Charles Birch – Science and Soul

At 89, the venerable Australian biologist, ecologist and theologian Charles Birch has written a new book, Science and Soul, a memoir in which he looks back with gratitude to the long list of world-famous scientists and philosophers of religion who have influenced his work – Theodosius Dobzhansky, J.B.S.Haldane, Paul Erlich, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Margaret Mead, and many more. Charles Birch talks about his life and his belief in a God that feels and grows as we do.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Stephen Crittenden: Welcome to the program.

As this is our last live episode of The Religion Report for 2007, let’s start with some more music, appropriate to the season, and a choir that I think hasn’t received so many hard knocks.

CHOIR

Stephen Crittenden: Well the season of Advent inspired some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most joyful music and this suits the theme of today’s program, I think you’ll find; for our last live program of 2007 we’ve got something very special: a conversation with one of the most venerable living Australians, biologist, ecologist and theologian Charles Birch.

Born in Melbourne in 1918, Professor of Zoology at Sydney University from 1960 to 1963, then Challis Professor of Biology from ’63 to ’83, Charles Birch won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1990. He’s pioneered a view of the universe that sees everything in the universe from human beings to atoms and quarks as a feeling or subjective entity, and a view that sees God not as almighty and all-powerful, but as persuasive, feeling and growing with creation.

Now 89, Charles Birch has published a wonderful memoir, summing up his scientific and religious beliefs. And in the first four chapters, providing short sketches of the world-famous scientists and philosophers of religion who’ve influenced his work: Theodosius Dobjanski, J.B.S. Haldane, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, the great preacher at the Riverside church in New York, Harry Emerson Fosdick; theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Neibour, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and many more.

For Charles Birch and many of these scientists, one of the central concerns of their work has been the question of consciousness or subjectivity, the question that arises out of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, and then becomes a religious question.

As human beings we know that we’re thinking, feeling, subjective creatures. We know the dog and the cat are feeling, subjective creatures. But how could that consciousness have evolved where there was no consciousness before? Charles Birch.

Charles Birch: The first thing that one has to do I think is to accept the fact that there is such a thing as consciousness, and it cannot simply be ruled out eventually in terms of molecules and atoms doing things that are completely without any relationship to mentality at all. It’s a view that says there are two aspects of consciousness, sciences deals with the objective facts, in other words what happens in your brain when you have a conscious thought? What happened to the cells of the brain when you have a conscious thought? But it leaves unanswered the question – I’m talking about science now – it leaves unanswered the question, but what about the feeling I have of consciousness. And there’s a tremendous gap between what I experience and what science tells me, and this is the gap that somehow or other has eventually to be filled, or some alternative thought.

Stephen Crittenden: I guess the other important thing to say here is that you take as your starting point, the fact that as human beings we’re conscious, feeling creatures, and you work back down the chain of evolution from monkeys and dogs and cats, to insects and amoebas right down to atoms and quarks. And you say they all must be feeling, experiencing, subjective entities.

Charles Birch: Yes, this is absolutely the important point that it’s interpreting the lower, namely the dogs and cats and then eventually atoms, in terms of the high, which is human feeling and experience, and you cannot get human feeling and experience out of a world that doesn’t have something implicit in it about mentality. Science has great difficulty in dealing with that, it’s highly successful in dealing with the objective events in the brain, and an awful lot of people are working on consciousness right now, but they don’t touch the problem of the subjective side because it’s too hard to know where it fits in. So I say in order to deal with that, you have to become a philosopher of some sort, and look at the different philosophical alternatives, which is the one that makes sense with the modern understanding that science has as well. It’s a big task and a very difficult one.

Stephen Crittenden: It’s a rare thing, it seems to me, for someone at the end of their life, a great thinker at the end of their life, to write a book that looks back and acknowledges all of the intellectual influence, the people who’ve influenced their thinking.

Charles Birch: Oh really? Well it seems to me an obvious thing to do because insofar as I’ve developed any point of view, it is primarily because of other people. I don’t regard myself as original, everything that I’ve written comes from elsewhere and primary from this what are now known as the process thinkers, people who regard the most essential elements in the world as process activity rather than as bits and pieces that have no mentality to them.

Stephen Crittenden: The key figure, and it’s interesting, this is one person that you don’t have a chapter on in the book, is Alfred North Whitehead, who died in 1947. Did you ever meet6 him?

Charles Birch: Never, because he died in 1947 and I went to the United States in 1947 for the first time. No, I never met him.

Stephen Crittenden: But he is the father, if you like, of this kind of thought in the 20th century isn’t he?

Charles Birch: Oh, absolutely. He is a polymath in the sense that he can cope with – since he started off as a scientist and mathematician, he can cope with the scientific side of things, and also the metaphysical side of things, the philosophical side of things, in a way which very few people can.

Stephen Crittenden: Is Whitehead’s biggest contribution his idea that matter is mental?

Charles Birch: Yes, it is. I would say that there are mental aspects to all actual entities. The actual entities being things like atoms and molecules and cells and organisms, not tables and chairs, because they only have an organizational unity, whereas the other things that I mentioned, have an organic unity. In other words they are entities that feel as one.

Stephen Crittenden: There’s somebody in the book, a very interesting figure that you do write a chapter on who perhaps sums up the problem most eloquently, and that’s the geneticist, Theodosius Dobjansky. He accused you of believing that atoms had brains. Isn’t that the implication finally of your view, that every particle right down to quarks, feels, has subjectivity.

Charles Birch: Yes, it’s rather difficult from saying that they have brains. No, you’re absolutely right in that respect.

Stephen Crittenden: Even if it’s a quark, is it a feeling entity?

Charles Birch: It’s an experiential entity, yes, in other words it cannot be simply described in terms of objective science. There is a mentality there, otherwise you don’t have the continuity in their relation. See the problem that Dobjansky has is that he had, when I said to him that ‘You regard evolution up to a certain point, without mind, and then mind comes in and consciousness comes in. You believe in miracles.’ He said, ‘Well I do believe in miracles’, and that is a position that I would not accept. I think you’ve got to get beyond the supposition that these things are understood only in terms of miracles happening; that’s not an explanation at all.

Stephen Crittenden: There’s another figure in hour book, Sewell Wright, who was a professor at Chicago University who says exactly this: that to believe that mind arose from no mind is to believe in miracles. Why is it any more miraculous than the evolution of fingers or hands or eyes?

Charles Birch: Oh well, people like Dobjansky and so on would say fingers and toes evolved out of something that wasn’t quite fingers and toes, and there’s no problem there, because the mordanic unity from something that is a toenail that was not quite a toenail a long time ago. That’s not a problem. Mind is a different category of existence from matter in the alternate position, and Sewell Wright is saying you have to believe in a miracle if you can get out of non-matter something which is mindful, and that is the attitude of absolutely contrary to Dobjansky; it’s all right as a biologist like Dobjansky, and Waddington, the British biologist has the same views Sewell Wright. There are a few people in biology and science who have this position, but it’s a pretty minority view. The view is beginning to become more important in physics, but in biology, no. Biology is still a very mechanistic science and reasons for that I’m not quite sure, but I think that Darwin had a tremendous impact on one way of thinking. Then the other way to say about this is that most scientists don’t think at all, anyway. They think on their subject about as much as bank clerks think about them, and that means that there’s only going to be a few people you can draw on as to their views on the subject. Now Dobjansky is one, but he had the opposite view to what I have. Sewell Wright is another, and he had a similar view to what I have.

Stephen Crittenden: That’s interesting you should say that, it reminds me of an interview, I can’t even remember who it was with now, somebody who said that the attempt to map the human genome was the intellectual equivalent of stamp collecting.

Charles Birch: I think the same person said that science is either physics or stamp collecting. That puts biology in its place, you see.

Stephen Crittenden: Right. Now I think for most of the listeners to our program, the crucial question now becomes where is the point that evolution, a subjectivist, non-materialist theory of mind, leads out then to God, to religious belief?

Charles Birch: Well I would say that as one thinks, so one behaves, and if you think mechanistically and materialistically, you behave in a way which would have no place for religion, obviously. If you believe that there is something subjective in the whole of existence, in other words it’s much more a mindful world than a mechanistic world, there is then room for an activity of God in the world, but not as an interferer, not as an interventionist God. And the problem with most people is that they don’t have any alternative idea. Now I have to reject the orthodox view of God’s relationship to the world, because as I say, he doesn’t intervene into the sort of order that we find in the scientific world view, that God only works through subjectivity. In other words, regards entities as subjects. See, if you say What does God do in the world? Well he doesn’t do the sorts of things that interventionists, people who believe in an interventionist God, want him to do. But God in human life is persuasive, I would say, and is fulfilling, and beckons one forward into a new experience of life. And this is possible because there is a basic mental aspect to all existence.

Stephen Crittenden: If as a scientist you had a theory of how the universe was made up, that was materialistic and mechanistic, would you at this stage of your life, be a believer? Would you believe in God?

Charles Birch: No, not at all, simply because I would have to believe in that sense, as in an interventionist God, and there’s no evidence for that. That’s my real reason against it. I mean Darwinism rules out the possibility as far as evolutionary biology is concerned, of God having anything directly to do with it, since God does not intervene into the objective world that science investigates. Now a lot of people won’t accept that of course, but I think that’s central to the whole argument.

Stephen Crittenden: Are you talking in the end about a single unifying consciousness that we’re all part of some vast entity that we’re all living on the side or clinging to the edge of, so large that we can’t see it?

Charles Birch: I think it is a unifying, very speculative view of course, of the world. But I say that in Whitehead’s view and this is the process view, there are two aspects of God’s activity: one is God’s primordial activity, in other words the potential that God has for the whole existence. I mean at the moment we don’t think evolution and existence is finished and final, that things are still going on, and that the potentiality is not part of God’s being. He doesn’t use the word ‘potentiality’, but I think this is what is meant.

Stephen Crittenden: These ideas do have a long lineage in the history of Western thought, don’t they? One that goes back through Enlightenment, philosophers like Spinoza and Leibnitz, all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, and I guess to me, one of the most interesting things in your book is to consider how Platonic a lot of these ideas are.

Charles Birch: Well I got a lot of ideas from early on, reading Plato because Whitehead emphasized that aspect of things, Plato’s nation of the forms, and ideas, is very central to the whole idea that I have of the process thinkers have.

Stephen Crittenden: That science deals with the material, but it can’t see or can’t deal with the subjectivity behind the material. That fits very closely to the Platonic idea of forms.

Charles Birch: Yes, I think it does. But eventually the two have to come together and the question that Hey, how do you do that? In other words, the scientific objective view of the world, and the subjective, more mentalistic view of the world which is real. In fact it’s the most important part of the world, because if you asked me what are the most important things for me, it’s my feelings, feelings I’ve had in the past, feelings I have now, and feelings I have in anticipating the future, and I can’t leave that out. And science doesn’t tell me anything about that. But I’m not ruling out the possibility that some day science will be able to include that. But it’s just too difficult at the moment. Now Whitehead says, and I think this is important, that there’s one advantage in having had this simplistic view of the world, and that is, if you tackle the problems that can be solved first, and then you leave these very difficult ones for later investigations.

Stephen Crittenden: Except that metaphysics as a discipline has sort of shriveled away in the modern period.

Charles Birch: Oh, it’s disappeared almost entirely, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not important somewhere, because the mechanistic and materialistic scientist has a metaphysic, although he doesn’t recognize it, which is his own mechanistic way of looking at the world.

Stephen Crittenden: At this point in my conversation with Charles Birch, we turned to Richard Dawkins and his book The God Delusion, an entirely materialistic approach to the subject. Does Charles Birch agree that the reason why so many of Dawkins’ readers are so enthusiastic about The God Delusion, is because the public no longer have much appreciation for the metaphysics?

Charles Birch: That is because they’re dealing only with the objective facts, which are relatively easy to discover, and this is where Dawkins is very successful in saying that science has got this information which is accurate and good and valid, that religion is a very non-scientific view of the world, and he tackles fundamentalism as I would also; I would go along with a lot of what Dawkins has to say because Dawkins is against the interventionist God, and most Christians are in favour of an interventionist God, they want God to make the world right instead of wrong. But then another book has to be written, and that is the alternative religion to the one that Dawkins very successfully I think, criticizes.

Stephen Crittenden: This brings us to the question of Christianity, and you talk about in the book, you talk about your youth. You say you were a fundamentalist and that your scientific thinking brought you out of that to something else. Where does Christianity stand in relation to the body of scientific thinking?

Charles Birch: Well it depends on what you mean by Christianity of course, and if you mean what Dawkins is destroying, then I would be totally with Dawkins to that that is a view of Christianity that I want to reject. The Creed, for example, which says virtually that God made the world, and he sent his son to redeem the world, and then his son goes back to heaven and will come again to judge the world. Now that is so antiquated in terms of its view of the world, scientific view, it’s very hard to see how anything good can come out of it. And I don’t think much good has come out of it. At the time that the Creeds were made in the 4th century, it helped to resolve some issues, but they don’t, to me they’re absolutely obstacles in thinking about relationship and Christianity to the future.

Stephen Crittenden: A lot of intellectual thought in religion at the moment just seems to be going up and down on the spot, would you agree?

Charles Birch: I’d agree with that entirely. And the field has virtually been taken over by the fundamentalists. Why that is I’m not sure, but it’s a pretty sad thing. The important thing for me was that at the time that I was a fundamentalist, I thought that was the only view of Christianity. What I had to learn, and did learn, was that there are alternative views of Christianity, views that don’t involve an interventionist God and I’d say that Jesus had that view. In other words, the view that God doesn’t intervene into the world primarily, but is concerned with persuading people, persuading entities right from the beginning of the foundations of the universe, and that creation is still going on, and that creation is not something that just God does, but creation is a relationship between creativity of God and the creativity of humans, otherwise you believe in a sort of a pre-destined world. The future is absolutely open, and to suppose that God is omniscient in the sense of knowing everything, including the future, is ridiculous.

Stephen Crittenden: Theo de Chardon, the great paleontologist, had the idea that evolution had an ultimate goal, the whole of creation was evolving to a point that he called a final sort of consummation that he called the Omega Point. Sounds like it’s something you would reject, that idea.

Charles Birch: Well you’re quite correct, it’s something I wrote today because it suggests that the future is determined now, and the future is absolutely open I think to all ports of possibilities. But Theo de Chardon had one aspect of this thinking that I think is important. An d that was, he accepted inner aspects of all entities. In other words, well what I’ve been talking about, in addition to objectivity there is subjectivity right down to the ultimate bits and pieces, like quarks and atoms. Now Dobjanky rejected that important insight, but he accepted and liked the idea of there being a goal that was going to be achieved in the end. I mean I spent years with Dobjansky talking about these things, and he never moved one iota from his position. He couldn’t conceive an alternative.

Stephen Crittenden: Charles, reading your book in a way made me sad. You come from a generation in size, and a generation in religion, of great, progressive, optimistic, expansive thinkers. You write about people like Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, that was particularly the world of the 1940s and ’50s and it seems to me that it was a much more interesting generation, a much more important generation, than the baby boomers who think they created everything would have us believe. But it was a very promising generation, and something of that world still survives in our thinking, but a lot of it has been dropped. Would you agree with that?

Charles Birch: Yes I would, and what surprises me is the extent to which it has been dropped. Very few people know anything about either Tillich or Neubour. They didn’t leave a great string of followers, I don’t know quite why not. But for me, particularly Paul Tillich, they were great and wonderful sort of adventurers into the future which to me was very revealing of possibilities of religious life.

Stephen Crittenden: Tillich of course, a great theologian at Columbia University who you knew well.

Charles Birch: Well I knew well in the sense that I attended a number of his lectures, and had some talks with him privately, but not many. One thing I learned form Tillich was that the spoken word is terribly important and you get more from the spoken word than you do from reading books. And I thought, well, if you put your ideas down in books, that’s the way to communicate. But no, a lot depends upon the personality that’s communicating, and Tillich was wonderful to that extent. Somebody else said that when he talked about Copernicus, Copernicus was there when he discovered his ideas.

Stephen Crittenden: Well Tillich was there with Copernicus.

Charles Birch: Tillich was there with Copernicus, and likewise with Darwin. Tillich had that wonderful presence, and I think the presence of the person who’s talking becomes very important and persuasive.

Stephen Crittenden: In fact you say you’ve been fortunate to have lived through the golden age of the intellectual preacher. I assume you mean people like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Neubour.

Charles Birch: Yes, see the interesting thing is that when I was in the United States, the times that I visited the United States, this was a heyday for these sorts of thinkers. One could always be sure of finding them either in the chapel in New York at the Union Theological Seminary, or the University Chapel in Chicago. But now both of those are virtually closed down, there’s not an interest in them. Well there may be an interest, but the people are not there to communicate.

Stephen Crittenden: Well as you say, perhaps the fundamentalists have won out.

Charles Birch: Well that’s a question that I would say that eventually they won’t win out, but they appear to be winning out at the moment because people like simplistic answers to the world’s difficult problems. I think it’s very sad that more liberal view of religion is not being communicated to people through churches and other organizations. I was absolutely dependent upon listening to Tillich and Neuber and such people, in chapels and what-have-you in universities throughout the United States. Now that’s not a possibility for people.

Stephen Crittenden: Let’s just come back to this generation that we were talking about from the ’40s and ’50s. One of the things about that generation that has always struck me as interesting is they’ve been through two world wars, they’ve been through the4 Holocaust, many of them were Europeans in the United States of course, and yet they were optimistic and expansive. Our intellectual view sixty years later seems to be so much darker than theirs, and yet they were so much closer to the centre of the maelstrom.

Charles Birch: Yes, they were, but they were criticised because they supposedly didn’t take Yvonne Sung seriously whereas the people, other who went through the two world wars, so you cannot understand what’s happening unless you regard human beings as basically sinful. Now people like Neuber and Tillich wouldn’t use those words, in fact they wanted to get rid of the concept of original sin, because was really important was original virtues, original goodness that people were capable of, and you can’t label people just as either good or bad, they have all sorts of possibilities.

Stephen Crittenden: As you look back on your own life, do you feel sad or depressed, or let down, or neglected by the fact that more people haven’t taken up your work and these ideas generally, here in Australia? At Sydney University, for example, in the religion departments around Australia?

Charles Birch: Well I’m sad that Australia’s so behind in these things. I’m happy that they still exist in the United States, room and spokespeople for this alternative view of the world. I’m said that there are so few people in Australia who are prepared to go along this track, but this isn’t the day for polymaths any more.

Stephen Crittenden: One thing we haven’t talked about is how these views interesting also include an ethical vision.

Charles Birch: Yes, absolutely. For 20 years I’ve been on a Committee of the World Council of Churches that had to do with science technology in the future. And one of my battles was to get the World Council of Churches interested in the non-human creation, which is what you’ve been talking about. That has been a struggle and a half. The reason why it’s been difficult is that they say our first priority is to the oppression and injustice of human beings throughout the world. OK, let that be a first priority, but let there also be a priority to all the other creatures, including the problems that ecology raised for them and for us. That raises the issues of rights of animals as well as human rights. Now I think one success we’ve had is getting that built into the program of the World Council of Churches in a program that’s called The Just, Participatory and Creative Society. So that you’re quite right, this has very important ethical implications and they include the whole of creation, not just human beings.

Stephen Crittenden: I wonder whether with global warming, whether this ethical aspect is the one area in this whole constellation of ideas whose time really seems to have come.

Charles Birch: I think you’re correct, because for a long time we’ve been saying that some of us have been saying that economic growth can’t go on forever, that the idea of putting all your values in material goods, has to come to an end sometime, because the resources of the world are limited, and the alternative we’ve put is to work for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society. In other words, in which the ecology is not going down the drain all the time.

Stephen Crittenden: Charles Birch, and his book, ‘Science and Soul’ is published by New South Wales University Press.

Thanks this week to producers Jenny Parsonage and the wonderful Hagar Cohen, who’s been with me for these past few months. We’ve had lots of fun. Goodbye now from Stephen Crittenden.

Guests

Charles Birch Bioligist, ecologist and theologian

Further Information

Australian Biography: Charles Birch

The New Believers: Charles Birch on The Spirit of Things Publications

Title: Biology and the Riddle of Life

Author: Charles Birch

Publisher: UNSW Press

Title: Science and Soul

Author: Charles Birch

Publisher: UNSW Press

Presenter

Stephen Crittenden

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/religionreport/stories/2007/2122324.htm#transcript