No, says Nicholas Spencer in “Magisteria”, a new book. Even (or especially) those readers inclined to disagree with him will find his argument refreshing
19th century two books on science and religion were published within a decade of each other. In “The Creed of Science” William Graham tried to reconcile new scientific ideas with faith. In 1881, by then an agnostic, told him: “You have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance.”
Mr Spencer works at Theos, a religious think-tank in London, and is one of Britain’s most astute observers of religious affairs. Some conflict between science and religion is understandable, he argues, but not inevitable.
The roll call of scientists who were people of faith runs from Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell to Gregor Mendel and Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest who, on the basis of mathematical calculations, first proposed that the universe was expanding and therefore had a beginning. In 1933 Lemaître made what, for Mr Spencer, is a key observation: “Neither St Paul nor Moses had the slightest idea of relativity.” The writers of the Bible could see into “the question of salvation.
altogether. Mr Spencer thinks it is “disciplinary overreach” for either side to dismiss the other entirely. “Neuroscience stands no more chance of finding morality or the soul in anscan than ethicists or theologians will locate evidence for frontal lobe activity in the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ or the Bible.”
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