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.