Dialling down the drama in the science and religion debate

In the first of a new series, biologist and priest Andrew Davison explores the perceived tension between science and religion, and the role identities play.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Vails containing growing plants sit in a lab's fridge.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Evolution isn’t just an idea for me; thinking about it has changed the course of my life. I arrived at university in the 1990s having been a member of a house church, full of the kindest people, but fundamentalist when it came to the Bible. I thought that the world was made in six days, six thousand years ago. When I realised that the evidence is stacked against the idea – to say theleast – it almost cost me my faith.

I got through that crisis because friends introduced me to Christian thinkers from the Middle Ages, especially Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274). Far from representing an age of fear and ignorance (the ‘Dark Ages’), I found there an intellectual world that thrived on questions, with such philosophical sophistication that I was sure any of its chief exponents could have taken evolution in their stride. The struggle between faith and science lifted. Eventually, the sorts of questions that had previously kept me awake at night in worry, kept me awake in wonder. That was almost thirty years ago. Today, contemporary developments in evolutionary theory are one of the main strands of my work as a theologian.

In two further articles, I will describe some of what’s so interesting, and disputed, in biology and evolution at the moment. In one, I’ll talk about the shift away from the idea that we can reduce everything down to the working of genes. That’s sometimes called an example of ‘nothing-but-ery’: here, the claim that our destiny is ultimately about ‘nothing but’ genes. In the other, I’ll talk about some of the ethical repercussions that those contemporary evolutionary developments might suggest, on such practical matters as good housing.

In the rest of this piece, however, I will stick with the idea that it’s useful to see the idea of a tension between religion and science, not least over evolution, as being as much personal as intellectual. In particular, tensions over evolution in ‘science vs religion’ are caught up with questions of identity. Seeing oneself as a ‘religious crusader against science’ or a ‘scientific crusader against religion’ is an identity. It’s part of the story you tell about yourself, part of what you take pride in. Since these are also identities that define themselves in opposition to one another, they tend to extremes. Reconciliation involves renegotiating one’s identity.

Nor is money insignificant. There’s money to be made in writing shrill and divisive books, but in calm and conciliatory books, not so much. Angry books create interest on social media. They find to an already energised readership. Moderate books, and authors who try to dampen the flames of animosity, don’t sell that well; neither do books that are willing to say ‘actually, these questions are more complex, or nuanced’.

Evolution and economics

Crucial in these questions of identity is the gulf between those seen as the ‘elite’ and those who don’t see themselves that way (a common theme in politics today). Why is a denial of evolution more common in poorer communities? It’s not only that these are people without educational advantages. It’s also that they feel on the disadvantaged side of an economic and cultural system. In that situation, people are typically all the more invested in what the system can’t take from them, such as their ethnicity, their religion, and its culture. Good on them for that. People in that situation will be all the more unwilling for others – whom they perceive as an elite, who enjoy all sorts of worldly advantages – to tell them what to think about their biological origins, bound up, as they are, with dignity, faith, and self-understanding.

As an economically disadvantaged Muslim man once put it to me, ‘No one’s telling me that my faith’s stupid, or that I’m just some sort of monkey.’ There’s so much more going on in that statement than ‘being wrong about the science’.

Moreover, disadvantaged people, and especially the majority who don’t have white skin, have been on the receiving end of prejudice cast in evolutionary terms. Teaching the theory of evolution – glorious though it is as a work of science – has a checkered moral history. That brings us back to monkeys. The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ (1925) has achieved iconic status, as the triumph of science over superstition in rural Tennessee, but it’s more complex than that. The prosecution, with its anti-evolutionary stance, was wrong to dismiss evolution as a matter of science. They weren’t wrong to be repelled by the science textbook at the heart of the case, which was uncomplicatedly racist, and indeed racist on supposedly evolutionary grounds. Evolution, it claimed, had produced lesser (black) and more advanced (white) races. As historians have also shown in recent decades, evolution was a powerful inspiration, into the early century, for advocates of cut-throat economics and politics: winner-takes-all, survival of the fittest, let the poor go to the wall.

I’m not saying that every bit of opposition to evolution among poorer communities rests only on the ways that evolutionary theory has been used against them, but it is useful to remember that some of the religious opposition to evolution in the twentieth century came from a principled response to the unpleasant ethical, political, and economic positions to which – they were told – evolution gave support, including full-on advocacy for eugenic programmes of sterilisation of the poor, and contempt for the physically weak: all clothed in evolutionary garb.

Drama critique

The spectacle of a ‘science vs religion’ drama turns out to be about more than science, and also about more than theology or religious belief. It’s also about identity, advantage and disadvantage, about some deeply unpalatable economic and social positions, and even about making money out of writing books. There’s everything to be said for teaching biology well, and for arguing about the truth of evolution on scientific terms. I do a fair bit of that myself. There’s everything to be said for teaching theology well, and for arguing that it can take evolution in its stride. That’s even more my aim. But neither offers the full picture, and it’s not helpful to think that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is simply stupid or wicked. We won’t get very far, not even as advocates of science, unless are willing to listen. Unexpectedly, my experience is that the flagship scientific societies in the United States (where tension over evolution run so high) are better at this than they are in United Kingdom.

Getting trapped in one end of some mutually reinforcing antagonism is hard to shake. It’s difficult to get to a nuanced position when you’re dealing with positions that are defined against each other. Whether arguments about evolution are part of your experience or not, there’s a wider message here, which we might all do well to take on board, asking ourselves whether positions of animosity can become unhelpfully baked into our sense of ourselves.

Accepting evolution does not naturally, or inevitably, lead to brutal social Darwinism, but it’s been used that way in the past, more often than coverage of science today often lets on. We are by no means out of its shadow, even from under the shadow of eugenics. Being aware of that big, historical picture is useful, but it shouldn’t obscure the message from the beginning of this article, that these matters are fundamentally personal, and as much about how we see ourselves, and others, as they are about ideas. Reconciliation and understanding happen person by person, and person-to-person.

You might think the work I’d most relish as a priest and scientist, or think most useful, would be reassuring religious people that evolution isn’t their enemy. That’s a good thing to do, but I’m actually even more thankful for opportunities to reassure scientists that religion can be thoughtful, unafraid, and even downright passionate about science. Turning up to dinner in my college still in my cassock after evensong, sitting next to visiting scientists, and asking intelligent, enthusiastic questions about their science can do as much good as all the lectures I give in churches or to theology students about the irreplicable value of science.

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War & peace

1 November 2024

5 min read

Put poppy politics in the past and give Remembrance a hopeful future

Memory without hope will lead us to a dead-end.

Mark Gilbert

Mark is a research mathematician who writes on ethics, human identity and the nature of intelligence.

A woman walls along a war memorial wall covered in red poppies.

War memorial in Canberra.

Raelle Gann-Owens on Unsplash.

Remembrance Day is complicated. A nation shows its gratitude for the service and sacrifice of its armed forces and tries to connect to its history. Never far away, are poppy politics, along with anxiety about identity and forgetting, and fears about nationalism and militarism. Is this the way to remember?

Last November, protests in solidarity with Gaza dominated the headlines. On Armistice Day, hundreds of thousands of people marched through central London to demand a ceasefire. In the preceding weeks, there was vigorous debate about whether the march should be cancelled. There were several motivations for this: there were genuine fears of violence and extremism, and of disruption at the Cenotaph, but also questions of whether marching on Armistice Day was inappropriate or disrespectful.

The march itself was organised to minimise the risk of disrupting public commemorations of Remembrance. It started several hours after the two-minute silence and followed a route several miles from the cenotaph. It was mostly peaceful, although there were arrests for anti-Semitism, open support for terrorism and violent attacks on police officers. Armistice Day did see violence around the cenotaph, but this was from the self-described ‘Cenotaph Defenders’ who had organised a counter-demonstration against the Gaza march. The group of football hooligans and far-right EDL members gathered with poppy emblazoned banners declaring ‘Have some respect for British Heroes’. Within a few hours, the calls for respect had degenerated into violent attacks on serving uniformed officers, in this case the police.

The far-right’s adoption of remembrance symbolism can be seen as an extreme form of a wider entanglement of poppies and politics. The red paper poppy is a symbol of remembrance, but it has other connotations. For some it invokes patriotism and feelings of pride in their country, for others it represents conformity and militarism. Whether television news presenters are wearing them attracts disproportionate attention. In 2019, one Australian TV network had a very tasteless segment denouncing a rival station whose newscasters failed to wear poppies. The non-poppy wearing hosts were accused of failing in their duty to respect their country and to help preserve its culture and traditions. Regardless of the presenters’ actual reasons, this feels like a lot of baggage to load onto the delicate poppy, a symbol of quiet remembrance and gratitude.

Unsurprisingly, this has led many to question whether Remembrance Day has become detached from its original purposes. Twelve years after the death of the last British First World War veteran, there is little living connection to either of the two world wars. With this passage of time, there is a growing danger of mistaking the symbols of ceremonial Remembrance for the thing itself.

The focus of remembrance can shift away from the sheer horrors of war, from awe at the sacrifice of our forebears, and from the resolved ‘never again’ to fixing our gaze on the processed goods: the ceremonial silence, the poppies themselves and even the quality of our own emotional response.

Some commentators have suggested that organised Remembrance has served its purpose and is best forgotten, and that too much remembering is a bad thing, fuelling grudges and sectarian conflicts. Personally, I’m not convinced, but I do think our current Remembrance is missing something.

With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity.

Reflecting on the importance and difficulty of memory, the writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel emphasised the importance of hope. Despite the horrific experiences of the twentieth century, for Wiesel it is hope that “summons the future”. Memory without hope would lead us to a dead-end, where we grip onto the past while feeling it slip like sand through our fingers. Many of the anxieties around Remembrance point to a hope deficit.

How can we remember with hope?

We need to broaden our perspective and engage better with our shared national story. We need to be grounded in our history, stories and myths but we also need to be drawn forward by the good things we have and will have. If this story is big enough then it will be a large tapestry of interwoven strands, and we will be able to generously incorporate new strands, other cultures with their own relationship to the past into it. We will also be better prepared for our remembering to deal with difficult questions about our nation’s history. With a strong grounding in a shared past and a common hope, we would talk frankly about the times our country has fallen short without a sense of betraying our history or identity. Hope would connect us better to our neighbours overseas and to the men and women who risk their lives to serve their country.

Last Remembrance Sunday, I helped our church’s under-7s make big paper poppies out of red paint and paper plates. The older children made origami peace cranes, and both the big red poppies and the peace cranes were placed by the altar. Here the focus is on remembering, but not just on our own memory. For me and countless other Christians, God’s memory is the real focus. God remembers us in our broken and war-torn world, and as Jesus, chose to join us in it, experiencing the worst of suffering while dying a painful death. All our personal and collective stories of pain, loss and sadness are met in this sacrifice. More than this, in the promises of restoration Jesus gave when He rose from the dead, they find a concrete hope.

What does Remembrance look like when it’s really grounded in hope? I think there would be a few noticeable signs. It would be less precious about itself. It would be more open to different emphases of remembrance such as the Peace Pledge Union and the white poppy, and excited about new creative expressions of remembrance like the ‘poppy walks’ organised by the Royal British Legion. More patient to the concerns of those who find the religious elements of Remembrance difficult. More integrated into our attitudes to current and ongoing conflict around the world. Most of all I hope it would make us really hungry for both peace and for righteousness.