BBC Radio 4 2016-02-11

BBC Radio 4 2016-02-11

Good morning. It’s been announced that the Royal Bank of Scotland has shortlisted three eminent nineteenth century scots, one of whom will be portrayed on the new polymer ten pound note. They are Thomas Telford the great civil engineer and architect, whose roads, bridges and canals transformed communications in the early nineteenth century. Mary Somerville the science writer who in 1835 became the first woman member of the Royal astronomical society, and the physicist James Clerk Maxwell who formulated the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first time electricity, magnetism, and light as manifestations of the same phenomenon, the breakthrough which later led to radio communication (and eventually to the Today programme!)

Maxwell has always been somewhat of a hero of mine, not only because he was a great physicist but also because of his insights in both science and religion. When a younger physicist, James Prescott Joule made a breakthrough in his scientific endeavours Maxwell wrote this note to him, “There are very few people who have stood where you stand & after a period of minute observation & patient mental toil have put their minds into exact accordance with things as they really are.” To put your mind into exact accordance with things as they really are – that surely is the objective of all scientific research and, in our own time, that is what is going on in the expected announcement this afternoon of the evidence for gravity waves, predicted by Einstein.

But if “To put your mind in exact accordance with things as they really are, lies at the heart of all scholarship”, “to live in accordance with things as they really are, as they ultimately are, is the objective of the life of religious faith, for faith in God is not the same as having a hypothesis about God, in faith, you are the apparatus and your life is on the experiment.

This certainly was Maxwell’s own attitude when he applied the same rigour to his religious faith as he did to his science. He wrote “Now my great plan, ... is to let nothing be wilfully left unexamined. Nothing is to be holy ground consecrated to a Stationary Faith. All fallow land is to be ploughed up. ... Never hide anything, be it weed or no, nor seem to wish it hidden. ... I assert the Right of Trespass on any plot of Holy Ground which any man has set apart.”

Those were challenging words for a scientist trying to honour the truths of his science and religion in the nineteenth century, and they are equally challenging to us today, whatever our faith.