OPening ADDReSS: Science, ReASOn AnD ReligiOn 19.09.12 PROfeSSOR Keith WARD introduction: Revd Scott S. McKenna

Good evening. Welcome to Mayfield Salisbury Parish Church. This is the first of five events which make up our Festival of Science, Reason and Religion. When we wrote to each of our invited guests, we said:

In our view, the Church has never fully or adequately responded to the 'challenges' of science or reason and, in the present day, the Church is perceived to be anti-intellectual, superstitious, bigoted and homophobic, at times not without justification.

We said:

We are spiritual seekers after truth and recognise that there may be more than one truth. Our festival will be an honest, intellectually rigorous and, we hope, enjoyable exploration about the nature of reality and what it means to be human.

This evening’s opening address is being delivered by Keith Ward. We were delighted when Keith accepted our invitation.

Keith Ward is a philosopher, theologian and a priest in the Church of England. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has over 25 books to his name. Keith graduated from the University of Wales. Through the 60s and 70s, he lectured in Logic at Glasgow University, then Philosophy at St Andrews. He has also lectured at King’s College London and Trinity Hall Cambridge. Finally, in 1991, Keith was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, a post he held for 13 years.

In his retirement, if I may put it that way, he has written much and lectured across the world, from Calcutta to Auckland and Philadelphia to Bellagio. He has given keynote addresses in such places as Washington, Dublin, Basel, Istanbul and now Professor Keith Ward Edinburgh.

4 Opening Address: Professor Keith Ward (Full Transcript)

It is a great privilege to be asked to open this series. I think the series stands at the head of any possible series on this subject, leaving myself out of account. It is a fantastic array of people speaking so it should be fantastic. But I’ve got to open it so you have to put up with this for tonight, and I am going to talk about, of course, science, reason and religion: subjects which have fascinated me throughout my life. And I have been lucky enough to be able to spend my time studying them, and one of the advantages of moving round universities is that you meet lots of experts in science, and philosophy and theology too, and what you don’t know you can ask. So although I don’t know everything, I know a lot of people who do, and I tend to ask them what they think about things. So most of my information comes from people I have had dinner with, so, some of it is liquid and all of it is changeable, but it’s mostly reputable.

I want to begin by saying that there is a legend grown up. It is very strange how these things happen: a legend about the relationship between religion and science. And the legend is that there is a battle, there is a war, between religion and science. And just as a matter of historical fact this is very hard to think that it’s true. It does seem to be a myth put around by people who have an ideological interest at stake, and they get most of their information incorrect.

So let me start with one or two historical facts about the relationship between the sciences and theology. The first obvious and indisputable one is that science, in its modern sense, as we know it now, began in Christian Europe, and in Christian Europe it was belief in God which led to the rise of science. So that is the first thing, that’s just a fact. It was the belief that there was a wise designer of the universe that led people to think about what that design might be like, and to take an interest in what the universe was like. And because in the Bible it says that human beings were made in the image of God, people thought, well, perhaps we are rational, and God is wise and rational, so perhaps human reason can work out what the universe is like.

So for example, the Copernican hypothesis: that is the view that the planets go round the sun, was invented, of course, as you would expect, by Copernicus. But what people don’t always know is that Copernicus was a Canon of the Roman Catholic Church, and if you go to Kraków Cathedral you will find a stone with a representation of the Copernican system, with the sun at the centre and the earth going round it, and there was no controversy about this whatsoever. The introduction to his book was written by the local cardinal who said what an excellent piece of work it was. So there was no war at all. Nobody thought about that.

Later on of course Galileo came along and that is perhaps where people seize on this

5 as the battle. There was a sort of battle with Galileo, and in 1633 he was declared a heretic. Now that’s quite true. But the way to remember this, the way to think of this, is that at that time of course the Roman Catholic Church was the only outfit around which was studying science. I mean that is where science was done, within the Catholic Church. Galileo’s telescope is still there in the Vatican. It is not a very good one, but it is a very interesting one to look at, not to look through, because Rome is so full of light that you can’t see anything, but there’s the telescope. Galileo always was, remained and died a faithful Catholic.

But the dispute of course was whether Aristotle was right. Aristotle was thought to be the person who knew everything. He was the master of those who know anything. So people thought Aristotle has said the truth, and Aristotle has said that the stars are on a crystalline sphere and the earth is at the centre and there are no sun spots or defects on objects in the heavens. And the quarrel was not between the faith and science, it was between establishment science saying this is just so foundational, Aristotle is so foundational, that if you let that go science would collapse, so you must believe Aristotle. Anyway what was Galileo’s telescope worth? It probably didn’t work and couldn’t be trusted. His was the first telescope, not the first telescope, but the first one that had been used to look at the stars, so of course there could have been something wrong with the equipment, so that was the argument. It got very heated, and Galileo unfortunately called the Pope stupid, which was not very clever at the time. The church was very tyrannical. But the equivalent today of that argument would be somebody who came along and said they had refuted Einstein’s theory of relativity. If somebody said that you can imagine all the fellows of the Royal Society would say this is absolutely ridiculous, throw it in the bin, and if they had the power they might even, of course Galileo was never tortured or anything like that, but if they had the power they might say we are going to throw this bloke out of the Royal Society because these thoughts are too radical. So if you look at the historical background to the Galileo dispute, it wasn’t actually science versus religion, it was established science which turned out to be wrong, and new fangled science looking at things through telescopes inventing new theories, although Copernicus had actually thought of it already. It was that sort of dispute. The Church has admitted that they were wrong, admittedly it took three hundred years, but in fact not long ago, a few years ago, the Catholic Church did apologise, well almost. It said: ‘We could have been wrong, that’s true’.

So yes, there have been little disputes, and of course we know there are disputes today, about people who think the world was created in six days and a lot of people think it wasn’t. So there are disputes, but that is hardly a dispute between science and religion. It’s a dispute between different groups of religious people. The vast majority of Christians, the vast majority, think the world was not created in six days, the world was created in 17 billion years, ah no, 13.7 actually, American billion years which is 1000 million years. We have no trouble with that. The Catholic Church has officially 6 committed itself to that view. The Anglican Church, my own church, hasn’t committed itself to anything, but that is what most of us think, and there is no difficulty about that. But there are a lot of Christians who think ..., they take the Bible literally, and so, yes, the dispute is within Christianity.

It is worth saying that thing about the literal thing, no Christian theologian historically has ever taken Genesis literally. There isn’t one major Christian theologian: Aquinus, Anselm, Augustine who has taken it literally, and can I just quote from St Augustine. St Augustine wrote a book called ‘ On the Literal Meaning of Genesis ’, in which he said that the literal meaning of Genesis is, of course, nothing to do with time, and when it talks about days that is not talking about periods of time at all. Augustine’s theory was, it’s talking about logical types of thing, like rocks and animals and human beings and plants. These are logically different types of thing. So it is important to see that historically theologians have not taken that literally, that theory arose with modern science, interestingly. It was after modern science began that people thought you have to take things literally, because literal things are the only things there are. So if it says six days it must have meant days. Now that belief came around actually in about the 16th century, I suppose, and it originated in its modern form in the United States of America in the 1930s. So, it’s not really a battle that concerns religion as such and science as such. You see that’s the legend. It is that some people differ about how to interpret the Bible, and of course we know that, or there would not be a Church of Scotland, would there? So people have to ..., I admit that there are these disputes that go on, and that’s all right.

And within science there are disputes. Now that particular one isn’t a dispute within science because scientists more or less universally accept that the universe is terribly old. But there are other disputes, lots of disputes, within the sciences, and one of the big ones which is relevant to religion is whether in evolution there can be purpose. Could it be going anywhere, could it be designed? And that is a dispute between evolutionary biologists. They disagree about this. And a lot of evolutionary biologists, I guess about 50%, I haven’t exactly counted, quite a lot, think there could be design and purpose. An example of such a person is Simon Conway-Morris, he is the Professor of Evolutionary Palaeontology in Cambridge, and he has written a very good book called ‘Life’s Solution ’, in which, as an evolutionary biologist, he argues that there is purpose or design. It looks as if evolution is going somewhere, the universe is evolving from a state where there is no consciousness, no value, no complexity, to a state in which there are wonderfully intelligent beings like us, and the brain, the most complex thing in the whole universe, which gives rise to consciousness and intelligence, and that’s a sort of progress isn’t it really to have even people like us is progress from nothing at all. So you say well, yeah, it looks as if there could be direction, God could have made it. So that inevitably intelligent moral responsible life could have evolved from the material beginning of the 7 universe. So that dispute exists within evolutionary biology.

And what those who have a vested interest in being atheists say is, ah well, the only real biologists are the ones who believe that there is no purpose in evolution so it is all chance. And that is what gets the fundamentalist Christians worried, of course, because it is true if you say evolution means it is all accident and it is all chance, because that doesn’t seem very helpful to God who says, well, I don’t know what is happening, it is all random you know, let’s just see what happens next. And I suppose religious people would want to say God has a pretty good idea what is going to happen next, God set the whole system up. So there would be a dispute there, but it is important to see that this is a dispute within evolutionary science.

And there are lots of first class evolutionary biologists. I mean I think of Dr Sansky, who is one of the great names in biology, you have probably never heard of him, but he is a great name in biology; Francisco Ayala, a leading biologist, who is Catholic priest. Interestingly I was talking to Francisco Ayala, because he doesn’t go looking like a priest, and I said, he is a very well known biologist, and I said to him ‘ Are you a priest? ’ and interestingly he said to me, ‘ Yes, I am but don’t tell anybody! ’ And the reason he said that is interesting, because in fact it might damage his reputation as a biologist if it was thought that he had a prejudice in favour of God and purpose in evolution. So there is that feeling in the world of science that perhaps if you say you have got an inbuilt religious faith, or a faith of some sort, you are not a real scientist. If you are a real scientist you have to believe nothing at all, you have to have a clear mind.

So, the first thing I’ve said is, it is not a dispute between religion and science. There are disputes in science, quite a lot of them; there are disputes in religion, quite a lot of them, and these are on the whole creative disputes. They help people to get their ideas straight and sorted out in the end what seems the most sensible view. So I have tried to deal with the Galileo affair. Yes a dispute but primarily a scientific one. But, I’ve admitted that, of course, some things in science would be very worrying, if they were established as true, to religious belief. Some would. If you could establish that evolution had no possible direction, that it was all random, that would be very worrying. But of course it hasn’t been established, and that’s a disputed question. In fact it is a philosophical question, more than a strictly scientific one, because there is no scientific way of telling whether or not the evolutionary process is purposive or not. How could you possibly tell? You would have to be able to find out what the purpose of the creator was and there is no scientific way of doing that. So that’s saying that it did not start out as a dispute. Science: it started out as trying to understand the ways of God. So there is Copernicus in Kraków Cathedral.

But of course an even more obvious example is Sir Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton virtually invented the laws of physics. I mean, there weren’t any laws before Isaac 8 Newton, well, I suppose there were, but no one knew that there were. Nobody thought that there were. You see, when people wrote the Bible they did not think there are laws of nature in accordance with which things happen. They knew that things tended to happen regularly, but they did not have this idea of laws that you could actually put into mathematical equations, so that actually the law of gravity is an inverse square law, and you can measure mass and distance and you can correlate them in mathematics, nobody had ever thought of that. So it was Newton who invented laws in the modern sense, that you understand nature by understanding laws in accordance with which things happen. Now he knew he invented laws and his great work was ‘Principia Mathematica ’ and he wrote that in 1687, and in that book he says what led him to the idea that there were laws of nature. And he said what led me to the idea was that I believe in God, I’m a Christian, he said, and I believe that according to the book of John, John’s Gospel, God created the universe through the logos, through the wisdom, through the reason of God. So God must be quite a reasonable sort of being, just like me, said Newton, and so, if I think what’s the most elegant, simple, fruitful, set of laws that would make the universe go along predictably, which would be useful, that is what God must have done. So it is the thought of a God making the universe in an elegant and beautiful, simple way, mathematically speaking, that led Newton to formulate the laws of nature. And it turned out, of course, that Newton was right. So there was no battle there either. I mean Newton said this is what I think God would have done. Newton wrote lots of books about the Bible, and of course he was a man of his time, and his books about the Bible are not truly very good. His books about physics, of course, are fantastic. But the main point is physics arose, and the idea of the laws of nature arose, because people like Isaac Newton thought a rational wise God, God is rational, that’s a very important point, would have made the universe in wise and rational ways, and would have made human beings so that we could understand the universe.

Now that I think is faith, isn’t it? It’s not having a mind which does not believe anything at all, it’s rather having a mind which says it’s a postulate of faith that the universe is rational, that it’s intelligible, that it runs according to laws. Why think that? Well, it makes sense if you say there is God who is rational and would design it that way. But if there is no God why should you think that the universe is intelligible at all? That’s really a very difficult question to answer, and even scientists, physicists, who are not religious, feel the force of that question.

Eugene Wigner, who is a mathematician, a world class mathematician, wrote a very well known article called ‘ The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ . He is a pure mathematician. And you know that in Britain we can’t afford to do expensive experiments, so what we do is mathematics, because you just need a blackboard for that! We do mathematics and good mathematicians do things. There was one very 9 famous mathematician called G H Hardy, who is a pure mathematician, and he said that his one purpose in life, he is very recent mathematician, his one purpose in life was to invent some mathematics that could have no possible application to anything. That’s pure mathematics. That’s as pure as you can get. But he was thwarted in his ambition because all the amazing mathematics that he invented on the backs of envelopes and bits of paper and blackboards actually worked. They applied to things. They led eventually to quantum mechanics and understanding the universe in immensely new ways. So the mathematics that he made up actually applied to the universe. And so Eugene Wigner in this article ‘The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ said ‘How can it be that these mathematics which people just make apply to the universe? Why should the universe run on elegant simple mathematical principles? And that the harder we think the more we find out about the universe?’ You see there is ..., if you are a mathematician you know this, you know that modern science isn’t based just on observation, in fact, modern science contradicts most of our observations, and if you go into quantum physics they will tell you things you can’t even believe. You have to think they’re true presumably, because they produce mobile ‘phones, they do have effects in the end. But the actual mathematics that they produce, is pure mathematics really, is just wonderfully complex, but it does seem to explain how the universe works. And the point is this, it is the mathematics which comes first and the observations that come later.

Everybody in Edinburgh has heard about Higgs boson. Yes, and Higgs boson, I asked, not Dr Higgs himself, but I asked the physicists in Oxford what Higgs boson was. and the person I asked took a very deep breath and said, ‘Ah ...’, and this was a man who worked in CERN and devoted his life to finding Higgs boson, and he said ‘Well, we don’t actually know!’ So that wasn’t much help. I bought him a couple of beers and then he said ‘All right, Higgs boson is a sort of quiver in an energy field which extends infinitely throughout the universe.’ So I said ‘Thanks very much, bla bla, bla, now I know what it is!’ So quantum physics is really beyond the imagination of everybody really, you can do the mathematics if you are lucky, but what it means is hard to interpret. Now the point I am making here is modern science is not just looking at things very hard and seeing what happens. That is what Aristotle did and Aristotle got it all wrong. Modern physics is doing the mathematics first, inventing a beautiful theory, just inventing one, the most beautiful theory you can, and then seeing whether the universe fits your theory. And so the mathematics comes first. It has to be tested, that is important, there has to be confirmation, but the theory comes first. And that was the birth of modern science, it was the birth of mathematics, really. So Newton’s laws are mathematically formulated. And you then have to think of experiments. And the trouble with Higgs boson, is for a long time we couldn’t think of any experiments which would show whether or not there was a Higgs boson. And we had to spend billions of pounds building this thing in Geneva to find out. And even now, I tell you the truth, if you put me, I’ve been to CERN, and if you put me in the middle of CERN and you say ‘Right, just 10 find a Higgs boson’ I would be at a loss, I’d say ‘Why, what does it look like, God?’ I do know what it looks like, but I couldn’t tell from that it was a Higgs boson. So looking isn’t enough.

Modern science, and the point I am trying to get at here is, modern science depends on a set of faith in the rationality of the universe. And, you could say, quantum physicists do say, that if you are asking questions about the universe, you are going to have a physicist talking to you later in this series, so I hope he will agree with what I am saying really because I partly got it from him in the first place in a way, that is, that a modern physicist will say, well, the modern universe is beautiful, it is elegant, it is mathematically intelligible, so if we do the best we can to invent such theories they will probably fit the universe. We have to test it and see, but they probably will. And people more or less believed, they staked their life on Higgs boson, before anyone discovered it, indeed I have to say it is not quite certain it has been discovered it is only possible that it has. But it is so expensive to conduct these experiments, that it’s like spending all your pocket money for a sweet that you are not sure if it exists or not! So it is quite difficult in modern science to say it’s without belief. It is not without belief; it is belief in the intelligibility of the universe. So the theory comes first and then you try to test the theory in ways that only a very few people can understand what the tests would be, but still there might be tests, but they are not always conclusive these days. We know that physicists nowadays talk about other universes etc. How do you find out if there is another universe? I mean this universe is one space / time, ok? So a lot of physicists now say that there are lots of other space / times as well. But, well, how could you find out that there was another space/ time? Well you may think there is a way, but it’s not very certain. So I don’t want to go on too long about that, but the point is, it is not just looking to see, it’s assuming that there is an intelligible universe and framing a theory, purely because of it’s beauty and mathematical elegance, and then trying to think how you could possibly show if your theory was true or not.

Let me remind you that Albert Einstein, of course undisputably the greatest physicist of the twentieth century; Albert Einstein never believed in the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. And we now know quantum mechanics to be true, so we know that Albert Einstein was wrong on that issue. But we don’t say he was stupid not to believe in it, we say ‘Well done, Albert, you know, carry on trying to disprove it’, because he thought that. You know his favourite quotation: ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’, again isn’t that significant, that he thought that if this universe is totally rational and intelligible there couldn’t be chance random events, so what quantum physicists are saying can’t be true. Again the theory was determining what he thought about the facts. Now he happened to be wrong because there is a better theory, quantum mechanics is a better argument, and that theory shows that actually a rational God could build chance into the universe. Now that is quite a complicated argument, but let me give you an example of how that’s true. How could you have a 11 rationally designed universe? Remember what I am saying is - this universe looks rationally designed, it looks as if its God created. How could you have that if there is a lot of chance in it? The example is this: the National Lottery. You know that National Lottery exists. Now the National Lottery is intelligently designed. People don’t just get the National Lottery by chance. They employ good mathematicians to say how many numbers do we have to have so that everybody doesn’t win a prize? Well you have to get the exact probability that very few people are going to win, but somebody is going to win. And that’s a mathematical question. And you design the lottery so that you can’t predict who is going to win, but that’s what people want, they want to know that you can’t predict, that’s what they want, right. So if God wanted a universe in which people couldn’t predict what was going to happen in detail next, God would have to build chance into the universe, right? And that’s the way we are, because we are free. Let’s just take one little argument. We are free moral beings, it’s important to say I can’t predict whether you are going to do right or do wrong. I can’t predict that. So there must be an element of choice about that, and that means the universe can’t be determined to go in just one way. Otherwise if I knew enough physics I could predict it. But physicists now know, beyond doubt, this is beyond doubt, I challenge anyone on this one, this is beyond doubt. Physicists know, we could never predict in detail what was going to happen in this universe. It’s absolutely .., there is a proof that that is impossible. There are complications about this. It does not prove that it is not determined, but it proves that nobody could tell that it was determined. Again if you say the whole universe is determined so that it couldn’t be otherwise by physical laws, that’s a faith. Albert Einstein believed that. That was his faith. Now I, and many other people, say he was actually wrong about that. You can have an intelligible universe and it is still not wholly determined. Indeed it is more intelligible because it relies on moral freedom. So you see the way these arguments go. It is not that you just look and see, it’s that you look for a theory which gives you the most elegant rational explanation and that means you assume there is such an explanation and that means that you assume the universe is rational and that is the whole point of my talk tonight. That even the most atheistic scientists assume that the universe is intelligible and they have no reason to assume that. Newton had a reason because there is a God, and if there is a God then the universe is intelligible because God creates it through reason. That is a very important argument and I still think that argument has a lot of force.

But let’s move on from Darwin in this little historical survey of alleged battles. Well there is no battle between physics and religion. In fact Stephen Hawking, who is a member of my college that I was at in Cambridge, he has said, in a recent book, his most recent book, Steven Hawking said, this universe, this space and time, originates from a purely mathematical realm beyond space and time which is elegant and beautiful. Now that’s so like belief in God that it’s uncanny, because what a believer in God would say, is, this space / time has originated from a realm beyond space and time which is elegant and beautiful and that is God. The mind of God is elegant and 12 beautiful. And so I think modern physicists, even Steven Hawking, who is not a well known theist, he is not a well known believer, he is not talking about God in other words, but he is still talking about something so like God that it is a hair’s breadth away from God. So of course when I use the word God here it is important to see I am not starting from God as a person outside the universe who is making arbitrary decisions. That is not really what Christians believe anyway, that’s the caricature of God. Unfortunately that is what some scientists have, they have the caricature. God makes arbitrary decisions. You pray to God and say ‘ Please God, I need to do my shopping could I have parking space ?’ and God thinks, ‘ Let’s see, how many people want parking spaces? Yes, yes, this is the only one who has prayed, you can have a parking space. ’

A lot of people think God is like that. Well, you know, Christian theologians do not think God is like that. In fact what I think is that if you pray for a parking space God will say, ‘Blow you, you are not going to get one, because you should have prayed that someone else would get the parking space! ’ Anyway that view of God is just too simple to take any notice of really. But if you think of God as the creator of this amazingly complex vast universe and you think God is the source of all that, then that God is a Being of elegance and beauty who exists beyond space and time and from whom space and time originates. I would actually say quantum physics and cosmology are very close to belief in God, and the reason that some scientists are not religious is just the same reason that lots of people are not religious: they don’t like going to church. They find it boring and other things that I won’t go into now. But there are reasons people don’t go to church. Usually because they don’t like the minister I suppose or the other people who go. But again, it is nothing to do with physics, but again it is not the science which is putting people off. So I am running the line tonight that science is actually predisposed towards, in favour of, religion, because it is predisposed in favour of the rationality, the interminability, of the universe. That implies, it does not prove, that there is a rational intelligent mind behind the existence of the universe. So that’s Newton, he is easy for someone like me. He was a Christian after all.

What about Charles Darwin? He is a bit more difficult: 1859 ‘ The Origin of Species’ . It is true that Charles Darwin became more and more agnostic throughout his life. We know that that’s true, but he never, never disbelieved in God. He disbelieved in certain Christian dogmas of the day, so he came to be agnostic about the Christian faith. But one thing to remember, if you think, if you are tempted for a moment to think, there is a war between Darwinism and Christianity, just remember where was Darwin buried? He was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was buried with sermons by the Dean and a whole stream of clerics saying what a wonderful theory Darwinism was. So where’s the battle? All the people who honoured Darwin by placing him in Westminster Abbey were saying this is a great scientist who came up with a great theory. What’s the problem with that? So again, historically speaking, whatever you think about the issue, historically speaking there was not any battle between Darwin and the Church. Most 13 of the people in the Church welcomed the theory, of course there were some who didn’t, there were some who found difficulties with it, but most did and the proof is he is in Westminster Abbey. How did he get there? Somebody must have liked him. So, not a battle, anyway. But he did become more agnostic. Of course the problem was the evolutionary system seemed to him too cruel really: ‘ Red in tooth and claw’ , as the poet Tennyson put it. But that is not a problem about evolution. We know things like that. We see animals eating each other. That’s nothing new. Darwin doesn’t give you any new information about the cruelty of nature. So Christians have always known about these things. So Darwin did not introduce any new details about that at all.

And I suppose you would say, but again there is a feeling about this, the media seems to consistently get it wrong or some of the media do anyway, that when the present Pope, Benedict XVI, called a meeting of his old graduate students when he had been a professor of theology, together to talk about intelligent design theory, which is one form of ... a non-Darwinian theory of evolution, the press, large sections of the press, reported that he had condemned Darwinism. Now that’s the opposite of the truth. I know exactly what happened at that seminar. And they actually condemned intelligent design as a theory. That’s what they did. They said that is not a very good scientific theory and in fact, you know, there may be lots of other explanations. Now of course Christians have to think that evolution, if there is evolution, and almost all evolutionary biologists think there is, of course, if there is evolution, it must be designed and it must have a purpose, and God must be using that to bring about whatever riches that God wants. So you have to believe that. So the only question is, is that incompatible with believing in evolutionary theory? And most people would say no, it is not incompatible.

Of course you have always got Richard Dawkins, true, but Richard Dawkins is not so straightforward about this, because Richard Dawkins actually says, because he is a colleague of mine in Oxford, and Richard Dawkins says, ‘ Given the fundamental constants and the fundamental laws of the universe ’, this is Dawkins own view, ‘ It is inevitable that sooner or later intelligent life will come to exist .’ That is an amazing thing for someone like that to say, because you would expect him to say that it is all just chaos and you can’t predict what is going to happen, it is all chance so anything might happen, but he doesn’t say that. What he says is intelligent life is bound to come about given the fundamental laws of nature. Well, ok, so in that case, that is quite consistent with there being a God, because all you want, to say that God created the universe, is that what God wants, which incredibly is us, intelligent beings like us, will inevitably come about in the universe. So if someone, even an atheist like Dawkins, says, yes, that does look inevitable to me, then he is actually saying this could, because it looks like that, it could be consistent with God. So his problem with God is a problem with something else, it is not really about evolutionary theory.

So Darwin is a harder case because he wasn’t a Christian, but, remember that Darwin’s 14 theory was invented, exactly the same theory was invented, at the same time, by someone else. And if you know this story you will know that, this somebody else, Alfred Russell Wallace, actually let Darwin, quite rightly in fact, take the credit for the theory, because Darwin had actually thought of it first, although Alfred Russell Wallace had actually written it down first, but anyway, so the two of them thought of the theory at the same time. The point about that is that Alfred Russell Wallace was a Spiritualist. That’s right! So he certainly believed in a spiritual basis of the universe. Now it might not be a religion that you like very much, but it is a religion. So he was religious and he thought of the theory of evolution, so there’s no incompatibility. It’s not incompatible. And of course Darwin himself said that the person who understood his theory best was Asa Briggs, who was professor of biology at Harvard at the time. Now Asa Briggs was a Presbyterian. Asa Briggs was an elder in the Presbyterian Church and Darwin said this is the person who understands me better than anybody else, and Asa Briggs always supported Darwin’s theory. So again if you look at the historical facts, I’m not asking you what your opinion about the theory is, I’m just saying historically there was never a battle. There were people who took different views on each side and as matter of fact scientifically a lot of people opposed Darwin because they thought there wasn’t good enough evidence. That was actually true at the time. Darwin turned out to be right most of us think, but the evidence wasn’t all that good at the time. And so there were scientific objections. They have now disappeared virtually, but, so the disputes were there, but they weren’t religion versus science.

So I have run through this sort of historical thing and I think I am running out of time, so I haven’t got much time for anything else. But let me try to pull it into a larger frame and bring philosophy into the picture. I know John Haldane is going to talk about Philosophy but I just make the point, and again it is a historical point. What I am doing tonight is giving a historical framework for thinking about religion and reason and science. That most, the vast majority of philosophers, that people that come to Edinburgh University to read philosophy will read, believed in God as the most rational explanation of the universe. So Plato, Aristotle, definitely Aristotle, his theory of God is one that many Christians still believe really in essence, Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Descartes: go through all the great classical philosophers, they all thought if you are looking for an explanation of the rationality of the universe, and it is rational, then there must be a supremely rational being of great value who created it. So the testimony historically of philosophy is in favour of God too. So that is the historical framework.

Now, I am standing here in Edinburgh, and I suppose some of you might have heard of the name David Hume. And, of course, he is a slight difficulty of my grand theory that everyone really believes in God, because David Hume did not really believe in God, or at least did not think the arguments were very good. So what do we do about Hume? Well Hume is the great exception. Ah - Hume was a very, very good philosopher, there 15 is no doubt about that, but he was an Enlightenment philosopher, a philosopher of the 18th century Enlightenment, and he was the only philosopher, major philosopher, of the Enlightenment, who took the view that he took of reason. So I give you one famous quote from David Hume and here it is, and people think of the Enlightenment, the 18th century Enlightenment, as the age of reason, where reason was brought in to triumph over faith perhaps. What David Hume said about reason is this: ‘ Reason is the slave of the passions ’. Now whatever Hume was he was not a rationalist, he was not a person who thought the universe is rational, and that is why he’s the exception. If you think of Thomas Reid, who in his day was much more well known than Hume was, and well, you know, it just shows the stupidity of appointing committees, but Thomas Reid got a chair of Philosophy and Hume never did. But Thomas Reid was very well known, and Thomas Reid thought, well, it’s just obvious there’s a God, because again the argument it is a rational universe. Now the interesting thing I just want to put before you is this, Hume thought, he did not like the idea of God because he thought the universe was not rational. He did not trust reason, he thought that reason was the slave of the passions. He is the great Enlightenment exception. He was not at all a rationalist; he based his morality and his philosophy on sentiment and on experience. So you make of that what you will.

But all I want to point out is that those who tend to think the universe is rational, those who believe in reason believe in God, historically, that’s the way it goes, so if you are asking the question, and this is tonight’s question, ‘What is the relationship between science, reason and religion?’ It is they have always historically gone together. People who have believed in science believe the universe is rational, people who believe in reason, most philosophers who believe in reason, have always believed this because there is a rational creator of the universe, and that‘s the most rational explanation there is of the universe, and those who oppose that are fundamentally irrationalists. So my conclusion is this, reason is not opposed to faith, reason inevitably is based upon and leads to faith. And when you lose faith in reason then you see the universe as a chaos without intelligibility, without laws, without mathematical truth, without beauty, without elegance, without all the things that science prizes. So I want to put in a word against the legend that there is a battle between science and religion, and say look at it historically and see that that’s not true. There have been lots of disputes and long may they continue because I couldn’t have a job if there weren’t disputes, that is my job, talking about disputes and arguments, so a good job there are some! But if you look at the history of it, the rationalists, the people who believe in reason, are the religious. There is no battle between faith and reason, because to have a proper faith is to believe that this universe was created by a God through logos, through reason, through intellect, through wisdom. So this is a rational universe through and through. If you pursue that to its furthest extent what you get is something extraordinarily like the Christian faith. Anyway that it is what I have to say tonight. I shall be very pleased to enter into discussion if there happens to be any person who disagrees a little. 16