I've long held that science and religion are partners, rather than opponents, in the search for truth. This morning, while surfing the BBC, I found this rather interesting article (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4488328.stm).
Last Updated: Friday, 2 December 2005, 10:52 GMT
When science meets GodRobert Winston
By Robert Winston
The world today is dominated by science, but faith has not withered away. Robert Winston, respected scientist and committed Jew, examines the relationship between science and religion.If you look carefully, you might see one of those slim, elongated boxes attached to the front doorpost of one of the houses near you. They appear on houses across the world - wherever Jews have lived.
The box contains a tightly rolled parchment on which a qualified scribe will have written Hebrew letters in special ink.
The text contains a commandment from Deuteronomy to attach a sign to all doorposts of your house. It starts with an affirmation, central to Jewish faith, of the existence of a single God.
The little box is called a mezuzah in Hebrew. My house bears such a box, and when I leave home on a workday morning, my head crammed with the usual worldly thoughts and worries, I occasionally touch it.
Simultaneously, as I am closing my front door, an elderly merchant in Tashkent, some 4,500 miles from where I live, escapes the noon heat. Wearing a white lace cap, he stretches an old, small woollen carpet on the floor in his warehouse. He slips off his sandals and prepares to recite Zuhr, the midday prayers.
At the same time, some 4,000 miles away in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a young woman carefully lays out some tropical fruits and flowers on a burnished metal platter.
She lights some incense sticks at a small brightly coloured box - a box that to our western eyes resembles the top of a clean bird table. She bows briefly, then stands up for a second. She bows once more.
Like me and the merchant, she has, for a few brief moments, given her mind and her body over something that was not physically present. These examples of ritualised behaviour or prayer are repeated many times over in many places and nearly all human cultures.
I am a medical scientist, who has spent his career fascinated with one of our more basic human instincts: the compulsion to reproduce. For some of my scientific colleagues, humans are mere expression of an intricate genetic programme which creates that drive to have babies.
For some scientists, this belief - and I deliberately call it that - has some consolations of religion. It attempts to make sense of every corner of existence and of our place within all that exists.
Scientists tend to build a reputation on refuting the theories of those who have gone before. Yet, whatever we hypothesize, observe, measure or record about the natural world, it leaves more unanswered questions.
Though a very superficial view might argue the contrary, science does not give us certainty about ourselves or our origin. Some ideas endured and the most enduring is the idea of a supernatural dimension to our existence. I call it the "Divine Idea".
For some people, the very fact that the "idea of God" has survived is proof enough of God's reality. But it is a simplistic theory; things survive for all sorts of random reasons.
But in any case, this is not an enquiry into the existence of God. My purpose is to tell the story of an idea, how humans approach that idea and how that idea has shaped human life.
It does not matter whether you believe there lurks a real God or gods behind the idea. The idea is real and, as a scientist who studies "real things", I believe it deserves to be examined.
In the book of Genesis there is an extraordinary, puzzling episode involving Jacob and a silent man who he wrestles all night. The man leaves before dawn so that Jacob never actually sees his face.
Many English translations of the Bible call Jacob's antagonist an angel. Some Jewish sources argue he is Jacob's guardian Angel or saviour. Other suggest it is himself, his own conscience. But perhaps it is God.
Whatever the meaning of Jacob's story, it gives a powerful image for the impulse underlying what I am saying. Virtually all of us at one time or another have wrestled with God.
I think humans have always wrestled with the Divine Idea - an idea that unites and separates, creates and destroys, consoles and terrifies. Throughout human history, it is an idea that seems sometimes to have caused whole populations to rise up and slaughter one another.
It is also a kind of bond, a mode of human expression that links me, a Jew, the merchant in Tashkent and the woman in Cambodia.
All paths to the divine involve a wrestling match. Wherever God is considered, there are radically conflicting ideas. Spirituality on its own could not have been sufficient for human consciousness: we need to formalise our beliefs, to give them structure, to arrive at a frame work for the rules of living.
Religion has endured since the dawn of human consciousness precisely because it encompasses so much of being human. No idea has endured so long, gathered up so many disparate needs and wants and feelings, and inspired so many different paths towards understanding it.
In some ways, the wrestling match is typified by the apparent conflict between God and science. This dispute is largely vacuous. They are both essentially two different ways of looking at the natural world, though each gives an important insight into the other.
But we must not confuse religion with God, or technology with science. Religion stands in relationship to God as technology does in relation to science. Both the conduct of religion and the pursuit of technology are capable of leading mankind into evil; but both can prompt great good.
My book is not an exhaustive history of the struggle between science and the divine. I have compressed the story, preferring to focus on some influential religious movements and the more interesting examples from science.
I hope also that a personal account of some of my own struggles with God, and an impression of how I continue to attempt to resolve that conflict, as an averagely rational scientists and a Jew will be of some interest.
The Story of God is broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 4 December at 2100 GMT. The Story of God by Robert Winston is published by Bantam Press.
