Science and religion, ladies and gentlemen and Daryl! (Daryl, you get a specific mention because I know this sort of thing really, really gets you going.)
This is a really late post, and I must apologise for that. It’s been hovering in draft status for weeks, while I’ve been trying to live and struggling with trying to understand my work and myself. But intellectual curiosity is part of being an Oxonian, so I figured that I shouldn’t just let this post rot off, so, have a miniature discussion of two talks! First, John Micklethwait, the editor of the Economist, speaking on how God is Back, and second, Professor Peter Atkins, chemistry professor at Lincoln College, speaking on how science and religion are an irresolvable conflict. Both were extremely interesting.
I think the main thing I took away from Micklethwait was the rise of Christianity in China, through the rise of a phenomenon called ‘house churches’. Which, as the name implies, is essentially the study of Christianity and its gospel in small groups. There’s apparently a law in China forbidding gatherings of more than twenty-five people, and this apparently prompts a rather amoeba-like fission, where, as a house church approaches 25 members, they split in half and go gather more.
The next interesting point was his mention of the profile of house church members, who, according to Mickelthwait, are generally young and well-educated: the rising class of China’s intelligentsia. Professors, businessmen, bankers, artists, writers – all of them are turning to Christianity in a surge that is posited as a search for a new and perhaps more spiritual ideology.
Lastly, the major point that I want to emphasise from Micklethwait is the possible effects that religion has on politics – both in terms of a country’s internal power politics and its relationship with other countries. He gives the impression that the Chinese government is a bit ambivalent about the current rise of Christianity. Some don’t see it as a serious threat to the current ruling structure, some do. I think it seems instinctively valid for a Communist government to worry about the rise of a potential challenging ideology (especially when you take into account the fact that Christianity is not the only religion to experience a surge in China – all religions are essentially surging there), but the specific form and mechanism of that danger doesn’t seem quite clear yet.
Right: to my own specific views, then! I think what was particularly good about the Micklethwait talk was that it expressed a different sort of religious profile. Marx’s “opiate for the masses” is out of fashion, clearly, because it’s not the uneducated masses that are getting on the religious bandwagon. I think it’s relatively uncontroversial that the sudden rise of religion in China is an expression of angst – the search for meaning in a society that hasn’t quite got a soul that it can reconcile with the sudden speed of its progress. At the same time, I can’t help but think that there might be a sense that Christianity in particular is part of the modernising trend. (China playing catch-up with the West?)
That leads to the rather interesting question of how Christianity is going to be interpreted in China, though. It does seem like such a Western religion (God as a bearded white man, etc, etc). I refuse to believe that Christianity is going to be bought wholesale by the Chinese, and yet at the same time, it’s easy to notice that Christianity in particular is an extremely adaptable religion, adopting leftover bits of pagan practice here and there. (Much like English acquiring bits of other languages, really.) I think that with Christianity in China, we’re going to notice not only the effects that Christian doctrine has on a population, but the effects that a population and its cultural history is going to have on Christianity, and that’s going to be fascinating.
Lastly, I really want to think about how we could go about studying all this. Perhaps its the academic slant in me emerging (that’s one thing that I’m really glad about taking away from Oxford), but how would one go about studying this kind of on-the-ground change? Micklethwait made quite a strong use of statistics, which I do acknowledge as an objective source, as objective as these things get. But then again, statistics is a fairly modern method of looking at my subject areas (though not so much in economics, perhaps, and I don’t think that statistics are ever going to make a serious dent in philosophy, but politics is intriguing right now as a field that is undergoing scientification (no such word, really, but I think you all understand me), and it is worth noting that the major important political texts that we consider classics were written by people who had a strong idea of what was happening on the ground. How does one get insight into the situation itself? (Makes me think that a career in journalism or diplomacy is probably the route to take if I do eventually want to become an academic proper… especially if i want to focus on politics.)
Enough of my own views, though – let me give a quick summary of the next speaker who talked about religion. Peter Atkins, who’s a chemistry professor with several best-selling chemistry textbooks to his name (apparently he’s pretty much used worldwide), spoke on the utter incommensurability of science and religion. I was quite amused at several points in his talk. He’s a mildly offensive speaker, so I did get the feeling that he was trying to court controversy, and I do think that his type gives atheism a bit of a bad name. You could probably label it frankness or honesty, but… hmm. That really depends on the individual listening to him. And I do think he got off easy, because when you’re talking to a bunch of college students, you’re talking to a demographic which is, if not outright atheist or agnostic, is at least generally more sympathetic to such points of view, regardless of their own religious convictions.
I won’t go too much into the content of his speech – it’s the same sort of straightforward atheism that (quite rightly, in my opinion) puts religion down as a complete sham and argues that there should be no space for religion in our discourse. I quite like that he tries to reframe the debate by emphasising that there are only some questions that are fundamentally important: mainly the question about how the universe began. He dismisses as rubbish questions about whether there is an afterlife and even what “meaning” our lives and the universe have.
To be fair to him, he does hold up some fairly harsh criteria for science to fulfill, and I am actually very interested in the way he says that any scientist who professes to hold religious beliefs is half a scientist only. He was quite careful to say that even as half a scientist you can produce brilliant and incredible work, but you haven’t fully subscribed to the philosophy of science, as it were… which is in its own turn interesting because the way he holds up science as the only and ultimate arbiter of knowledge makes me feel like his arguments against religion apply equally to the humanities, which should either move towards a scientific expression of their arguments or fall in the illegitimacy that he ascribes to religion… which I can hardly subscribe to wholeheartedly.
Having said all that, I shall now go get back to my Mill essay, and my game theory problem sheet… or, given that it’s so late, I think I’ll pop off to bed and wake early tomorrow to work instead.
sourdough 