Abstract

The difference between science and religion is that science is material and religion is immaterial.

Quoted by Coulson

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 04 December 2002

C A Coulson

Charles Alfred Coulson (1910-1974) was an English mathematician and theoretical chemist born in Dudley, Worcestershire, who developed many mathematical techniques for solving chemical and physical problems, including molecular orbital theory and partial valency. He was professor of theoretical physics at King’s College, London, 1947, professor of mathematics at Oxford 1952, and then Oxford’s first Professor of Theoretical Chemistry 1972. He was chair of the charity Oxfam 1965-71. His book, Valence, was a necessity for chemistry students in the sixties.

Professor Roy McWeeny described Coulson, his teacher, as “a great and remarkable man”. What was remarkable about Coulson was that he was apparently more interested in being a Methodist lay preacher than he was in theoretical chemistry. McWeeny says Coulson had from his College days been a convinced and committed Christian, who had been in great demand as a lay preacher and worked unceasingly for Methodism and Christian fellowship. His father, then Principal of the local Technical College, gave him as a child the deep religious faith which accompanied him throughout his life. Coulson writes of his father that he “first showed me the unity of science and faith”.

From the early fifties Coulson was as much in demand as a lecturer on religious and moral issues as he was on scientific matters. In 1953, at Durham, he gave the Riddell Memorial Lectures on Christianitv in an Age of Science, which formed part of the argument of his lectures at North Carolina the following year. In 1954, he gave the John Calvin McNair lectures at the university of North Carolina which were published in a book much admired by Christians called Science and Christian Belief. McNair, like the latter-day Templeton, endowed this lecture series in 1906 to show the bearing science and theology had on each other.

McWeeny, in the tribute he made to Coulson shortly after his death, at the Fifth Canadian Symposium on Theoretical Chemistry, expressed himself amazed that Coulson’s “convictions were so deep and unshakable, when the arguments on which they were based seemed to me so slender and insubstantial”. That is what amazes all unbelieving scientists about their colleagues who profess Christianity. They simply abandon all logic and training in respect for their religion. It is a tribute to the immense power of childhood indoctrination.

Yet unlike the modern equivalents of Coulson, the Polkinghornes and Fullers, Coulson does give an impression of struggling with what are essentially irreconcilable. He seems to yield as much as he can, then withdraws it all in the face of the test of his faith. Even so, this book is a much more sincere attempt at the reconcilaition of science and religion than the modern books that Templeton gold is pulling from talentless opportunists. Even so, it still fails.

The Challenge of Scientific Thinking

Coulson began his talks by admitting that Bishop Wilberforce was “unwise” to have attacked Darwin’s theory in 1860. The Christian reaction to science has done more to undermine Christianity than science. Christians had to admit that science had to be treated as another “revelation of God, consonant in its insistence on value and person with the traditional Christian concept” but adding to it. If Christianity claims universal competence then science must fall within its orbit. If Christianity rejects science, then it is accepting it is no longer universal. Of course, Coulson meant science, not some distorted plasticene image of it made to humour Christian prejudice such as we get from supposed theologians today. He gives this citation:

Unless all existence is a medium of revelation, no particular revelation is possible.

Archbishop Temple, Nature, Man and God

Yet Christians have traditionally regarded science, especially physical sciences, as a rival, and something to be opposed, as they have to anything progressive throughout Christian history. Christian schools and teachers have not taken care to teach it properly, so that the historian, G M Trevelyan, could write:

There is too little about science in our histories, considering science has been the chief factor in human affairs during the past 200 years.

Science is now the main force in our lives, but 200 years is not long, and the word science itself was only coined by William Whewell in the nineteenth century. The speed of the growth of science left tradition reeling. Loss of tradition relates to the growth of science. Science and tradition are opposites. Any account of science has to take in this vitality of science and the traditional stance of religion. Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1929 cite Freud in The Future of an Illusion as saying:

The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to man, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief, at first only of the obsolete and objectionable expression of it, then of its fundamental assumptions also.

Lord Morley went so far as to say:

The next great task of science is to create a religion for mankind.

And to paraphrase Sir Richard Gregory:

My grandfather preached the gospel of Christ.
My father preached the gospel of socialism.
I preach the gospel of Adelphiasophism.

Adelphiasophism is of course the modern veneration of Nature—modern Pantheism, in which science is acknowledged as the way to knowledge. Religion does not necessitate anything supernatural. In ancient times, religion was identical with culture. In those days it necessarily entailed belief in gods, because gods explained what was otherwise inexplicable, and from those beginnings, it has become an dogmatic assumption that religions are to do with gods, and other supernatural, otherworldly concepts. Adelphiasophism returns to religion as explanation, and veneration as having a purpose. Religion is properly a world view—the set of beliefs that underline one’s understanding of the world. These beliefs, not only do not need to involve gods and ritual magic acts like holy communion, they are better today not to. Lord Morley meant we need a new world view that dispenses with unscientific beliefs while drawing people together in a mutual purpose. That will be the new culture. It is Adelphiasophism.

Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham, wrote in the advertisement to the first edition of The Analogy of Religion (1736) that it is taken for granted that “Christianity is not so much a subject of enquiry but is now discovered to be fictitious”. Butler aimed to refute it, but “analogy” is not accepted today as it once was, although Christians accept “plausibility” as its substitute. Almost 300 years after Butler, the truth that Christianity is fiction is still only gradually growing among Christians, but the drift away from the pews is steady, and in some places almost complete. 93% of British people do not attend church except for weddings or funerals. Many more Americans do so but a lot only out of fear. People are voting against Christianity with their feet, and the Christian professionals are getting worried about it.

F S C Northrup, a sociologist at Yale, wrote in 1954:

To understand the culture of the US, look at its universal education in the national sciences, and their skills, its agricultural colleges, technical institutes and research laboratories.

No mention here of churches, yet the churches have regained some of their baneful influence with a concerted campaign, especially on the campuses, and many of the scientists in those noble institutes keep silent about religion—again out of fear. C H Waddington wrote, in The Scientific Attitude:

Science itself and only science by itself, unadulterated with any contrary ideal, is able to provide a way of life which is firstly self-consistent and harmonious, and secondly is free for the exercise of the objective reason upon which our civilisation depends.

Coulson concurs:

If we are to restore faith to men it will be through science.

Christians and Science

What seems to puzzle Christians like Herbert Butterfield, the historian, A N Whitehead, the philosopher, and Coulson is that science grew up in a Christian tradition. They seem amazed that the Somerset friar, Roger Bacon, would praise the study of Nature as a way to a knowledge of the Creator. At a later time, Robert Boyle and John Ray thought science exalted God, and John Wesley even used Ray’s book to train preachers. Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton were the same. So, what did happen? Coulson’s answer is that it was the “atomisation of knowledge”. What was once part of religion separated from it as more had to be learnt, then they had to be understood without the hypothesis of God, and God necessarily dropped out of them. This is not an explanation, or is only part of one. Professor J D Bernal observed:

It was not that science had to fight an external enemy—the Church. It was that the Church—its dogmas, its whole way of conceiving the universe—was within the scientists themselves.

Christians, like Coulson, are fond of telling us this—the first scientists were Christians, and it stands to reason that they would not have willingly cast off their religion for their science. It was as Bernal notes—they realised that the dogmata of Christianity were incompatible with their own observations of reality. Darwin himself is the most moving example of this. A man who began his life deeply religious, as most of the Victorian middle classes were, but was obliged by a lifetime of observing, to reject it, even though his own much loved wife remained devout.

Coulson highlights some of the faults of the attitude of Christians to scientific knowledge. They cling to the past, being unable to face up the new, and forever looking back with nostalgia to old certainties. Coulson admits frankly what his modern counterparts will not do:

It is an attitude born of fear… the antithesis of the scientific attitude.

It shows the absence of the “elasticity of mind” needed to receive new knowledge or experience. It was the fault of the Bishop of Oxford, in taking on Darwin and his bulldog, when he wrote in Quarterly Review that “natural selection was absolutely incompatible with the word of God”, “an attempt to dethrone God”, and if it were true, then “Genesis is a lie” and “the revelation of God to man as, we Christians know it, is a delusion and a snare”. It shows that Christians are bound by the supposed truth of the scriptures, and they will cling to it despite all the evidence and common sense. They have nailed their flag to the mast, and must fight to the bitter end defending what is false and, as the bishop said, a lie.

Coulson points out that it is because current views were being turned “topsy-turvy” that elasticity of mind was essential for Christians. Notions such as the heliocentric nature of the planetary system, the immense age of the earth and the theory of evolution opened up new possibilities of understanding the universe—God’s universe, for a Christian. Clinging to the past, Christians let the opportunity go by, simultaneously creating mistrust in the coming generation, the intelligent ones of whom will be attracted by the new ideas and challenges. As Coulson puts it:

There is no hope for the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.

Another fault of Christianity is to take refuge in metaphysics. Coulson tartly says it follows the discovery that physics is not sufficiently accommondating to personal whim. An example is Karl Heim, who notes that all the previous absolutes of existence like mass and time have gone—so there must be an absolute God! Or, Heim tries also, since a circle must have an origin, there must be a point from which faith in God and the theses of natural science can begin to be explored. Coulson dryly comments that such an argument “may sound well in certain types of ear, but it cuts no ice with the professional scientist!”

Science has to go wherever its clues lead and accept uncompromisingly whatever it meets. As T H Huxley is supposed to have said before Bishop Wilberforce at the British Association in 1860, “I am come here in the interests of science”. The bishop had other interests. Coulson observes that, if science is a revelation of God, then there is nothing impious in speaking in its interests.

Another fault is division into magisteria, interestingly refuted by Coulson as “fatal” fifty years before Gould revived it shortly before he died. It means the mind must be permanently divided by a Chinese wall, except that it is a particularly insecure one for religion which risks science making discoveries that intrude on to the religious side of it. Coulson considered it to be the “God of the gaps”, in the first use of the expression. When science finds ways of filling in the gaps, the end is a small God because there are only narrow gaps. The pineal gland was the home of the soul until its real purpose was discovered. The soul had to move house.

Some Christians like to use the argument of large numbers, thinking it might provide a shield for the activity of God. Coulson is blunt;

A God who is obliged to conceal His actions of providence so that we cannot see Him, a God who hides His presence in Nature behind the law of large numbers, is a God for whom I have no use. He is a God who leaves Nature still unexplained while He sneaks in through the loopholes, cheating both us and Nature.

As the reverend Charles Kingsley said about Philip Gosse’s idea that God had made the world complete with sediments, fossils and tree rings to make it look older—to believe it is to believe that God has created a deliberate lie.

Coulson was not happy with the idea of God as a sustainer either. The sustainer seems worse than the mechanic who set the cosmic machine going and went for a tea break. The universe that requires the mechanic to stay on duty is not as reliable as one that runs perfectly well unsupervised. The mechanic has to keep alert to use his spanner and oilcan to sustain the wonky machine He has made. Coulson believed God was present in the whole of Nature all right:

If God is not present in the whole of Nature, then He is not present at all.

But not for the demeaning purpose of sustaining it. The Christian has to believe that, if God created the world then He created a world that worked, with laws that worked reliably so they did not need tampering with, and that God had the intelligence and foresight to anticipate and pre-empt faults. If the Christian is to be an honest scientist, he has to believe this of God, so that the mechanism or organism that he has set up can be known by discovery, because God must have made it that way as an intelligent being, not a stupid one having to personally precipitate every drop of rain, and individually design every separate beetle.

Coulson also speaks of the error of territorial rights, sounding again unlike Gould with his NOMA:

We cannot serve God and science… God must be found within the known not the unkown.

E N da C Andrade, the physicist, thought, like many modern Christians, that quantum mechanics leads to the “doorway to religion” because there must be causes involved beyond our comprehension. Of course, in 1952, David Bohm had put forward an hypothesis that involves causes—hidden variables—that we can comprehend, but there are not enough theoretical physicists interested in exploring its consequences. It is not fashionable!

But Coulson thought the separation of science and religion into two domains was a dangerous illusion—dangerous to religion—and this use of the uncertainty principle, though popular was foolish. The electron is neither a particle nor a wave, and the uncertainty principle says nothing about whether it is one or the other, or what it is. It is merely a limit of measurement and the nature of the electron needs a broadening of human conception.

Neither is it a “doorway to religion”. Coulson calls this a “misuse of science”. The proper use of science is that of Laplace, who dealt with it without needing the hypoithesis of God. To keep on trying to see God in some unexplained aspect of Nature invites rebuff and ridicule, but Christians will not stop trying it, whether they are Christians who claim to be scientists or just those who are trying to con some innocent into pawning their life.

Scientific Method

The quotation at the beginning of this article humourously reflects that science is about the real world and religion about a supposed spiritual world. Science is relevant to our lives and religion irrelevant unless someone deliberately chooses to feature it.

Coulson’s answer to these self-evident truths is that God must be in science from the outset. Science must be a religious activity. Coulson appoints scientists to the company of God’s heralds. All of them are messianic! Science is the way God has chosen to reveal Himself for those with eyes to see. He means for those willing to accept the delusion that there is a God. Once one has imagined that there is a God, He can freely be seen in anything at all. What is more to the point is the answer to the question: “Why imagine a God at all?”. It is perfectly possible to live an entirely adequate and fruitful life without the delusion of God. Indeed, forcing the delusion on to children gives them an unnecessary concern throughout their life. Coulson is a prime example.

Coulson now asks: “What is scientific truth?”. Even though he warned Christians against metaphysics, he begins to get metaphysical. Einstein got rid of mass and position, Michelson and Morley got rid of the ether, Heisenberg introduced uncertainty into every observation, neuroscientists showed our brains were all different, so, no two people can apprehend “truth” in the same way. To observe Nature was to change it.

All of this is working up to a special plea for Christianity, but it is not such a fantastic or insoluble problem. The sky, the oceans, any river or stream and even the street outside are never the same on two successive moments or to two successive observers, but they cause no problems to ordinary life for being so. The truth of the sky, the oceans, rivers and streams and the street outside are not altered for the fact that they are never the same one from one second to the next. That the photons impacting the page anyone reads are changing the momentum of electrons in the page is scarcely a concern to the reader. Coulson is doing what he warned against doing. He is no better than Andrade. He is aiming to open a door to religion.

He even notes that an electron can never be seen, as though seeing things directly is the only way of knowing. Christians particularly do not believe that. Every one of them knows that Jesus rose from the dead, even though no one saw it happen. They read hearsay accounts of things that happened forty years before they were written down, and even then were not directly seen but assumed from the circumstances, and they know it is true. Well, they believe they know! Electrons cannot be seen but what they do can be studied here and now. Scientists have an immense knowledge of electrons and can direct them to do astonishing things. To disparage all that by saying they “cannot even be seen” is the sign of a Christian talking.

Warming to his theme, Coulson tells us that atoms are fictions of the mind. Quite what Coulson is getting at is not clear. Is anything that a Christian says? He made a career out of working out how these fictional things join together to make molecules, which also must be fictional, being made out of fictional atoms. Since they are fictions of the mind, he could have made them join together in any way that he thought of. So, is he talking rubbish, or being deliberately dishonest, in typical Christian style? Molecules can be seen by using electron diffraction, x-ray diffraction and more modern methods, so what sort of fiction are they that they actually exist in reality? They must be “ficts”, fictional facts. A Christian has invented something ex nihilo again!

Coulson seems to be getting at what scientists give as descriptions of their observations. A hypothesis is a generalized description. His point is that it is our description of our observations, and so the hypothesis is not a law of Nature. That is true. Science actually grows by refining its hyotheses, so they are not laws of Nature. They are human approximations to a law of Nature. The laws of Nature cannot be changed at the whim of a human being. But who seriously believes they can? Scientists claim only to be seeking ways of expressing the truth about Nature in a series of closer approximations. Maybe Coulson’s intention as a scientist is to give us a useful reminder that this is the case, but when Christians seem to be disparaging science, there is reason for suspicion. Even a scientist as good as Coulson, being a Christian, owes his allegiance ultimately to his beliefs—so long as he can keep himself convinced of them. Plainly he could because he remained a Christian.

Existence

So, we find that atoms, the force of gravitation, electrons and electricity, and so on, do not exist. They are merely patterns of experience, mental constructs limited only by the rule that they must fit together. Dr Johnson knew otherwise, kicking his stone and shouting, “I prove it thus!” It is remarkable that such clever men can speak like this. Coulson would not jump off a tower block confident that gravitation was merely a mental construct. Nor would he hold on to an electrical cable when the power was switched on. It is certain, whatever happens in the brain to give us these impressions, that the experiences they record are real ones. So, the scientists, having noted that there is a neurological question there, will return to their atoms, electrons and gravity fields.

It is not clear what advantage a scientist has that knows that an atom is not really an atom but is merely a mental construct of an atom. The combination of hypotheses—mental constructs every one—that go to describing the properties of an atom are its mental construct or pattern of experience. We know the atom from its properties, and they work, giving us confidence that they correspond to something real and not imaginary. It is the pseudo-sciences, of which Christianity is one, that have mental constructs that do not correspond with anything in reality. Serious scientists can nod assent to their colleagues of a philosophical bent, like Coulson, that they are dealing with patterns of experience or whatever, but continue to imagine, with no disadvantage, and probably an advantage, that they are dealing with reality, and approximating closer to it with their advancing theories.

Martin Luther gave this way of distinguishing a God:

A God is simply that whereon the human heart rest with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then the God is right. If the resting is wrong, then the God is illusory.

No scientist could have put their belief in science better, so long as science is not blamed for its misuse by politcians, greedy industrialists and financiers, and military dictators.

Coulson illustrates the Janus facedness or the self-deception of Christians, even as notable scientists. He declares that Christianity is rooted in the “facts” of history 2000 years ago, but also the relating of the facts in a meaningful pattern, like science. Would Coulson, the scientist, really be willing to accept the “facts” of Christianity put to him cold? He obviously does accept them out of a bad habit learnt as a child, but they simply are not compatible with scientific skepticism. He cannot accept the “facts” of Christianity out of careful judgement. The same goes for any pattern that grew for Christians from the “facts”. For example, do the facts in the pattern include the unspeakable and disgusting crimes of Christianity, and are they adequately weighted in the pattern or are they ignored as much as possible?

Truth and Awe

Coulson does not think that science is getting nearer to an objective truth. It is “a preposterous conceit that we must ridicule”. Coulson means by we Christians because what annoys them is that there should be a batter way to objective truth than Christianity, the truly preposterous conceit of those who think any almighty God pays any attention to them personally. There can be few worse ways to imagine objective truth is attainable than by Christianity. It does not do for a scientist to believe Cardinal Newman when he defines truth as a personal “cumulation of probabilities”, and it is the Christian in Coulson that does it.

It follows that what, to one intellect, is a proof is not so to another, and that the certainty of a proposition does not properly consist in the certitude of the mind that contemplates it.

A personal truth is therefore not necessarily true. A personal truth is an oxymoron. It is merely an opinion. Truth must have a standard.

The scheme of science is like the drawing of a mighty palace, Coulson tells us, especially an architect’s drawing. It describes the building accurately but not exactly. Huge amounts of detail are missing, but all the main lines are in place. The detail can probably never be given in any scientific hypothesis, but there is no other way, whether religion or oral drugs for getting it. Only direct experience. Belief in a religion or a God cannot help here. Knowing the universe through religion or drugs is illusory.

Coulson refers to the “awe and exaltation” that people experience “when they feel themselves in the presence of the living God”. This is an astonishingly circular argument for a scientist, especially one as good as Coulson, and shows the destructive nature of Christianity. No one can dispute that Coulson feels awe and exaltation in some circumstances, there can be few people who do not, but he concludes it is because God is present. No untrammelled scientist would settle for a supernatural reason for the feeling of awe. Even though Coulson warned us not to find gaps for God, he immediately finds one. It is no different in kind from ancient people attributing thunder to the gods, or modern people attributing their nightmares to alien abductions. A strange or inexplicable experience, real or psychological, is attributed to the supernatural. It is infantile.

Scientists who believe Christianity are fond of citing from the great founders of the scientific enterprise, like Francis Bacon. The reason is that most of these ancients still lived in times when Christians unrepentantly incinerated those who disagreed with them, so most people had a strong albeit not spiritual reason for professing belief. Bacon, though a founder of scientific method, was fond of writing “God” in his works, so often gets quoted by Christians. Coulson does several times and modern “scientific” theologians continue the tradition. Many of the citations are circular. In paraphrase:

Natural theology is a consideration of created things which gives a spark of the knowledge of God from the light of Nature, and thus is both divine and natural.

Nature is assumed created and so is some sort of evidence or source of knowledge of God. God is in the assumption. No Christian can escape from this logical error, even scientists. Christians, like Coulson, find God in Nature through science because they have already put Him there.

Coulson continues his Christian dishonesty. Christianity is so profoundly corrupt that even otherwise honest men like Coulson cannot stop lying once they get into their apologetic stride. The anarchistic philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, would love it. “Anything goes!” Coulson quotes Sir Lawrence Bragg who says that the realisation of the answer to some troubling scientific problem comes as a flash of revelation. This is what the psychologists call gestalt and seems to happen even in chimpanzees, but from Bragg’s simile—the idea comes as if it were a revelation—Coulson jumps to the conclusion that it is a revelation. Only God could be the hierophant, if it were. Christians believe that human beings can do nothing for themselves except be wicked. Everything good is God’s work.

Coulson, emphasising the unity of life, something that scientists agree on but religious people do not, quotes Descartes, without apparently noticing the consequences:

I am lodged in my body, not as a pilot in a ship, but so intimately conjoined and, as it were, intermingled with it that I form a unitary whole.

Descartes is stating that his conscious personality is one with his brain and his body. Let the latter die and Descartes’ personality necessarily dies too. They are indeed conjoined. The consequence is that the personality cannot survive bodily death and there can be no afterlife.

Science is Religious

Ignoring this, Coulson draws the opposite conclusion. The unity of the sciences has a qualtity about it that “can only be described as spiritual”. He now cites Einstein who says that good scientists are rapturously amazed at the harmony of Nature. It is a “religious feeling” akin to that which has possessed religious geniuses of all ages. Einstein was an atheist in Christian terms, so whatever he is talking about here, it was not what Coulson supposes. It is the “awe and exaltation” argument again. It leads Coulson to God, because that is how he was indoctrinated as a boy, but it leads more objective scientists like Einstein to pantheism. If the unity of Nature and the awe that is felt before it are spiritual, then Nature itself is divine. There is still no need of the hypothesis of God. Mystical experience is an experience of the unity and divinity of the whole wonderful life we are a part of. To imagine something greater, with no sound foundation, is to belittle divine Nature, the most stupid error and the greatest crime humanity has committed. Coulson actually writes:

Nature itself requires a religious significance.

The sheer stiff-necked stubbornness or incomprehension defies belief and further analysis. Christians are simply blinded and besotted by their own self-indoctrination. Earlier Coulson spoke of the habit of ostriches of putting their heads in the sand. It is a misapprehension, but it is no misapprehension that Christians put their heads in a bucket.

Pantheism

So, Coulson, the natural scientist, just refuses to give up the supernatural even though it is not necessary. He quotes Pasteur, an intensely religious man, that “the supernatural is at the bottom of every heart”, and he summarises that “we cannot touch or handle the things of earth and not, in that very moment, be confronted with the statements of heaven”. this is pure theology and not science. Non sequitur follows on non sequitur, but none of them add up to a “sequitur”. Yet, he dallies with pantheism in his imagery:

• God is a circle with its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
• God is the canvas on which the picture is painted.
• “Raise the stone and thou shalt find me. Cleave the wood and I shall be there”.

Then a surprise. Coulson writes:

It is true that this has not got us to the Christian faith. In one sense, it has only got us as far as pantheism.

In truth, Coulson is stuck at this point and cannot convincingly get beyond it. He admits:

The argument may not be logically convincing.

It is not. It boils down to:

1. We see everything subjectively.
2. All then is personal.
3. It reflects the nature and character of Him from whom it comes.

And, true to type, he summarises all this bull as Christian “truth:”

The truth of the matter is that having come to that which we can call God, we have found that nothing less than personal terms can be used to describe either the way or the truth or the life.

This really is typical Christian truth because it means nothing. Let a Christian see the phrase “the way, the truth and the life”, and they will convince themselves the sentence that contains it means something, but it is conjury for kiddies and sophistry for sheep. What we have come to is that Nature is wonderful in its own right. No one has ever been able to show that a single supernatural experience is not really natural. It is sheer obduracy for anyone, especially a scientist, to keep finding the figmentary father everywhere they look. Everywhere anyone else looks there is one thing only to be seen—Nature.

Attempting to reach God through pantheism leaves Coulson having to remind us not to be sentimental about Him. The gamboling lambs in the springtime field will, before long, be someone’s sunday lunch. The truth is the Christian God is incompatible with Nature. It is impossible for the lion to sit down with the lamb, unless both are anaesthetized or dead. Nature gives birth and also brings death. No intervening sin is necessary and no supernatural doorway leads to eternal life. In Christian theology, God is even relieved of the responsibility for death. Death is humanity’s fault for being wicked, even though God placed the curse and need not have done. A good God could not have done!

Having got lost, Coulson retrieves the situation with a few quaint and saintly anecdotes to distract the audience’s attention. Christian sleight of hand. He thinks the balance of Nature would be better appreciated by the Christian who had read Pilgrim’s Progress, he says, one of the most violent and tender of all books. It seems odd he should not have thought of the bible in this context, unless there is not enough tenderness in it to counterbalance the violence. Then he returns to pantheism:

• Creation and Nature and man, these are not what God did, or even what God does, but what He is.
• Without a proper relationship to our environment, we cannot find any true fulfilment.
• No one can be fully healthy without a response to their environment of the kind that we call religious.

And Coulson quotes Roger Bacon and even T H Huxley approvingly in his rejection of authority:

Of the three ways of acquiring knowledge—authority, reasoning and experience—only the last is effective.

Roger Bacon

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such. For him skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest skepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith.

T H Huxley

He agrees with Whitehead:

The notion of the complete self-sufficiency of any item of finite knowledge is the fundamental error of dogmatism. Every such item denies the truth, and its very meaning, from its unanalysed relevance to the background which is the untold universe… Every scrap of our knowledge derives its meaning from the fact that we are factors in the universe, and are dependent on the universe for every detail of our existence.

Order in Nature

Following M Polanyi, Coulson equates science with religion because both have suppositions:

• The search for truth.
• The unexamined belief that facts relate to each other.
• The unproven assumption that there is order and constancy in Nature.

It seems that Christians find all this rooted in the “rationality of God”. What then is the advantage of postponing the source of rationality from Nature to God, one step further back, or saying these things are unexamined and unproven when they are examined and proven daily in practice? To introduce God is to introduce an unnecessary entity to no advantage, contrary to Occam’s razor. The irrationality of this should be plain, but Christians just cannot grasp it. The Greeks had no need of this God but simply began the task of speculating about Nature, God at best being an alternative name for the order that can be seen in Nature.

Christians have to find something of merit in those endless dreary and devilish days called the Dark Ages. Whatever did come through them was nothing to do with Christianity. It was Christianity that strength was needed to overcome in those bleak times. What came out was through the fortitude of human endurance in the face of seemingly endless oppression—by the agents of the loving God.

Christians try to say that their centuries of torment and oppression were the roots of good! They all pander to the ogre in their heads. Write something nice about the Christian monster and it will ensure they are all right when they turn up for judgement. The centuries of burning at the stake have left the forelock tuggers alive. They have been unnaturally selected because they will believe the ogre no matter what evidence is placed against them. They have effectively been selectively bred as lapdogs for bishops, while the ones inclined to question or defy the Christian dictators were melted alive for their amusement.

None of them believe in Christianity as any sort of moral exemplar—it can never now be that—they believe in Pascal’s wager. Play it safe. Get a little supernatural insurance. There is nothing to lose, except your free will, and your honesty. Those Christians who think like this are already crooks. Those who deceive themselves in this way will obviously deceive anyone else. And for them to imagine that their supposed omnipotent God would be impressed by any so cynical and opportunist a reason for belief—or rather for effecting belief, for that is all it really is—is not only a self-deceiver but take their own God to be a bigger fool than they are themselves.

Order was not only a property of gods before Christianity, it was a property that preceded gods. The Rita, Arta and Logos of the ancients were “order” and “reason”. Even the gods were subject to it. It was fundamental in the cosmos. Christianity did not preserve this in some way from classical times and thus allow science to emerge. The Christian suppression of knowledge for so long prevented it from emerging. The fact that remnants of it remained in the Greek philosophy that Christianity needed is a historical accident and no more. There is no credit in it for Christianity.

The mathematical simplicity of Nature is a presupposition of science, but it is not without foundation. Primitive observers saw regularity in the steady progression of the day and night, the phases of the moon, the seasons and so on. Millions of years of living and dying in the world in which this regularity existed made it a part of the organisms that lived in it. From it the Greek philosophers felt confident in assuming order in Nature, and everything that has been done in observing the world since, using precise instruments, upholds the assumption. We are now justified in assuming say that the law of gravity is an inverse square law, and not some fractional power. Nature does indeed tend to be simple rather than complicated, and the criterion of elegance or beauty in an explanation is justified. If the world did not seem beautiful to us, then we could not live in it.

Coulson tries to claim that science is a religious activity on the basis of its actions, its search for truth, its mode of working, and its presuppositions. None of it applies—or if it does—it applies to anything. For example, to say that both science and Christianity are searching for truth is often claimed by these scientists who try to shove Christianity down our throats, but no rational and honest perosn could find any identity between the two supposed truths. Christian “truth” is merely what they believe on no adequate basis. By any standard of truth, it is just not true!

The actions and mode of working of science and religion are also utterly opposed. Religion has no objective content, and no sincere interest in Nature. It is subjective and supernatural. These are scarcely just different directions of approaching some ultimate truth. They are opposite and irreconcilable differences. As for presuppositions, what does not have them? No system of enquiry can be entirely self-contained, as Gödel’s theorem showed. Why should they be? We are part of the world, immense and so subtle that it is divine in its own right, as Coulson repeatedly showed but through his Christian bigotry could not accept his own proofs. We have to put up with reality, even when it does not do what we would like, and find ways of explaining it that agree with it. Christians attribute anything unusual to God.

The Human Element

Again Coulson says that the common features of science and religion were a common belief in the universal character of truth, in the order and constancy of Nature, and the sense of spiritual fulfilment that accompanies the practice of science. Christianity purports to be interested in truth but lips often lie, none more than Christians’, and what is merely uttered cannot just be accepted. Practice has to be the criterion, and it is not sufficient that many Christian lead honest and exemplary lives. So do lots of non-Christians and even non-religious people. Indeed, psychologists have shown non-religious people are generally more honest than Christians are.

Moreover, even Christians like Coulson, people otherwise as honest as the day is long, when talking about their convictions, lie habitually. The professional Christians are the worst liars. Opinion, however sincerely held, cannot be identified with truth. The whole history of Christianity cannot be used to dispel any fears that these doubts might introduce, because it is as shameful a history as it is possible to write. Whatever the universal character of truth is, Christians show no signs of seeking it. They only think and say they are, but they just stick to opinions that their parents or vicars indoctrinated them with as children. This is unnacceptable in a just society unless the truth is well founded in reality. Only science seeks to do that.

On the order and constancy of Nature there can be limited agreement in the sense that Christians have inadvertantly transmitted the notion down the years, but it was not theirs initially, so they cannot claim it for themselves. moreover, they have not themselves kept a constant attitude to it. Many clerics regarded the world as irredeemably wicked, the aim of the saint being to get out of it unsullied by it, but some, and increasingly later, Christians have seen God in the works of His creation—natural theology. The views are incompatible. Science does not see good or bad in Nature. Nature is not even indifferent, because that implies awareness. Nature is unaware, or it was until humanity made it aware.

As for the sense of spiritual fulfilment, it is partly the sense anyone gets from a job well done, and added to it is the elation and pleasure of discovery. If this is spiritual, then so be it, but it is simply a Christian use of a meaningless word. Coulson wants to use it because he claims to be seeing God in his science, but many other scientists do not. They see the amazing wonders of Nature. So Coulson is merely begging the question, as they inevitably do as a consequence of their belief!

To hold Coulson’s view that science is a religious experience poses the question of why scientists are therefore not all Christians. Coulson begins to answer it by saying that there are many truths, or ways of seeing truth. Many scientists do not see it that way. There is only a single truth and it is the scientist’s job to struggle towards it. Whether Coulson is using a bit of Christian tricky-dickery is hard to say but he has returned to the architect’s drawings of the marvellous palace.

All of the drawings are true, says Coulson but give quite different views of the building. The skeptical scientist will willingly concede this point without conceding his own point that the building is the truth being illustrated. Scientists will surely get different impressions of the truth as they work towards it, but they aim, in the end, to have a conception of the whole completed building. So, when Sir Ernest Kellaway says only one description of the universe can be true, he distinctly means there is only one true universe, and is not counting out partial or approximate descriptions, but emphasising that truth is indivisible. Partial and approximate descriptions of a truth are not true. They can be made true by adding conditions that describe when the partial truth is true.

Coulson, of course, wants the whole building to be God, and he is actually complaining that people who cannot see God there are only looking at one of the plans or elevations. Scientists might reply that they cannot see Atlas holding up the heavens either, but then Coulson would agree with them that he too cannot see Atlas. Perhaps all of them are only looking at a partial truth, and that is why they cannot see Atlas. Christians are deluded into thinking there is something beyond a perfectly good truth. Their delusion is that all truths must be God. That is the universal reductionism of Christianity. In short, it is a lie.

Along with this, and part of the justification of it is to claim that art or literature or music are alternative truths, but Coulson is deliberately introducing confusion. Art, for example, is not intended to lead anyone to contemplate the truth of the origin of the universe. The artist might want to arouse emotions in the viewer, or merely contemplate the subject from a particular viewpoint chosen by the artist, but an artist is particularizing not generalizing as a scientist is in formulating a hypothesis. A painting of a tree illustrates the concept of a tree but it is a particular tree that the artist depicts. Even less does music illustrate truth in general, even though it can influence mood and memory. Here perhaps is an illustration of the texture of the building but otherwise it tells us little about it.

This is not to belittle these things but to put them in perspective. Music, literature and fine arts are not aiming at the same target as science, and science has pretensions of explaining the others, though they cannot explain science. They have truths in them, but their purpose is not to achieve “the truth”. That, though, is the aim and ultimate purpose of science. Whether it can be achieved is another question, but it aims for truth just as an archer aims at the bullseye of the target, even though it might not be hit.

Coulson turns to the debate about mind and matter. He frankly admits mind is “associated with body and brain”, and the brain is essentially a complicated machine. What then is mind? For Coulson, it is a concept invented to make sense of our experiences. The experiences related under “mind” are vast and “mind” should not be confused by trying to compare them inappropriately. yet that is what the Christian does who thinks their personal experience is God’s truth.

On the dichotomy of free-will and determinism, Coulson agrees with Max Planck—it is a phantom problem. An individual’s decision has to be agonised about and taken, even though the circumstances, to an observer, compel the choice. For man as actor it is free-will, but for man as spectator it is determinacy. Free-will then is an illusion. As Voltaire said:

It would be very singular that all Nature, all the planets, should obey eternal laws, and that there should be a little animal five feet high, who, in contempt of these laws could act as he pleased, solely according to caprice.

Denying God

Coulson addresses the problem of why some people deny the presence of God. he accepts that within one discipline, God might not be seen at once, or might be seen but unrecognized, but it is “futile and impoverished” and “narrow minded” to think, with someone identified only as a distinguished poet-scientist:

Scientific humanists do not reject Christianity because of its moral claims on the individual, but because they cannot accept a God whose working in the universe is not merely unscrutable, but so well concealed as to leave no vestige of observable material to the unconvinced observer.

Coulson comments that “he might as well have asked us to weigh the soul”, again showing that science is utterly secondary to his delusions, because he is quite happy to believe something for which there is no evidence. Christians never consider that they are the ones with the “futile and impoverished” and “narrow minded” ideas because they insist on holding to a childish fantasy contrary to all evidence and common sense.

Roy McWeeny was, of course, correct. There simply is nothing in Christianity to justify from a scientific or rational standpoint because it is an irrational belief, and even such intelligent men as Coulson are reduced to frustrated name-calling when others do not share their delusion. As to the successful weighing of the soul, “it would have been a disaster of the first magnitude”. Odd? Not at all. If it were weighed, then it would enter the realm of science, and soon would be understood, spoiling the mysterious unfathomability of a persistent delusion. The only reason why these things remain mysterious is because they are delusions.

Coulson says, “a denial of God is always the result of shutting one eye”, so he thinks that scientists who deny God are simply refusing to look. He cannot bear to think that someone, just as capable as he is, has looked, and with the proven methods of thought and practice of science, and can honestly see nothing because there is nothing to see. The alternative hypothesis to their belief in God is that they are mistaken in their belief. They have been encouraged to remain childish to the benefit of hugely wealthy religious institutions.

Though Coulson is a scientist, he is quite unable to separate off the self-deceiving habits of a lifetime. The loyalties of people like him remain firmly with their delusion, showing that no scientist who holds to a religious faith like Christianity can be trusted as a scientist on any issue that might have implications for their faith. Mainly it is not an issue, but, in fields like cosmology, evolution, and the archaeology and history of the ancient near east, it is such an issue that scientists gratuitously lie to uphold their religious views! Christians should not be admitted into serious work in such fields.

Some scientists who also believe can be frank. The trouble is that no one can be sure that they will be once they admit to Christianity. Laplace and Descartes were both professing Christians but Laplace had no need of the hypothesis of God, so did not try to introduce it to get credits for entry into heaven. Descartes at one time at least must have felt the same way for he wrote:

Give me matter and motion and I shall construct the universe.

Coulson now returns again to pantheism and seeks to solve problems in a matter of fact way by redefining religion as follows:

Religion is the total response of man to his environment.

The simple inclusion of God or heaven in the definition of the environment is sufficient to recover what he needs.

What leads or draws people to God is the Holy Ghost which has to be first experienced—it is then the conversion experience personified. Since the conversion experience is a delusion, the Holy Ghost is delusion personified. This is important to Coulson because he can find endless authorities to quote who have experienced this delusion and therefore can see God in every star and blade of grass. It is particularly easy to find scientists who were thus deluded in the nineteenth century—those who saw God in sedges and wild campion, the maternal care of ichneumon flies, and the industry of bumble bees. Doubtless Coulson’s father was one of them.

They saw God in science or Nature, but what we need to know is whether they had God first. We can guess that they had, because they were brought up to it, but would they have seen God there in Nature had they not been already indoctrinated? Few people have come to Christianity through science, and those that have mainly have dubious backrounds in respect of religion.

Einstein had a religious upbringing in Judaism at a Catholic school and all through his life read both testaments of the bible, and spoke of God often, but he was an atheist. Einstein’s idea of God was not the Judaio-Christian one. It was pantheistic. Others were not as strong minded as Einstein, and, though they seemed to reject their religious upbringing, it was only to fall back into it later, thus looking like converts from humanism to Christianity.

It might be possible to come to some idea of an abstract God through science, but to arrive from science at a belief in a God as wicked as the one of the Jews and Christians is impossible without simultaneous insanity. The vileness of the God of the bible and the equal vileness of Christian history have to take precedence over rational science. That is crazy!

Scientist or Anchorite?

What do we find that Coulson says about atheistic scientists? They cannot adequately make the “full act of reflection”. If that were to send a scientist insane then they do right not to “make” it. Always, though, Christians consider they are the sane ones, even though they are the ones who are hallucinating. Books of tortuous argument and analogy are written to show people how to see this hallucination, but to honest scientists, they just expose their authors as barking mad.

Coulson speaks of Pasteur saying that “chance only favours the prepared mind”, as if he is talking about the chance of seeing God. He was talking about solving scientific problems, and emphasising that the intuitive mind could work on that which had been thoroughly studied, leading to the flash of gestalt. There is truth in the parallel that Coulson seemed to mean, that those who steep themselves in religion have a greater chance of seeing God, or, for that matter, the Devil, angels and so forth. It is social conditioning, and those who over indulge themselves are already usually consumed with guilt, heavily indoctrinated from infancy and, in brief, already half mad to want to do it. A few years utterly steeped in it in some lonely anchorage is sufficient to send them totally off the brink.

The difference between the insane religious monomaniac and the dedicated scientific investigator is that only the latter produces anything of communal value. The scientist makes a demonstrable discovery whereas the anchorite wanders the world in a personal haze of superstition. What is dangerous about missionary religions like Christianity is that people like Coulson encourage other human beings in becoming insane. When people get this derangement, they are likely to be self-righteously condemning and unpredictable. Admittedly, mainly they hare happy to spend a few hours each week with others of a like mind in their asylum of choice, but some are likely to do far worse things. Christians ultimately are no different from Moslems in this. Both ignore the real world in favour of an imaginary one supposed to be better, and delude themselves into thinking that utterly wicked acts in this world will get them entry into the other putatively happier one.

Almost everything that is read about Christianity requires the convert to pretend or imagine they can see what does not exist. It confesses continually that there is nothing there through books like Coulson’s, that try to persuade us what we need to do to see whatever it is. Yet the highest thoughts and convictions of this religion are ineffable and unspeakable respectively, according to Bishop Butler. He should have simply said that the whole religion was unspeakable. Was Hans Andersen’s fairy tale about the emperor’s new clothes directed at the Christianity of the day? It is singularly appropriate and ought to be a reminder to young children not to let the religious mind vampires get a hold of them. Mostly they are too young to judge for themselves and finish up the living dead.

Coulson, foolishly for a scientist, but with cunning deceit typical of a Christian, raises various Gods of the gaps to help the wavering reader see the illusion.

• What pleases us about an octave in music? God of the gaps.
• Is the feeling of two lovers meeting described by the adrenalin released into the blood? Probably, yes!
• Does a mother care for a child just to preserve the race? Indeed she does!

Christians want emotions to be the feature that distinguishes science and religion, but emotions are simply what the thinking animal uses to describe what impels them to act instinctively. Love, whether sexual or a mother’s, induce people to behave in a certain way that has evolved to propagate the species. Because people feel these things rather than think them, religious propagandists always want us to see them as God given, yet they are more primitive than rational thought.

All animals have instincts, and for the animal they must be emotions. Animals cannot express what they feel but they obviously feel the need to do things like sexual coupling and looking after their young. Emotion is just our word for describing the feeling. Coulson, typically Christian, wants to transfer this emotional aspect of our lives into another dimension—to make it spiritual. This is where the scientist should part company with the pseudo-science of Christianity, but Coulson cannot.

Coulson ought to be able to tie what he calls spiritual life into real life quite naturally via the instinctual influences of evolution on motivation. People like Coulson must be deceiving themselves for they must be able to see natural explanations for love and beauty. No doubt the full understanding of these matters will take up years of study by psychologists, socio-biologists and probably computer experts, but only the Christian can ignore the hypothesis that these matter can be explained naturally. The supernatural explanation simply is not needed, and Coulson is dishonest either to his audience or himself to pretend otherwise. Earlier, Coulson had not been willing to place any importance on teleological explanations, preferring to think they wre just explanatory figures of speech, but suddenly it implies a belief in a designer. Yet he brazenly cites Heisenberg saying:

The chain of being that connects the atom with man is continuous.

At what point in a continuous chain does God intervene? If the continuity is to be preserved, it is either nowhere or everywhere, but either way, humanity is not distinguished from the rest of Nature. Bang goes the afterlife.

Coulson ends up telling us that only the Christian can assess man correctly.

• The physicist says he is a machine.
• The chemist says he converts chemical energy.
• The biologist says he is the intelligent product of evolution.

The Christian says “he is the child of God”. But, the Christians agrees with all the others too so Christians are superior, and are the way to be! Anyone who agrees with Coulson here is a fool—so well suited to a lifetime of keeping the platters full. Science is a unity, even though it is so big that scientists have to specialise. All of the scientists would agree with the proper expression of a scientific view from the others. They would not see any meaning in the Christian’s expression. The Christian has the delusion of God. The others do not.

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