By John D. Gibbon

I’ve just returned home to London from a month in India on a collaborative research trip in an attempt to finish a piece of work with 8 co-authors and to begin two new projects. In the aftermath of such visits, friends in the UK from outside academia often ask me, somewhat obliquely, what was it that I was actually doing? After all, it is implied, none too subtly, that Professors give lectures – understandable for someone who works in little more than a glorified High School — but the research part is incomprehensible, and is thus dismissed by the questioner as unimportant. Don’t scientists spin vague theories about impossible processes beyond their understanding? Don’t mathematicians just deal only with ever larger numbers? Why does one need to travel to do that, and who cares anyway?

Much of this sadly comic attitude comes from a lack of understanding of the nature of science and what scientists actually do. In her 2015 book, “The Story of Science: from the writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory” (W. W. Norton, NY) Susan Wise Bauer wrote:

“The nature of science itself seems to get lost in the details. Most ‘people’, regular citizens who have no professional training in the sciences, still have no clear view of what science does — or what it means.”

In the first chapter of my book “Science and the Knowledge of God”, I have tried to pick up on this theme to explain how professional scientists are more akin to members of a global village which has inter-locking components and collaborations stretching in networks across the planet. For more than a generation, members of the world’s scientific communities have been acting in a globalized manner long before the media became aware of the concept.

Let me add some extra fuel to this argument. When I tell friends that my own institution, Imperial College London, turns over $1.2Bn annually, they try to not look shocked. When I add that by far the greatest proportion of this total is research grant money they look even more puzzled. The fact is that the research sciences run on money just as an engine runs on fuel: experimental laboratories and large-scale computing facilities are massively expensive. Allow me to bore you, dear reader, with some facts and figures (Science Magazine (AAAS) Dec. 18th, 2015). The annual budget (2016) voted by Congress for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is $32Bn; that of the National Science Foundation (NSF) is $7.45Bn; that of NASA is $5.6Bn and that of the US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) is $2.7Bn. In addition, the Office of Science at the Department of Energy (DoE) gets $5.35Bn to manage and fund 10 National Labs such as Los Alamos or Lawrence Livermore. Basic research within the Department of Defense (DoD) has a budget of $2.31Bn and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has about $2.87Bn. The Pentagon is the USA’s major funder of basic research at universities in a number of fields, including computer science, mathematics, and some engineering disciplines. The total is just over $58Bn without the agricultural sciences being included. A big proportion of this total will be filtered through the US university system as grant money. The scale of the NIH budget, which comes in at more than half this total, illustrates the shift from the physical to the biomedical sciences over this last 20 years. Add to this total the research budgets of the UK, France, Germany and Japan (and now India and China), together with substantial money allocated by EU-funded programs, plus the efforts of private companies such as members of Big Pharma, the Aerospace Industry and Silicon Valley, and one has large amounts of money that fund the laboratories, machinery, computing facilities and salaries that make up the interlocking global research world.

I also made the point in my book that science funding now also has a multi-state-sponsored, industrial and political dimension which has culminated in the collaborative experiments such as the space telescopes (e.g. Hubble) or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Some scientists are but small cogs in the engine of one of these collective, multi-state-sponsored ‘Big Science’ experiments which are now too expensive even for a single government. It is clear that while these experiments have an enormously high public profile, this can also have a distorting effect. Despite the wide range of admirable engineering, instrumentation physics, and data analysis methods employed, these ventures still touch only a small fraction of what physical, engineering and bio-medical scientists actually do in reality. The annual publication output of this greater cohort across the planet runs into tens of millions of technical scientific papers, but only a relatively small proportion are concerned with high profile issues. It is therefore unfortunate that many questions about the nature of our universe asked by working scientists have fallen under the radar because the media and popular writers concentrate on either high-profile or controversial matters. Thus many Christians have been persuaded, incorrectly, that a few subjects, such as astronomy, high energy particle physics or evolutionary biology, are the only subjects that scientists study. Extreme opinion even holds that scientific activity is, at best, highly suspicious, and, at worst, a conspiracy to delude the world. Such attitudes are a gross misrepresentation of how things work in practice.

I have many close and valued friends and collaborators around the world who travel incessantly but without the funding access to the First or Business Class travel available to many in the business world. They do little but work, travel & sleep (occasionally) but never have time to read anything beyond the papers on their laptop or iPad. An absence from a meeting or conference means a lack of exposure of one’s latest results, thereby putting in jeopardy the next grant proposal. Among those senior people in a field when asked to review and grade NSF or NIH proposals (or even sit on the committees), few have the time to fully read the enormous number of proposals in detail, so they depend upon seeing a summary of the work at a conference: “Didn’t I hear a talk about that last week?” Being absent from that conference could be fatal for the proposer. Climbing back onto the fast-rolling log after one has taken a fall can be extremely difficult. Grant money is not a vanity but a necessity to be able to run labs & computing facilities. In Physics or Engineering the start-up cost of a lab for a newly appointed young Faculty member is about a million dollars. Grant money also factors ever more strongly into the metrics that increasingly dominate the world where “evaluation” is demanded at every level.

Although still research active, now that I am an Emeritus Professor, I am able to look back with gratitude on a career full of great excitement and very hard work, with hopefully still more to come. It’s all been great fun, which I hope will go on for a while yet. There is, however, another side to this coin. For a Christian working at the top levels of international research — I know very few — the life one is forced to lead can be both relentlessly demanding and numbing to the soul, especially when there is no time to look at things from the perspective of eternity.

The Preacher in Ecclesiastes (1:1-4) nailed it when he looked at the value of human endeavour when God Himself is ignored:

Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever.

What did he conclude in the final and 12^th chapter (verse 1)? His wise words were: “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth …” The two Parables of ‘The Hidden Treasure’ and ‘The Pearl of Great Value’ in Matthew 13:44-45 remind us that the search for knowledge only has a true and lasting meaning when it ends up finding Jesus Christ.

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By John D. Gibbon

The last ten days I have been residing in the big Indian city of Bangalore, home to 15 million people. Its southern area is also home to India’s Silicon Valley (Electronic City). It is also the home of India’s premier scientific institution, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), as well as the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) and the Centre for Applicable Mathematics (CAM). The last two institutions are funded by the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR) although the founder of the Tata family dynasty made a significant contribution to the foundation of IISc in 1909. I am hosted here by ICTS which now sits on a new campus out in the country on the city’s north side. The buildings are finished but it still needs landscaping so we are living on a construction site with lots of red dust. This week I have both lecture & seminar engagements at CAM and IISC. These take time to write so I am kept busy.

India has an increasing population of 1.275 billion people. At 15 million people, Bangalore is still growing, yet it’s already twice the size of London. The sheer size and scale of India is mentioned by everyone who visits. The fact that official figures say that the Christian population is between 2% and 3% inevitably brings to mind the Great Commission.

In chapter 9 of my book “Science and the Knowledge of God” I discussed how the descendants of Adam and Eve have spread throughout this earth and have covered large tracts of it with tarmac and concrete. From just two we have grown to more than six billion people. India and China are prime examples of the relentless growth of the emerging world economies although China seems to be slowing. From earliest times until the present day, human history has been marked by constant conquest and conflict, interspersed with cycles of growth and destruction. Historically the search for resources — food, water, wood, spices, gold, silver, copper and precious stones — has dominated human history. In the modern day one could also add to this list the ores of iron, manganese, aluminium and zinc, as well as those of the rarer elements such as platinum, iridium and vanadium. In addition, coltan is much prized as it contains the elements niobium (columbite) and tantalum essential for mobile phone construction. Even the deep sea-bed and the asteroid belt are more than a glint in the eye of global mining companies. To turn outward to the stars and planets, the start-up company Planetary Resources has announced that it has the backing of Google multi-billionaires Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and is also being advised by James Cameron, the director of the films Avatar and Titanic. They are attracted by the prospect of mining rare and expensive metals, such as platinum, from the asteroid belt. Their long-term plan is to launch an experimental space vehicle within 2 years and an orbital propellant re-fuelling station by 2020. Other influential people include the aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Eric Anderson, the co-founder and chairman of the first commercial spaceflight company, Space Adventures Ltd. He has arranged for paying individuals to travel to the International Space Station since 2001. Another private venture is SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, which specializes in space transportation.

How will this end? Superficially speaking, the ancient Greeks thought of history developing in cycles, Marxists think of History (with a capital ‘H’) moving inevitably towards a classless society, while there are those who have taken the Enlightenment idea of ‘Whig history’ more seriously than they should. This is a political and social approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater Liberty and Enlightenment. In the last generation one strain of popular science literature has fashioned a historiography of western scientific discovery as an epic struggle for enlightened ideals with a Hollywood cast of heroes and villains. Allowing for a degree of parody, the narrative is highly celebratory, and treats Science (with a capital S) as an idealized being — akin to the cardinal virtues Truth, Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Courage — marching onwards towards the sunlit uplands of enlightened human knowledge. It is a classic, cartoon-style Enlightenment narrative fashioned for a consumer audience: the cast of good guys are depicted as enlightened early scientists, holding to the virtues of Truth and Reason, who have had to fight the bad guys. None of this should be taken remotely seriously, although students attempting to grapple with the injustices and problems of the world may be tempted to think in these terms.

The desperate need in the world, both spiritual and physical, is overwhelming in its scale. For Disciples of Christ it is enough to drive us to our knees. Where ‘history’ will end is in the Second Coming whenever that occurs. Until then we are under obligation to bring the Gospel to everyone.

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By John D. Gibbon

The release of the new Star Wars movie “The Force Awakens”, after its premier in LA on December 14^th, has evoked a predictable media frenzy. For years, friends of my own generation — devout Star Wars fans from the beginning — have half-jokingly signed their emails “May the force be with you …” The ‘Force’ is now invoked almost everywhere. However, it is strange that in a society which has largely rejected conventional ideas of religion, the sci-fi literature of the age and its associated movies still uses pseudo-religious language and costume. The movie-sets look like intergalactic versions of Downton Abbey with the actors dressed in priestly costume. One has to concede that much of this is highly entertaining; e.g. stories about the nature and existence of alien beings in higher dimensions, UFOs, and strange forms of time travel. Such ideas are a convenient security-blanket for members of a generation who feel more comfortable with the concept of an impersonal force yet yearn for the mysticism that many other religions provide. There are now large numbers of people who take this type of material seriously and give it far more credence than the views expressed by Scripture about the nature of God and humanity. The Bible says that God is a Person, not an impersonal force; that he has a Name, and in His Son Jesus Christ, he came to this earth as a man to redeem His people and show us how to live. There is nothing impersonal about our universe. Moreover, He cannot be used as a tool for our own ends, nor can He be coaxed, bribed or manipulated as people attempted to do with the idol gods of the Old Testament. The prophet Jeremiah (14:22) once pleaded “Are there any among the false gods of the nations that can bring rain? Or can the heavens give showers?” For those who look down upon Christianity as a passing and intellectually flawed historical anomaly the Apostle Paul had the perfect answer (1 Corinthians 2:6-10):

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” — these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

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By John D. Gibbon

My wife (Sheila) and I are at sea on a Christmas cruise to the Canaries. Long, long ago I spent a year at sea, even serving as an unofficial deckhand for six months – unofficial in the sense I didn’t do a watch. I learned to love this dangerous environment but it can be truly frightening. Six days hove-to in a Force 11 (verging on 12) in a Biscay storm concentrates the mind wonderfully. If I recall the Beaufort scale correctly, 12 is hurricane force. When wind speeds reach 80-100mph the smaller surface waves are ripped away leaving the huge, deep rollers into whose troughs a ship can disappear like a cork. No clear air/water interface exists and the world seems full of what looks like grey-white shaving foam which claws and tears at your face. I suffered no sea-sickness but I had a terrible headache. Sailors have traditionally had a respect for the sea bordering on the superstitious because they know that however mild the weather, something nasty and dangerous may be lurking just over the horizon.

Many Christians think of danger as a personal thing, such as temptation, violence or suffering, but there is a different type of danger that could, for example, come from the pressures on the church exerted from an increasingly secular society. Those who attempt to argue the case for a biblical world-view often face intolerant opponents who consider that all past ideas and values are worthless. Some believe that what is human and what is intelligent needs to be re-defined. This idea suggests that humanity is no more than a blank page on which we can write our own script. On a very different tack, Martin Rees, the Royal Astronomer, has written several articles in the FT making it plain that in his view humanity is just in one stage on a long cosmic road of evolving intelligence. This isn’t the place to discuss these ideas in detail but it illustrates the type of serious issues with which Christian apologists have to deal. Last week I remarked on the generational change to the public mind where people think differently than their ancestors. The criticism that met the publication of Thomas Nagel’s book “Mind and Cosmos” in 2012 encapsulates many of the controversies and contradictions that appear to be inherent in modern attitudes to scientific discovery. Nagel is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view of the emergence of consciousness. In “Mind and Cosmos”, as a rationalist philosopher, he argues that the standard physico-chemical reductionist account of the emergence of life — that it emerged from a series of accidents, acted upon by the mechanism of natural selection — flies in the face of common sense. Nagel is not the only modern philosopher to believe that the rise of science has permanently changed how people think of the world and our place in it and that there is too much emphasis placed on a mathematized understanding represented by modern physics.

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By John D. Gibbon

This week I am in Vienna at the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (University of Vienna) speaking at a fluid turbulence meeting. The grand and beautiful Viennese baroque palaces tell the story of a once powerful Empire that ruled over half of Europe before its sudden collapse in 1918. At that time, the Europeans considered their Empires to be almost eternal, yet their demise began a period of unprecedented and accelerated political, cultural and technical change. My mother died in late 2013 but when she was born in 1915 the German Kaiser, the Russian Tsar and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef still sat on their thrones, while the sun had not yet set on the British Empire.

One example of accelerated cultural change has been the aggressive secularization undergone by western societies in the last generation. Some changes have been welcome, some have crept upon their victims like an illness in the night, while others have had an even stronger negative influence. The effect of secularization on western societies has been like the rolling shell-fire of WW1. When the dust and noise have subsided, a ruined, pot-holed, spiritual landscape has emerged. The grass and trees may re-grow and the birdsong may re-start, but the contours of the land have changed forever. Secularism has been trustingly ignored because its championing of personal freedom above all else has beguiled us into thinking that it is a benign or, at worst, a neutral force. In reality, the sheer scale of its blanketing fire has changed our societies and forcibly re-moulded many areas of the church to such a degree that they are almost unrecognizable from a generation ago.

As biblical influence on western societies has been discarded, a strange melange of not only religiously-tinged populist physics but much cruder forms of sci-fi beliefs concerning aliens, multi-faith religions, eastern mysticism and astrology have been sucked into the vacuum. The result has been a blurring of any perspective on the ultimate biblical questions regarding the origin and destination of humankind. The canvas of public opinion has thus become open to the painting of any shape or form that appears to be the fashion of the moment among a people whose minds have been formed by influences totally different than their ancestors. When mixed together with extreme versions of materialistic individualism, a Jackson Pollock-like painting has emerged which represents what popular western culture thinks of as ‘theology’ which is unrecognizable to the Christian.

In “Science and the Knowledge of God” I have endeavoured to sketch some of the new results and ideas that have swirled around the scientific world in the 21st century. To the usual favourites such as cosmology, astronomy and high energy physics, we could also add newer areas such as artificial intelligence, theories of the mind, genetic engineering and editing, astro-biology and complex computer networks. All of these have been much hyped by the science writers of the day and have tickled the popular imagination. In the media, the millions of regular technical papers and results are rarely mentioned for understandable reasons, but the phenomenon of what I call ‘populist science’ has turned into a form of anti-religious propaganda put out by a small set of celebrity scientists who, while extremely distinguished in their own fields, use their professional positions to propagate their own opinions on the existence or non-existence of God, the future of the human race or the validity of religion. This material is shaping the minds of this generation who think they are being led into a new world of thought unspoiled by more conventional and (in their eyes) tarnished religions. Numerous examples of this influence lie in cosmology, complexity and evolutionary biology. On occasion some well-known name cannot resist the impulse to appoint himself or herself a high-priest-scientist — a familiar stereo-type — by moonlighting as a philosopher or secular prophet. The resulting book is usually couched in popular scientific language but propagates ideas that lie well beyond the rigorously established results of the author’s technical expertise and, more often than not, contains quasi-religious personal opinions. The book reviewer Brian Blank once acidly referred to this style of writing, common-place in cosmology, as “science fiction with academic cachet”.

How are Christians to deal with this? The old Puritan adage about “preaching to the condition of your hearers” ought to be taken seriously. If your hearers are steeped in a culture driven by secular values that may, in part, be hostile to the Gospel, how will you be able to talk to them and answer their questions unless you have understood how their minds have been formed? Whatever the situation in which we find ourselves, serious Christians ought to use the minds they have been given to understand the issues and grapple with them in a way that is both intellectually rigorous and also faithful to the Bible.

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