Voices of Science

The arguments between religion and science are completely false arguments. They’re encroaching on each other’s territory. So for example, religion cannot say anything about what science is discovering. I mean, you know, i.e. religion has no possible view of creationism. I mean, creationism is nothing to do with science. You’ve got to separate those out. On the other hand, science cannot say that religion is – is unscientific. I mean, it’s completely separated. And I think the more thoughtful people actually do separate those two. My own view is – is Hawkins’ view, that we are going to see the mind of God, i.e. we are going explain everything, is total hubris. I mean, frankly whether – whether God exists or not, I just do not believe that they’re going to get to the point. If you look at what’s happened in physics, they’ve always said, well, we’ve only got to discover this one more particle and we’ll know everything, and they immediately discover that that particle’s made up of something else. Do you notice that in physics, if you read about it? There’s always another layer. It’s like Chinese dolls or something. Now I don’t – I don’t argue that proves that God exists. I just say it proves that scientists often have a lot of hubris about what they think, or the physicists do.

Has that been a sort of consistent throughout your entire life, being able to sort of separate them both?

Yeah. Well, it just never seemed to me to be a problem at all, in the sense that if God is a creator he’s perfectly capable of having created a universe that started with a big bang, as having created a universe that started with you, me and everything else sort of in embryo existing already. I mean, in fact it’s rather cleverer to create something from a big bang [laughs] than from anything else, but – so whatever is the – the latest view of where things come from, I – I don’t see that science necessarily can explain nothing from something, although the mathematicians say that. But I equally don’t see that they can possibly say, we can prove that religion doesn’t exist. As I say, they’re in – they’re in separate territories and they ought to be separate.