Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

Science

• Cosmology

  • The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, John Barrow and Frank Tipler, Oxford University Press,.

    This book is a classic. Not an easy read, but one that repays effort with a comprehensive picture of the different levels of anthropic principle and their implications. It set in motion, 18 years ago, the interest that led me to choose the anthropic principle for my Templeton project last year.

  • The Mind of God, Paul Davies, Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster.

    This is probably Paul Davies’s best book to date, certainly one up on God and the New Physics. Here, he goes beyond amazement at the world in which we live and examines a deeper mystery: that we, or at least he, seem to be able to understand the basic laws of the universe. It is as if we were the first Westerners to arrive at a distant island only to discover that the natives spoke English. Why is it that the universe appears to be governed by elegant rules which we can formulate? Is this simply an expression of the creative human mind or, in looking deeper into the cosmos, are we seeing into the mind of God?

  • Before the Beginning; Cosmology Explained, George Ellis, Marion Moyars Publishers.

    This is not just another cosmology book, George Ellis, a past winner of the Templeton Prize, looks not only at the origin of the universe but at its purpose and the place of humanity within it. It might lack of the literary sparkle of Brian Greene, and it might miss out on some key discoveries of the last decade, but his cosmology cannot be faulted and he uses it to take us to some remarkable conclusions of religious significance.

  • The Fabric of the Cosmos; Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, Brian Greene, Penguin Allen Lane/Knopf.

    Take some of the most difficult concepts in modern cosmology and turn them into an accessible roller coaster ride without a mathematical formula to be seen. Brian Greene proved that he was a master at popularising his own subject with

    The Elegant Universe.

    This brings cosmology into the 21st century and makes it at once lucid and entertaining.

  • The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch, Allen Lane.

    Oxford mathematician and quantum theorist David Deutsch investigates what he calls the four main strands of scientific thought today: quantum theory, epistemology, the theory of evolution and the theory of computation. He weaves these together into a fabric which he suggests gives us, for the first time in the history of ideas, our first glimpse of universal understanding. The most profound of his four strands is quantum theory, and he supports the interpretation that quantum theory is best explained by the existence of many parallel universes interacting through quantum interference phenomena. That view would seem to give us a miraculous universe but with out invoking a deity.

  • The Artful Universe Expanded, John Barrow, Oxford University Press.

    If ever there was one book that crosses freely between the two cultures of C. P. Snow, this is it. John Barrow is a mathematician and cosmologist, but his cosmology includes ourselves, the art we produce and the beauty we experience in the natural world. This book is a celebration of that which reveals just how closely linked art and beauty are with the mathematics and geometry of the universe that produced them. For simple souls like me who enjoyed the pictures, this expanded edition is particularly satisfying. Just to give one example: you can spot a fake drip painting supposed to be by Jackson Pollock by mathematical analysis. Only a genuine one has a truly fractal pattern distribution. But I bet he never realised that when he was painting them!

  • The Life of the Cosmos, Lee Smolin, Weidenfeldt and Nicholson.

    Lee Smolin brings Darwinian evolution to cosmology and suggests that universes themselves may evolve. If the collapse of a black hole gives rise to a new universe, and if that universe acquires some characteristics from its parent, then universes that give rise to many black holes will be selected for. There are a number of big ‘ifs’ in that statement, but it is interesting that a universe that tends to give rise to black holes also has many of the characteristics of one that tends to give rise to complexity and life.

  • Our Final Century, Martin Rees, Heinemann.

    Now president of the Royal Society and Lord Rees, Martin Rees is possibly Britain’s top scientist. A highly respected astronomer and cosmologist, he has written a number of excellent popular books on his science. Here, he ventures into speculation and suggests that humanity has reached the stage where technology has become so powerful that, through error or terror, a small action could spell the end of civilisation. Privately, he admits to being a churchgoer, though for reasons of music and ritual rather than faith, he says. He also admits that the scenario of this book represents a worst-case, and one that we will probably avoid. But nonetheless, there are warnings here that the human race should heed.

• Origin and Evolution of Life

  • Life’s Solutions: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, Simon Conway Morris, CUP.

    This is one of the best books available on the origin of life and the evolution of species. By seeking to explain that life on Earth as we know it is the only solution to the problem of life, Simon Conway Morris explains many of the chemical pathways found in life as well as the body plans of living organisms and suggests that they, and indeed we, are virtually inevitable in an earthlike world endowed with life.

  • The Fifth Miracle; the Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, Simon Conway Morris, Simon and Schuster. (Otherwise known as The Origin of Life, Penguin)

    When this book was published, just six years ago, it was breaking new ground. New ground for Paul Davies, who had previously restricted himself to physics and cosmology, and new ground in popular science in that most studies of the origin of life until this point had concentrated on unlikely chemistry in primordial soup on our own planet. Paul Davies highlights the possibility that life came to Earth from Mars where conditions in the early solar system may have been more favorable, and that it sheltered from early bombardment deep under the ground. He revives the old idea of panspermia, that life might have been spread on comets and meteors from even further afield. But he also points out that the miracle of the origin of life may lie not in its chemistry but its information content. That seems the true miracle of life today.

  • The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Press.

    It’s a classic, now celebrating the 30th anniversary of its first publication. It tells the story of evolution not as something purposeful to produce intelligence, consciousness, and religion, but as something driven blindly forward by the chemical desire of DNA to replicate. At one level it is convincing, but I so hope it is wrong!

  • The Ancestors Tale: a Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Richard Dawkins, Phoenix.

    This is told as a pilgrimage in an attempt to reflect the style of Chaucer. It describes the journey 4 billion years back in time to seek our ancestors in the company of every other living creature. As in Chaucer, each pilgrim tells its tale along the way and follows the processes involved in the unfolding of life on Earth back to its origin. It is an engaging story well worth reading but ultimately seems less complete than Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution.

  • The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore.

    Oxford University Press. If genes are acquired through inheritance, memes are acquired through cultural routes, principally imitation. The word was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Here, Susan Blackmore, a psychologist who claims atheism but who can never quite leave religion alone, fleshes out the meme of Dawkins into something as socially relevant, and sometimes as selfish, as his gene.

• Neurotheology and Consciousness

  • The Astonishing Hypothesis; the Scientific Search for the Soul, Francis Crick, Simon and Schuster.

    I did not find this astonishing. For me, consciousness is the most astonishing thing in my experience, but Crick seeks to devalue that in a ‘nothing but’ sort of way based on his studies of much more primitive nervous systems.

  • The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience, Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newburgh, Fortress Press.

    This excellent introduction to neurotheology explores what goes on in the mind during religious experience and mystical states. The authors find clear evidence of specific neuronal pathways and suggest that having such mechanisms may bring evolutionary benefits.

  • Why God Won’t Go Away, Andrew Newburgh, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause, Ballantine.

    This book covers some of the same ground as The Mystical Mind, but in an even more accessible and readable way. It tells the tale, among others, of the Tibetan meditators who had a thin thread they could pull as they entered a state of bliss during meditation, triggering the injection of a radioactive marker which, in a scanner half an hour later, would reveal the seat of their experience in their brain. Just as revealing as the active areas were those that shutdown, including one which gives us a sense of our physical position, perhaps explaining the sense of universality that can come during meditation. Interestingly, with the addition of active speech centres, nuns at prayer showed very similar brain activity.

  • The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, Dean Hamer, Doubleday.

    The first part of the title is unfortunate in that it is lead to gross simplification in the media and occasionally in this book of the complex genetic predisposition to faith. It is nonetheless essential reading for anyone who wants to investigate the physical and neural basis of belief.

The Science–Religion Dialogue

• Science and the Spiritual Quest; new esays by leading scientists, M. Richardson, R.J. Russell, P. Clayton, and K. Wetger–Mcnelly (eds.), Routledge.

  In 1997, 60 leading scientists from around the world met in a series of workshops in California to discuss the relationship between their science and major themes from the world’s great spiritual traditions. The project culminated two years later in a major conference at Harvard that I was fortunate to attend. This volume distils some of the very best from those discussions, covering a vast range of disciplines and beliefs.

• The God Experiment, Russell Stannard, HiddenSpring/Faber.

  By the time Russell Stannard was invited to deliver the Gifford lectures in 1997, they had become academic and often inaccessible. Stannard discovered that the original bequest called for them to be popular, and this is the result. He begins with phenomena that should be comparatively straightforward to test through experiment —the effectiveness of prayer, the occurrence of miracles, life beyond death, and so on. In fact, as we know, even these have had mixed results and are still hotly debated. He goes on to take the same experimental approach into the religious dimension of issues such as cosmology, evolution, human origins, and our place in the scheme of things. This readable account is coloured by Stannard’s own Christian belief and in places, my edition already seems out of date, but it provides an excellent introduction to the many ways in which, through experiment, science and religion can illuminate each other.

• Science and Wonders, Russell Stannard, Faber.

  This engaging book is based on a series of conversations with scientists and theologians of many different persuasions. Stannard asks if the relentless advance of science will not one day be able to explain everything and gives us the clear hope that it will not.

• The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, HarperCollins.

  The language may be more than half a century old, but the insights seem very modern in this classic by a Jesuit geologist.

• A Devil’s Chaplain, Richard Dawkins, Phoenix.

  Richard Dawkins is good at annoying people, but no one can deny that he has an excellent writing style and these essays are a joy to read. He takes potshots at all sorts from crystal gazers to creationists, relativists to cheats. His almost religious commitment to Darwin’s theory of natural selection is matched only by his sense of wonder at the natural world his science reveals.

• God, Chance and Necessity, Keith Ward, Oneworld, 1996.

  This is one of the most readable and reasonable of the many books on the science–religion dialogue. Keith Ward comes down from the theological high ground to pick through the materialist arguments of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins on their own level. He takes the trouble to understand the science and not misrepresent it and at the same time he’s careful not to descend into a slinging match or accuse his adversaries of ignorance or delusion. Instead, he analyses the philosophy of science and finds the materialist view lacking something important. This book takes on the twin daemons of materialist cosmology and evolution and finds them to be good descriptions but inadequate explanations of reality. Keith Ward lives in the same universe as materialists, but his universe is infused with an elegance and purpose that atheist materialists deny.

• Theology and Psychology, Fraser Watts, Ashgate.

  Fraser Watts takes a specific aspect of the dialogue between science and religion and looks at the links between psychology and Christian belief. He examines scientific topics such as consciousness and artificial intelligence from the religious perspective and Christian themes such as purpose in the world in the light of psychology. It forms a valuable contribution to our understanding of the psychology of religion.

Philosophy of Religion

• Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett, Allen Lane (Penguin).

  I opened this new book with some caution, given the annoyance that I felt after reading Consciousness Explained, which might be titled ‘consciousness explained away’. I haven’t finished it, but I certainly intend to. He begins by suggesting cautiously that it would be good to subject religion to scientific investigation. He’s only so cautious because he’s hoping to sell the book to Americans! What he’s advocating seems not only necessary but urgent in these crazy times. He hopes, for instance, to be able to unravel what is meant by religion so as to distinguish it from such near neighbours as spirituality, fanatical devotion to ethnic groups, superstition, or commitment to secular organisations. He suggests, interestingly, that when better understood, it might be seen that Buddhism is no closer to Islam than say whales are to sharks—both of which live in the sea, and are of similar appearance, but are phylogenetically eons apart. Behind all this, I still have the feeling that he is trying to explain religion away as a social and neurological construct, but perhaps a construct with a purpose.

• Ways of Knowing, edited by Chris Clarke, Imprint Academic.

  The scientific paradigm that has ruled Western culture for several centuries tells us that there is only one way to know things. But we have all had intuitions and dreams, perhaps premonitions, visions or mystical experiences. We’ve enjoyed myths, legends and folktales. We live in a both/and universe, says Chris Clarke and we should make room for some of these less scientific ways of knowing. As a former professor of mathematics, his opinion seems valid. This is a collection of fascinating essays, some of them academic others more ‘new-age,’ and they could open your mind to new ways of knowing.

• God: A Guide for the Perplexed, Keith Ward, One World, Oxford.

  This is, in a way, a history of Western belief, but it is much less daunting than that. Keith Ward takes us by the hand and guides us along Western Civilization’s great spiritual odyssey, from the traditions of Judaism and Hinduism through the classical world and into Western Christianity. This never becomes a sermon or tells us what we should believe, but guides us through Western philosophers that have wrestled with spiritual ideas. He favours those that lead us towards Christianity, but does so with a smile and occasionally a laugh.

• The Whispering Pond: a Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science, Ervin Laszlo, Element.

  Ervin Laszlo is an author and academic with numerous qualifications, mostly in philosophy and systems science. He is founder president of the Club of Budapest, has worked for UNESCO, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. This is a popular book published in 1996 and makes a significant contribution to the science–religion debate without ever mentioning religion per se. Laszlo might be described as a scientific mystic, picking through the theories of modern cosmology and consciousness to find the interconnections that he believes pervade the universe and unite us. Some will think he goes too far but he is at least more rigorous than Lynn McTaggart in her bestselling book

  The Field.

• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Karen Armstrong, Ballantine.

  This book is a lucid and scholarly account of the early years and subsequent evolution of the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is written from a position of deep but detached understanding by someone who was once a Catholic nun but who has since embraced Buddhism.

• The Face of Glory: Creativity, Consciousness and Civilisation, William Anderson, Bloomsbury.

  William Anderson was a close friend of mine who sadly died of cancer 10 years ago. This was his last and greatest work. Though not overtly either scientific nor religious, Anderson weaves an inventive thread through history, philosophy, science, and religion to give us a deeper understanding of the power of creativity and human consciousness. He takes us on the journey that reveals that the enjoyment of the products of consciousness and creativity is just as important as the act of creation itself, on the individual scale, in the achievements of human civilization, and on a cosmic scale. This is probably the book I would take to my desert island.

• The Way of Passion: a Celebration of Rumi, Andrew Harvey, Frog Books.

  This is not a science book. It is more a book of poetry, vibrant translations of some of the 13th century mystic Jalal-ud-Din Rumi’s best. It captures the fire and the passion of Sufi philosophy in a way that will sweep you off your intellectual feet and set you on a new path of searching.

• The Hand of God: Thoughts and Images Reflecting the Spirit of the Universe, edited by Michael Reagan, Templeton Press.

  If you have come this far, you deserve a treat! Sometimes we used to many words. Here, there are spectacular pictures of stars, galaxies, and nebulae and short but uplifting quotations from great figures ranging from Albert Einstein to William Shakespeare. Dip into it and share the sense of wonder.