know… I ended up with thirteen O Levels. Because you just kept taking exams. And then I went into the Army. And that’s when I began to think, what on earth’s going on here? [laughs] I had just gone straight through the system, and that’s why I became so deeply suspicious of the systems that just… But once I, you know, went into the Army, then I did begin to, to think, why on earth have I arrived here? I was supposed to go to Cambridge, but, I found out in the Army you could get a week’s leave if you did the entrance exam at Oxford. So, I decided to apply to… I didn’t know which college, but a friend of mine in the sixth form had once got a Greek prose back with the mark ‘zeta’ on it, and with the comment, ‘Keep this up.’ So I thought, if he had already got in to Worcester, I thought, well that’s the one I’ll try. And so, I applied to Worcester, got the week’s leave, and was then offered a place, and asked, what did I want to read? So that was why I had to think pretty hard. What did I want to read? And I ended up by, and this is, comes right round to your question, when did I start to think about God? And I thought, well the only way to think about God is actually to understand what is claimed in relation to God. So I said, I want to read Theology. And that’s the reason I read Theology. Because I wanted to, challenge, I mean, the man who has lost his God. What has he lost? What is it that’s on the table here? So that’s why I decided to read Theology. And I am therefore extremely grateful to the Army that it gave me a week’s leave, to have the opportunity to do that.

[1:41:27] And so, you got a place to read Theology at Cambridge.

No, Oxford.

At Oxford.

Yes.

And then, at Worcester College?

Yes.

John Bowker Page 35 C1672/23 Track 1

But then went into the Army?

Yes. Well I was in the Army you see, because I could get the week’s leave, which was a blessing, we were in the middle of basic training then. And then in the Army, the, you had to put down, after you, you did basic training, and went to Eaton Hall to do lots of training. And, that had an effect, because I remember I was put into… You were told before you went, you had got this terrible… It’s just chance, they took an intake in every fortnight. We happened to go into B Company. And we were told that, they had got a real so-and-so who was the sergeant-major. And I was put in… We… At Eaton Hall, it was the Duke of Westminster’s massive Victorian, huge palace is the only word to describe it. We had two companies of people in training in the servants’ quarters. Now two companies is a hell of a lot of men. I mean, I agree, we shared rooms [laughs]; even so. I was put into a room where the ceiling had been sort of patched up as though it had fallen in with a rainstorm or something. In fact what had happened is that somebody had committed suicide in the previous intake, he had shot himself with a shotgun, and these were the remains of his thing. That was my introduction to Eaton Hall. And again, it made me stop and think, how do we come to make the decisions that we do? Are there any constraints, are we driven? You know. I understood about being driven to behave, it’s from being in my public school. But what makes us behave as we do? And how should we behave to those who are under such strain that they’d rather take a shotgun and end it than go on with basic training? And basic training was extremely hard work, to put it mildly. But, again you see, all these questions were coming up, and no answers. Anyway, at Eaton Hall, you had to put in, where do you want to be posted? And my father had given me the advice, well, obviously, everyone’s given the advice, don’t volunteer for anything. But if you have to say something, always put down the opposite of what you really want. So I said I wanted to be posted to London, Aldershot, and Catterick, and I got posted to northern Nigeria. [laughs] So a superb result, really superb result for me at eighteen and this naïve, ignorant, insulated from the world, youth. Didn’t know anything about anything. Not even about myself. Suddenly, in this, the middle. And there was very considerable responsibility, as I mentioned earlier. And that’s when it really began to, I began to really think, and, argue with myself and so on.

[1:44:37] John Bowker Page 36 C1672/23 Track 1

Before we get to Nigeria, could you, having said that basic training is difficult, putting it mildly, could you give us a sense of that by describing it for…?

Well it’s, you’re just chased around from pillar to post. You get picked up and put on extra parades for the most minor things. It’s just, discipline, well, the authority and the discipline writ large. Why did we go on with it? You couldn’t do anything else. What could you do? You could, you know, disobey an order. The one that you didn’t want to do was end up in the Colchester, in the military prison in Colchester. I mean it was fear, absolute fear. Oh, just, you know, what is life? You did, you… In, in some sense, you know, you’re all in it together. Clearly it does matter to some people, or he wouldn’t have killed himself. But, generally speaking, if you’ve been through an English public school, you’re going to survive this all right. Because you’ve had so much, not on this scale, and not the physical discipline. I mean, you know, the, the training is, is, makes you very fit. So, this is the big difference between this generation and the younger generation, when you look at something like Brexit. My generation, the majority are, for getting out. And I think this is nothing to do much with the economy or with immigration. It’s to do with the central authority of Brussels, which can’t be challenged or changed. And we’ve all grown up through this long process of, of discipline, with the Nazis first; immediately we were into another authoritarian discipline, very brutal. I mean we all knew what Stalin was up to. I say all, it was no secret, about the gulags and… We just knew it. And we knew that this was another tyranny. And, were we going to give up and just, roll, and, better red than dead is the phrase. Were we going to do that? Or were we going to say, we’ve got things here, and people here, which is what mattered to me? We’ve got people here, whom I have simply got to defend. I mean I may be wrong, but that’s how it felt at the time. So we’ve grown up… I mean the Cold War didn’t end till about 1991. All our lives have been spent with a threat of, an unaccountable tyranny invading… I mean I was trained, I got to Nigeria, I was trained to fight on the plains of Europe. I remember we were taught what to do if an atomic weapon has exploded near you. It was quite impossible. You have to close your eyes, hold your nose, put your hand over your mouth, block your ears, and duck behind a wall. Now you try and do that. [laughs] You’d see why we weren’t going to win the Cold War, or the hot war as it would have been then. But we were being trained for a serious war. I remember, I was, I had arrived in Cambridge, I mean, the Cuba thing was, you know. It didn’t John Bowker Page 37 C1672/23 Track 1 frighten any of us I don’t think. You just knew it was going to happen. Or if it did, we were going to do certain things. So I think this is a very big control, constraint, on this generation that’s now dying off. And whereas I find listening to people talking about Brexit that, the younger people don’t talk about the tyranny and the oppression and the threat; they talk about the future. What is going to be the best outcome if we participate in Europe and make it a great place? And, I, I think it’s, it’s an emotional kind of divide that’s, I don’t think there’s any way an argument would ever change either point of view. So, that was the context in which I began to, to think more seriously, about religion and belief.

[End of Track 1] John Bowker Page 38 C1672/23 Track 2

[Track 2]

Could we continue, then, to talk about National Service, which covers the period ’53 to ’55, but, we’ve got now to the point of your posting to Nigeria.

Yes. Well, I’m in 1954 now. [pause] The impact was terrific, because, this insulation I’ve talked about, boarding schools and, confined village life, and no travel and, so on. So, to suddenly find yourself there was, was just staggering, is marvellous. And, the main focus then was not actually to train the Army to fight, though the Nigerian battalion, it was in the exotically named Royal West African Frontier Force, had had a very distinguished record in two world wars, but we weren’t actually particularly trained, though we did do military training and exercise and so on. It was more to prepare, particularly the north, because the Muslim north, mainly Hausa, the education wasn’t anything like as far advanced as it was in the south, which was largely Christianised. So, it was trying to close the gap so that it wouldn’t be a big division in the subsequent organisation of society and government and so on. But I’m not sure that I was really much help with that. I can remember standing in front of my platoon with an orange in one hand and a mango in the other in order to teach them that the Earth goes round the Sun. Or is it that the Sun goes round the Earth? And I had one of those moments, I couldn’t remember which it was. [laughs] And that was another moment of huge illumination. Because it was exactly like Husserl’s moment. I didn’t know that at the time, but I, when I read about it later. It raised the question, what difference would it make to these Africans sitting on the ground in Kaduna, whether the Sun did go round the Earth or the Earth went round the Sun? What difference would a more correct knowledge make to the lives they were going to have to live? Now for Husserl of course, it was the great debate about solecism, is the world really there? Actual infinities, and all this sort of thing, at the end of the nineteenth century. And, Husserl had that great moment, and then became of course, the founder first of phenomenology in its proper sense and then of existentialism, he suddenly thought, well supposing one side won the argument, one side really proved to the other the world really is there, or the other side proved that the world really isn’t there. What difference would it make to anybody? And it was that sort of moment in Africa that I realised that, belief systems and life and so on are integrated in a far, far more complicated way. This is back to the paths of my infancy, John Bowker Page 39 C1672/23 Track 2 which path should you be on, and does it lead to, connect up with another path, and so on. What difference d our belief systems make to the lives that we live? And, all the rest of it. So, I certainly remember that moment very well. [03:57] I was also put in charge of, because there were so few of us, you see this is, we’re still in the time of the British Empire, independence was a few years ahead. So, the British officers were put in charge of everything. And I was in charge of the Sunday service, because my father was the vicar of a parish. I remember going to the first service. This is ridiculous. [laughs] I haven’t got strong, confirmed Christian belief, or any belief. I was immensely sympathetic, as I had seen, as we were talking about earlier, Christian people behaving in ways that I thought wholly admirable, indeed enviable. But, there was I, standing in front of them, as though we were on parade. And, from that, again, so naïve, I suddenly realised, they should be standing, all of them, here, and I should be sitting there. And so that’s how we proceeded. Not very effectively, because I still sort of started the thing off and ended it, so it’s the old control system still. But, it wasn’t like that in our, in the actual occasion. So that was an important lesson. And also, we met them, they were Christians in a predominantly Muslim land, and their way of being Christian when there was a lot of hostility to them, made me realise that actually Christianity wasn’t the thing you automatically assume because you’re in Britain which has a Christian history so connected up with India. Certainly began my interest in, not, interest’s a terrible word, my concern to understand and gain insight into other religions and their relationships with each other, that unquestionably comes from those days.

[06:08] What form did the sort of local opposition to Christianity take, what did you see?

It was, in terms of separation. It was in terms of Muslims having separate meals, or, I remember I was in charge of the races. I was in charge of everything in the end I think, but, because there were so few of us. I remember we had to stop the, one of the races, because it was prayer time for the Muslims. The race had actually started, and a man came out with a flag, and the horses stopped where they were on the racecourse, in their positions, and if there were Muslim jockeys, they got off, or Muslims in the crowd said their brief ivaan [ph], and then, they got on their horses John Bowker Page 40 C1672/23 Track 2 and the race went on again. [laughs] It’s bizarre when you think of it. I don’t think it would happen now, but it did then. So, it wasn’t then a matter of fighting and conflict, it wasn’t like that at all, but the separation was clear. I would say, guessing, I don’t know enough about it, but I would guess that, the Western control of Muslim nations had not lost its consequence by that date. I think, the sense that Islam was a minority religion in relation to the West. I’m not identifying the West with Christianity, but I mean the West was identified by them with Christianity. I think that was, I think they were not feeling that they were oppressed or… I think that just hadn’t happened. But I’m guessing now, I don’t know enough about it. But that’s how it felt, that there as a, an order that we had inherited, and nobody at that date in Nigeria was really rocking the boat. So, you could say it was… I mean as I, the incident you referred to, there was more conflict between Muslims and animists, but that was often over possessions or land or herds or something, more than it was, probably… I don’t think it was a religious thing. I don’t think the animists worship idols or anything like that.

Could you tell the story, that story, the one that you refer to?

Well it was just being sent on riot duty. Up there on that shelf I’ve still got the two pamphlets that I had in my hand, Duties in Aid of the Civil Power. And they were, told you how to behave when you faced a riot. And it goes back to the infamous episode in India when General Dyer in Amritsar had a Sikh… Right. The Sikhs were seeking an independent Punjab, or a home state of the Punjab, and, Dyer went to deal with it, he brought his troops, he lined them up in the classic way, and told the people, if they did not disperse he would open fire on them. And they didn’t disperse, and he opened fire. And, a lot of Indians were killed, fell down, some jumped down the well to try and avoid the fire and drowned. This is absolutely seared into your brain when you’re in training at Eaton Hall. That’s what you don’t do. Because what Dyer had done was put his troops in the only gateway into the courtyard. So they couldn’t disperse. So, it was absolutely drilled into you, if you get this wrong, you’re going to be on a court martial automatically. You maybe have good reasons for doing something that you’ve done that … And so on. But that would be sorted out at a court martial, but that’s where you will end up. So… You had to… This was a riot in the marketplace, and it was, Muslims were in conflict with animists over a donkey. John Bowker Page 41 C1672/23 Track 2

I didn’t have a clue what their dispute was about. And I went through all the right motions, because I was terrified, eighteen and a half years old, you’re not going to go on a court martial, surely. So I was doing all the right things. You have to have a bugler, who blows the bugle to alert the people. You have to have an interpreter, you’ve got make sure what languages the people will understand. And so on. There are lots of rules that you’ve got to keep. And I was going through all the rules. And you must always give three warnings. You’ve got to give three warnings so that they’ve got to disperse or you’ll open fire. And I found myself, you know, when the bugles were blowing [laughs], and, I found myself shouting, ‘Disperse three times or I will fire!’ [laughs] I was petrified. You know, again, you’ve got to think, eighteen, nineteen years old now, they’re sophisticated and old, they’ve had, God knows how much experience of the world and everything. But we hadn’t. And we were suddenly in these situations where you’ve got to do the right thing. So, anyway, it was while I was standing there, they just, pulled this donkey apart, limb from limb. I mean they’d got knives and things, but I mean, that’s quite a difficult thing to do. [11:48] And I just thought, I just want to spend my working life, such as I have, understanding why religious people hate each other so much. And that connects up with all the things we’ve been talking about, the authorities, the systems, the bullying, and, the them and us, and so on. It was all surely flowing into that. But it was just that moment that made me realise I wanted to understand why religion, religious people are such bad news. And not just religious people, but religious systems, are such bad news to so many people. Now eventually, yes, I came to see, [laughs] you know, they are good news as well, and that’s why I produced eventually what I call this paradox of religion, which is that, religions are such bad news when they are, only because they are such good news. And it’s how to understand that paradox, and then, if we wish to have human life on this planet in the future, how we disentangle the complexity of that paradox. If they’re such good news, then people will die and kill rather than give them up. How do we deal with that paradox? And, the first step is, you’ve got to understand the religions. And if you are going to understand the religions, you’ve got to understand the languages. And so that’s why I made the decision, after I went back to, of course, to Oxford to read Theology, but I also, you didn’t have mixed degrees in Oxford in those days, so you had to read one undergraduate degree, but I also wanted to read Oriental Languages. So I stayed on in John Bowker Page 42 C1672/23 Track 2 order to learn, you can’t learn all the languages but, and Oriental Languages wasn’t Far East, it was the Middle East, because I wanted to understand Islam. So that’s why I went on to read, in addition to Theology I read Arabic and Hebrew and Syriac and, you know, that Semitic group of languages. So by the time I was going to start work, I was just about coming up to retirement, you’d done two years’ National Service, and three years as one undergraduate degree, two years as another one. It was almost time to hang up those boots.

[14:21] At the time in Nigeria, when this concern with the negative aspects of religion strongly appeals to you as something that you want to go on to work on, was there anyone in Nigeria at the time that you could talk to about this concern, or…

No.

…about the things that you were seeing and thinking?

No. It’s interesting isn’t it. There was a garrison church, and I used to go to Evensong. But I, I remember the Archbishop of West Africa coming to it once, but I can’t, I never talked to him. I never talked to anybody about it. It’s interesting, that, looking back. I don’t suppose there was anybody to talk to. No, I didn’t.

At the end of a day of doing whatever you were doing, what sort of accommodation were you going back to, what sort of…?

Well we lived in these, giddahs [ph] they were called. They were, there was a living room and a bedroom with a basin and… There were two of us in each of these, and we shared the, shared the room. We had a… Seems, just seems… We’re talking about, centurions in the Roman Empire. This is all so long ago. It would be different now. [laughs] But, we had a houseboy, it would be called a batman in the British Army, but he did much more than looking after your kit. He looked after you. And that again was instructive, because, my… I hate the word, houseboy. It’s like when I went to borstal, the young men, or, older boys, whatever you want to call them, they were always called lads, and, names, you know, tell us an awful lot about attitudes. John Bowker Page 43 C1672/23 Track 2

Anyway. I didn’t have an attitude, but, that’s what they were called, and that’s why I use the phrase, though I really regret it. He used to talk to himself on the, there was a veranda. It was very like the Indian cantonments really. There was a veranda outside, and he would be there ironing the trousers or the shorts or whatever. And he would always to himself. I didn’t pay much attention. You know, I thought, well this dull job, I should think that’s the only way you can keep going. And then I began to learn Hausa, and of course I began to understand what he was saying. And all the time he was talking to God. And that obviously, taught me the obvious lesson. The less obvious lesson was that it alerted me to the fact that, what is usually known as folk religion by anthropologists… Again these are phrases I just don’t like. There’s sort of, a patronising tone to them. But anyway, it’s what Robinson used to call, something aligned to implicit religion, the religion that, the religious beliefs that people live by and practise, and so on, which may be very far removed from the, say, central orthodoxy. I suddenly realised that Islam may sound as though it’s a, rule, sort of, based, sharia type religion, you know what you’ve got to do and you do it, but actually, there’s an emotional religion, which one sees obviously among the Sufis but, but here was somebody whose natural way of passing the day was talking to God. And, I remember referring to this in, in one of my books. Constance Padwick wrote a great book called Muslim Devotions, where she looked at the popular folk religious sort of, prayers in Cairo and other parts of the Muslim world, and some of the sort of, more popular prayer manuals, not the sort of orthodox, ulema kind of manuals. And, I quoted her as saying, there’s this part of Islam which is not so easily recognised and appreciated, where people have an easy, let’s go back to that word companionship with God, which they express in their own way, and often in these popular devotions. And, it’s the first of my books to be burnt in Pakistan. [laughs] I only just mention it, and it was, I had a tirade, a furious attack. I’ve had several attacks of my views in time [laughs], but this one was because, how could I, as an infidel, have the enormity of behaviour as to quote something that had nothing to do with Islam at all. It was a furious reaction. So that taught me, that thing taught me a very important lesson: don’t look at religions just as they are put forward in the mainstream forms of expression, whether they’re worship or books or liturgies or whatever they are. That the, the dynamic of religion is sustained, and is, is sustaining in itself, in popular ways that may be in contradiction. And of course since then, that’s become extremely John Bowker Page 44 C1672/23 Track 2 obvious in the tensions within Roman Catholicism. So… Well in other religions as well, but… And that was where I learnt it.

[20:13] What else did the houseboy do other than iron trousers and…?

He was, he would come with you when we went on a trek, and, he was just a very close companion again. You know, when we went on trek, you had to live off the land, not all the time but some of the time, you had to shoot your meal or you didn’t have one. That’s a terrible thing too, you know. Never questioned it. I just did it because it was there. It’s like Everest isn’t it. So he would come and, you know, handle the gun in the way a beater would, if you go on a shoot in this country. He would introduce you to his friends so that you became… He didn’t have to do that, I mean, but he, he would if you wanted him to do that. He would… So you became, much more close to friends than, than servants, if I can use that word. I hate all this hierarchical language, and that goes back to my school days. I really can’t stand hierarchies which don’t think out the reasons. I can quite understand the necessity for teaching and learning. It’s how you do it that, that worries me, that we just don’t get at it strongly enough.

And so the person that you were sharing this…

Yes, gidder[ph] with.

Gidder[ph] with, yes. He, for example, is not someone that you could talk to about things that you were seeing and thinking here?

No. No. You could have done I dare say, but no, we didn’t talk about that. What did we talk about? Certainly obviously the Army and, the games we used to play, as, a lot of sports there as you would expect. The next riot that was likely to happen. Quite a lot of talk about politics, certainly, of the local, I mean, well local, West African politics. I remember, we had a, driven by taxi, I obviously can’t drive, I can’t see, but, so use taxis a lot, and almost all the drivers now are from overseas. And, a marvellous argument when you hear their stories. To have unlimited immigration John Bowker Page 45 C1672/23 Track 2

[laughs], and damn the housing and the Health Service. They’re marvellous people, most of the ones we’ve talked to. This chap was from Sierra Leone. I said, ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I nearly flew into you to put down a riot.’ He couldn’t understand what I was talking about.’ [laughs] So yah. What did we talk about? I don’t know. We certainly didn’t talk about anything like, you know, what we’re talking about, and there was no question of… I mean, particularly of course, you know, in male institutions, you don’t talk about politics, you don’t talk about religion, and you don’t talk about women. I mean those are inflexible rules, you just never break them. Why do you never break them? Because that’s the way the system was. Funnily enough, those linger on, don’t they. I mean in Cambridge colleges, you go to dinner, well Oxford ones, you’re not supposed to talk about politics, religion or women. Still. And they do, but they, there’s still, you can have a conversation, and somebody, one of the older fellows, will say, ‘Just a moment.’ It’s a different world, it’s unimaginable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a sixteen-year-old doing his, whatever they’re called now, GCSEs are they? I can’t imagine, with tablets and mobility and, freedom to go around with your friends and so on. I just can’t imagine. I understand it intellectually but I can’t imagine what it would feel like to live in those circumstances. And I think it must be impossible for them to imagine what it would felt like to be in those circumstances. And, so maybe, it’s why your work is, is perhaps worthwhile, because, one or two of them may want to get some sort of inkling of what it felt like to be there. And, one of the obvious things is, you didn’t feel very much, because feelings were not allowed amongst young men in those days. They had them, but they bottled them up.

[24:57] What do you remember that you read while you were there?

There was a bookseller used to come round with a box on his head. These are still, it still, Africans do still carry a lot on their heads, but everything was carried on their heads. When we went out on trek for two or three months, not only did we bring our evening mess dress, we didn’t wear it every night but only on some occasions, but they also carried boxes with some silver candlesticks and decanters and so on on their heads. Because if you were going to dine in the middle of the jungle – well it was the bush, not jungle, but in the middle of the bush, then the boxes would be made the John Bowker Page 46 C1672/23 Track 2 table, and you would have candlesticks and port and so on. What did I read? This man came round with a, a box of books. I bought books, that’s the only thing I could spend money on. Limitless. I’ve still got many of them, and they’ve all got ‘Kaduna’, you know, ‘1954’ in them. All the novels of Arnold Bennett. It just depended what he brought round in his thing. So I read all the novels of Graham Greene, all the novels of Arnold Bennett. A lot of Thackeray. No Dickens, he never brought Dickens round. They tended to be, not the great English classics, but the, you know, second level classics of, of English, and they were all paperbacks. I remember one of them was Casino Royale, it was… I ought to have kept it, because of course, it was the first edition of the paperback anyway of Casino Royale; I could probably sell it for a bit now. So I remember reading that, and thinking, this isn’t like Arnold Bennett. [laughs] So, any book that he had got. You see I, it’s going back to sitting at the kitchen table reading anything in the war that had print on it, and so I would buy anything that he brought round. Unless I’d already bought it. And I just read an enormous amount. And, because I had begun to have these, what I call commonplace books, these little notebooks, of course, by writing it out, these things that you read that were memorable, they stick in the memory far better than… I used to underline books a lot. But better than underlining, if you have to write them out… I remember reading John Strachey The End of Empire, which was a salutary book to read in those circumstances, and copying out a lot of that. And that also mires the fact that this was ridiculous, this, you know, was the remnant of it, we were going. But we ought to have gone, with much more help in the handover, we should have brought the Nigerians much more strongly into the administration. We did have two Nigerian officers in the battalion towards the end of my time. Both of them became presidents of Nigeria and both of them were assassinated. One was a very nice man; ended up in a ditch. We should have done more to, in my view, to create the companionship, going back yet again to that word, to create the friendship, more than friendship. The, the companionship requires a sort of, recognition of the worth, the equality, the superiority of the person you the compaignon - be eating bread with. And we didn’t do that enough. I mean we did bring them into the Army and train them as good company commanders and so on, but that wasn’t what really was needed. It was something much more profound than that, which we failed to do.

What was the purpose of the treks? John Bowker Page 47 C1672/23 Track 2

The trek was to give them training on how to live off the land. And to do… We used to do military manoeuvres, you know. You have to remember, in these days, we’re still fighting at least four wars. We had just finished the Korean War, only just, but, we were in Malaya, in Kenya. I mean these were serious conflicts. And people were dying. I mean, a friend of mine a year ahead of me at school was killed in Korea, who I had known very well. And, this is what gave all this, it gave my generation, or this generation, a different sense of sobriety. It’s why we were so stupid and reckless in so many other ways, it’s because, if you have this around you, and this is what is waiting for you, in the year after this, it changes the perspective on things in a very deep way. So, yes, we went into the bush to, to learn how to, clear a bit of jungle, or, search for enemies and so on. [pause] Wouldn’t want to actually do it.

[30:03] Could you, then, bring us back to the UK? How does…

Oh well, back to the UK was, back to the Et in Arcadia Ego of Oxford. [laughs] It’s exactly, that golden place of dreams. It was so different from the Army and school. Bliss was it, et cetera et cetera. It was absolutely marvellous. So, yes, I began to think a bit more seriously. Reading Theology was very good, it’s a very… In those days it was a very narrow subject. At Oxford it was, it was the Bible, and the doctrine of the Church for the first three or four centuries. And you could do an optional paper, and most people did the history of the Church, because it went with the other one. So, it was very, very narrow. But on the other hand, you had to know it very thoroughly, so you… Hebrew was an optional language. I knew I was going on to learn Hebrew, so I took… I didn’t take it as an option, I just learnt it, because you so had so much time. And I was very fortunate, I had a tutor who took us for supervisions for every subject in the Honour School. I mean it was only the Bible and the early Church if you like, but, now, people who do, you know, say, the patriarchal period, are not going to be supervising you on the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. It’s become much more specialised. But he took us for everything. And we only had to write one essay every three weeks. We were supposed to write it each week, but we only had to read it out once every three weeks. And he would never recommend any reading that had been, if the book, for any, any book that had been John Bowker Page 48 C1672/23 Track 2 published after the Second World War. Now, we’re within ten years of the end of the war, so, perhaps you could say, well, not that many books, but of course there were. It was another very instructive lesson. Because it made you, a) get your roots very deeply into where academic scholarship had been coming. And this is what I was saying about the sciences, that if you know what they were trying to do in these inadequate languages, it’s not that you want to say, ‘Oh well, they were really talking about this.’ They weren’t. They were not. But they were talking about what they were perceiving with the resources they had at their time, and to learn that, to understand that, is to prepare one for better understanding of why people have made the moves they have in the more up-to-date times. So I am profoundly grateful that we weren’t regulated. Because then you could do RE if you chose to. Of course you didn’t have to. But I was interested, so I again read, very very widely. And Oxford, of course, has this marvellous system of no exams. You have a prelim after your first two terms, just to make sure they haven’t made a mistake. And if you get through that, you’d got this marvellous period of, of long vacs, and you didn’t have to work in those days in the vacs if you had been in the Army particularly. I did actually go and pick cherries to earn a bit more, but, you didn’t have to. So you’d got these acres of time to read. And so, your only exam is right at the very end when you get these thirteen three-hour papers. And that suited me superbly, because I wanted to find my way. I can remember lying in the bath at Worcester. Mind you, Worcester College didn’t have many baths, and you had to go miles in your dressing gown to find one. Anyway, I was lying in this bath, and I suddenly thought, I think I could see what the solution to the issue of predestination is. And I was so excited, because I was reading Augustine at the time. And, I was so excited. I was still in the bath about an hour later, gone completely cold. I was just lost in thinking about this problem. And I don’t suppose I solved it. It’s like my sixth proof of the existence of God. But it felt like it at the time, one felt one was really at the edge of things, very much as, as in science, you really feel, gosh, I’m right at the edge, nobody has stood on this ground before me, kind of feeling. And that’s always stayed with me, that, one of the objectives of academic work is to stand on this new, untrodden ground, and this is as much true in the humanities actually as it is in the, in the sciences.

[35:23] John Bowker Page 49 C1672/23 Track 2

Could you describe your, your rooms, and talk about the people most closely around you physically?

That’s a very big question isn’t it, because now of course one had enormous circles of friends. The room was very good. I mean we… The room I shared, actually, funnily enough, I shared it with this person who had got the zeta mark, why I had gone to Worcester at all. We were actually put in the same room, because we were in the same school. Originally, they had been one very large sitting room, and, originally for one person, there was a dressing room and a bedroom. Well obviously, those had been turned into two bedrooms, but we had this huge room and then two separate bedrooms. And, it was, marvellous. I mean one’s own room for the first time. Then I went, my next year, into the mediaeval cottages, and that was good fun too. And then, in those days you had to go out into digs in your third year, so I went into a, Wellington Square, and then, after that I was put into, when I was doing my second degree so to speak, I was in the cottages near, part of Worcester, you know. One just moved around, so, yes, it… It wouldn’t have mattered what the rooms were like, they were your own. It was the first time.

[36:50] What do you remember doing when you weren’t either writing your essay or reading? In other words, sort of, what you might call leisure time.

I played golf. I played a lot of, I played hockey, because I, I was actually quite good at hockey [laughs], in, in Africa, where a lot of it was played. I went to the cinema quite a lot, because we had never been allowed to before. So… But you went punting a lot. In fact, some of us ran a, a pentathlon which became a sort of, I don’t know, an octathlon or something. There were four of us, and two of us, you know, played the others. All the games we could think of, and so on. In other words, it was totally frivolous. I spent a lot of time in the Ashmolean. I listened to, I went to concerts a lot, I listened to music a great deal. Indeed I, I was present in Merton College Chapel when Kodály, very old by then, came to conduct his Te Deum in Merton College Chapel. And, there was no applause in those days in churches, so there was this old man who had come through the war with great suffering and tragedy, and when he, the Te Deum was finished, he put down the baton, and, of course there was no John Bowker Page 50 C1672/23 Track 2 applause. And it felt strange. I didn’t… I mean strange in the sense, usually, but if it hadn’t been at a chapel, of course there would have been. And he turned round, and as he turned round to walk out, it’s one of those spontaneous things which always interests me from a scientific point of view, spontaneous movement, you know, flocks of starlings, they were moved, as though they’re one organism. And all the people in the chapel stood up instantaneously, and it wasn’t, some stood and others followed; it happened. And, he walked out, and it was so moving, it was extraordinary. And, his tears were streaming down his face. And then at the west door into the antechamber, he turned, and he just simply said, ‘Te Deum laudo.’ I’ve never forgotten it. [pause] So, yes, I listened to music a great deal. [39:31] And then, the other thing that took up an increasing amount of my time was that a friend of mine, who was South African, was on a Rhodes Scholarship from South Africa, was a physics graduate, I mean he was doing research in physics. He was actually one of the early people to work on nuclear fusion. And, of course we were near Harwell, and so he was most of the time in Harwell. But when he came back from Harwell each day, you know, meals were compulsory then, in those days, you had paid for them, or, you didn’t have to go, but, you had paid for your meals, so most of us just automatically went, because you hadn’t got the money to go and have other meals. So, he would come into Hall, his face would be glum. ‘Oh,’ he would say, ‘your apparatus has blown up again.’ He’s the only person, you probably know more, but, he’s the only person I know well who got a PhD for totally negative results. He demonstrated that the way they were hoping to get fusion couldn’t possibly work, and he demonstrated conclusively. I know we’re still trying, but we’re not trying along that route. [laughs] And indeed we still haven’t done it quite, have we? Not economically anyway. So, he took me along to what was known as the Oxford Pastorate. It was based on St Aldates Church. By now reading Theology, I had begun to see that the arguments for the reality of God, that God was not this thing that people made up, you know, to deal with their troubles and all the rest of it, that obviously wasn’t right. So, I suppose my conversion, if that’s the right word for it, is almost entirely intellectual. It was arguments. And certainly I was trying to convince myself of the arguments that God is an unreal figment of, of the imagination of inadequate people, and this is what they did long ago. I mean, those sort of conventional views in my adolescence. But I had begun to see that the, the possibility John Bowker Page 51 C1672/23 Track 2 of God was in fact, at least by now the probability of, of God, you know, I really tried to go this way and that way around it, and I couldn’t. And he took me along to the Pastorate church, and it didn’t convince me of the truth of, of Christianity. But, it got me back in touch with people who practised what they believed, and thought about what they believed, and so on. So, I became involved in the, in the Oxford Pastorate, which is, sort of… It wasn’t… The… OICCU was the, you know, the more, well you know what it is, so… But this was reflective, if I can put it like that. It was not taking anything on trust because, and that would be its fault from the point of view of other people, it wasn’t taking anything on trust, because, it came from something claimed to be revelation, which is obviously not going to be something I would be persuaded by anyway. But, I’m sure they were right and I was wrong, but, I’m just saying where I was. And that got me involved in practice again of, of doing the religion rather than, so to speak, putting the emphasis on believing propositions. So I did go on Pastorate missions, for example. I remember on one of them I shared a room, a bedroom, which Stuart Blanch, who later became the Archbishop of York. He had been a chaplain in the RAF, and he was on the Pastorate. He was a curate at St Aldates, and we had been put in this room together, because I think I was leading one of the groups or something. And I, by then I was saying, you know, I have a feeling that I may be meant to be being ordained. And he said, ‘Well why wouldn’t you?’ And I said, ‘Well, there are things that I can’t say in the services. I really just don’t believe them.’ And he said, ‘Well give me an example.’ And I said, ‘I can’t in Evensong ever say, “Grant peace in our time oh Lord, for there is none other that fighteth for us but only Thou oh God.”’ And I said, ‘I just don’t believe that God is like that.’ And he just simply said, ‘Well nor do I, but does it matter?’ And I thought, of course it matters. We’re saying it in a service. And he said, ‘Yes, but so what?’ When I eventually became Dean of Chapel at Corpus Christi, Frank Lee was the Master, and in the chapel, when, the preacher always sat next to the Master in the chapel, and, he had been the First Secretary to the Treasury, and, he was a, a very very nice chap. And, I noticed… Well I, because when I preach in chapel, sitting next to him. Then when we came to the Creed, there were some clauses that I never said, and there were some clauses that he never said, but they weren’t the same clauses. So we almost put the Creed together between us. And again, I thought, yes, you see, but, isn’t that exactly how it should be? Don’t start saying things if your heart isn’t in them. Another very good example of that was at Trinity when I was Dean of Chapel. John Bowker Page 52 C1672/23 Track 2

The Master of course was Andrew Huxley then, the son of the Huxley family, and, he… He and I arrived actually at the same time. He became Master when I became Dean of Chapel. And, he, you know, asked me in to talk, and, he said, ‘What do you want me to do about the chapel?’ And I said, ‘Well conceivably, make it into a library if you think we need more room.’ I actually did propose that at Corpus, that we turn the chapel into the library, because we had run out of space for the Parker Library and so on. And they very nearly did it, but not quite. So, I said… And he said, ‘No, I, I want to be a part of the chapel, because a chapel with a dining hall are two most important parts in a chapel.’ So I thought, well that is promising. So I said, ‘But, I wouldn’t ever be happy myself if you simply came to chapel because you ought to, think you ought to support it.’ He said, ‘No, I would never do that.’ Well, a Nobel Prize winner, the son of the Huxley family [laughs], is not going to say that, so it was a silly thing of me to say perhaps. But, he then said, ‘I want to participate, but I never want to have to say anything that I can’t honestly put my heart into.’ I thought, that’s fantastic. And by his, my last term there, I had to retire when I was… but my last Christmas there, he read the opening chapter at the end of the carol service of St John’s Gospel. Now that to me is what Christian life and Christian growth, indeed I think religious life and religious growth, but certainly Christian growth, is all about. It can be dramatic, can be sudden, and so on. But also, it can be extremely quiet, patient, and profoundly honest to oneself, and to what one’s inherited. And one’s taking it forward into the construction of this new kind of picture that we were talking about earlier. And I thought, that’s really impressive.

[end of session]

[End of Track 2] John Bowker Page 53 C1672/23 Track 3

[Track 3]

I’m just going to ask, as I said, a few things on last time. The first is that, you talked about not praying during National Service, you know, at the bed in the barrack room, because of the, in part because of the likely response of those around you. But I didn’t then ask whether there were people there who did kneel at the bed and pray.

Very occasionally. Very rarely. But there was… I mean, I can only remember one. It was a transition period, because we still belonged to a generation where an awful lot of, where Sunday was, nothing happened. So… And some people reinforced the nothing happening by saying, and nothing should happen. So that, it was, if there was any Christian belief at all, there were many, many families where Sunday was not a day of, entertainment. So… And those kind of observances, of religious practice like saying your prayers every night by your bed, were definitely on the way out, but there were still a few for whom that was a mark of where they belonged, a mark of identity almost. Probably for them it was more than that, but it was at least that. So it wasn’t surprising. But I had been brought up in a fairly, certainly on Sundays you never did anything, except read a book, go for a walk, go to church. So for me, it was something that I didn’t do, and I suppose this was the transition into an entirely different understanding of what participation actually means in practice in a particular religion.

And what do you remember of the response when that single individual did?

I don’t remember it. No.

[01:54] Thank you. Last time you said that if… You said, your conversion through the Oxford Pastorate, but you did say ‘if that’s the right word’, conversion, was almost totally intellectual. I wondered…

Well it was a movement. I mean, the thing that I have come to realise since those early days, at Oxford the linguistic school, A J Ayer and verification, and, Language, Truth and Logic, were extremely dominant. And, then, the issue between one’s own John Bowker Page 54 C1672/23 Track 3 beliefs and conflicting beliefs, whether they were social, political, scientific, whatever they were, was much more propositional, and of course, if you’re at Oxford, you are a highly verbalised creature. So you are likely to think about truth and those related issues in terms of propositions much more than anything else. And it seemed to be the case that that was the sort of dominant mode. Since then, I have come to realise that there are many more modes of discerning what is truly the case. And one of the most important in understanding religions, but partly also in understanding the sciences, is that you, you can discern truth by participation in communities that practise what they take to be the case. Now that obviously applies in the sciences. And very often scientific advances are made by that participation. Things may be tentative, speculative and so on, but groups of people sharing in common a quest to find out what is truly the case here, is very important in the scientific, but it’s even more important, if I can put it like that, in religions, where the discernment of what is true, in participation with others in the way one shares, the way one lives with others, and so on, came to be of paramount importance for me. So, I would say that I was practising at Oxford; what I came to realise in the end is that there are more ways to challenge or discern truth than language, truth and logic, and verification, and these were the days when Popper came on the scene and suddenly falsification became even more important. But at that time, I had not thought any of this out at all. I only participated in the Oxford Pastorate because friends took me along. And because I could live with them and among them and see what they were about, and their values and goals, the propositional side remained paramount for me, but I realised that there was something going on that was never going to be translated into propositions. So, that’s what I meant by the, change, if conversion’s the right word for change, the change in my attitudes came about through participation. But then, thinking about it, and saying, well, they’re throwing up such and such which could be put in the form of a proposition, or a claim or whatever; how would one test whether that is reliable or true or, or whatever. So that’s what I meant by being intellectual. It was reflecting on what I observed and what I thought might be the case, and in many instances what I hoped might be the case, that really there was a true way of living in and understanding the world that cared for others and put others first, that cared for the planet, cared for the climate. So all these other considerations came in out of a context of the hope that they might be true, but no way I was going to assume they were true, and there was no way I was going to take it that such and such is true, John Bowker Page 55 C1672/23 Track 3 either because, let’s say, a claimed revelatory text, a Bible or a Qur’an or something, said so, or because some prominent, dominant scientist said it, or some philosopher in the A J Ayer school said that it was the case. So I was always jumping on the boards, to see what weight a particular understanding or view of the world, either scientific or religious, might bear the weight of what it needed to take.

[06:56] Thank you. And what insight, as you had hoped it would, did the reading of Oriental Languages as they were called offer into a religion like Islam, which I think was the, the aim?

It was clearly indispensable to know the languages, and to know the history, and to know the context in which particular words had been uttered and deeds had been undertaken. So… Then you cannot understand another religion without knowing its languages. So therefore, I faced very early on that that’s impossible, you can’t learn languages, all the religions of the world, and let alone the dead languages. So I began to develop a way of teaching languages in universities which aimed at what I call a translation knowledge of languages, that you must know the basics of the language so that you can look up words in a dictionary and you can actually check a translation against a text, so that you can see the text, you can see, or the translations anyhow, because otherwise you can’t even adjudicate between alternative translations. So, I realised, yes, that you, you simply have to have a basic, and some people will always go on to have a much better understanding of… Indeed, in the Festschrift that was presented to me on my eightieth birthday, somebody has written a chapter of that, in which they say they can remember me lecturing at Cambridge in my earliest days, and I was lecturing on Islam in the early years of Muslim theology, and I was lecturing on Al-Ghazali. And apparently, I don’t remember this, but apparently I was standing at the lectern and I was saying, you really had got to come to… If you want to understand Islam, and particularly Islamic thought, you’ve simply go to understand Al-Ghazali. It’s indispensable. And apparently I said, ‘The trouble is that none of it’s been translated into English.’ And the chap who writes this says, and without looking up from the lectern I said, ‘But of course, that’s not going to be a problem for any of you who really want to understand Islam.’ And he goes on to write that, that those lectures and that sentiment changed the direction of his life, he began to work in a John Bowker Page 56 C1672/23 Track 3 new way, realising that he had got to get the foundations, the roots. And then he went on to do absolutely superb work, far beyond anything that I could even aspire to.

[09:57] Now we know at this point in the life story too that you, you are reading Theology, you’re reading Oriental Languages, and you’ve made a decision that you want to be ordained, but that’s as far as we’ve got. Could you take us on to explain what happens next?

Yes. The decision that I should be ordained came about because I had become convinced that the picture of God in Christ reconciling the world was a justifiable and reliable account of what had happened in and around the lifetime of Jesus. And at the time I was lecturing here at Cambridge on Judaism at the time of Jesus, and so, it’s not that I thought that every detail of everything that had been, say, written in the Gospel or written in Christian history was reliable and justifiable; that wasn’t the point. It was that the general account of the difference that this particular life had made, and the claims that were made about him, were, if I may use the word, true. I don’t mean each detail was true, but, but were true. But that had major implications, because, it implied that one would try always to be at the service of others, and particularly of those who were in an unenviable situation. At least, you know, not making an abstract judgement. You look at people, you say, I’m sorry for you. It sounds patronising, but it’s not meant to be that. It’s that there are people who bear tremendous sorrow, pain, et cetera. So, I thought that the best way to do that would be to be someone who mediated the initiative of God into the world through the ways chosen by God. And all that arose out of trying to understand what some of the details of that general picture, God acting in Christ, were. For example, the, the study of Judaism at the time of Jesus made it quite clear what historically was most likely to have been happening at that Last Supper. Huge disputes in Christian history about what was going on and what it meant. But, it became obvious that, Jesus at that Last Supper was acting like one of the classical prophets who, when they got totally frustrated by their, the people they were talking to, would put their words into actions, and the actions weren’t, you know, the lecturer’s demonstration, or the experimenter’s demonstration of what will happen when you put X with Y, and so on. At that time, when these people did something of, put these words into actions, they would call, John Bowker Page 57 C1672/23 Track 3 each one of these was called an oth, o-t-h, an oth. And it was believed by those who participated in that world at that time with that logic that, the, the word had now been enacted and had come to pass. Thus, when Agabus, who was a classic prophet in the early Church, the Book of Acts, describes this, predicted that Paul would have to go to Rome, and would be arrested, and, might be executed and so on, he put it into one of these actions, these oth-oth, by binding himself up with a girdle. That was what… And, the reaction is interesting, because the people all around burst into tears. In their world, that had already happened. The only way you could contradict it was to extend the action. Thus when Jeremiah predicted that everyone was going to go into exile, he put a wooden yoke on his shoulders, and, the high priest of the temple couldn’t contradict him, because he was an authenticated prophet. All the high priest could do, come out, smash the wooden yoke, and say, ‘Well we are going into exile, but it’ll only be a few months.’ Now this meant that Jesus was trying to reach through the death that he knew was certainly coming, and a lot of my work has been focused on why he knew that for a certainty, and he, since he knew that this was going to happen, tried to get across to his disciples what, later summarised, ‘Look, I’m going to be with you always, even to the end of the world.’ And, the earliest account of the Last Supper actually says, ‘So long as you do this. So long as you do this.’ So this was an action with a slight difference. It wasn’t going to be enacted once, there wasn’t going to be one exile, one imprisonment of Rome, but over and over again, he was saying, this is the way that I am going to be with you to the end of the world. Now of course he may have been completely wrong, but that doesn’t alter what was going on at that moment. And because in the Church at that time, and probably foreseeably, this was mediated through the ordained ministry, it seemed to me the only way that I could become a part of that would be by being ordained. So that was the main reason why I moved in the direction of ordination.

[16:23] So what happens immediately after your first degree at Oxford?

My first degree, I simply went on and did the second one. I just went on with Oriental Studies. Eventually, I ended up at an Anglican theological college, Ripon Hall, which was on the outskirts of Oxford, in training for the ministry. But by then, all that I felt about the truthfulness of the whole Christian picture, I mean, taken as a whole, of God John Bowker Page 58 C1672/23 Track 3 reaching into the world and into the lives of those whose lives needed rescue, or redemption or whatever, meant that I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with sitting in an Oxford college or an Oxford theological college and pursuing my own enthusiasms, and they were enthusiastic, I was very much concerned with the relationship between Christianity, and other ways in which the possible truth and reality of God had reached into those cultures and those lives. So already my interest, going back to my Army service in other religions and their relationship to God had, was very strong, but this just seemed so selfish, so self-indulgent. So, that’s when I started to go into borstal as if under sentence. Everybody knew that I wasn’t, that I had come in by a different route. But this is what incarnation meant to me, that you must be where other people are, in their circumstances, not visiting their circumstances too briefly, you know, seeing them and then going on. So, there used to be considerable physical pressure [laughs], to put it mildly, to make believe. Because obviously, I could walk out of the door and they couldn’t. So would I? But, anything is endurable if you believe you are doing it for the sake of what you believe to be true about the outreach of God into their lives. So after that there were just the usual things, oh we’ve got all these knives hidden under the floorboards. And when the staff didn’t come in and tear up the floorboards, suddenly, everything just settled down to the ordinary ways of human friendship. And, then, I just lived and worked alongside them.

[19:21] Can you just, before we go into these two things a bit more, could you give us a sense of the timings of this, if you like, voluntary entry into borstal, in relation to the Ripon Hall…?

Well, they were very generous with me. I’m not sure that they should have been, but… I hardly did any theological training, in the sense that, you had to pass what was known as, some kind of exam, but they even let me off doing the papers. So that, I used to go for periods, they could be very short, say three weeks, they could be longer, but I could take blocks to go and do theat. And that went on when I was a curate, after I had been made Deacon. So that, people were generous in, I think in understanding why I had to do that. So that, I was given a lot of licence. I didn’t really… When I came out of theological college I didn’t really know which way round to hold a baby, if I was trying to baptise. And I think probably, looking back on John Bowker Page 59 C1672/23 Track 3 it, people were very generous in seeing that there was something about me that wouldn’t go on if I couldn’t do this, if you follow what I mean. So, I was given considerable freedom and licence to take these periods. So obviously it was nothing like going in for two years as they did, but actually, somebody worked out, occasionally some of the other people in the theological college would come with me for a fortnight or, or a spell. Eventually one of them worked out that I had actually done longer than a whole sentence, if you added up all the periods that I had been inside. But of course I did them in different borstals, so it’s quite different from being in, in one. I saw some of the stately homes of England, because some of them had been turned into borstals. There was, Hewell Grange was a beautiful Victorian sort of mansion with really beautiful decorations. I remember the old study had a maze in the ceiling which intrigued me. But that wasn’t really what I was there for, so…

[21:44] Tell me about the origin of the decision to go into borstals.

I went originally with the Franciscans, who used to run camps for East End people to go hop picking, and to go… And then they did holiday camps for children, particularly from the Est End of London who really didn’t, I mean none of us went on holidays, or very few of us went on holidays in those days, but had never sort of been out of the East End of London. And they did one from Oxford which took a group of undergraduates to go and live for a fortnight in borstal, and that’s where it all began. I went on one of those, and I felt, but, this didn’t feel quite right, going in with a sort of, special organised Franciscan sort of group. It was slightly sort of, freakish. It was the right impasse, to be where people are, to be alongside people. So that’s why I detached from that, didn’t go on that again, but began to… I got to know one of the governors and he introduced me to another governor in another borstal. And in the end, we were trusted enough that, I remember, when I was a curate, curates were always put in charge of the youth club, and I remember taking some lads from the youth club, and some from borstal, and we did a great part of the Pennine Way together. And on another occasion we actually went, did climbing on Stanage Edge. I mean not mountain climbing. This is this very specific Joe Brown type climbing on gritstone faces in, quite difficult to do. It always looks easy. But I remember the first time I took the youth club out doing that climbing, they took me, because they had John Bowker Page 60 C1672/23 Track 3 been doing it, this was near Sheffield, they had been doing it all their lives. So, because I was supposed to be running the youth club, we all went out to be do this day climbing the grit face. And, they all went up, because they had done it so many times before, and they said, ‘You’d better come up on a rope first time.’ So I had got a rope round my waist in the usual way, and I stood at the bottom of this cliff, and I was trying to get my foot up onto the first foothold. And a bizarre way, in those days, orders of nuns used to wear their habits at all times, and some of them were quite elaborate, with elaborate, I don’t know what they’re correctly called, but head dresses on. And a group of nuns came along on their afternoon walk. And they stood around me in a semicircle as I tried to get my foot up on the first foothold. And eventually the youth club said, ‘Come on, we’ll give you a pull,’ [laughs] and began to pull me up. And one of the nuns cried out, ‘Ee lad, we’ll pray for you.’ [laughs] And that was an epitome for me of trying to participate and share. I couldn’t do it and they could. And I was supposed to be in charge of them, but actually, the participation was an interchange of frailty and competence, and wanting to help each other. And, another group, who couldn’t presumably climb a cliff edge in their habits, nevertheless their part was to surround this exercise going on with what they were good at, namely their prayer. So it’s, it’s a trivial incident, but it meant actually an awful lot to me in reflection.

[25:44] Thank you. Could you, for the listener who will only be able to imagine a borstal, describe what you saw on this first sort of, organised visit with the, with the sort of organised group to the first borstal?

Yes. And, it was one that I went back to on other occasions.

OK.

It was an army barracks. It was exactly like, I think it was in army huts. I don’t know whether it was, but they were exactly the same as army huts, just rows of beds on each side. And, this was the North Sea Camp, which I think has probably now become an open prison. And the work we did each day was to, we were building a sea wall to reclaim land from the North Sea, and, we reclaimed, when I was there, I think it was John Bowker Page 61 C1672/23 Track 3 about 230 acres, something like that. And of course, a digger, and three or four men, could probably have done it in a year. I mean it was miles to go, I mean, you know what the east coast of England is like, and the marshes around Boston and so on. But we did it in an old-fashioned way. Where the wall had been built to, there was then a little mini rail track ran round with these little wagons on it, and we would fill a wagon with mud from the seaward side and then push it round to the foot of where the wall had got to. And then there was a winch that pulled the wagon up. You tipped it out, and then you went round, and you filled it again. It really was like working on a treadmill. And, you were only allowed, in the winter, to fall in the water twice a month, because, you had to… It was so cold out there, it was really extraordinary. But you had to go back to get dry clothes, and, if you did it too often, it was obvious you were just skiving and you were just trying to get back, get warm. So, the work was, it was, it was certainly hard, there’s no question about it. But on the other hand, as always in this life, in participation, you find the truth of human relationships. Absolutely everything came out. And I’ve never forgotten, and it’s included in one of my books, that, when we used to walk back at the end of a day’s work, you walked back along the top of the wall, back to North Sea Camp, and as the sun was, if it ever did shine [laughs], was setting on your right, the sea was on your left, and it’s incredibly beautiful. Absolutely staggeringly beautiful. I close my eyes and I can see it still. And on almost every occasion when that happened, I’d be tempted to say every occasion, but I’m sure that would be wrong, but, almost always on those occasions, in extreme winter beauty, the lads used to start to talk about death. Not that I prompted. I never prompt a conversation in these circumstances. There’s me going in to tell people what they ought to be thinking about, or talking about something. And that was fundamental, you listen first. And, if you have something to say, you say it the ordinary human way. But they would always initiate conversations about death, what was going to happen. Is it right to commit suicide? All the questions you would expect. And that I found occurred in other borstals. It’s as though particular circumstances initiate conversations that wouldn’t otherwise occur, and that became a key to me in terms of understanding incarnation, that often you have to wait for a conversation. For sure I would never, never pressure anyone into believing or, anything about anything. It’s the patience of waiting until they want you to speak, and then your speech is just part of their conversation. And they might believe it or they might not believe it, the same as you and I talking together. John Bowker Page 62 C1672/23 Track 3

[30:15] But I remember an occasion I was in the Usk borstal over Christmas. I was sharing a cell. It was the old county jail, which had been turned into a borstal, and the cells were the old-fashioned Victorian ones which were arched, their roofs were arched. So it was exactly like a Gypsy caravan. And the chap I was sharing with was a genuine sort of Romany Gypsy. And he actually, for Christmas, he made all these paper flowers out of old bits of newspaper, and he decorated this cell as though it was a caravan. Anyway, we happened also to be on the same working party, and, there was a, I can’t remember the name, Ples Coeth or something, there was a farm up in the hills, and we were driven out each day. And you worked in the fields. We were working on building a fence round a field. And, we never saw the beginning or the end of the fence, because the mist up on the, for the week before Christmas, it never lifted. So we went putting in posts, putting up the barbed wire, and we went round, well I suppose we were going round. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to, to ever, you know, have fires or anything, but it was so cold that Christmas that we were allowed to have a fire, but we were told absolutely in no circumstances do you try and cook anything on it. Each dinner time we would go in, and, they had the hut where the meal was served, and there were sheds where they were sorting out the potatoes that were coming in off the other bits of the farm. And one lunchtime this Gypsy went into the shed and he said to the people, which are the lots that are going to be sold, which are the lots were for the prison, good ones for the, bad ones for the prison. So, picked up two of the sacks that were going to be sold, put one sack under each arm, disappeared into the mist. We went back, and of course we roasted potatoes in the fire. All the rest of that week until Christmas the conversation kept coming back to, is it right to steal potatoes? Is it right ever to steal? And so on. Ordinary human con… They were asked out of interest. So, eventually, about, I suppose, probably a year later, I got a letter from this Gypsy, and I would never, ever try and keep in touch with anyone I had become friends with in borstal, unless they wrote to me, or something, but, otherwise you get more pressure, more pressure. So the great thing is to enable other people’s lives to become what they might be, and if you can help a little in that, thank God. But very often, I dare say you didn’t. And this was an instance of this. Because, he wrote this letter, and he said, ‘I was out with me mates last week, and we saw a factory window open. They climbed in. I remembered the potatoes. They were caught. Ha ha ha.’ He actually wrote it in. ‘Ha ha ha.’ And you see, the John Bowker Page 63 C1672/23 Track 3 corrupt part of oneself says, oh, terrific. Helped him not to go back to prison. But the realistic part of oneself was, I was there when we went in and stole those potatoes, and I never talked, I never had that conversation, with all those who saw this, and they said, ‘Oh this strange chap who comes in and lives with us, he doesn’t mind stealing.’ And maybe I reinforced one of them to climb through that window and get arrested. So, it’s the thing that Borrelli found in Naples. He was the chap who lived with the scugnizzi in Naples. There was a very very good book by Morris West called Children of the Sun, which described how he did what I suppose I was trying to do in borstal, living absolutely as they did and with them. And there’s a passage in that book where Morris West asked him, ‘But didn’t you have to do things that you knew you were wrong?’ And, Borrelli said, ‘Yes, I did have to.’ And Morris West said, ‘But…’ I can’t remember the exact words, but, ‘How did that come out on the Day of Judgement?’ And Borrelli just shakes his head and says, ‘I leave that to God.’ So yes, I participated in things that, if I were in another circumstance I probably wouldn’t have done. But the key to all this, in Christian terms, is, how can we help ourselves as we grow up, and how can we, if ever, help others to acquire responsibility for the outcomes of what they say and do? Fantastically difficult to do. You think of all the peer groups that have influenced you, and, controlled you into doing… You probably enjoyed them, probably they weren’t bad, or, but just, it’s the strength of the peer group. And, the art of growing up and becoming mature, particularly in the religious context, is, the realisation, there are all sorts of things we might do, and often do do, which are pretty terrible. But then how do we acquire our own responsibility and say, no, I’m not going to do that, or I am going to do that thing that I ought to be doing, and so on and so on. And that’s one of the keys to understanding the relationship between religions. How in each different religious context is the process of acquiring responsibility understood, how is it helped, how is it enabled, how is it endorsed, how is it punished if it doesn’t happen? And all these questions of human behaviour in the different religious contexts.

[36:39] When you had decided that you were going to go into the borstals as it were independently, how did you explain your presence to those around you who were in the borstal because they had been put there if you like by someone else?

John Bowker Page 64 C1672/23 Track 3

It was a question of saying absolutely from the outset that I am here only as a friend, as someone who is not happy that you are here, and I don’t suppose you’re happy that you are here, and I don’t know that there’s anything we can do together, but if there is, let’s seek, let’s find out what it is. It was almost as vague as that. But it was explicit from the outset, that I was only there because I wouldn’t have wanted to be there myself.

And can you talk about how you were seen by them, as far as you can tell?

I’ve no idea. You would have to interview them. And I think they’d take a lot of finding now. But, I’ve no idea. I mean, ordinary friendships developed. A few went on beyond the end of their sentence or my going, and some of them ended in disaster. The Gypsy was one you could say, I don’t know about all the others who did get caught, but the one who didn’t get caught had acquired that responsibility for deciding what he was going to do, even though there was a peer group that was, you know, probably going to be pretty sarcastic to say the least when they came out, if they hadn’t been caught. So some clearly, some of these friendships clearly helped people to begin to, to use an old-fashioned phrase, stand on their own feet. But some ended in disaster. I remember when I was a curate in Sheffield, and there was another curate who I’d been at theological college with, and I had worked up at Pollington on a turnip farm, and we worked on these turnips together. And, he seemed to me to really want to get away from all that had led into this position. And, I remember getting in touch with the probation service, and this other curate said, ‘Yeah, we can give him a room.’ And he did fantastically well. He got a job, he worked well, he, they didn’t want him to pay rent but he said he wanted to pay rent, because he would feel that he was living in the real world. They liked him so much that, when they went on holiday they left him in charge of the house, and when they came back to the house, it was absolutely empty. Even the copper pipes which you used to have in the plumbing in those days had been sawn off, in order to be sold. And, I remember he came round to my digs in Sheffield. I walked to the door. I opened the door, and there he was. [laughs] I said, ‘I don’t know what to say,’ and I threw my hands in the air. And, he said, ‘Don’t say anything. It’s taught me what the real meaning of being Christian actually is.’ And, that’s, all this kind of thing, which sounds so boringly anecdotal, and trivial, isn’t trivial because it’s how you begin to understand the meaning of the John Bowker Page 65 C1672/23 Track 3 propositions. You see if you take a notion like grace, that we can’t get on our own feet, any of us. The… All these doctrines that can so easily be destroyed and dismissed, for example, original sin. It is so obviously totally wrong, as it was articulated by Cyprian and Augustine, seminal transmission. I mean it’s just absurd. But if you think of something like, say, ab hyphen original, coming from one’s origins, then our genetic inheritance, our environment, the family we are born into, the education we receive, we didn’t choose any of these things. Well we may, there’s a few of them, but, hardly. You see what I’m saying? These are unchosen constraints, which we don’t negotiate, and they control us into outcomes of the kinds of lives we live, the kinds of people we become, and so on. But they’re not deterministic, contrary to, you know, some extreme genetic determinists, they’re not determined. And the question is then, how do we find the help, how do we find the resources, how do we find the inspiration, where do we find the education, that helps us to gain insight into how we’ve come to be where we are, and then having gained that insight, gain the support and, and help and encourage us to begin to construct a different direction for ourselves? It’s not that the constraints from the past can be erased, they’re there, but it’s what you do with them. [42:36] And so this is the beginnings of where I began to take an interest in cybernetics. Because cybernetics rests on the principle that out of all possible freedoms, actually, some, the whole point of cybernetics is that, the total infinite freedom of possibilities is narrowed down to particular sets of constraints, and cybernetics is often analysing what the constraints are, to produce a particular outcome. And then, there’s a great phrase of Ashby, who was one of the pioneers of cybernetics back in these early days, that where a constraint exists, advantage can usually be taken of it. And, although I didn’t read that until, probably about ten years after this period in borstal, this was fundamental, that, of all the friends I made in borstal, you could say this is exaggerating, but I will exaggerate, none of them was responsible for being there. If you understood the constraints, using that word as, you know, rather than causes, because cause is a confusing word, but, if you understood the constraints that had controlled them into the outcome, that they ended up in the North Sea Camp, you could say, but they weren’t responsible. The circumstances, the constraints were so strong, and so controlling, that it was not surprising, use a more modest phrase, that they ended up where they did. But then, there are two things, aren’t there, you have to John Bowker Page 66 C1672/23 Track 3 remember. One is that that’s not deterministic, that’s not the end of their lives. That’s where this endeavour to help people, myself among them, to acquire responsibility, to acquire insight, which is the step to it, is important. But the other bit of it is, yes, but there were lots of people born in their circumstances, or something very like them, who did not end up in borstal. So you can’t over-simplify the complexity of human behaviour by thinking that, well, they’re only in borstal because. It’s never like that. You have to understand people much more, much more profoundly. And that’s the reason I was ordained. But, there’s a great definition by G K Chesterton. Charity is a reverent agnosticism about the complexity of the human soul. And I’ve lived with that my whole life. And this is why you take a huge delight in other people, even the ones you don’t like, because it’s the complexity of who they are. Marvellous, exhilarating variety and diversity. But it isn’t all good news, in any of us. There are things about us that we need help with.

[45:47] In what ways did the things that these young men told you about their lives up to the point of being in borstal, in what ways did that inform this view of the extent to which lives are to some extent channelled, or, or operate with constraints?

Well it, it influenced immensely. Because on the one side there was I who, in this place, and you could say my life was, to use your word, channelled, in the sense it just, rolled down one of Waddington’s trajectories [laughs], and I ended up where I did. Yeah, they were definitely… But, you see, I, this is why I think that one of the great breakthroughs in the transformation of twenty-first century sciences from the twentieth century is that, we’re beginning to abandon the casual use of the word cause. So constraints, of which, among the many constraints there will be some that are immediate and proximate to an eventuality, and we would rightly call them the cause. But we are unwise to put the definite article in, even then, ‘the’ cause. So there are proximate obvious causes, and a great deal of scientific research is focused on those proximate constraints. But the domain assumptions, the other constraints which ultimately go down to the laws of motion, can normally be ignored. But sometimes it’s unwise to ignore them, so an example would be, the length of the neck of a giraffe. I mean, in general you could say, all eventualities in the world of animals are, in the context of, of natural selection, but you don’t specify natural selection as a, John Bowker Page 67 C1672/23 Track 3 a cause of most things that happen. I mean what would be the point? You haven’t time. So you get on with the immediate cause. But when you come to the long neck of a giraffe, you are likely to say, well among the constraints that controlled eventualities into that outcome, natural selection and the search for food is actually an important constraint. So, natural selection doesn’t actually, you know, explain things. It’s the context in which correct explanations in evolution and so on can occur. So, one’s always, or I’m always working with, yes, trying to understand the immediate proximate constraints which are virtually synonymous with what we have traditionally called a cause, but, charity in Chesterton’s definition always reminds you, but there’s probably more going on here than that immediate proximate constraint. So, I think I learnt that before I knew about it. [laughs] And that certainly came out of those borstal days. So some of the great themes of the Christian understanding of nature, of God, of human beings and so on, so on, I think that all came out of those years, partly the academic learning of course, because you don’t get to a knowledge of, well let’s say Arabic, you don’t get it on the cheap, you have to work at it. Which of the two is more important is, an individual thing, but I do remember the two coming into real tension, what is one supposed to be doing? Part of me was saying that the Christian requirement is the incarnational one, you’ve got to be where people are. But on the other hand, that channel as you were referring to it of, I had been to school, been to Oxford, learnt languages, that also seemed important to understand others, because you can’t, even then I knew perfectly well, you cannot understand conflict. And that’s going back to the donkey in Africa. Why do people hate each other so much? You can’t understand that without doing very serious academic work. [51:09] They came, they flowed together when Corpus Christi College in Cambridge wrote to me to ask if I would go to be Dean of Chapel there. And, I was in my first year of curacy, and, I was partly in borstal and partly teaching advanced Hebrew in the university. So this is the way of trying to keep the two bits of things that seemed important to me together. And, so, I went to the Bishop of Sheffield and said, you know, well I, initially I said no to Corpus, because I thought the borstal stuff was more important, but they wrote again and said, ‘We’ve looked around and you’re the person we really want to come. Would you reconsider it?’ So I went to the bishop, I said, ‘Whatever you say, I’ll do. I don’t think I’ve ever been under obedience except John Bowker Page 68 C1672/23 Track 3 in the Army in my entire life, but,’ I said, ‘I’ll do what you say.’ And he said, ‘Well, I think that, anybody can go and live in borstal, but not everybody can learn, Arabic and Syriac and so on. I think you should go to Cambridge.’ I think, looking back, he was entirely wrong. I’m not unhappy I came to Cambridge. I actually think anybody can learn Arabic, but I don’t think everybody can go and live in borstal, looking back on it. But that was how the decision was reached. So I came back to Cambridge.

[52:49] Before we get to Cambridge, what stands out in your memory of the things that the boys told you about their childhoods, about what had taken them to where they were? So the sort of details of their, of their lives. The things that had happened to them that you felt might have been the constraints.

I think it was, poverty, and education. There’s some fantastically good education going on, but there’s also some fantastically poor education going on. This is why I was saying earlier, you can’t generalise about, you can’t do that. It was certainly the lack of opportunity, and it was the, conformity of expectation in their own families. But that’s a strange phrase. Sometimes, what I mean by that, they had been made to conform to particular behaviours in a family, and that had had a considerable effect, because, in this instance, these were people who had refused to conform. But otherwise it was because the family didn’t exist; even in those days there were very broken families. It’s… You… You’d have to pick out one life and then another life and then another life, because, I’m generalising about some recurrent themes, but in each case there were some particular things. I mean for one lad it was that, why had one member of the family been killed in a bomb dropped on Liverpool, and not another member of the family? And, it had really torn him apart, so that he became schizophrenic, not that anybody knows what that word means, but you know what I’m referring to. And incidentally, that lad who emptied the house in, the curate in Sheffield, I mean he was diagnosed, subsequently of course, as a classic schizophrenic, so far as schizophrenia was understood in those days. But he had just episodes where he had no feelings about other people of any kind whatsoever. So, what did I learn? I mean that, people, many, many people have very, very tough lives.

[55:49] John Bowker Page 69 C1672/23 Track 3

And, although you said that it’s not possible for you to know how you were viewed, are you able to say whether they, they regarded you as a representative of the Christian Church?

I don’t know. I would imagine they must have done. And incidentally, of course a lot of people, a lot of them would just be completely indifferent, I was just part of the furniture. But they must have done, because I always got up at half-past five every morning to go and say Matins as it used to be called in those days, maybe still is, the morning Office, in the borstal chapel. Now my reasons for doing that were partly what we were talking about, about prayer beside the bed, and I certainly didn’t do that, but I did feel, a) that I ought to make an indirect illustration of why I was there and what I believed in, and secondly, because I actually needed the help of God, I’ve no idea what the word God stands for, and, you know, when you just say it like that, it has, what am I talking about, would be a good question. But let’s leave it as a shorthand. I needed the help of God to get through the next day. It wasn’t easy doing this actually. I mean, OK, it was no worse than basic training in the Army, but, it certainly wasn’t better than that. [laughs] And, I needed help. So this is, all this would teach me that, as I said a moment ago, that, the word grace is so fundamentally important in all human lives, unmerited and often un-asked for. Help is really what it amounts to. Now there’s a third reason. You see how all our lives are tangled. Because I got up half an hour early to say Matins, I got to the basins in the washroom earlier than anybody else, by about four minutes, and then I could get a basin and I could get shaved before the basins were all gone.

[58:09] And, what was the, if… Can you give us some sense of the, the view of the boys of Christianity? Their, their levels of belief, their attitudes towards Christianity.

I can’t do that, and I don’t believe anybody could. I talked about talking about death on the, coming home from the, coming back home from the marshes, and it was clear that there were very very deep-rooted, affirmative beliefs, if I can put it like that, but, very unarticulated, about Jesus certainly. There were strong hopes that parents, if they had died, had not gone forever, and so on. But I actually never asked anybody what they, what they believed. Some did certainly have both strong belief and strong John Bowker Page 70 C1672/23 Track 3 practice, and, but, I never… What did they… I’ve no idea. Obviously some of them treated it with derision, I would think, but I never experienced it. The odd thing is that I thought I would, and I didn’t. I just thought, because of all I explained before, that, a form of Christianity, the way it was expressed, the way it was practised, the way it was defended, was just, so far out from the world that most people have to live in: that was a wrong judgement, of course, but that’s how I felt at the time, that, I was almost a bit ashamed of, of being a Christian. But I never got any of that from the lads at all. So, yah, on occasion, they would certainly. And indeed, I used to go sometimes, if they asked me, to a graveyard in some remote part of the land and say a prayer at the grave of, of one of their parents. I would go and visit. It usually was parents. But I remember going to visit somebody’s mother in the London Hospital, and that was a creative experience, because I met there for the first time the famous Father Joe Williamson, who was the exact opposite of, of myself. He wasn’t ashamed of being a Christian. [laughs] I hope I’m not ashamed any more. It’s just, I had come out of that context. So, they definitely had beliefs. And, it wasn’t that, this particular person didn’t just ask me to go and visit his mother in hospital, but would I go and say a prayer for her. And I said, ‘Well I could say, we could both say one together here.’ And he said, ‘No I want you to go.’ And he, in a sense he wanted almost anointing or the laying on of hands, but wouldn’t know how to say that, but that’s what she got anyway, so… Yah, I think folk religion, as Edward Robinson used to call it, implicit religion was the word that he used when he founded this exploration of it, that the beliefs, the religious… that is implicit in all people, I now of course understand, miles better, because of course it has its profound genetic roots. So, implicit religion is far more important most of the time for most people than explicit religion. So, I didn’t know enough about that to recognise it, but looking back, I think they were very very religious. The problem is with implicit religion, that while many people express out of these roots, of course other people, more organised people, may well call superstition. So, the borderline between implicit religion and institutional, organised, corporate religion, is very very blurred indeed, and that’s why I can’t tell you what any of them actually believed, but that they believed a great deal would be recognised by anybody as religious is absolutely certain.

[1:03:09] John Bowker Page 71 C1672/23 Track 3

Thank you. Could you, then, describe what we might call your workplaces, having moved back to Cambridge, this is 1962, to become Dean and…?

Yes, 1962, yes. Well, in those days colleges were small. I simply had a room in college, and, somebody looking after me. In fact I had, they were called, the people who looked after you in your rooms were called scouts in Oxford and bedders in Cambridge, and they were the heart and soul of the college. The chap who looked after me had been left to the college by an old member in his will. And, he was somebody who left his estate to the college, but he left very strict requirements, in an order. And, the order in which the money was to be spent was to begin, the college chapel shall have stalls for the fellows more splendid than the stalls in King’s College. He had a list, and, the provision was that we would go down the list until we found something that actually the estate was large enough to finance. And… But one of the provisions was that this man who had been his butler over many years should be employed by the college, really to look after him. In a sense he was coming up to retirement. And, so, the butler was left to the college. And as the college looked at this list of requirements, we didn’t really want any of them, but we did want the butler. So… Because he was such a nice person, and, and you know, he needed looking after and so on. So we went down the list, and eventually we… And if you ever go to Cambridge and look in Corpus Christi Chapel, you will see the result of this. He said, he said it should have a new organ, beautifully gilded and decorated, and be a very splendid musical instrument. So we bought a new organ. And, the butler came, and he looked after me in my first year. So, in those days it was, the colleges were very very small, and, it was a question of taking all these things I had been learning and applying them in the new… So in the first year I was in Corpus it was a question of, enabling what the undergraduates wanted and needed to do in order to feel they had arrived in a good place and got these opportunities. So I remember we did the, the world premiere of Pär Lagerkvist, who was a Nobel Prize winner in literature in Sweden, we did the world premiere of one of his plays. I mean, somebody, one of the fellows translated it from the Swedish, and, then they did all the production, and then the college orchestra could play music before or after. So there was an entire sort of college enterprise around this. And, Lagerkvist was just overwhelmed. He said, ‘This isn’t a play I don’t think anybody can perform, but I’m very very grateful to you.’ And of course he was right in his judgement. It was the John Bowker Page 72 C1672/23 Track 3 most melancholy play. And people sat around. It was one of these interwar existentialist kind of things, you know, early French existentialism. And people sat around saying, ‘Oooooooh.’ [laughs] And then somebody, ‘Oooooooh.’ [laughs] And… But, what it did for the college was absolutely superb. You see, two of the organ scholars that I appointed in my time there, one was Richard Armstrong, and the other was Mark Elder, who went on to become great conductors as you know. We wanted people to, to… Yah, wanted to get a degree, but that wasn’t so important as having this last three years when they weren’t going to be paying taxes, of, of relative freedom to do something, anything almost, that they hadn’t done before, and just to have a go at it. So… And for some, yes, it worked very well, and for others, it was the absolute opposite. We had one undergraduate in that first year who committed suicide. So again, we’re back with the diversity of human possibility. So, again, that reinforced a sense that, where I’m doing, I’ve got to be way back, off the set and off the scene, and, and, you, you try to watch for those who are being put under strain, and are going in the direction, say, of suicide, but you can’t spot that always. But there is no one good recipe. It’s to be a sufficiently close incarnation of it, to where people are, that you can just perhaps be a means of grace towards them, not telling them what to do, but giving them the opportunities to become more than they otherwise might have been.

Did you come to know the reasons for the suicide, or any of the details?

Yes, I do know them very well. I actually knew the parents before he actually came to the college, but I wouldn’t want to talk about that.

[1:09:34] Thank you. Could you describe your…

How are we doing on time by the way?

We’ve got about an hour.

OK, fine.

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Could you describe your sort of, your, your day-to-day, a sort of, a typical day here, your daily work?

Well, it was, it was morning service, abbreviated Matins. There was supervising. At that time in Cambridge you could be a fellow of a college but not a university lecturer. Many, all, pretty well all university lecturers were fellows of college, but it wasn’t automatic that if you were a fellow you would be a university lecturer. But I did do quite a number of lectures, mainly for, things that I suppose don’t exist any more. I mean they were university sponsored, but they were for the WEA, the Workers’ Educational Association, or for teachers coming on, you know, sort of, refresher courses of where in such and such a subject you’d got to, and so on. So I was doing some lectures, but I wasn’t a university lecturer. So, all my work was focused on the college, and on its, its services, and then on enabling undergraduate life to be as lively as possible. It was important, because, I remember we went as a group; we were always going away on, doing things, and, I remember we went to St Pölten in Austria. So we’re now, quite a long way from the war, but the mayor of St Pölten gave a sort of, evening for, for us, and welcoming us. And I’ll never forget, he was old, but he said he, as a young man, of course he remembered the Nazis entering Austria. And, he said, the only thing he would tell us young people was that if you do not do politics, politics will be done to you. And that so impressed one undergraduate that he changed subjects in his third year, and became, went into the Foreign Office and became a diplomat for that reason. So, you never know what’s going to come out of these… I think, in that early period, it was trying to sort of put things on, bring people in to the college. For example, Joe Williamson I referred to that I met in the London Hospital, who was so, un-self-consciously what he was. [laughs] I remember him in the Commercial Road, it’s quite a busy road in London, in those days anyway, and he always wore absolutely full, cassock, biretta. absolutely everything, and he would come out of the hospital, and he never looked left or right, he would take off his biretta and hold it up in the air and just walk across the road. And all the traffic stopped. So, I got him in for a week [laughs], to college, just to live in college and to, be himself. And, that had important consequences. Two bishops came from that week. Not that that’s necessarily a good thing, but it did change their lives anyway, and they actually were very attentive to their people, bishops.

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[1:13:13] Now, you’ve referred to at least two sort of scientific ways of understanding reality in what we’ve said today. I think you mentioned the epigenetic landscape model, the Waddington thing, and cybernetics. But, so I wanted to know to what extent at this time, in the early Sixties, you are following science, and if you are, how you’re doing it.

Almost entirely because of the background with my father that I referred to, so, it was just always there, and always reading. But it was a parallel activity at that time, because it had to be part-time. I mean it was, time off. Cambridge only has eight- week terms, so there’s quite a lot of time in the vacs. But, at a very early stage I began to keep commonplace books. So there are rows and rows upstairs of these little red notebooks which I used to take, I used to take wherever I went, because a headline in a newspaper or an advert in an airport if it caught my eye would go into my little red book. So it wasn’t all… But, I can certainly remember writing nearly the whole of one of those little red notebooks on stochastic theory for example. And I would write down anything, even if I didn’t altogether understand it, because, by writing it out, you can’t go fast; you have to stop. It also means you can memorise it better, it goes into your memory, so you know where it is. And, also, because we, we weren’t particularly well paid, we, we started on £1,000 a year, from which then there were deductions for keep and all the rest of it. So there wasn’t a lot of money spare, but I’d got a sum still saved from those army days. And I used to ask the scientists in the college for advice on what I ought to be reading next. And Cambridge has the massive advantage that it has got an open shelf copyright library, so you can wander up and down the shelves. But I didn’t rely on that. I would ask them what I ought to be reading, and then I would go out and buy it, buy the book. So, I remember somebody who came for a supervision from King’s College, not my own college, and, I was, went out, put a kettle on, I thought we’d have a cup of coffee. So he’s looking at the books, and he turned round and he said, ‘Excuse me but I think I’ve come to the wrong room.’ [laughs] And, all the books were, you know, scientific books, mainly physics in those days, but particularly biology. So, there were more science books on the shelves than there were languages or, or theology. So, it was mainly by reading, but also by guided and informed reading. So, I began to make connections through this scientists in the college, then into the university more widely. And you could say, John Bowker Page 75 C1672/23 Track 3 well that’s just a bit juvenile really, but I’m not sure it isn’t a good thing to do. There was a chap here last week who came to a lecture I did recently in Oxford, and something caught him, and he came to talk, and he, he was just finishing a… I may have told you about this, did I? Just finishing his PhD, he’s got his viva next week, on geophysics, he’s been doing stuff in Iceland. And, I’m sure he’ll get it from the way he was talking about it. But, you know, that… But anyway, he said, he really now wanted, not to go on with that, but to move, when I was lecturing, it was obviously relations between sciences and religions, never science and religion. [laughs] And, he wanted to, he approached people, he could do a one-year sort of diploma to get some theology, and then he could go on and do an MPhil in, it will be called science and religion. And I thought then that, actually he doesn’t really want to… Well he, he needs to, but he doesn’t want to do a diploma in theology to get some theological knowledge. He wants to do this year’s guided reading. But he, in this modern world you’ve got to get a qualification, you’ve got to get something on your CV, don’t you. [1:18:52] So, I’m not sure that that way of, of doing it wasn’t perhaps the better. One of the advantages was that the people I talked to made it clear that science wasn’t as certain as I had assumed, not having worked first-hand in it, that it must be. Because I suppose like most people they kept producing jet engines and… I remember seeing the first Gloster Meteor flying over my prep school and being absolutely amazed by it. And, the technology that sciences were producing was, was, it was just astonishing. And I, of course, spent hours reading, Landau and people on quantum stuff, and, I thought, yeah, they’ll get over this. It’s going to be, it’s going to be, they’ll get it sorted out, it’ll get as certain as Newton. I mean, that’s how naïve I was. But of course by reading you began to realise, actually that isn’t what the sciences are about at all. And that the technology is a marvellous, marvellous, marvellous, marvellous throw-off. And I know it’s the objective of many people, but that actually isn’t the certainty that obtains, or, anyway, that’s so obvious that it’s, now. But it wasn’t obvious to me then, and I was cured of thinking that science is the sort of trump card that will tell you ‘the truth’.

[1:20:35] Who were the scientists in the college? John Bowker Page 76 C1672/23 Track 3

There was, Faber in physics. Goodness, I can’t remember names. There was a very good botanist I remember who was… Oh, of course there was Christopher Longuet- Higgins. Now he was interesting. He was a physicist, and, he was one of the most constructive. He was the son of an Anglican clergyman, and was very anti-Christian, and that was marvellous for me. I’m not sure it was marvellous for him, but, you know. Who knows? God does. And then there was… But I think he was actually the key person, because he was so anti-chapel and anti-Christian, and a marvellous expositor. He did very interesting Gifford Lectures in conjunction with somebody else. I remember saying to him… And he actually comes in, he reproduced the same phrase, so, years later in these Gifford Lectures, I don’t know what we were talking about now, it was something in physics, and I remember saying to him, you know, he was saying that something actually can’t, can’t be done. He didn’t even add, ‘at the moment’. He said, something can’t be done, like my friend getting negative results on particular methods of approaching fusion. And, I said, ‘Yes, but surely in principle it could be done.’ And he said, ‘Be wary of all scientists who say that in principle something can be done [laughs], because it’s a way of saying, actually, we can’t. [laughs] And, he had reproduced that in the Gifford Lectures, and he gave a marvellous list of very specific examples in physics where it doesn’t help to say in principle it could be done, because actually, there are reasons why it can’t be done. And, so I learnt that from him very early on. And that’s why many of my books are littered with a sentence that, most of what we say that has any informative content is approximate, corrigible, provisional, and mainly wrong, from the point of view of later generations. And this is why we talked earlier, the thing that now intrigues me and intrigued me then, is, well, then how do we get so much right on the basis of what turns out to be wrong? And that still intrigues me as a question and a puzzle. But it does mean in the religious world that, the pursuits of orthodox statements seem to me on the whole misguided, [laughs] because they’re definitely going to turn out to be wrong. Supposing God were to turn out to be God, which would surprise all of us I’m sure. God, whatever that word, whatever it is that has evoked the word God, or Deus or Zeus or whatever, whatever is evoked the necessity for words of that kind, it won’t be caught within the mesh of any of our approximate corrigible statements. But it’s very very difficult for religions to learn that, indeed they don’t learn it by and large, or religious people find it impossible to learn that. But, that God is always greater, is a John Bowker Page 77 C1672/23 Track 3 wise remark. Anyway, I got that particularly from all those conversations with the Corpus scientists in those early days. And they were enormous generous. I suppose they perhaps thought that maybe I might be brought back to the correct and proper fold. But it was exciting, exhilarating.

[1:24:55] That implies that, not only Christopher but the other scientists were also atheists.

No, they weren’t.

Ah.

They were divided. Some certainly were Christians, and attended chapel. And some, one at least, attended chapel, though he said that he couldn’t believe any part of the Creed in the form in which it was, the verbal form in which it was expressed. But what those words were pointing to, he believed in very profoundly. Which is a good way of put it.

And how was Christopher Longuet-Higgins’s atheism expressed?

Not aggressively, in terms of his behaviour. It wasn’t like Trinity College, where the atheists certainly expressed their atheism extremely strongly. There was the famous incident where… There was, when I arrived at Trinity there was a fellow there called Tresillian, and he was called Tris always. And I was there when he celebrated his 100th birthday. So he went back, on his 100th birthday, he was given a dinner by the college, and gave a, a speech, just to say thank you, and, and just give some few reminiscences of the Trinity he had known over this immense span of time. And, by the time he reached 1914 he had been going for three-quarters of an hour [laughs], so… He I remember telling me that, at that time there was a philosopher of time called McTaggart, and, there was a debate about whether chapel should continue to be compulsory. So we’re back in this ’14-’18 sort of period. And, the… I can’t remember who he was, might even have been Bertrand Russell, because he was a fellow then, was arguing that, chapel should no longer be compulsory. And that’s why I think it probably was Russell. And McTaggart was in the chair behind, and as John Bowker Page 78 C1672/23 Track 3

Russell, let’s call him Russell, was giving this speech, must abolish compulsory chapel, McTaggart began to shake his chair to try and stop him. And he eventually shook the chair so violently, [laughs] the whole chair collapsed, and Russell was on the floor. And Russell said, ‘Why? I thought you were very much against having compulsory chapel.’ And McTaggart said, ‘No, I want chapel to be compulsory, because if the young men have to go to chapel they’ll never believe a thing.’ [laughs] So, the atheism at Trinity was almost an affectation. It wasn’t actually, in my experience of it, very sincerely felt; it was because, there are very good accounts of this in Harry Williams’s Some Day I’ll Find You, but, it was, it was just a thing that some fellows did, because that’s the sort of thing that some fellows do. So, back in the Corpus days, the atheism of Christopher Longuet is far, far more profound than that. It was really, properly thought and felt, and therefore he didn’t need to shake a chair, and try and make it fall to bits. It was really, serious. What else can one say? It mattered. It was as serious as those conversations about death on the wall in borstal.

[1:29:18] And, what sorts of things were you pointed to in your reading? Were you being told about specific journal articles, or, about…?

Certainly some journal articles, definitely, yes. And, the history and philosophy of science was beginning to sort of get going in an important way. There were very good people in the history and philosophy of science. I get confused about dates, so I won’t say who they were, but, that, I read, that’s where many of the articles came from. [laughs] Terms of methodology in science. And we were moving towards the Feyerabend and, understanding of scientific method, and, the Kuhn sort of paradigms and… That was all coming over the horizon. So there were many, many articles. And people were very good, they used to send me offprints; in those days, I don’t know if they still do, offprints used to be quite common. Still got most of them, so…

But when a fellow from another college came and looked at the books on your shelves and felt that he must be…

Well he was an undergraduate who was coming for a supervision. John Bowker Page 79 C1672/23 Track 3

Oh. OK. And felt he must be in the wrong place. What sorts of things would he have been looking at on your shelves at that time?

Well some of the books he was looking at are still over in, we’ve got another study, you know, so, back at the garage. Some of them are still there, because I still find it useful to go back occasionally and to see where we’ve come from. I mean, one sees that they were indeed corrigible, and from a certain point of view, mainly wrong. Dates are difficult here, because I can’t remember when I read some particular books, but, they were, as I say, they were mainly physics and particularly the move to quantum physics, and, in genetics, because I can remember walking across Gloucester Green bus station in Oxford and reading in the newspaper for the first time about the double helix. I can remember where I was when I read that article. So that was obviously going to be massively important, you just had to read why it was such an achievement, and you could see where it was going to go. I can’t remember the titles now. It’s… I could go over there and read some of them off. I remember being… This must have been later. You see I don’t know quite when he began, but I remember David Bohm of course having an alternative view, well no, it was a third view really, wasn’t it, the alternative view was already in place, but this was a third one, and I thought, now that’s interesting. And, why was it interesting? Because it was a different way of imagining how the same sorts of consequences might have been brought into being. So again, that reinforced my conviction that it was a real mistake to be looking for causes rather than constraints. I wouldn’t have put it like that then. But, it seemed to me that, one of the fundamental problems was this quest. Well, I mean, the obvious way to summarise it is, the reductionist quest, was an unwise way to go. But he was totally dominant then, I mean it was, much later but, the opening of Francis Crick’s book, you know, ‘You’re nothing but.’ [laughs] So already then I was very strongly arguing and lecturing against what used to be called then ‘nothing buttery’, I know it’s become a silly phrase now. But… And that’s why one of my early books says, one of the great dangers of the unfolding of the new anthropology that will have to come, and which has not yet come, is that, whereas Christians and others were always accused of looking for a God at the Gaps, but I mean that really, it’s disappeared, even in the nineteenth century itself. But we had, we were suddenly in the midst of, of the danger of looking for, for the man of the John Bowker Page 80 C1672/23 Track 3 gaps. Now, man was used, you know, not, for, generically, male and female, but I wouldn’t … I used to use man in my early books; wouldn’t dream of doing so now. And rightly, I mean, it’s a perfectly proper point that has been made and I took a long time to learn it. [1:34:34] But, so, this refusal to try and say there is something about the human that transcends the reductionist endeavour, really became central to, to what I worked on subsequently. And I think we are now, I hope, now, that the extreme reductionist quest has disappeared as much as the God of the Gaps has disappeared. But, will only disappear provided you move from a preoccupation with ‘the cause’. If you’re going to always say, but we’ve got to find ‘the cause’, you’re always on a reductionist trajectory. You’ve got to get it to that cause. Whereas if you talk about constraints, you can say that outcomes come into being from multiple constraints, and some are much more proximate, urgent and immediate than the others, so you don’t have to specify the laws of motion every time, you don’t have to specify natural selection every time you want to talk about a biological event or something. [laughs] But you must remember that you might have to, and in any case, even if you don’t specify, it is part of a network of constraints. Now that became important for me in understanding the relation of God to creation. If we are really seeking the Aristotelean first cause, it will always be the case that, if you’re, if, well either there is a first cause, or there isn’t And it’s much easier to see why there wouldn’t be a first, et cetera et cetera. Once you see the argument of the relation of God to the universe in terms of constraints, then, you can see not only why God could be a constraint like, say, the laws of motion, or natural selection, or something, but you don’t have to specify God on every occasion as though he is ‘the cause’. But sometimes you may have to do so. And that’s where reflections on prayer and incarnation make perfectly natural, underlining natural, sense in a universe of this kind, and why it is not surprising to find the reality of God, the truth of God, realised in the way that particular constraints are realised. You know, don’t, we’re not sitting here thinking, my word, gravity is doing a good job, we’re not flying round this room. And we don’t sit here thinking, my God, God’s doing a good job. You see you don’t, you… But prayer is realising the condition in which one always is, and prayer for others is simply making the connections of love in that way rather than in sending a bunch of flowers because it’s an anniversary of a marriage or something. So once you get into the world of constraints, then the John Bowker Page 81 C1672/23 Track 3 interaction between each other and the cosmos and God become part of a single kind of picture that makes coherent sense of the data, the instantiating data, that are crying out for explanation.

[1:38:35] Thank you. Now you, you are at Corpus Christi until 1965.

No. I was there till 1974.

Oh, ’74. Yes, OK.

Yes.

So you… But at some point you become an assistant lecturer.

Yes. You had to apply for that, and then, you’re… And I was originally elected as a lecturer in Judaism at the time of Jesus. But because there was no study of any other religions, there was one course of lectures a year given to teachers on other religions, and, I did that lecture really because there was nobody else and because I knew the languages and I was interested, obviously, in other religions, at least Islam and Judaism. But I was appointed as a lecturer, and that’s what my early books, I wrote a book on Targums and rabbinic literature, which are the Jewish exegesis of scripture and how it was done, and, so on. And another one was Jesus and the Pharisees. And then, because the lectures seemed, you know, well attended or were being asked for, a committee was set up to ask whether the study of other religions could be integrated into the Cambridge Theology Tripos, and the difficulty there was, there were many who said, this is a faculty of Christian theology, and Christian theology is still the queen of the sciences, and so on. And, I chaired the committee, and, we eventually came up with a proposal that we would introduce the study of some aspects of religions, ugly phrase, which would illuminate and make more intelligible things that were already in the Theology Tripos, that you couldn’t understand Christian, it wasn’t just theology, it was Christian history and, so on, and philosophy and so on. And, so that’s why we came up with a, the, a proposal that there should be an examination of how religion, or Christianity, is understood, so to speak from the outside, by John Bowker Page 82 C1672/23 Track 3 sociology, anthropology and psychology. And we were then going to take one particular topic that all religions have something to say about, and that’s why we took the theme of suffering. And, we had been promised a job, we wouldn’t have set up the committee if we hadn’t been promised a job, so we, I don’t know exactly what year this is, but it’s somewhere around 1965, ’66, somewhere around there, and got the first of the government cuts. And it’s very hard for people to remember that the first… You know, they’ve been going on ever since, but the first of them came around this ’65/’66 time, and the job we had been promised, to teach this new thing, was cut. So I was asked by the faculty if I would take a year’s sabbatical leave, and go and retrain really in order to introduce this paper into the faculty. Because it was thought to be important, it had been approved, and so on. And, I remember coming back and doing a Hollywood thing with Margaret, my wife, walking up and down the carpet, because all this research I had done on, particularly on Islam, early Islam, the Qur’an, and on Judaism at the time of Jesus, I mean, would be finished. But eventually, it was a long, long weekend, I thought, it’s so important for Christian self- understanding, a faculty of Christian theology, to incorporate this into their self- understanding, that I agreed to I would do it. And, so I took the year’s leave, and this is where the open shelf university library came in, because then I did walk up and down the shelves picking out books and doing nothing but reading, reading, reading, making notes. And, then, I was, I applied to and was appointed to do the Wilde Lectures at Oxford, and that was why my next book was The Sense of God: sociology, anthropological and psychological understandings of the origin of the sense of God [: Sociological, Anthropological, and Psychological Approaches to the Origin of the Sense of God]. Which must have something to do with theology somewhere. But it meant that I had now completely moved into a new subject. And that’s why I’ve always remained a Victorian amateur, and like those wonderful people, particularly, many of them women, who used to go to the Himalayas and come back bringing a bit here and a bit there, and so on. I understand, because, a certain amount, but I’m not a scholar. Because you can’t be. You can’t move from your research and then do something entirely different, and do it at a, a scholarly, academic standard. But I still think it had to be done, and I still think there is a value in somebody being able to show where points of connection are made. And the next one for that was of course the burgeoning interest in genetics. So when eventually science and Christianity came in at Cambridge, when people like Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne came, I John Bowker Page 83 C1672/23 Track 3 could then come in to make a contribution on the genetics side, and that’s why one of my later books is, you know, Is God a Virus?: Genes, Culture and Religion.

[1:45:29] Thank you. Could you tell the story of meeting your future wife? Which I think, must have been in the early Sixties.

Yes, I, I can certainly remember that. It was, we were both at Oxford, and, I had been playing fives with the Worcester College chaplain. And, you know, very close last game, and he wouldn’t give up, and I certainly wouldn’t give up. And, so we were a bit late. And he had asked Margaret to tea. And, we came in late, she was already in the room, and, he said, ‘Look, you look after each other. I’m just going to go and have a shower and then you can have a shower after me.’ And I walked into her room, and there she was, on the opposite side of the room. And it was absolute, instantaneous. It’s quite extraordinary. And we are very far from understanding that, in terms of neurosciences. I mean we know what, we’ve mapped what happens in the brain, but that’s telling us extremely little. Why does one person turn one other person on, or why are some people turned on by some sort of people? What turns us on sexually and all the rest of it, is still a vast unknown territory. And you think of the all the books and videos that have been made about it, and we really don’t know. We just don’t understand, as with so much of what happens basically in the brain. It’s in the whole body obviously, but… So, I mean there it was. I said, ‘Let’s go out.’ And we walked out to, across Port Meadows, I think it’s called The Trout. It’s one where they often did the Morse episodes. We walked out there, had lunch, and, it began from there. We had a, a, pretty well a year apart, because she got a lectureship at Cambridge and I was at, had to do a curacy and do this work in the University of Sheffield. But I can remember bits when I was working, I was still working then on the Qur’an and reading these - well it wasn't the Qur’an, but it was a commentary by Baidawi, on the Qur’an, and seeing me reading this. And, and her image kept floating across the Arabic text. [laughs] So, I was glad to be able to come back to Corpus. And we got married in 1963.

[1:48:05] What had been her, her background, up to that point? John Bowker Page 84 C1672/23 Track 3

Her background was the same as mine. We were sent from, I mean we were both evacuees during the war, sometimes it was with family but sometimes it wasn’t. She had been sent to many different schools. Her father died of very high blood pressure, which you did die of in those days. He had worked in shipping and was, had big responsibility for loading the cargo ships that came from America with, weapons or armaments or, flour or whatever, in them, and he had to find loads to send them back in ballast so they wouldn’t sink, unless this by means of submarines. And, so, I mean she, there she was. She went to various different schools, because we, the war, you did, you just… And, she had a very good history teacher at the, her sixth form, in her sixth form years, and, she won a scholarship to Girton in Cambridge but went to Somerville and liked the look of it and the history teaching there better. So she actually chose not to take up the scholarship but to go to Somerville. She was, very much like me in the sense of, if you see somebody in need or suffering, you do something about it. She helped to found Jacari at Oxford, that’s the Joint Action Committee Against Racial Intolerance. And, she, they founded the first scholarship that brought an indigenous African to Oxford on a scholarship from South Africa. Indeed at one point she was banned from entering South Africa and I was banned from entering Israel. So… [laughs] So she had a very very deep social conscience, but she also had a very very quiet and self-questioning Christian faith, by no means signing up, you know, on the dotted line. So very like me in that respect. Knew there was something there that wasn’t just, well fairly interesting, there’s something there that was compelling, attractive and true. And what you did about it, then unfolded. She actually went on a camp, also with the Franciscans [laughs], to take the children camping, I think it was down near Weymouth. And the Franciscans said to her on the second night, ‘Well, you’re the only girl we’ve got here. We want you tonight to tell all the boys about sex.’ Of which she knew very little. [laughs] Because in those days you didn’t, particularly if you were a girl, because if you got pregnant, certainly at Oxford, you were almost invariably sent down. So, this is why when we got married, I said, there’s no way I’m going to fly on honeymoon. I’ll fly back, but I’m going by train. [laughs] I mean, for people like us, there was, just, sex didn’t happen before you got married. Obviously there were many for whom it did, but, that’s the thing we were talking about earlier, the way you, the context in which you were brought up. And so, yes, she saved my life. John Bowker Page 85 C1672/23 Track 3

[1:52:25] Where did you live, once married?

Lived in a garage to begin with. We lived in the garage of somebody called John Barton, and his wife was Anne Barton, who’s a great Shakespeare scholar. Now John Barton was the producer at the Stratford, Shakespeare company, who did the first version of The Hollow Crown, that, you know, has been on, different version of it, but the very first one, putting the plays together and making them run as a sequence, he did. Well we started life in their garage. Because our house was being built, it just hadn’t been finished. And, we eventually moved into our house that had been built not far from the college.

[1:53:13] And, could you talk about the way in which your, your academic careers sort of work together? Presumably, at some point you start a family.

Yes, we did.

Sort of how, how sort of domestic work was divided up, how you organised your professional lives around family and childcare and…

Yes. Well, we spent the whole of Margaret’s salary, or you might say it was mine, but I mean, half of the salary went on a really excellent person to look after, David is our son. And, but we, the great thing about, for me at Cambridge, was of course, that I wasn’t a lecturer to begin with, so there was, I used to have to do a great deal in the evenings and the early mornings, whereas Margaret, being a university lecturer, was working through… So, usually, almost all the time, there was, one of us was with David, and, but, she would take him for walks and so on, but… Because we were sensitive, not least from listening to the story of the people in borstal, that the mother- child relationship is absolutely non-negotiable. I mean if you don’t… Well, we did meet, because of my catastrophic childhood, I went to a very good psychiatrist who gave me some insight into what was going on in me. Jack Dominion. And, he said, well, it is important that there should be, that the first language of love is always John Bowker Page 86 C1672/23 Track 3 taught between the mother and the baby, if it possibly can be. But he also said, that’s not going to happen for many people. We were still close to the end of the Second World War. Think of all the people whose parents were, the children whose parents were killed. And this haunts me now, as one thinks of the refugee children who have no means of learning that first language of love. But, Dominion said, but then you see, in these days, this is how it would be put, marriage is the second great chance of learning the language of love. Now, with marriage disintegrating as a statistical phenomenon, it still remains the case that there are other circumstances, other partnerships, in which one can learn the languages of love. And that’s one reason why from the outset of the AIDS epidemic I said, used to argue that… [voices outside] That the… [pause] I was saying that, at the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, I said that the Church must bring the blessing of God to bear on same sex partnerships, because that’s where the language of love is going to be being learnt, or expressed, for those people. And, I would take services of blessing. And that created a certain amount of hostility in official church circles, but I have never wavered on that. I remember a reporter ringing me up, ‘Are you really saying this?’ And I said, ‘Yes I am.’ And he said, ‘But, you realise that people are saying that’s the end of your career in the church.’ And I had to pause, I thought, thank God! I thought. [laughs] Because I had never had a career anyway, but, that wouldn’t matter. And I said, ‘Yes, of course I mean it.’ People must learn the languages of love, and it’s not the Church that marries people, people marry each other. And then we bring the blessing of God, his grace, his support, his help, we were talking about in other circumstances, to bear. So I never wavered on that, and I would certainly, certainly do that.

When did you…

Incidentally, that’s where the interaction we were talking about. You see she was a very very good historian. And we always talked about each other’s work. And she’s a marvellous critic. I dread giving her my finished pieces of work. [laughs] But, it’s always, she always gets it right. And, I remember she was the first, she said, ‘Yeah well…’ when I was on a marriage and divorce commission, one time, and, she first, you know, brought home to me that, people marry each other. She said, ‘Well, well in my period they used to marry, marry each other in the haystack.’ And I said… And John Bowker Page 87 C1672/23 Track 3 she said, ‘Yes, they had their sex together, and, you might well say, “Well, I think, we’re married now, don’t you?” And she would say, “Yes,” and they were.’ And they might get married in church. They didn’t all. So yes, we, we, I think we had such different subjects, and such different methodologies, that, at least I very much received from her. I remember her saying to me, you know, I was writing about… ‘You know, you’ve got to watch out you don’t reduce your ancestors to a height of two foot six.’ So, since then I’ve always got the height of nine feet three. [laughs]

[1:59:20] When did you go and see the psychiatrist?

Well that was about, three or four years after we were married. And we were very happily married, but I would suddenly find myself doing or saying something, really, it would seem, out of character. And, it was, now… And it became important to try and understand this. We were coping with it, but it was very important. And, Margaret never wavered, I would say something really, destructive, but she never wavered. I can’t think why. I wouldn’t have stood it. But, I went to Dominion because, this wasn’t what I wanted to be, and I didn’t know why I was doing it. And, I mean then he went back through all this, you know, losing mother, house bombed, and all, father away and all the rest of it. And, he took me through, and gave me a narrative, and, I remember, once he said, ‘You know, somebody came to see me who was living at the top of a, these, one of these blocks of flats, and the lift kept breaking, and she had got a one-year-old, and she’d got a small balcony. And all these stairs. And, she came to me and she said, “You know, sometimes I think I’m just going to go out on the balcony, and I’m going to throw myself off.”’ And he said, that he replied to her, ‘And, you know, if I were you, I think I ‘d do it.’ Which you are never supposed to say, [laughs] in case they do. But he said, her circumstances were so awful, and yet so explicable, that, he started from that point, to try to work back, to how the circumstances could be changed, so on, so on. And that’s what he did for me. He gave me the insight that, what I was doing the whole time was trying to destroy any good or loving relationship, because I was absolutely certain, deep down, that it was going to be broken, like all the rest of them. And that would be the end of that. And Margaret didn’t break. So, we have just celebrated our fiftieth anniversary. How she stayed, I can’t think. But you see what you learn from that in terms of religions, John Bowker Page 88 C1672/23 Track 3 and sciences. The religions have a story to tell about redemption, let’s say, rescue or forgiveness, or, in that area. And, the psychiatric, they’re not, they might… I think they like to call themselves sciences, but I don’t know whether they are, but on that side, of analysis, let’s call it that, they had a story to tell which is much more scientific because it’s, it makes the connections with other people who had comparable, not, never the same, but comparable experiences. So I suddenly saw how the two should creatively, and could creatively, be related to each other. But in practical terms, words like redemption, I knew the meaning of them, though I knew there were several meanings of them, suddenly, this was enacted in practice, the actual meaning of the word was given vitality, by the way that Margaret acted, and by what she said as well as what she did and so on. So that, from that point on, I have always been very careful not to use words, you probably heard me a moment ago, I said, well done God, but whatever it is that has evoked the necessity to use a word, God, Deus, Zeus, if you remember I said. This is true of all words. What has evoked our need to use that sentence, or those words, or that equation, or whatever it is, what is it? So always, from that experience onwards, the issue, fundamental issue to me has been one of ontology. What is lying ontologically in reality? It may be an idea, but what in reality is lying at the root which is acting as the, almost methodological constraint, go back to that word? Now clearly, redemption is a metaphor, but it’s also a methodological constraint in terms of what you do and so on. So that’s always been recurrent in what I’ve tried to write and do.

[1:04:38] It’s difficult to, it’ll be difficult for the listener to, listening to you now, to imagine what you might have said when you say that you every now and then have said something destructive. What sort of thing would it have been?

Well, I would… I don’t really too much want to go into detail, because I mean it’s, I’ve left it behind, but I would, I might at one extreme say, you know, I, ‘I don’t think I’m capable of any sexual act with you,’ or I might say, I, I think there are more important things to do than, going off and doing something. I mean it’s those sorts of, stupid. But they were meant to be destructive, that was the point. This is why I don’t particularly want to revisit them, because they didn’t have any content. They were weapons, not really to destroy her, which some marital disagreements can take the John Bowker Page 89 C1672/23 Track 3 form of; they were weapons to destroy a relationship that actually existed very powerfully. And the more powerful it was, the more real it was, the more important it was for me, I now know, to see whether I could destroy it as everything else, and I made it my own fault, everything else, every other relationship I’ve been, had been destroyed. So it wasn’t really what I said or what I did. These were weapons. And, they can be very very powerful, can’t they.

[2:06:25] Do you happen to know what kind of analyst Dominion was?

Yes, he happened to be a Freudian, in background. He was much, much beyond Freud. Jung would have been hopeless. It’s, it’s Freud who, and I mean there are other kinds of psychiatrists, there were people like Laing around at the time. But, Dominion’s background was, was Freudian in terms of relationships. And, the great thing about Freud is that, he never bothered to tell the historical truth, meaning by truth something that might correspond to some evidence. [laughs] But he created this extraordinary, powerful narrative about the formation of human feelings and destructive feelings and all the rest of it. And it was a complete work of fiction. But this is, when I came to realise this, this is where I began to argue so strongly for the first time, the truth can be told as much through fiction as through fact, as much through poetry as through prose. And it was that which made me start writing the poetry that appears in, well some of it’s been published as a separate book, but it often appears in my other books, because when I absolutely reach the point I cannot express what I’m trying to convey, may be entirely wrong, but what I’m trying to convey to a reader, I put it into poetry instead of going on struggling with the prose that isn’t carrying the weight of the meaning. And I remember Anthony Bridge, who was a very considerable artist, wrote to me once and said that one of those poems, which I wrote about, ‘It was better when you were in argument about God,’ had actually, had a crucial point when he converted… You can read the story of this, or anyone can. He wrote an autobiography about this. And, he was moved from, 1930s, aggressive, contemptuous atheism, and suddenly realised. And he said, that poem had actually had quite an important part to play in that. [2:09:00] John Bowker Page 90 C1672/23 Track 3

So, sometimes you see, and… But this is why my whole endeavour has been to, to show the connections. This is why in the recent book on the ways in which sciences and religions can be related, there’s the classic four by an author called Ian Barbour, they’re too limited. They’re correct but they’re too limited. So I list another three or four ways in which they are actually related. But one of them is, that, took the example of myth, but, the work in one area, let’s say the sciences, can be, the implications of that work can only be extended by another means. The example I’ve taken in the book happens to be myth, which we have destroyed by making it synonymous with false, but in the days when it was a good word [laughs], myth extended the implications of, of science. And it actually also works the other way around. The implications of religion that it doesn’t know how to express can be extended by the scientific insight and, and methodology. And that’s partly what I’ve tried to do in my own work, connecting sciences and religions, looking at the work of the extensions working in both directions, so that the meanings of both become enriched. So there’s no, sometimes correct, it’s sometimes challenged, but extended, extended, and that’s… So, we get, we are richer for the relationship by the very enterprise of extending the implications of each domain. But you can do that definitely through fiction and so on.

[2:10:58] And I think we’ve just got time, please, if you could tell me about your relations with those people you mention at Cambridge, who are introducing the beginnings of what might be called a science and religion field of study. I think you said Arthur Peacocke and…

John Polkinghorne. This is of course a big later, quite a lot later in fact. But, a paper was eventually introduced on science and theology and, which I taught a bit. But that’s very very much later, and I wasn’t actually a university lecturer then, when I came back. We came back to Cambridge because my wife had cancer and she was told that she had about five years to live, and, she was in a lot of pain, and, so we came back to Cambridge, because she could actually still see students. And, but then you see, she was one of the very first people to be put on tamoxifen, the drug was just invented, and, she hasn’t had a regression yet. So… But we came back, and, so… By then, I had been at Lancaster, where there was much more done on sciences and John Bowker Page 91 C1672/23 Track 3 religions, very very good department there. John Brooke, and somebody called Fox, they were really, absolutely superbly good. And I joined IRAS, the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science. And, although they didn’t agree with me and I didn’t agree with them on certain religious presuppositions, really superb people involved. And they had got good people. I remember doing a week-long debate, others were there of course, but a week-long debate with Ed Wilson, you know, sociobiology. At the end of the week, one of his great allies, Ivor Davis, who did work on seagulls, they were both at Harvard together, at least I think it’s Harvard, changed sides. You see, I was maintaining that, the worth and the possibility of discerning truth in religions in the plural couldn’t be controlled and decided by whether it got the imprimatur from… I know this is all stale stuff, but that’s how it was presented in those early days. And, there were some excellent people there. Victor Turner, a great anthropologist, took part in it. But you couldn’t get off the island that these debates were held on. You came over on a ferry, and it picked you up at the end of the week. And it was in an old colonial kind of hotel with a long veranda where the boards went from the lecture room out to the veranda. And I remember doing my first lecture pointing out that, it’s no good talking about the humanities if you’re a scientist if you’re not prepared to be as careful with the evidence as, in the humanities, as you are in the sciences. And I went through, there’s a footnote at the end of socio… No, I think it’s probably his first work on ants, you know, that’s what he worked on first. And he’s quoted the famous Hubert, the Frenchman who did the great unlocking work on ants. And, because I went back to the French original, I found he had missed the whole two sentences in the middle in which Hubert[ph], he just reversed what the bracketing sentences said, and said, ‘But that’s not what is the truth.’ And I said this, and Wilson was so angry. He said, [laughs] he hadn’t come all the way across the sea – it was only about ten miles, but still – to be told to check his footnotes. But I said, ‘Yes you have come, if you’re going to take part in this, you’ve got to be serious about warrants for your assertions, as much in the humanities or the religions or, as you are in the sciences.’ And so he calmed down. But at the end of the thing, this chap who worked on seagulls said he now saw what the people who were saying there is truth and worth in the religions, despite all the flurry of obfuscation that goes around in the religions, at the heart there’s something that’s got to be attended to, and you can’t attend to it in a way that genetic reductionism thinks it can. And he changed sides. And, Wilson, I had gone out, because the thing was getting onto the veranda, things were getting to John Bowker Page 92 C1672/23 Track 3 tense. And Wilson was literally jumping up and down, [laughs] and all the boards on the veranda outside were going up and down in, as he, as he jumped. [2:15:57] Now that’s why, through that American work, I did a lot of work with other people, like Sol Katz. He was the chap who worked out the formula by which the Egyptians brewed beer, and he actually made Egyptian beer, you may have seen it in the newspapers, about fifteen years ago. Anyway, he… There were great scientists there. And a Nobel Prize winner was the head of the thing, and so on. There were very competent scientists. But they didn’t take the religion seriously, because they came out of, the organisation came out of a Unitarian background. And that’s fine by me. I mean, you know, I’m not arguing. But, you’ve got to pay attention to the religions, if you’re talking about, as they would, religion in an age of science, for singulars again. So I was really there to represent what the religions are about, let’s leave it as simply as that, based on what they really are about. That’s why the languages are so important, you’ve got to know what they’re talking about, what they do in practice and so on. So I was trying to represent that kind of, of view. And that’s why I took such an interest in genetics evolution, and why I took on people like Richard Dawkins in, in the book Is God a Virus?. The problem, though, when you’re arguing with scientists of that kind, is that they, they cannot put a question mark in the margins of their own work. You see there is no analogy between the transmission of viruses and the transmission of the belief in God, and as for the notion of memes, which has actually become quite popular [laughs], it’s a total farrago of nonsense. Philosophically, it’s not my opinion, philosophically, the disanalogies are what you always have to attend to, not just the, there’s a few resemblances so we’ll say that’s what they are. So methodologically, I have certainly tried to argue, with total lack of success, that we should pay attention to evidence in the case of religions as seriously as we do in the case of sciences. And I’ve argued in the recent book, if only we had chosen the proper metaphor first. He chose the selfish gene, and confused the unit of selection with the unit of retention. If only, if you’re going to use a metaphor, we had chosen the selfless gene. Because there isn’t a self in the gene that can be, ambitious [laughs], or, envious or whatever. Could be called the selfless gene. That would have gone into a controlling metaphor, as it has, in human values. Selfless people, we admire. And I admire the genes. Look at what they’ve created. [laughs] If only we had gone for that metaphor. And then, we might have a society in which we would John Bowker Page 93 C1672/23 Track 3 put the last before the first. And I believe somebody in a religious domain once said that. So, I have tried to, and I’ve worked with scientists, for example, one part of Is God a Virus? is written with a chap who is a consultant psychiatrist now, but who has continued to work on the religious brain, and is producing enormously important work on that. So, I, that was what gave me the, the focus on the scientific, so that the early reading I could update and then could bring to bear, but in, of course, a very amateur way. But it has resulted in this last book which summarises what I’m doing, where I do have a glimpse of a new way in which the two levels of phenomenology can actually now construct a proper anthropology which the scientific and the religious are contributors, and partners.

[End of Track 3] John Bowker Page 94 C1672/23 Track 4

[Track 4]

Could you tell the story of the move from Cambridge to Lancaster in 1974?

I went to Lancaster because at that time it was the only major university department which was devoted to the study of religions. Up till then, it was more like Cambridge where I had introduced the study of religions, and, but it had to be integrated into, or, at least in Cambridge, integrated into an existing department of theology, and elsewhere the tendency was, in this country, not in America but in this country, was to tack the study of religion onto existing departments of theology. So for it to flourish as a subject in its own right and on its own terms, it had to have a much larger staff, and many more resources. And the attraction of Lancaster also was that it was a new university, and having spent a working life in either Oxford or Cambridge, it was exhilarating to get out and to go to a place where things were new. In Oxford and Cambridge, if you went under a bus there’d be a queue of people who could come in and replace you, but in a new university you are responsible really for your own courses, and you have to cooperate extremely closely with other people, and academics in this country are not good at doing that. So, Lancaster was a very exciting challenge and opportunity when I went there in 1974.

[01:52] Could you describe the department, including the people around you, the people you were working with most closely?

The department had been established by Ninian Smart, and there were, I suppose, about seven or eight other members of staff then. But that increased over the years, there were quite a few, not many years, a few years, it doubled in size. So we had major resources. Ironically, it had one of the strongest departments of Christian theology and philosophy there, even though it was a department committed to the study of religions as such. So, the range of studies was immense. For example, in Lancaster I, we insisted that undergraduates should have the opportunity to study the base languages of the major religious traditions. So whereas in Cambridge there had been a debate about how many languages should be compulsory, in Lancaster they were extremely voluntary, the whole degree system was, there were routes and John Bowker Page 95 C1672/23 Track 4 pathways, but the undergraduates could select very widely, including independent studies where they could make up their own degree from the available courses. So that we were teaching there Sanskrit, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and so on. The advantage of that is that, you give to the undergraduates the opportunities to, as they develop their interests and their… [pause] As they develop their interests and enthusiasms, they can really do serious study. And the, some of the graduates from that department were absolutely first-class, world-class scholars, and have gone on to make a name for themselves, quite rightly, in their various disciplines in universities around the world. So, the big advantage was that, if we apply all this to the relations between sciences and religions, the whole picture, and it’s still the case, is very very badly skewed. At the moment the organisations like the Templeton organisation tend to identify the truly distinguished scientists, and they’re very very effective at doing that, and the scientists certainly are specialists in one area of science or another area of science, but nothing like the same trouble has been taken to make sure that people on the religious side have a knowledge of religions. They may be specialists in one religion, but they’ve studied more than one religion, and of course that’s the famous Max Müller remark, if you know about one religion, you know about none. So, the discussion, the interaction, has been weighted on the science side, and it hasn’t… Most of these organisations and meetings and conferences tend to emphasise the sciences, and to identify particularly scientists who may be practitioners of one particular religion, or no one particular religion, or maybe a group of religions, such as, Japanese and Chinese, or maybe the religions of Abraham, and so on. What we have been lacking are people who may have deep specialist knowledge in one area of religions, but actually have a knowledge of other religions beyond the merely superficial and generalised. So that Lancaster provided the opportunity to get a serious knowledge of more than one religion or one area of religious tradition. And it placed emphasis on a behavioural study of religion so that people were very well- quipped to understand the religious world.

[06:28] Have you made any attempts yourself to address that imbalance in, for example, the kind of work that the Templeton promote, in other words, to try to push for understanding of relations between science and religions, more than one religion at once, if you like? John Bowker Page 96 C1672/23 Track 4

Yes, I personally have done so, not perhaps very effectively, but I have contributed to a wide range of very different endeavours in which the sciences and the religions are both needed in order to come to constructive and creative conclusions. It would be a long list, but it goes back, for example, to working with Cicely Saunders at the beginnings of the hospice movement. She obviously knew all the nursing and palliative care side of it, but she found that she was, in the early days she was very much opposed by some doctors, some scientists also, who thought that the job of nursing and care should be to try and get people better, not to help them to die well. So she and I used to do lectures together to try to, she would of course do all the nursing side, medical side of it, and I would try to help, particularly doctors and nurses, to understand the, the nature of death and the value of death in the religions, the major religions of the world. So that was a way in which you really needed to put both sides together, not just in theory but actually to, to speak and demonstrate how death is of high value, not just in religions but very much in the sciences as well. Without death, obviously you cannot have life, but the way you do have death, then you do have the opportunity of life, and the whole story from the death of stars to evolution is illustrated. It seems so obvious now, we’ve become familiar with it, but in the early days it had to be argued, and argued against really quite strong opposition. [08:57] But then I used to do other things of a smaller kind. For example the Wellcome Trust did a, published a book and had did seminars and got a group together to do this work on embryo research, yes or no. And, I contributed to that kind of thing by bringing the perception of such an issue, or such a question, to the meeting. Now obviously, religions have extremely deeply held and profound views on what we would call embryo research. Now, what they would identify as the embryo, or the foetus, will vary. So, it’s important not to assume, as scientists tend to assume, well, everybody knows the embryo is up to x days and then it becomes a foetus. That is not at all clear in the religious traditions, and, first one has to clear the ground by understanding how the different religious traditions perceive the moments from conception to birth and then growth beyond it, before you can begin even to talk about the ethics of such problems. But in a totally different area, this, perhaps not so much the sciences and religions, but it was involved, I did a great deal of work on changing the perceptions in UNESCO and the United Nations on how religions understand political and social John Bowker Page 97 C1672/23 Track 4 issues, and what they might bring to those issues. For example, I helped to draft the United Nations Declaration on Religions and Apartheid. When I became a part of that, Trevor Huddleston had struggled for years to see if there could be an agreed statement on the attitude of religions to apartheid. And it was coming up to the first draft constitution which was going to bring the Indians and coloureds into the voting system, but not the indigenous native inhabitants of, of that area. And, the whole discussion had got bogged down, because, many of the Asians, or Indians, in South Africa felt, well we might as well take this first step, but of course, if they had done that, it would have postponed the movement for the indigenous population, or early indigenous population, for years and years. Now, the perception of religions there was absolutely critical, because it was possible to start by observing that if you just want a declaration that such and such is, is bad, that’s easy to obtain, and many interreligious meetings do that, they look for generalised agreement that they don’t like such and such, or they do like so-and so. But you have to go much deeper, and you have to start from the reality and the fact that religions have done terrible things to people in their own histories. And if you start by the acceptance of what can go wrong, and then the perception of why that religious tradition has come to believe that they were mistaken to have had those attitudes or those actions, then you can bring those perceptions to bear on an issue that seems immediately to be repugnant, evil and wrong, but you don’t just decide it’s repugnant, evil and wrong from the history of dealing with a social and individual evil. The religions have much to bring to bear on, not just that issue but many. So this culminated in Gresham College financing a seminar that I ran for three years, drawing religions together on violence and reconciliation. It is obvious from the newspapers and the news that religions are involved in many of the violent warfare, terrorism and so on around the world, and this is not diminishing, this is increasing. And, we therefore said, OK, religions contribute, or some religious people contribute, to warfare, violence, terrorism, oppression, but what, how do they perceive whether that’s wrong, and if so, what within it is wrong? And of course, religious people are divided on such things in each religion. But then, what can they bring to bear from their own resources that requires their adherence or their followers to seek reconciliation and peace particularly after conflict? Not just as a matter of goodwill, you know, well maybe I’ll wake up this morning and I’ll love my neighbour, but looking within the religious traditions themselves and saying, but these are the obligations within the tradition itself, not John Bowker Page 98 C1672/23 Track 4 imposed from outsiders, but from within the logic of the tradition itself, that if you are to be an endorsed, if I can put it that way, and respected and valued member of this tradition, if you wish to reach the ultimate goals of this tradition, whether it be enlightenment or God, to keep it very over-simplified, then you must do, must, and the must comes, not from an argument about whether it’s good or evil from a neutral point of view, but must from within the tradition itself actually behave and act in these ways, looking for peace and reconciliation. So, it was published eventually, and it offers the resources there that politicians, if they wish to do so, could in fact draw upon.

[15:44] To what extent were you involved in introducing, or developing, the study of the relationship between religions and sciences at Lancaster, as part of religious studies?

There was an extremely good department of history of science at Lancaster. So there was a cooperation. The point of Lancaster is that, the whole degree was made up of individual units. I don’t mean small units, I mean there were areas of, of study. So that the cooperation within Lancaster was, was accidental in the sense that each of the units would be individual and run itself, and the papers would therefore interact and interconnect, but at the degree level, at the academic study where the undergraduates were concerned, it was putting together units rather than an enterprise that joined things together. But, the context of that were, seminars and, senior member discussion groups that attempted to draw people from different departments together. I think more of the cooperation for me at that time was done with the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, which was an American based movement, and, it was, fundamentally came from a Unitarian context, and, paid much attention to, particularly at that time to Whitehead, and process, and how you integrate that way. But it was by no means exclusively adherent to the roots that brought it into being long before I had anything to do with it. And that really was very very exhilarating, because they had got extremely good nucleus of members, and certainly very good scientists, but again, it was weaker on having very good people who knew about religions. OK, so I was one, but there weren’t that many others. So, to some extent it was to my advantage to be involved in that, because I could listen to very good scientists, and could see how my interest in the religious world really was connecting John Bowker Page 99 C1672/23 Track 4 with the changes in science. So, I think, at that time more of my own development of understanding the relation between the sciences and religions was, was happening in America than it was happening in this country.

[19:11] How did your view of what was important about religious studies match up with the founder of the department’s view of what was important about religious studies, Ninian Smart’s? Were they in alignment, those…?

They were entirely in alignment. We have to find the ways in which we can deepen our understanding of what religions are and why. There was no difference at all. He, I dare say he would write different sorts of books from mine, but there was no difference at all. The really good thing about Lancaster was that, nobody asked where you were coming from. It was all judged on what you were doing and the teaching you were doing, and, how the undergraduates reacted. And the fact that I am a Christian myself, and there were different kinds of Christians no doubt, there were Roman Catholics and non-Roman Catholics, and, it just never obtruded. There was no competitiveness, there was no empire-building, or anything. It was, it really was an extraordinary place. There were, I’m sure, arguments, I don’t doubt that, but, the real ethos was, how can we help ourselves and then help the students around us to really gain a detached understanding of religions? I suppose if there was any difference at all, is that, Ninian was focused much more on how to establish, particularly in schools, not just in universities, the first level of phenomenology. So, the first level of phenomenology is, how do we, and can we, describe the religions, what they do, what they’re about, how their people live, how they think, so on and so on, how they move through time. And Ninian produced his famous five dimensions of religions, which will be involved in the understanding of any religion, whether it’s a major world religion or a village religion or small-scale religion, or whatever. I suppose, I have always been more interested – well not more interested, I mean that’s indispensable… Nobody can produce an objective value-free description of anything. You can’t do it of the universe if you’re a scientist, you can’t do it of religions if you’re studying religions. You always bring your own history, the culture of your time, the context of your time, and so on. But, the first level of phenomenology tries to be aware of what one is bringing to the effort of description. The second level of John Bowker Page 100 C1672/23 Track 4 phenomenology has been much, much more neglected. And that’s, I suppose, perhaps why it interested me, how can we integrate the second level of phenomenology? Now the second level is to ask, well, given that we’ve described what is happening in the religious world and in religious history, in religious art and so on and so on, given that we tried to describe what’s going on, and that is a never-ending task, but given that we have tried to do that, we are then, I think, required to ask, OK, but then, what brought all this into being? Why is it there, as it is, as we have described it? And that leads to questions of course of, very strong questions, of truth. So, there is a tension between the two levels of phenomenology, and that’s been the tension between departments of theology and departments of religious studies, that theology, whether it’s Muslim or Hindu or Christian, tends to begin with the givenness of what is in the tradition, say, it might be a revelation, a scripture, a Veda, a Qur’an. And it sees how from that the first interpretations and so on built up. And it tends to be reflective on the implications of a fundamental datum, and emphasising the Latin: 'given thing'. And of course, on the basis of that datum, it might then expand and say, well that datum requires me to reflect on the nature of other claimed data, other revelations for example. So, theology can easily move into the theology of religions, to use one of the common phrases. [24:30] The approach from the second level of phenomenology, though, is, is asking, well, what might it have been that evoked and brought into being these sorts of beliefs, and these sorts of behaviours that we’ve described? And that at once brings in an entirely different way, for example, the behavioural study of religions, because, there will be many who will offer explanations of why religious beliefs and behaviours have come into being and have then developed as they have. It also brings into being, into relationship, the philosophers, in the sense that they are asking, well, supposing such and such claims about the origins of a particular religious belief had been described correctly, how might they be considered to be either true or false? So, the second level of phenomenology is as important really as the first level. The emphasis in the twentieth century, and still to some extent in the twenty-first, is on the first level of phenomenology, describe it as dispassionately as you can. The second level is always asking ontological questions, what is it, or what may we infer, that might have brought these behaviours, practices, beliefs and so on into being?

John Bowker Page 101 C1672/23 Track 4

This relates to what you said last time about your interest not in what God, the word God, might mean, but what has caused people to use that word, that…

Yes. That is certainly, relates to that extremely closely. We need to reflect on the uses of language; that’s not very original. What in human experience has brought such and such vocabularies, and not just spoken vocabularies but enacted vocabularies, of truth and being, into existence. And, it assumes that, as in the sciences, so also in religions, people in any century, generation, will always be saying things that are approximate, provisional, corrigible, and mainly wrong, from a later point of view. They are unlikely, particularly in the religious case, but it’s also true of the sciences, they’re unlikely to welcome that news, and may resist it extremely strongly. They may say, ‘But we have the datum. We have the revelation.’ Or whatever it is. But, again, I think one of the few things a university can ever teach anyone is to realise that they may be wrong. So, I think I’ve said this before, that the important thing is to learn to put question marks in the margin, not just of other people’s books or essays, but of one’s own books, or essays. One is likely to be wrong. So, one has to hold things very provisionally, and yet, and this is the real link between sciences and religions in terms of human attitude and, and life, within the midst of all this approximation, we find immense reliabilities. We can’t always talk about those reliabilities in un-challengeable languages, whether of behaviour or of words or of art or of music or whatever, but we can say something, and we do find that they bear the weight of life. So just as the sciences develop and build on, take advantage of the huge reliabilities that they establish, not least in technology, so also religions have built and extended the immense reliabilities they have discovered in terms of how to live, for example, in relation to what they take to be the ultimate end and goal of all reality and life, which they are inclined to call by some such word as God, and also, the reliabilities they have established socially in making an attempt to love their neighbours as themselves. So that, it’s no small thing. It’s often glossed over, but the fact is that, in all religions, not just in the major religions but some of the low, very small kind of religions that anthropologists study, some form of the golden rule is always to be found, do to others as you hope they’ll do to you, or don’t do to others what you wouldn’t like them to do to you. And it seems so trivial almost, you know, what did it take, eight seconds to say it. [laughs] It’s taken a history of religions, the whole lifetime of religions, a) to work out what the love of God and the John Bowker Page 102 C1672/23 Track 4 love of one’s neighbour might be, and also, secondly, b), to endorse and encourage that behaviour and to condemn the other. Now obviously, the love of God isn’t the only end or goal of all religions; it may be that one seeks an enlightenment, a state of realisation and being, or even almost non-being, that transcends the trivialities of languages about God or Deus or Zeus or whatever, and it may be that Enlightenment with a very large capital E is the way in which a religious tradition has moved through history. But even in those religions, still, the other half of it, the reliabilities that are found in behaving in particular ways that can be endorsed towards one’s neighbour, or towards the stranger in one’s midst, those are there also. So, those areas of reliability that have been tested in human experience belong very much to the understanding of religions and of why they are and what they are and what they get up to.

[31:42] Are these forms of behaviour more or less reliable because there is, as you see it, an underlying truth that the various different religions are approximating to in different languages and in different forms of behaviour, but, so that they are, so that they are corrigible expressions of a deeper truth that underlies all of it?

There is a certain truth in the way you put that, but, one must take the differences extremely seriously. I wrote an article once called ‘Do Differences Make a Difference?’, and they clearly do. So, I would feel that, they have a comparability in the sense that religions are organised systems of processing information, and they have, obviously resources, but they also have particular goals towards which they hope or believe that it will be wise, particularly in ultimate terms, for people to move. But the goals are very differently described, so I do not take the view that they are all approximate, incorrigible languages about the same, what shall we call it, x. I think that the differences do make a difference, but if I as a Christian say that I believe that whatever the word God stands for is the ultimate resource end and goal of cosmos and of individual lives, that does not mean that I would regard enlightenment, which may well turn on my language about God and say, grow up, it doesn’t mean that I think that they are, put it over-dramatically, wrong, let alone that they are talking about the same reality as I try to talk about, even though we’re both talking incorrigible languages. Thus, it seems to me that from a theistic point of view, since the one thing one can infer about God for certain, seems a strong statement, is that God likes John Bowker Page 103 C1672/23 Track 4 diversity. If you infer from the created order what the nature of the Creator might be, then you of course end up with Haldane, that God has an inordinate love of beetles. The diversity, in the snowflakes, the fingerprints, the voice recognition system, it’s just, the fundamental, a fundamental fact, like shape, about the cosmos, about the universe. Why should that diversity not, that love of diversity, not extend to the ultimate condition in which humans, maybe more than humans, might end up? Of course we may all be going to oblivion. Supposing we’re not. It is entirely coherent with the created order, as a theist sees it and experiences it, that the condition of enlightenment is indeed the ultimate good. It is clearly different from what, say, a Muslim is describing as the garden, and that is clearly in extremely corrigible language, though I’m sure a lot of Muslims would not agree, because what is true of the sense that God is the ultimate good to be attained is that it includes relatedness and relationship, whereas enlightenment, by its own definition, says, but we can move beyond relationship and relatedness; that’s what we have to transcend. But there are moments when both the, I’m talking very extreme generalised terms, when both of them see what the other one is talking about, Eckhart for example in Christianity, say yes, well, you talk about the trinity of an interrelatedness, a dynamic of love, he wouldn’t have used that, he used more traditional language. But on the other hand, I mean even if you talk about relatedness in terms of the, the trinity, these are words. And what God is would have to lie beyond the words. And again, from the other point of view, there have certainly been many Buddhists who have seen exactly what Eckhart, and many more than Eckhart, but Eckhart is an example in the Christian tradition, what they are talking about. And there is a meeting point beyond the particular corrigible words that we’ve been talking about. But I would still say that, although one can see the good of the other, it is still, to some extent, the other, and that will always be the case.

[37:34] One more question on Lancaster before we talk about Worlds of Faith, and that’s, whether you or you felt anyone else in religious studies felt it was necessary to, in any way downplay their own religious commitments in order to be seen as a scholar of religious studies. In other words, whether it was, whether sometimes it was necessary not to talk about your own faith in order to be seen as objective about various faiths.

John Bowker Page 104 C1672/23 Track 4

I’m not sure that talking down, I can’t remember the exact phrase you used, ever came up at all. It’s just that, my own life, and I felt this was true of others, it sounds pretentious, it actually was concerned with truth. It was the paramount thing, that we were trying to adhere as closely as possible to a, a true account of what we were talking about, what we were studying. So the fact that one came towards the truth in terms of, of Buddhist meditation for example, that might be extremely well known, certainly. And indeed one of the lecturers there taught a course without any textbooks, and taught it entirely through Indian images of different kinds, and it would not be impossible to discern where their own sympathies lay. So it was never a case of talking, talking, or concealing, or pretending one wasn’t what one was. But I do know that they, the first year, it used to be very large, with more than 100 people doing religious studies in the first year at Lancaster, used to have a kind of, I don’t know what the right word is, it’s not a sweepstake but just sort of, bet on, on what my own faith is, or was, looking back at it in the past. Most thought that I was a Hindu, the next was Judaism, and then third was Christianity. It’s not that I ever actually, until I realised, I never really thought about it; I just thought everyone would know that I was a Christian. It just didn’t seem to me… I suppose looking back, that maybe one should have said, well, I happen to be a Christian, but I hope I can be detached. But it just didn’t come up, it didn’t seem important. So, I… Does one… It’s not… Everyone just is, as a human being. I happen to be a Christian human being, but truth is so much more important than being a Christian in, 1323 or 1982, or whatever. I mean one is a human, and others are human, and they have their assumptions and beliefs and so on. So, no, it, it… I don’t remember that being an issue of any kind whatsoever, and it certainly wasn’t an issue in teaching. I mean, I always used say then, the goal of our teaching is that, not the, a goal of our teaching, must be that students can come out from the studying of the religions that they have studied, able to make a better case for the worth and value of that tradition than an adherent of that tradition could make for themselves. That was the, the real goal. Of course, to be an adherent, a believer in a tradition, you make a lot of other points that a non-believer cannot possibly make. That is certainly the case. But, the idea was that you could understand, you could see why people acted and believed as they did. The temptation I suppose, if you take that line, is that you gloss over, or you bracket out, epacane[ph], husolean[ph] word, all the evil things that people do - to a better case. So we always were attentive to the challenges to the often theoretical case that, John Bowker Page 105 C1672/23 Track 4 such and such should be the case; often it isn’t. So how do you deal with the dissonance within a tradition? And that of course is a part of the whole issue of how do you understand why religions are involved in so much violence, warfare and terrorism.

[42:49] Could you tell a detailed story of how Worlds of Faith came to be made? All we know from the preface or introduction to the book that came out of it is that, in 1981 a BBC producer suggested that, another kind of programme was to be made, but we don’t know how you met them, or why, why you met them. You know, how, why did this happen, as opposed to not happen, the Worlds of Faith programme?

I had met this particular producer, David Craig, because, I had been a, I don’t know if it was he or the department, but anyway, I met him because I was asked to do particular broadcasts, and, particularly Radio 3 used to do sort of, short matter-of- opinion broadcasts, that kind of thing. And it was he who came up with the idea of doing the long radio series. The… I didn’t think I could do it, because, we were very stretched in terms of staff numbers, but then, it wasn’t by any manner of means the first of the government cuts to university departments. I only moved over into religious studies and behavioural study of religion because a promised job fell through at Cambridge, and I was asked if I would take a year’s leave and retrain in order to make sure that the study of religions in the context of theology continued, or even, really began, in Cambridge. So that gave me a clue. And, we lost, somebody resigned, who was doing Jewish studies, and if anybody resigned at that time in the universities, you couldn’t replace the job. There just wasn’t the money. So we were suddenly going to lose the study of Judaism. And there was I teaching Hebrew, but it wasn’t going to lead to the study of Judaism, and that was absolutely absurd. So I took a year’s leave from, and the university gave me a year’s leave, to make the programmes Worlds of Faith, so that we could use the BBC money in order to fund the post in Judaism until we could raise the money, as we eventually did, to fund it from outside sources. But I mean it was so immediate that something had to be done drastically. So, that was really how it came to be made, because the university gave me a year’s leave, but then I could put the money in to, to enable the study of Judaism to continue. John Bowker Page 106 C1672/23 Track 4

[45:55] What was the role of the controller of Radio 4 and the head of religious studies in the BBC in the making of the programmes?

I don’t remember that so well. But there is, in a Festschrift that was given to me on my eightieth birthday this producer David Craig has actually written an essay on how all this came into being. I don’t remember this, but apparently, the director, the controller of BBC Radio 4, said, well, we could make, I don’t know, four or five programmes. And apparently, I don’t remember this, but, this is the producer remembering from his point of view how it all came into being, I apparently went and argued with, Monica Sims was the Controller then, and made a very passionate case, and so she ended up by saying, ‘Yes, well you can make thirteen programmes.’ [laughs] So, generally speaking, Christian broadcasting, Christianity in radio, was very strong indeed, whereas the other religions were not so strong, in those days. So, there was, this was looked at with some suspicion as sort of, putting all religions on an equal footing. But, apart from the initial hiccups, we, there was no opposition at all, and we were enabled to go around the country and to interview really anyone in any place that we could, that we wanted to. [47:43] So, the programme was, the programmes, the series, was extremely unusual in the sense that, we went and interviewed in much the same way everybody. So we didn’t have particular questions for Jews, Hindus and so on. We tried to give much the same questions, of course with different vocabularies in different cases, but, much the same sort of questions. So we covered the same areas with all the people that we, we interviewed. And, there were hundreds and hundreds of hours of, of tape. And at that time I was doing a lot in sciences and religions particularly through IRAS in America, so I was flying quite a lot between America and, and England. And, I used to sit on the plane and listen to these tapes, and, and mark up the bits that could be used in the broadcasts. So, it was a massive effort. And, we did not in any way try to lead people in any sort of direction at all. That’s why we had this, it wasn't a schedule, but we had an understanding of the areas and the questions that would always be asked, even if we didn’t get answers. I remember we interviewed someone whose English was so poor that we could hardly use any of it. But we still asked all the questions, even John Bowker Page 107 C1672/23 Track 4 though it was clear that we were not going to be able to use very much of this, but as a matter of principle we didn’t skew the programmes by sort of saying, oh we’ve got enough answers on death, or whatever. And it’s important to remember that the real objective of the series was to give second generation immigrants to this country the chance to say, how this had affected their beliefs and practices. It wasn’t exclusively recent immigrants and their families, but the focus from the start had been to ask recent immigrants and their families what had happened to their faith once they had arrived. But although that was the focus, in fact it did spread to become a much more generalised programme, trying to really understand what Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains and so on, belief about, family, illness, so on.

Yes, but, certainly by the time that the book comes out of it, the sense of it being a project on recent immigrants isn’t any longer there, I don’t think, in the way that it’s set up. Very strongly it’s set up as ordinary people and everyday practice, rather than, elite accounts, or, and special occasions, but the sense of it being a recent immigrant study isn’t retained in the final book.

No. It certainly isn’t, because, it became clear that what they wanted to say about their faith and practice was, had remained very much the same, obviously changed a little, and you, you can see that, you know, when you ‘Well, what would you do on such and such an occasion?’ And sometimes they’ll say, ‘Well I would have,’ but… So, you are absolutely right, that the book really did become an account of religious belief and practice in Britain on whatever date it was. So, it didn’t become a programme about immigrants, but it became instead really a, listening to and allowing people to speak in their own words about what, what their faith and practice meant to them. And that of course is a fundamental part of understanding religions, that the diachronic account, the account through time, has recognisable repetitions. You can understand what a Muslim is talking about in the fifth or sixth century as much as you could understand in the twentieth or the twenty-first. So that, some things remain identifiable as belonging to what I understand by prayer, what I think will happen when I die, and that relates therefore vey profoundly to what we were talking about earlier in terms of religions, the major religions, having data, given the things that come through their history and come through their organisations and practices and so on. John Bowker Page 108 C1672/23 Track 4

[52:46] There were, it was in the winter of ’81 to ’82 that the interviews were conducted, as far as I know, with people aged between seven and eighty-eight, interviews one to five hours long. How were the interviewees identified, located? We might imagine you or, and/or other people, going round the country, but, just stopping people in the streets, you know, how were they…?

It was done by, there was a, a good research team, and it was they who went around. And, we would give some guidance that we would want to listen to, for example, an orthodox, if we were listening to an Orthodox Jew, we would want to listen to a Reform Jew. If we were listening to a Sunni Muslim, we would want to listen to a Shia Muslim. So they knew the sort of categories of religious identity that we felt must be recognised, and allowed to give expression to their point of view. So that one was able to, to some extent, to bring them into juxtaposition, and indeed sometimes into argument.

And the researchers themselves, how were they trained in interviewing, what kind of sort of, interviewing practice were the people…?

They didn’t do any of the interviews. They would go to the local communities and find the people.

And who actually did the interviews?

I did all the interviews. And that was important, because, you’ve got to have consistency and coherence between the interviews. So, I did the lot. It was a huge task. I mean hundreds of hours of, of tape. But it seemed to be then, as it does now, very important to allow people to, to talk, to be given the chance to say how it really felt to them, and conversely of course, or equally of course, from people who, Radio 4 is a very big audience, and so to give them a chance to listen to people from these communities speaking from the heart, seemed to me as important then as I do now.

[55:15] John Bowker Page 109 C1672/23 Track 4

It wasn’t picked out in the book, but I wondered whether you were asking them about their faith over time. So… At one point you say that, we did come across people who had lost their faith, but this book is about people who are still in faith, who believe. But did you ask about, you know, a change, a change in their religious practice or belief over the course of their life?

Yes. And to some… I think it is there in the book, but not upfront as a particular sort of, item.

Mm.

The extraordinary thing was, the repetition of the view that they couldn’t do necessarily the same things in Britain as they might have done in, East Africa, because there were a lot of Sikhs had come from there, or India or whatever, but that, basically, what they believed about it, I can’t remember if it’s in the book, but an example was, it might have been in another of my books, but, the observation that… Perhaps I should put that slightly differently. One of the great insights that I got from doing these interviews, and listening to these people, I took, and have then applied, very fundamentally, to situations of conflict where reconciliation seems impossible. And it’s to ask someone of a particular faith, who’s in conflict with somebody of another faith, and one could take, South Africa was then, the Middle East, Sri Lanka, and so on, different places in the world one can apply the same thing. You ask people from each side of the, or maybe more than one, you know, maybe, all sorts of undercurrents of difference within any position, but, keeping it simple, ask people, what do you think you must have in this, say, contested situation, or contested ground, or whatever, that will enable you to think that your grandchildren will be able to grow up in an x home, Orthodox Jewish home, Sikh home, Shia home? And then at the other extreme, well, that’s what you’d really like to have. And of course it’s virtually everything. But then, having come to this country, where you can’t have everything that you had in an Indian village, what do you need in order, what’s the minimum that you need almost, to have some hope that your grandchild will at least grow up with a, Sikh, Hindu, Muslim identity? And of course the answer is, virtually nothing. And I used, in, I’m not sure if it’s in the book, but I remember a Jew who had actually been in the concentration camps, actually rolled up his sleeve and showed me the, his John Bowker Page 110 C1672/23 Track 4 concentration camp number on his arm, saying to me, ‘I used to think that, for my grandchildren to grow up Jewish they would need, a synagogue,’ and then he listed a lot of things. ‘But in the camps I realised that we needed virtually nothing, and that you could eat Passover bread by the leaf, even in a concentration camp, in the Passover Seder.’ So, I took that to various situations of conflict, and, ‘What do you need, if you’re going to live at peace in Syria?’ ‘Everything.’ And the different people will, you know, the Alawites, the Shi’ites, the Sunni, the Daesh, they all have a huge list of things. ‘Yeah, but, what’s the sort of minimum where you think…?’ ‘Well, yah, we could just about, but I don’t want to do that.’ And of course, it comes down to very little, if you saying, what you really have to have in order to remain a Sunni Muslim, a Shia Muslim, Alawite Muslim and so on. And then the negotiation is moving from the all and the nothing, toward some sort of middle ground. It’s not really a compromise, because you’ve not compromising detail, you’re not fudging detail; you’re saying, it’s coming to a middle ground where you think, well, yes, that’s worth taking a risk. And that was one of the main things I got from making those programmes, that this is actually a very very creative, life-giving way of trying to draw people in impossible, intransigent, never to be ended conflict, like the Reformation [laughs], bring them together so they will say, ‘Yeah, well, it’s not what I really want, but, I can be myself, and my grandchildren can be themselves, in this same tradition, on this basis.’ And in that way one can hope to achieve some modus vivendi, to use a useful Latin phrase, wuth the emphasis on the vivendi.

[1:01:27] Now it’s clear from the introduction to the Worlds of Faith book that it’s inspired by, as you’ve explained in this interview, much of your work is concerned with the political effects of the existence in the world of religion, so that, Northern Ireland and Beirut are mentioned very early in the book as, as a sort of context for explaining the reasons why this book is important. I wonder to what extent, from this point onwards, you have been involved directly in engagements with policymakers, politicians, over questions that have religious content. I know that last time off the recording you spoke of a recent situation where you were writing to the Government about certain things, but, it seems likely that you have been involved in work that is not immediately obvious in the public record.

John Bowker Page 111 C1672/23 Track 4

The role that I play, so far as possible, is very very much in the background, and I don’t mean off scene or off script. I mean that the kind of work that I do must necessarily not be done in the actual public debate or situation or whatever, because then you become identified with one side or the other. So that, what I hoped to do, and have indeed done, is to supply some of the vocabularies, again meaning vocabularies in the widest possible sense of that word, I mean the terms, the arguments, the logics, the concepts, the resources, the ambitions, that are relevant to this particular impossible conflict. And, in that way, as with the Gresham College work, which produced the book on conflict and reconciliation, the contribution of world religions, the idea is to, the hope is to supply those who are meeting across the table, if one can get that far, sometimes you can’t, with, not just the sort of, nuts and bolts and screws and nails, though that actually is quite important, but the attitude, that, we’re not going to seek to find a compromise, because that I think virtually always fails. It’s to seek to find a way in which both parties, I’m going to keep it simple as two [laughs], in which both parties feel that their, that the security of their tradition is predictably, and nobody knows the future, but predictably strong. Now, you can’t be sure, so, you’re not looking for, nobody’s looking for certainty. You have to, it’s an attitude to what might be worth risking. So, one is always dealing with helping those involved in conflict, who want it to come to an end, because not everybody, of course, does, to see what there might be that would enable them to say, well that’s enough. And, it’s a very long process. But the… And it’s always threatened, so that one needs also to be very aware from the outset that, what will happen if. And some of the best meetings have been, that I’ve been involved in, I try not to be involved, because that would… If you get involved, say, in, personally involved in, for example, the Syrian conflict, you then go to the Yemen, and it looks much the same, shall we say [laughs]; it’s nothing like the same. There are Muslims involved in both of different kinds. So, if you’re going to, if you start being involved in one, then you, you may not be trusted in another. So to be detached, it’s a bit like the Lancaster ambition, that you can be detached from it in the sense of impartial, not taking sides, while at the same time remaining passionately committed to the children who are dying in the streets. That’s what my role has been, much more in the background, to supply and to encourage. And it’s extremely time-consuming. It’s easier to make Worlds of Faith with the, you know, 400 hours of tapes, than it is to be John Bowker Page 112 C1672/23 Track 4 in the background of some of these really impossible conflicts. But it is important for some people to be detached. [1:07:27] Now do I sometimes… [pause] Do I sometimes get more directly involved? Occasionally. Sometimes I’m just in such a despair, that I am impelled to write a letter or something. It’s all to no avail, I don’t doubt. But, to give an example. As Islamic related terrorism began to spread in European countries, a narrative began to be developed that there was, that this wasn’t really Islam, these were not really Muslims, and that the majority of Muslims were a) victims of these terrorists themselves, but also, secondly, that they condemned them. So a narrative began to develop that, Al Qaida, Taliban, Daesh, were all perversions of Islam, and that of course is immediately to supply a major recruiting card into the hand of, of these groups, because, Muslims may disagree with other Muslims, but they wouldn’t necessarily say that they are a perversion of Islam just because they disagree with them. And, also, many Muslims objected very much to being told, well, there are the really dedicated Muslims getting on with fighting to restore a caliphate, the committed Muslims, but they’re the bad Muslims, whereas all the good Muslims over here, you know, they’re peaceful, they want to integrate, and, many Muslims objected to that division, because they didn’t believe that they were uncommitted, it was just… So, I was, U did write to the members of the UK government who, I was saying these kind of things, and, not just pointing that out, but pointing out why that was wrong, and why the, if you go into the history, that actually, Daesh, particular focus of that at the time, Daesh came into being somewhere around the eighth century, in the sense that they were a consequence of the, of the six things that divided Islam immediately after the death of Mohammad. So, they are an interpretation of Islam, of Qur’an, Sharia and so on, that you can’t call them a perversion, not just like that. [1:10:40] Now, having got that far, in fact it did have a consequence, because nobody after that, except one member of the Conservative government, ever referred to it as perversion again. So one can… And therefore, one could get back to what is the real issue, and one can hope to mobilise those Muslims who are against indiscriminate terror in the inter-Muslim argument about the status of Daesh, and it was therefore easier from that point on for the Muslim majority to, to articulate the argument that what Daesh are doing is indeed an interpretation of what Mohammad intended and wanted, but, it’s an John Bowker Page 113 C1672/23 Track 4 interpretation that has gone outside what are known as the hudud, the limits of Islam. Thus, the method of killing and so on, I mean there are so many things which I don’t need to list, that those people are doing, that are outside the limits of any Muslim interpretation. There is no way they could be justified from any of the, the Qur’an, Sharia, the hadith. They just cannot possibly be justified. Not only that, but Mohammad himself explicitly condemned, or the Qur’an has condemned, some of the things that they are doing. Now that then becomes a Muslim logic to point out why they have to be opposed, and it could become the basis of mobilising, using quite a strong word, sort of, Muslim opposition to particular groups in Islam which have gone outside the Muslim limits, I mean the word hudud appears in the Qur’an, so it’s even a Qur’anic word. And that’s what I mean by, understanding religions well enough to know what belongs to their argument and their perception. In one of the broadcasts I did before, made on Radio 3 before Worlds of Faith, was one in which I said quite explicitly, the reason why we’re involved in so many completely intransigent conflicts and problems in the world is because far too few politicians have read religious studies at a university. And that remains my view. And it comes right back to the sciences and the religions. The sciences are much better represented usually in these debates than the people who know about the religions with some depth, with a comparable depth and understanding, and you would expect the scientists to understand, not just their science, obviously, they’ll understand their best, but they’ll be perfectly well aware what’s going on in the other sciences, and sometimes know it extremely well. You can’t have an interaction between the sciences and religions unless the religions are represented by much more than particular people from particular religions who are interested in the sciences.

[1:14:26] Well, what it would seem to need, then, is a kind of movement for the popular understanding of religion, rather like the movement for the sort of, public understanding of science almost, and…

Yes. And, it was one of Mr Gove’s tragic mistakes that he didn’t include religious studies in the, whatever it’s called, is it called the Baccalaureate in England now, I forget names, and I get out of date. That was… And he did it on the argument that, I mean it goes back to the 1944 Education Act, because the churches and synagogues, John Bowker Page 114 C1672/23 Track 4 not mosques then, but, had been supplying, particularly the Church has been supplying so many of the schools and so much of the money, we got this double status in England of the sort of, the church schools and the, the state schools, they weren’t called that then, but, in effect that was what it was. And therefore, when, as this changed through time, so the original provision that there must be an act of worship in UK schools at the beginning of the day, and so on, that became the argument, but religion is already being taught in the schools, and of course, that was totally to miss the point. And, that has been, the fact that it’s not in the Baccalaureate has been, and will continue to be, a massive, massive damage to society in this country, because it, it puts back the process of some degree of integration. So that the Jewish integration was really exemplary in the sense that, they, many Jews kept their identity, even if it was cultural Judaism and not necessarily synagogue Judaism or whatever. But, they kept their identity in such a way that they were able to enter into society in Europe and this country and so on, whereas for some of these other communities, and particularly for Muslims, there seems to be so much in the population culture and way of doing things that can’t be reconciled with an observance of Islam in any of its many different forms, that it’s almost gone in the opposite direction. And of course there are many Muslims who are deeply integrated, and, of course there are, I don’t mean it can’t happen. I mean that, that there can be a tendency, though, to say, if our grandchildren are going to grow up as good Muslims, we must protect them from being drawn too closely into the solvent of the surrounding society. So to have taken out religious studies as an academic subject, indeed Kenneth Baker, when he was Secretary of State for Education, said that religious studies cannot be an academic subject, he actually said it explicitly. But there’s a difference between the study of religions in an academic way, the two levels of phenomenology, the description, but beyond the description, the raising of questions, but is it true? But is it true? And if so, how would you want to indicate that this, that, this, that, might be true? That has, not disappeared, but it has become a much more marginalised subject. And just at the moment when this country needs this kind of, two-level approach to understanding religion so children can enter into understanding descriptively, but can also still keep their Muslim, Jewish, Christian way of, of raising the questions of, of truth, is a real tragedy.

[1:18:58] John Bowker Page 115 C1672/23 Track 4

You say that the writing of the letter was an example of more direct action, but that you’ve preferred to be in the background. What does being in the background consist of?

The Internet.

Oh.

Almost just like that. Of course, I’m not, I can’t travel now, so I don’t get about, but, the Internet’s an extraordinary invention, is it not?

How do you, how do you operate in the background, to try to influence things positively?

Oh well, by, people know about me and will get in touch. I mean people know the kinds of things that I have done in the past, if they’ve been involved in them. I don’t advertise myself, as you will have appreciated. So, it’s, it’s communication, and people asking questions, particularly faced with this, what. But if you… And of course one can do that in relation to Syria, obviously, that’s very time-consuming, but, the difficulty there is, how do you translate the opportunities and the possibilities into political action? And, you could well make a riposte, and even I say too few politicians have read religious studies; well too few people who have read religious studies have been high-level politicians or secretaries of state. So, there are, I mean there are genuine, of course there are, genuine conflicts which cannot be resolved. But I remember writing to William Hague when he was becoming Foreign Secretary, and he wrote an extraordinarily good couple of letters back, and he could see the problem. He’s a highly intelligent person, as you know. He could see the problem, but he said that, but in the end, at the end of the day… And I, I won’t say what I had said. At the end of the day the two-state solution is the only show in town, was his phrase. And I remember writing back and, and saying, it’s not even in town. The only way you can get a two-state solution out of the present Middle East problem is by imposing it, the Americans imposing it on the Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu. And, it never occurred to me that the Americans couldn’t even do that. So, this, there is political intransigence that, nothing can move, just as there is religious John Bowker Page 116 C1672/23 Track 4 intransigence that nothing can touch, noting can move. So, I’m not trying to say I have a magic wand that will solve all the world’s problems. I’m only saying that some of them have been ameliorated by trying to take this informed approach that, to meet halfway does not mean compromising. It can, you can retain your integrity, but you can’t have everything that you had thought once belonged to that integrity. It’s not that you compromise on it; you, you may something have to just abandon it. It is, it seems much worse than comprise. It actually isn’t. Sometimes one has to lay something aside, at least in the public sphere.

Do politicians, then, get in touch with you, via the Internet, to ask advice on particular things, is that how things have happened?

Yes, that, that is how things… But, that’s not an area where I would want to talk about it. I mean the whole point of this is that it’s not known about. It must be. So I, I don’t, really, I don’t… But the answer, simple answer is, yes, but I, I wouldn’t even want to say how much or to, in what way, to what extent.

Thank you. Now, we’ve…

Got about half an hour left.

[End of Track 4] John Bowker Page 117 C1672/23 Track 5

[Track 5]

So how do I see religions in the context of the sciences, and the insights and truths that the sciences reveal of human nature and society and the cosmos? And I suppose, I would always start at the scientific end, because that gives us a, an insight into the only subject matter of religious studies which is really the, the human person. So, I see religions as a consequence of the circumstance of all life in evolutionary history, always, not necessarily consciously but always seeking to solve problems. The emergence of life and the evolution of living forms and so on is always directed towards the limitations that stand in the way of successful gene replication. The ultimate limit is, of course, death for living organisms, but, this side of, of the ultimate limitation are many, many problems and limitations set on the successful, life being successful enough to replicate its genetic information. Therefore, I see religions in the context of dealing with particular compounds of limitation. And for me the phrase ‘compounds of limitation’ is a bit like natural selection. It doesn’t… Natural selection doesn’t explain anything, but it’s the context in which explanation, true explanation, occurs. And the compound of limitations is the correct context in which to understand why particular religious enterprises and so on have taken place. So basically, to that extent I certainly agree with Ed Wilson and Richard Dawkins that religions are a consequence of the fundamental necessity of gene replication and the nurture of children. [02:55] Now religions are the earliest cultural constructions that we have evidence of, only hinted at in the case of the Neanderthals, but at least the earliest that we have evidence for, which created successful systems to protect gene replication and the nurture of children, which is why religions are so preoccupied with sex and food. And one of the difficulties, of course, of, in religious history, has been that they were so successful that religions in subsequent history had tended to want to conserve the successful ways in which they protected gene replication and the nurture of children in the past. But, looking at it in terms of, of the, why religions emerge and what they are, religions were extremely successful in organising themselves for that and for the processing of information from one life or from one generation to another. They were so successful that they created contexts in which, social contexts in which people could almost say had time to address other limitations, not just death in general, but John Bowker Page 118 C1672/23 Track 5 the, the many limitations of, of climate, geography, relations with other people. They were sufficiently successful as information systems that they enabled people to engage in additional explorations, not just where the next meal’s going to come from, though that clearly was always one in the compound of limitations. And the great achievement of religions was that they didn’t simply encourage and endorse the exploration of the external world; they also encouraged and endorsed the exploration of the inner world, the world within humans of, of experience and emotions and all the rest of it. And, these two explorations of the outer and the inner world have remained in, the priorities in the religious traditions as we, as we know them now. It’s not that there is, say, the Abrahamic religions put an emphasis on exploring the outer cosmos, though they certainly did do that, which is why the natural sciences, well all sciences, are rooted in religious traditions, they are simply the latest development of exploration, which religions initiated and sustained, and still do in many ways, for many millennia. But equally, those Abrahamic religions, it wasn’t just the external; they also emphasised the exploration of, of the inner world, what Thomas Browne called those inner oceans. So they explored both inward and out, also the Asian traditions which emphasised the importance of finding and exploring and finding truth within, certainly did not ignore the external exploration. In Asia of course it was the Chinese who for a very long time held the two together in a creative tension. [06:55] So, this means that, religions resemble, I mean, people in religions resemble other animals in the sense that they have to solve problems, they have to try to find a way through the compounds of limitation that circumscribe their lives. So, one has then to ask, well, why religions? If starlings and, can sort of, behave as one unit almost, why, why are we talking about religions, like other animal societies, that they find that cooperation helps you to deal with particular compounds of limitation? But, most animals don’t say their prayers, though Indians, or some Indians, believe they actually do. But, generally speaking. So why religions? And, it’s really because the consequence of those explorations being held together, the external world, but also the internal world, produce such extraordinary consequences in experience and thus in behaviour, that they were rewarded in their own right, they were worth pursuing in their own right. So nobody knows what religious experience is. I mean it’s just, too big a word, I mean there’s too much in there, but using it as a shorthand, it is obvious that all religious experience is correlated with something happening in the brain, John Bowker Page 119 C1672/23 Track 5 because if something wasn’t happening in the brain, we’d be dead. But while we are alive, it is possible to develop, explore, extend, test, the exploration of the inner world as comparably they found they could explore, test, compare, trust and so on, exploration of the outer world. Now it’s not that they are the same kind of exploration. That’s why in a sense religions and the sciences, one of the reasons why they divided. But the fact remains that, religions came into being because they were such successful systems for protecting gene replication and the nurture of children they led to immensely important, exhilarating discoveries both outer and inner, and, they began to develop the ways of sharing and communicating and extending them into other generations. So that, I remember Geoffrey Driver, the great Semitic languages scholar who taught me Hebrew and Ugaritic saying to me, if you just listen carefully enough to the early words in biblical Hebrew, you can hear your ancestors sitting in the cave making their first noises that became language. And what he meant by that was that Biblical Hebrew got frozen. They either spoke Greek or Aramaic, and then there’s modern Hebrew. But biblical Hebrew, all the really key, fundamental words that you need to deal with the compounds of limitation, and to extend relationships, are all one syllable. And as biblical Hebrew developed, became more sophisticated, they become, virtually all Hebrews words, two syllables. So words like arv[ph], father, oum[ph], mother, aish[ph], fire, fum[ph], son, really basic words, are all one syllable, as though it’s the first, you’re overhearing the first grunts of our ancestors, trying to share with each other what they are perceiving, what they’re seeing, how they related to each other. And that may be, it’s obvious it’s speculative and may not be true, but it’s always a nice conceit I think, that you can overhear your ancestors in the cave. Well obviously religions took the basic sharing, which underlies altruism, and goes far, far beyond kinship altruism, which was always the great discovery in the second half of the twentieth century, goes far beyond kinship altruism. Because, religions eventually said, but the whole world is the family. Thus, Christianity talks about the soma, the body of Christ, in which all are involved. Muslims talk about the Ummah, the whole world community, and that’s why for Muslims all, the whole world should be Muslim, and this is why Christians, you know, went out to try and convert, because they should be brought into the one family so to speak. But then, because religions were so successful as systems with good boundaries to protect gene replication and the nurture of children, and then all these other discoveries came in to the same system, and it was well controlled, this is John Bowker Page 120 C1672/23 Track 5 why you get the development of hierarchies of religious organisation and political organisation, they’re almost coterminous in, obviously in the early days, and you get religions producing the extensions of, of language. So that, you look around now, and virtually all the great achievements that we value and treasure, that we’ve inherited and continue, some of us anyway, to create now, all come from these religious roots, these religious systems. So that, I mean it’s virtually everything, it’s art, drama, agriculture, poetry, music, dance, they all come, and all are deeply rooted in these early religious explorations and achievements. Even the natural sciences, as I was saying a moment ago, are all deeply rooted in the, these religious explorations. And we often think, well, Western science really comes from Greek philosophy and the Greek sciences and so on, Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, but, you know, that’s true, but also they come from the belief that is biblical, that comes from the Jewish tradition, that God is trustworthy. That the sun does rise each morning, it does set each evening. The Psalms are full of the reliability of God. And you put these two together, and that is why you get Western science in the particular form that it took, as Asian science, particularly in China, took a different form. Often they would achieve the same discoveries because, basically, while sciences are approximate, provisional, corrigible, often wrong, they achieve reliabilities. So the Chinese could invent paper and printing long before anybody in the West did, because there are reliabilities in the universe which means that paper can’t be made out of water, that kind of reliability. But religions also achieved these reliabilities in terms of human experience and relationships that have transformed and created the kind of societies that we have inherited. [14:58] So I would understand religions as deeply rooted in the constraints that are derived from our genetic inheritance, and that was enabled because of the systems that were built to protect it. So deeply rooted in the generic inheritance, and constantly attentive to the circumstances that surround them, what I have summarised as the compounds of limitation. So, they internalise constraints derived from these different observations, and make them this story of their own life, the story of their own biography. And the next great stage in the interaction between sciences and religions is going to be the attempt to understand what is involved, how it happens, in the internalisation of constraints. Because that is what makes us human. And it’s one of the huge gains from the twentieth century that we’ve abandoned the naïve sense that John Bowker Page 121 C1672/23 Track 5 what we’re looking for are the causes of things, because, that becomes competitive, about whether this cause is superior to that cause. And in fact we’re always dealing with the multiplicity of constraints, controlling eventualities into particular outcomes, and some of course are proximate and immediate, and, much more upfront than the others. But you always have to bear In mind the diversity and multiplicity of constraints. Now this why, all these achievements, which have brought you and I to sit in this room, all these achievements don’t happen by accident; they only happen because religions are such good, well-tested, well-winnowed systems for protecting all this. But where you have systems, there you have boundaries. And although the boundaries may be loose, permeable, often in religions there are some who think, actually, the maintaining of the boundary is extremely important, you’ve got to know who’s in and who’s out, you’ve got to know who’s behaving properly and who isn’t behaving properly. And what you do about it. But in fact, the religious systems, with their boundaries, don’t exist, in their own account, they don’t exist for their own sake. Some people they do [laughs], maintaining the system, maintaining the boundaries, monitoring the boundaries, yes, that’s the all-important thing. But in fact the point of the system is for people to reach the goal that the religions believe to be attainable, and to be ultimately more precious than anything else. [18:06] So, constraints, and I often quote this, is Ashby’s principle of cybernetics. Where a constraint exists, advantage can usually be taken of it. So where a constraint exists in a religious system, advantage can usually be taken of it. And there have been spectacular examples all through history of people who have internalised their constraints from within the religious system, the religious story, the religious narrative, the religious practice, into which they happen to have been born, but by having internalised it, seen the point of it, and they then are set free, into what Paul called the glorious liberty of the children of God. But in the meantime, these systems have boundaries, and where you have boundaries you have border incidents. And people would die rather than abandon or have destroyed around them all the achievements that the system has protected and transmitted through not just the odd ten years or so, but through, literally through millennia. And so, we reached the point where religions have to be understood in terms of boundary maintenance. It may be a small subsystem within a larger system, but still the boundary maintenance is what we have to understand, knowing that without that boundary maintenance, the genetic, the John Bowker Page 122 C1672/23 Track 5 endowed opportunities, from all those years ago, going arv[?], oum[?], aish[?] in the cave, could not have produced you and I having a fairly sophisticated discourse in the twenty-first century.

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