Rebuilding the Matrix

Many of the books written in the field of science and religion are unremarkable reiterations of material too frequently cited elsewhere. Denis Alexander has produced a tremendously competent, balanced and energetic study which is so comprehensive and so well-written that it has at once become one of the set books for my university courses. The particular excellence of Rebuilding the Matrix is its use of apposite historical and literary examples to illuminate his sustained argument. Naïve scientists dabbling in theology and philosophical theologians absorbing their science from contemporary popularising studies too frequently are misled by their belief that by reason and a light analysis of some historical instances, readers may reach a resolution between conflicting belief systems. The setting of science within a culture conditions which aspects of science are absorbed and the uses to which science may be used by society. Science is what scientists do. Scientists do not stand apart from culture, unaffected by its prejudices any more than religious faith may exist as a set of timeless truths floating free of the social context in which they are held

Alexander wisely begins by acknowledging the limited but essential role that sociological analyses have in helping clarify beliefs about science and religion. The media's portrayal of science, for instance, does not merely affect public attitudes among those who know no science: scientists too come to believe the governing images of an ideology of science as do theologians. The pseudo-history which provides the stereotypes is uncritically absorbed and repeated within the paradigm of the popular understanding of the past as if true. For example, the era before the rise of Western science, "the olden days" is lampooned as a time of universal ignorance abetted by religious superstition. Of course everyone believed the earth was flat; Columbus' sailors were afraid they would fall off the edge of the earth. This assertion is certainly false: "By the fifteenth century, the sphericity of the globe was accepted as a fact by all, or almost all, educated men throughout Western Europe." (p24) Alexander traces the origins of this widespread fallacy comparing it to the spread of a mutant gene through a population. The historical and scientific errors which shape our paradigms are by no means benign in their effect. The ideology justifying racism was provided with strong "scientific" validation not only in the nineteenth century or in Nazi Germany: even today various biological theories contain an incipient racism. In the nineteenth century, social and political concerns shaped the acceptance of bogus science and thereby gave an authority to underwrite what everyone 'knew to be both obvious and scientifically proven' about racial difference as evidence for claims to racial superiority. Alexander does not equate the pseudo-science of racism with the "conflict thesis" about the relationship between science and religion. However, the study of such examples of the use of science to justify social beliefs in a cycle of reinforcement offers interesting parallels. The chapters describing the Greek and early Christian metaphysical foundations of modern science and the secularisation debate are a pleasure to read. Whilst not maintaining that science arose exclusively from Christianity, the role of the religious beliefs of the founders of the scientific community and the persistence of such beliefs are shown to be too important to dismiss as unworthy of notice. Alexander's treatment of the Galileo controversies is simply excellent but he goes further to look at the role of the Philosophes in France and the non-Conformists (Priestley, Wesley and Faraday for instance) in Britain in shaping the responses of nineteenth century society to Darwinian evolution. Some of the most impressive material concerns the spurious claims of "scientific creationism" and the social role of evolutionary theory, for example in justifying Prussian militarism and eugenics in the West. No account of the relationship between science and faith could avoid discussing the question of SDA – specific divine action – in a world governed by the interconnected web of regularities in time and space, an apparently closed one, leaving the concept of miracle, seen as God's occasional breaking of the laws of nature, increasingly difficult to maintain. There is an immense literature in this field (the five volumes produced by the Vatican Observatory and the CTNS at Berkeley are the most profound and difficult contributions). To have Denis Alexander's succinct and accessible chapter available for students and interested non-specialists places us very much in his debt. Other chapters which are impressive in their scope are those dealing with cosmological myths and socio-biology and evolutionary psychology. Was Hitler right? Is Christianity merely "a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature"? The context in which twenty-first century religion comes to understand itself and its interaction with other aspects of human life is shaped by society's understanding of science and its cultural role. Alexander's conclusion maintains that "we need to draw on all the resources we can lay our hands on if we are to maintain human justice, dignity and worth in the face of scientific disciplines such as neuroscience and the new genetics". We surely must do this in an intensely critical and widely-informed way. Denis Alexander, who is the editor of the Journal Science and Christian Belief and a professional biologist at Cambridge, believes that theism, the historical and metaphysical origin of science, can provide a matrix for an understanding and application of science which will affirm that increasingly fragile commodity, human value.