SCIENCE AND BELIEF
The big issues
By Russell Stannard. Lion Hudson. 176 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978 0 745 955 728
With the discovery of the Higgs Boson and a successful landing of the probe to see if life could have existed on Mars, a book examining the potential for conflict between science and belief should be welcomed.
Stannard, a distinguished physicist who is also a lay minister in the Church of England, has set out to explore the middle ground between what he calls ‘fundamentalist creationists’ who reject evolutionary theory (all faith — no science) and the Richard Dawkins militant atheist (all science — no faith).
The book has nine chapters looking at major areas where belief and science appear to take different stances. Stannard sees his role as defining the issues and indicating how accommodation may be reached. This is a commendable objective, but its usefulness is greatly diminished by Stannard’s view of the Bible. He adopts the position of the Vatican II Council and concludes that ‘the writers had their own purposes in writing: the words were their own and not necessarily God’s’.
He sees conflicts in the accounts of the resurrection appearances and says that Genesis 1 and 2 contradict each other. He interprets most of the Old Testament as poetry rather than history, and most miracles as allegories. He quotes Augustine and Origen to support his view that a six-day creation is purely figurative language. This essentially renders the book ineffective. If one’s view is that the Bible is unreliable, then one can invent a religion to suit one’s interpretation of science, and Stannard largely does this.
He is a strong advocate of evolution and dismisses arguments against it, but sees it as the activity through which we can understand the world. His view of God seems to be deist. God put the universe in place and waited to see what would happen. Evolution is the process by which man created himself (p.32).
Stannard accepts that there is a separation between God and humans. Christ’s death is portrayed as an example of love. The role of atonement is not recognised. Original sin is identified as a self-centredness arising from the ‘survival of the fittest’ model of evolutionary theory. In much of the book, very complex issues are reduced to a few lines.
The interplay between psychology and religion is covered, but only through the work of Freud and Jung, as if no other thought has occurred in the last 100 years. There is a total speculation on the existence of intelligent life on other planets. A lot of space is given to relating to the big bang theory and the metaphysical significance of quantum mechanics. As Einstein and Schrodinger on one hand and Bohr and Heisenberg on the other (collectively the founders of modern physics) had totally different viewpoints, it’s not something the rest of us will easily assimilate into a worldview.
Is there anything of value in this book for the evangelical Christian? Firstly, one chapter, the Anthropic Principle, describes how precisely the universe has been constructed to permit intelligent life on earth. Secondly, despite his scepticism on the reliability of the Bible, Stannard finds convincing the evidence for the miracle of the resurrection. Otherwise there is not much for those who accept an inerrant Scripture.
