Alasdair Coles has had a unique career path. An academic neurologist, conducting research into multiple sclerosis in one of Europe’s finest teaching hospitals, he has recently been ordained in the Anglican church. Alasdair’s experience as a Christian in neurology has been a very positive one, and as he begins to minister in both the church and the workplace he is discovering some valuable connections between faith and science.
 
Being Human: More than a Brain
Revd Dr Alasdair Coles, Neurologist, University of Cambridge & Addenbrookes Hospital
 
Spirituality and the Soul
Ever since I stopped wanting to fly fighter planes, at around the age of fifteen, I’ve wanted to be a neurologist. I specifically wanted to work with people who have diseases of the brain. The thing that has always interested me is finding out how much the physical structure of the brain can explain our behaviour.
 
In a church environment my interest in the brain and its behaviour is obviously out of the ordinary compared to a lot of ministers. I often talk about my amazement at the way the brain is put together, and in a pastoral context I’m much more open to the body influencing our state of mind. One of the attractions of the Christian faith for me is that it’s ‘embodied’. The Bible recognises that we are bodies as well as rational moral beings.
 
We are dependent on our brains to be conscious and aware, to reflect on ourselves, to have moral reasoning and to have desires and hopes. We have a brain that has the capacity for religious experience. We may or may not find ourselves in an environment (social or biological) which allows this religious expression to thrive. Each person then has the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to allow this spiritual awareness to flourish and at that point God can intervene. When you deal with someone who’s struggling, then looking at their physical state is absolutely as important as their spiritual and mental state. I think that is a very important first start for tackling problems: staying fit, getting rest, not drinking too much, not abusing drugs. You’ve got to make the best of that person’s brain and body and then they’re giving themselves the best chance to be spiritually aware.
 
I believe it is a mistake to say the ‘soul’ is an independent entity that tells the brain what to think. It is also a mistake to say that the soul is nothing but the brain and that everything a person does is explained by the neurons (brain cells) themselves. It’s obvious to me that that isn’t true or at least not true in any helpful ordinary way. Consider: how do we best explain personality? How do we explain human behaviour? You could explain a painting on the basis of the chemicals that make up the oil paints. That would be a perfectly true explanation but most people would find that thoroughly unsatisfactory as an explanation of a painting. They would want to say, ‘There’s more to it than that, someone made this, it has a significance that is dependent on the oils but ultimately it has nothing to do with them.’ Human thoughts and behaviour are dependent upon, but in some way separate from, the material of the brain. You can either believe that God made us or that evolution made us or both, but we are made for a purpose.
 
Faith and Work
My hospital community lacks prominent Christian voices. It’s interesting that the hospital chaplains will tell you that the group of people they have most difficulty approaching are the ‘alpha male’ senior doctors. We are a very distinct tribe and closed off. Academic neurologists are a very unspiritual group of people. It is very unusual for a neurologist to be a credited minister, and religion and spirituality are not welcomed as topics of conversation. Although I’ve never encountered any hostility, I’ve certainly met with curiosity but rarely positive support. The most common reaction is lack of interest or a feeling that this is slightly eccentric. However, one person has made a great deal of difference to my faith in the workplace. I am very fortunate to have a friend and colleague who is a strong Christian. We agreed a few years ago to meet together to read the Bible and pray once a week. Then we decided to open up to all Christians in our workplace. Now up to fifteen people meet once a week to study a Bible passage and pray. We pray for the hospital, for the people working here and for the patients. Leaving aside what that means for the institution and whether there should be more of it, for me it’s powerful that I bring my faith to work and that people around me know that I’m a Christian so I can be held accountable for that.
 
The ‘added value’ of having a faith comes in lots of different ways. One of the things it has done is to make me ask if there is a neurological basis for religious experience. How do we fit faith into the working brain and at what level? These issues have never been a problem for my own beliefs. I think if anything my faith has encouraged me to keep asking questions, because at heart I think I’m just a child who’s enthralled with things. I have come to understand that feeling of pleasure and joy as a gift from God and an encouragement for me to carry on.
 
My interest in the structure of the brain and how it affects behaviour is stronger now than it ever has been. I would say that my faith encourages me to look into ‘the book of life’ and read the work of God. Neurology is what I like and what I’m good at, and I think God shares that pleasure with me. It’s never been a problem for me and I’m always surprised when I meet people who talk about conflict between the two.
 
 
———
 
This is an extract from Test of FAITH: Spiritual Journeys with Scientists, Ruth Bancewicz (ed.), (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009/Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2010). Used with permission of the publishers and the Test of FAITH project.  www.testoffaith.com

Heart and Mind: Understanding Science and Faith
By Deborah B. Haarsma, Associate Professor in Physics & Astronomy, Calvin College, Michigan

It’s almost a universal human experience to look up at the stars in the dark night sky and say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing! That’s beautiful!’ But as a Christian, I have a deeper experience. I not only see the wonder and the vastness of the universe but see a connection back to the Creator who made it. I believe that the God of the Bible created all that we see in the whole universe and part of what God has commanded us to do is to study and take care of it.

As an undergraduate I majored in physics and music. Then I went on to do a PhD in astrophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

I see the fact that we can do science at all as a tremendous testimony of God’s faithfulness: the laws of physics are stable in every time and place where we test them. There’s a great passage in the Bible (Jer. 33:25), where God says he has “established my covenant with day and night and the fixed laws of heaven and earth…” God is speaking to the nation of Israel and points to the fixed laws of nature as a testimony of how faithful he’s going to be to his people. The only reason that physics works at all is that experiments are repeatable, and the only reason they’re repeatable is because God is faithful in governing the universe.

I can understand how some scientists look at the natural world and decide not to believe in God, because I don’t believe that nature gives us proof of God. There are a few scientists that have come to faith because science pointed them that way but I think for most of us it was something in our personal lives. It was a person we met, it was seeing Christians in action, it was finding that Christianity explains human nature, it was sensing the presence of God. These non-scientific arguments are more important in making a religious commitment than logic and scientific evidence.

It’s unfortunate that both the Bible and science have been hijacked at different times. There are people who will take scientific evidence and say, ‘We have a scientific explanation for X, and therefore God is not involved in X and we don’t need God.’ There are other people who say, ‘Science can’t explain X, so God must be involved and that’s proof of God.’ The two sides argue against each other, driving each other to more extreme statements. I think both sides are completely wrong. Both make the assumption that a scientific explanation is opposed to God’s involvement. In the Bible, though, God is described as in charge of every part of the physical world in regular patterns. In my view, science is merely describing how God works in nature. God is also present in the X that science doesn’t understand yet but it’s foolish to use that as proof of God’s existence. God wouldn’t disappear as soon as a scientific explanation for X is found.

Everybody brings their own perspective to science, so it’s impossible to have pure scientific results without any other influence. I think most scientists today see science that way: as a human activity. We talk about ‘The standard model of particle physics’ or ‘The big bang theory’ or ‘The theory of general relativity.’ We say ‘model’ and ‘theory’ instead of ‘law’ because we know that we don’t have it all figured out yet. So how do we know that the results of science are reliable at all?

Science functions as a community, with people from different philosophical or religious backgrounds working together. In my research I’ve collaborated with people of many different belief systems. We can work together because we all recognise the worth of this kind of investigation. All scientists share certain philosophical beliefs: that the universe is regular in its operation; that there are regular laws; that humans are capable of understanding and describing those laws; that we need to do experiments to test those laws and make sure our understanding is correct. We might all come to those beliefs from a different angle. I come to them because I believe in the Christian God who faithfully governs the universe. An atheist might choose to believe them just because they seem to work. We can overlap in those beliefs even while disagreeing about other things, and where we overlap we’re all doing science on basically the same playing field.

If many scientists with different viewpoints can get together and come to the same conclusion, that gives you some sense that they are probably on the right track. It is unlikely that they are all biased in the same way. The scientific process, including the way that scientific papers are reviewed, helps us overcome biases and get at something closer to the truth. There’s a similar process in biblical scholarship, where different scholars share their work or work together. Christians read the Bible in different ways and see different meanings in the same passage, so not everybody is right about their own interpretation. The practice of correcting and challenging each other helps them come to a better understanding of Scripture.

I believe that God would not say something through the Bible that contradicts what he reveals though the created world. The conflict comes at the level of human interpretation. We could be wrong in how we interpret the Bible or wrong in our scientific interpretation of nature (or both!). As Christians, we can’t deal with conflicts by throwing out science or ignoring parts of the Bible because we believe God speaks through both. Instead, our role is to continue to investigate both aspects of God’s revelation and keep looking for that underlying truth.

This is an extract from Ruth Bancewicz (ed.), Test of FAITH: Spiritual Journeys with Scientists (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009/Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2010). Used with permission of the publishers and the Test of FAITH project.  www.testoffaith.com

Wearing two hats is also unstable. One typically falls off, usually at an inopportune time. God gave us one head and, though we may have to juggle roles such as family and work, there is meant to be communication between the two. Shared themes, core beliefs, common ground. I realised I was not well thought through and that this would lead to me making assumptions (in both roles) unless I addressed this.
 
I also realised that this would be a relatively poorly trodden path. There are Christian psychiatrists older than I, to whom I am indebted, but their views needed to be translated for the 21st Century. There were also people who only spoke from one perspective – Psychiatrists who happened to be Christians, or Christians who happened to be Psychiatrists. With a lot of help and wisdom from God, I was going to have to try and get the right mix.
 
To try and sort out my head, I did what many people did in the ‘noughties’ and started a blog. I wrote about my faith, my work, my conflicts and my thoughts. To my surprise, other people thought it was worth reading; and their comments honed both my writing and my conclusions. One regular theme was my anger at the injustice people with mental health problems face. This was not only in society, where raw deals are common, but also in the church where surely the bride of Christ is meant to manage things better.
 
Like Habakkuk’s complaint against God (Hab 1:2), this was a driving force for my life – the fire in my belly that meant I not only ought to work or wished to work, but wanted to work. I couldn’t not. The writing became a conversation, then a meeting in my front room, then in a bigger room in a pub – and slowly a movement.
 
God calls leaders in the Bible, but he rarely calls them alone. I met an old University friend, Will Van Der Hart, by now ordained, and found he had similar ideas. We discovered groups meeting across the country and many unanswered questions in the church. We teamed up with Premier Christian Media and, in 2007, Mind and Soul in its current form was born.
 
The blessing and grace of God have been amazing. As both of us have seen the arrival of two young children over the past three years, we were not exactly putting ourselves forward. Yet almost the less we did, the more we seemed to be offered. We have partnered with some amazing groups to run large conferences. We’ve been able to put hundreds of resources on a free website. We’ve published one book and the second is at the printers. We’ve been invited to Whitehall… Not to the Palace yet, though!
 
We have both also learned huge lessons and are still very much on a journey. The most important lesson is that this work is nothing without Him, and it stands or falls on the extent to which we realise this. It is not a social concern or charity initiative; it is something close to God’s heart for the ‘poor in spirit’. We take this momentum as a sign of His blessing and of having hit a painful nail on the head.
 
This is also a task unfinished. Our ten-year goals are to see a church that understands mental illness and a mental health service that understands what the church can offer. Both Mind AND Soul in the mix together and 100% of both; not an uneasy 50-50 truce. We have only begun to scratch the surface with what we have done so far, but there is a strategy and a growing influence.
 
As I consider the years ahead, three things must be core to who I am. The first is sustainability. One blessing of living in Edinburgh (apart from the beautiful buildings and fancy shops!) is that I can easily say ‘No’ to invitations to speak from down south. I turn down far more than I accept. Technology is a great help – a mobile phone, email, an automated website with free downloads. But not too much technology – I don’t have an iPhone, I keep date nights with my wife. I know where the ‘off’ button is.
 
The second is to remember that sustainability leads to succession (without which there is no success, as someone said).  This is Mind and Soul, a national network. Not me, not Will – we pray it will out-live us if the task is still ahead. If we have tapped into something big, then harnessing that power and the people involved is part of the future. As we are asked to do more, delegation and trust becomes musts. And it enriches us so much more than going it alone.
 
The third thing is the most important. Jesus said to Martha that she was worried about many things, but praised Martha for choosing what was better (Luke 10:41-42). Am I worried about the future of Mind and Soul? I have all the usual concerns, but in truth I am concerned with only one thing – that I retain my hunger for God and the complaint he has placed in me.

For more information and resources, visit Mind and Soul

I work at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. After my postgraduate studies in genetics I started working as a research scientist in a lab in Edinburgh. I was preparing for a move to the US to work on Parkinson’s Disease in fruit flies (as you do), but a few months into my job in Edinburgh I had a change of mind. I had been finding myself gravitating away from the lab bench, towards my desk, and realised that my passion was more for communicating science than doing experiments.
 
I found a new niche working for Christians in Science. This is an amazing group that draws together Christians working in all areas of science – academia, industry, and teaching, as well as students and non-scientists who are simply interested in science-faith issues. I discovered a depth of thinking about the interaction between science and faith that I hadn’t encountered before. I was challenged to confront some difficult topics – such as human evolution, use of stem cells and climate change – head on. I also met people who modelled for me how debates on sensitive issues can be conducted with grace.
 
It was while I was working for Christians in Science that we realised that many non-scientists in churches were looking for resources to help them think through the relationship between science and Christianity. At the time we didn’t have much to give them apart from books and academic papers. When the Faraday Institute started up in Cambridge I wanted to be part of the action, and was offered the opportunity to work on a project dedicated to developing accessible resources for churches, schools, youth groups – any context where science and faith is an issue.
 
Test of Faith is a collection of resources, born out of the desire to equip people to think through the challenges that science can throw at people of faith. At times the conflict is only imagined and much of what needs to be done is ‘myth busting’ or telling the stories of scientists who are Christians. But there are also some real issues that need to be discussed, such as ethics, the environment, the interpretation of Genesis, or discoveries in brain research. I’ve found it enormously helpful to have the opportunity to speak to the experts in these fields, bounce ideas off theologians and biblical scholars, and have tried to share that experience with the people of all ages who make up the Test of Faith audience.
 
Now that we’ve completed the Test of Faith materials I often travel around speaking to audiences in churches, schools and universities. It’s exciting to be able to challenge some of the assumptions that cause people to think that a Christian scientist must be a deeply divided, confused person. The one message that I hope people will go away with is that science and faith are friends, not foes.
 
One of the main things that I hope to do through this work is to encourage and equip the scientists and future scientists who will be at the front edge of ‘culture making’ in their various spheres.

Science dominates our culture. It’s woven into every area of our lives. And, of course, this is because it has been wildly successful. Scientific studies have given us a rich and deep understanding of the world around us, from star formation to the structure of ecosystems to the building blocks of matter. The resulting technology continues to change our lives radically. But where does this success come from? Is it simply a by-product of our need to survive? Or do we assume that it’s an unexpected side-effect of the way God made us? Surely, if we believe in a God who does things deliberately, we have to conclude that science works for a reason.
 
In looking for answers, let’s take a step back and explore our relationship with the world around us. The Bible makes the rather startling claim that humans have a special responsibility to the rest of creation. Tom Wright puts it this way:

“God loved the world he made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end he placed in his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the world who he, the creator, really was, and who would go to work to develop the creation and make it flourish and fulfill its purpose.”

 
Rather than being placed in an environment that is simply a convenient place for us to live, mankind has the role of caring for creation; the task of preserving it, helping it to grow and enabling it to glorify God more completely. And where does science come into this?  Perhaps we can picture it this way:
 
Our ability to help creation to ‘develop’, ‘flourish’ and ‘fulfill its purpose’, depends on our ability to develop an understanding of the world around us. Stewardship has to start with listening and learning, with seeing how things work and appreciating their internal logic. This, of course, is precisely what the scientific viewpoint gives us. Science isn’t incidental; in allowing us to understand the world around us, it is intimately related to who we are.
 
So, if we are involved in scientific work, our day-to-day activities can be an expression of mankind’s responsibility for the creation around us. As we make discoveries and creatively interpret what we see around us we have the possibility to ‘voice creation’s praise’ (to borrow a phrase from Jeremy Begbie). Johannes Kepler recognised this way back in the 1500s when he said that ‘through my effort God is being celebrated through astronomy.’
 
Or perhaps we use our knowledge to ensure that we can care effectively and in ways that are sympathetic to the existing order. Or maybe through our studying we are able to see new possibilities and ways to bring out the potential that God has built in to the cosmos.
 
We are surrounded by a world of wonders and potential. So, if science is your thing make it God-glorifying and creation-enhancing; a science of care and flourishing, of praise and celebration.

Let me share an insight with you. As I finished reading Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’, I was inspired by his last section entitled ‘The mother of all burkas’. If you ignore the obvious anti-religious allusion (you could think of being in a gigantic post-box instead) and focus on Dawkins’ wonderful description of how science opens our eyes to how incredible the world is, this piece of writing can actually be a powerful call to worship the creator who made everything revealed to us by science.

“Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light is a chink of brightness in the vast dark spectrum, from radio waves at the long end to gamma rays at the short end. Quite how narrow is hard to appreciate and a challenge to convey. Imagine a gigantic black burka, with a vision slit of approximately the standard width, say about one inch … The one-inch window of visible light is derisorily tiny compared with the miles and miles of black cloth representing the invisible part of the spectrum, from radio waves at the hem of the skirt to gamma rays at the top of the head. What science does for us is widen the window.  It opens up so wide that the imprisoning black garment drops away almost completely, exposing our senses to airy and exhilarating freedom”.[1]

Dawkins then goes on to show how science turns our everyday perception of things upside down. Science opens a window on an invisible world more fantastic that we could ever have imagined. This is the world that I believe God made.

I immediately turned to my daily Bible reading in Luke’s gospel about Jesus’ healing of a dead girl[2]. With my imagination still in the invisible world of science, I saw Jesus as the one who knows that invisible world inside out and – more importantly – spoke it into being.[3] How does Jesus’ awesome power relate to his ability to raise people from the dead? Obviously we won’t be able to understand how that works in scientific terms. We can’t routinely study dead people coming back to life in a lab. A miracle is a one-off event, usually in response to prayer, when God shows us how incredible he is and how much he loves us. But this healing and others like it show me that God is the creator of the universe and has the power to transcend everything, including the knowledge we’ve gained using the tools of science.

The view of the world that I have outlined here is a huge incentive for Christians to do science. We need to understand the world God has made and learn to use all the rich resources that are available to us through science and technology in the most appropriate, fair and sustainable way. And what better way to provoke a sense of awe and worship than to share scientific discoveries about the universe? Lastly, the knowledge that God is sovereign and can transcend everything we know is deeply humbling, and a reminder that he is our ultimate teacher. From where I’m standing, good science and genuine faith are definitely compatible.

References:
[1] The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, Black Swan, 2006 (paperback, page 406).
[2] Luke chapter 8 verses 49-56
[3] John’s Gospel, chapter 1 verses 1-18