Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to this ongoing conversation taking place at the intersection of faith and public life. Today we are going to ask just about every big question you can think of about the relationship of faith to the larger questions, the larger mysteries, and the larger whole program of scientific exploration. In less than an hour, we are going to talk about the origin of the universe, the problem of suffering, the nature of miracles, the afterlife, and we might get around to evolution as well; and we will have answers for all of those mysteries. Not to over press where we’re going, but we have a lot of work ahead, with a marvelous guest: the reverend, Dr. Keith Ward.

In case you don’t know, Keith Ward is an Anglican priest, the author of twenty books on philosophy, more than twenty books on philosophy and religion, and one of the world’s foremost Christian theologians. In fact, I would say, on just about any intellectual question about the credibility of Christian faith, you should go to your favorite book supplier, whether that's Amazon or Borders or Barnes & Noble’s or our local bookshop downstairs, and buy any of a stream of remarkable books, step by step articulating with the deepest intellectual rigor of Christian response to all of the big questions of our time.

Keith Ward is a fellow of the British Academy, was for many years the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and is now professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London. Keith we are honored to have you with us.

We were working on Forum questions for today and realized that you have taken just about the ten most interesting and provocative and just written a book called The Big Questions in Science and Religion. You ask ten big questions there about things like the origin of the universe and wasn't there such a thing as a soul and what to make of miracles. What made you decide take that particular approach? Why focus on those ten questions?

Keith Ward: Well, the honest answer to that is that the publisher asked me to ask. And amazingly when I thought of all the questions that seemed to me most relevant in philosophy and as well as in religion and in science, that turned out to be, miraculously, just about ten. Of course, I’m not saying there really are ten, but in questions like, “Does modern science allow for belief in the creation of the universe by a God?” or “What's the end of the universe going to be like, is that relevant to what we hope for in the future?” So questions like that, I try to take questions which are real ones, which people do find often to be difficulties for Christian faith, but at least to be intriguing problems. So, it was my publisher’s idea.

Lloyd: One of the themes that runs through many of those questions is the fundamental question that many would argue science presents, which is that this is a world of blind chance and happenstance that has no order or direction or purpose anywhere in it, as over against a religion-based argument that we live in a world with some kind of purpose, some kind of fundamental design in things. Do you see those as two opposing visions that clash up against each other? Is there some common ground, some ways they find mutual and respectful turf on which to live?

Ward: Well, I used to think there was common ground until people now sometimes known as the new atheists, like Rickard Dawkins, Kristen Hutchins, Sam Harris, and so on. Obviously made it their business to say there is no common ground.

Lloyd: In fact, it’s a fierce battle of visions.

Ward: It’s a fierce battle, really. And it is a battle between ways of seeing the world in general. These people aren’t all scientist, by any means. In fact, none of them are… Well, I’m not trying to be… Let me rephrase that. They are not internationally known Nobel Prize–winning scientists. And if you ask any Nobel Prize–winning scientist, as I have done, their views about religion and science, their answers are much more nuanced and much less confrontational.

So I think the battle is not really between science and religion. It’s between materialism and religion, and some people are using science to support materialism, I think quite wrongly. But that’s where the battle is.

Lloyd: Well, Richard Dawkins would say, and I wanted to touch on the stream of new atheists began pouring outside of books two or three years ago, peaking sometime last fall, not simply disagreeing with religion, but talking about how dangerously ignorant and potentially destructive religion is. Dawkins, for example, argues strongly that evolution simply proves there is no God. What do you make of a claim like that?

Ward: Well, it’s an absurd claim, since the view of evolution actually originated in Germany with Lutheran pastors, and, in particular, somebody called Herder, and later on Hegel, who was a Lutheran philosopher. And it originated by rethinking the Christian faith in a new context.

Herder, for example, who was a Lutheran minister, said that the history of the universe and the history of the world is the progressive self-revelation of the beauty of God. And that stress on progressive of self-revelation, a gradual unfolding of the possibilities of the created world, that was originally a religious insight.

Some people might disagree with that religious insight, but it’s not because they’re not religious; it’s because they have a different view of religion. So, evolution began as a religious idea and Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, was a deeply religious man who also used evolution as a way of showing how God progressively unfolded what was possible in creation. And, of course, the person who thought of or developed the theory of evolution at the same time as Charles was Alfred Russel Wallace, who was, again, a deeply spiritual and religious person. So there is no essential conflict there at all.

Lloyd: Well, there seem to be two alternatives, neither of which finally is something one would hold. One would be that the world is a place that simply of scientific laws unfolding, of randomness, of complete uncertainty that follows some patterns, but they’re meaningless patterns. And that seemed to be the objective, analytical science-based view. Even E. O. Wilson would subscribe to something like that. On the other side, what they are writing off as a view that claims that religious people would claim that God plans everything, God controls everything, everything is a decision from God.

So we have complete randomness, complete determinism. But there’s a ground in between, isn’t there?

Ward: Well, yes. And even talk about complete randomness is not something that most scientists would accept, I think, really, because, of course, scientists do understand there are laws in nature, that things don’t just happen randomly, they happen because there are laws, and those laws are elegant and beautiful.

And quantum physicists, in particular, tend to say that the more you know about structure of the physical universe, the more beautiful it is. Fractals, which most of know about, are very beautiful structures, and the mathematics of quantum physics is very beautiful—if you’re a mathematician, anyway. And you can have beautiful and elegant mathematics.

So it’s wrong to say it’s all chaos or randomness, and even the theory of indeterminacy in quantum physics is not just random. It’s probabilistic, but the equations which describe […] events called the Schrödinger equations are, in fact, quite deterministic. They give you a set of things which you could predict in general, at least. So randomness is not a great characteristic of nature.

And I’ll say one more thing about the laws of nature, that Isaac Newton virtually invented the idea of laws of nature, and he invented the idea because he believed in God. He says, himself, that he thought if there were a God who created the universe, surely he’d be a bit like me—like Isaac Newton, that is. He would be very interested in mathematics, and he’d make up the simplest and most elegant set of laws which produced the most interesting and complex set of effects. And they would be laws of nature, and then Newton thought, “What would they be?” He wrote them down and he found they were.

So his idea, Newton’s idea, the very fact of laws of nature arose from asking, “What would a wise and intelligent creator do?” So, I think the idea of laws of nature is already pointing to some intelligence, some intelligibility, some deep rationality in the universe, and so it’s not an accident that science began in a Christian Europe, modern science, with its idea of the reasonable but rational universe.

Lloyd: Certainly, what many of these atheist [materialistic] scientists would argue is that we simply don’t need the God hypothesis, I mean, more that ultimately everything, everything would be explainable if we take into consideration, the physics, now the biology, and the evolutionary biology, finally we are going to be able to account for everything, for brain phenomena, for everything that happens one way or another. But you argue that’s not enough.

Ward: Well, that’s a dogma.

Lloyd: That’s a what?

Ward: A dogma.

Lloyd: A dogma, yes.

Ward: Yeah, it’s a faith position that you couldn’t possibly establish to be true. People who say, “Oh, one day, some science would explain everything about the universe.” And we are nowhere near that at all.

Most of the scientists I talked to in Oxford—and one advantage of a place like Oxford is we have colleges where you’re forced to sit next to people who do different subjects than you do. So you talk to them, and you’re the best to understand what they are talking about. So I do talk to a lot of scientists, and most of what they think is that, at the moment, science is in a revolutionary situation. We don’t know what is going to happen. It’s going to change completely.

With quantum physics, after 1925, physics changed completely. It’s not the case that almost everything is understood. It’s the case that almost nothing is understood. Just think, for example, dark energy and dark matter, which we now say for 95% of the universe, nobody had thought of twenty years ago.

So that’s been a revolution in twenty years. What’s going to happen next year? The large hadron collider in Geneva, which, I’m sorry to say, is bigger than anything in America. (laughter) But I admit, it uses magnets made in America, (laughter) which aren’t working. (laughter) But, anyway, the large hadron collider will reveal things that nobody can predict; we have no idea. So I think science is in a new and creative situation.

We know it’s not complete at the moment for this simple reason: relativity theory is incompatible with quantum theory, and it can’t be. So there has to be something which embraces them both. So anybody who says, “Science is offering us the hope of understanding everything, isn’t a scientist.

Lloyd: So you’re argument is that God is at work through this eon-long process since the Big Bang of an unfolding universe that operates through what we come to call natural laws, but through the patterns that emerge in a chaos-based world that finds coherence and pattern along the way. But that there are indications in that of [purposefulness] that something is driving it forward or luring it toward something. Would that be accurate?

Ward: Surely, that’s what I hold. And, of course, not all physicists would agree that, but no physicists I’ve ever met would say it’s a silly idea or an impossible idea. The fact is that modern science doesn’t talk about purpose. It’s not something that you…

Lloyd: It’s not on their agenda.

Ward: It’s not on the agenda. You talk about laws and you talk about initial states and general, regular behavior, but you simply don’t ask the question in physics, “Is there a purpose behind this?” It’s just not part of physics anymore than if you’re looking at your car engine and you got a car mechanic to work, he doesn’t ask, “What do you want this car for?” It’s just not a question that is in car mechanics.

So I think purpose isn’t on the agenda of science, but it’s not ruled out by science, either. If you ask, “Is this whole process from the Big Bang to communities of intelligent, conscious, morally responsible communities of agents, does that look like an increasing value and a purpose?” Then that isn’t a scientific question, it’s a philosophical question. But scientific results are perfectly consistent with saying, “Yeah, the purpose is precisely that intelligent, responsible, conscious agents should emerge from a primitive universe of virtually nothing.”

Lloyd: In fact, you cite one writer, I can’t remember who, who said that it just may be that it takes a universe as vast as the one we’re in to produce in one corner of it intelligence and consciousness that is able to now reflect and respond back to its creator. An extraordinary idea.

Ward: I think that’s generally accepted in physics. I think every physicist would accept that. The argument goes like this: that the Big Bang was 13.7 thousand million years ago, and the universe has been expanding since then. And, according to basic laws of nature that we know, it would take about 13.7 thousand million years to produce intelligent life forms out of the development of the laws of nature, and therefore, because it’s taken that long, and the universe has been expanding for that time, you’d expect that if there were intelligent life forms, the universe would be 13.7 thousand million light years, across, okay?

So the universe would have to be that big to have things like us in it. It is an amazing insight. Why is the universe so big? Because we’re here. That is amazing. Every physicist would accept that. They might not say it’s a purpose, that’s the reason it happened, but they would say there is this correlation. The universe, the size of the universe, is essential to the nature of carbon-based intelligent life forms.

Lloyd: And the argument would be that if God’s purpose is to help the universe to make itself— working from the inside, to make itself over time, just as God is working with the humans to help us make ourselves, to provide the [maximum?] of both freedom and guidance that it took a sculpt or canvas, something like this for that to happen.

Ward: Yeah, I think that’s right. And those work in biology, now by quite a lot of people, but particularly somebody called Simon Conway Morris, who’s a professor of a rather improbable subject, evolutionary paleo-biology. And he’s the person who excavated the Burgess shale, which Stephen Jay Gould talks about in his book. And Simon Conway Morris’s view is that if you look at the basic structure of molecules, of carbon molecules, and the basic laws of nature, then the development of life, carbon-based life even, looks to be inevitable, from the basic laws of the universe.

So, that’s directional, you know, it looks as though a direction you’re willing to wards more intelligent life forms. Incredibly, I should point out, clearly Richard Dawkins agrees with this. Dawkins thinks that the development of intelligent life is inevitable given the basic laws of the universe. And it’s a mystery to me how he can say that and say there is no purpose in it.

Lloyd: Now, I want you to solve some mysteries for us, one after another. Number one: If there is a God of love behind the universe, why is there suffering?

Ward: Well, I think the best approach to this is to look at what science tells you about universe. And I will take a person, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, who’s not a theist, who feels his problem very intensely, but who also has to answer it, thought he doesn’t see it himself. And the answer is that the universe, to produce intelligent life forms like us, we’re made of carbon, which has been developed in certain ways in this environment with oxygen, etc. So, we belong in this universe, we’re a [central] part of this universe. Beings like us would only exist in a universe with laws like ours. So the universe and its structure are necessary to our existence. And I think that’s an approach that I find very helpful.

So, why is there suffering? Why is there frustration? Because these are necessary consequences of there being laws of nature. Laws of nature make it necessary that there would be earthquakes and tornadoes, because these are necessary to sustain the balance of the planet. Without them the planet would not exist. So, of course, we don’t like them; they’re not good for us. But they’re necessary for us to exist. So it’s a hard universe.

Lloyd: It’s a very hard truth.

Ward: Yeah.

Lloyd: Who is it that put it this way? If God is God, he is not good—because we see what’s happened around. Or is God is good, he is not God—which means he could have stopped it. So it’s the classic theodicy argument. How can you put together a God of love and a universe that’s filled with tragedy, Holocaust, genocide, the terrible individual tragedies of human life. How do you put those together?

Ward: Well, first of all, obviously a lot it, and you mention the Holocaust, is human evil. And that is people that God has permitted to do things which is in opposition to everything that God wants them to do. So a lot of that is human evil, and that’s permitted because, in general, it is good to be free. It is good to be free to love. And if you weren’t free to love and, therefore, free to hate, you wouldn’t be free. You would be a robot. You’ll be a programmed machine. So that’s part of it.

And then the natural evil, well that just follows. You know, we wouldn’t have carbon atoms. Carbon is formed in the supernova of stars where the lighter atoms, hydrogen and helium, fuse into carbon atoms. So that vast destructive force—the explosions of stars—is necessary for us to begin to exist.

So it’s necessity and freedom; those are the two factors, which I think a good God could indeed say, these are going to be things which are going to happen, which are intensely tragic. Perhaps a good God would say two things (I say this as a Christian): first, “I will share in that tragedy”; that’s the message of the cross. Secondly, “I will turn it to good”; that for every sentient being who suffers, there will be the possibility of an eternity of bliss, which couldn’t have existed without the world in which they were born.

Given those two things, I believe I believe without reservation that a good God could create a universe like this, and has done.

Lloyd: Miracles.

Ward: Right.

Lloyd: Are there such things as miracles?

Ward: Well, they’re certainly possible. I think there have been people who’ve said, “If scientific laws exist, there couldn’t be miracles,” because they define miracles as things that break scientific laws.

But Isaac Newton, of course, quite correctly said, “Well, God could break the laws if God wanted to.” I mean, why not? God makes the laws. But that’s a slightly too easy answer. I think it’s a bad definition of a miracle, that it breaks a law, and I think there’s a long tradition going way back to the eighteenth century saying that miracles are events which show in a extraordinarily way the power and the presence of God.

So miracles have to be extraordinary, but they don’t have to break any laws of nature. An example of an extraordinary thing would be if all the electrons in this cathedral gathered in a corner over there, instantaneously. We hope that won’t happen, because we would all seize to exist. But it is scientifically possible. So the limits of scientific possibility are much broader than people used to think. Things don’t have to go on in the same old way.

To put it bluntly, scientific laws are only other things being equal laws. They can be modified but not broken by other factors, by the influence of dark matter or dark energy, perhaps. So lots of things that might happen which are unusual, not regular, totally extraordinary, unprecedented: these things can happen.

If such things have a religious significance, they show something of God, if they are signs of God, then they are miracles. So I think a good scientist, who admits that you have to follow the evidence wherever it points, would say miracles are possible. And maybe if trustworthy people say they experienced one, we ought to take that pretty seriously.

Lloyd: So there is a lot more going on, both in the scientific reading and what’s happening around us and in a religious reading. A lot more forces that work in us and around us that we begin to imagine. So to write that off is simply reductionist and…

Ward: It’s blind in faith. It is blind faith. I mean, there’s a scientific, blind, stupid faith, which just says these things can’t happen. And you say, what’s your evidence that they can’t possibly happen? Obviously, there can’t be any evidence for that. So I find it ironic that some of these materialistic scientists say, oh, religious people have blind, stupid faith without evidence, when it’s the materialistic scientists who have the blind, stupid faith because they’re saying there can’t possibly be events which don’t follow regular laws of nature. Can’t possibly be? That doesn’t sound very reasonable to me.

Lloyd: Can someone pray expectantly that that prayer make a difference, within a contemporary scientific world view?

Ward: Yeah. Again no scientists, anywhere, is in a position to say that they can bind, looking at the laws of nature, predict what is going to happen and exclude any other possible influences. In fact, I don’t know a scientist anywhere in the world who can explain how it is that with a desire to raise my arm, it goes up. A thing as simple as that. And you say, surely that’s easy to explain. It’s just I intend to do something and that causes something to go in the right brain which changes the muscles which makes it go up. All right, that’s all right.

Okay, let’s look at that. How does my intention change something in brain? Or does it change something in my brain? What’s the relation between events in my brain? I know, as many of you will know, some of the best neuroscientists in the world, they can talk for a long time, but in the end they’ll say, we haven’t a clue. (laughter) Well, that problem is something we don’t even know how to begin to resolve.

The relation between intentions and thoughts and feeling and brain states, of course it’s fascinating, we’re discovering many correlations which are fascinating. But the link, how it works, where the interaction is, we don’t know.

What we do know is that intentions change things in the world. If we want to do something, we can often do it. So if God is a spiritual being who has intentions and purposes for the world, then even though we don’t know how it happens, God can surely do it.

Lloyd: You wrote a book called Defending the Soul, arguing again against the whole materialist flood of claims that now, with the appropriate amount of neuroscience and appropriate amount of understanding how the brain how the body, everything, works, it’s time to jettison this romantic notion that there is a special version of the self called the soul. Would you say something about that?

Ward: Well, I think, that’s the hottest and most difficult scientific issue of the day is the relation between consciousness and the brain. As I say, I don’t think anyone has any idea of how to resolve that question. But I would say that, from a Christian point of view of course, the soul has always been seen as essentially embodied. That is, in the Bible, you know, when it talks about “soul,” there isn’t a word for soul in the Bible, but there’s a word nefesh in Hebrew, and it means the breath of life.

And, of course, as Christians, we talk about the resurrection of the body, not of the soul, a different soul for the body, a different, but some sort of embodiment. So, the Christians have always said the soul is not a disembodied, purely spiritual thing attached to the body. The soul is the living, embodied person. And I think what Christian belief in life after death is that that same embodied person can be embodied in a different form, but still embodied and in a form which is what it is because of what we now are what we are. So the soul is embodied, I think that’s very important to say.

But it’s not just physical. It emerges from the physical, it’s connected to the brain. What happens in your brain is going to affect your consciousness. If I hit you with a hammer, your consciousness is going to be affected by that. We know that. But what exactly that relationship is, is very difficult to say. The soul, essentially, is that part of an embodied person, which is that totality of a person, which can understand, which can create, which can relate to others, which can conceive of and be conscious of God. The soul is, in that sense, the spiritual part of our personality.

Lloyd: One more question, then we are going to open it up to the audience, to all of you, you have a beautiful two sentences that go like this: “The universe is elegant, beautiful, intelligible with deep structure and necessity and purpose. And”—second sentence—“it has a spiritual reality as the most dominant factor in the whole thing.” Would you say something about that spiritual reality of dominant factor and how it affects the elegant, the beautiful, the intelligible universe?

Ward: Yeah. Well I think some people have a view of God which is rather misleading. You’ve got the universe over here, as more or less self-directing, and you’ve got God over here somewhere, and God sits outside the universe and has to keep interfering with it from time to time. And I think that model is totally incorrect). That God is the ultimate nature, what is truly real, and what is truly real is not what appears to us, to our senses, colors, shapes, solid objects, even quantum physics says that’s just an appearance of a deeper reality. The question is, what’s that deeper reality of which all these things are appearances? And a believer in God says, well, the nature of that reality is spiritual, conscious, purposive, beautiful, wholly good in itself, reality of supreme value.” And that’s what our world really is.

But what appears to us is that spiritual reality as it has been corruptive by our deeds, and as it has been limited by the very nature of created matter. So, for me, the spiritual reality is simply this reality, seeing truly: God is not a way out at the edge of the universe, but this if God. In God we live and move and have our being. But we see only the appearances, the manifestations of God, affected by what we have done to impair but sometimes improve the beauty of creation.

Lloyd: And the challenge also for us, as conscious creatures, is how then can we engage and come to know and even participate in this spiritual reality of God.

Ward: And that’s the job of religion. That’s the job of Christian faith, to find a way of becoming conscious of that spiritual reality and relating to it personally.

Lloyd: Question.

Question: The other day, I got the results back from some medical tests, and they were very good. I got home that night, and a construction worker at a project next door had been killed, leaving behind thirteen children in Guatemala. So I asked myself, why did I with no young children get a good report from a doctor, and the man next door with thirteen children was killed? So my larger question is not, why is there pain and injustice in the world? but rather, Why are those things distributed so unequally or unfairly, it seems to me?

Ward: Thank you. Well, I think that it would not be a universe that was the sort of universe we would want to live in if everything happened justly and fairly.

Now that may sound odd, but if you think about what that sort of universe would be like, a universe in which all the good people got rewarded and all the bad people got punished, and justice totally reigned in that sense, then we would know who the good people were and who the bad people were.

The good people would live in the big houses and have the nice cars. The bad people would be the poor people and, of course, they would deserve what they got.

I don’t want to live in a universe where I know that the poor deserve to be poor and the rich deserved to be rich. I want to live in a lottery universe to some extent, where you say, they’re poor but it’s not their fault. They’re ill, but that’s just the way things are.

It is our job as Christians to make that situation fairer. Justice is something we have to do, but the universe itself in neutral as between the good and the bad.

God makes it rain on the just and on the unjust because that’s the condition of having the universe where people can’t turn around and judge other people and say, You’re poor because you’re bad. So I don’t want a universe where somebody does something wrong and gets punished for it.

I want a universe where we’re all bound together in a community where lots of things that happen to us are good or bad luck, and it’s up to us to make it fair.

Question: I was just wondering, you talk a lot about there being a proof for God existing, and the harder question for me is the idea that this God exists as a personal personified spirit or as a more primal force in the universe. What do you think the answer is to that based on science?

Ward: I think the traditional Christian and Jewish belief in God is not, in fact, that God is a person. I think the traditional view is much deeper, if I may put it that way. For example, in the Old Testament, there is no image to be made of God. God is not like anything, not like any human person in particular; so there can be no image. And in the New Testament, too, God is hidden in the cloud of unknowing.

So I think when you talk about the personalness of God, you’re talking about the fact that, well, the ultimate reality is not less than conscious and purposive, and that’s the character of it. So it’s not less than personal, but it’s infinitely more.

And a second thing you might say is that, in the Christian faith, God has made divine being present in the person of Jesus. We can relate to God personally through Christ. But, then, we’re relating… I mean, in that person of Christ there is concealed the infinity of God. And that mystery is central for me, and for most theologians, to Christian faith.

Lloyd: If I could follow up on a waited question. We received this question online from Perry from Silver Springs wanted to know, “What constitutes proof of the reality of God?” There are the scientific arguments and proof, and people could talk about that personal experience, but in your view, what constitutes the possibility of proof of the existence of God?

Ward: I think there is no possibility of proof. But remember that I am a philosopher, and I can’t even prove that I exist. (laughter) I can’t even prove anything.

And most philosophers think that nothing is provable, strictly. We have to act on common sense or faith or habit or custom. We have to go with—to use the favorite American philosophy, you have to go with what works. That’s the great pragmatist philosophy, with which I broadly agree: what works, what makes for good, what makes for justice, what makes for love, you work with those things. And I think God makes for those things.

Proof has never been, strictly speaking, part of belief in God, anymore than believing that you sitting there are all having thoughts can be proved. I had a philosophy teacher, Freddie Ayer, who used to take seminars in Oxford that I went to. He’s a famous atheist, his philosophy was called logical positivism. And he said, “I can’t prove that any of you in this seminar are thinking.” And of course we all knew that he was right. (laughter)

Lloyd: But if there aren’t proofs, there can be compelling cases made why evidence and experience point in that direction, even if there isn’t an airtight proof. Would you say that much?

Ward: I’d say that the life of faith is, I find compelling. But it’s like being in love, I think. It’s compelling if you’re in love, but you hope it doesn’t compel anybody else in quite the same way, or at least in regards to the same person. It’s a very personal, unique thing. It’s very important. But at that part I would agree with Kierkegaard, that faith in God is a passionate commitment that you make in objective uncertainty. But it’s not unreasonable. It’s just you’re committing yourself to that relationship.

Lloyd: And that what all your books argue: it’s not unreasonable.

Ward: It’s not unreasonable, yeah.

Question: Professor Ward, a notable scientist and atheist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, once criticized Christians who defended intelligent design, kept calling it a “God of the gaps” argument that is basically defending Christianity as lazy science. Could you respond to that?

Ward: Yeah, thank you. Yes, a lot of people object to the “God of the gaps” who acts every now and again but not all the time.

But that expression, “the God of the gaps,” was invented by a very famous Methodist minister, C. A. Coulson, who was the first person to write about religion and science. And he was saying, as a Methodist, “We do not believe in a God of the gaps,” and his book was the best response to that because he said, “We believe in a God who is always active. There are no gaps.”

When I play pool, and I hit the ball, I don’t have to say that there are gaps between me and the ball in which I can act. I just say, “I am causing those balls to go round—in accordance with the laws of physics, no doubt, but I am doing it.” So with God. God acts within the laws that God has created so there don’t have to be gaps where only in the gaps can God act. So the [work] of C. A. Coulson is still worth reading.

Question: Good morning. I’m really glad that this cathedral is hosting this, because I think that this is an incredibly important topic and one that we need to explore more.

I’m a physicist by training; I did my graduate work about twenty-five years ago. And in that time, there has been this acceleration in the pace of change and in the development of technology and science. A number of writers have extrapolated forward and concluded that we’re moving toward a singularity. When technology is changing so fast, we can never really keep up.

Ray Kurzweil has estimated that in the next hundred years we’ll see ten thousand times technological change than we’ve seen in the last hundred years. And in our lifetime we might actually see technology developed to the point where we really can have almost eternal life, where we have technology to repair our bodies and to capture all of our experiences, and to link all everybody at a very fundamental level and a global brain or something like this, that science fiction is coming true. How can religion help us understand a world that’s changing so fast that we can’t keep track of technology?

Ward: I think it is important that religion engages in this debate. But I think one important thing that religion can do is to keep morality and concern for human personality and the need for consciousness throughout the animal kingdom: to keep that as a moral imperative that we do things enrich and fulfill human life rather than things which destroy it.

I’m always very sad, most of our physicists in Oxford spend their lives making bigger bombs, because that’s who pays them. It’s a just a bit sad that… I’m not saying it’s not necessary perhaps, but it’s a bit sad that most of the technology is going to destructive purposes.

I agree that technology is changing, but not that it’s a very exciting debate in which Christians are fully engaged about how Christian values can help that. I don’t think there’s anything anti-technological about Christian faith. Indeed, if you go back to the primitive Genesis stories, that human beings should care about the garden and cultivate the garden, I think has an implication of using technology for good. I think this is an important debate, and Christians shouldn’t be afraid engaging in it to ask what technology will fulfill human life, and what might make it more threatening to the life of the planet.

And you mention E. O. Wilson. E. O. Wilson of course is not a Christian, though he used to be when he was young, and he’s actually made a plea to all religious believers to join in a campaign for the health and good of the planet, to conserve what we have. And that’s where religion and science ought to be close allies.

Question: Evil is one thing but, throughout history, religion has been very much spread by war. Why couldn’t God be more clear? He is very silent. There are many different interpretations of the Bible and many different religions. People can still have free will, but they respond better to clear, you know, statutes and laws that […], and God has this significant power to be as clear as he wants to be.

Ward: Well, I think the problem there, and, I imagine I caught a lot of lawyers in the city here this morning, lawyers know that however clear you make your laws, somebody will interpret them in a different way than you intended. (laughter) So it’s not as clear as, God gives you some clear stuff and you just do it. Whatever you write down, you are going to get arguments between people of what exactly it meant and when you could interpret it in different ways and whether it’s not obsolete or whether it needs revision… There’s nothing that God can do about that, really. So, I would think what we are talking about is the deep, underlying view.

But of course, what we are talking about is God communicating, truly, through Christ, for example, through the person of Jesus, that’s to take one example. I think it’s pretty clear, some things about Jesus are pretty clear, but you still get a thousand different interpretations of it. And that’s just human nature, and, so, I think I put that difference largely down to the ways in which people respond differently to what God is doing. God is not overruling human freedom.

God’s saying some pretty clear things in the person of Jesus, and one of those clear things is, “You do not attack other people in the name of religion.” That’s absolutely clear to me. So, if you ask me why Christians have managed to do it, I don’t know. I can only say, “That’s human nature.”

Lloyd: It seems to be that God has decided not to intervene, not to have a voice come down out of the sky to the whole world pronouncing, but to speak to us in ways that allow for freedom out of the conviction that that’s the only way for the goodness of love and compassion to emerge, that by humans exercising choice along the way. Is it something like that, would you say?

Ward: Yes, but it just is the case that human beings can pervert the clearest advice and you can leave the Sermon on the Mount and then burn somebody to death for heresy. How is that possible? I can’t blame God for that. I think that actually is human corruption.

Lloyd: One last question from microphone two.

Question: If I’m not mistaken, Dr. Ward, you said that carbon results from supernova explosions.

Ward: Yeah.

Question: Isn’t it true that carbon is the production of normal stellar revolution and it takes the production of higher elements beyond iron to be produced by supernova? So, in effect, we’re exactly stardust, but it’s not from original stars, but second and third generations of stars. So it’s an even more elaborate process.

Ward: I accept that, yeah. Thank you. (laughter) I’m not going to argue about that.

Lloyd: This has been quite a conversation; I wish it could go on for hours. There are a few mysteries left that we have not found ultimate answers to.

Next week, I want to invite you back for a very important conversation here about the welfare of our children. Marian Wright Edelman, who is of course head of the Children’s’ Defense Fund, will be here with us.

For now, though, we’d love for you to linger for some coffee and conversation in the back. And at 11:15, our service will begin with Keith Ward as our preacher. Please join me in thanking our wonderful guest. (applause)