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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Politics

8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.