‘Christianity and…’
Keith Ward
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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