Proof the supernatural is a thing

Ian Norton in Jerusalem, 20 years after his miraculous escape from addiction Photo: Source

Near-death experiences are only one kind of mystical experience that open us up to how close the supernatural realm is in our life. Accounts of two other kinds of experiences have appeared in the past few days, provided by a writer, Rod Dreher, who is gathering personal narratives of people who have encountered something beyond the material world. (Dreher's work is here, but probably behind a paywall).  

The first narrative is from a British man, Ian Norton, who went to Israel 30 years ago as a heroin addict in search of more powerful drugs. After about 10 years of being put into rehab and himself trying end his drug dependency, he was one day sitting on a bank of the river Jordan, reading the verses in the gospel of Matthew about Jesus approaching John the Baptist and asking for John to baptise him in that same river.

Matthew relates the incident this way in Chapter 3:13-17:

Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Norton had not read the Bible before, let alone these verses. But he felt that the devil held him in a kind of slavery and he wanted to be free of the addiction. Norton tells what happened:

I was anticipating the pains to start, and the pains were starting, from not having any heroin, no food, no money, no anything. I was like, this is it, I’ve got to break through this addiction. I had worked with doctors in Tel Aviv, but nothing was resolved. I had a hole in my life that was being filled by heroin. So I was sitting by the Jordan, waiting for the pains to begin, and they were starting to increase. I was reading Matthew for the first time in my life. I got to that point where Jesus was coming to John the Baptist.

And then the event that changed his life:

Reading that part, this cloud just appeared. It was all around, coming closer and closer. It crossed the water first, and as it came nearer to me, it was becoming more and more condensed, more concentrated. At first you could just see it. Then it was something you could taste, and you could touch — and I realized that it had wrapped itself around me. It encompassed me, and pressed in. It held me. All I can say about it is that it was total purity, and peace. These wonderful things I had never felt before were just pressing in all around me, and holding me in this state of pure love.

After four days of being held there like that, without anything, it dissipated — and I was free from the struggle with heroin, just like that. 

I came to Jerusalem, but I was still fairly weak. Morally I was flying, but physically I was weak. I had a lot to recover from. I was sitting on the street with a “hungry and homeless” sign, begging. Believers were coming up to me, sharing their testimony with me while I was begging. Soon after that, I was met by a pastor from a Messianic Jewish congregation in Jerusalem. I went to live on the premises, and I gave my life to Yeshua Jesus then, twenty-something years ago. I was baptized in that place.

Today, Norton is still clean and is working in a gift shop in Jerusalem. He told the writer something of his understanding of the character of that much-storied city:

The first thing you feel when you get here is separation. The thing that separates us from our Creator, in Jesus, are the attachments we hold to the world. I was born in London, and coming out of London, everything is so worldly. Even if you’re born again, and you’ve given your life to Yeshua Jesus, there’s still that struggle with the things of the world pulling you back to it. You come to Jerusalem, and everything is God-focused. You’re wrapped in that spirit here. Everything is focused on continuing that journey towards him. Once you’re separated from the things you hold dear, you’re open to the Spirit calling on your heart.

That certainly something people from the West in particular, but all developing countries, too, can learn. With material wealth and the culture of "busyness", everyone is in danger of losing awareness of, and access to,  "that which is ‘invisible’ and ‘everywhere’ at any point in time, provided you make the choice to see what is plain to the eye of the spirit". See this essay on how film maker Andrei Tarkovsky sought to show "how we go through our 'life on earth', which is a journey of spirit more than anything else". From that essay on the cinematic power of the Russian director:

No matter under what ideological baggage we attempt to hide, whether we call ourselves religious or non-religious, or whatever fancy label we invent to suit our whims, Tarkovsky makes us aware of our individual responsibility towards life around us in the deepest sense possible. That type of responsibility can only be spiritual because it is a commitment that transcends the limits that time imposes on human beings.

Though Tarkovsky’s movies are deeply religious – it is in the spiritual sense that we need to analyze his work, especially in a time-period where both religion and spirituality have been discredited by “Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics…crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

A message about past suffering 

A second narrative that Dreher relates comes from a man who was sexually abused as a boy by a Catholic priest: 

My friend Michael, who is now dead, became a chronic alcoholic who compulsively sought out sex with men, often priests. Eventually, as an older man, he found sobriety.

He told me about how back in 2002, I think it was, a priest from somewhere in the Balkans came through New York. This priest was purported to have some sort of mystical gifts of healing. The priest said Mass at a big parish in Queens. Michael went to the Mass, though the priest spoke no English. He was hoping for a miracle. Michael said he waited in line to get the priest’s blessing, and made sure that he was one of the last ones. He didn’t want to be greedy.

He knelt to receive the blessing, then began making his way toward the exit. Before he got to the door, an English-speaking assistant of the Balkan priest ran to him, took him by the arm, and said, “Father wants me to tell you that the Holy Virgin saw your suffering there, at the hands of that priest. She was there with you, and suffered too.”

When Michael told me that, he was crying. Those words had been so healing to him.  

The gift of knowledge the priest had is part of the world of wisdom that God opens up for some individuals so that they can serve their fellows. In these cases, of course, we are expected to be wary until the fruits of their ministry can be observed as being clearly uplifting. 

Conclusion on near-death episodes

American psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has spent decades talking to people about near-death experiences. His book on the subject provides their stories and it covers the conjectures of scientists as to what makes these experiences possible. An interviewer asks him for his best conclusion:

Greyson knows that events in near-death experiences are impossible to corroborate. “We can’t do research on a deity,” he says, drily. But still, he finds it tough to dismiss wackier theories, even if the data isn’t there. When I ask him what his current logical understanding is, he looks resigned. “It seems most likely to me that the mind is somehow separate to the brain,” he says, “and, if that’s true, maybe it can function when the brain dies.” Then he adds, “But if the mind is not there in the brain, where is it? And what is it?”

“I grew up without any kind of a spiritual background. And I’m still not sure I understand what spiritual means. I am convinced now, after doing this for 40, 50 years, that there is more to life than just our physical bodies. I recognise that there is a non-physical part of us." 

One of Greyson's working hypotheses is that these experiences are the beginning of the afterlife. As evidence he tells how the lives of those whom he has studied have changed radically. In other words, the patient has responded by choosing to live in a different manner. A key element in the change is that they are not afraid to die, and they regard every moment as precious, impelling them to have heightened respect for the natural world and the people with they have contact. 

Therefore, there is evidence available to us that we are transcendent beings, able to rise above our material or physical circumstances. We sometimes hear such accounts from those close to us. We shouldn't close our minds to the spiritual dimension involved. If we undervalue our spiritual capabilities, if we ignore the God who made us to be restless until we are face-to-face with him, then, as one writer put it, we will tend to "undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny".

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Trans debate's style hurts women - gay stalwart

Simon Fanshawe: Does it think I'm the wrong sort of gay? Source

Because the loud voices in society are determined that we all should accept their revolution in extending the moral deregulation of society, we need to hold their agenda to vigorous scrutiny. 

The British have allies in the form of feminists Julie Blindel, Kathleen Stock, and most prominently JK Rowling, who are willing to push back. British mainstream media also haven't succumbed to the fashionable wokeism that has captured American media generally. For the British, The Times, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail are the leaders in maintaining some kind of independence from the ideological thinking that is hardening in its totalitarianism, becoming more antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that had allowed democracy to flourish. 

During the past week another voice has been added to those pointing out how transgenderism has set upon a revolutionary course that will only alienate those who support the dismantling of all barriers to enable homosexuals to thrive in their human dignity. 

 Simon Fanshawe writes in the Daily Mail:

I was one of the six co-founders of Stonewall in the 1980s. Along with the others, I poured all my energy into making the organisation a formidable force for gay and lesbian rights.

All that work is now in danger of being wrecked, Stonewall’s reputation [as a gay rights charity] discredited, and its credibility squandered, by trans activists — not all trans people, I hasten to add — who believe they can dictate what everyone is allowed to say and think.

He was reacting to a statement, given as part of a court case in London, when Stonewall's ‘head of trans inclusion’, Kirrin Medcalf, took the stand and declared: ‘Bodies are not inherently male or female. They are just their bodies.’ Fanshawe tells why he was so dismayed to hear that statement:

 People such as Kirrin Medcalf imagine that reality can be reshaped to fit their requirements.

Asked whether there is a difference between biological sex and gender preference, Medcalf denied it.

According to the official Stonewall position — and to disagree is to be regarded as a heretic or, in the current lingo, ‘transphobic’ — people are literally whichever biological sex they choose to be. Medcalf appears unaware of the screaming contradictions in this position.

One barrister asked pointedly about whether there are any circumstances where it would be OK to treat someone according to their biological sex.

The Stonewall employee offered that this would be OK ‘at a cervical screening service’.

So it seems that even in Stonewall’s world, there are still occasions when the reality of sex stubbornly resists the pretence.

But it is Stonewall’s trans activists, apparently, who have the privilege of choosing those occasions.

Other people don’t — and, in particular, the definition of what ‘a woman’ is must never be left up to women themselves.

This trial has become a spectacle of ludicrousness. The barrister Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers, Garden Court in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields, for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes.

She says she has been punished for speaking out against Stonewall’s trans policies and arguing that it is undermining the hard-won rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people in its determination to promote its trans doctrine.

'A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat'

Fanshawe gives his reasons for believing that the charity he co-founded has completely lost its way: 

Medcalf claimed that Stonewall had no choice but to advise people to avoid Garden Court Chambers, for fear of meeting Allison Bailey.

Her statements were supposedly so virulent and hateful that any trans person who encountered her would be ‘at risk of physical harm’.

This is simply nonsense. Allison Bailey has never physically threatened anyone.

She doesn’t believe transwomen are actually women, and this enrages Stonewall, but it’s a world away from physical violence.

Medcalf appears to believe that words are the same as actions, that to say ‘I don’t like you’ is the same as punching you in the face.

A difference of opinion is being painted as a physical threat. According to Medcalf, any trans person encountering Bailey is at risk of attack. This is a completely imaginary scenario. 

 Nothing of this kind has happened in real life. Yet Medcalf talks as though saying these things out loud somehow makes them true.

It was former U.S. president Donald Trump who first gave us ‘alternative facts’. When people challenged his version of reality, he used any form of coercion he could to shut them up. But it breaks my heart to see Stonewall adopt the same sort of tactics.

He continues:

Stonewall was born in an era of hostility, and we had to find a way of breaking down prejudice and building alliances with our critics.

The best way to do this, we discovered, was not by screaming abuse or attempting to lay down the law. Instead, we used data and research to construct a wall of credibility.

Further:

We did it so well that the social mood changed completely, enabling gay and lesbian people to enjoy real equality — with same-sex couples eventually being given the right to marry, for example.

The problem is now the reverse of what Stonewall faced three decades ago. Society is so keen to be inclusive and to respect diversity that it is open to manipulation. Everyone is terrified of appearing prejudiced.

The wrath of Stonewall is not a thing to be lightly provoked, as Allison Bailey has found out.

Her lawyers have described this as a protection racket. I wouldn’t go that far, but it highlights a serious problem with Stonewall’s approach.

Most Britons are very happy to see trans people treated fairly and equally, with decency and tolerance. Most trans people welcome that.

'Women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute'

He certainly does not hold back when he states:

But a small minority of activists, including those who have taken over Stonewall, do not want to extend that decency and tolerance to the rest of the population.

Equality, to them, means imposing their views on everyone else, without debate. That should concern anyone who believes freedom of speech is sacrosanct.

It is especially alarming to women who see their safe spaces breached by transwomen with intact male bodies.

Sexual violence against women must never be ignored or belittled, yet Stonewall is saying that no one has the right to question the presence of a naked and obviously male interloper in a female changing room.

Equally, women are told they cannot object to transwomen competing in their sports, despite copious data showing that cyclists, tennis players, swimmers and others with male bodies are at a colossal advantage when competing against females.

Women who do speak out, even those as highly regarded as JK Rowling or Martina Navratilova, are told with vehemence to shut up.

It often feels as though the trans debate has plunged us back into an era before feminism, when women were often treated as airheads with nothing to contribute to social discourse. 

By polarising the debate, and treating their version of trans rights as non-negotiable, Stonewall has opened up divisions.

That makes me deeply frustrated and sad. I’ve spent my life trying to bridge those divides and build coalitions.

Now people such as Kirrin Medcalf are taking a wrecking ball to that work and squandering Stonewall’s hard-won credibility.

I wish trans activists could see they don’t need to force their views on everyone else. Their greatest strength is in diversity.

When we marched in the first Pride demonstrations, we weren’t asking to be straight — we sang that we were ‘Glad to be gay!’

Let’s celebrate our differences, not wipe out our diversity.

 'It wants to change other people’s definitions of their lives'

In a podcast interview, Fanshawe stresses how insulting to him the extremist Stonewall position is, and how revolutionary it is for society: 

I have actually been told by the previous chair of Stonewall that I had put myself ‘outside Stonewall’, which sounds to me like Stonewall had made a decision that there can be the right kind and wrong kind of gays.

When you’re putting forward legislation or policy, you then have to recognise its implications, and you have to work through those in order to convince other people that your policy would still be a good thing. The gender-ideology campaign doesn’t do that. It seems to want to change other people’s definitions of their lives. It seems to be about telling women that the group they thought they belonged to – adult human females – turns out to be a much bigger group, which has actually got a whole lot of people in it who were originally born men.

If that is the aim, then campaigners need to be pretty clear about it. But I don’t see that as a political demand in the tradition of Stonewall, which was about tackling discrimination. I see that as a revolutionary view. It’s fine to hold a revolutionary view. But it’s also not a view that is shared by the vast range of those lesbians, gays and trans people who were originally involved in Stonewall.

Stonewall has got to make up its mind whether it is the representative group of lesbians, gays and trans people, or whether, actually, it is a much narrower ideological campaign that has other views. One way or another, that decision has to be made.

In truth, the bundle of woke theories being thrust on society are revolutionary, whether on the matter of policies for eradicating racial discrimination, or in the matter of the nature of optimal family life. We are seeing heroes arise in protecting society from the assaults on reason and reality.

Note:  A ruling is awaited in the case where lawyer Allison Bailey is suing her legal chambers for allegedly curbing her work and her income because of her view that there are only two sexes. She says she was punished for speaking out against Stonewall policies when the charity was advising the law firm.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

The supernatural is closer than you think

After surviving being shot (1968), Andy Warhol vowed to go to Mass on Sundays, a vow he fulfilled. The maker of "icons" met Pope John Paul in 1980. Photo Lionello Fabbri / Source

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm, to know the reality of how close God is to us. 

One of the most important ways in which we on earth are in communion with God in heaven is through the ceremony Catholics call the Mass. At Mass the priest brings into the world the death on the cross of Jesus Christ, man and God in the same person, and by this historical death 2000 years ago, Jesus' act of doing justice to God for the offences of all people, past present or future. God is so good, that any evil act or neglect of the good, the true or the beautiful is abhorrent by way of insult to his absolutely pure qualities. Justice, of the absolute degree, demands a punishment, a recompense for the insult.

Contrary to a lot of poor Protestant understanding of what the Church from the beginning has believed, the Mass — also known as the Eucharist — does not presume to supplement with repeated sacrifices Jesus' sacrifice on Calvary on behalf of the human race. Catholics continue what was the teaching of the Church fathers, allowing time to mean nothing as we share in the act of Christ's worship of the Father.

The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice: “The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different. And since in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner…” (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1367)

The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit: [Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper “on the night when he was betrayed”, [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented. (CCC #1366) 

Matthew Becklo draws out the supernatural element of our coming together in worship:

[...] What a mountain of difference hinges on that one word: re-present. What’s being said here? Not that “every time Mass is said, the sacrifice of Christ is offered over again”. Re-presenting doesn’t mean repeating, reproducing, or redoing. The sacrifice is not being double-checked, dittoed, or duplicated to ensure completeness. On the Catholic view, it’s already complete; the ... Catechism passages make that very clear.

No—the truth is stranger than fiction. To re-present is to make present—to manifest an eternal reality here and now. “Since Jesus is divine,”  Bishop Robert Barron writes in his book Eucharist, “all of his actions, including and especially the sacrificial act by which he saved the world, participate in the eternity of God and hence can be made present at any point in time” [My emphasis - BS].The Catholic Church teaches that this is precisely what the Mass does: makes present, from eternity, the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ on Calvary.

And while the manner of presentation is different, the sacrifice remains the same. [...] The Mass is the cross re-presented—not on our own initiative, but on the initiative of Jesus; not through our own work, but through the work of Christ; and not to try and supplement the perfect offering of the only begotten Son as if God needs it, but to participate in that offering and apply its fruits down the ages because humanity needs it.

Can the sacrifice of the Son to the Father be perpetuated mysteriously through time? Can Calvary suddenly be made present, mystically but truly, in another place—say, Santa Barbara, California? Can the faithful then radically unite their lives to it, not just spiritually but physically? [...] Protestants and Catholics are not split on the completeness of the sacrifice of Christ; we are split on the metaphysical depth and breadth of that one sacrifice. 

Becko captures the meaning of Mass beautifully when he states that "the Mass as a single, trans-historical sacrifice across time and space", a concept that may make the typical modern-day materialistic person balk. His idea in full:

The idea of the Mass as a single, trans-historical sacrifice across time and space may be difficult to conceptualize, much less accept. It may run so counter to a million other beliefs and intuitions that it just looks and feels grotesque. Fair enough. But [...]

Therefore, let Protestants understand that for Catholics "the Eucharist is not an invitation to surpass the unsurpassable sacrifice of Christ".

On the contrary, it’s a far more mysterious and beautiful invitation: to surpass the dimensions of time and space and participate, body and soul, in the New Covenant. And this invitation is not a medieval corruption; instead, it stretches back to the Apostolic Fathers and indeed to the Last Supper, where (as Scott Hahn, a former Protestant pastor, has pointed out) the Lamb of God fulfills and transforms all Passover sacrifices; sacramentally anticipates the definitive sacrifice of Calvary; and then commands his disciples to continue to do likewise among themselves (Luke 22:17-20). And so they have, in awe of the inexhuastible mystery before them. As Bishop Barron puts it in Eucharist: “Those who are gathered around the altar of Christ are not simply recalling Calvary; Calvary has become present to them in all of its spiritual power.”

Pope Francis drew attention to the trans-historical nature of the Mass in a daily homily in 2014 . He said:

"When we celebrate the Mass, we don't accomplish a representation of the Last Supper: no, it is not a representation. It is something else: it is the Last Supper itself."

The source article continues:

The Pope centered his reflections on the "theophany" spoken of in the first reading, taken from the First book of Kings, in which David's son Solomon, the new king, places the ark of the covenant in the temple, and God's presence descends upon it in the form of a cloud.

Listing the many ways that God speaks to his people, Francis emphasized that a theophany [...] speaks in a different way than prophets or scripture because "it is another presence, closer, without mediation, near. It is His presence."

He then observed how this same thing happens during the Mass, highlighting that it is not just a "social act" or a prayer gathering, but "the presence of the Lord is real, truly real."

"When we celebrate the Mass, we don't accomplish a representation of the Last Supper," noted the Pope, explaining that "it is the Last Supper itself," and that it "is to really live once more the Passion and the redeeming Death of the Lord."

"It is a theophany: the Lord is made present on the altar to be offered to the Father for the salvation of the world."

Calling to mind how some people say that they are going to "to hear Mass," the pontiff emphasized that "the Mass is not 'heard,'" but "it is participated in," and that "it is a participation in this theophany, in this mystery of the presence of the Lord among us."

Representations, he said, are things like nativity scenes or even praying the Stations of the Cross, but the Mass "is a real commemoration" in which "God approaches and is with us, and we participate in the mystery of the Redemption."

 "The liturgy is to really enter into the mystery of God, to allow ourselves to be brought to the mystery and to be in the mystery." 

"All of you here, we are gathered here to enter into the mystery: this is the liturgy. It is God's time, it is God's space, it is the cloud of God that surrounds all of us."

 [T]he pontiff encouraged all present to ask that the Lord give each of us "this 'sense of the sacred,'" and that "to pray at home, to pray in Church, to pray the Rosary, to pray so many beautiful prayers," is one thing, but "the Eucharistic celebration is something else."

"In the celebration we enter into the mystery of God, into that street that we cannot control: only He is the unique One, the glory, the power...He is everything.

"Let us ask for this grace: that the Lord would teach us to enter into the mystery of God."

This is an echo of the words of the Church fathers. 

Lawrence Feingold, in his 2018 book The Eucharist: Mystery of Presence, Sacrifice, and Communion, writes:

In his On the Priesthood, John Chrysostom (died 407) extols the office of the priest by speaking of the Eucharist as the sacrifice of the Lord who, through the priest, is mystically immolated on the altar. He who sits at the right hand of the Father is continually touched and held by the priest and offered to the faithful: 

When you see the Lord sacrificed and lying before you, and the High Priest standing over the sacrifice and praying, and all who partake being tinctured with that precious blood, can you think that you are still among men and still standing on earth? Are you not at once transported to heaven? … Oh, the loving-kindness of God to men!

He who sits above with the Father is at that moment held in our hands, and gives himself to those who wish to clasp and embrace him—which they do, all of them, with their eyes.

He continues later: But when he invokes the Holy Spirit and offers that awful sacrifice and keeps on touching the common Master of us all, tell me, where shall we rank him? What purity and what piety shall we demand of him? … At that moment angels attend the priest, and the whole dais and the sanctuary are thronged with heavenly powers in honor of Him who lies there.

Likewise, Theodore of Mopsuestia (died 428) is a witness to the mystery that Catholics participate in. He writes:

When he [Jesus] gave his apostles the bread he did not say, “This is the symbol of my body,” but, “This is my body.” So too with the chalice he did not say, “This is the symbol of my blood,” but, “This is my blood”—and with good reason. For he wanted us to turn our attention from the nature of the bread and the chalice once they received the grace and the presence of the Lord…. But if the life-giving Spirit gave our Lord’s body [in the Resurrection] a nature it did not possess before, we too, who have received the grace of the Holy Spirit by sacramental symbols should not regard the offering as bread and chalice any longer, but as the body and blood of Christ. It is the descent of the grace of the Holy Spirit that transforms them, obtaining for those who receive them the gift which we believe the faithful obtain by means of our Lord’s body and blood.

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm. It is possible to cultivate in ourselves an openness to the experience of the holy that a religious event such as the Mass arouses. We need to know the way our hearts and minds work concerning, as Becklo states, "[our] background convictions, assumptions, and imaginations (either/or vs. both/and, dialectical vs. sacramental, etc.) to any doctrinal question"—and much more, such as our regard for our neighbours. 

Paul, as usual, has words of wisdom. In effect, he says we should teach ourselves to recognise the closeness of God and his goodness. Consider the rains God sends, he says, the fruitful seasons, and the way he "filled you with nourishment and gladness for your hearts". 

For this awareness, we have to open our hearts, minds and imaginations to God's presence, and make space in our lives for our response to the extra dimension God makes possible, and into which we can extend our lives.

There's a final thought that follows on from the insights of Chrysostom and Theodore one expressed well by Scott Hahn, a former evangelical Calvinist pastor, but now a Catholic scripture scholar. He titled his 1999 book on the Mass—The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth. 

Hahn gives an account of his first encounters with the Mass. Taking just one instance, he writes:

In less than a minute, the phrase "Lamb of God" had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than 28 times in 22 chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn't ready for this, though—I was at Mass!

Yes, we can participate in heaven on earth, we can know that God is in our hand and we take him into our body so that each of us can be absorbed into him. "Mystery", "mystical": words to describe the reality beyond what is commonplace, though what is commonplace can reveal the supernatural. 

To conclude, as we strive to participate in heaven on earth, there are two scriptural quotations that are apposite in relation to how we must cultivate the ability to grow in right perception.

The first is of the words of the father who came to Jesus to ask for the healing of his epileptic son. In the course of his interaction with Jesus he made this prayer: "Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24)

The second entails the prophecy of Isaiah that Jesus quoted when he taught his disciples about why many of the people they met had difficulty in understanding the message about the kingdom of God. Jesus said:

You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.

 For this people's heart has become calloused; their ears are dull of hearing, and they have shut their eyes, for fear they should see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and be converted, and I would heal them. (Mt 13:13)

We can break out of the natural world and enter the supernatural realm—if we cultivate the hearing and the seeing of God's goodness in the ordinary, and the Holy Spirit at hand in walking with us (as paraclete) in our interactions with the people, the world around us.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Catholics and science - updated historical view

Since this blog has devoted a lot of attention of late to the issue of what is said to be a matter of incompatibility between science and religion, it's worth adding this contribution from Catholic bishop and public intellectual, Robert Barron. After having an academic background, he is now a bishop of the Los Angeles archdiocese. He always has an interesting and well-reasoned manner of expressing his ideas. 

Science & religion: where moral questions protect us

                                                                                                                                           Graphic Source

That moral issues arise from scientists' research has long been known, highlighted by the development and expanding deployment of nuclear weapons. These days, artificial intelligence (AI) is but one of several projects that is eliciting expressions of growing concern from well-placed observers, such as Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk who had been an investor in the DeepMind effort before it was sold to Google, and he is now involved in the OpenAI research lab.

One report put it this way:

Musk has repeatedly warned that AI will soon become just as smart as humans and said that when it does we should all be scared because humanity’s very existence is at stake.

In addition, Musk has joined "thousands of individuals and almost 200 organizations who have publicly committed not to develop, manufacture or use killer robots".  To add some detail:

“We the undersigned agree that the decision to take a human life should never be delegated to a machine,” reads the [2017] pledge [...] organized by the Boston nonprofit Future of Life, an organization that researches the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence along with other existential issues related to advancing technology.

So how can we have a better – deeper – science and religion conversation, where religion provides insights into the ethical principles that should be applied now in medicine, healthcare, in the professions to upgrade the care of the public, to give immediate examples, but more so in the future?

In a third dip into ‘Science and Religion’: Moving away from the shallow end, a report on research by the Theos think-tank, a British Christian organisation that works at the intersection of politics, religion and society, we examine what some of the more than 100 scientists, philosophers and communicators in the field had to say on the subject.

The report writers explore how we can go beyond moral polarisation in "conversations" over ethics. They start with a some recent history:

In a way that was obvious to many people, the New Atheism spasm of the 2000s was ethical rather than scientific in origin. This was partially obscured by the fact that most of its leading proponents were scientists, but the arguments, the language, and the context (Islamic terrorism, Religious Right, decay of secularism) were all highly morally (and politically) charged. That whole affair was a textbook study of life at the shallow end and was recognised as such by those of our interviewees (including atheistic and scientific ones) who mentioned it.

They quote from the expert interviewees:

“To some extent, particularly I found this with people like Richard Dawkins, they purposely misrepresent it because it makes the religious side of things look more simplistic, more basic.” (#99)

“One very simplistic and problematic way of understanding it is the way it’s assumed by the New Atheists where they seem to see religion simply as an inferior rival to science.” (#93)

 “The fact that a body can fall 32 feet per second is not something I derive a morality from... and the problem with the New Atheists is that they thought science was a value.” (#54)

The report sees a clear moral basis to the rhetorical stance of antagonists of religion: 

Talk of religion poisoning everything, of religion as child abuse, or religion as being like the smallpox virus only harder to eradicate were broadsides against religion but ones that were grounded in its allegedly harmful effects or immoral practices. As the popular New Atheist slogan of the time put it, “science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings”. Religion might be wrong but, above all, it was bad.

Such views were rather rarer among the general population today than they were 15 years ago. In 2006, a ComRes poll, commissioned by Theos found that 42% (!) of adults people agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” (It was not, to put it mildly, what we had hoped to hear from the great British people...). Today, that figure is 20%. 

As a rule, however, even the most anti-religious interviewees recognised that there was more to the science and religion debate than moral polarisation, whether that was good scientists vs bad believers, or morally-neutral science vs morally-laden (or morally-toxic) religion. 

The deep end of this ‘ethics’ part of the debate in fact had several conversations going on in it, each complex and challenging in its own way. Some were related to the epistemological dimension of the wider debate, such as the way in which science, for all its rigorous method, depended on ethical commitments or on an ethical framework that it cannot itself supply.

“Scientists... clearly have moral commitments to truthfulness, to honesty, they usually value hard work... they hate negligence and deceitfulness. So quite a number of moral things there which clearly are not justifiable in terms of science, but scientists have to proceed with them.” (#6)

It is clear some scientists do not appreciate adherents of religion assuming a role in "scientific" endeavours. Scientists ask how religion provides moral insight when a creator is the source of suffering in both the natural and human spheres. The report offers this thought:

There were answers – or at least responses – to this point. Some interviewees claimed that the argument omitted consideration of the good and beauty that results from the process (a consideration that Darwin himself drew into his reflections on this question). As one scientist said:

“I think that the only possible approach to the problem of evil is, oddly enough you can find implicit in Darwin, that suffering is part of the price of evolution but that overall in the life of any organism the good outweighs the bad, otherwise organisms would [feel] depression. He actually does use the word 'depression' in this context.” (#46)

Some pointed out that it ignored any consideration of eternity and redemption which are central to (many) religious views. Others said that the severity of the challenge presented by evolutionary suffering depended on the implicit image of God with which it was being compared.

“Unless God is an all-controlling engineer who simply makes things, it’s bound to have a degree of freedom and unpredictability about it which I believe is at the core of creation, so in that sense, if it’s messy and seems to keep changing its course, this is not incompatible with anything other than an engineering God who made the cosmos with fiat.” (#75)

Interviewees remarked that the whole discussion was predicated on a highly contestable sense of what was ‘wasted’. And some pointed out that pain was simply a reflexive mechanism without which life could not be sustained (the so-called ‘only way’ defence).

“[The] idea of wastefulness...[this is due to] the part of us that worships utility and efficiency, but there’s nothing that suggests that the cosmos works like this at all... God is able to create something which looks to the human mind wasteful, but it isn’t wasteful because it issues in what was needed, whatever means are that are needed for it those means have to be done. The whole idea that evolution is wasteful is a mistake.” (#75)

Whether these constituted adequate responses was far from clear, however, and there were several religious interviewees who were prepared to admit that the problem of suffering, amplified by our scientific understanding of deep history, did present (certain forms of) religious belief with an insuperable problem.

“The creator of the world is one who doesn’t care about the fact that 99 plus percent of all species are extinct now. Or they are suffering. Or that death is an integral physical part of life. It is very, very difficult to square that with a loving, omnipotent god.” (#88)

Whichever way one comes down here, however, the relevant point for our argument is that this critically important part of the science and religion debate is shot through with ethical considerations.

Beyond these specific parts to the ethical dimension within the science and religion debate, there was one additional, generic but very important one. In essence, it is not possible to separate science from technology, and technology from progress. Questions of whether and what we are progressing to, why, how fast, and by what means, are all irreducibly ethical, and that meant that science itself could not help be tied up with wider moral debate, whose connection with religion was obvious to all.

This could be seen at various levels. At the level of individual scientists’ behaviour, if science depended on honesty and integrity, that meant it was also vulnerable to dishonesty and fraud. The practice of science could be good or bad. Science got nowhere by ignoring ethical considerations.

At the level of programmatic research, the topic and method of research was similarly embedded in ethical considerations. Nobody claimed that scientific research was in itself necessarily morally good.

“Science can be as immoral as the rest of us. The Nazis used scientists. And we know that they experimented on not only Jews, but they experimented on mentally and physically handicapped people... One reason why, apparently, African Americans at the moment will be dubious about the vaccine is that they were experimented upon by white scientists, way back in [the previous] century.” (#73)

And then, at the level of application, it was clear that the way in which science shaped technology and technology shaped progress was rife with moral challenges. As one philosopher put it:

“I think science is absolutely shot through with moral stuff. I mean AI is a great example, and I worry about it. The idea that progress in AI is being made in this moral vacuum... [or] by predominantly male people who quite often – you look at people like Elon Musk frankly, and you’ve got to wonder whether they’re approaching all of this stuff with an appropriate sense of the moral implications of what they might be doing.” (#64)

It is important to be clear here. Just because everyone we spoke to recognised that there was an irreducible moral dimension to science – its practice, its programmes, its application – did not mean that everyone (or even a majority) thought that this meant religion should be involved in the ensuing discussions. [...] Some were very clear that it did not.

“I don’t really see religion as playing any distinctive role in that issue, except insofar as you might think that the religion is the thing that grounds the ethics. So, it seems like fundamentally an ethical issue and then you might bolt on the religion as a way of giving you your ethics, which obviously I think would be a mistake.” (#13)

A more favourable view was obvious in others' comments:

“I think there is a real tension but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.” (#47)

The point was simply that there was an irreducibly moral dimension to this debate, and that, as one atheist philosopher put it:

“The religious communities often have a developed ethical vocabulary that helps people to think about ethical issues, for example, the just war tradition.” (#5)

The report's remark concluding this section on the meeting of minds between those involved with religion and science is this:  

Religion being indissolubly connected with ethical reasoning meant that, like it or not, ethics was a key part of the science and religion debate.

This aspect of the necessary conversation came through also in what the expert interviewees had to say about the political dimension of the work of scientists. One interviewee, in referring to the criticism of scientists as wanting to "play God", found that there is some logic to the underlying sentiments

The phrase ‘playing God’, when used, was not used approvingly. Nevertheless, as the same respondent went on to explain that "there is at least some logic to the underlying sentiment".

“Now while I disagree with their argument as they state it, I nonetheless have a lot of sympathy with what I think is the emotion underlying it. And that is that we will be doing something extremely complicated with unforeseen consequences. And it might be wiser if we were to be at the very, very least be very cautious here.” (#46)

Others concurred. Science could make astonishing discoveries. Technology could achieve astonishing changes. But scientists, they claimed, could sometimes be dangerously enthusiastic or naïve about their achievements.

“Particularly to do with ethics I think that scientists often lose sight of the ethical implications of their work, and they often want to just plough through ethical boundaries. This is particularly with biosciences and biotechnology, and they just see them as being an unnecessary obstacle to what they see as progress." (#13)

This was not to claim that scientists could not contribute to these ethical debates. They could. However, they were not necessarily best placed to make decisions here. Quite a number of respondents were insistent on this point.

“Scientists have no particular authority about what aims we ought to have and how we should weigh them and scientists have no particular weight on that matter.” (#55)

“I think unfortunately science and religion both are engaged in practices of control that are probably doing a disservice to it and certain control over women, for example.” (#71)

“Science is based on measurement. And measurement takes no notice of secondary qualities... never mind value or meaning.” (#12) 

So, if scientists are not in the best position to assess the value or meaning of their work, other parties can speak for the common good, with society as a whole offering its views in applying a wide-angle lens to scientific projects. Just as players in the monetary economy  are regulated, at least minimally, because they can wreak havoc with the whole of society as we saw in the financial crisis of 2008 or in imposing outrageous income inequality through corporate irresponsibility, so the scientific community should continue to be supervised by ethics committees.

Science and religion are linked in many ways, but the moral and ethical sphere is central to the effort to work together for the benefit of society as a whole. The "joy of the science and religion conversation" is in the meeting of minds, allowing even conflicting views to produce light that guides and protects.

💢 Read the first and second parts of this series:

Religion and science: a meeting of minds 

Science and religion: use a wide-angle lens 

 Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Jesus – the friendship at the center of our life

Abbé Ména and Jesus – original in the Louvre

 Abbé Ména was an Egyptian martyr of the third century. Jesus stands with him in a wonderfully familiar pose. The icon above is a fragment of a painting on wood (tempera on fig tree), produced in the sixth or seventh century. It was found at the site of Bawit (or Baouit) in Egypt.

The Coptic Ména has been interpreted as "everyman", and as one commentator put it:

It is easy to see why the image has received its popular title ‘icon of friendship’, as the two friends stand comfortably alongside each other with the arm of Jesus about the shoulder of his companion.

Let's think a little more about the friendship of God for humankind – for each and every individual – made visible by Jesus' life. Helping us explore this fulfilling musing is David Stephenson, an Anglican priest in Cotham, England. He wrote a blog post for Lent 2019 with the title "Praying with the Icon of Friendship". It's out of season, with the Easter "alleluia" continuing to be sounded, but it's all good for the soul and worth going back to. He writes:

I’d like to suggest a few ways in which the icon might inspire us to prayer in its spirit of friendship. First, and most fundamentally, as an image it communicates powerfully that Jesus is near to us, alongside us, with (as it were) a hand about our shoulder. Jesus is modelled as our companion who walks alongside us; who shares our place and space. Friendship can be exclusive, pictured with two faces gazing at each other. However, this image suggests a very different reality – as our friend Jesus looks where we look, and he looks upon who we look upon. 

Conversely we can be encouraged that in friendship with Jesus we can look at what his eyes of love turn towards – we can see what he sees. The icon invites us to ask where is Jesus looking and what is he telling me about what he sees? Friendship with Jesus is shared compassion, longing, vision, insight, as we gaze with his eyes of love. Perhaps this is a good summary of prayer – to look with Jesus and share his gaze of love; to know that he shares our gaze, that he sees the world through our eyes.

 Although the icon is a relatively simple composition, it has much more detail than immediately seems apparent. First we can notice the hands of Abbé Ména – in one he holds a scroll and with the other he blesses. The scroll probably represents the rule of life of his community; or, like the scroll Jesus takes up in the synagogue of Nazareth, the scripture that is his own commission (‘the Lord has anointed me to…’). What does our scroll contain? What rule of life shapes our praying and living, what is our commission from Jesus our friend? These are good questions to explore prayerfully during Lent.

Meanwhile the hand of blessing is an invitation for us to recognise that prayer is the way in which we connect with God’s benediction – the face of blessing for us and for the world. As God’s people we are called to be people of blessing – not in a trite way (“aww, bless”!) but rather by noticing and naming God’s gracious presence and good intention. John O’Donohue’s fine book Benedictus is a master class in such noticing and naming; perhaps in an age of complaint and negativity we can begin our apprenticeship as people of benediction.

May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening. May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

— John O’Donohue

Stephenson enjoys the thoughts arising from the image of Jesus as a friend who accompanies: 

Lastly, the icon’s age has worn away the feet of Jesus but the feet of Abbé Ména are shown to be bare. In company with Jesus he treads gently on the earth, and this place and moment of shared encounter is ‘holy ground’. Friendship with Jesus calls us to friendship with the earth – to re-connection and recognition of our absolute felt connection with the rest of creation. We begin Lent with the reminder that we come from dust and shall return to dust – this is not only an expression of our mortality but also a reminder that we are ‘of’ the earth. Praying with bare feet, especially outside, might be a good Lent prayer practice – a practice commended by Barbara Brown Taylor in her excellent book An Altar in the World: Finding the sacred beneath our feet.

This is what the publisher says about Taylor's spiritual insights:

While people will often go to extraordinary lengths in search of a 'spiritual experience', she shows that the stuff of our everyday lives is a holy ground where we can encounter God at every turn. For her, as for Jacob in the Genesis story, even barren, empty deserts can become "the house of God and the gate of heaven", places where a ladder of angels connects heaven to earth and earth to heaven.

An Altar in the World reveals concrete ways to discover the sacred in such ordinary occurrences as hanging out the washing, doing the supermarket shop, feeding an animal, or losing our way. It will transform our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in, and renew our sense of wonder at the extraordinary gift of life. 

Stephenson concludes: 

As we look towards Lent, and enter it as a season of prayer, I hope it will also be a season of growing friendship. [...] Our friendship in faith with each other is inseparable from our friendship with Jesus.

Friendship with Jesus is friendship as service within the world around us, and to and with the others who God puts in our life. This means our consciousness is awakened to what has been given to us, to the reality that everything within our world is a gift. The natural world, the built world, the cultural world, each individual – gift, gift, gift, gift! We can discover the sacred in the ordinary elements of our life. Knowing that Jesus is a friend we can give our hearts to, we are able to open ourselves to all the enchantment that life offers.

Ω If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

Science and religion: use a wide-angle lens

The deeper the discourse, the more interesting it is. Graphic Source

The keys to resolving the science and religion debate are these areas of concern:

Epistemology: how do we know what (we think) we know?

Metaphysics: what is the fundamental nature of reality?

Hermeneutics: how do we read texts, particularly authoritative religious ones?

Anthropology: what does it mean to be human?

Ethics: what is good and how do we progress as a society?

Politics: who gets to decide?

How we delve into such questions will produce simply a lot of noise or, on the positive side, light by which to make our way through important issues.

The writers of a new report on research on "science and religion" say the debate in recent years has been like a swinmming pool, where all the noise is at the shallow end, with the emphasis on rhetorical point-scoring and little respect, whereas going deeply into these vital matters allows more honesty and makes the discourse more interesting.

The report is ‘Science and Religion’: Moving away from the shallow end, produced from public polling and interviews of "experts" in the field by Theos, self-described as "the UK’s leading religion and society think tank. It has a broad Christian basis and exists to enrich the conversation about the role of faith in society through research, events, and media commentary". 

Referring to the key elements of the debate given above, the report states:

This report draws out six different ‘dimensions’ within the science and religion debate and argues that for each we should abandon the shallow end and go deeper. Specifically, we need to go beyond:

💢 faith vs fact, when it comes to what we know

💢 natural vs supernatural, when it comes to what we think about reality

💢 literal vs metaphorical, when it comes to how we read holy books

💢 material vs spiritual, when it comes to how we understand what it means to be human

💢 moral polarisation, when it comes to how we think about our ideas and practices

💢 ‘playing god’, when it comes to who decides about the progress of science and technology

The report writers say that optimum outcomes in such analysis of human experience and our living reality would not be agreement and harmony—unlikely to ever occur—but to have participants accept that they should "open up the rest of the pool and [...] go deeper".  

Focusing on narrow issues disrupts our attempts to approach a field of science or religion from a wide perspective. The report gives this example:

The topic that has most often dominated the science and religion debate is, of course, evolution, the sometimes bizarre and often bad-tempered confrontation between Darwinists and those who reject the theory.

The best known and most influential figure in the science and religion debate over the last 40 years has been Richard Dawkins, the British evolutionary biologist and best-selling author, who has not only made a powerful case for a gene-centred understanding of evolution, but has repeatedly framed evolution and religion as competitors for the same truth. Religion, by his reckoning, is “a scientific theory”, “a competing explanation for facts about the universe and life”, and, more specifically, a straightforward alternative to evolution: “God and natural selection are... the only two workable theories we have of why we exist.”

By no means all evolutionary biologists adopted his line on the issue. The late American paleobiologist Steven Jay Gould not only disagreed with Dawkins’ interpretation of evolution but also with his views on science and religion. Nevertheless, the very fact that this became a debate between two evolutionary biologists further helped root the whole issue in this field. As a result, media coverage of science and religion has been heavily weighted to discussions around evolution, aided by the Darwin celebrations in 2009*, and even research on science and religion has been heavily skewed in that direction.

*[The 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species (24 November 1859) and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (12 February 1809)]

The report continues:

It hasn’t all been evolution. Another famous scientific figure, Stephen Hawking, was associated with science and religion ever since he ended his best-selling 1988 book A Brief History of Time with a line about knowing the mind of God. Hawking was an atheist, albeit a less combative one than Dawkins. He was clear that his famous concluding phrase was entirely figurative, and pitted his discipline against religion, in a way that drew a riposte from fellow cosmologist and longstanding friend, Lord Martin Rees^.

^ On Hawking's death Rees wrote: 

Stephen was far from being the archetype unworldy or nerdish scientist. [...] He had robust common sense, and was ready to express forceful political opinions. However, a downside of his iconic status was that that his comments attracted exaggerated attention even on topics where he had no special expertise – for instance philosophy, or the dangers from aliens or from intelligent machines. 

Rees' riposte referred to was:

 "I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read very little philosophy and even less theology, so I don't think we should attach any weight to his views on this topic."  (The Independent 2010)

He went on to comment:

"I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains. Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it's not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by."

His interviewer states:

Lord Rees is not a militant atheist who goes out of his way to insult people of belief – Richard Dawkins once called him "a compliant quisling" for his tolerance of religion. 

To return to the Theos report, it continues, "The third usual suspect is neuroscience":

This part of the debate usually lacks the fireworks of the others, and often adopts a somewhat humbler tone if only because most people recognise that we are a long way from understanding how the brain works. Nevertheless, since the link between epileptic seizures and religious experiences was first probed by neuroscientists, the idea of a ‘God spot’ or that the spiritual was ‘all in the mind’ has fascinated a wider audience, and gained much media attention.

It's no wonder that Hawking, putting on his philosopher's hat, would explore how his theories – yes, Hawking is known as a theoretical physicist – were linked to the range of topics that cosmology encompasses:

Cosmology naturally gravitates to metaphysics, invariably drawing on ideas of creation, contingency, necessity, lawfulness, and eternity in its rhetoric. Even if it’s only for marketing purposes, God is popularly invoked in the title of books on the Big Bang or high energy physics. Moreover, the prominence of the creation story – technically two creation stories – at the start of the book of Genesis, lends the idea of creation a religious significance. If only because they come together around the moment of creation, it feels obvious to find evidence for the science and religion debate within this particular scientific discipline.

Looming on the horizon are issues related to the impact on people's lives of AI (artificial intelligence) and transhumanism in all its forms:

In the light of this, the relevance of neuroscience and its connection with neurotheology is obvious.

However:

When you burrow into the data around public (let alone expert) opinion on evolution, cosmology, and neuroscience, you begin to realise that none of these topics is as significant or as contentious in the landscape of science and religion as you might think.

For example:

When asked the extent to which they agreed with the statement, “the more we know about the universe through astronomy and cosmology, the harder it is to be religious,” 23% of people agreed and 13% agreed strongly. By comparison, 23% of people disagreed with the same statement and 13% disagreed strongly. Public opinion was perfectly divided.

Moreover, "there was a slight balance in favour of the belief that the Big Bang theory made it hard to be religious, but it was relatively small". Also:

Half (50%) of the non-religious respondents, for example, agreed/strongly that “the more we know about the universe through astronomy and cosmology, the harder it is to be religious”, compared to 19% of Christians and 18% of Muslims. That correlation is only to be expected. Either way, what is clear is that antagonism around cosmology issues and religion is considerably lower than around generic ‘science and religion’.

For other issues on the "science-religion" front:

No scientific discipline was judged on balance to make it hard to be religious, in the way that the Big Bang was. For example, for neuroscience, 28% of people agreed/ strongly that the discipline made it hard to be religious, whereas 39% of people disagreed/ strongly. For medical science it was 32% vs 40%; for psychology, 25% vs 40%; chemistry 28% vs 37%; climate science 24% vs 44%, and for geology, 28% vs 35%.

One more set of data further underlines how the perception of science and religion is distorted. That relates to people's attitude to science. These figures come from an earlier study in this Theos series titled, The Perils of Misperception (2019).

When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, 9% of the total population agreed/strongly, whereas 65% of people disagreed/strongly. Among the religious this balance was 12% vs 61% (non-religious 6% vs 77%) whereas among regular (> once a month) worshippers it was 16% vs 59%.

Hostility (or perhaps anxiety) on the part of religious believers over science is "driven by textual literalists". Note that mainstream Christians do not believe the Bible is word for word from God. To look at that more closely:

Of those who thought that the Bible was “the inspired word of God but not everything should be taken literally, word for word”, 12% agreed or strongly agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, whilst 61% of people disagreed or strongly disagreed – i.e.broadly similar to the national levels. By comparison, of those who thought that the Bible was “the actual word of God and to be taken literally, word for word”, 22% agreed or strongly agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, whilst 31% of people disagreed or strongly disagreed. There was a similar pattern of evidence according to people’s attitude to the Qur’an.

Looking at the attitudes of the 101‘elite’ interviewees  "who were recruited (a) because of their expertise in science, philosophy, sociology, or religious studies, or for communicating these to a wider audience, and (b) because of their general distance from or aversion to religion" where 63% were non-religious and 55% said that they “did not believe in God”:

💢 12% said they thought science and religion were strongly incompatible;

💢 24% said they thought the two were incompatible;

💢  41% said they thought they were compatible; and

💢  23% said they thought they were strongly compatible.

And so to the conclusion that can be drawn from these findings:

In summary, if we adopt the narrow-angle lens on the relationship between science and religion – the evolution-Big Bang-neuroscience lens – and then present it as a series of binary choices – evolution or creation? Big Bang or God? neurochemicals or spiritual experience? – and, thereafter, a single model – harmony or conflict? – we naturally steer the conversation to a restricted area where there is likely to be a lot of shouting and noise; in effect, the shallow end of the pool. Alternatively, if we opt for the wider-angle lens take on the relationship, we will begin to see a rather more complex picture, with pockets of antipathy, anxiety, and incompatibility, but also with areas of ambiguity, complexity and harmony.

These insights into the science-religion debate are valuable because they show that the attitudes of the players in this field are key to how fruitful the attempt to achieve a meeting of minds will be. Rhetorical warfare will achieve little, whereas the truthful assessment of what is known and what is conjecture, as with Stephen Hawking, can enter into the deeper realms of human experience and knowledge.

Ω  See the first part of my delving into this report: Science and religion: a meeting of minds. 

Ω  If you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.