Faith in Mystery in Science, Reason and Scepticism in Religion

A surprising text on the parallelism between the seeker of God and the Scientific seeker.

About 25 years ago a beautiful and intelligent young woman, a doctoral candidate in psychology, flattened me in argument with two objections to Christian belief which I as a physicist was quite unable to rebut. One concerned the naiveté of physicists about the human psyche. The other was this : ’Look, the human race has been around for 5 million years. It has tried many religions. Christianity originated among a few fringe people in a minor Roman province a mere 2,000 years ago. Isn’t it really rather implausible that so late, after so many wrong trails, suddenly Truth should appear ? My friend was arguing her own modern, progressive, rational, scientific philosophy of life. Several days passed before it struck me that the same embarrassing historical newness affects science also. In 5 million years humans have tried many ways of interpreting Nature. Modern science originated among a few fringe people in war-torn Europe a mere 400 years ago. Isn’t it really rather implausible, etc. . . . ? And in their earliest beginnings both systems, science and Christianity, are equal in precariousness and particularity. Good historians have linked Newton’s genius to his dreadful reservoir of psychic rage against his mother, and Galileo’s physics to the accident that his father was a musical instrument maker, for it was by using violin strings as timing devices that Galileo established the laws of falling bodies. Proponents of religion in a scientific age have in general followed one or other of two distinct intellectual strategies. The first moves on an abstract philosophic plane, applying for example ideas about chaos or Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to revivify religious belief in free will. The second, traceable to C. G. Jung, makes science and religion different modes of discourse, each valid in its own sphere. In the latter view science is fact, reason, prose, the left brain ; religion is faith, emotion, poetry, the right brain. Only by cultivating religious sensibility can we pale technocrats become fully human. This glib intellectual apartheid prompts one to ask, as in Africa and other countries, who controls the division of the land. The left-brain right-brain terminology reveals that it is the scientists, and not the most profound ones. Worse, the terms of partition grant religion both too little and too much. No follower of Jesus can regard the way of the Cross as a sensibility to be cultivated, still less assume that religion always brings humane feeling. Those whose hardness of heart weighed most heavily on Christ, according to the New Testament, were not the technocrats from Rome but Pharisees, sincere, upright, scrupulous men, concerned to maintain a great religious tradition. Of course, modes of discourse may differ. Scientific truth, as Sir Nevill Mon observes, is constant from Washington to Moscow, whereas no two people see religious truth in quite the same way. Still that distinction needs a setting. Politics is as diversified as religion ; and science as I hope to show has dimensions only describable by ’right-brain’ words like ’faith’ and ’mystery’. A truer division of discourse, cutting across science and religion, is into three quite other modes : the personal, the abstract, and the historical. Ìn emphasizing religious neurosis my friend reached into the personal. In challenging Christian origins she touched a larger historical mystery, the newness of civilization ; geologically speaking the emergence of agriculture 30 000 years ago and of city-dwelling around 10 000 BC seems pitifully recent. This separation of categories, itself an abstraction, is never complete. Though mathematics is supremely abstract, a mathematician will, as Ludwig Boltzmann wrote a century ago, recognize the personal voice of a great exponent such as ’a Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi or Helmholtz, after reading a few pages just as musicians recognize after the first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert’. In what follows, I reject the cliché that science is all fact and reason and religion all irrational faith. Instead, I argue that Judaeo-Christian belief has an intense rooting in reason, while science involves acts of faith at various levels, and may, though this is more controversial, bring to those who practise it, whether believers or not, experiences that are inherendy religious. How in this context are we to weigh the staggering factual claim that Jesus rose from the dead ? Not by science. We cannot plot curves of body temperature or insist, with doubting Thomas, on personally inspecting nail holes and spear wounds. Rational inquiry turns on historical evidence which, with at least six independent lines of written testimony, is substantial. The earliest committed to paper is Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, dateable with considerable confidence to AD 50 or 51, closer to the event than we are to Martin Luther King’s death. This, in its casual treatment of the resurrection as accepted fact, is to me more telling even than the Gospel accounts. Something must have happened to generate such radiant confidence. Yet the historical balance is nicely poised. Questions remain. Hard as the saying is, the evidence may be exacdy what it should be for a religion that intertwines history, reason, and faith : enough to allow belief not to be an abrogation of intellect but not so overwhelming as to compel us against our will.

Faith and Mystery in Science

Faith enters the lives of scientists at three levels. The first, which I call conformist faith, involves bowing to the teachings and beliefs of a community. ’Outrageous,’ you say, ’scientific method checks everything by experiment.’ Overlooking the many philosophical difficulties in that view, I respond that it is false in practice. All of us accept on authority a multitude of things we cannot test. How many physicists have verified each step, empirical and logical, from Galileo’s researches to Hamiltonian dynamics ? We check a few textbook derivations, mostly sloppy ones, and take the rest on faith. Later, needing information on say the binding energy of Fe57 or the mass of the Sun, we turn to the ’physicist’s bible,’ the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, in its 1985-6 edition 2373 pages of data, formulae, and definitions. Does this invaluable compendium urge scientific doubt upon us ? No, it boasts of recalculating ’the molecular weights of all the inorganic compounds using the most recently approved IUPAC1 atomic weights’ ; of redefining ’certain units in order to standardize values on an international basis’, of presenting certain data ’in the format which is under review by IUPAC’. The Vatican could not be more authoritative. Conformist faith has much in common with the medieval Catholic idea of faith as objective assent to the teachings of the Church. A sceptic might retort that science stands on its success, that the word ’faith’ has inappropriate transcendental connotations, and that anyway scientists challenge authority. Possibly so. Success, however, is a tricky criterion : religion also has successes, some good, some evil.

Authority likewise : even the most revolutionary scientist accepts far more of the tradition than he rejects. Rather than pursue those questions, I turn to a second, more personal kind of faith, the adventurous, where a person feels called to set out on some lifeshaping spiritual journey. In the Bible its great exemplar is Abraham, the Old Testament patriarch, who while still childless in late middle age passed through a spiritual crisis in which God – not the moongods of Ur and Harran he had known till then but one altogether other and mysterious – called him to uproot and travel hundreds of miles into Canaan where he would father a great nation. Much could be said about the relationship between conformist faith and this adventure-faith, but perhaps for us Abraham’s chief interest is that he was not in any ordinary sense a ’religious’ man. He was a workaholic businessman belatedly acknowledging parental longings ; and he founded not a religion but a family. The story forces us to rethink our ideas about religious experience. Science also in its higher reaches brings life-shaping leaps to the unknown : Freud’s to dream-interpretation, Darwin’s to the problem of species, Faraday’s to the study of electromagnetism. No more than Abraham do these three fit our stereotypes, yet each upon examination seems almost a chosen figure, preordained by upbringing for what he was to do, shaped in character by the doing of it. So Freud looked back on a path, strangely circuitous, that had brought him to where he had always wished to be, and with wry selfperception saw that for ail his strenuous claims about psychoanalysis as science, his was less the temperament of a scientist than that of a ruthless Spanish conquistador. Freud, Faraday, and Darwin : an atheist, a member of a failing Protestant sect (the Sandemanians), and a wealthy hypochondriac who lost ail interest in religion : these may seem odd choices for the scientist as a man of faith, especially with Faraday insisting as he did on ’an absolute distinction between religious and ordinary belief… between the things of man which can be known by the spirit of man which is within him and those higher things concerning his future which he cannot know by that spirit’. Worse, though none of them could match Newton’s savagery, each had vast intellectual possessiveness. Freud’s writings storm with self-concern. Darwin, after years of scholarly secretiveness, rushed to publication when A. R. Wallace appeared. Faraday in 1832, upon reaching certain theoretical views, at once deposited with the Royal Society a sealed note to establish “a lone right, if they are confirmed by experiment, to claim credit for the views at that date’. In the mud on the river-bed lies gold. The jealousies of great minds hold clues to more important things – consciousness, faith, identity, will, and moral choice. No scientist doubts that his ideas are a personal achievement, his property. In one light that feeling makes sense : achievement is identity. In another – the light of science as a closed, all-embracing account of Nature – it makes nonsense. Why seek fame for mere predetermined (or chance-driven) synapses in the brain ? The scientist’s own behaviour contradicts what seems to be the ’scientific’ worldview. There in a nutshell is the mystery of self-awareness, deeper than all those age-old abstractions about free will and determinism in which we humans entangle ourselves, yet kin in paradox to Laplace’s famous vision, sketched in 1776, of a supermathematician who, given ’all the relations of the entities of this universe’ at some instant, can calculate every past and future eventincluding presumably his own future thoughts. Laplace, far from being a scientific megalomaniac, was asserting practical limitations on determinism. He was arguing for a science of imperfect knowledge – probability theory. Since modern quantum mechanics goes farther, asserting that Nature is inherently probabilistic, many defenders of free will hail it as their rescuer. Will, for them, works at the subatomic level, cheating the statistics like a bent casino operator who, not satisfied with fixing the odds and biasing the roulette wheel, grabs the ball when no one is looking and drops it into the right slot. To my taste that answer, even if true, is not useful. It lacks moral fire, and painfully it falls into the very reductionist trap that Laplace sought to avoid. Suppose we take the experience of freedom in creation as a scientific datum in its own right and ask where that leads. Not to an obscurantist rejection of what other sciences, from evolution to AI (artificial intelligence), may teach about mind, but certainly to new realms of complexity, for even as we reject atomistic determinism we find within the human psyche – within ourselves – deterministic forces more powerful than any that Laplace studied, driving and shaping all that we are and do. And never simply. The high morality that denounces the acquisitive-competitive-destructive drive in a Newton as merely evil is altogether too naive. In science, as in capitalism and sport, competition spurs achievement. Yet loyalty to self must include loyalty to something higher ; Darwin’s delight in the world of living things and his honesty : Freud’s stern Victorian commitment to science : Faraday’s fine tentativeness seen in the glancing farewell sentence which ended the last paragraph (3362) of his Experimental Researches : ’it is better to be aware, or even suspect, we are wrong than to be unconsciously or easily led to accept an error as right’. Truth, once reached, will be more beautiful than one’s cleverest idea. That is an eminently non-obvious proposition. To accept it takes a faith more stringent than either the conformist or the adventurous faiths discussed earlier. To practise this third kind of purifying faith involves something more interesting than free will as commonly imagined ; it involves moral choice, the beginnings of the freedom the scientist thought was his all along. Do any of the three faiths meet religion ? A Faraday would say no, it is ’ordinary belief’ ; religion concerns the future life. The dichotomy fails. Taken literally, it would secularize even Abraham, whose faith centred not on life after death but on the promise of descendants upon Earth2. We must tread carefully here. Repudiating Faraday’s absolute distinction does not imply absolute identity between things scientific and religious. To analyse the structure of the atom, or even the vagaries of the human psyche, is not automatically to love one’s neighbour as oneself. But then faith, as Paul knew, is not the only or the most important element in religion. Newton’s heartless paranoia and Newton’s high intellectual detachment, how are they to be reconciled ? They are of a piece with his religion and his era. ’Humble to God, haughty to man’, R. H. Tawney’s distraught epitaph on the seventeenth-century Puritan, perfectly fits this man with his prism and silent face ’voyaging on strange seas of thought, alone’. I turn now to that other seemingly anti-scientific word from religious discourse – ’mystery’. If we ignore theological technica (’mystery religions’ for certain first-century cults ; ’mystical’ for experiences alleging direct union with God) then, I think, ’mystery’ in a religious context ordinarily means either (1) some doctrine that passes human understanding, like the mystery of the Holy Trinity, or (2) some experience that arouses awe. Often the two overlap ; each has parallels in science. In physics, beliefs that pass understanding are usually called.” ’principles’ – Maupertuis’ principle, the principle of least action, the equivalence principle, Mach’s principle, the uncertainty principle, and so on. Mysteries all. The so-called ’weak’ equivalence principle, for example, asserts that two physically different things, mass m as a receptacle of inertia and mass mg as known in gravitation, are identical. Experiment confirms this ; it remains a mystery. Einstein did not explain it. His general theory of relativity brilliantly reinterprets gravitation as space-time curvature rather than force, but only by assuming equivalence. The issue is this : neglect gravity and all physics reduces to laws involving equations of motion and m ; take gravity alone and equations of motion are superfluous, it reduces to field equations and mg- The two realms are disconnected. Numerically-minded people, including physicists, sometimes deride Christian belief in the Trinity as illogical. You can’t have it both ways : either there are three gods or one God. But those mysterious fourthcentury creeds were formulated by clear thinkers pondering the implications of a threefold experience of God, (1) as Parent, (2) as Spirit at work in us and in Nature, and (3) as seen in the tremendous event of Jesus of Nazareth. Challenge the experience if you will ; recognize that Athanasius’ philosophic categories were not ours ; but do not cry illogic when physics holds similar mysteries. Electrons are both a unity and a duality, with analogies to both waves and particles. Absurd ? No, given a proper philosophy of analogy, to have it both ways is exactly what one can do. Overarching all is the mystery of what physics is. If we slither past the mountainous problems of how ordinary language ties mathematical symbols to physical entities, and how experiment elucidates the entities, we reach the commonplace that the laws of physics are mathematical relationships among fundamental entities. The goal is unification – to write down, as the great physicist Richard Feynman once put it, a master equation

U=O

in which the universal function U incorporates everything that is. Feynman was even able to indicate the form that U should have U = (a/b – 1) + (c/d – 1) + etc., where a = b, c = d, etc. express individual physical laws. Simple. Alas, no ! The deep questions remain. Of what kind are the fundamentalities (waves, particles, forces, energies, symmetries, dimensions in hyperspace) ? How many are they (4, 24, 124) ? In what do their relationships consist ? We confront that ancient problem, the One and the Many. Physicists who seek a Grand Unified Theory do so by representing the four forces of Nature, as, say, broken symmetries in a ten-dimensional hyperspace subject to constraints of quantization, local Lorentz invariance, etc. – that is, by replacing one set of the Many with another. The mystery of One and Many is compounded by two others, axiomatization and completeness. Euclid reduced the axioms of geometry to five, the last of which was suspect. Why five ? Why among several geometries found when the fifth axiom is relaxed does one, Riemann’s, in oddly asymmetric form, fit the world better than Euclid’s ? Why does its success hinge on something just as problematical, Einstein’s ad hoc equation between mass-energy and the curvature of space ? Every theory has such puzzles, and every theory seems in its unfolding to follow a repeating historical pattern where, after initial euphoric success, it is seen to be incomplete. By incomplete I do not mean in a state of crisis and about to collapse ; my concern is with the way good theories leave big problems untouched. Quantum electrodynamics is a magnificent theory. Formulated 60 years ago, it accounts for the atom, all of chemistry, all of solid state physics, every interaction of light with matter, and much else. It supplies a computation of the magnetic moment of the electron agreeing with experiment to 1 part in 100 billion. It faces no crisis. Yet locked within its structure is an utterly unsolved mystery : the fact that three physical quantities, Planck’s constant h, the velocity of light c, and the charge e on the electron, form a dimensionless ratio h c /2. ? e2 = 137.036, which must have meaning and must imply that one of the three originates in the other two. The theory is incomplete. Brilliant success combined with gaps, imperfect axiomatization, and a reductionism that never quite works, always the tale is the same. Neither Einstein’s dictum that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible, nor Paul’s ancient image that we see through a glass darkly, truly catch our dilemma, which is that physics seems to be simultaneously (a) highly successful (b) fundamentally impossible of completion. This window is patchy, transmissive in some areas, opaque in others. Cleaning one part often smears another, and while we undoubtedly see further than our seventeenth-century forebears, we are always being mystified by objects half glimpsed behind the trees and bushes in the garden. Awe opens from the unexpected. An instance in my own experience came in learning quantum mechanics. Puzzled like many students about the yawning gap between it and classical mechanics, I chanced upon the section in Dirac’s famous treatise where he identifies a certain mathematical object, the commutator, as the quantum counterpart of a little-used classical concept, the ’Poisson bracket’. Here, miraculously, stood the bridge between the two worlds, manifestly right, beautiful in its intellectual economy. It was as if a flood of light had entered my soul. Another similar experience concerned the formulation by James Clerk Maxwell, greatest of nineteenth-century physicists, in 1866 of a mathematically rigorous theory of transport phenomena in gases. Maxwell’s leap was to replace the concept of a characteristic distance (the mean free path) used in earlier work by a characteristic time, the ’modulus of the time of relaxation3’ of the gas. His argument began with the seemingly grotesque irrelevancy that over long periods many solid bodies (glaciers for example) flow like liquids. What bearing has this on gases ? Vividly I recalled my stunned awe at Maxwell’s offhand proof that a small isolated volume of rarefied gas acts as if it were a solid ! It is in the relaxation of this quasisolidity, at a rate proportional to density, that we find our understanding of gases. This scientific awe has two aspects : an amazement at the human ingenuity of a Maxwell or a Dirac and, more interestingly, with Einstein a richer sense of the mystery of comprehensibility. Yes, the Universe is comprehensible (to a point) but the Divine Artificer is a parent who delights in giving puzzles to his children. Dirac’s discovery came during a long walk after weeks of puzzling about why in Heisenberg’s new matrix mechanics quantities u, v corresponding to dynamical variables fail to commute, i.e. u v does not equal v u. ’Out of the blue’ (as Dirac put it) floated the thought that perhaps uv-vu had some connection with Poisson brackets, though Dirac hardly remembered what Poisson brackets were. It was a long, long night of waiting before he could check in the library from Whittaker’s Analytical Dynamics that, yes, this was it. The piquancy is that there exists another very similar classical concept, the Lagrange bracket, which has no importance in quantum theory. Science knows many such tales of unconscious intellectual creation. Enrico Fermi, a physicist as far from mysticism as any, had this to say in a discussion with S. Chandrasekhar about the discovery of slow neutrons, his greatest achievement :

We were working very hard on the neutron-induced radioactivity and the results we were obtaining made no sense. One day, as I came to the laboratory, it occurred to me that I should examine the effect of placing a piece of lead before the incident neutrons. Instead of my usual custom, I took great pains to have the piece of lead precisely machined. I was clearly dissatisfied with something ; I tried every excuse to postpone putting the piece of lead in its place. When, finally, with some reluctance, I was going to put it in its place, I said to myself, ’No, I do not want this piece of lead here ; what I want is a piece of paraffin.’ It was just like that with no advance warning, no conscious prior reasoning. I immediately took some odd piece of paraffin, and placed it where the piece of lead was to have been.

A Greek would credit such inspirations to his Muse. We, without holding Dirac to a word, may note that the expression ’out of the blue’ is a euphemism for ’from heaven’ which in turn euphemizes ’from God’. Am I really, you ask, attributing unconscious intellectual creation to divine inspiration even when its vehicles are agnostics like Dirac or Fermi ? My answer is a qualified yes. The crux is intellectual ownership. Now Fermi implicitly and Dirac explicitly disclaimed ownership. Dirac contrasted the ’deserved success’ of his definitive logically worked out paper of 1927 on the mathematical foundations of quantum theory with the ’rather undeserved success’ of various of his out-of-the-blue discoveries. We are moving beyond the question of free will versus determinism. Maxwell who also had many out-of-the blue discoveries admitted to his friend Fenton Hort, the Cambridge biblical scholar, that he did not know what to think : ’states of the will only puzzle me’. Though his disposition was to think always ’about the immediate circumstances which have brought a thing to pass rather than any will setting them in motion’, introspection led him in yet a third direction ’what is done by what I call myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me’. I am not so foolish as to set up mysteries in the human unconscious as proofs of the existence of God. My claim, a dual one, is different. First, that the unconscious spawns creativity as well as the destructiveness which Freud, rightly for therapy, concentrated on. Second, I claim equal authenticity for similar experiences in religion. One need not share John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century theology to be impressed, on reading his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding, at how in his lonely anguish, passage after passage from the Bible, some of which he did not even know that he knew, welled up into his consciousness in healing. Illuminating flashes like Bunyan’s or Dirac’s are not the whole of science or religion. Many people never have them, and even to those who do they are only a small part of the story. Dirac’s inspirations came during a crisis in the history of physics to a man hard at work learning classical mechanics and quantum theory at the same time ; Bunyan lived through the politico-religious upheaval of seventeenth-century England and drew through his study of the Bible on thousands of years of testable religious experience. Such are the complexities that meet us when we consider science not as an abstract system but as the living reality it is – personal, embedded in history.

Reason and Scepticism in Religion

Whoever chooses the spiritual quest must confront an ugly truth. Religion is not all good. The Roman writer Lucretius who exclaimed of one horror in his world ’Only religion could produce such a mass of evil’ might have been speaking of occurrences within Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Insight comes unsought. Visit the Vallée des Merveilles in the French Maritime Alps, 30 miles from the Mediterranean coast. There, facing a mountain of awesome beauty is a rocky slope dotted with hundreds of Stone Age graffiti. Thither, six millennia ago men came from across the sea, leaving their fragile craft to tread solemnly along a road marked by spear-shaped pointers, upward ever upward to the place of high religious ceremony, a flat altar stone. What worship did they offer there ? The graffito depicts two figures, both human, a priest and a bound victim with his head smashed in. Such devotion, such energy… in horror the Christian turns away, then joltingly is reminded how closely sacrificial violence is entwined in his own religious heritage : God’s command to Abraham to offer up Isaac, his son, as a burnt offering : the Passover and the slaying of the firstborn of Egypt : a man dying horribly on a. Roman cross. Except for remarking that Isaac in fact was not sacrificed, and that Jesus in dual role as both priest and victim (to use the strange but evocative New Testament language) gave up His own life, I leave these mysteries, turning instead to a seemingly remote topic, the exalted role of learning and education in Jewish religious practice at the time of Christ. On the face of it this emphasis is most surprising. A recent critic’s sneer that the Hebrew scriptures must have struck any cultured Greek or Roman as a preposterous gallimaufry (hotchpotch) is not altogether wrong. But facts are facts. Rich as Greek tragedy was, the making of critical intellection a part of daily religion is a Jewish not a Greek achievement. It followed upon the most shattering event in ancient Jewish history, the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in BC 587. This event should have been the end. To glimpse an anguished despair such as is found in no other writing one must read the five stupendous poems that make up the book of Lamentations. Yet prophetic voices spoke and a few captive men in Babylon began a work of collating documents saved from the ruin, rebuilding their faith about the written word. When around 520 BC the Persian conquerors of Babylon allowed Jerusalem to be rebuilt the religious equation had changed. Over the next five centuries, as Jewish communities formed in distant cities like Alexandria, scribal academies were set up everywhere to study the Mosaic law, forming an intellectual tradition with a fascination all its own, as seen in the 176 verses of Psalm 119 which tell in an elaborate acrostic structure its author’s almost sensual pleasure in the beauty of the law. When around 40 BC the great Hillel came to Jerusalem as a young man he rapidly sharpened his mind in the two halachic schools of Shemaiah and Attylion. The influence of Hillel and his descendants on rabbinic Judaism, continuing to the death of Gamaliel V in AD 425, is well known. Less so, perhaps, is the impact on Christianity. It was Hillel’s brilliant grandson Gamaliel I who shaped Paul’s intellect and is spoken of so highly by Luke in Acts. A closer influence is possible. When Jesus’ alarmed parents found him in the temple at the age of twelve holding precocious debate with the doctors of law, Hillel, still active in his seventies, would probably have been there. Several of Jesus’ sayings echo Hillel, often with intriguing extensions as in the transformation of Hillel’s ’In my abasement is my exaltation’ into Jesus’ more dynamic teaching that ’He who humbles himself shall be exalted’. Many scribes were boring. Jesus astonished because he taught ’as one having authority not as the scribes’ – he was an original thinker. Yet the scribal method of debating the meaning of a text word by word can be wonderfully educative. The path from Hillel to Einstein and Freud, though winding, is real. To the protest that this makes religion a mere servant of education, I answer that God formed the mind, and that one test of a sound religion is its effect on education. And Paul, in urging the Roman Christians to break with the cruel and corrupt ethos of Rome, described the transforming power of religion as working ’by the renewal of your minds’. This eminently Jewish emphasis on right reason contrasts with the more ancient belief that the gods come to us in madness. When the prophets of Baal in Elijah’s day sought to make rain, they danced around their altar in ever-growing frenzy, ’cutting themselves after their custom with swords and lances until the blood gushed out’ while he jeered that the god must be asleep or on a journey or off in the bushes urinating. Jesus’ irony about pagan mumbo-jumbo that ’they think they will be heard by their much speaking’ is gender, but equally an appeal to reason. So among New Testament writers we find that John sees Christ as the Logos – the rational principle – incarnate ; that Paul, even when loudly asserting the futility of Greek rationalism, stands as the most effective debater of the age ; and that Luke, the literary genius whose two books comprise a third of the whole, is precisely the kind of cultured, reasonable, coolly detached, upper middle-class Greek who should have been, but was not, repelled by Old Testament gallimaufry. At this point a host of objections present themselves. A religion centred in the mind (1) leads to the aridities of scribal teaching – and of modern biblical criticism, (2) makes salvation a matter of IQ, (3) misses the supremacy of love, (4) overlooks the weakness of the various philosophical proofs of the existence of God, (5) and Jesus’ concern with the human heart, (6) and the Freudian (and Pauline) conviction that unconscious drives not reason control human action, (7) runs counter to such classic Christian theologizing as Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd) and Anselm’s credo ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand). Aridity and the tying of salvation to IQ are real concerns. But the gift of high intelligence is no highway to personal truth ; first-class minds often have a first-class capacity for rationalization and self-delusion. And in emphasizing the heart Jesus was not downplaying thought but contrasting inward religion with a religion of empty observance – in Hebrew usage the heart meant the whole inner being not the emotions. Correlatively, to love one’s neighbour as oneself takes understanding – of both neighbour and self. As for aridity, how boring much religion is ! That large regions of science are equally boring is doubtful consolation. Passing over tedium in worship and the wonders of churchly bureaucracy, let us ponder Rudolf Bultmann’s explanation, which was that the Bible’s outdated world view makes it seem to modern man as irrelevant as alchemy, so that the Christian task becomes one of ’demythologizing’ its timeless truths and repackaging them in a viable twentieth-century thought-structure – for Bultmann, Heidegger’s philosophy. That many thoughtful people find Genesis absurd and Paul repellent and obscure is plain fact. Nevertheless, both Bultmann’s diagnosis and his prescription are inadequate. Religious boredom is no twentieth-century invention ; it existed in Jesus’ day, with abstract principles taking on a life of their own that no ordinary person could follow. Now demythologization is in its very name a process of abstraction, seeking to join the essence of ancient truth with a philosophy of experience that is itself abstract. Helpful as it is to the gifted few whose minds move easily in abstract realms, it cannot be a general answer. A man of formidable intelligence, a man who had thought long and hard about the nature of religious truth, a man who succeeded against near-impossible odds and who emerges from his times as not so much ’modern’ but timeless, Jesus of Nazareth adopted a far bolder intellectual strategy ; we should ask what it was. In one of those short sayings that reveal his social alertness, Jesus likened the kind of scribe whom he as a teacher sought to train to a ’householder who brings forth out of his treasure things new and old’. What is this image ? We must picture a wealthy man with some honoured guest opening his safe (for theft was as great a worry in first-century Galilee as it is in twentieth-century California) to fetch out two objets d’art, an elaborately wrought gold cup inherited from his great-great-grandfather and a clever little carving that he purchased last week from a young artist who is just beginning to be known. Each is fine, each has its own appeal ; but the aesthetic impact of the two together is greater than that of either alone. Thus Jesus’ own strategy. As learned as the scribes, he could dispute textual subtleties with the best of them ; but beside that he developed (developed, not invented) another quite different teaching device-parables. These microscopic stories are some straightforward, some nuanced, and some plain disconcerting. Who else would compare the religious quest to the activities of a crook, who, after finding treasure by covert mining operations on somebody else’s land, promptly hides the evidence and sets about raising money to buy the land ? Then we see the appeal to reason. Why not apply as much ingenuity to faith as to swindling ? Vivid personal stories set side by side with elaborately reasoned exposition of ancient religious texts – it is a wonderful combination. For us the parables are themselves ancient ; often they too need critical elucidation. But the grand strategy of working two disparate teaching methods together, one ancient, one modern, is something religious thinkers in every age can gain from. And herein lies another flaw in Bultmann’s thinking. Whatever may have been the case in the 1940s, in the 1990s large numbers of people are interested in myth. Once one recognizes that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are myth, and that religious experience is alive and well in the twentieth century and capable of being expressed in modern language, it becomes worthwhile to go back with some friendly art critic to look at that ancient gold cup. The claim thus far is that reason is, and should be, woven into the fabric of Christian life, not abstract reason alone but a process circulating creatively among abstract, personal, and historical modes of discourse. Take Jesus seriously and your mind will be stretched and expanded to the limits. That granted, I proceed to a more drastic claim that religion should incorporate an astringent scepticism. Good people may be shocked. Religion is a matter of belief ; the more the better. No. Quality is what counts ; shoddy belief is often worse than no belief at all. Here it is necessary uncompromisingly to denounce Tertullian’s plea for absurdity as very bad theology ; and to lament the fact that St Augustine lent his great prestige to the same evil paradox. Of course, we in our blindness may dismiss true ideas as absurd ; many physicists did that at first with Einstein’s work. Tertullian’s error is far more insidious. To extol absurdity is to open one’s heart to a deadly spiritual one-upmanship which derides those who do not share one’s own special belief as inferior beings. Neither Tertullian nor Augustine escaped that sin. Anselm’s credo ut intelligam is better, but even it remains shallow thinking, despite the praise heaped -.on it by Christian writers. Belief and understanding have to go hand in hand. We start accepting physics through other people’s testimony, but not until we have learned enough to use it in actual problems does our belief achieve any true inwardness. The same holds for religious belief. But why scepticism ? For answer we must remove from the scribal safe another ancient heirloom, the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes. Written probably about 250 BC Ecclesiastes is unlike any other religious book, for in it the author reveals all his doubts. Its power only becomes clear when we detach it from the biblical setting and lay it alongside other classics of scepticism : Voltaire’s Candide, Johnson’s Rasselas with its ’conclusion, in which nothing is concluded’ and Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam. A fascinating study could be made of the diversity of minds that have been touched by this disturbing assemblage of 4400 words : Augustine, Luther, Byron, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Kipling, to name but a few. Three recent popular movies have turned on quotations from it. At one level it is a story of disillusionment. The author begins by portraying as his own the life of cultivated hedonism, the spacious possibilities open to someone with youth, health, brains, and an income of several million a year : yachts, Mercedes, houses, gardens, servants, art, music, philosophy, books, ballet, mistresses, everything, including finally… emptiness. But wait, perhaps he is too self-centred ; he must look around him. That brings only the unpleasant realization that no one else knows the answers either. With mounting horror he sees all the folly, cruelty, corruption, and ingratitude that go to make up the modern world of 250 BC, which is our world. Like death-knells the great phrases ring out : ’all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbour’ ; ’he that increases knowledge increases sorrow’ ; ’in the place of righteousness wickedness is there’ ; ’the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to men of skill ; but time and chance happen to them all’. Nor is the message simply an indictment of society. This is a religious despair thrown at us full force in what is assuredly the most terrifying sentence in the entire Bible ’God has made everything beautiful in its time ; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end’. God exists ; he has given us eternal longings and then left us alone. How can one defend this as a creative religious message ? First, because in exposing his doubt the author is exercising strong spiritual empathy. To anyone in the grip of despair nothing is more destructive than someone else’s breezy cheerfulness, whereas to find that a man of obviously genuine religious feeling has been even deeper into doubt than we, is reassuring. Second, because he offers a policy. The policy, when it appears late in the book, is so unexpected that many readers miss its profundity. After all the agonizings about futility come six verses urging us to cast our bread on the waters, to give generously, to sow our seed without worrying about winds or clouds – in other words to adopt a positive outlook on life even though it stands against all probability. Well-stated in a few words the author has told us what Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre said in many words badly. One can philosophize and philosophize and philosophize ; sooner or later one must act. The ultimate moral choice, the ultimate act of faith is a question of direction – whether one turns towards good or towards evil. Only someone who has been to the limits of scepticism can put the issue that sharply. And the scepticism needs to be maintained. Just as physics confronts us with the mystery of successful incompleteness, so does religion. This window also is patchy. The religous person should accept that some parts of belief, like some parts of physics, are more firmly grounded than others. Not that we should despise second level beliefs. There is great force in Ecclesiastes’ parting words, where, looking at himself in the third person as he had also at the beginning of the book, he remarks that ’being wise the Preacher still taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging proverbs with great care’. The philosophic quest is hopeless ; it is inescapable. Only through a judicious mixture of childlike belief and hard-headed scepticism can we mortals attain the beginnings of maturity.

Notes International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Though as Jesus observed in a masterpiece of rabbinical disputation (Mark 12 :26) other scriptures outside the book of Genesis may be read as implying Abraham’s continued existence after death. 3. Thus introducing the notion of ’relaxation time’ which was to have ramifications through all of physics and engineering.