Chapter One

Science and Christianity: strange bedfellows?

Some might consider it strange to begin a book about the truth of Christianity by talking about science. Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?

Science certainly raises important and unavoidable questions for Christians. There are two that are most important in my opinion. Firstly, how do we interpret the Bible in the light of modern scientific discoveries? The first few chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, contain the two creation stories, the story of the great flood, and of the tower of Babel. This is the so-called primordial history, which seems to tell a very different story to the one told by science. Secondly, and most seriously, what are we to make of the theory of evolution by natural selection. This tells us, plausibly, that human life came about through a process, natural selection, which is in itself, undesigned, purposeless and meaningless, and as Richard Dawkins puts it, acts with ‘blind, pitiless, indifference’ (Dawkins, 133).

Evolution by natural selection is not just a challenge to Christianity but to any attempt to make sense out of human existence. These questions cannot be dismissed, and we will come to them in later chapters. However, there are some questions that can be dismissed quite safely and we will deal with those first.

 

The conflict thesis: are Christianity and science mortal enemies?

Many people take the view that, not only has science disproved Christianity, but that every time science makes an advance, Christianity is forced to retreat even further than it already has. This has always been the story of science and faith, they say: science advances, Christianity retreats. Many believe that Christianity has always opposed scientific advances, either by banning books, trying to prevent science being taught in school and universities, or sometimes by using persecution and violence, all in a desperate and futile attempt to resist the advance of scientific knowledge. The two examples usually quoted to support such a view are both legal trials. Lawfare is clearly not a new thing. The trial of Galileo aforementioned is the most famous of all, but it is followed not too far behind by the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’. The later was named after John Scopes, a school teacher in the US, who in 1925 was put on trial for teaching human evolution. At the time this was illegal in public schools in the state of Tennessee where he was teaching. The trial was a media sensation, needless to say. These events certainly happened and there are plenty other incidents of religious opposition to scientific advance that occurred in history. The view that these events typify the history of the relationship between science and religion is called the ‘conflict thesis’. It is not a view that would be held by many historians today; a more balanced view is favoured (Brooke, 5, 411; Poole, 89).

Poole quotes Colin Russell, professor of the history of science and technology.

… to portray them [science and religion] as persistently in conflict is not only historically inaccurate, but actually a caricature so grotesque that what needs to be explained is how it could possibly have achieved any degree of respectability (Poole, 89).

That this view, nevertheless, remains very commonplace is in no small part down to two notorious 19^th century works of anti-Christian propaganda which became and remain very influential.

There are some good arguments for the view that Christianity and science are incompatible, some bad ones, and some truly terrible ones. Most prominent amongst the third category are these two books. They are: A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White (1896), and John William Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874). In spite of their flaws, the books were a huge success. Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says that Draper’s book, ‘succeeded as few others do. It fixed in the educated mind the idea the “science” stood for freedom and progress against the superstition and repression of “religion”. Its viewpoint became conventional wisdom.’ In the United States the book had 50 reprintings in 50 years, and in the UK, 21 in 15 years, and it was translated worldwide (Russell, 38, 41).

The titles of the books are helpful in that they describe accurately what you can expect if you read on. Sadly, it’s all downhill from there. Accurate would be the last word you would use to describe the actual contents of the books. Jeffrey Burton Russell (no relation of Colin Russell) writes:

Draper’s description of the church fathers’ cosmological views failed even as caricature. He despised St Augustine particularly, attributing to him views more appropriate to a dim nineteenth-century non-conformist preacher (Russell, 40).

St Augustine’s most famous quote is, ‘Lord, make me chaste, but not yet’, describing the prayer of his younger self in his book Confessions. Augustine’s output was vast. He was certainly one of the greatest intellects of his age, arguably the greatest. It’s fair to say that Augustine was not dim, and whether you agree with his views or not, they were not dim either. We will meet him again. White is similarly guilty of misrepresenting his subjects (Russell, 44).

Both Draper and White were rather distinguished people and should have known better. White was one of the founders of Cornell University and John William Draper became professor of chemistry and biology at New York’s university, and eventually head of the medical school. Both books proport to be careful, evidence-based histories of the relationship between science and religion but they most certainly are not (Brooke, 33-42; Hutchings and Ungureanu, 15).

Historian of science James Hannam says of Andrew Dickson White:

The hordes of footnotes that mill around at the bottom of each page of his book give the illusion of meticulous scholarship. But anyone who checks his references will wonder how he could have maintained his opinions if had read as much as he had claimed to have done (Hannam, 4).

The best known of the many errors that Draper and White promoted is the spurious tale that the church in the Middle Ages taught that the earth was flat. This idea, widely believed even today, started out its life as a piece of anti-Christian propaganda. The idea of course was to say: ‘look at those stupid, ignorant Christians believing the earth is flat. They are always opposing science with their superstitious nonsense!’ They did not invent the story; that seems to have come from various sources. Even Washington Irving, author of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the story of Rip van Winkle, got in on the act in his 1828 book A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Russell, 51-58). The book has Columbus being solemnly warned at a ‘Council of Salamanca’ by foolish clergymen, who believed that the earth was flat, that his voyage was impossible. There was indeed a meeting at Salamanca in 1486 but Irving’s story is ‘pure moonshine’. There was a dispute about the viability of Columbus’ proposed voyage at the time. But Columbus was not warned that, since that the earth was flat, if he sailed far enough west, he would fall of the edge of the world (Ha, ha, very funny!) Columbus was warned that the earth was much bigger that he claimed, and that therefore his proposed journey was impossibly long, and that he would simply get lost in the middle of the ocean and perish. This warning was correct. If Columbus had not, by an enormous stroke of luck, bumped into the Americas on the way to the Indies, his intended destination, then he would have got lost in the middle of the ocean and perished. Irving was a writer of historical fiction. He was also something of a prankster. He published his book A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the Dutch Dynasty in 1809. It was a satire on pompous and pedantic historians and was written, apparently, by Diederich Knickerbocker! Irving went to considerable efforts to persuade the public that Knickerbocker was a real person (Russell, 52). Given all this, people probably should have been more careful about taking him at his word!

Irving may have been a prankster, but Draper’s and White’s books were supposed to be serious.

Both Draper and White repeated the flat Earth story. The story thus found its way into school books, history books and other places, and soon it became so commonplace that it was established as a ‘fact’ (Russell, 27-28; 40-46; Hutchings and Ungureanu, 58-59). Historians have tried hard to correct the idea that people in the Middle Ages believed the earth was flat, but with limited success. Russell quotes from a 1982 school text book from the US called We the People.

The European sailor of a thousand years ago had many strange beliefs. He turned to those beliefs because he had no other way to explain the dangers of the unknown sea. He believed … that a ship could sail out to sea just so far before it fell off the edge of the sea … (Russell, 3)

Oh dear. It is astonishing how often this ‘Tale of the Flat Earth’ is repeated even now. In the time it took me to write this chapter I read it in an article in a respectable political magazine, and heard it in two separate unrelated scientific podcasts. In all three cases the story was repeated by highly intelligent, educated people. The message that the story is nonsense has clearly not got through yet. You can blame Dickson and White for that. The reality is that almost no educated person in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat; clergy, foolish or otherwise, included (Russell, 70). Indeed, the fact that the earth is a sphere was well known in the ancient world, long before Columbus. The Greek mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene who lived in the third century BC famously calculated the circumference of the earth to within five percent of the true value. I used to get my students to do a simplified version of the calculation in my physics class at school. The idea is to measure the length of a shadow cast by the sun on the day of the summer solstice in two different places at the same longitude, but with one location further south. The two cities used in antiquity were Alexandria and Syene (modern Aswan). The result then follows from high school trigonometry. That’s twice school trigonometry has turned out to be not just useful but history making in just a few pages. When less enthusiastic maths students say, ‘But sir, what’s the use of all of this?’ I think to myself, ‘If only you knew!’

I tell the story of Draper and White as a cautionary tale. Religious people are capable of producing arguments which are based on wishful thinking, selective use of the evidence, a reluctance to give up on long held beliefs in spite of the evidence against them, self-deception and indeed actual deception, self-interest and so on. This story illustrates that anti-religious people are equally capable. Just because people claim their arguments are based on science, evidence and reason, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are. Take nobody’s word for it; and that includes both Christians and anti-Christians. Arguments, and histories, should always be judged by their merits.

A well-known example of a book which is a careful, evidence-based history of the relationship between science and religion is: Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives by John Hedley Brooke. He says this:

Serious scholarship in the history of science has revealed so extraordinarily rich and complex a relationship between science and religion in the past that general theses are difficult to sustain. The real lesson turns out to be the complexity. Members of the Christian churches have not all been obscurantists; many scientists of stature have professed a religious faith, even if their theology was sometimes suspect. Conflicts allegedly between science and religion may turn out to be between rival scientific interests or conversely between rival theological factions. Issues of political power, social prestige and intellectual authority have repeatedly been at stake. And the histories written by protagonists have reflected their own preoccupations. In his efforts to boost the profile of a rapidly professionalising scientific community at the expense of the cultural and educational leadership of the clergy Darwin’s champion, T.H. Huxley found a conflict model congenial. Extinguished theologians, he declared, lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes besides that of Hercules (Brooke, 5).

The relationship between Science and Christianity has often been fraught, but contrary to the view of Draper, White, Huxley and other supporters of the Conflict Thesis, it has also been highly productive. Many would argue that it was Christianity which provided the cultural and intellectual environment which enabled the scientific world view to emerge (Hannam, esp. 337-342; Barbour, 44-50; Lennox, 20–23). Whatever you might think of that claim, it is undeniably the case that it was mediaeval and early modern Europe, that is to say historic Christendom, that was the birthplace of modern science. This was in spite of Europe being in many ways rather backward compared to other parts of the world. Europeans did not, of course, start modern science from scratch. They were building on the scientific and mathematical knowledge of the ancient world and on innovations which came from the Islamic world and beyond. Nevertheless, it was Christendom which gave modern science to the world. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. After all, as any scientific person will point out, things don’t happen without a reason.

As Brooke notes, many scientists of stature have professed a religious faith. It’s worth naming some of the most famous ones. There are many others.

• Copernicus was a priest and canon of the cathedral at Frauenburg.
• Kepler was a man a profound faith whose work was inspired and motivated by his Christianity. As he put it in his Astronomis Nova de Motibus published in 1609: ‘The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics’.
• The father of physics, Isaac Newton was deeply religious, albeit in an unorthodox way.
• Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, was an entirely orthodox and devout catholic. Madame Lavoisier, it should be noted, made important contributions alongside her husband.
• Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was a monk. OK, that’s enough fathers now!
• My personal favourite scientific hero is Michael Faraday. His father was a blacksmith. He was only educated to primary school level; the rest he mostly taught himself. He laid the foundation of the science of electricity and magnetism and is as great a scientist as any in history. Read his story and visit his museum at the Royal Institution in London. He is truly an inspiration. He was a lay preacher in his denomination, the Sandemanians, and his faith was central to his life.
• My final example is Georges Lemaître , priest, mathematician, astronomer and father of the Big Bang Theory. Sorry, I promised that there would be no more fathers, but hey, why shouldn’t he have the honour too! More about him later.

As well as these examples from history, there are also many distinguished scientists today who are committed Christians (Poole, 7, 86)

Christians have sometimes in the past made the mistake of trying to stand Canute like in the way of scientific progress. I think most have learned their lesson now. A faith seeking understanding will not fear evidence, or reason, or the advance of scientific knowledge.

 

Believing with evidence

Let’s return to the idea that the word faith means ‘believing things without evidence’. It seems to me that to say that faith means ‘believing things without evidence’ is actually rather an odd thing to say. I suspect that no one in the entire history of the earth has ever said: ‘Oh, I believe that, but there’s no evidence for it’. When I was a boy, my parents took me to a lecture by Patrick Moore, the astronomer and TV personality, who presented the astronomy TV program The Sky at Night from 1957 – 2013. It is the longest running TV show with the same presenter in history and it is still going strong with different presenters. There were questions allowed at the end of the lecture, and one gentleman with a very strong Devon accent asked him what he thought of the books of Erik von Daniken. These claim, amongst other things, that the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Moai of Easter Island could not possibly have been built by humans with the technology available in the ancient world, and that therefore they must have been built with the help of aliens. His books were, of course, regarded as nonsense by scientists and historians, but they were wildly popular and sold by the millions. The best known is Chariots of the Gods: was God an Astronaut? published in 1968. Last time I looked in my local book shop I noticed that it was still on sale! It made me feel all nostalgic. In von Daniken’s view, to the people of the ancient world, the aliens appeared to be gods, and this explains their religious beliefs; hence the title of the book. The chariots of the gods were really spaceships. Patrick Moore told him that he never answered questions about von Daniken and moved on to the next questioner. But the man with the accent was not so easily rebuffed. ‘But how can you ignore the evidence?’ he said. ‘There is no evidence,’ said Patrick Moore. Personally, I think Sir Patrick should have stuck to his guns and refused to discuss it. I quite understand why he did not want to be drawn in to a discussion about aliens building the pyramids. It would have ended up using the whole of the rest of the time available and achieved nothing; but it’s not as simple as, ‘there is no evidence’. Many would regard von Daniken’s ideas as ludicrous and dismiss them on that basis, but the trouble is that ‘ludicrous’ is rather a subjective judgement. Although von Daniken’s ideas are certainly cranky and his interpretation of the evidence, such as it is, is fanciful to say the least, von Daniken and many of his readers thought there was evidence. Everyone thinks that there is evidence for the things they believe. So, what do you do?

You could spend time reading Chariots of the Gods and examine the ‘evidence’. You would no doubt find it unconvincing, but you would not then have dismissed it out of hand, which is all well and good. The trouble, obviously, is that lots of people believe all sorts of different things. How much time do you invest in considering the evidence for these different ideas? And which ideas do you consider; there are so many of them. You can’t look at them all. In practice, there are lots of ideas and beliefs that you will have to just dismiss out of hand. The problem is much worse now than it was in those days. For me at least, then, there was von Daniken and there was The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (published in 1982), and that was pretty much it as far as weird and wacky theories went; or rather, those are the ones that I remember from the halcyon days of my youth. There were lots of others on the margins which I don’t remember coming across at the time. Some of them are catalogued by Martin Gardner in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Gardner).

And yes, I know, lots of people would regard Christianity as weird and wacky. It’s a fair point, but let’s continue nevertheless. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a somewhat bizarre reinterpretation of the history of the Christian faith based on a hodgepodge of different historical conspiracy theories, including the so called ‘alternative’ gospels. The ideas in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code bear more than a passing resemblance to those in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The authors sued Dan Brown’s publisher for nicking their ideas, unsuccessfully. In fact, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail spawned a whole new sub-genre of its own. Every few years another book promoting an ‘alternative’ gospel conspiracy theory is published, some more learned than others. I just read a review of the latest one: Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God by Catherine Nixey. In fact, another one, by historian Paula Fredriksen, is in the pipeline as I write: Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years. Just like London buses, there’ll be another one along in minute. We’ll come back to these ‘alternative’ gospels and Christianities in chapter eleven. At least books like Chariots of the Gods and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail were entertaining; and if nothing else, they were an education in how to tell the difference between a valid argument and the dark arts of persuasion.  

On the religion front, Christianity was by no means the only game in town. It was trendy to have an interest in eastern religions. The Beatles got involved rather disastrously with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and musicians such as Danny Thompson and Cat Stevens became Muslims. On the whole, though, if people were interested in God, they still tended to look to Christianity and not worry too much about the others.

The situation now, thanks to a combination the internet, digital media, and mass migration is overwhelmingly more complicated. There isn’t necessarily more weird and wacky stuff in existence now as there was in 1957 when Martin Gardner wrote his book, but we have more access to it; or it has more access to us, one or the other. There is information overload everywhere; ideas political, historical, philosophical, religious, and of course extraterrestrial; they all want our attention. Much of the ‘content’ we now have access to is misinformation of one sort or another. Much of it is well meaning but just isn’t very good; and much of it is just nuts. A large proportion of the material on the internet and digital media makes Chariots of the Gods and the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail look like islands of sanity in an ocean of madness by comparison. In the sprawling mass market of ideas, good, bad, and appalling that now exists, how do you choose?

And no one could now pretend that Christianity is the only religion even if they wanted to. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism are the mainstream ones, but then there’s the Scientologists, the Mormons, and all the rest. They all have their supporters and they can’t all be true. You can’t blame people for just giving up on the whole thing. There are various giving up options, religiously speaking. You can just keep the beliefs you grew up with, and ignore all the rest. You can go fundamentalist and ignore all the rest. Or you can say, I’m not religious, I’m spiritual, and just play it by ear. Popular option that last one.

Given all of this, why invest time and effort into investigating the evidence for Christianity? It’s not an easy question to answer; but after a very long period of time in which Christianity was seen as yesterday’s old news, as an embarrassment, and sometimes even treated with something approaching hostility, significant people are reconsidering its truth claims. Something seems to have changed. Suddenly, it seems possible to talk about Christian faith as a living reality and not just as a dying relic of the past.

For example, Justin Brierley in his book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God asks if we are witnessing a return of belief in our generation. He notes that Jordan Peterson, Tom Holland, Dave Rubin, and many others have found themselves surprised by the continuing resonance of the Christian faith. People are returning to Christianity and there’s a new conversation building on whether God makes sense of science, history, culture, and the search for meaning. There are signs that the sea of faith has gone out as far as it can, and now the tide is coming in again, he says.

In their book Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity editors Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath describe conversations with twelve men and women from five different countries across a variety of professions: philosophers, artists, historians, engineers, scientists, and more; who explain their disillusionment with the so-called new atheism, and their journey from atheism to faith.

Jordan Peterson has reignited an interest in the stories of the Bible in his podcasts and in his latest book We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, formerly a prominent new atheist, has found a Christian faith, and has spoken about it publicly with obvious sincerity. Alex O’ Connor is an atheist, but in his popular podcasts he has serious conversations about religious matters of a kind that we didn’t see until relatively recently. If you are now looking again at Christianity, or looking at it for the first time, then you are not alone.

I’m not going to worry here about who built the pyramids, or any of the rest of it. We will just look at the evidence for Christianity. If you have got this far, then you must have decided that this is one idea which is worth your consideration, so let’s proceed.

What is the evidence for Christianity? There are four categories of evidence which I consider in this book:

• the classic arguments for the existence of God
• evidence from science – with special reference to cosmological fine tuning
• the moral argument – an extended version to include beauty and spirituality
• evidence from the scriptures – viewed as historical documents

These do not provide us with knowledge which is infallible, unlimited, complete, and based only on things which are self-evidently true but, as we have seen, we don’t set the bar that high even for science.

 

Summary

According to the ‘conflict thesis’, Christianity has always opposed scientific advances either by banning books, trying to prevent science being taught in school and universities, or sometimes by using persecution and violence, all in a desperate and futile attempt to resist the advance of scientific knowledge. The conflict thesis is a widely held view amongst the general public, but it is not one favoured by historians.

The relationship between Science and Christianity has often been fraught, but contrary to the view of supporters of the conflict thesis, it has also been highly productive. This conflict thesis is largely a product of 19^th century anti-Christian propaganda. This fact is illustrated by the spurious but widely believed story of the ‘flat Earth’. Many of the pioneers of science were not just conventionally Christian in accordance with the times they lived in. Their faith was deep and both motivated and informed their science. This is also true of many leading scientists today.

In the age of the internet, we are surrounded by all kinds of ideas and beliefs. The supporters of these ideas all claim that there is evidence for their beliefs, but they can’t all be true. Which ideas should we take seriously? It’s not easy to know, but if you are today looking again at the evidence Christianity, or looking at it for the first time, you are not alone.

 

Works Cited

Barbour, Ian G. Issues in science and religion. Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.

Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995

Hannam, James. God’s Philosophers: How the medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Icon Books, 2010.

Hutchings, David and James C. Ungureanu. Of Popes and Unicorns: Science, Christianity, and How the Conflict Thesis Fooled the World OUP USA, 2021.

Lennox, John. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God. Lion Books, 2009.

Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. 2nd Revised edition, Dover Publications 1957

Poole, Michael. User’s Guide to Science and Belief. 3^rd ed., Lion Hudson plc 2007

Russell, Jeffery Burton. Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. Praeger Publishers, 1991.