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

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

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

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.

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

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?’

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.