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31 August 2003
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Truth, a fictional conflict and the need for Christian morality
Thomas Huxley ... ‘Darwin’s bulldog’
Edited from an address by the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr George Pell, to the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship at Parliament House, Canberra
As anyone with experience of the media understands, those who can cloak their politics in the garb of science have a considerable advantage, especially over people like ourselves who are lumbered with religious opinions.
This is true even when the opinions of religious people are supported by science.
Last year’s debate on stem cell research provides just one example of this.
Proponents of destructive embryo research and cloning, often with considerable financial interests in the research they were advocating, regularly attempted to dismiss the concerns voiced by the Churches and by politicians and specialists with any sort of faith commitment as “religious” (and therefore “unscientific”) views, which should not be imposed by law on the country as a whole.
Some even went so far as to suggest that “religious” opinions as such had no place at all in debates on public policy, and should certainly be excluded from any discussion of scientific questions.
This argument is not valid for a number of reasons.
To begin with, the Churches are in no position to impose their views on anybody.
This is not just a recent development, and despite my reputation it is not something that I lament.
On the other hand Christians, individually and collectively, have the same rights as any other citizens in a democracy to express their views.
One such right of the Churches and of believers in a democracy is to propose the bedrock principles for the common good, human rights, and a just political and social order.
This duty and right is not abridged when the discussion turns to questions of science and technology, although it does require us to know what we are talking about.
More importantly, Christian arguments against destructive embryo research are not based solely on scripture or revelation.
You don’t have to be a Christian to believe that human life has a unique dignity that should be protected and respected from its earliest origins. This conviction is not in any sense irrational, and it is based as much on what science itself shows us about life at its earliest stages as it is on God’s goodness and love as the Creator of life.
It is a strange situation to have to defend this principle of the dignity of human life against the charge that it is “unscientific”, although on other issues, such as euthanasia and abortion, it is a charge which the defenders of the dignity of human life, whether they are believers or not, increasingly have to refute.
And it gets stranger. Medical science has continually pushed back the age at which premature babies can be saved, including babies who have survived abortion.
This great gift of science has led some abortion activists to insist that abortion is not just the “right” to terminate a pregnancy, but the “right” to “the extinction of the foetus”.
And those who oppose this continue to be described as “unscientific”, all of which highlights that the political manipulation of science is well and truly with us, and is not something new.
In fact, it is one of the oldest games in town.
In a new book, For the glory of God, American sociologist Rodney Stark documents not just how Christianity made science in the West possible, but also how - beginning in the 18th century - hostile non-believers and (non-scientists) such as Voltaire, Diderot and Gibbon helped create the dramatic fiction of an implacable conflict between Christianity and science.
Outside the realms of specialist historians and sociologists of science where it has been completely dismissed, this fiction remains in place largely undisturbed, and it continues to distort significantly public understanding of both religion and science.
For example, to the extent that most people know anything about Christopher Columbus, they know he discovered America and proved that the world was round in the face of opposition from the Church, which insisted that the world was flat.
But as Stark makes very clear, “every educated person of the time, including Roman Catholic prelates, knew the earth was round”, and this knowledge went back to at least the Ven Bede in the seventh and eighth centuries. If there was any opposition to Columbus’ voyage, it was “only on the grounds that he had badly underestimated the circumference of the earth and was counting on too short a voyage ... Had the Western Hemisphere not existed, and Columbus had no knowledge that it did, he and his crew would have died at sea”.
To take another famous example: most educated people have heard of the famous debate at Oxford in 1860 between the Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and “Darwin’s bulldog”, Thomas Henry Huxley, over the question of evolution.
Wilberforce is said to have made a fool of himself by asking Huxley “was it through his grandfatheror grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey”, and in responding Huxley had the better of it.
This line of “Soapy Sam’s” has always been a personal favourite for me, and I was almost disappointed to learn that the whole account of this debate from which it is drawn - and which has been quoted as gospel in every serious biography of Darwin - is fictional, and was shown to be fictional more than 20 years ago.
This particular account was written almost 40 years after the event and is at odds with all other accounts of this debate.
There was no mention of monkey ancestors and, far from being humiliated, many thought Wilberforce won the debate, with even committed Darwinians conceding at least a draw.
Wilberforce, who was no fool (he took a first in mathematics at Oxford), had written a scholarly review of The Origin of Species which Darwin himself described as “uncommonly clever” and making “a very telling case against me”.
How this legend came to have such great currency is a story in itself. Far from being unsettled by the discoveries of science, Wilberforce was one of many learned and thoughtful religious leaders of the time who saw in the work of people like Darwin further evidence for the argument that life and the world are designed and created by God.
It was precisely this argument which infuriated Huxley (and discomfited Darwin). The sticking point was - and remains - the role of God.
The argument between religion and science in the second half of the 19th century was not caused by religion’s opposition to science, but by partisans of a particular kind of atheistic science who insisted that people of faith “accept the untrue and unscientific claim that Darwin had proved that God played no role in the process [of evolution]”.
Naturally, and for good scientific reasons, believers refused to accept this demand. Thus Huxley and his friends got the fight they wanted, and it continues to this day, while poor Wilberforce continues to be maligned as someone who “must have been wrong and a fool because he was a bishop”.
Stark also argues that there would have been no science as we know it today without Christianity and the biblical revelation of an intelligent and rational Creator God.
He claims that it is “the consensus among contemporary historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science that real science arose only once: in Europe”.
Science is not just technology or engineering. Nor is it simply empiricism. Rather it provides abstract theoretical explanations based on and tested against empirical observation.
Ancient Greece and Rome, China, India and the Islamic world developed knowledge, skills, crafts and techniques, but they did not develop science because “their empiricism was quite atheoretical and their theorising was non-empirical”.
Many of these cultures had highly developed systems of alchemy and astrology, but only in Europe did they lead to what we know today as chemistry and astronomy.
And the reason for this is that only in Europe was God understood as a personal and rational being who had created the universe. Each of these attributes is crucial.
In the other great cultures I have just mentioned God was understood either as an “essence” rather than a being (for this reason Stark speaks of the “godless religion” of the elites in the parts of Asia), or as wilful or arbitrary (the case in Islam and the Greco-Roman world respectively); often in combination with a belief that the world is eternal and uncreated, and therefore a supreme mystery.
Nor did Europe have to wait for the Reformation or the Renaissance for science to blossom.
The flowering of science in the 16th and 17th centuries, undoubtedly encouraged by the Protestant Reformation, was only made possible by the earlier work of the Catholic Scholastics (thinkers and theologians) in the medieval era and by the technological advances that arose from centuries of interaction between Christianity and the Germanic tribes who eventually absorbed the Roman Empire.
Medieval Europe made considerable progress in both philosophy and science, so that by the late 13th century its science and technology far surpassed anything that could be found anywhere else in the world.
Science was also carefully nurtured in that most Catholic and medieval invention, the university. Religion in Europe put fewer impediments in the way of science than it did in other places.
Einstein once famously remarked that “science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind”. This does not mean that scientists must include God in their cosmologies, or that believers must conform their beliefs to the latest scientific breakthrough.
But it does highlight what each has to offer the other in their common pursuit of the truth.
Stark’s book makes it very clear that the normal relationship between science and religion throughout most of history has been one of fruitful interaction.
The origins of science in Christian theology underscore the inherent compatibility of science and faith, and this needs to be rediscovered. I suspect that science is in greater need of this rediscovery than faith, because by itself science cannot answer questions of value and so distinguish benevolent from malevolent purposes.
To date it has been living off an overdraft on its unacknowledged Christian origins.
This has meant that for the most part its work has been directed to benevolent purposes.
But the 20th century provided some horrifying examples of what science can do when it is cut off from values which emphasise the dignity and value of the human person. Science based exclusively on materialist assumptions insists that humans are really only another type of animal.
It is only the lingering influence of Christian values in secularised form that prevents secular people from drawing the logical conclusion of this claim and treating each other only as animals.
Science only developed once in history and this was in Christian Europe.
The debate is not between science and religion, but about how society decides what scientific activities are legitimate. The debate is between contrasting moralities.
The contrived conflict between religion and science has had a distorting effect not only on religion and science, but also on politics.
Our democracy can only be stronger and better for putting an end to it, because democracy needs morality and Western democracy needs Christian morality.