Science and Spirituality –

Is Dawkins right?

Holy Trinity October 3^rd and 4^th 2007

Dr Alison Morgan, PhD from Cambridge, formerly university lecturer, now ordained minister in the CofE. Not brought up in church, I used to be atheist, till I found myself confronted with questions about life and death I couldn’t answer. I’ve been writing books about spirituality and the search for meaning ever since.

Introduction

Good evening! What’s life all about, and how do we make sense of it? And who are we meant to look to to find out? Is it the traditional religious faiths which have the answer? Or is it modern science, with all its insights into the way things are? And does it really have to be either-or, or could it be both-and? Because often science and faith seem to be in competition with one another. The latest competitor is Richard Dawkins.

Like Dawkins, I was for many years an atheist. I thought God was so improbable he just had to be an illusion. I wasn’t brought up to go to church, but I was a brownie, so I had to go to monthly church parades. I couldn’t really make head or tail of it – but I do remember thinking it must be really weird to be a vicar, and have a job that was all about nothing.

I did want to know what life was all about, though, and when I was 16 I went to the school library and started reading books about truth. My favourite subject was biology, but I wanted to go to Cambridge and I was no good at chemistry, so I did languages instead. I stayed on to do research, specialising in the Middle Ages. I love the Middle Ages, because everyone was interested in everything. Science and faith struggled together to answer life’s greatest questions. Poets studied astronomy and scientists studied philosophy and theology. Now we live in a world of specialists. Each has their own language to describe reality, and sometimes they don’t want to talk to one another. But I think actually this makes for a really interesting situation – because again people are beginning to say, do we really have to choose between science and faith, or can we do both?

The protagonists

Let me start by introducing you to some of the main characters in the faith and science story.

· This is Aristotle. Aristotle lived in the 4^th century BC. He founded a school of philosophy in Athens, where he taught logic, ethics, politics, poetry, physics, biology and psychology. Physics was then called metaphysics, and biology was called natural philosophy. How did the world begin, and what was life all about? Well, Aristotle talked about an unmoved mover, a God outside the universe to whom it must owe its existence. Modern science really dates back to the rediscovery of his writings in the 13^th century, and modern theology is still influenced by the great 13^th century theologian Aquinas’s attempts to get to grips with his teaching.

· Let’s jump forwards a few hundred years. This is Jesus. Roman historians record that he was executed in what’s now Israel in AD 30. Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. He attracted a large following, and was widely known for both his teachings and his reputation for healing people. His followers, many of whom lost their lives for continuing his teaching, founded the Christian church. Jesus claimed to have access to truth in a way that nobody had before, and said that through him it was possible to enter into a meaningful relationship with God. Billions of people since then have said that for them that’s the case.

· Next. Here’s Galileo, a mathematician and astronomer who came up in 1632 with definitive proof that the earth goes round the sun. The church had adopted the Greek scientific view developed by Ptolemy that the sun orbits the earth, and turned out to be completely incapable of adapting to this new information. Galileo was tried for heresy, forced to take it all back, and placed under lifelong house arrest. For the first time in history science and faith part company.

· This is Charles Darwin. In 1831 Darwin went to South America as the ship’s naturalist on HMS Beagle. Nearly 30 years later he published the Origin of Species, in which he advanced the theory of the gradual evolution of species by natural selection. Richard Dawkins claims that this theory is a total explanation for the way life has developed , and means that belief in God as creator is no longer viable. Reaction at the time was mixed, as it has been since, and Darwin himself did not take Dawkins’ position, describing himself at the end of his life as an agnostic. Incidentally, the Origin of Species didn’t fascinate everyone as much as it does Dawkins. In the late summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy. Elwin read the book with interest, and agreed that it had merit, hut feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. Everybody’s interested in pigeons, he said helpfully.

· Now let’s take another jump and come up to date. Here are some modern university professors. At the top is Richard Dawkins, professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He’s well known for his books on evolutionary biology, but recently he’s been writing about what he believes to be the implications of Darwinism for religious belief. Dawkins holds that everything that needs to be known can be known through science.

· In the middle is David Hay, a zoologist who became the director of the Religious Experience Research Unit in Oxford. He now specialises in the biology of human spirituality at Aberdeen University. Drawing on the latest research by neuroscientists mapping the activity of the brain, Hay suggests that the human brain is actually hardwired to engage in spiritual activity; faith has a biological basis.

· And at the bottom is Alister McGrath, formerly a research biochemist, now Professor of Historical Theology, also at Oxford. McGrath has written books charting the rise and fall of atheism over the last 200 years. He points to the upsurge of interest in spirituality, and challenges Dawkins both scientifically and theologically. He’s just written a book called The Dawkins Delusion.

Now I suppose this all sounds quite academic. But it isn’t really. All the debate goes on at a rarified level. But the same questions affect all of us. It’s just that we experience them differently. I remember once talking to a friend. This friend is now a professor too, as it happens, but he steers well clear of all this – he’s a specialist in the novel. Anyway, my friend went on holiday with his girlfriend. This was about 25 years ago. They stayed in an old cottage deep in the English countryside. He was woken in the middle of the night by a draught coming from the window. He sat up, and found himself staring straight through a ghost. It was a man wearing kind of Elizabethan black robes, with one of those frilly white ruffs round its neck. Now friend wasn’t brought up to think about things like that. And this was before all this stuff became fashionable. So, in the best traditions of research, he told me I was on no account ever to tell anyone. And got on with his book on the novel.

I work quite a lot in Africa. There are no atheists in Africa, and not many research scientists either; but there are millions of people trying to make sense of reality. Reality for most Africans is a complicated mix of the physical world you can see and the spiritual world you can’t. It’s a world peopled by spirits, spirits of ancestors and disembodied spirits with whom specialist witchdoctors are able to communicate. They think it’s incredible that we don’t believe in them. I often find myself asked to pray with people who have been damaged by their involvement with this invisible spirit world. A few years ago a man came, pointing at his diseased eyes. Would we pray for him? As soon as we started, he began to shout and yell and scream. Don’t waste your time on him, they said, he’s mentally ill, he had a road accident and damaged his head. He went to the witchdoctor but he just got like this. I’ve met too many people like this not to believe in evil spirits. Get out, we said. He coughed and retched, then stood up and smiled. Next day he came to see us, with a piece of paper that said 1992 on it. He’d been like that since he visited the witchdoctor – which was 11 years. And now he was clothed in his right mind. I could tell you lots of stories like that – and some of them from England too.

The achievements of science

So those are some of the key characters. Now we’re ready to look at the story.

We’ve come a long way since Aristotle. Our lives have been transformed by the achievements of modern science. Galileo was followed by Newton and Newton was followed by Einstein. I’ve always been fascinated by biology, but I suppose it’s not really biology that really amazes me, it’s physics. I’ve read loads of those books which attempt to explain the discoveries of modern physics to non-specialists. I am astonished that we can split atoms into protons and neutrons, and those into leptons and quarks. I am amazed that leptons and quarks are now thought to be not particles at all but minute strings - vibrating strands of energy that oscillate in lots of different dimensions. I don’t want to get that wrong, so this is physicist Michio Kaku explaining it:

The herotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations, clockwise and counter clockwise, which are treated differently. The clockwise vibrations live in a ten dimensionl space. The counterclockwise live in a 26-dimensional space, of which 16 dimensions have been compactified.

Are you OK with that? Because if so, you will be fascinated to know that these strings may be part of a whole network, a string net liquid, which runs throughout the vacuum of the universe.

I like to think about the big questions too. How did the universe begin? We now know it was at a specific moment in time, 13.7 billion years ago, with a Big Bang, the background radiation of which is still detectable. Another professor, Stephen Hawking, has come up with a mathematical explanation for this which he calls a singularity theorem. Like Einstein before him, Hawking often talks about God when he thinks about the universe and its laws. For example,

‘It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border.’

He’s not alone. Henry Schaefer, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Georgia, remarks that it’s unusual for a physicist to be an atheist. An American poll a few years ago showed that on any given Sunday, 41% of PhD scientists are found in church. In the UK, the Professor of theoretical physics at London University and the former Professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge are both Christians. For many top scientists, science and faith go hand in hand.

There’s still a problem, though. The problem is that fascinating though all these scientific discoveries are, they don’t have an immediate impact on my inner being. How will knowing all this stuff affect our daily lives? A scientist called Erwin Schroedinger sums it up. Schroedinger was awarded the Nobel prize for his work in quantum physics, and he went on to write an incredibly influential book called What is Life? which inspired a whole generation of molecular biologists. This is what he said about the limits of science:

I am astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

The boundaries of science

Well, Schroedinger is not the only one to point to the boundaries of science. Ever since Galileo, science and faith have been somewhat in tension. But gradually we are becoming aware that science can’t give us the whole picture. It tells us a lot about the world out there; but doesn’t deal so well with the world we find inside ourselves. It’s possible, for example, to talk about love in terms of chemistry, or even in terms of evolutionary biology – which is what Dawkins does. But does that work for you? Or does it seem to you that there’s more to it than that?

Science itself has moved a long way from the astronomical facts discovered by Galileo and the mechanical laws laid down by Newton; it’s now a mysterious world of quantum forces and subatomic uncertainties. It fascinates me that the greatest scientific advances of our times can only be talked about in the language of poetry and metaphor. We talk about a Big Bang, about the curved material of spacetime, about string theory. It used to be thought that science proceeded by a process of gradual factual discovery, like peeling back the layers of an onion. That might have been so once, but it certainly isn’t any more. This is Einstein:

‘the supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained... There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition, based on something like an intellectual love’.

In other words, science proceeds by metaphor and hypothesis, by taking leaps of faith which then have to be tested. That’s how my faith works too. Maybe science and faith aren’t so far apart after all…

The rise in spirituality

Well, that’s all quite technical. What’s happening on the street? This is Nicola, taking part in Professor David Hay’s research study in Nottingham: (6)

I think you just have to make the most of what you’ve got... and not think too deeply about it. Because I think if you go into it too deeply, I dunno, you can sort of , ‘Whay am I here? What am I doing here?’, and it could be sort of a bit negative feeling, if you aren’t coming up with the right answers’.

This is Matthew:

It’s probably just a nagging instinct, that while all the material evidence is telling me, this is ludicrous, you know, this is all complete chaos, nonsense, it’s arbitrary, you know, we’re a rock in a vacuum just spinning through nothingness and, you know, the consequence of impersonal cosmic forces, nothing beyond it. Whilst my sort of intellectual faculty can tell me that, there is this other, and I’m not going to use the word ‘soul’, but there’s this other bit of me which is just sort of going, ‘hang on’, you know, ‘What if, pal?’.

Nicola and Matthew are typical of people all over the country. They think there’s more to life than the physical, but they don’t know how to think about it or find out about it. And while traditional churchgoing is declining, there’s a massive rise in spiritual awareness and experimentation. These are some of the statistics from a survey commissioned by the BBC in the year 2000 and compared with the same questions asked by a Gallup Poll in 1987. If you look at the cumulative total on the far right, you see that 76% of the UK population now say that there is a spiritual dimension to their lives – up from 48% in 1987.

· 55% say they are aware of a patterning of events in their lives,

· 38% say they are aware of the presence of God (that’s a 41% increase in just 13 years).

· 37% say they have experience of answered prayer.

· 29% are aware of a sacred presence in nature, 25% are aware of the presence of the dead, and

· 25% of the presence of evil (that’s an increase of over 100%).

Why is this? Well, perhaps it’s because after 200 years of incredible scientific advances, people are beginning to realise that maybe there are dimensions of human experience which can’t be investigated by particle physics or molecular biology. Science does tell us some amazing things – your body is made of atoms which were once part of a star. 6 trillion chemical reactions take place in your body every second. You may have as much as 20m km of DNA bundled up inside you. And we are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a up to a billion of our atoms probably once belonged to Shakespeare.

But none of the atoms I now have are the same as the ones I was born with – which makes me think, who am I? Am I just a physical being, or is there more to me than that? Am I just a body; or do I have a soul? Is science the only language of reality, or is there another one which we might call faith?

Nicola and Matthew aren’t as clever as Dawkins – but are they in touch with something significant?

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist with a long and distinguished academic career. His best known book is probably The Selfish Gene. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001 in recognition of his contribution to science. But since becoming Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford in 1995 Dawkins has focussed not so much on science as on the challenge of science to religion. His most recent book is The God Delusion.

I read The God Delusion on holiday this summer. Quite frankly, I was amazed. Not by his compelling arguments, but by the astonishing tirade of insults, inaccuracies and caricatures it contains. It’s nothing like any serious academic book I’ve ever read, and it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Let me give you some examples.

This is Dawkins’ definition of faith: ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder’.

This is what he says about God: the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

For good measure, he throws in that Mother Teresa is a sanctimonious hypocrite. He says miracles can’t be discussed because they violate the principles of science. Thomas Aquinas’ demonstration of the existence of God is vacuous, and Dawkins actually ends his summary of 12^th century theologian Abelard’s work with the sentence ‘nur nurny nur nur’. He dismisses the personal spiritual experienceof nearly 80% of the population with the one-line statement that he dealt with hallucination in chapter 3, and concludes the book with the observation that religion in general is best regarded as the failure to give up a comfort blanket. At worst, it’s the root of all evil and the sooner we get rid of it the better for all of us.

The response to Dawkins has been mixed, to say the least! Philosopher of science Mary Midgely describes him as a scientific fundamentalist who seems to think that knowledge reduces to one fundamental form, which is the statements of science – whereas in fact science is only a small, specialised part of what anybody knows. Other scientists have said he brings science into disrepute. One eminent psychiatrist declared that having read the God Delusion he’s concluded that Dawkins knows nothing about God, and nothing about Delusion. One leading atheist and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, has said Dawkins makes him embarrassed to be an atheist.

The story I like best, though, is one told by one of my colleagues who was asked to speak about Science and Faith at a men’s breakfast in Oxfordshire. He gave his talk, a bit nervously because they are all so clever in Oxfordshire. At the end of the meal a man came up to him to continue the debate. He was the chairman of an IT company, and for 30 minutes he disagreed with everything Martin had said. Then at the end he said, ‘Thank you. That was very helpful’. Martin, who felt he’d been on his back foot the whole time, said helpful, how had it been helpful? ‘The trouble is’, said the man jabbing his finger in the air, ‘I want to believe Richard Dawkins. But he doesn’t look happy, and you do!’. Well, that’s scarcely evidence, said Martin, who used to be a lawyer. ‘It’ll do for now!’.

What accounts for Dawkins’ ferocity? Well, I don’t know. I used to be an atheist, but it never seemed to me that it was worth getting het up about something I thought didn’t exist. I’m not an atheist now, but I’m still very happy with the theory of evolution, as are most Christians including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the last Pope; but it seems to me that while it explains many of the how questions, but it doesn’t answer any of the why questions. Dawkins wants to stretch evolutionary theory almost into a religion in itself, and turn it into a philosophy of life. That takes him to some interesting places. For example he suggests that ideas are ‘memes’ which are transmitted in the same way as ‘genes’, except without any physical basis. It just doesn’t seem very scientific, and there’s certainly no evidence for it.

I think partly you have to understand where Dawkins is coming from, which is mostly to do with what’s going on in the US rather than what’s going on here. Just as the 17^th century church couldn’t handle Galileo, so some parts of the contemporary church can’t handle evolution.

The pesudo-science of creationism is the example which understandably infuriates Dawkins. In May this year a 27 million dollar Creation Museum opened in Kentucky. It sets out to demonstrate that the book of Genesis is not just true but literally, factually, scientifically true. That the universe was created in 6 consecutive 24 hour periods, that the earth is 6,000 years old, and that all human beings are descended from two individuals named Adam and Eve. It has a special effects theatre, complete with vibrating seats, where you can watch a video of the Great Flood and learn how dinosaurs survived aboard the Ark. I’m as embarrassed by that as Dawkins’ fellow scientists are by him. For me it just shows a misunderstanding of the opening chapters of Genesis, which wasn’t meant to be a scientific text but rather a poetic account of the beginning of life. Equations and formulae just aren’t the only way to describe things.

Why do the creationists do this? Well, a lot of the current American reaction against evolutionary theory comes from the so-called social Darwinism of the early 20^th century, which coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’ and taught that it can be applied not just to biological species but to whole people groups - thus paving the way for racist philosophies such as Nazism. If that’s what evolution teaches, then it sounds pretty unacceptable. Let’s stick with the Bible, they say.

Well, Dawkins doesn’t advocate social Darwinism. His brand of Darwinism is just as far from what Darwin had in mind, though. It goes way beyond biology. It’s a kind of cultural Darwinism, if you like, in which not species or people groups but ideas themselves are the subject of evolution. Religion, Dawkins says, must have some evolutionary advantage – though he also says he can’t for the life of him see what it might be. Moving on from his concept of ideas as memes, he speculates that religious ideas are best regarded as some kind of mind virus, which interferes with the smooth progress of human development. (Atheistic ideas are by contrast truths, which frankly is a such a piece of illogicality that it’s hard to believe it comes from an Oxford scientist).

Science and spirituality

I said earlier that Professor David Hay believes that the human brain is not so much infected by faith as specifically wired up for it. I’m fascinated by the overlapping new fields of neuroscience and what is coming to be called neurotheology. Let me introduce you to another Oxford academic, Danah Zohar. She has a research degree from Harvard in physics and psychology, she teaches in the Strategic Leadership Programme at Oxford and lectures all over the world on the application of neuroscience to psychology and human relationships. She’s written a number of books with her psychiatrist husband, the best known of which are The Quantum Self and Spiritual Intelligence. Zohar draws on the research of a neuroscientist called Rodolfo Llinas who has found that there are 3 distinct processes in the brain: pathways, networks and oscillations.

Let me illustrate. When we are engaging in logical thinking, messages are passed along serial pathways, like a chain of rope lights. This is what’s going on in your brain when you are doing maths or filling in your tax form. Measuring the efficiency of this activity gives you what we know as IQ.

But when we are experiencing emotional activity or doing automatic things like riding a bike, the brain works in a different way, with patterns of activity transmitted across neural networks. Zohar says this corresponds to the more recent notion of EQ or emotional intelligence. It’s the gut stuff.

Then when we are engaging in spiritual activities such as meditation or prayer there is a third pattern, in which a series of oscillations pass across the surface of the temporal lobes of the brain – so she calls this SQ, or Spiritual Intelligence. The oscillations occur at a precise speed – 40Hz, and are so precisely located that the relevant part of the brain is now popularly referred to as the God spot.

David Hay summarises some research done by Michael Persinger in the course of his investigations into epilepsy. Persinger designed a helmet which stimulates the God spot with a magnetic field of a precise wavelength. Some people report extraordinary spiritual experiences when wearing this helmet. Dawkins apparently tried it and said he felt nothing more than a mild tingling…

Horses for courses

So, how do we cope with all this? Well, I think by using a device which one of Dawkins’ colleagues, Stephen Gould, has called NOMA. NOMA stands for non-overlapping magisteria. That is, that you know different things in different ways, and make use of different but complementary disciplines to investigate them. In other words, it means you use science to explore one dimension of reality, and you use faith to explore another dimension of reality.

In other words, it’s about using HORSES for COURSES. You don’t use a racehorse to plough a field. Shire horses tend not to win the Grand National. You need the right tool for the job. And I’d like to suggest that science and faith are different tools which do equally important but different jobs.

Every human culture has to come up with the answers to 2 fundamental questions:

1. The first is, how do we know things? In other words, how do we access reality?

2. And the second is, how do we make sense of them? In other words, how do we explain reality, discern its purpose (if it has one), and find our place within it?

Every culture has its own way of answering these 2 questions.

We in the West are unusual in that we have come at them from 2 different directions. It’s as if we have 2 different languages, and instead of using one for each question, we’ve tried to use each of them in turn for both questions. One is the language of faith, and the other is the language of science. Both have their sources in the accidents of history.

1. The language of faith

Let’s think about the language of faith. For centuries our culture was founded on a Hebrew world view which offered faith-based answers to these 2 fundamental questions. It relied on revelation. According to this approach, what we know, we know because God tells us; and he tells us not through science but through story. So the Bible tells the story of the relationship between man and God in the context of a bigger story which runs from the creation of the world in time to its recreation in eternity. This world view is still available to us as Christians. I find that through it, and in particular through Jesus, I find meaning for my own life. I find that I have access to a spiritual dimension of reality in which I may safely participate. I live in the awareness that I am known and that I have a purpose.

The problem with the Hebrew worldview is that whilst it gives brilliant answers to the question about purpose – my purpose is my part in the story – it gives lousy answers to the question about knowledge. Attempts to understand the world we live in from within this revelation-based framework have become less and less convincing. Revelation does not help us to understand the working of DNA or the laws of physics. It’s not meant to.

2. The language of science

And so from the time of Galileo people started to try and answer these questions in a different way - more like the way the Greeks had answered them – through logical thought and practical experimentation. Scientists tried to understand reality by thinking about it rather than by trusting in it, and a new, scientific worldview was born. It’s taught us a fantastic amount about the world we live in, and transformed our ability to manage it. But it has nothing at all to say to us about purpose. As Shroedinger said, it has nothing to say about all the things that are dearest to our hearts.

What’s the result? Well, an enormously increased Western standard of living. But there’s a downside. Journalist Clifford Longley comments:

Having constructed a society of unprecedented sophistication, convenience and prosperity, nobody can remember what it was supposed to be for. Just enjoying it does not seem to be enough. Indeed enjoyment as an end in itself quickly turns to ashes in the mouth. Not only is it boringly bland. It is even more boringly purposeless. There is more to human life than comfort, entertainment and the avoidance of suffering.

Everywhere we look, our society shows signs of strain. What is life all about? Is it just about technology, economics, success, the right to enjoy ourselves? Or is there something more? Professor John Drane has said that we are the only people in the whole of history ever to have supposed that a mechanistic and individualistic understanding of life offers the way to become fulfilled and whole persons. In 2000 the President of Harvard University said that the biggest problem among college students today is inner emptiness. Someone has suggested that our age can be summed up in the mantra ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’.

So we have two languages, two horses, two tools. We used just one to start with, the faith one. That only answered half the questions, so we got rid of it and started using the other, the science one. But now we are noticing that that only does half the questions too – the other half. So we’re getting back in touch with the faith language - people are getting more and more interested in spiritual matters. Nicola and Matthew may not have the right answers, but they do have some very good questions.

Where does this leave us? Well, I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Dawkins can talk about evolutionary biology with incredible sophistication, and I wouldn’t dream of arguing with him. But when he talks about faith, to be quite frank it’s a bit of a joke. One critic reviewing the God Delusion said this: ‘imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology’.

But having said that, the results are equally disastrous the other way round. Those creationists who teach that the world is 6,000 years old (a theory first propounded in the early 17^th century by James Ussher and John Lightfoot, who calculated that God had created the earth on Sunday 23 October 4004 BC at 9 am London time) don’t help us to understand either scientific research or biblical teaching.

Science is fascinating and wonderful. It’s brought us astonishing advances in knowledge. But it doesn’t help us make sense of what we know. Maybe we should give the last word to Professor Stephen Hawking, who probably understands the universe better than anyone. This is what he says:

Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question ‘why does the universe bother to exist?’. I don’t know the answer to that.’

But as a Christians I think that we do have some answers. My experience is that we find those answers in a dimension of existence of which Richard Dawkins as yet has no experience. We find them in the context of a relationship with God.

References and notes

Some of the works specifically referred to in this talk:

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Bantam Press 2006

Alister McGrath, Dawkins’ God – genes, memes and the meaning of life, Blackwell 2005; see also his other books, The Dawkins Delusion and The Twilight of Atheism

New Scientist March 2007 – report on the theory of the string net liquid by Zeeya Merali

New Scientist October 2006 – review of Dawkins by Mary Midgley

H Schaefer, ‘Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang and God’ – lecture given at Georgia University

David Hay, Something There: the biology of the human spirit, DLT 2007

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, BCA 2003 – fascinating layman’s overview of the history of our attempt to understand the world we live in

Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder – letters for the journey, Fount 1995 – quirky facts and figures

Roy McCloughry, Living in the presence of the future, IVP 2001 – quotes Clifford Longley

Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall: SQ - Spiritual Intelligence, the ultimate intelligence, Bloomsbury 2000; and her earlier book The Quantum Self.