Mark Harris on Science, Religion, and Quantum Theology

With professor Mark Harris, I talked about the field of science and religion, including his recent research on, what's been called, quantum theology.

Professor Mark Harris holds the position of the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, which is attached to a Professorial Fellowship at Harris Manchester College. As a physicist working in a theological environment, he thinks of himself as a theologian of science, interested in the complex ways that the natural sciences and religious beliefs relate to each other. He is also the Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and he serves as President of the European Society for the Study of Science and Theology (ESSSAT). He is also my doctoral supervisor.

(Image: University of Edinburgh, School of Divinity)

Andrej Zeman: Mark, you are the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. Before I ask about the field of “science and religion”, how do you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a theologian as a scientist? Or how do you see your role?

Mark Harris: That's a great starting question, particularly because my self-identity has evolved over the years. My original career was in professional physics for some 15 years before I was trained as a theologian and was ordained in the Church of England. I started working in a parish before teaching theology and moving to Edinburgh, where I managed the University’s program in “Science and Religion“. Thus, I've gone backwards and forwards between being a scientist, a theologian, a scientist-theologian, and now I feel most comfortable describing myself as a scientist who works in a theological context. That may sound rather long-winded and pretentious, but it captures my feeling that I'm really a scientist who's interested in humanities.

AZ: How did something like the academic field of science and religion come to exist?

MH: As an academic subject, “science and religion“ is relatively recent, and we tend to trace it back to Ian Barbour's famous book of 1966, Issues in Science and Religion. But if you look at the roots of what we discuss in the subject, they go back for centuries, if not millennia through a venerable area which is often referred to as “natural theology”. This area deals with such questions as:  how do we see nature as the work of a Creator, or what kind of evidence might we expect to see in nature of that Creator? As I said, these kinds of questions have been discussed for millennia, going back to the Greek philosophers and the time of the Bible, and of course in religions throughout the world as well, not just in Judaism and Christianity. So, from that point of view, “science and religion” is a very ancient field, which makes it rather intriguing that it's only come to the fore as an academic subject over the last 50 years, where you now have academic roles such as my own, as well as academic degrees in the subject.

AZ: How widespread is the field? Can you study it in multiple places in the world?

MH: That’s another interesting question. Certainly, the scholars who write on it and go to science and religion conferences are spread throughout the world, but there's only a handful of centres of expertise that specialize in it, to the extent that they might offer a dedicated degree programme. Edinburgh is one of them, Oxford is another (in the UK). There are a few others in Europe and in the US, but it’s not very widespread as an academic subject in terms of places where you can go and study it at an advanced level. Science and religion retains, however, a very high level of interest at the popular level, even if it’s not studied so widely at the university level.

AZ: Let’s now talk about the notion of conflict. In many people's minds, science and religion have been always locked in a perpetual conflict and this sometimes called the “conflict thesis.“ But if we read the contemporary historians of science and religion, they paint a different picture of this relationship. They say this is too simplistic to say that there was nothing but this conflict model. Could you give us just a brief explanation of why this is so?

MH: The background to this conflict is very complex, so I have to be simplistic here. But this conflict explains why, even though the questions that we ask within the science and religion field have been around for thousands of years, yet it's only really been in the last, let's say, 50 years, that academic study of them as a “field” in its own right has really started to proliferate. This professionalisation of science and religion as a field has come about through the earlier professionalisation of the sciences in the previous centuries. As we know, the sciences were quickly seen as being so powerful at gaining knowledge about the world that they might even compete with other, more traditional forms of gaining knowledge about the world, such as religious thought and philosophy. Thus, this notion grew up - and began to take hold in the late 19th century – that there is conflict between science and religion. At the same time that this notion of conflict between science and religion was becoming established (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), the idea of secular society also began to form. Today, secularism is a very prominent cultural philosophy in the Western world. Now when you look at what defines secularism, it tends to operate on the assumption that any particular religious belief must be relative to other kinds of religious and philosophical beliefs. And so, what you find is that where secularism is valued as a basis for society, then you nearly always have some sense of conflict between science and religion. You might almost say that they’re two sides of the same coin. Now, as I’ve said, that situation only really grew up in the last century or so. When you go back before that time to the birth of the scientific revolution, not only was there no such thing as secularism, but neither was there any obvious or widespread conflict between the emerging sciences and religious belief. The upshot of this historical evolution is that it's simply inaccurate to say that science and religion were in conflict in those earlier periods. 

Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion of Science (1874), one of the famous ‘conflict’ books from the latter half of the 19th century.

AZ: So maybe we should be avoiding these extremes and say that science and religion have been always in this perpetual conflict. But maybe we shouldn't go over to the other extreme and say that science and religion are never in any conflict. Do you see that science and religion are today, at least in some instances in some conflict? Could you give us an example of this?

MH: In order to get to the example, I’ll just say a little bit more about the first part of your question. So yes, if I say that the claim science and religion are in conflict is inaccurate, it’s equally inaccurate to insist upon the opposite, that science and religion are in harmony. Very often those who challenge conflict do so because they want to put over some other agenda, perhaps promoting a religious concern over and against science and a perceived secular ideology which is antagonistic. But there are some very clear instances where scientific theories and religious beliefs clash and make conflicting claims to each other, and where you really are faced with a more cut-and-dried decision over which option to adopt. The clearest example of such “true” conflict is the creation-evolution debate, particularly in the way it's been played out in fundamentalist Christianity. And this debate is not only about propositional knowledge  - say, about the origins of life, for instance - but it also has moral and ethical implications for the ways that religious communities situate themselves against wider society. In an example like this, science and religion might be said truly to be in conflict, but the conflict is not just a simple matter of evolutionary biology versus, say, The Book of Genesis.

AZ: Tell us something about your research that you’re doing right now about quantum theology. Could you start by explaining what “quantum theology“ means?

MH: This is quite a well-established area in the science-and-religion world engaging with fundamental physics. It is trying to understand how fundamental physics tells us about the very depths of nature: What might physics say about the way that the creator God (or gods if you prefer), relate to the created world? Particularly, if physicists are right that quantum mechanics tells us about nature at its most fundamental level, then that would suggest that nature begins and ends with quantum mechanics. So, if you believe that your God has some relationship with the created world - and perhaps can even work in that world, answers prayer, for instance - then quantum mechanics should have some kind of way of informing the way that might happen. Now, one of the things that has challenged traditional religious belief, especially Christianity, since the birth of modern science, is what’s called determinism. This is the idea that if science carries on being as successful as it has been in determining the way the world works, then that gives God very little room to carry out doing things in the world: For example, to answer prayers, perform certain kinds of miracles or actions. So, if the future is effectively determined by science, it seems as though we have to push God out beyond the boundaries. Well, one of the interesting things about a dominant understanding of quantum mechanics is that it suggests that science is not deterministic, that we can't predict the future using quantum mechanics. That's another reason why theologians have been quite enthusiastic to use quantum mechanics and they’ve suggested that maybe God has some kind of room to intervene or work in the world through this kind of interventionistic form of science: quantum mechanics. That’s a very large area in theology, and I'm writing a book which is surveying this critically but also trying to be positiveas well because I think it's a noble aspiration to try to use this very difficult branch of science to do some theological work with it.

AZ:  You mentioned there are multiple ways how theologians use quantum theology. What do you think, however, about these suggested proposals? Do you think that they have legitimately good ideas, or should we be careful – if not worried – about what they’re saying?

MH: There's a number of these proposals. Sometimes these uses of quantum mechanics to describe God's relationship with the world are made very cautiously, almost like a thought experiment. A great example of this is the famous conundrum since the earliest days of Christianity: How to describe Jesus Christ as Son of God? The church councils have maintained that he is both fully divine and fully human, but how can he be both of those and one person at the same time? Does it make sense? One of the things that theologians have latched onto is the early discovery in the development of quantum mechanics that fundamental entities like electrons and light waves and so on can behave as both waves and particles depending on the way you look at them. And I should say that waves and particles can be used as analogies for the divine and the human, since waves and particles are mutually exclusive types of physical matter. The fact that we might need to use mutually-exclusive categories (wave, particle) to describe one entity (e.g. an electron) is known as complementarity. Thus, one of the things that theologians do is to use this model of wave-particle dualities — a way of talking about the humanity and divinity of Christ – as a kind of thought experiment. Now that's all very well as long as you’re cautious about it. But sometimes it's taken too far and almost as though it's “This is exactly what quantum mechanics tells us.” Then you start to run into theological problems about the way you use scientific models to make definite theological truths, for instance. So as long as you're careful and take these as rather loose metaphors, I think that you can do a certain amount of work with quantum mechanics or with science in this way.

(Image: Freepik)

AZ: Let’s connect this then with praying. Do you think it makes sense to come up with some proposals on the quantum level and to claim that this is actually how God works? Do some actually theologians claim that this is how God answers prayers? And if so, what do you think about these proposals?

MH: One of the longest-running debates in the science-and-religion field as an academic area is the question of how God works in the world. If we're assuming traditional theism where God has some kind of relationship with the world, God can answer prayer, God can do things in the world, accomplish miracles, and so on. But how does God do that? God doesn't have fingers like we have and can't move things around in the same way, but perhaps God uses the laws of nature to have some way of manipulating them. Quantum mechanics has this particularly attractive feature known as indeterminism which prevents us from seeing the future. So perhaps God, who can work at that very fundamental level, pushing particles around effectively, we would never be able to see it. Now that's a very popular model of divine action. It's called the “quantum-mechanical model of divine action”. But there are many other people working in the area of science and religion who are very unenthusiastic about it because it would appear to fall into what's often referred to as the god-of-the-gaps model. In other words, here we have a gap in our scientific knowledge, so let's put God in here and we’ll say that God works here and we wouldn't be able to see it. The trouble is that as science changes (and science is changing all the time), very often these kinds of gaps in our knowledge get closed down. So, what happens if the science of quantum mechanics changes and actually we decide that it is deterministic after all? That would then leave God with no potential mechanism or divine action. That’s why this is often seen as a problem. Having said that, the people who proposed the quantum-mechanical divine action model are well aware of the god-of-the-gaps problem, but I think that they are effectively playing around with thought experiments, affirming this theological belief in divine action: “We're not quite sure how it works, but let's try this as a kind of thought experiment”. However, we’ve always known that there are problems and limitations with thought experiments, but they’re ways of exploring our mindset and the kind of parameters we need to determine. From that point of view, I think as long as we’re aware that we’re working at the thought experiment level, these can be quite instructive things to play around with. The difficulty comes when too much is made of them, as is sometimes the case with this area.

AZ: Who would you say is your favourite figure in your field? And why is that?

MH: That's a really hard question to answer because, of course, I know many of the people currently working in the field as personal friends whom I respect very greatly. So, I'm going to suggest someone who is long dead: Sir Arthur Eddington. Eddington was a British astronomer, particularly famous for his work in the early 1900s, when with his team, he confirmed that Einstein's theory of general relativity was correct. But Eddington was also a Quaker, had very sincere Christian beliefs, and wrote and lectured prominently about his attempts to reconcile his religious faith with what he was learning as a scientist during this momentous time in physics (the developments of relativity and quantum mechanics). I especially like The Gifford Lectures that he gave at Edinburgh where he's trying to reconcile what we know about the quantum world with what he believes as a Christian. Now of course there are far more people working in this area, but he was a pioneer in his day. So, I'm particularly fond of Eddington,  his writings, and what he gave us by confirming general relativity as well as thoughts on quantum mechanics.

AZ: What are some of the books you have written and what are they about?

MH: Most of the material in my field comes through published papers, but I've written two books. The first one was a study of what biblical studies has to say to the science-and-religion debate, particularly about the notion of creation in the Bible. Then I’m one of the editors of a collected series of essays, all about philosophy, science, and religion, together with my colleague Duncan Pritchard. It’s called Philosophy, Science, and Religion for Everyone and it’s really trying to bring philosophy into the area as well as science and religion. And I'm working on a book at the moment called Theology and the Quantum World.

AZ: What would be a good resource for someone who would be interested in learning more about the field of science and religion? What would be your top pick? Is there something on the Internet you would recommend?

MH: As with everything on the Internet, there's a great deal of fantastic information out there, but also a great deal of misinformation as well, particularly on a topic like this which excites such a huge amount of public interest. So, I'm not too keen on recommending YouTube videos or things like that. This may come across as being rather dry and academic, but I personally prefer academic texts for these recommendations. I have in mind one in particular written by Professor Keith Ward from Oxford, The Big Questions in Science and Religion. And I always think that's probably the best place to start if you're interested in learning about science and religion as it’s discussed at the academic level.

Originally interviewed in 2021.

With authorization updated in 2024 for Science and Religion Café.