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The 2021 Boyle Lecture on Science and Religion

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The 2021 Boyle Lecture on Science and Religion Presents The 2021 Boyle Lecture on Science and Religion “The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science” by Professor Tom McLeish Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of York Response given by With response by The Rt Revd & Rt Hon the Lord Rowan Williams of Oystermouth Table of Contents Background to the Boyle Lectures 2 The Boyle Lectures Advisory Board 3 Former Members of the Advisory Board 4 The Rediscovery of Contemplation Through Science 6 Response to Boyle Lecture 25 Webinar 32 2021 Boyle Lecture Links 33 The 2022 Boyle Lecture 34 Previous Boyle Lectures 35 1 Background to The Boyle Lectures The original series of Boyle Lectures ran from 1692 until the early 1730s. Funded by a bequest from Robert Boyle, the celebrated seventeenth-century natural philosopher, the lectureship was re-established at St Mary-le-Bow in 2004. It now provides an annual platform for a distinguished scientist or theologian to explore the contemporary relationship between the two disciplines. The lectures aim to be faithful to the intention of their founder, who viewed religious faith and experimental science as mutually enriching. The new Boyle Lectures are guided by an Advisory Board chaired by the Earl of Cork and Orrery (the 1st Earl of Cork, 1566-1643, was Robert Boyle's father) and since 2018 they have been arranged in partnership with the International Society for Society and Religion. They also receive significant support from a number of other parties, principally the Worshipful Company of Grocers and the Worshipful Company of Mercers. The Board remains deeply grateful to the ISSR and its other supporters for their assistance in organising the Lectures. 2 The Boyle Lectures Advisory Board The Rt Hon. the Earl of Cork and Orrery (Chairman) The Hon. Robert Boyle Professor John Hedley Brooke, Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford The Revd George R. Bush, Rector of St Mary-le-Bow Xenia Dennan, Past Master, The Worshipful Company of Mercers The Revd Professor Michael J. Reiss, President, The International Society for Science and Religion Dr Russell Re Manning, Reader in Philosophy and Ethics, Bath Spa University Julian Tregoning, Past Master, The Worshipful Company of Grocers Professor Fraser Watts, Visiting Professor, University of Lincoln 3 Former Members of the Advisory Board Dr Michael Byrne (Convener, 2004-18) The Revd Professor Alister McGrath, University of Oxford The Rt Revd and Rt Hon. the Lord Chartres KCVO Sir Brian Jenkins GBE The Rt Hon. the Lord Plant of Highfield The Revd Canon John Polkinghorne KBE FRS The Rt Hon. the Earl of Selborne GBE FRS The Late David Vermont 4 5 The Re-Discovery of Contemplation through Science Tom McLeish Tom McLeish, FRS, is a physicist, academic interdisciplinary leader, and writer. He is inaugural Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York, England, and is also affiliated to the University’s Centre for Medieval Studies and Humanities Research Centre. His scientific research in ‘soft matter and biological physics,’ has inspired collaborations with chemists, engineers, and biologists to study relationships between molecular structure and emergent material properties, recognized by major awards in the USA and Europe. He has conceived, won funding for, and directed several large interdisciplinary collaborations and currently leads the UK ‘Physics of Life’ network. He holds a 5-year ESPRC personal research fellowship focusing on the physics of protein signalling and the self-assembly of silk fibres. His interdisciplinary academic interests include the framing of science, theology, society and history, and the theory of creativity in art and science, leading to the recent books Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP 2014) and The Poetry and Music of Science (OUP 2019). He co-leads the Ordered Universe project, a large interdisciplinary re-examination of 13th century science. He has also contributed to the philosophy of emergence, and to research in cross-curricular education for post-16 pupils. From 2008 to 2014 he served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at Durham University and was from 2012-2015 Vice President for Science at the UK Institute of Physics, and from 2015-2020 Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. He is currently a Council Member of the Royal Society, a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation, and chair of Harvard University’s Knox postgraduate awards. He gives frequent public lectures in literature and science festivals, and in schools, on topics across the sciences and humanities, and regularly appears on local and national radio. One of the great sadnesses of 2020 was the tragic loss of former UK Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. His successor Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis embedded a marvellous anecdote about him in a subsequent BBC Radio 4 Thought for the Day. Sacks and George Carey, then Archbishop of 6 Canterbury, had struck up a firm friendship fuelled by their mutual support of Arsenal football club. So when their beloved team suffered a massive home defeat under their very noses, the Sun Newspaper claimed the débacle as final proof that God doesn’t exist. ‘On the contrary’, replied Sacks, ‘it is direct proof that God does exist, and furthermore that He supports Manchester United.’ The lesson: on the question of God and on how events in the world should be interpreted theologically, the Sun journalist had simply been looking the wrong way. Parallels with the question of God and the interpretation of those other real-world events revealed by science are clearly begging to be explored – but if they hold up, the news will be worse for us than for the Sun newspaper. For the pathological narratives of conflict and incompatibility around Religion and Science that have played out since Robert Boyle’s time indicate that we might have been ‘looking the wrong way’ on this question for over three centuries. What I want to argue today is that, in spite of the uncontested glories of science since the time of Boyle and Newton, that period saw some pivotal re-orientations in the interpretation and practice of science. And I want to suggest, although these moves seemed inevitable for science to work, that they always were arbitrary and unnecessary, even damaging to science, and that there are alternative framings, other ‘directions to look at the field of play’ if you like, under which science would better serve human flourishing, as well as find its place within a theological purpose and practice. To be more specific, I want to explore four of these ‘wrong-turns’: 1. A turn from human contemplation of nature as subjects immersed in the world, towards a formal but illusory objectivity. 7 2. A turn from the appreciation of imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, in partnership with reason, to an elevation of reason alone. 3. A turn from science as a shared cultural experience to a restricted and professional expertise. 4. A profound misreading of the Book of Nature - that traditional metaphor of the world as ‘God’s Second Book’. If we are to understand science theologically, I think we must rediscover how to read it, not as prose, but as poetry. Now I do realise that such a manifesto will appear rather obscure right now. I promise to do my best to unpack it, but to do so I must make a preliminary request: we will need to drop notions of the ‘boundaries of science’ – or indeed ‘boundaries of theology’ for that matter. For this disciplinary fragmentation - this territorialism - is part and parcel of the very early modern wrong-turns we are trying to correct. Our disciplinary boundary-making is, for our task, as futile as a geological expedition to Antarctica would be that focused on where to erect the political fences. In the past this fixation on frontiers has led, to take just one example, to our assumption that ‘science and religion’ questions must belong to apologetics. This pigeon-holing entirely misses the point that the theological consequences of the ability of humans to do science are profound. Profound and also beautiful. But it is high time that we heard in a Boyle Lecture from Robert Boyle himself! Boyle writes in The Christian Virtuoso, that ‘Being addicted to Experimental Philosophy, one is rather Assisted than Indisposed, to be a good Christian.’ The title that Boyle eventually chose for his book points to his direction of thought – it is not so much the results of scientific enquiry that he suggests nudge his readers towards the Christian story, but more the practice of it, and especially the devoted – ‘virtuous’, trained – ‘virtuosic’, open-eyed study of nature. Indeed, the title was originally to have been ‘Religion and Experience.’ Boyle’s emphasis on scientific experience serves as a way in to the first of our four ill-chosen modern re-orientations – to remind you: that of a pretence that humans can really act as 8 disconnected subjects over and above a physical reality of objects. Boyle knew very well – by experience – that truths about nature emerge from the immersion of observers in the world we seek to understand. Our text-books may insist on ‘framing’ science – here the art-gallery metaphor is very apposite – as a glazed image of truth before our gaze. But there are lessons from the practice of science that point to a much stronger coupling that conscious observers have with the objects they observe. By now a good fraction of folk listening will perhaps believe they hear the approaching rumble of a lorry-load of quantum physics - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the unavoidable change of quantum states when these are observed, and so on. But the immersed and strongly-coupled nature of all scientific descriptions of the world doesn’t depend on quantum mechanics at all.
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