True Scientists, True Faith by R J Berry

Author:R J Berry [Berry, R J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Monarch Books
Published: 2014-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Oxford and atheism

After taking a Master’s degree in plant taxonomy at Reading University, I came to Oxford to work as a field assistant in the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology (EGI). Shortly afterwards, I was awarded a studentship, and so had fees to work for my doctorate in ornithology; at last I was making a living from birds. I was surprised at Oxford to find that most people, even in the EGI, were not as passionate about birds as I was, and the issue of the value of life soon emerged for me as a material one. It did so because bird welfare seemed to be a more significant issue for me than for some of the zoologists around me. Whether or not my perception was correct, it seemed that they had accepted the Selfish Gene view of life so thoroughly that they had extrapolated it to their working relationships with animals.

Because of my bird-ringing qualification, I soon found myself with sole responsibility within the department for training students in ringing techniques. This enabled me to instil in them from the outset that the welfare of a wild bird in their hands was a matter of significant responsibility (a bird is more than just a data point on a graph). The coming of the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act in 1986 raised ethical issues much more sharply than before for everyone engaged in animal-related work, including ecological studies. Despite its shortcomings, it is largely thanks to this that it is no longer possible to pay mere lip-service to ethical issues in animal research, and my appointment in the 1990s to the Ethical Review Committee of the Zoology Department brought the issue of value strongly into focus.

Through the 1980s and 1990s I became increasingly dissatisfied with the arguments for atheism that I found promoted gratuitously in my biology reading. Hitherto I had been content to ignore God, but I was now being forced to think about the issue. For example, having read a surprisingly strong scientific argument for the existence of God in Peter Medawar’s The Limits of Science,9 the best argument for demolition that he could muster in the next chapter was that it “defied common sense”! I had long held the view, based on my rudimentary understanding of quantum mechanics, that for a scientist “common sense” was the last refuge of the desperate. Furthermore, in the opening to The Problems of Evolution,10 Mark Ridley had pointed out that the very notion that species were not immutable (i.e. that they evolved), itself, defied common sense. So common sense gets us nowhere. Indeed, since my view that life has value was part of my common sense, it must at least be as valid a position as Medawar’s, even if it proved not to be scientifically sustainable. I began to realize that the conclusion that God did not exist did not come inexorably from any real science, but from the systematic annihilation of straw men – from simplistic literal readings of Genesis,

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