‘Fallacies of the modern world view have to do with the conception of
the world as substance or machinery, mistaking abstractions for reality,
confusing origins and truth, failing to attribute feeling to things that
feel, recognising ethics as exclusively anthropocentric, thinking a posteriori,
objectifying facts as separated from values, reducing the complex to the
simple and dividing knowledge into distinct disciplines that produce experts
who are often wrong.’

In their place, Charles Birch would like a philosophy and religion ‘that
makes room for purpose as an effective casual agent in the universe’. This
would entail a view of nature as organic and ecological, rather than mechanistic;
an interpretation of lower forms of organisation in terms of higher ones,
as well as vice versa; an acknowledgment of sentience much further down
the organisational ladder than is at present commonly imagined; a biocentric
ethic; and a holistic approach to knowledge.

Strong stuff. It amounts to a call for a revolution in ways of thinking
to break out of the constraints that a falsely mechanistic interpretaion
of science has imposed on ourselves and our world. As a good biologist,
Birch begins with life, with what we directly know of feeling, living, purposing
and choosing. His post-Cartesian starting point is: ‘I feel, therefore I
²¹³¾.’

On Purpose is a caleidoscope of a book. Birch is an ebullient polymath,
a former professor of biology at the Universety of Sydney, no mean theologian,
a philosopher and dovotee of A N Whitehead, a distiguished member of the
World Council of Churches, a reconteur, an activist in a multitude of good
causes, and one of last year’s recipients of the Templeton Prize, the most
prestigious and valuable prize in the world for progress in religion. Characeristically
he has given it all away. He writes as he lives: with passion, elegance
and humour.

Although my brief summary of his main thesis may arouse fears that this
is just another antiscientific diatribve, and though some of the ideas in
it, notably his panpsychism, are hard to swallow, and though parts are maddeningly
imprecise, persistence pays dividends.

Furthermore, he manages to articulate the feeling that something has
gone seriously wrong with the so-called rational scientific world, as well
as with traditional theology. One of his aims is to develop an understanding
of both in which they are seen as essential to one another.

God for him is the ground both of order and of novelty. He is the persuasive
presence rather than the all-powerful ruler. He is the enabler who lures
the network of events and relationships, which constitute the Universe,
to fulfil its potentialities. He is the holder and preserver of value in
an ever-changing process. He is, in Whitehead’s words, ‘the fellow-sufferer
who understands’.

I am not myself much enamoured by Process Theology, which is the tichnical
name for what Birch is expounding here. It has won greater favour in the
US than in Britian where it is generally regarded as conceding too much
to a particular, and somewhat incoherent, philosophical system. Birch fails
to convince me that a more traditional theology could not do the job.

It is important, therefore, to see that the kind of revolution for which
he calls does not entail the acceptance of his whole philosophy. Many thinkers
besides Whitehead have seen that events and processes may be more fundamental
expressions of the ‘thinginess’ of things than concepts like substance and
matter.

Many have pointed out the absurdity of concluding that the reality is
impersonal and purposeless on the basis of a methodology which deliberately
and systematically excludes such notions. Many have begun to question rigid
distinctions between fact and value, and the revolution toward a greater
appreciation of the intrinsic value of all life is well under way.

In Purpose is a useful stimulus. A book which begins with Whitehead’s
introduction of Bertrand Russell at a Harvard lecture – ‘Bertie says I am
muddle-headed. But I think he is simple-minded’ – cannot fail to be full
of good things. But Birch is a modest man, despite his immodest ideas, and
would not see his book as any more than a starter.

John Habgood is Archbishop of York. He began his academic career as
a physiologist and pharmacologist.

The historical relationship between science and religion can be described
in terms of the three familiar stages of an individual’s personal development.
The first stage was one of dependence; modern science, based as it is on
the belief of an ordered nature, had its origins in a Christian culture
based on the idea of the rationality of God.

The second stage, starting in the seventeenth century and running up
to our own time, has been the period of independence. Science has been keen
to proclaim its autonomy from other belief systems, and for many scientists
has almost become a system of faith in itself.

We are now moving into a much more conscious stage of interdependence,
as theology learns that it must take science more seriously, and science
– I hope – learns that without theology, it can remain dangerously incomplete
and exposed.

The discovery of the limits of independence between science and other
belief systems takes many forms today. First, there are the challenges to
the notion of complete objectivity in science. This has always been true
in the human sciences, since they necessarily entail some kind of personal
involvement. But within our century we have also had the blurring of the
subject/object distinction in physics, and the acknowledgement that we can
change reality in the process of studying it.

It is becoming apparent that a methodology which systemically excludes
everything which cannot be set out in mechanistic categories inevitably
ends up with a view of the universe as a machine. This happens not because
the methodology has discovered some great truth, but because it has discovered
the implications of its initial assumptions. Leave out the human person
from the very beginning, and the end is a universe which has no place for
the human subject.

Secondly, there is the challenge from biology and ecology. Many biologists
argue that their ultimate aim is to understand everything in reductionist
terms, splitting it up into its smallest constituent parts. Others, however,
claim that such an aim is self-defeating. These scientists argue that we
may need, within biology, concepts which draw more directly on our own experience
as human beings. Can one do adequate research in biology or ecology without
using categories such as feeling, purpose, intention or choice?

Thirdly, philosophical and sociological questions are being raised about
scientific realism – the belief that science simply discloses what is there.
Many philosophers of science have recently been asking whether scientific
theories are not just useful fictions which enable us to find our way around,
and whether the scientific picture of the world is merely a human construction,
an imposition of order on a world which is capable of bearing many different
interpretations.

The foundations of a naively realistic view of science are, in a whole
variety of ways, being washed away. This is accompanied by the growth of
a counterculture which emphasises consciousness raising, holism, deep ecology,
and a philosophical monism in which matter and spirit are all part of the
same thing. In particular, it emphasises new – and in my view suspect –
forms of irrationalism.

We are also living in a strongly commercially oriented world, in which
science is valued primarily as know-how. Such an orientation carries strong
inducements towards the loss of scientific rigour. For example, scientists
asked to judge whether nuclear waste or food additives are ‘safe’ or ‘dangerous’
are under pressure to deliver more than they honestly can, since ‘scientific’
answers to such questions are not yet available.

All these considerations indicate a need for science to return to its
roots. We must beware of the dangers of relativism. We must also defend
a belief in science as real knowledge against, on the one hand, the dangers
of an irrationalism which could lead to the return of ideas that have been
excluded from the whole scientific field for centuries. And on the other,
against the corruption that can result from the political and financial
context within which scientists now have to operate.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s themselves need to recover an awareness of being part of
a larger enterprise of truth seeking. This is why those who care about science
should be sufficiently bold and open-minded to see in theology an ally in
putting forward metaphysical claims about a reality which is actually there
to be discerned. For both of these very different disciplines have to make
such claims if they are to survive.

None of the claims to truth put forward by science and theology should
be taken as final. Both accept that truth is a regulative principle; in
other words, that it is something that we seek, rather than an infallible
attainment – something that we are always approaching, never quite getting
to. Furthermore, both depend on a philosophical tradition which is infused
by rationality, by attention to actual experience, and by the use of creative
imagination under critical control.

Christian insight, I believe, can take us just a little bit further,
and show us that truth is not simply something external to us. As a theologian,
I believe that we are not spectators simply looking at an external, immobile
God, nor at an external, immobile universe, but are sharers in the painful
business of creating a meaningful world.

In the end, knowing is inseparable from acting and from loving. Perhaps
the insight which lies at the heart of theology – that knowing and loving
cannot be separated – is the lesson which needs to be learnt within science,
particularly in the need for sensitivity and awe, and in the sense of cooperation
with what is to be understood and used.

The best scientists have always had this sense of awe about what they
are doing, and acknowledge that out of it can come a science which is aware
of its moral limitations as well as its intellectual ones. Such a science
will surely survive as an honourable and honoured part of the human search
for understanding.

John Habgood is the Archbishop of York. He was a demonstrator in pharmacology
at Cambridge University before becoming a priest. This article is based
on a talk given recently to the Royal Society of Arts; the full text will
be published shortly in the society’s journal.