Trinity Papers No. 26 - ''Christianity and ...': Possibilities for Dialogue'

‘CHRISTIANITY AND…’ POSSIBILITIES FOR DIALOGUE by

REVD PROFESSOR KEITH WARD

Public Lectures delivered at Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, by the 2003 Frank Woods Fellow of the Trinity College Theological School 3 and 21 March 2003

TRINITY PAPERS NUMBER 26 – MARCH 2004 ROYAL PARADE PARKVILLE VICTORIA 3052 A USTRALIA · TELEPHONE +61 3 9348 7100 · FACSIMILE +61 3 9348 7610 E-MAIL enquiries@trinity.unimelb.edu.au · WEBSITE www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au

‘Christianity and…’

Keith Ward

CONTENTS

Prefatory Note

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The Cosmic Christ and the Scientific Worldview

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The United Faculty of Theology 2003 Commencement Lecture

Christianity and Islam: An Inevitable Clash?

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Public Lecture

About Trinity Papers

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About the Author

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Prefatory Note

The two lectures that make up this volume of Trinity Papers were delivered during the Revd Professor Keith Ward’s visit to Trinity College, the University of Melbourne, as the College’s Frank Woods Fellow for 2003.

Professor Ward, who was at the time of his visit the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, has had a distinguished career as a clergyman and academic theologian. Prior to his appointment to Oxford, he taught at the Universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew’s and London, and also held visiting professorships at Duke University, Claremont Graduate School and the University of Tulsa.

These lectures reflect two of Professor Ward’s principal areas of research and teaching: inter-faith dialogue, and the interface between science and religion. They also reflect his remarkable ability to infuse his teaching with vitality, warmth and erudition, irrespective of the audience. The first, delivered to a principally theological audience, nonetheless avoids the risk of allowing theology to become too serious. The second, for which the audience was rather more diverse, illustrates Professor Ward’s remarkable ability to foster dialogue and a commonality of purpose.

Simply put, the title of this volume—‘Christianity and…’ Possibilities for Dialogue—hopefully captures this very spirit of frank exchange and commonality which characterized Revd Professor Ward’s lectures and, indeed, his entire visit.

Dr Mark R. Lindsay Director of Academic Studies Trinity College

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The Cosmic Christ and the Scientific Worldview The United Faculty of Theology 2003 Commencement Lecture delivered by Revd Professor Keith Ward at Trinity College, 7 March 2003

When I was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford twelve years ago, it happened that there was a debate in the press in Britain about the story of Christmas—the usual thing about the myths and legends about the three wise men and so on. Having endured a desultory correspondence on the issue, and feeling in a skittish mood, I wrote a spoof letter to The Independent, saying that I know that there are three wise men because I’ve been to Cologne Cathedral and I’ve seen their tombs, and I can vouch for the fact that they’re there. Richard Dawkins, the Professor at Oxford for the Public Understanding of Science or, as some of us call him, the Professor for the Public Misunderstanding of Religion, wrote to The Independent and said, ‘What a disgraceful professor this is! Theology shouldn’t exist. He ought to resign immediately. It’s disgusting.’ That was my introduction to the world of religion and science. We have since then had a number of public debates in Oxford, which he has usually won. Nevertheless, it’s been an interesting experience. Professor Dawkins is totally opposed to religion which, of course, gives you the idea—an idea that he would be very pleased to encourage—that there is some sort of war between religion and science, so that the scientific worldview is intrinsically opposed to the religious worldview. That’s what I want to explore: What is the scientific worldview?

What is its relation to religion and specifically to the Christian worldview?

There are two sorts of scientific worldview. There’s what you might call a soft one, which is simply what scientists generally say. And then there’s a hard one, which is what the really tough guys in science say—people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and others too, who make the claim that science is intrinsically atheistic or naturalistic, excluding by definition all reference to supernatural realities.

Let’s start with the soft version. The soft version is how most contemporary scientists see the world. It must be said straight away that the way that contemporary scientists see the world is very different from the way anybody could have seen it in biblical times. Nobody guessed in biblical times that human life had evolved over millions of years. Nobody guessed that the universe was very large in extent and so very old. The view of the cosmos has changed a lot since the Bible was written. How much that matters remains to be seen, but it’s certainly true.

What would a scientist say about the size and age of the cosmos? Well, on the whole, the scientific view is that the universe began between fifteen and eighteen billion years ago with the well-known ‘big bang’. If you were inclined toward the hard scientific view you would say it began by chance, or a variant on this is to say that it

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began by some sort of necessity. One of the favourite theories is John Wheeler’s Many Worlds theory, that there are all the sorts of possible universes there could be, generated from the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. This is, of course, one of those possible universes, so if you run through all the possibilities there could ever be, this world is bound to exist sooner or later. The universe thus comes into being by a combination of necessity and chance. It’s necessary that you run through the combinations of possible universes. It’s chance that we happen to live in this one.

There’s a great difficulty about whether this is really an explanation or not, or whether it is more of a ‘just-so’ story for the modern age. Stephen Hawking has written probably one of the best-selling unread books of all time, A Brief History of Time. I know very few people who have got to the end of it, and they didn’t read the middle.

Stephen Hawking will always refuse to talk about God in public and this can be misunderstood as a version of atheism. One of his humorous comments in A Brief History of Time is that a modern cosmologist looking at the generation of the universe fifteen thousand million years ago would say, ‘well there’s nothing left for God to do’, the universe was generated by random fluctuations in a vacuum (whatever that means). As a good friend of mine in physics tends to say, ‘After two pints, you think you know what it means’. But what it is suggesting is that somehow the mathematics seems to work on its own, producing a universe out of its own dynamic processes, so there’s nothing left for God to do. Some people have taken that as a real expression of Stephen Hawking’s view. Let me tell you, it’s not his real view. It was a joke, or at the very least a wild supposition! It’s simply that people never know when physicists are telling jokes.

But, of course, the role of God in creation does remain a bit of a mystery. Is it the case that you don’t need God, that God is superfluous because you can get a mathematical explanation, what people call a theory of everything, which would somehow explain the generation of the universe itself? Or, is it the case that there is something extraordinary about the fact that this universe, with its very finely tuned constants—gravitational constants, cosmological constants, and so on—comes to generate human life? The soft scientific worldview would not make any statement about that, since it lies beyond the limits of normal physical theory. But many physicists do find the intricately structured form of the universe suggestive of a sort of immaterial reality of some sort. For example, Einstein, who generated one of the most influential contemporary physical theories—the theory of relativity— used to talk about what he called ‘the old one’ or ‘the wise one’, underlying the structure of the cosmos. He did think it was pretty clear to a physicist that the universe looked as though it was intelligently designed. He just couldn’t see that had anything to do with God. Yes, there is a vast intelligence behind the universe, but why go to the synagogue to say so? Or, why go to the Church to say, ‘yes, there’s a great intelligence up there. Good. I’m glad about that.’ What has prayer got to do with that?

So, physicists find it difficult to see the point of prayer. They can’t do experiments on it, or if you do experiments on it it’s a mistake, and you shouldn’t. Nevertheless, a great number of physicists think that this universe is not just an accident, that there is a deep intelligibility to it. So, there is something there which is not just accidental, but somehow necessary, and uncannily mind-like.

Paul Davies, a well-known mathematical physicist who now lives in Australia, has written a book called The Mind of God. He is not himself a religious believer, but he

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says that when you look at the structure of the universe, you cannot but admit that it looks as though we were meant to be here, the universe was expecting us, it was set up so that we would exist. That’s an extraordinary view to come from an atheistic or non-religious philosopher. But, of course, Paul Davies actually says that the intelligent designer of the universe is different from and better than the God of the religious. So, again, there is a peculiar gap between the way that physicists look at God as a possible explanation of the universe and what goes on in places of worship.

There’s a gap which is quite hard to bridge.

However what I want to say at this point is simply that the scientific account of the genesis of the universe is not anti-religious. It’s not concerned with worship and prayer. It’s not concerned with the sort of God who can do things for you if you ask him to. But it is very much concerned with whether there is intelligibility and design in the structure of the universe itself. And I believe most physicists would say there does appear to be such a structure, that that’s the way it looks. Stephen Hawking would say that, Einstein certainly said that. Isaac Newton, of course, was a devout Christian, and Michael Faraday was a very sincere, believing man. Galileo was a devout Catholic, despite the legendary tales told about him. And Charles Darwin—did you know a rather unexpected fact about Charles Darwin? He actually wrote to the Church Missionary Society in Britain toward the end of his life, and said, ‘I’m going to send you money every year for the conversion of people in places like Australia’.

So, Charles Darwin wasn’t an out-and-out atheist. It’s difficult to tell the motivation for what he was doing. Perhaps he wanted to civilise the Antipodes, but whatever his motivation was at that time, he gave his money to the Church Missionary Society.

It is not true there is a war between the ‘soft’ or ordinary scientific worldview and the religious worldview. There is, however, a gap about how to get from what goes on in churches to this scientific view of the amazing complexity and intelligibility and elegance, the sheer elegance, of the universe. When Paul Dirac, the Cambridge quantum mechanist, was asked, ‘how did you discover the equations in quantum mechanics that reveal so much about the structure of the universe, how did you choose those equations?’, his answer was, ‘because they were the most beautiful ones’. Not all of us can appreciate that fully, but I assure you, to a mathematician there is beauty in mathematics and there is beauty in the structure of the universe. It is an extraordinary thing that the universe, mathematically speaking, is the most beautiful structure you can envisage. Physics is very much on the side of a religious view of the universe, if that is the view that the universe is deeply intelligible.

Remember here the Christian view—and this is a deeply Christian view—that the universe is created through the wisdom or the word of God, the logos in John’s gospel. In the beginning, there was the logos, the word, the word was with God, the word was God. Well, that’s the intelligibility of God. So, Christians have always thought the universe is founded on intelligible principles. It’s not a haphazard collection of things we can’t understand. It is wise because it is created through wisdom. In Colossians 1: 15-20, Paul writes that ‘Christ is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation, and that in him all things were created.’ And so there is this very deep Christian view that the whole universe was created through the wisdom of God. The whole universe is patterned on divine wisdom.

I don’t think that it’s an accident that modern science began in a Christian culture and that it flourished in a Christian culture, because it was in a Christian culture that

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people thought there is one wise God who creates the universe to be patterned on wisdom. Indeed, God has created us in the divine image so that we can understand that wisdom. Isaac Newton put it very well when he said, ‘What I’m doing is reading the wisdom of God in the stars’. So that what you see is not just random chaos or impersonal mathematics, you see the beauty and wisdom of a personal God holding the universe in being. The creation of the universe through wisdom is a deeply Christian view, and one that lies at the foundation of modern science.

So, why should people think there’s any sort of difficulty about science and religion?

Well, of course, the name that comes up is always that of Galileo. I’m not going to go into that debate in detail, but I will just say this. The quarrel—and there was a quarrel—was not between the Church and science. Galileo was a member of the Church. The quarrel was between two separate groups of scientists. One group was supported by the Church, and that was unfortunate. It was, as the Pope fairly recently admitted, a mistake. It took the Church three hundred years to admit that, but it got there. In fact, the quarrel was between Aristotelian physicists and the new-fangled experimental physicists like Galileo. The Aristotelian scholars, who were the scientific heavyweights at the time, were people who thought that Aristotle knew everything, so whatever Aristotle said was right, and Aristotle said the earth was the centre of the universe and the stars were all crystalline. It wasn’t in the Bible, but it was in Aristotle, and because of that the Church mistakenly got itself hooked up to old-fashioned science. So, what was wrong was not that religion was opposed to science, but that religion had tied its flag to one view of science which turned out to be wrong. That’s what went wrong. And, Galileo, of course, was right. He was the new sort of scientists who said, ‘actually, I think you ought to look at things and not just say “Aristotle was right”’. It may be obvious to us to want to look at things, but remember what Plato said about science. He had some hard words to say in his great dialogue, The Republic. He said that people get reincarnated according to what they’ve done in their previous life. If people are very stupid they might get turned into fish. What is an example of a stupid person? Well, said Plato, an example is somebody who thought he could find out about the movements of the stars by observation. So, that’s where the astronomers go: into the aquarium!

The Greek view was a perversion of rationalism. They were thinking, as we would now say correctly, that the way things go in the universe is elegant and beautiful.

They got that right. But, they thought they knew what was elegant and beautiful without looking. So they thought that planets had to move in perfect circles because that was the most beautiful thing to do. It may be that an ellipse is actually much more mathematically beautiful than a circle. But we had to look at the movements of the planets to find out how they actually move. And that was the great revolution, the biggest revolution, perhaps, in human thought, to say yes you need the mathematics, you need the beauty, you need the pure intelligibility. But you need the observation as well, and if you cannot experimentally verify your beautiful theories, they must be regarded with suspicion. That was what lay behind the Galileo dispute—whether science should be based on observation or not. It was nothing to do with religion, except to the extent that the Church at that time, for various reasons, had wrongly got itself involved with the authority of Aristotle. But, the lesson we can learn from that is you shouldn’t tie your religious flag too closely to the science of today because it might turn out to be wrong.

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Nonetheless, we have to go along with what the scientific worldview is, even if it is provisional, and even if next week something may come along which is quite different. The scientific worldview of the present day says that the cosmos has gone through a very long, evolutionary process from primeval plasma, energy, and light through the formation of the most simple atoms—hydrogen and helium. Then you need the explosion of the stars to form carbon. If you don’t have supernovae explosions, then you don’t get carbon-based life forms which, thanks to Star Trek, we all know that we are. So we have a long, evolutionary cosmic process. That fact was completely unknown to the writers of the Bible, but in fact it gives a deeper, more satisfying intellectual view of the wisdom of God in working the divine purpose out over millions and millions of years. And also over millions of light years of space because the size of the universe is going to be same as the age of the universe. Why? Because the universe is expanding as fast as it can. I’ll leave you to work that one out.

The size of the universe is the same as the age of the universe. So, the universe is going to be between fifteen and eighteen million light years across. And, it is. If you ever wonder why there is so much empty space in the universe, it is because the universe has been expanding for exactly the amount of time it took to generate rational (or fairly rational) life-forms like us by natural physical processes.

So much for the origin of the universe. But what about the end of the universe? Some people find this a bit of a problem. The scientific worldview says everything’s going to stop. In a few billion years, a few billion, billion, billion, billion years the universe will come to an end. So, some people think, it’s hardly had any point at all. The second law of thermodynamics, often called the law of entropy, says that energy will run down and things will move more and more slowly and then eventually dry up.

Now, physicists are in dispute with each other about whether the universe will expand and just go on expanding, getting thinner and thinner, or whether it will bounce back again and start all over again. But, either way, everything is going to cease to exist at some point. So, the universe is going to stop.

Some people say this undermines any religious view, because religion must in the end be optimistic about the universe. As a Jew or a Christian, you have to say that the Kingdom of God is coming, everything’s going to get better, that sometime there really will be a society of true justice and peace. If not now, then in a few billion years, at least. But the physicist says ‘no, it’s all going to get worse’. You’ve got a little bit of order on this planet, but the law of entropy is inexorable and chaos will reign in the end. So is that utter pessimism? Is the scientific worldview ultimately pessimistic? It partly depends what you think about things ceasing to exist. After all, we are all going to cease to exist at some stage. Should that make us say, ‘oh well, then nothing is worthwhile, I’ll be dead soon so let’s stop giving or listening to this lecture’? I’m sure some people feel like that, but might we not also think, ‘no, actually, if we’re going to die all the more reason for enjoying what there is now and saying what a good purpose that would be, to find meaning in things before they do cease to exist’. I think that’s a much better thought. It seems rather odd to say, ‘oh, I can’t stand it, the universe is going to end in twenty times ten to the nth power years.

I’m so depressed about that’. You’ll be dead long before that. It’s like listening to a Beethoven symphony and you saying, ‘yes, it’s all right so far, but it’s all going to end, isn’t it?’. That’s not a rational way to look at things. The rational way is to enjoy it while it is being played. It would seem curious to say that the end is what’s important. People get mixed up about this. They think that if the universe has a

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purpose, the purpose must come at the end of it. So, if at the end there’s nothing, then it didn’t have a purpose. Now, that is a very, very bad argument. The purpose doesn’t have to come at the end. The purpose of your life, whatever it is, is not your last minute. And you think, ‘well, gosh is that it? Was that the purpose of my life, this last minute?’ I hope it will be a very nice one. But, nevertheless, that will not be the purpose of your life. The purpose of your life will be what you’ve done during it. It’s the whole process of what you’ve made of the enormous gifts that creation does give to us. And, that’s the purpose of life. So, it’s got nothing to do with how it ends at all.

It is true, of course, that Christians believe in life beyond death. But, Christians don’t think that’s going to happen in this universe. They don’t think that at some point in the future we all come back to the earth again and we’ll all have super traffic jams and there’ll be so many people here they’ll be squashed up one against another. No, sensible Christians don’t think that. I think one or two do, but not sensible ones. Most Christians think there will be existence after death, but not in any sort of universe like this at all. It’ll be somewhere else. So, that this universe comes to an end is no different really from saying that we will come to end as physical organisms. It doesn’t take away the thought that there is a purpose.

What about the question, ‘scientifically speaking, is there a purpose in the existence of the universe at all?’ I suppose a physicist would have difficulty with that question, but it’s interesting to ask why they would. I’d say the answer is pretty simple and basic. A physicist doesn’t have an answer to the question because a physicist never asks that question. It is ruled out of physics. Rule one in doing physics is never ask what the purpose of anything is. That was what was wrong with Aristotelian physics.

That’s why science didn’t start earlier, because people asked the question ‘what is the purpose?’ Science only got started when people stopped asking that question and instead asked, ‘how does it work?’ Physics doesn’t deal with purposes. It’s not interested in them. It leaves them out. It doesn’t say there aren’t any. It just says, ‘I’m not asking that question’. And, if you think about questions like this you can see why it is that questions about purpose are questions about what you want, what you value, what you’re aiming at. Those questions don’t occur in physics. Physicists are, I’m told, human and when they’ve done their experiments, or written their equations on the backs of envelopes, then they go home to their families and they think, well what are the values that we’re going to try and encourage in our children? And, what are the things that we’re going to think are worthwhile in our own lives?’ They don’t say, ‘ah, just hang on, I’m going back to the lab and see if I can work this out with a couple of equations’. No, they say ‘that’s not a question for physics at all’.

One of the things that goes wrong in modern culture is the thought that only science can give you the answer to any human question. That is completely false. There are many things to which scientists can give you answers, but they can’t answer any of the human questions about what is of value—what is worthwhile, what is worth aiming at, and how am I going to live my life. Nothing in science will tell you that.

That’s a value question. And, questions of value are questions of purpose. You can say, ‘what’s my purpose?’ Then I think, ‘what are the values I’m aiming at?’ My purpose is the values I’m aiming at. And, if I don’t have any values then I don’t have any purpose. But, if I do have values then my purpose is to realise those values.

Purpose and values go together. Neither of them occurs in science. Scientists don’t ask ‘what is the value of this?’

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The important question of the value of human life is a question that cannot be answered by scientists, in principle. And yet, it’s the most important question each of us can ask. And that shows you immediately what’s wrong with the hard scientific worldview. The hard scientific worldview is the one that says science can answer all your questions and the only questions worth asking are the ones with scientific answers. I think we have to say that is false. It’s inhumane and subhuman because the most important question we have to ask at this time in the world is what are the values that we want to commit ourselves to and how can we implement those? We can’t just say what can we do with these scientific mechanisms that have—genetic engineering and nuclear weaponry, weapons design, these are things that scientists can do—but you have to ask the question, how should we use these things? How should we direct them? To what end? To what purpose? Science will not answer that question. The worst kind of scientist will say, ‘I’ll do whatever I can’. And people who have sat on ethics committees in science faculties will know that there are some members of every science faculty of every university in the world who will say, ‘if I can do it I will do it. If it becomes possible I’ll do it.’ But, we also know that they have to be stopped, because you can’t just let people do things because they can. You have to make them ask the questions ‘should I do this? What will be the value of doing this?

Who would it hurt? Who would this help? And what are we going to say is going to make a truly humane world?’ Science can get out of control when it no longer asks those questions about what is a humane world.

All I’m saying here is don’t make this scientific worldview stop you from asking questions about value and don’t let it delude you into thinking that the only worthwhile questions are those about technology or means or things that scientists can give you answers to. Science must always be instrumental. We’ve got to say, ‘now scientists have designed nuclear weapons, what are we going to do with them? What are we going to do with nuclear energy?’ The scientists won’t give you that answer.

They will provide invaluable instrumental information about the consequences of various courses of action but they won’t answer that ultimate question of value.

I have said something about the beginning of the universe, and said that there’s nothing anti-religious about scientific views about that at all. I have said a bit about the end of the universe: there’s nothing anti-religious about that either and, in fact, I would say more positively that the scientific views actually point towards a religious view in the sense that they point to the elegance, the beauty, the intelligibility of the universe and that’s something Christians would be very ready to respond to, and say ‘yes, the universe, the heavens do declare the glory, the wisdom, the beauty of God’.

But what about the middle of the process? Here we come across Darwin and evolutionary biology and I suppose some of the chief enemies of religion. There are people who would say that the development of biology is definitely anti-religious.

Why? Because it is taken to show that the whole process of the evolution of life is both accidental and cruel. I will now turn to look at this.

Some would make the claim that the process of evolution is an accidental process, that it need not have happened the way it did, that it’s pure chance that we have come to exist. One of the best-known evolutionary biologists in the world was Stephen Jay Gould. He did in fact, before he died, write a book about religion and science, in which he said they were compatible. It’s interesting that he did write such a book. But Stephen Jay Gould also said many times that the process of evolution is totally

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accidental. A picture he used to use is this: if you run the evolutionary program of the earth through again, like running a film for a second time, it would not come out the same. He made his reputation investigating fossil remains in the Burgess shale. He said that he found many fossil forms of life which could easily have evolved but didn’t. If you ran the history of the earth through again, he suggested, they probably would evolve and then you wouldn’t have human beings. Or, take another example, dinosaurs were wiped out probably by a comet hitting the earth. If that comet hadn’t hit the earth, then today we would all have been reptilian and having reptilian lectures on whether humans might conceivably have existed. These examples show that the course evolution actually took was just accident, depending on chance events like comets hitting the earth, or little mutations happening that might easily not have happened. Human beings were never intended, nor was the evolutionary process designed to produce them. Humans are the results of millions of flukes, improbable and unrepeatable accidental occurrences.

I think Charles Darwin was worried about this possibility. I’d describe Darwin as an increasing agnostic, as somebody who always thought the laws of the universe were designed by God, but he couldn’t quite see the point of the laws because they looked very cruel in their outworkings. That’s what worried Darwin. His own daughter died.

He never got over that, really, and it brought him to wonder how an evolutionary process designed by a reasonably good God could exterminate so many species. It seemed too cruel and accidental.

Here you do have a conflict with the religious view, because it would be quite hard for a religious person, a Christian, to say that the evolutionary process, which God has created, is cruel and accidental. It would be equally hard for a Christian to say that the existence of human beings is just a chance which wouldn’t have happened in another million, million universes. It just happened in this universe. So, it wasn’t really planned by God at all. And, it’s cruel. So, here you do have a problem.

The religious believer has to how to respond to this? I think one thing we need to ask here is how much evaluation is being put into this presentation of the evidence? You need to ask, what is established by biological evidence? And, what is the evaluation of that evidence? A lot of stuff gets put into what people say which is actually evaluation and not neutral description of the evidence.

Let’s look at the accidental bit for a moment, at the apparently descriptive claim that everything in the evolutionary process happens by accident. A biologist may say everything happens by accident because evolution happened by random mutation—because of changes in the chemical structure of DNA which are not planned and are not all for the good. However, a physicist would immediately say, ‘Rubbish! There is nothing accidental at all in this process’. And, of course, things aren’t really random, from a physical point of view. Mutations aren’t random in the sense that nobody could ever know what they were going to be. We just don’t have the information to know why they happen the way they do. The laws of physics operate and they continue to operate and that’s what governs what happens. The laws of physics are not random—the well-known principle of indeterminacy almost always cancels out at the level of common human perception, leaving the laws of physics intact. So, when biologists talk about randomness, that’s because it is not their business. Physicists can do that if they want. Biologists work with cells and

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molecules. And, that’s a very good thing to do. I’m not against that. It’s a very nice thing to do. But, biology is not entitled to say ‘this is random’ in the sense that there are no laws governing these processes. That’s an illegitimate thing to say. All we can say is that the complexity underlying these mutations is so great that I can’t give you any particular laws which are going to describe which mutations are going to happen.

But, if a physicist had the time, and a super-computer, a physicist could in principle do it. In that way, the process is not really accidental.

But what Stephen Jay Gould meant by accidental is something like this: if you’re starting off with one-celled organisms, for example, you will get a series of mutations which do not seem to be specifically planned. Some of them are harmful, many of them make little or no difference to the organism, and a few may give a small evolutionary advantage. A whole series of such slight advantages—together with millions of ‘mistakes’, might eventually produce something like an eye. Or you might get mutations that produce things with legs, or with central nervous systems and then brains. This looks like a long series of thousands and thousands of freak accidents which, in the end, have turned out to produce human beings. Each of these accidents is so improbable that we could not expect them to happen again, certainly not in the same sequence. The chances of these mutations producing healthy, intelligent, rational beings are infinitesimal. Those are the facts. What’s your evaluation of the facts? Stephen Jay Gould says, ‘My evaluation is that what you’ve got are thousands and thousands of pure accidents, which would probably never happen again. What that shows is that the process of the development of life on earth has been a freak accident’. But, supposing you took a different evaluation—and I think it’s a much more plausible one—that if you get thousands and thousands of things which are so improbable that you would never expect them to happen, ending up with rational, moral agents like us, doesn’t it look as though the whole thing’s been fixed to end that way? What you would expect from a random mutation process is that things would go on getting worse. You wouldn’t really expect things to improve. One of the slightly odd arguments in Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species is that the process of natural selection will inevitably produce a constant improvement in nature, that evolution will lead to continual improvement. On his own theory of natural selection, that’s simply not the case. Natural selection just says two things basically, that you get random mutations—that is, chemical changes in the structure of DNA; they produce all sorts of organic changes, some good, some bad. The second thing is that some of these are selected by the environment. All that means is that they’re not exterminated by the environment. What these two things together say is that you’ve got chaotic mutations in cells, in long molecules of DNA, and you’ve got an environment which exterminates most of them, but not all of them. Given those two principles, what would you expect to happen?

The answer is: nothing at all. You would expect nothing at all to happen. Life would never evolve. Things would never get more complicated. Most putative organisms would self-destruct almost instantaneously. The environment would wipe everything out. All the mutations would be harmful. You’d never get any evolution. You’d never get any development of life. Now, it hasn’t been like that. Things have developed from unconscious, inanimate, very simple, unstructured bits of gas—hydrogen and helium—that have developed into communities of rational, intelligent, moral agents capable of asking questions about ultimate values, capable of relating to one another in love and, unfortunately too, in hatred, capable of forming rational communities.

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That’s what actually happened. So we have thousands and thousands of immensely improbable events leading from unconscious chaos to highly-structured, rational, intelligent communities. Now, what is more likely? That it is just one damn accident after another? Or, that there is a rational, intelligent designer of the process who wanted this to happen and ensured that it would. If there is a God who wishes there to be rational, intelligent agents who have evolved from the material structure of the universe that God has created, then this would be a very good explanation of the evolutionary changes that are happening.

The argument is very simple, but it seems strong. The more improbable the things that happen which lead to an overall good result, the more likely it is that they have been fixed precisely to lead to that result. Anybody who has been to Las Vegas knows that that’s true. One or two improbable hands in a poker game, you can just let by; three, you get suspicious; four, you throw people out of the casino. You just can’t get that many improbable things, thousands and thousands and thousands of improbable things, all cumulative in producing human beings. Someone is fixing the odds.

We have to admit that the evolutionary process on earth could have been just an accident, but how very improbable if it were. If the whole process had been set up so that intelligent, rational beings would be naturally produced out of those hundred, billion quark-filled gases, then you’d be strongly tempted to say this has been set up from the beginning of the universe, perhaps. So, it’s not accidental at all.

Interestingly, Richard Dawkins, no friend of religion, takes the latter view: It’s not accidental (though there is no designer either, in his view).

It seems that biologists and physicists disagree about whether the evolutionary process is actually accidental—so that absolutely anything might happen—or whether it had, sooner or later, to produce rational, intelligent life. Richard Dawkins takes the latter view. Charles Darwin took the latter view. But then would it be helpful to call this process accidental? I think anybody who has studied the structure of DNA has to say this is just overwhelmingly incredible. In fact, I hope you know that three people got the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Everybody knows the names of Crick and Watson. But few can name the third man, Maurice Wilkins, of Kings College, London. I was sitting having lunch with Maurice Wilkins one day and he said to me, ‘You know, the strands of DNA which fold around each other, they do so in a loving embrace’. And, I said to him, ‘That’s a very nice metaphor’. He replied, ‘That’s not a metaphor’. I didn’t probe him any further about that. But, here is a person who felt that there is something in this structure which actually speaks of something deeply designed and intended. And which speaks of love somehow in that structure. Watson and Crick go around being rabid atheists: Crick wouldn’t even allow a chapel to be built in Churchill College in Cambridge, where he was. He was very influential in getting the governing body not to have a chapel. (Now, there is a chapel because other members of the governing body wanted to have one. But, it’s in a field some distance away from the college.)

But Maurice Wilkins would have had a chapel. I would not say that he was any sort of orthodox believer. But he had a strong feeling for religion, for the mystery of life, for the strange intelligence of its source. And he completely understood the religious motivation to seek personal knowledge of that intelligent source.

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There is an innate beauty and elegance in molecular biology and the chemical strands there. Again, this is no accident. This is absolute, precise design. At least it’s very easy for a Christian to say this actually looks designed. A good percentage of biologists—including Richard Dawkins—say it might look designed but it’s not. Then people like me have to say, ‘if it looks designed why can’t you just say it’s designed?’

And, his answer is something like, ‘Because I hate grovelling to a supernatural God’.

So back to prayers and churches again, which he doesn’t like. That does not look like a scientific dispute, but a matter of deep existential outlook, of how we basically respond to the world at the level of our most profound feelings.

What irks Dawkins—and this is quite understandable—is the amount of cruelty he perceives in the evolutionary process. No good God could have created that, in Dawkins’ view. This is not a new problem, though perhaps it is posed in a new way when it is impossible to appeal to some alleged first sin of Adam and Eve to explain why suffering came into the world (though that would not really resolve the problem for animals). Christians, believing in God, throughout the ages, have always wanted to ask the question, ‘Why is there so much suffering in the universe?’ It’s the problem that troubled Darwin more than anything else. As we know from reading the Book of Job, there is no easy answer to that question. But, let me give you a sketch of a possible answer using the scientific worldview. This is, in my opinion, another way in which science actually lends support to a Christian view: What scientists tend to say, and especially physicists—I am prejudiced in favour of physicists—what physicists would say is that if you look at the structure of the universe what you find is something that quantum physicists tend to call ‘interconnectedness’—that everything in the universe is connected to everything else. For example, if a nuclear particle comes into existence many light years away it will have some effect on what is happening in this room. You won’t notice that, but it will have an effect. Everything is interconnected. Now, if you take this seriously, what it means is you can’t take away part of this universe and keep the rest intact. Things are interconnected in such a way that if you change one bit, you’re going to change the whole thing somehow by however little. A simple example of this is the gravitational field. Gravity extends infinitely. If you take away part of a thing which is exerting a force of gravity you’re going to change everything it influences. Some of these changes are negligible. We ignore them, thank goodness. Some of them are not negligible and they have major effects. But you cannot just change one part of the universe and preserve the rest intact.

So you cannot change human nature, making everybody perfect, and leave the rest of the universe the same. We are animals, evolved by successfully out-mating and outfighting competing species over millions of years. That’s what we are. There no doubt could be intelligent beings which weren’t like me but they wouldn’t be human. If you were not lustful and aggressive, as you all are, you would not be you. So, in a sense, you should not be too ashamed of your lust and aggression. You could say, now that’s what I am. Now, I don’t want you to get this wrong. Like St Paul, I’m not saying you can sin more abundantly because you’re all lustful and aggressive and it’s perfectly natural, so carry on. What I am saying is that lust and aggression give to human life many of its important values when they are controlled. In those circumstances, of course, you don’t call them lust and aggression. You then call them love, desire, competition and striving. It’s the same basic forces, but brought under some sort of control. Whether controlled or not, those are the forces which make us what we are.

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They are part of the evolutionary process. The point here is you can’t be you, you can’t be a human being, without lust and aggression. That means, your ancestors have killed a lot of people, they’ve killed a lot of species. And, you go on killing lots of species. You kill mosquitoes. You kill lots of things. You’d probably exterminate those if you could. Most of you would anyway. So, that’s how you’ve become the dominant species on the planet. That’s part of what you are. If you said, ‘take away the suffering from the universe, take away the extinction of species’, what would you have? Well, you’d get no evolution for a start because, obviously, the old things wouldn’t die. So, the planet would be full of slime or unstructured species which never died out. That would be terrible. Just think of all the flies never dying. They’ve got to die. We’ve got to die. I want my children to have somewhere to live, so I’ve got to die and let them have it. That’s perfectly natural. And, if they know that that is part of the cycle of things, they might not immensely look forward to it, but I hope they can see that if it didn’t happen then there wouldn’t be children. There wouldn’t be new developments.

Even if you look down at the atomic level, without the destruction of atoms there wouldn’t be any formation of star systems. Without the destruction of stars there wouldn’t be any carbon. Without the destruction of carbon there wouldn’t be life forms. So, life is formed from destruction. In other words, destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin in the universe we have. I’m suggesting part of the answer to why there is suffering and destruction in the universe is: that’s the way a universe with us in it has to be. It’s a bit like a meeting of bishops that I was told about, in which one of the bishops said, ‘I’m fed up with this meeting. Everybody is so bad tempered and stupid. I think in the Church we ought to be loving and full of reconciliation’. And, the archbishop who was presiding (probably called Rowan!) said, ‘Yes, well perhaps there should be such a meeting of bishops but, unfortunately, you would be excluded from it’. And, that’s exactly the problem. There could be a much better universe than this but, unfortunately, we would be excluded from it. This is where we belong. This is the universe we’re in.

What physics can do is to show you how it’s necessary that the universe has to be the way it is to have people like us in it. At this point you come across an ultimate value question: ‘Is it worth having people like us?’ And, this is where people like Francis Crick would say it’s not. He actually says we are a virus on the surface on the planet and the sooner we’re wiped out the better. Well, if that’s your view, at least that’s not a scientific worldview, this is an evaluation. Christians would say of course it’s worth having us because God loves us, because God, in the Christian view, actually became human and took human nature into the divine nature. If this universe had not existed there would have been no humanity within the divine. So, yes, this universe, with all the things that it carries, has a purpose and a value which is of infinite worth. A worth which really only those who believe in God see fully because only Christians really believe that out of this universe there comes eternal life. Not, something bound to this flesh and blood, but something which passes into the level, as Peter says, of sharing in the life of God itself. That is the gospel of the redemption of the world, which is an important part of the Christian faith.

I have tried to say something about the scientific worldview, and I’ve raised the question, ‘is this incompatible with Christianity?’ I suggested that it’s not incompatible even though the biblical writers had no idea of the scientific worldview.

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But I’m also saying more than that. I’m saying the scientific worldview can give positive support to the Christian worldview because it is saying, first of all, in the beginning the universe had an elegance and beauty which speaks of the wisdom of God in creation. At its end this universe is speaking of a completed purpose, a completed meaning, a completed value, in which we shall, hopefully, have played a part, insofar as we do what a loving God intends us to do with our lives: that is, pursue love in our own particular ways and places in time. This universe has conflicts, it has destruction, not randomness, but freedom. And, it has the capacity that we can spoil things, but we can also mend things. And, we have the responsibility to care for this planet and this world and to see that love and reconciliation triumph rather than hatred and warfare.

In the end, what Christians say is this whole universe is the ante-room to eternity, so that beings who are the products of time and evolutionary change shall become sharers in the eternal life of God. The scientific worldview shows us how immensely large and great and wondrous this universe is. If you look at pictures of heaven in medieval churches, you will see a human God with a beard; you will see Mary, probably, and Jesus, both human; and, you’d see some human-looking angels—all very anthropomorphic. That’s a terrible restriction of vision, which a good grasp of science can remove.

Today, thinking of the worldview of science, we might ask what would the picture of heaven look like? Humans would be down in the right-hand corner, because there are billions of galaxies in this universe. There must be life-forms countless in form. The wisdom of God must be known there as it’s known here. The risen Christ will not be in the form of a man. I’m not saying the word of God never was in the form of a man.

I’m saying the word of God is infinitely greater than the form of any human being and may take infinitely other forms. Our picture of heaven would be that in this amazingly large and great universe there are, I hope, countless life-forms, all destined to share in the life of God. And, on this planet, we have been privileged to see the wisdom of God made in human form. For when we see the glorification, the transfiguration of the whole universe into the life of God, then we will see Christ in forms we can scarcely begin to imagine. And for that extension of theological insight we have to thank the scientific worldview. Not only are Christian faith and the scientific worldview compatible, they enrich one another in a marvellous way: Christianity pointing to the purpose of the whole process as the development of personal values of understanding, compassion and love, and science demonstrating the amazing extent and elegant complexity of the wonder of creation. Together, they provide what I believe is the most comprehensive and plausible view of the nature of reality which is available to us, and the future development and interaction of both is to be welcomed and supported with enthusiasm and hope.

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Christianity and Islam: An inevitable clash?

Public Lecture delivered by Revd Professor Keith Ward at Trinity College, 21 March 2003

The title of this lecture, of course, reflects the title of a book by Samuel Huntington, a distinguished American political scientist, on the clash of civilisations. One of his themes is that there is very likely to be a clash of world civilisations, and one of those clashes will be between Islam and Christianity. Tonight, I want to examine how far that might be true, and what a theologian, like myself, or what a Muslim theologian, might say about that.

One difficulty is, of course, that religion very easily gets mixed up with politics. And, as we started with a moment of silence about the present conflict in Iraq, it is well to remember that it is not a religious conflict at all, though there are religious overtones felt by some people. It’s not religious because, for a start, this is an occasion when all the mainstream Christian churches and all the mainstream Muslim organisations are in complete agreement about what they feel about the present conflict. So, in fact, from the religious point of view it’s a time when Islam and Christianity are closer together than they have been for many years. So, it’s not that sort of conflict.

But, let me begin by looking at the history of relations between Islam and Christianity and why there has been felt to be historical conflict. The reason is this, I think: that, in Europe, at least, what is called the Dark Ages is the period from about the seventh century to the tenth century, I suppose, when Europeans were rushing around with armour bashing each other with maces. On the other hand, at that time, after 622 by the Christian calendar, when the Muslim era begins, Muslims would regard this period as the age of enlightenment, not of darkness. It’s an age when al-Andalus, what we now call Spain, was a great Muslim nation and when Muslims were those who were rediscovering and retranslating, for the benefit of the world, the great Greek classics. This was a golden age of Muslim civilisation, which extends into the tenth century.

But, there’s something a little bit odd about both Islam and Christianity. Christianity began as a virtually pacifist sect of Judaism. It was very difficult to be a soldier in the Roman army, for example, if you were a Christian. There was alleged to be one legion of Christians but, on the whole, Christians steered clear of military conflict. And, yet, after the conversion of Constantine, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. And, some say, it’s all been downhill from there. Whether or not that’s true, Christianity certainly changed at that time. It became associated with the

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Roman Empire in both its eastern and its western parts. This set up between Christianity and the Roman Empire what Weber would call an ‘elective affinity’—that is, a relationship not quite logical but a little more than causal. On the one hand, you have the Byzantine Empire, centred on Constantinople, and then a Roman Empire, centred on Rome. The Byzantine Empire was, like most military dictatorships, a rather unpleasant place for the people who were dominated by it.

When Islam came along, Islam overran the Byzantine Empire remarkably quickly and did so largely by force of arms—but, in response to the pleas of the subject peoples of the Byzantine empire for liberation from their imperial masters. Islam was seen as a liberating faith at that time. The Byzantine Empire, of course, collapsed. The Roman Empire collapsed too, although that collapsed for other reasons—mostly because of an especially barbaric people, the Germans, who managed to eat away at its borders.

This strange, sad story of the association of religion with military empire has been the tragedy of Christianity. It’s been difficult to disentangle that original pacifist faith from the empires which have actually called themselves Christian, and that would include not only the Byzantines and the Romans, but the British Empire, and now you might talk about the American Empire.

What about Islam? I have to say the record is not really very much better. Islam, too, gave birth to what is arguably the greatest empire the world has ever seen: the Ottoman Empire. But, again, it was an empire, and it got into conflicts with other empires and particularly with Europeans. So, here you have two imperial faiths which have indeed been in competition. The point is, however, they’re not really imperial at their inception. That wasn’t their basis. They became imperial by being taken over by imperialists. And the problem of both is how to deal with this now.

I think if you wanted to ask about the question of Islam in the modern world, you would have to bear in mind that the tenth century (in Christian terms)—was the age of enlightenment in Islam, when Baghdad was basically the centre of world culture. But in the present age, as Muslims are well aware, one hundred years ago virtually every Muslim nation was owned by some European nation. The dominating question for many Muslims is ‘how did this happen?’ How did it happen that one of the great civilisations and cultures of the world collapsed and Muslims became very largely a dominated, colonised people? And, what can now be done to remedy this situation? I don’t think you can understand the Islamic point of view at all unless you see this political dimension. It raises deep questions about the role of Islam in world history, and how it comes to have the position that it has, and what should be done about that.

Christians have an equivalent problem, but in the Christian case it’s one of having too much world-dominating power, and what should we do about this? As a spokesman for the Vatican said just this week, ‘is George Bush too Christian or not Christian enough?’ That remains a very difficult question. So, that’s the political background to the conflict of Islam and Christianity. But it belongs to the past. Those empires really are dead. There’s no Ottoman Empire. There’s no British Empire. There are remnants of both, but we call them something different, and let’s disconnect from those imperial dreams and start again, or not start again, get back to where the thing did originally start. So, let me turn from the political and, I think, the obsolete past, to the religious sources of Christianity and of Islam.

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Muslims see themselves as the children of Abraham, as Christians do. So, there’s a great commonality right at the beginning. Of course, we know that children often disagree and are often unafraid to show that they hate each other more than they hate anybody else. So, it doesn’t solve all your problems to say you’re both children of Abraham, but still it’s worth bearing in mind. Christians trace their descent from Abraham through Isaac, whereas Muslims trace their descent from Abraham through Ishmael. The relevance of this was that Ishmael was not a child of the covenant. If we look at Genesis 17:20, you’ll remember that Ishmael was the child of Hagar and because of Sarah’s jealousy, Hagar and Ishmael were pushed out of the family of Israel to go and live in the wilderness. But, the Bible is quite clear in saying that God said, ‘I will bless Ishmael and make him fruitful, make him a great nation.’ And God said to Hagar that he would be with the boy. So if you look in the Bible, there is the record of a non-covenant people, the children of Ishmael, not the children of the covenant, but still the children of Abraham, whom God loves and is with. For any Jew, religiously speaking, it is impossible to think that only Jews are loved by God. I’ve never met a Jew who thinks that. Jews on the whole don’t care much what God thinks about other people, but they don’t think God only loves Jews. That’s not a possibility for Jewish thought. It’s only Christians, some Christians, who shall be nameless, who think that God only loves Christians. I don’t know how they get that idea. But, certainly it’s not part of Judaism to say that God only loves Jews. There are many other people, and the Ishmaelites—the Muslims—are one of those whom God loves.

The Muslim point of view is very similar to that, in that it is quite clear that God loves many people, not just Muslims. It’s a standard part of the Muslim faith that each nation has its prophets. If I may quote from an English translation of the Qu’ran, ‘we believe in God and that which is revealed to us and that which was revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob of the tribe, and that which Moses and Jesus received, and that which the prophets received from their Lord, we make no distinction between any of them.’ So a fundamental tenet of Muslim faith is that every nation has its prophets. Jesus is one of those. And, although Christians, according to Islam, make lots of mistakes, they are nevertheless people of the book. And they are loved by God. If I may give another quotation from the Qu’ran, ‘whoever believes in God on the last day and does right, there shall come no fear upon them, neither shall they grieve.’ I’m going to say a little bit more about this later, but there are quite clear statements in the Qu’ran that to believe in God on the last day and to do what is right is what is expected of people, Muslim or not. So, Judaism and Islam agree absolutely on these points. And, I think Christians ought to, as well.

There seems to be a common basis of belief between Islam and Christianity that there is a God, there are prophets, and that God loves all human beings and desires them to come to know and obey and love God. So, that is common ground. That common ground is worth stressing. Not only that, Muslims do revere the person of Jesus. They hold that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, ascended into heaven and will return, and that he is a genuine prophet of God, a spirit sent from God, in a mysterious way that no one can quite understand, but it’s something very special. So, here are some similarities: An agreement that there is one God; one creator of the universe; there are prophets sent from God to every people; God loves and wants all people to obey God, to be saved, in Christian terms; there will be a resurrection of the dead; there will be a judgement; and that judgement will take place largely on what you have done—the

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deeds you have done for good or ill. It’s a huge area of agreement.

But, of course, there are disagreements, too. And, I think, at this point, what is most important is to understand why these disagreements exist. It’s very easy to misunderstand why, and when we do, Christians can say, ‘it’s because Muslims are rejecting the Gospel’, and Muslims can say ‘it’s because Christians are wrongly giving Jesus divine status.’ It’s possible for each religion to demonise the other. If you do this then there will be an inevitable clash. If you’re a Christian, you look for the worst Muslims you can find and you say ‘that’s Islam’ and you look for the best Christians you can find and you say ‘that’s Christianity’. In fact, there probably aren’t any quite good enough so you make up something that is purely an ideal and say that’s Christianity, it’s all love and peace. If you’re a Muslim, you look for the worst Christians you can find—and don’t have to look very far—and say ‘that’s Christianity’, and then you look for the best Muslims or an ideal Muslim—the Prophet himself, perhaps—and say ‘that’s Islam’. Now, that has to stop. You have to stop demonising. And, to stop demonising means you have to start understanding why differences arise. There are some big differences, and I’m going to talk briefly about the major differences and why they arise. I think this will help to understand that they’re not demonic. There are genuine issues of conscience and belief. We must all learn to respect those who follow their consciences in going their different ways.

So, let me take one of the most obvious differences. That is, is Jesus the son of God? Christians do say Jesus is the son of God. And, Muslims, in the Qu’ran, deny that God has a son. Now, that is a pretty big difference. The temptation is to say, ‘oh, the Qu’ran must be rejecting the word of God,’ and from a Muslim point of view ‘to say that Jesus is the son of God is to say something utterly ridiculous’, namely that God is like a human being who has a son and possibly a pigeon too (think of the Trinity). It all looks a little bit odd.

However, it shouldn’t be difficult to sort this out. Indeed, the way to sort it out is perfectly obvious. Look at the Bible; where does it talk about people as sons of God and who does it call sons of God? The Bible calls King David the son of God, it calls King Solomon the son of God. It calls the people of Israel the son of God. So, the expression ‘son of God’ is a metaphorical expression that just means the beloved of God. What we need to do is get away from literalism in religion. If you say God is a father, you don’t mean he’s got different chromosomes from mothers. Gods have no chromosomes. If this lecture has a motto, it’s that God has no chromosomes. If you call God ‘father’, you’re speaking metaphorically. And, where you use a metaphor, people cannot disagree with you. You cannot disagree with a metaphor. Supposing I say, ‘I am a lion’. You can’t say it’s false. I know it’s false. That’s not the point. I’m talking about my absolutely wonderful, aggressive character. I know what I mean.

And, you may say, ‘oh no, I think you’re a fox’. Is that a contradiction? No, that’s not the way to think of it. It’s not a contradiction. You’ve found these metaphors appropriate because there is a place that you allocate me to in your worldview. So, religion largely consists of metaphorical expressions. The Qu’ran is full of metaphor, metaphor about God seated on a throne with hands and eyes. It’s a metaphor, not a literal truth. Christianity is full of metaphors about God seated on a throne and he has a son. But, remember the other things that were said of Jesus. Jesus is the ‘word’ of God. Now, how somebody can be a son and word at the same time, literally, just beggars belief. But, if you take those as two different metaphors they make perfect

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sense. ‘Son of God’ means chosen by, beloved of God. It is in this sense that Jesus is God’s son. Of course, Christians, when they use that expression, mean to make Jesus more than a prophet. There is a difference here. I’m not at all suggesting that Islam and Christianity are the same. They do disagree. They are different. We have different beliefs. What I’m saying is, let’s understand why those beliefs are different and let us try to see it in a way that will make this is an honourable difference, a difference that could well exist, and does exist, between two people who are honestly, in good conscience, concerned to find spiritual truth.

I can see perfectly why a Muslim wouldn’t like to call Jesus the son of God because a Muslim is so concerned to make God transcendent above every finite thing that a Muslim will not want to associate anything with the majesty of God. This is out of honour for God. The greatest sin for a Muslim is Shirk, that is, associating something with God, saying that God has a partner, saying that anything is like God. Well, this is an honourable view. Any Christian would have to say, ‘I respect that view. It is indeed true that nothing should be associated with God at all. God is beyond everything finite.’ And, a Christian would agree with that. But, what a Christian would say is that God has assumed a human nature, in the person of Jesus, into God. God has not changed or become diminished in any way, but has actually assumed humanity. But, I can understand people, and in Christianity, they’re called ‘unitarians’, who say, ‘I can’t agree that Jesus was actually the embodiment of God’.

There are Muslims who do talk about embodiments of God. They would not use the word incarnation, but let me tell you who they are: They are the Ishmaelis. And, Ishmaelis, I assure you, would speak of some human beings as those who, in some sense embody Shariah—God’s law, God’s teaching—in their own lives. And, indeed, within Judaism there are Rabbis who would say that a well-instructed, completely faithful Jew will embody Torah—the Jewish version of Shariah, the teaching of God. So, it is possible for a human being, even possible for a Muslim to say, the acts of human beings can embody Shariah. They still wouldn’t use the word incarnation, but let me suggest the difference is not so absolute and it is honourable. So, there is difference: the religions are different. But, each one has good reason for the view it takes. Islam has good reason for saying God transcends everything finite. And, naturally, since I’m a Christian minister, I think Christians have good reason for saying that the person of Jesus is a genuine embodiment and disclosure of the love of God. This is a genuine difference, but not a difference where one person is evil and demonic and the other is completely saintly. It is rather a difference in the way people honestly see the nature of the spiritual life and of human relationships with God. What is important, I think, if Islam and Christianity are to live together, is that they should agree to differ. There is no possibility of them ever agreeing. I am not arguing for that at all. Just as I will never be a Unitarian, so I will probably never be a Muslim because I disagree with some of the things that Muslims believe. But, I don’t think that to believe those things would be evil. I just think it would be mistaken. I would expect a Muslim to say the same thing to me. We do this in ethics, we do it in morality, we do it politics. We have to learn to do it in religion and say that difference does not mean argument. Differences might entail, rather, explanations and searches for greater understanding. I think that is happening in the modern world.

Let me take one other case of major disagreement between Islam and Christianity.

That is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Again, the Qu’ran says ‘do not say that

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God is three’. Again, however, this is an understandable and honourable difference.

You can imagine someone saying, ‘how can you say that the one creator of all things is somehow three?’ There are not three Gods and most ordinary Muslims that I meet go on thinking Christians think there are three Gods. I just can’t get them out of thinking that. I can assure you I do not think there are three Gods. At least one Christian doesn’t think there are three Gods. But, there are three somethings. As Augustine said, and I’m happy with what Augustine said, I don’t know three whats but there are three somethings: the father, son, and holy spirit. Again, we might be in the realm metaphors here. We might be in the realm of images that we, as human beings, have to use to understand the infinity of God. It might be better, from a Muslim point of view, to say not that there are three Gods—that is definitely wrong—but to say that God is threefold. Why not? Why not say that God has many aspects and many names. Isn’t God infinite? Doesn’t God have at least ninety-nine names? What are names? You could say they are just human ways of speaking about God. But, probably, if you were a Muslim theologian you would want to go a bit deeper than that and say, no the names of God are actually aspects of the infinite divine being, which is always one but in an infinity of forms. Well, couldn’t the Christians say ‘yes, you’re getting closer to what I wanted to say there’. I want to say there are three forms of God, which my tradition, the Christian tradition, is especially interested in because we’re interested in seeing God in Jesus and in seeing the holy spirit of God within us, and in seeing God as the transcendent creator of all. We’re interested in those three aspects. We don’t deny there are more. We don’t say we understand everything about God. Indeed, in the tradition I belong to, we’d say the essential nature of God is always beyond human understanding.

But, the Trinity is a way of thinking of God which has been given to us, through Jesus and in the Christian tradition. So, again, might we not be able to say, we are not going to agree about this? There are always going to be Unitarians and there are always going to be Trinitarians, but let’s not make these into the sorts of literal disagreements where one person says, ‘I know exactly what I mean and I know that you’re wrong’. I have never met a Muslim who knows what they mean when they say ‘God is one’.

Never. I have talked to the best Muslim theologians—and I make a big qualification here—who speak English. Not one, when pressed, could say what is meant by the ‘unity of God’. The unity of God is a mystery beyond human understanding. What the great Muslim theologians, like Al-Ghazali, do say is that God is not one in the sense of being one of two or three possible beings of the same sort. It’s a completely unique sense of unity. It’s a divine mystery.

Well, say I, in my philosopher’s dress, what’s the difference between a Muslim saying, ‘God is one and I don’t understand that’ and a Christian saying ‘God is three and I don’t understand that either’? Wouldn’t it better for religious conversations to say none of us knows what we’re talking about here? I know you may think that’s absurd, but it’s not.

Let me take one of the greatest Muslim writers, Al-Ghazali, and one of the greatest Christian writers, Thomas Aquinas, and give you a little quotation from each. Thomas Aquinas starts his great work Summa Theologica, by saying, ‘we do not know what God is’. And, Al-Ghazali also, taking a verse from the Qu’ran, says, ‘everything perishes except the face of God’. Ultimately, the way he construes this enigmatic verse is that in the end you cannot even distinguish creation from creator because to

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do that you would be using human distinctions and concepts that are completely inadequate for the divine being. What you’ve got in the end is silence, the fading away of all duality in the face of a unity which encompasses everything.

I think instructed Christians and instructed Muslims will agree about the ineffability of God. They would agree that God is unitary: there is only one God. They would disagree about whether they’re going to speak about God as Trinitarian—three-fold.

Theologians like Karl Rahner and Karl Barth, probably the best known Catholic and Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, would say, ‘when we think about the Trinity, we must use new concepts because the old ones now are very difficult to use and we must say that there are three modes of the divine being, three ways in which the one God is’. Christians talk about these three modes of being as introducing a certain sort of complexity in the being of God, whereas Muslims do not. So there is a difference, but an honourable difference, one you can understand. It is, in fact, the same difference between Christians and Muslims as there is between Trinitarians and Unitarians.

I think we can understand very well the temptation for a Christian to be a Unitarian, and even give up on the Trinity altogether. On the other hand, an instructed Muslim would be equally wary about talking about the unity of God, because such talk inevitably raises one of the central Islamic problems in theology. Does the unity of God include the world or exclude it? Many volumes have been written about this. If you read Muslim writers like Al-Ghazali, you will find a position which sounds very like saying everything is actually the face of God. It may seem odd to get to such a position from a faith which starts by saying that God and the world are absolutely distinct. God is sovereign, the world is the creation. They are absolutely apart. You couldn’t get further apart. But you suddenly find that you’re saying the opposite. And, it happens like this: God is the ultimately sovereign will. All that happens is decreed

by God. The will of God is identical to the essence of God, so the will of God is identical to God’s essential nature. So, what God wills is what happens in the world and what God wills is God’s essential nature. So, what happens in the world is God’s essential nature, and in a sense there is no longer any distinction between God and the world: QED. ‘All perishes except the face of God’. There it is.

We could say that this is the ultimate mystical impulse. All dualities fade away before the absolute unity that is the will of God. To be a spiritually mature believer is to see this. It’s not to have some sort of creed and a set of beliefs you can come out with. It’s to see, to have an insight into the absolute presence of, the infinite God. I think both Christians and Muslims can say this, so there is a mystical convergence at that level.

The tragedy is that although Al-Ghazali and Aquinas agreed very closely in their doctrine of God, they were unable to spell this out because, as I said, Christianity and Islam had got mixed with conflicting empires and you weren’t allowed to make friends. So, they had to find and stress a difference. Now, do we want to live in a universe where we have to find a difference which demonises those who differ from us? Or, do we want to live a world where we say that although there are differences, we’re not going to demonise anybody? We’re going to say those differences arise from freedom of conscience and expression. I’d go for the latter. I think it’s clear that Christians ought to do so, although not many Christians would, apparently. The New Testament says that the chief Christian virtue is to love your neighbour as yourself,

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and makes it perfectly clear that your neighbour is absolutely anybody, especially if they’re very different from you, including those who are quite different from you in belief and in custom. That is an absolutely unequivocal Christian command: you must love those who differ from you. And, of course, you cannot love anyone if you don’t try to understand them. That wouldn’t make any sense. So, if you follow the Christian command you have to try to understand people who are very different from you. So that’s the Christian command: understand the differences. And, in Islam, too, there is the same concern for understanding and accepting those whom God has created who are different from you.

Let me give you two quotations from the Qu’ran—the first is a very famous one, but worth repeating endlessly: ‘Let there be no compulsion in religion. Whoever rejects evils and believes in God has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks.’ So, let there be no compulsion in religion. And again, ‘If your Lord had willed, he truly would have made mankind one nation, yet they do not cease to differ.’

So, it’s the will of God that there are differences. We don’t know why, but it’s God’s will that there are Christians and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Unitarians and atheists in the world. Why God has created atheists, I don’t quite know. I can make a good guess, though. I think God has created atheists because there are too many people like me about. Christians like me can get on people’s nerves after a while. If we are not closely criticized, we can very easily become judgmental and censorious.

Atheists are the people who will do the necessary criticising, and so help to make the religious slightly less hypocritical.

In a similar way, perhaps Christians and Muslims need one another just to stop the absurdities that they each keep falling into all the time. Now, it doesn’t quite work out the way God would like, I think, because what we do to this is to make these differences into demonising oppositions. So, here’s what we have to do. We have to say—and this is the essence of what we call a liberal education—that what you have to do is encourage positive criticism and learn from it, understand the criticisms that other people make of you. That is the great breakthrough that people who were mostly atheists in Europe made in the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment as we call it.

The Enlightenment allowed and encouraged critical thought. Critical thought does not have to be destructive, but if someone says, ‘look there’s something here which you haven’t seen and I think this is wrong’. Then you have to think, ‘how can I respond to this?’ Both Christianity and Islam have found it very difficult to really encourage critical thought. Yet it’s in our religious tradition to encourage such thought, because God has created differences for a purpose.

One of the meanings that some Muslims theologians give to the word jihad—striving in the way of God—is that we are to strive with one another in the way of God, to see who shall be the best, not to see who can curse the worst, but to see who can achieve unity, union with God in a positive way which survives the criticisms that can be made of it from other positions. That word jihad means primarily the inner striving of the soul, to become worthy of union with God. Regrettably in the present political situation, we often hear more about the lesser jihad, the less important one, religiously. It licenses taking up arms in defence of Islam or to remedy gross injustice. This is almost identical to what Christian theologians have almost all said, namely that it is permissible to defend yourself or

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the innocent by the use of force. In the present military conflict, some people have gone beyond that doctrine and that’s why the Churches are objecting to the Iraqi conflict, because it goes beyond the traditional Christian rules for the engagement of war, which is that you should only wage war in defence of innocent people who are threatened. Well, in this respect Islam is exactly the same. The Islamic doctrine of jihad, as formulated by the theologians of Al-Azar University in Cairo, is almost exactly the same as the Christian doctrine of the just war, formulated by theologians like Thomas Aquinas.

It’s easy to say Muslims believe in war, Christians believe in peace. But, who wages war most? I wouldn’t like to make a judgement on that. But the fact is that the rules for warfare are much the same in both traditions. Those who are called Islamic fundamentalists and who are perhaps better called Islamic militants, are actually in revolt against traditional Islam. That is their enemy. Traditional Islam is the Islam by which the Qu’ran is interpreted in many different traditions—at least six major traditions of legal interpretation of Islam. The Shariah is not something which tells you to do all sorts of strange things like cutting people’s hands off and so on. It doesn’t tell you that at all. Shariah takes a thousand different forms. As I say, there are six major schools of interpretation of Shariah and it’s perfectly possible to interpret Shariah in the same way that a Jew interprets Qu’ran, if you can work that out. In other words, there are many different ways of interpreting it. Some people would be more rigorous than others, but there will always be different traditions of interpretation. People who call themselves Islamic fundamentalists reject every tradition of interpretation and they say, ‘I’m just going to read the Qu’ran myself and interpret it on my own’, but very often, paradoxically enough, with the aid of Karl Marx and the Communist doctrine of the overthrow of unjust societies by violence.

What is happening in the Muslim world is a rejection of tradition. We must be careful to distinguish traditional Islam from these radical militant movements that are very different in character.

A similar thing happens in Christianity. Remember how strong fundamentalism is in Christianity now, certainly in some parts of the world. Christian fundamentalism, too, is a rejection of Christian traditions. It’s saying, ‘I don’t believe in tradition. I don’t care what it says. Thomas Aquinas? Who’s he?’ The mark of fundamentalism is to say, ‘I’m going to read the Bible, probably in English, probably in old-fashioned English, and I’m going to decide what it means for myself. I’m not going to read these commentaries and I’m not going to look at church tradition and see how things have been interpreted over the centuries. I’m just going to make it up and say this is what God says.’ Furthermore, they usually add, ‘I’m a very humble person. I’m not saying this. It’s in the Bible. I just happen to know what the Bible means. I’m privy to the thoughts of God. There have been thousands of theologians before me, but I don’t know what they said and I don’t much care either.’

That, I think, is most unfortunate, because religion is a quest for truth, the quest for the most important sort of truth: spiritual truth, the truth about God, the truth about ultimate reality, the truth about how human beings should live. And, if you’re seriously on a quest for truth you need to learn from others. You can’t make things up for yourself. You need to know what the best minds have thought about. You need to read and respond to them critically. If you’re a Christian, you need to know what Thomas Aquinas said and then you need to criticise it. That’s the difficulty. If you

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can’t do this, don’t pretend that you’ve done it or don’t pretend that you don’t need to do it. In other words, just be a bit less arrogant and admit these things are very disputed and difficult to interpret.

What we can do is to concentrate on what will make our own lives closer to God—not on abstract doctrines, which we can always disagree about, which we probably don’t know how to interpret anyway. Never use beliefs as weapons to hit somebody else with. Christians must never say to Muslims, ‘you don’t believe in the Trinity so I’m excluding you from my arena of worthy people’. Muslims must not use the doctrines of the unity of God and the absolute sovereignty of God as a way of excluding others.

Use them as ways of coming to understand what God is in your own spiritual life.

And, if you do that, you’ll find that both Muslims and Christians have a shared spiritual concern to obey and love God. That agreement ought to overshadow all the real disagreements there are, and ensure that they do not become the sources of bitter dispute.

There is one final thing I should say as I come towards to the end of my talk tonight.

That is, that if we are to have a future which is not going to have a clash between Islam and Christianity certain things need to be done. The danger of a clash—Samuel Huntington was right—is always there. There’s always a danger. The danger will be realised if one set of doctrines, intellectually formulated as apparently clear, is then set over against another set of different doctrines and said to be the only correct one, whereas the other doctrines are clearly false. That way, there will be a clash because though the differences may be stressed by wise and spiritual people, their words will be used by arrogant and violent people. So, don’t say that sort of thing. Rather, accept the conscientious freedom of people to come to their own conclusions in belief. There should be no compulsion in religion, for true religion lies in the free assent of the heart to the inviting presence of God. Both Christianity and Islam need to insist more strongly and obviously than they do on the freedom of belief.

What is also needed is full acceptance of plurality, within your own faith, as well as between faiths. An acceptance of plurality means living with difference and being able to distinguish when differences are honourable and conscientious from when you really are faced with evil. There is evil in the world. But, people who have different beliefs are not, as such, evil. You need to accept that there are going to be differences of interpretation. Why this should be true, I don’t know. But I know that if you have a room with three people in it you will, if you talk for long enough, have four theological opinions. (Somebody will change their mind in the middle). If you let people believe what they conscientiously think, they will always disagree with one another sooner or later. Religions find it hard to accept this. So, we must accept there’s always going to be difference of interpretation religion.

Both Christianity and Islam must put first their belief, which is shared, that God is a god of compassion and mercy and love. Every Muslim prayer begins with the phrase, ‘In the name of God, the compassionate and the merciful’. Christians believe that God is a god of unlimited love, who will stop at nothing to bring people to know and love God. If you put those things first, then there couldn’t be a clash between Islam and Christianity as such, because we would both be praying to be forgiven by God for all the mistakes that we are probably making. I am prepared to swear an oath that many of my theological beliefs are mistaken, but I cannot find out which ones they are. This

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means I must simply be true to what it seems to me is right, given that I have listened to the wisest, most spiritually-advanced voices that I can hear. Some of them have come from Islam. Some of them have come from Christianity. And, having listened to those voices I must, in the end, come to my own decision. Or I must follow someone, not as an infallible guide, but as a guide who is a provisional guide and who can help me to tread a further stage on the spiritual path.

So, could there be a clash between Islam and Christianity? Yes, there could, if religious believers insist on not understanding one another. But does there have to be?

No. In the modern world, for the first time we are in a position when Muslims and Christians, freed from the empires of the past, can begin to seek to understand one another better without falling into the old stereotypes—three Gods/one God, one son/no son. So, let me end, as a Christian minister, with a quotation from one of my favourite philosophers, Al-Ghazali. He said, ‘To be a Sufi means to abide continuously in God and to live at peace with men.’ If only all Christians and Muslims could agree about this, there will be no clash, but a striving in the way of virtue, until we all come to the final vision of God which will silence all disputes.

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Trinity Papers: This paper represents the twenty-sixth in a series published from time to time by Trinity College which focus upon broad issues facing the community in such areas as education, ethics, history, religion, politics, and science.

Further Copies: Copies of this and other Trinity Papers are available upon request from: Tutorial Office Trinity College Royal Parade Parkville VIC 3052 Australia Telephone: 03 9348 7100 Facsimile: 03 9348 7610 Email: enquiries@trinity.unimelb.edu.au Trinity Papers can also be found on the website at: www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/publications/papers/ About the Author: Revd Professor Keith Ward (Emeritus) is a former Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon Professor of Christ Church College, at Oxford University. Prior to his appointment to Oxford, he taught at the Universities of Glasgow, St. Andrew’s and London. He has also been Visiting Professor at Duke University, Claremont Graduate School and the University of Tulsa. His areas of research and teaching speciality include: concepts of God; the idea of revelation; method in theology; doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity; religion and science; inter-religious dialogue; Christianity in the context of world religions. He has published widely, with his major books being: Religion and Revelation (1994, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Creation (1996, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Human Nature (1998, Clarendon Press, Oxford); Religion and Community (2000, Clarendon Press, Oxford); and God: A Guide for the Perplexed (Oneworld, 2002).

Professor Ward was the 2003 Frank Woods Fellow at Trinity College.

Copyright © Keith Ward 2004

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