Thoughts from a Life: Science and Religion

By Tom McLeish FRS

One of the most refreshing contributions that Roger Scruton made to an otherwise tired, and largely derailed, discussion of ‘science and religion’ in the last two generations is to avoid that specific heading almost entirely. His tacit refusal to construe a bipolar debate along the current conflictual axes defined by neo-atheism and fundamentalism was, already, a welcome signifier that the field of play is larger, weightier and more complex.

This is not to say that he did not address the role of particular sciences within discussions of religion. The Soul of the World has much to say on the science of evolutionary psychology, in particular, on its claim to trump the social sciences in providing a grand, albeit reductive, explanatory narrative of religious belief in Darwinian terms. When sciences take centre-stage in Scruton’s discussions, however, his subjects tend to be the social sciences of anthropology and sociology which, in a previous phase had attempted the explaining-away of religious narrative, belief and community in Durkheimian mode. In a nuanced view of what questions these special sciences can address, and which they cannot, Scruton welcomes the understanding of the religious impulse they bring on their own terms, but illuminates the point at which science becomes scientism through his favourite theme of the first-person subject.  The confusion that arises when ‘the subject is placed in the world of objects’ is repeatedly the object of his critique, perhaps most clearly spotlighted in discussions of neurological attempts to identify the self (or more frequently, its absence).

The wider task of thinking through the relation of science and religion, or, as he would certainly have insisted, the particular theological appraisal of science within a particular tradition, is left more as an exercise for his readers. Fortunately he left plenty of clues for us. In a brilliant moment in his chapter Looking at the Brain, Scruton points out the glaring analogy of incarnation, of kenosis, in the disappearance of human self when reduced to neurological explanation. When we do objective science on our own minds we ‘empty ourselves’ as Christ emptied himself and took on the form of a servant. 

This is profound, at least in so far as it begins to point beyond the rather hard disciplinary boundaries that Scruton regularly set himself, to the point at which one needs to start thinking of the practice of science – of full-blown natural science – as a humanity. This is necessary on Scruton’s own terms: theoretical physics is performed by subjects, whose true discourse must retain first-person grammar. As Coleridge saw in his late philosophical reflections, imagination as well as reason can be truth-telling, an insight that Scruton developed in Imagination and Truth: Reflections after Coleridge. The poet writes in the late Biographia Literaria:

‘The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’

Here the imaginative re-creation of the world, that is the creative, human task of the natural sciences finds itself in the Exodus 3 locus classicus of Judeo-Christian theological for the first person. The ‘science and religion’ question was never one of apologetics, but always one of rediscovery of the huge theological implications that science is possible. That, like the mathematics whose transcendence Scruton was also so fond of pointing out, is a signifier that, beyond explanations of the world, lies personhood in the image of its Creator.

Tom McLeish FRS is the Chair of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York. From 2012-2015, he was the Vice President for Science at the UK Institute of Physics, and the Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee from 2015-2020.