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Sermons

Language to Engage

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Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

Not surprisingly, since our first session on Tuesday, I’ve been thinking about stories. I’m sorry I missed much of yesterday, and apologise if anything I say repeats (or worse, contradicts) what was said then. But then we’re scientists, so we’re used to having to handle corroborating and conflicting data – numbers that fit nicely onto the graph and numbers that are literally way off line.

But we’re more than scientists, we are theologians too. As such we work with the two basic, but separate, building blocks – numbers and words. Our numbers we fashion into formulae and theories, designs and products. Our words we aggregate into sermons and stories, doctrinal teachings and moral imperatives.

I wonder whether that makes the members of this society particularly useful, to both church and science, on those occasions when words and numbers clash and collide.

Last week I was sent a copy of a report on diocesan safeguarding statistics that was shortly to become a press release from the Church of England. It was well set out in a familiar academic style. Each section began with a very brief introduction, leading into a series of tables and figures, and was then followed by a few lines of text analysing what the numbers might mean. I was invited to comment on it, as the nearest to a statistician among those who have to field media enquiries on behalf of the Church. They numbers made sense, the textual description fitted them, but the overall effect wasn’t quite right. Bluntly, they lacked a story, or the story came too late. By the time a journalist had glanced at a few of the statistics, they would be writing their own narrative around them, with greater regard for what made good copy than for the truth of their assertions. Better, earlier narrative would make it harder (though I’m sure not impossible) for the numbers to be pressed into the service of some hostile agenda.

The suggestions I made were little more than probably any of us here today could have done. The paper just needed someone confident enough with both numbers and words to see how the two could be assembled into a coherent message.

As I mentioned to my small group on Wednesday, I learned how easily numbers lose out to words some years ago. Well over a decade ago, at a parliamentary launch event I was given a series of credit card sized pieces of paper that statistically demolished the ten most popular myths about migration. I thought it was a great piece of research, and bound to change minds. It had no impact whatsoever. A third hand story about someone’s daughter being denied a council house, and then seeing a family assumed to be foreigners moving into such a property the next week, carries far more weight, even if it is wildly inaccurate, than any well evidenced argument that migration has very little impact on housing waiting lists.

Entire chunks of UK welfare benefits policy have been based on the power of the narrative around the tiny numbers who seriously abuse the system, even if eradicating their abuses can only be done at the cost of catching many more innocent people in a poverty trap. I suspect every single family with ten or more children reliant on state benefits, and there are only a few dozen at most in the land, has had its day on the front page of at least one tabloid paper. Stories trump numbers, especially when those stories chime well with what we want to believe to be true. Confirmation bias is alive and doing very well, thank you.

Many of us here are people who are comfortable around numbers. We calculate and calibrate with them. We see them as our friends, and we treat them with the respect that friends deserve. Yet we ourselves fall victim to confirmation bias if we assume that others share that perspective. My wife Sue, who will be ordained as a Self Supporting Priest later this month, did some of her research into maths anxiety. In Western society to be illiterate is shameful, to be functionally innumerate is almost seen as a badge to be worn with pride. Outside the scientific community, and in the church as much as anywhere else, numbers are feared, misunderstood, shunned. Within science, words are often awkward, poorly delivered. We’ve all sat in the lecture theatre whilst the wonders of nature are rendered banal and boring by the limitations of the speaker’s language. The force and delight of discovery is often diminished or deflected by the weakness of how it is expressed.

So, are there ways that we can serve the church and society as those who have had to prove ourselves in both fields? Let me offer just two examples. You can think up your own later.
Challenging narratives that twist the evidence with ones that are equally, if not better, stories, yet are grounded in reality and can, when called upon, be supported by the data. When I was asked, following a lecture given whist I was in the USA for the Society’s retreat there, to turn my PhD into a book, I knew I would have to replace the statistical tables, much though I loved hem, with example. At the publisher’s request I’ve recently turned the same theory into a series of daily devotional readings for Lent, to be published later this year. A lot of my broadcasting work is grounded in the belief that there is no such thing as effective prose, only poetry that is travelling incognito.

Explaining scientific theories and technological advances in well-crafted prose. It can be done. Few people understand the equations that underlie quantum mechanics but far more think Schrödinger had a cat. The popularity of black holes is probably 75% because they were given such an evocative name. How can we, who are required by our ordination to be wordsmiths, help science find its language more reliably?

Sermons

The story I tell myself

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Sermon from Stig Graham,
Warden of the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2019

One of the joys of being Warden is that I get to share with my brothers and sisters in this Society my favourite Bible passages. Last year I was able to share with you the courage of Thomas, Thomas the Doubter, and this year it is the story of the Syrophoenician woman which, like Thomas, has been a pivotal one for me. The joy for you is that you can sit and listen to me.
Or is that just the story I tell myself. That may not be the story you tell one another in the bar or over dinner this evening.
We do like stories. As children, as adults, through all kinds of media, verbal, textual, digital, movies or theatre we flock to have the world explained to us. It really isn’t surprising that Jesus told parables, acted out his drama, drew on contextual symbols to try and communicate his Good News.
The week before last, here in the UK, the very last episode of The Big Bang Theory was televised. The essential theme was simple; over several years it followed four very geeky young men and scientists through their love lives, (which most of the time, until recent years, was defined more by its absence than its presence) and their careers. And it has to be said that young women in their lives were much more savvy than the boys were. The series concluded with a strong feel good ending with professional recognition, and the Nobel prize, but most all the recognition of the importance of friendship and the responsibilities it entails.
Sheldon (the Nobel prize winner)(in the interests of parity observing en passant that he won it with his wife with their joint paper on super asymmetry)(and yes, I know you are scientists but it’s a comedy so just go with it), Sheldon had a very clearly structured hierarchy of people in his head. Top of the pile are the theoretical physicists (just like him in fact), then come the experimental physicists followed by the lowly engineers. On being challenged that his wife is also an eminent neuroscientist he smiles condescendingly and observes that, well, yes but after all, it is only biology. And as for those who haven’t what it takes to be scientist, well… Certainly, that is the story Sheldon likes to tell himself.
And yes, it is funny – except it is a trope which has been around in science for a very long time. I am sure we have all had the experience of hearing someone joking about it, and we laugh and then think, ‘You know, you believe that, just a little bit, perhaps a little bit too much’. Have a listen to the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast with Professor Brian Cox (and I am sorry Sharon, but somehow I can’t achieve the same level of passion in my voice as you when saying his name – perhaps it’s my lack of any kind of hair) and Robin Ince. A witty fun programme, but now and again, just a little too fervent. Or is that the story I like to tell myself?
And, by the by, in tomorrow’s Admissions Eucharist, the eucharistic prayer contains the line, ‘In the fullness of time you made us in your image, the crown of all creation’. Us, the crown of all creation? Or is that the story we like to tell ourselves?
The story of the Syrophoenician woman is a case in point. Generally, in my experience, people don’t like this story. That was true in even my youth when we were much less aware or sensitive to issues of abuse but in this age of the #metoo generation it seems even more unacceptable. ‘Why does Jesus ignore her? That’s not very Christian’ is the popular cry. Part of the problem is that the reading we have just heard is normally split over two Sundays, by which time most people have forgotten the first half, assuming they were there to hear it in the first place.
But taken together, there are only two verses between Jesus saying, ‘For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.  These are what defile a person’ and then us being told that Jesus did not respond.
As a chaplain I would call it ‘holding the silence’. Creating a sound space to afford an opportunity for it to be filled. The disciples don’t need a question, nor even an invitation; they pile on in, sharing with the world what is in their hearts. ‘Send her away she is noisy, she is foreign, she is a woman’. Technically, of course this passage only specifies that she is shouting at them but as we know elsewhere the disciples become greatly exorcised when Jesus is talking with women, children and Gentiles; all those people who are clearly beneath him, and probably unclean – the story which is in their hearts, the story they tell themselves. And, remarkably, being ritually unclean is what they have just been accused of by the Pharisees.
For the record, I don’t believe for one moment that the Jesus was rude or abusive. I believe he knew exactly what he was doing: testing the disciples. It is possible that the Canaanite woman, surrounded by equally noisy men, was a woman of such great courage, fortitude and determination, not to mention desperation, that she still pursued her claim. I find it much more likely that in Jesus she saw someone who would not abuse her but would help her, finding in herself the confidence to block his way, kneeling before him, and engaging in witty if brief dialogue. Shades of the scandalous woman at the well, and an echo of Jesus’ own mother ignoring his response, overriding him, and simply saying to the servants, ‘Just do what he says’.
But more importantly today, I want to draw out what Jesus said about it being what comes out of our mouths which defiles us.
There are many examples in life of abusive behaviour, diminishing and demeaning others, because it aggrandizes ourselves. It is the self-affirming story we like to tell ourselves, because we are the ones who know better.
But let’s stay with the women – they are at the heart this Gospel story. We may shake our heads at the disciples. What narratives were running through their heads as they sought to send her away? We may condemn movie moguls exploiting young women for sexual favours – didn’t we just mention evil intentions and fornication. ‘No, not at all,’ is their cry, ‘I was merely helping these willing young women to develop their careers’. Well, that’s the story they keep telling themselves and, if they have the chance, tell the world too.
Thank goodness that doesn’t happen in the Church or Science…
Except of course it is horribly well documented what has happened in the Church. We even have our own designated form of abuse, spiritual abuse. And sadly, it is very real. And in Science too, people with power and authority abuse the vulnerable in all kinds of ways, sometimes indistinguishably from movie moguls. And I suspect we can’t begin to imagine the story they tell themselves to justify their actions.
But at least Science, the pure institutional concept, is safe, based as it is on reason, objective thought and empirical evidence. Sadly not. At present, there is a campaign for drug doses to be recalibrated for women because of their physiological differences. The proponents aver that present dosages are predicated are experiments which were mainly conducted by men on men and very often with diseases that afflict men. They also point to how little money has been spent on research on women’s ailments. And the history of science shows how often women have been dismissed, demeaned and denigrated just because they are women – and science has been used to justify the stereotypes. Women dying after childbirth because doctors cannot believe that they are the harbingers of death, ignoring the evidence about cleanliness and the washing of hands. The science around breast feeding does not bear review, as the poor delicate wee things, that is – the mothers, clearly don’t have the strength or capacity to breast feed their babies for any length of time. And as a woman scientist observed only last week on Radio 4, ‘If men suffered from endometriosis rather than erectile dysfunction, I wonder where the money would have been spent’. Even as late as the 1950’s scientists at Harvard studying menstruation were still talking about ‘meno-toxins’, supporting the work of Bela Schick who in the 1920’s had published anecdotal evidence that contact with menstruating women caused bread to fail to rise, flowers to wilt and animals to die.
So what? What can we do? As priests and as scientists we can call out poor theology, poor science, poor ethics, especially when it impacts the vulnerable and disempowered. As Christians we are called to stand with the poor and oppressed, those in need. As scientists and priests, we have opportunities that others don’t to fulfil that call. But as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth we are also called to examine ourselves, our own motivations, to challenge the stories we tell ourselves too. To ask ourselves the question, and believe me standing here before you, I feel the irony deeply, to ask ourselves the question, ‘What is coming out my mouth that defiles me and the image of God that is within me?
Just as well I believe in a God who knows what it is to be human.
Just as well I believe in a God who knows how to forgive the unforgivable.
It may be the story I tell myself, but it is the myth and reality by which I try to live my life.

Sermons

Learning from Change

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Sermon from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, 2018

I’m very much in “proud dad” mode at the moment. A few days ago, my daughter got the final results from her university exams; she will shortly graduate from Exeter with a First in Biology. Within hours she had started job hunting for research based work. Half my age, she now uses statistical modelling techniques that blow my own achievements completely out of the water. What fascinates her, and where she hopes to make a career in scientific research, is how species and their Ecosystems respond to changes in the wider environment. She’s come a long way from simply protesting about the dangers of climate change, to wanting to understand where the risks lie, and what opportunities we have to do something about them. Her science, like much of the scientific task, is about how, where and why things change.
Theology can present itself as almost the very opposite discipline. It can be characterised as being primarily about delving deeper into the unchanging truths that lie at the heart of faith. The previous Bishop of London famously, but jokingly, said, ” You want change? Don’t you think things are bad enough already?” So I believe, that one of the gifts those with both a scientific and theological training can bring to the latter, is a willingness to engage with change creatively and positively. A generation or two ago, the Process Theology championed by the likes of Whitehead and Norman Pittenger (who I knew in my Cambridge undergraduate days) sought to do just that. By I suspect there’s a new task, for a current generation of thinkers, which may build on different foundations. Indeed, it would be wonderfully ironic if the only way to think about change was the way that earlier generations had developed.
So let me suggest three areas where a scientist’s willingness to engage with change might impact for good on our theology.

Liturgy and Change

Leading a church that contained charismatics and traditional Anglicans. It’s not whether you have both change and stability, it’s about where you locate them, eg hymns or liturgy. Most of us find other people’s preferred places of change and stability at best odd, at worst disturbing.
How far can we do change in our liturgy so that it helps us cope with change in wider life rather than being an impediment? Can change done well in liturgy help. Or is it better to make liturgy the locus of the deeply fixed?
Division 2 performances in a Premier League world.
How do new arrivals in our churches cope with the fact we do some things not that well? What can we change in order not to look like we don’t really care very much about our God?

Evangelism and Change

What does commitment to Christ mean in a society where the notion of commitment has changed hugely in a lifespan?
A society where for most there is no permanent career, life partners are changed, and we love in communities that don’t look like what we joined.
What do we do when a gospel rooted in God’s face to face engagement with humanity in Christ, confronts a society where proximity and presence is overtaken by social media?
What does salvation mean in a world that has lost a sense of sin? And where church pronouncements about morals are seen as toxic to our brand?

Pastoral Care and change

Has the home become a place of privacy not of gathering and welcoming? Can home visits still work beyond the Elderly?
Can home groups survive?
Can pastoral care still be an appealing prospect in a society struggling with the safeguarding agenda?
What is the role of the vicar or lay visitor in a context of highly professionalised interventions for our wellbeing?

Concluding Remarks

I don’t believe that change is ultimately a threat to the propagation and practice of the Christian Faith. I do believe that failing to grapple with the nature of change is the real threat.
I also believe that we inhabit church structures that were built more to sustain stability than to engage creatively with change. A church more Benedictine than Franciscan.
But I am an inveterate Franciscan. And I believe those of us with scientific know how can help the church to find the right responses to the big questions around change that face us.
Amen.

Sermons

Changing Minds

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Sermon,
Lucas Mix, Provincial Warden
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, US, 2018

It can be hard to preach when you’re in the process of changing your mind.
Nick’s talks this week have me thinking and changing,
but that’s part of what I wanted to say today, so it’s fitting.
I’d like to share with you two dualisms and a monism:
that is two ways of dividing the world –
neither of which I entirely agree with –
and some thoughts about how to pull it all together.

We have a reading from Genesis about the First day,
and that has me thinking about Philo,
who may have been the first to suggest a dual creation.
The first day was, for him, a creation in light of ideal forms.
The other days, the material creation, began to work out the details
of concrete physical things.
This dual creation inspired similar schemes in Augustine and Aquinas
and eventually the familiar mind and matter of Descartes.
I think it also lies behind the line in the Nicene Creed about God
creating all that is, seen and unseen,
the invisible order and the visible stuff of creation.
I do not think there are two kinds of substances – mind and matter –
but I do think we live at the boundary between the two.
I think we live at the intersection of the mental and the physical.
I also think that we, especially as ordained scientists,
live at the boundary of the known and the unknown,
the seen and the unseen.

Our readings from Acts and Mark also provide a dualism
with two kinds of baptism:
the baptism of John and baptism of Jesus,
the baptism of water and the baptism of spirit,
the baptism of repentance and the baptism of new life.
I’m not sure how best to interpret these passages
and I don’t want to suggest that I have the best way,
but I’d like to share my own thoughts on the two baptisms.
I see John’s baptism as reactive.
It brings repentance and forgiveness.
John’s baptism is all about turning away from what is evil.
But that is not enough.
It is not enough to turn away from the evil;
we must turn toward the good.
We must orient ourselves in God and Christ.
Jesus’ baptism is proactive.
It brings adoption and inspiration.
It leads to growth.
It does more than save us from the evil;
it empowers us in the good.

The two can never be fully separated,
but I think it’s useful, in both science and theology,
to think about renewal in both ways.
We do more than falsify bad theories;
in some mysterious way, we find good ones.
With C. S. Lewis, I think that there are infinitely more ways of being right
than there are of being wrong.
When we focus too much on atonement, repentance, and salvation,
we develop an anemic faith,
one that can resist the bad,
but cannot embrace the good,
one that can deny the past,
but not reach forward into the future.
Atonement, repentance, and salvation are crucially important;
they are not the full end of baptism.
There must be more.
There must be a movement of the Holy Spirit in us.

And once again, we, particularly as ordained scientists,
live at the boundary,
where we are rejecting the bad, but also embracing the good,
turning away from bad ways of looking at the world,
but also promoting good ways.
Skepticism is not enough.

Some of you may be familiar with a book by Bill Countryman,
Living on the Border of the Holy.
It speaks of our calling as Christians to live on the borderlands
between the secular and the sacred,
between life as we experience it and life fully in the presence of God.
We cannot cover the ground for people,
nor can we act as an intermediary between them and God,
but we can be guides for others as they travel unfamiliar territory.
We can reorient them when they get lost,
help them up when they stumble,
and point out some areas where it’s easy to get bogged down
or stopped altogether.

There is only one world,
and all of us struggle to find our way in it.
Science and faith can be valuable tools for that,
when we use them rightly.
Ordained Scientists have a calling to help people in that process.

What do you do when you find yourself in sudden darkness?
Call out?
Light a match or turn on a flashlight?
In my mind, science is like a flashlight.
It is this wonderful tool for dealing with darkness.
We should always carry it with us and try it out.
And sometimes, a flashlight just doesn’t help.
It shines over the edge of a cliff, or onto a black surface, or the battery runs out.
Sometimes we need other tools and other strategies.
We need to be prepared when our flashlight is not enough.
After all, sometimes the best response to the darkness
is to let our eyes adjust.
And sometimes we can only lie down and sleep until the dawn.

The borderlands can be like that,
the strange region between seen and unseen, visible and invisible, secular and holy.
They require patience and clear thinking and a variety of tools.
I think ordained scientists can help people use their flashlights,
but I also think we are here to help people when the flashlight
isn’t enough.
Science is narrow.
Faith must be broad enough to encompass the whole world.

I love God and I love the world that God has made.
This love keeps me looking.
It motivates my science and my theology as I try to understand,
and nothing could stop me from my investigation.
Would you stop from following your beloved?

We know about relationships.
We know that they require both curiosity and commitment.
A relationship with curiosity but no commitment, cannot grow.
It lacks the bonds that hold people together.
It lacks the shared responsibility and care
that make two people one.
A relationship with commitment, but no curiosity, grows brittle and frail.
How can we say we truly love someone when we no longer know who they are?
Our relationship with God and creation must be like this:
committed to curiosity
and curious about commitment.
We must be always looking and listening to hear.
We must be always responding and sharing what we have.

So, I would commend to you both curiosity and commitment,
as you negotiate the borders of seen and unseen,
and as you help others along the way.

Sermons

Statistics, Scientists and Religion

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Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist, Dr David Walker
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, Richmond, VA, 2018

As most of you know, I’m not a proper scientist, I’m a mathematician who dabbles a bit in statistics. But on the plane coming across to the US I was reading a report on a survey of 3000 scientists in the UK, France and Germany, that was examining the evidence for the popular belief that science and religion are at war.
These three European countries (assuming I’m still allowed to consider the UK as European until Brexit) would all be classified as at the secular end of the scale. Yet what was interesting was that only a quarter identified as atheists, and around half claimed to be religious or spiritual in some way. Only a minority among the atheists believed science and religion are opposed. and quite a small minority of them saw science and the broader notion of spirituality as being in conflict. Particularly interesting was that atheism scores were lower for those who had higher scientific qualifications, doctorates for example. The high profile, high performing, anti-religious polemicist could well be categorized as an endangered species. I was pondering that we should maybe set up sanctuaries for them in places that would minimize contact with the outside world. But I’m not sure sanctuary is a word they could cope with.
Anyway, none of these findings imply that we should simply assume the argument to have been won, endangered species are always worth studying. But maybe it suggests that the force of our efforts should and could lie elsewhere. Let me offer you three challenges, or opportunities, that arise from these Ipsos-Mori research findings, one for each of the three main non-atheist groups. Some of you are probably already doing a lot of this.

Strengthening the faithful

  • Being visible in a society where religion is treated as private. Physically visible, visible in the cyber world, visible in magazines, journals etc. Housing example.
  • Sermons and liturgies that take science seriously – maybe special events to appeal to those who don’t want a weekly habit.
  • Finding people things to do. How can a faithful scientist grow their faith through practical action or engagements? Faith, like a bodily muscle, grows when you exercise it. Give it nothing to do and it will slowly atrophy.
  • Helping people articulate what they believe and how it relates to their science –
  • De-compartmentalizing, to use some of the language we have been working with this
    week.
  • Scientists in Congregations event at Manchester Cathedral this coming Tuesday.

Encouraging the spiritual

  • Offering a spirituality that goes beyond the individual’s private experience.
  • Awe and wonder at the natural world as shared phenomena.
  • Opening up the mystical traditions of faith. It’s not primarily about dogma.
  • Quest religiosity.
  • Building that inhabitable house that Stig has referred to in our conversations. For some people the Chapel is there in the basement, alongside the foundations, for others it’s on the roof, the final element to be put in place. Spirituality can lead to belief as well as the other way round.
  • I not sure there has been enough exploration of what a good science informed spirituality looks like. The Western tendency to look for spirituality in pre-scientific societies may not be a help.
  • Turning spiritual values into practical action.

Engaging the undecided

  • Opening the mind through meditation. Conversation with senior BBC director.
  • Ethics – paralleling the responsible shareholder movement, what is responsible
    science? Too often ethics seems to be a box to be ticked when getting a research proposal through the maze of university protocols. The Ethics Committee is one more hurdle to jump, and once you’ve cleared it you can forget it. What does it mean to take a responsible, ethical approach at every stage of the scientific process?
  • Enjoying uncertainty together – the Quest dimension of religiosity. It’s ok to have doubt, it’s even better to enjoy doubt and uncertainty, especially when they become the energy to explore further. Not to reach certainties but to find some even more exciting doubts to profess.

I’ve couched this in response to a survey about professional scientists, but I would hope that it’s more widely applicable to engaging with the scientific mind and spirit in general.

Each of us can pick at least one to focus on for this new year. To help the religious, the spiritual, or the agnostic. And not to waste energy throwing food to the polemicists in their protected enclosures.

Sermons

The Art of Science

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Sermon Extracts from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Annual Retreat, 2017

Douglas Adams, in his Hitchhikers Guide, tells the story of a huge computer, which in a short time begins with “I think therefore I am” and deduced the existence of income tax and rice pudding. Adams appeals to a particular view of science as driven by logical necessity, one seen again recently when another atheist entertainer argued that 1000 years after an apocalyptic event science would have reinvented all that had been lost whilst previous religions would be totally forgotten. This view of science plays to the old image of the man (or just occasionally woman) in the white lab coat, holding a test tube. In the convention, that individual would have superhuman intelligence combined with the emotional and artistic capacities of an earthworm.

No doubt there are some scientists who are so coldly rational that they are capable of committing any conceivable act in the pursuit of their studies. The Nazi trials of 70 years ago threw light on some grave abuses of human rights that that took place, in the name of science, in camps such as Auschwitz. But that is not the way that science as a whole progresses. Outside the world populated by Adams’s fictional hitchhiker, there is no such thing as a truly rational rice pudding.

The scientific task is not just logical, it is aesthetic, artistic, moral and spiritual. Which is where you and I come in.

I discovered early on in my own research career, that the answers we find depend hugely on the questions we ask. It often takes far longer to find the right question than to answer it. Our choice of questions is determined to a large extent by factors such as what we think will be useful, what appears to have innate beauty, what may lead to morally good applications, and what funders are prepared to pay for. All of these are issues I face just as much in my day job as a bishop, and indeed they are matters we all face as Christian ministers.

So how can we use our grounding in both the fields of faith and science, so as to be a priestly people for the good of humankind? Rather than generalities, let me briefly look at three specific areas, but then the principles can be applied more widely.

Medicine and pharmacology
Statins and the CT scan. Why do I get offered a choice of treatment when many others don’t?

Misuse of antibiotics, the tension between now and the future.
Manchester story, how nineteenth century scientists began to study the diseases and injuries of the working classes.

Climate change and human sexuality
How do we deal with politically or religiously driven minority research?
When is a consensus a consensus?

Particle accelerators and space probes
How much of the science budget should be spent on going beyond the obviously useful?

The true rice pudding is much more than the logical consequence of heating up plant seeds in liquid. It’s a mouthwatering combination of flavours; it’s a means of feeding the hungry; it’s the use of a readily affordable crop that will grow well and cheaply in wet environments; it’s a lifesaver for those with wheat intolerance. And for you and for me, it’s something over which to offer thanks to God.

Sermons

Scientific Observations

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Sermon given by Bp. David Walker, Visitor, at the Annual Gathering 2016

In the time I have spent as Visitor to this society, it seems that I’ve observed three aspects of its role. And preparing for this few days with you it felt like I’d been around long enough to now begin to report back on my observations, and see if you agree. After all, moving from observed phenomena to the construction of a hypothesis lies at the heart of the scientific method.
To begin with, it exists to show that it is possible to be a person both of deep Christian faith and of sound scientific credentials. It meant a great deal to me, as a young student at Cambridge, to attend not only scientific lectures given by John Polkinghorne but also listen him address a Christian fellowship. If he, the Professor of Particle Physics could combine science and religion, then certainly a mere undergraduate in his department could do so. It was noticeable back then that the people who were most inclined to tell me that science and religion could not coexist tended to be not only irreligious but also non-scientists. The scientists, and the religious, knew better.
I suspect that this has, if anything, got harder over the intervening years. Firstly, there are probably fewer scientists today who had their upbringing in a church going family. It is always easier to be hostile or indifferent to something you have not experienced or that doesn’t touch the lives of your immediate relatives and closest friends. Secondly, the increased stridency of forms of Christianity that clearly despise science and will only give credence to theories that lie entirely within their theological framework, has discredited all people of our faith. W e are all assumed to subscribe to the doctrines of the most fundamentalist. And if we don’t, then that is taken as evidence that we are not really as religious as we pretend.
My worry is that we are less likely today, even than a single generation ago, to get near enough to many scientists to be able to demonstrate that we have the integrity that we do. That’s why I’m extremely grateful to David Wilkinson and his colleagues in Durham, for creating space in recent years for senior religious leaders and front line scientists to meet up and simply get to know each other through conference of a couple of days or so. The enemy of both science and religion is ignorance, and ignorance of each other risks making us enemies. I’m also grateful to programmes such as God and the Big Bang, which puts scientists of faith into sixth form classes, where they have a chance of engaging with at least some of those who will be professional scientists in future. W e need to support such programmes. The return on investment may not be immediate but the longer term impact may be vital. I was very lucky as a teenager to attend a school where nobody was allowed to do more than three A levels, and where the remainder of lessons were deliberately drawn from outside of the range being studied for examination. Those of us who were learning sciences were required to choose additional options that bent towards the humanities, and vice verse. I’m not convinced that many schools take that line today. Maybe, where we are school governors, we can at least ask the questions.
My second observation is that we exist to help the world of science. A good and current example would be that of climate change. The contribution of faith has been essential both to set a framework in which research into this topic has been widely supported and through which the findings of scientific research have been propagated and publicised. Modern science is not any longer carried out by parish clergymen with a university education and lots of spare time on their hands. It requires funding and funding requires political support. And that support is often resisted by those who have strong vested interests in the status quo. A good theology of creation and of stewardship has a vital role to play in maintaining the weight of public support that holds politicians to continue to let funding flow for the research, when private sector money is either not available or would corrupt the programme. And climate change is an excellent of example of how people of faith, led by good theology, have been at the forefront not just of practical action but of disseminating the findings of research. Again, too important to be left to the publicity machines of the commercial lobbyists.
But climate change is not the only area in which good theology can support and help good science. W e’re fortunate in having Bishop Lee Rayfield as one of our society members. Lee’s work, in the field of bioethics, is a great example to us. When science runs too far ahead of an ethical base, even more so when it denies the need for ethics at all, it not only risks prostituting itself to the basest customer, it risks losing the public support within which it must always operate. It isn’t
possible to separate the question of what can be done and what should be done within the world of research. And scientists are often not the ones best equipped to evaluate ethical considerations. What you and I know, and what needs to be at the heart of our particular contribution, is that in the absence of an ethical framework for scientific research being informed and influenced by theology that is friendly to the scientific quest, the framework that is set up will be influenced by theologies that are much less sympathetic.
My third aspect of our role ought to be the easiest, but I fear is perhaps the hardest of all. W e are to see that theology and religion does its work in a manner that understands science and incorporates best scientific practice. This isn’t just, indeed it is hardly at all about challenging the wackiest theologies that fly in the face of basic scientific consensus. It’s more about trying to encourage the church to do its own research and to base its decisions more solidly in evidence. One of the most important but grumbled about departments of the Church of England is the small national unit that works on research and statistics. Clergy moan more about filling in annual statistical returns than about almost anything else except their Parish Share. Last month I attended and presented a paper at the biennial conference of the International Society for Empirical Research in Theology. It was about the fifth such conference I’ve attended, and probably the best yet. W e had soundly researched papers on a wide range of topics that could and should be guiding churches in the establishment of their policies and practices. And yet all too often when research findings come up against previously held positions or personal preferences, it’s the research that loses out.
Many of you will know, we submitted a contribution to the Pilling group on human sexuality a few years ago. It set out where the overwhelming weight of scientific opinion lay, as well as where opinion remained divided. Nobody was suggesting that the ethical issues around same sex relationships could be entirely determined by the observation of similar behaviours in other mammals and primates, or by the majority view on nature versus nurture. But it was depressing to see that the report simply noting that as there were some scientists who took views contrary to the consensus, everything was still open for debate and the evidence could be largely discarded.
As a society we are better placed than most to be able to tell the difference between genuine areas of scientific disagreement, where much is still to be decided, and where the division is between a broad consensus and a resistant rump, the latter often having external reasons for the positions it holds.
Some harder today, for each member of the society, as we affirm our promises and commitment, as that each of us may find one of those three aspects of our life to which we can make a particular effort over these next twelve months. So that between us we can continue to further the cause of good science and good religion being good friends,

Sermons

World Views on the Macro and Micro Scale

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A sermon by the Rev. Dr. Keith Suckling, Warden at the Society’s Gathering at Scargill, July 2015

I was glad to hear in David Gosling’s talks at this Gathering his experience of aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam which he shared from his periods of time in South Asia. It should not have been a surprise, but it was still very striking to see the differences in the world view of these cultures almost at first hand. We are of course familiar with the concept of world views and the conflicts that can arise when they come in close contact. The readings we have heard this morning give us a scriptural context. The story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.1-9) can be seen as the point at which world views began to diverge. More significantly, Jesus points out to his disciples that the world view which he represents is fundamentally different from that held by the wider society in which we live (John 14.22-15.1).

It is a familiar picture, but sometimes small events bring the real situation into closer focus. Early in 2014 I received a completely unexpected invitation from the Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney to come to Fraserburgh in north-east Aberdeenshire as Priest in Charge of St Peter’s Church. It was the kind of email which demanded taking very seriously and after a period of discernment and the necessary visits Helen and I moved to Fraserburgh in October. There was a very strong sense of being led by the Holy Spirit, of which more towards the end.

Shortly after arriving I made contact with some local schools and some weeks later this was followed up by a request for a discussion with a sixth year student who was working on a project on assisted dying. Legislation was in progress in the Scottish Parliament at the time (although it subsequently failed). I had a good discussion with the student and she was grateful to hear a point of view which was new to her. She had carefully gathered views from her own circle, family and friends, and it seemed that most of the opinions she had heard came from a utilitarian and pragmatic perspective. We are familiar of the idea of a conflict model between religious world views and secular ones, but on the basis of this and related experiences, I think we need to replace it with the ignorance model. It may not be too extreme to suggest that in the Venn diagram of these world views there is practically no overlap.

And still the regular traffic of confused debate continues. The challenges of natural disasters and suffering remain, God is accused and answers are demanded, but we can only have a debate when there is some common ground to work on. Fundamentalist atheism is no longer respectable intellectually but still dominates media discourse. All these factors and developments suggest that the ground in which we operate has slowly been shifting and now is quite different from what it was 30 years ago when the ideas of forming SOSc were taking shape. If people don’t know what Christianity is they are not going to be particularly bothered about the subtleties of the science/religion debate. But the fact that some people pop up here and there who obstinately try to live fully within the

world view of a religion but who also accept and indeed celebrate the kind of data that the secular world needs to rely on sometimes stops the secularist short. Yes, amongst others, we are those people.

Christianity has to recover by people wanting to be part of it. You join a club, a sport or a society because it seems attractive to you. You don’t know everything about it at the time but you are prepared to give it a try. But it’s got to be attractive enough – to raise interest and curiosity. To those who follow a different world view, we are, using the word in a different way, curious people, but maybe we are ones who raise enough interest so that it gets to be followed up at some time in the future.

This continues to be our role in SOSc, and it is exactly as the aims of the Society were conceived 30 years ago. Perhaps some of the wider church is beginning to pay more attention. We continue to be, as I said two years ago, the data and the evidence. Or, put a little differently, we are and we inhabit and we have to remain the common ground, the more visible the better. In fact, we are getting some response to our publicity. In the past six months there have been more email requests for information about the Society with a view to membership than ever before. There is the unmeasurable but real trickle effect of people who have come into contact with our members telling others about us. Those of us who use social media can have an encouragingly wider impact.

Having made a major and unexpected move in the past year, and starting off with an agenda in mind containing far more things that could be done than are possible, I’m quite clear that we as a Society also have to continue to expect to be led. It’s that peculiar partly proactive and partly reactive state where we try, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to synthesise all sorts of inputs, some specific and defined, some vague and hardly sensed. It’s one that sees opportunities as they appear and, after appropriate discernment, takes them and manages to make progress without needing to have all the milestones defined in the way that we did for the kind of drug discovery programme I used to lead. Fuzzy. Often challenging to the scientific mind.

We can only be effective in taking the opportunities that offer themselves to us if our primary response is to God and to God in creation. This is what we share today as we celebrate the Eucharist with a eucharistic prayer from Operation Noah. I’ve talked mostly about the outward role of the Society, about our world view and others. But now as we worship together, this is the internal strength of our community. The real sense of community is never stronger than at this point in the Gathering. All that we stand for is enhanced and deepened and as always, I feel warmed and greatly encouraged by our time together.