Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, Launde, UK, Summer 2022

I love being a minister in a church that has a set lectionary for every day. Not only does it save me from having to pick passages from which to preach, it offers me opportunities I would never have grasped. So, here today, as we meet to admit a new member and reaffirm the vows of existing Ordained Scientists, we have, in our Old Testament passage (1 Kings 18: 20-39) an account of one the most rigorously executed scientific experiments in antiquity. So let’s have a look at how it might help us today.
Elijah sets out with a clear hypothesis – that the God of Israel is supreme and Baal is nothing. He makes every possible concession to allow his hypothesis to be disproved – giving his adversaries plenty of time, dousing his own offering three times in water – before finally proving his proposition. You can imagine it set out, not as a passage of scripture, but as an article for a modern peer reviewed journal. My only quibble with his scientific method is that, in having his enemies seized and killed (in a final verse the lectionary chooses to omit), he has perhaps taken the task of cleaning up the laboratory afterwards, to excess. Of course, those were the days before Ethics Committees pored in such detail over every aspect of even the simplest research proposal.

INTEGRITY IN EXPERIMENTS

Elijah, of course, has a lot invested in the success of his endeavours. Had his adversaries succeeded, or had he failed, he would have been the one seized by the crowd and destroyed. And yet he is meticulous in doing nothing that might lead to accusations that he has rigged the experiment in his favour. Over the last five years, I’ve become increasingly involved in supporting those living in high and medium rise buildings affected by the cladding scandal. Many of them are living in fear of both fire and the financial ruin they will suffer in seeking to rectify the mistakes of developers and freeholders. Back in March I was able to take Archbishop Justin on a visit to meet residents of one particular city centre block in Manchester. From the balcony of one apartment they listed the costs in millions it would take for each of the blocks we could see to be made safe enough for their homes to be capable of attracting a mortgage again. As the Grenfell Inquiry has discovered, many unsuitable materials found their ways into the fabric of people’s homes because the tests for combustibility were rigged; fully real world conditions were not simulated. In a parallel case, at least one major motor manufacturer has been found to have installed test cheating software into their systems. To move to yet another sector, pharmaceutical companies are regularly accused of hiding unhelpful research findings that might destroy the potential of a drug they have spent significant sums in developing.
Central to our calling, as Ordained Scientists, is that science must be honest. No matter what the positive or negative consequences, be they commercial, reputational, or career damaging, the integrity of the research process must be paramount. Every falsified experiment not only damages its own hypothesis, it undermines the entire scientific exercise. In my most suspicious moments, I have wondered whether the water Elijah threw over the wood might have actually been highly distilled, and readily combustible, alcohol, but I doubt it. It’s a fair experiment, as experiments should be. Over 2500 years on, our own engagement with God’s creation is too precious to let us collude with anything less than full integrity in our research processes and practices.

EXPERIMENTING WITH GOD

Arguably, one of the oldest ethical restrictions for any experiment is issued by Jesus himself. When he’s challenged by Satan to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple, he memorably responds “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”. At first glance, that might seem to be a rejection of what Elijah did, in proving God’s power to the Israelites. But the two are actually almost direct opposites of each other. Elijah’s experiment offers space in which God can choose to act; Satan seeks to deny God space, to force him either to intervene or to see Jesus’s ministry destroyed at the very outset. If Satan can force God’s hand, then he can lay claim to be God’s equal or greater. Having failed here to get Jesus to collude with his experiment, he retreats, only to return later and
seek to force God a second time, this time in the baying voices of those on Good who shout for Jesus to prove himself by calling on angels to bring him down, unharmed, from the cross.
By contrast Elijah performs an experiment that allows God to show his power, if he so wills. God remains supreme.
The scientific endeavour, in all its fields, is, at its very best, an exploration of the wonders of God’s creation. It should evoke, both in those who engage in it and those who simply receive their results and discoveries, a sense of awe that is only a short step (if even that) away from worship. Far from confining God into ever smaller gaps in our human knowledge, science reveals the ever increasing complexity and beauty of all that his hand has created, from the delicate interplay between universal physical constants that makes complex molecules and hence life forms possible, to the gentle pressure of evolutionary forces, moulding life into multiplicity. St Francis (you wouldn’t expect me to complete a sermon without at least one reference to him) loved every aspect of God’s creation, even death itself, because in all of it he saw the handiwork of his creator and redeemer. Our role as ordained scientists is not simply to do science, but to exult in it, something we see the very best public presenters of science do on TV. Our response should be at the level of our passions and emotions as well as our intellect, so that the world can catch a glimpse of the glory of God in our endeavours.
Elijah’s successful experiment doesn’t bring his troubles to an end. Only a few verses later he is once more fleeing for his life, with Jezebel, her mind closed to any event that doesn’t fit her own faith, having vowed to destroy him. But whatever troubles he has yet to face, his journey deeper into God goes on, first to encounter his Lord in the still small voice on Mount Horeb, and eventually to be taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot. Our own journeys may not contain quite such explicit theophanies, but they play their part, and do so to the glory of God. Amen.

Dispersal Address from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Online Gathering, 2021

Yesterday afternoon, in a slot that sadly overlapped with the start of the second of our sessions that day, I spoke in the UK House of Lords, as part of the legislative process which will lead to a new Environment Act being placed on the statute books. The particular debate I was taking part in, was concerned with plans to require a minimum 10% net gain in biodiversity from planning developments. I had two minutes to link from the theology of creation through examples of how churches are practically promoting biodiversity, not least in churchyards, to end by urging members to amend the Bill to ensure commitments to net gain are adequately funded and not time limited. There’s little point agreeing to a thirty-year biodiversity plan with a landowner, if they can then plough it up and destroy it in year 31.
In both preparing and delivering my speech, I felt the strength of this Society behind me. If this is true for me, who am simply your Visitor, how much more can it be true for the members.
The worship sessions we have shared over these last few days play a vital part in assuring me that God is with us in our care for creation. The Meditations we have heard, have opened my mind even further to see the wonders of life on Earth and strengthened my resolve. When Pan spoke of the catastrophic events that have occurred in the history of this planet, it reminded me that life is both extraordinarily precarious and amazingly resilient. To live on a planet whose age is measured in billions of years, and bears the scars of those ages, is a far more miraculous and awe-inspiring truth than the 6025 or so years that Bishop Graham Usher reminded us his late namesake’s calculations would have it now be. I was sorry to miss most of Roger’s presentation last night, which I know from colleagues was equally inspirational. And indeed to be detained, literally at Her Majesty’s Pleasure this morning, when conversation continued. Jared’s meditation this afternoon helped me get more of a sense of how important is the work that my epigeneticist daughter and her research colleagues at Exeter University do.
Our plenaries and breakout groups have allowed us to explore the ideas presented to us in greater depth. For me at least, it is that close conversation with a handful of colleagues and friends which turns data into understanding, allows me to test my views in a safe and supportive place. whilst, in common with most bishops, I do a lot of talking, I also get talked at quite a lot. And no matter how well presented the arguments, I don’t find I’ve properly processed them until I’ve taken part in some sort of conversation that tests my understanding.
Like many of us, I’ve relished the fact that holding our Gathering online has allowed an ease of participation from members in many time zones. We have saved on costs of time and travel. But we have missed that particular dimension of human engagement that comes from meeting face to face. Some months ago, I compounded the quip, “God so loved the world that he didn’t send a Zoom invitation”. The doctrine of the Incarnation places on Christians, even more than anyone else, a priority to be physically present with one another. To attend to each other at a depth not possible from behind a screen. We above all should be hugely grateful for the science and technology that makes virtual conferencing on this scale available to an extent that less than a decade ago would have been hard to imagine. Like many other bodies, we now need to think hard about how we can blend virtual and physical gatherings together in ways that maximise participation, especially for a community as widely dispersed as SOSc. But I very much hope many of us are able to gather physically next year, in the USA in January and the UK in summer.
Meanwhile, in a few minutes time, our 2021 Gathering will be over, we will press the Leave button on our screens one final time, and return to the demands of our regular labours and routines. Yet we will do so carrying the Society and its members invisibly with us. The events of this week will colour our engagements over the time to come.
For my part, when I go into a debating chamber, especially one as demanding as parliament, and I intend to speak to a further series of amendments on forestry on Monday, I sense myself clothed
with the support of this Society. I know that my concerns for faith and science are not some isolated peculiarity of my own. For me that makes all the difference. Whatever your own equivalent context may be, as you journey back and forward exploring both science and faith, I pray that it may do so for you. May God go with you.

Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Gathering, UK, Summer 2020

Jesus offers one of his most characteristic challenges in today’s gospel; he warns his hearers of hypocrisy. It’s a term as likely to be thrown at religious people, especially religious leaders, today as ever it was in Israel 2000 years ago. What’s more recent, is that it is now levelled at scientists as well. And responses to the coronavirus pandemic have highlighted the challenge that all those who work in sectors that give advice (directly or indirectly, moral or health wise) to the public, face.
UK based members of this society will probably be familiar with the fact that scientific advisors to both the Scottish and English governments felt compelled to resign for breaking the very clear guidelines on lockdown they themselves had played a part in drawing up and promoting. One had made visits to a second residence away from her city base, the other had allowed his (married) girlfriend to come and visit him in his home. It isn’t only scientists who have been exposed for flouting the rules, others have too, including some very close to the centre of power, and not all have felt the moral imperative to resign, but enough has been said about that. Society, and the scientific community itself, expect a high standard of integrity from those who are engaged in a form of work that has the search for truth at its very heart. Politicians, and political advisors, may have very different needles, if any, in their moral compass.
As ordained scientists, members of this society bring to questions such as these, both our understanding of the scientific process and our comprehension of wider ethical and moral behaviour. Rather than compartmentalise those twin aspects of our vocations, we hold them close together. Our science informs our understanding of ethics, our theology informs our understating of science. And the interplay between science and ethics reaches much deeper into our practices and our lives than simply the well-worn task of getting approval from the academic Ethics Committee for some particular piece of research.
We will ask ourselves whether it is possible to keep entirely separate professional and personal ethics. Is there no correlation between the two? Or does there come a point when a scientist who has justified themselves in hiding a clandestine relationship will be more likely to justify themselves in suppressing experimental data that does not support their hypothesis? It would seem to me at least a plausible hypothesis that, once the principle that it is right to dissemble in order to protect or promote one’s personal reputation has been conceded, it is a far shorter leap to taking similar steps in order to sustain or enhance ones professional reputation. And, indeed, vice versa. Perhaps one of the ways in which members of this society can serve the scientific community is by being a priestly presence, maintaining the centrality of ethical standards, but doing so with both a pastoral sensitivity and a forgiving demeanour.
Having double standards, is of course only one dimension to hypocrisy. And although he denounces it elsewhere, it’s not actually the reason behind the challenge Jesus issues on this particular occasion. In this passage hypocrisy is more about motive than behaviour.
I love the writings of T. S. Eliot, that most English of twentieth century Americans. In Eliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, Archbishop Thomas Beckett is visited by a series of tempters in the time before his murder. Having seen off the first three, Beckett believes his challenges are over, he can now go to his martyrdom with a quiet conscience. And then along comes tempter number four. This one doesn’t seek to dissuade him from going to his death, but rather encourages him with tales of how he will go down in history, his reputation will last far beyond his lifetime, for having stood up to the king and being killed for doing so. Shrines and miracles may follow. Beckett almost yields. But then he sees what is happening. “This”, he cries, “is the greatest treason; to do the right thing, for the wrong reason”. Jesus does not level criticism at his hearers for saying prayers, or for being generous to charity. The hypocrisy lies in their murky motivations. A prayer uttered for the sake of pleasing human hearers, has not in truth been addressed to God. A charitable gift made in order to win praise, has not been offered for the benefit of the recipient but for that of the donor.
One of the complexities scientists face today, is that much research is funded not by impartial philanthropists or academically interested governments, but by commercially motivated organisations or by Trust Funds set up to advance a particular viewpoint. What gets researched, and in what depth is not a purely academic matter. And scientists whose findings are unfavourable to some powerful lobby group or commercial interests may find it harder to access grants and funding. It isn’t hypocrisy to explore new and potentially costly treatments for medical conditions, and to seek to recoup the costs of research from the premium charged for the eventual product. But maybe the line has been crossed when equally promising avenues of treatment for the same condition fail to be explored because they would not generate profit. Or when diseases that almost exclusively affect the poor are neglected because the victims would not be able to pay enough for the research to have been financially worthwhile. Motive matters, and we as ordained scientists might see it as part of our vocation to challenge the hypocrisy of Beckett’s final tempter, when he enters the world of science, no matter how alluring his whisperings.
Over these last few weeks, the pandemic has been joined at the top of my work list by the need to respond, urgently and effectively, to the issues raised by the killing of George Floyd. Many words have been spoken in response to his death, not least by white leaders of organisations including churches. Prayers have been uttered, and photographs taken of prominent figures kneeling in support. I have done those things myself and intend to go on doing them.
Yet we know from previous scandals over the ill treatment of black and other ethnic groups that everything, from the micro-racisms faced by our sisters and brothers every day of their lives, to disproportionate killings by police officers, that once the fuss has died down, we tend to go back to how things were before. Our feelings may have been engaged, our morals outraged by the extreme behaviour of others. For a time it has been less comfortable to ignore the problem than to respond to it. But after a while the needle on the comfort scale, for people like me, all too easily shifts back in favour of the status quo. When we speak out and act out, however genuinely in the moment, but within ourselves knowing that we really want the issue to go away and leave us alone. That too is hypocrisy. Our words and our gestures are devoid of true meaning, they mislead and at worst raise false hopes that will all too soon be dashed again when we revert to business as usual.
Double standards, deceptive motivations, and the mouthing of platitudes, are all, if distinct, forms of hypocrisy. Yet between these thorns grows a rose. And it belongs to none of them.
That we have standards which we fail to live up to, is the common lot of humanity – at least among those who accept the existence of standards at all. St Paul writes, with a degree of convolution that resonates with the problem he is facing, that again and again what his mind tells him he should be doing is not what his body compels him to do. This is no simple dualism, though Paul can get close to that error from time to time. Rather, it is a recognition of the pervasiveness of sin.
Those scientists forced to resign from their roles in the pandemic because they had broken the rules were only being hypocritical if they genuinely believed they were entitled to exceptional treatment. If they were trying to keep the rules but had succumbed to temptation, then they are simply weak human beings like you and like me, deserving of our forgiveness. Such forgiveness does not negate the need for them to face the consequences of their misdeeds, perhaps including resignation, so as not to undermine the advice they had previously given, but it changes the moral landscape significantly.
Many aspects of the societies in which we live that have long been present, are being brought to greater prominence and urgency by the coronavirus crisis.

Sermon for the Admissions Eucharist from Dr. David Walker,
Bishop of Manchester and Visitor to the Society
Society of Ordained Scientists, Retreat, Tucson, USA, 10 June 2020

Driving through Tucson a few days ago, we switched on the car radio to listen to the late afternoon news on National Public Radio. The presenter announced the title of the programme as “All things Considered”. I joked to Tom that, given the diversity of opinion in the USA, there was probably a rival station whose drive time broadcast went by the name “Just go with your gut”, or possibly “Hold to your prejudice”.
I didn’t listen long enough to be able to judge whether the show lived up to its name, some of you probably know it far better and can tell me afterwards, but the aspiration seemed an honourable one – that everything should be taken into account, weighed carefully in the balance. Only then should a judgement be made. Moreover, if new evidence or additional perspectives come to light, fresh things not previously considered, then any and all previous judgements must be at least open to reassessment and revision.
One repeated research finding, including from some of my own studies, is that the deeper we go into our faith, the higher we score on the scale known as Quest Religiosity. Quest measures our willingness, and indeed desire, to live with uncertainty. It measures how much we enjoy the fact that our faith is not final and static but developing, as we continue to explore questions for which we have no simple answers. It’s another way of putting what Lucas has been referring to as curiosity in our talks here. As Questing, curious Christians, our conclusions remain subject to revision, as we seek to live a life of “all things considered”.
I suspect that members of the Society of Ordained Scientists all score high in terms of Quest. In your various scientific endeavours, as academics, industrialists, research workers and space explorers, you will have had to develop the desire to venture into the unknown, and to enjoy the process of discovery as much as the things eventually discovered. Part of the charism of the Society is, I believe, to be a cohort of men and women who not only do that with their science, but carry it over to what it means to be an ordained minister in one or another Christian denomination.
The mantra of “All things considered” also flies in the face of that pretence to balanced journalism which consists of getting a protagonist from each of the extreme poles of a debate, giving them equal airtime, and imagining that would cover all views in between. Indeed, the Society of Ordained Scientists began because the public interaction between science and religion was being dominated by the shrillest voices of militant atheism and fundamentalist Christianity.
That same call to holistic consideration also challenges the pattern of presenting, as though of equal worth, both the widespread mainstream informed consensus on some matter and a maverick position. To take a timely example, in my view the overwhelming evidence for the human impact on climate change, and the need to address it urgently, has gone far beyond the point where the views of climate deniers should be entitled to more than a cursory mention in a footnote of the debate. They matter politically because of the extent to which they continue to provide cover for those who choose to resist environmental policies on other grounds – as for example the Prime Minister of Australia, who sees his nation’s coal reserves as a vital economic asset, one which outweighs both the damage done by the fires that have ravaged his country in recent weeks, and the risk of future conflagrations.
Science fails most gravely in its responsibility when it fails to properly consider all things, to weigh the whole of the evidence and to offer that evidence for corroboration and contradiction from other experts in the field. For decades the tobacco companies, and their own research teams, suppressed the evidence that linked smoking to cancer. And this isn’t just an issue of the past. Hardly a year goes by without it coming to light that some major pharmaceutical company has
suppressed evidence in its possession that suggests some highly lucrative product might not, after all, be as safe as its widespread prescription and usage would necessitate. It does concern me that one of the greatest shifts in recent decades is that less and less scientific research is being carried out by wholly independent academics who are free to choose the areas they wish to study and to present and publish whatever findings they may evidence. The dependence of science, even at university level, on sponsorship and support from those with commercial interests in the field, puts the task of considering all things at great risk. Even if a particular project itself has no commercial funding, many academics would be wary, and their employing institutions perhaps even more wary, of doing work that might upset the vested interests who will be looked to in order to fund future programmes of work, or to endow laboratories and research centres. It’s a brave university in the UK that would open up any field of research that might cause concern to the government of China, since so many Chinese students are paying juicy fees into the academic coffers.
I would hope that part of the charism of this Society can be to provide ethical and pastoral support for all those engaged in science who feel they are being pressed to act in ways that undermine the integrity of the scientific process. Those who are being coerced to consider only part of the evidence or to consider only those things that help reach the conclusion their sponsors or employers want to hear.
Secondly, we can take that mantra of “all things considered” as a spur to considering both the scientific and theological aspects of any matter, and considering them together.
In my work chairing the Ethical Investment Advisory Group of the Church of England, we have become, over the last couple of years or so, world leaders in devising support for investor groups who want to use their influence to tackle climate change, or to improve the safety of tailings dams in the mining industry. We are turning our next investigation onto the field of big data, and the large corporations that tend to hold, control and commercially exploit it. In each area, we work the theology and the science closely together, it’s an integrationist approach . Our findings and our strategies should be consistent both with what we know about the science and what we know about God and the Church. What we have found is that our strongly Anglican basis provides not only a grounding for how we should use our own modest investments of between ten and twenty billion dollars, but attracts many who do not share our theology but agree with the conclusions it enables us to reach. Our Climate Change investment tool is supported by over 13 trillion dollars of assets under management and is now used by a group called Climate Action 100+ which had over 30trillion of dollars under management even before Blackrock signed up earlier this week. Our mining initiative has the backing of many of the world’s largest investors as well as some of the most influential mine owners and managers. I do believe we have moved on significantly from the days when a church report into any matter of public interest contained an obligatory introductory chapter on theology which was then pretty well entirely ignored for the rest of the document.
The investment work I’m involved in, which we knew was having impact when one of my staff won a vote at the Exxon Mobile Annual meeting, in the teeth of robust opposition from the company’s directors, is an example of trying to fit together science and theology, but it isn’t the only one. For me, my very understanding of basic theological doctrines or positions depends on a process of considering all things that draws on my scientific understanding too. For example, the fact that we live in a universe that hasn’t always been around, but came into being in a huge flash of energy, or Big Bang – a theory first set out by a Belgian monk – helps shape my understanding of how God works within the laws of his universe in order to produce life forms capable of responding to divine love. The increasing awareness that the four dimensions of space and time we commonly perceive, are probably only a minority of the dimensions that exist, helps me get my head around a God who exists both within and beyond the visible universe defined by those four directions. Scrödinger’s famous Uncertainty Principle, helps me understand how in a

universe governed by certain basic laws, both human free will and divine Providence are liberated from the bonds of a narrow Calvinistic determinism.
Lastly, I want to commend the way in which Ordained Scientists serve as an example of what it means to cross tribal boundaries in our society, and to suggest that what we learn from our dual membership, and in particular from our responsibilities within the science tribe and Christian tribe, can be applied more generally to how we both transcend other tribal boundaries ourselves and the ways we can support others whose different dual memberships enable them to be boundary crossers too.
So, for example, in Manchester, I look to my many LGBT+ clergy to refute the accusation that Christianity is inherently homophobic. I can’t do their work, but I can back them in it, and see that they can progress their ministries to the most senior levels, including as bishops. I look to my senior clergy of other ethnic heritages (my Asian Dean, Caribbean Archdeacon, Latina canon) to live out the truth that to be Christian and Anglican doesn’t mean you have to adopt white British ways of thinking and believing. I can’t do their job but I can make sure that every major service in my Cathedral is led by a team who show visible ethnic diversity. Among those exploring vocation, I can ensure that lack of proficiency in English is not the bar to training for ordination that it is in many other dioceses. All in all, I can play my part to ensure the church for which I have responsibility under God is one that embraces and nurtures its boundary crossers.
So my final challenge to you would be to seek out where else in your particular church there are people with the gifts and experience brought from widely different contexts, and especially those who have most been rejected or marginalised within the church; to seek them out and to offer the aid you can from your own life journey and experience of dual membership as an Ordained Scientist. If each of us could find one person we could support in that way, we would be making a real impact.
I haven’t linked this sermon to some particular piece of scripture. I could readily have done so if I had felt it necessary. But all too often such links can be simply brought in after the fact, as loosely connected as those theology chapters of church reports I referred to earlier. To consider all things is to allow God to motivate and stir us by whatever in his creation happens to inspire. And whilst that might on some occasion be the most profound verse of the bible, it can also be a chance remark, overheard one January afternoon whilst travelling through the Tucson rush hour, on a National Public Radio broadcast.