People sometimes complain about the way ‘the media’ treat ‘religion’. This week’s Start the Week will help you understand why.
It was a typically interesting line-up, featuring geneticist Adam Rutherford, geneticist Steve Jones, neuroscientist, Barbara Sahakian, and artist, Susan Aldworth.
Jonathan Freedland, sitting in for Andrew Marr, introduced the show by saying, “we’re asking the big questions today… how did we get here and where are we going and what exactly makes us who we are; questions the great religions have wrestled with since the beginning of time, and which preoccupy the people around this table, except that there’s not a cleric or a theologian among them!” Those with ears to hear might have heard alarm bells ringing.
First up was Steve Jones, an atheist with as much respect for religion as Richard Dawkins, although one who eschews what he called Dawkins’ “vulgar abuse” (one must be thankful for small mercies, I suppose). The new book to which he spoke is entitled The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold as Science.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Publishers need to sell their wares, and calling a book ‘the God-this’ or ‘the Bible-that’ seems to do the trick in our self-confessedly secular age. Using the Bible to tell a number of scientific tales is a clever trick and no more objectionable that Dawkins’ use of Chaucer is his masterly The Ancestor’s Tale.
Unnervingly, though, this time it seemed to be more than just a publishing stunt, which didn’t augur well given that the Bible is largely uninterested in those subjects we now cluster under the rubric of ‘science’ (origins and order of the universe, physical structure of nature, biological diversity, etc), instead mainly comprising history, law, poetry, letters, and biography.
Steve Jones’ opening gambit confirmed fears. “The Bible was the world’s first scientific textbook. It saw and examined the world around us, it was curious about what was happening, and it came up with explanations.”
This is so wrong is hard to know where to start. The Bible isn’t about ‘science’ and certainly isn’t a textbook. It spends precious little time examining the world around. It shows (frustratingly) little curiosity about what happens in nature. It offers virtually no explanations. It simply assumes much of the physical worldview of the Ancient Near East cultures in which it was written (while, of course, challenging their metaphysical views). And, quite apart from all this, as a book, it post-dates most Greek, Chinese and Indian ‘science’.
Not a great start, then. But it got worse. We were told us that there were elements of truth in the Adam and Eve story because humans can trace their ancestry back to an single man and woman, albeit who lived 100,000 and 200,000 years ago respectively – as if the Genesis story is about ancestry or descent.
Religious experience was then equated to mental illness. “If someone is having what seems like a conversation with God, [for] the person who is having that conversation, who may perhaps possibly have schizophrenia… it’s an entirely real experience for them… it’s natural that they believe this to have been the case, they preach on this subject, they tell people about it. Nowadays most people would interpret that as a mental disorder.”
No doubt some “religious experience” and some “conversation with God” is like this. But all of it? Can you really talk about a daily recitation of the Lords Prayer in the same breath as frothing, foaming, floor-rolling histrionics? And, in any case, what scientific (as opposed to philosophical) reason is there to say that a religious experience may not be both subjective and objective, when most other experiences of our lives are?
When pressed on whether he was, despite his protestations, stirring up the exhausted science and religion debate, Jones explained something of his frustration. “So many British Christians in particular say, ‘the Ark, the Flood, it was a metaphor; possession by devils, it’s a metaphor; creation in seven days, that’s a metaphor. My question is, where does the metaphor stop? If it’s all a metaphor it doesn’t mean anything.”
Quite apart from the bizarre idea that metaphors don’t mean anything (can a writer as gifted as Steve Jones really believe this?), it is precisely these questions that are addressed in the discipline known as hermeneutics, which you will find in most British universities. Has Jones not come across it?
All this was, sadly, no more egregious than much popular fare about ‘religion’. What elevated this particular discussion was the absence of an intelligent and informed counterpoint – the fact that “there’s not a cleric or a theologian among them!”
Instead, Jonathan Freedland (having told us that there were two people on the Ark) served to speak on behalf of religious people, in the process able to make them sound like simpletons and children. “No one minds you debunking Alice in Wonderland,” he pressed Jones. “But people are very attached to the Bible as more than just an entertaining story. Are you the person in a way who’s sitting there during a magic show tapping the audience member on the shoulder telling them I know how that trick’s done and therefore spoiling it for people?”
Towards the end of the programme, the participants wondered why the interaction between science and religion has become so heated over the last 20 years. For an answer, they could do worse than to listen to the programme again.
Nick Spencer
Image from Commons Wikipedia available in the public domain.
