Latest / Polymath World Channel / Polymath World # Episode 41 - Dr Nick Spencer
Transcript
- Polymath World (00:01.219) Hello and welcome to the Polymath World Channel and today I'm talking to Dr Nick Spencer and we're going to be going through the history of science, history of religion, we'll be getting into some ethics. Nick is a real outstanding writer and I was very fortunate to have a great chat with him for the show Premier Unbelievable a year ago and I got to do a book review for his book Playing God for one of the Science and Religion channels. So really excited to be here today. Thanks so much Nick for joining me. Nick Spencer (00:28.494) It's a real pleasure, thank you. Polymath World (00:31.083) So you are a historian, a writer, a historian of science. Tell us how you got into the field. What was your journey like in terms of education and research? Nick Spencer (00:43.414) I think it's probably fair to say I'm a jack of all trades and a master of none whatsoever. My first degree many, many years ago was in literature and history, which was a joy. I then went on to become a researcher, kind of a consumer and social researcher for a while, and then moved on to work for a couple of small Christian think tanks and joined Theos, the Christian think tank for which I work now 20 or so years ago. And then about 10 years into that, did a doctorate in... political theology. So you'll notice that none of those particular disciplines are scientific or normally understood to be scientific, but I've had a long standing interest in science, particularly the history and philosophy of science. I wrote a little book on the Big Darwin anniversary in 2009 and got more and more interested in the topic. So for much of the last 10 years or so, I've been working on the history, the sociology and the philosophy of science, particularly as it relates to religion. Polymath World (01:41.335) Yeah, your books have done outstandingly well. I mean, you can find them all in a Waterstones or Blackwells and all those sorts of places. I used Magisteria a bit in my first doctorate. And this is a fascinating area. I feel like we're moving into a new boom of history interest with people like Tom Holland. When did you start getting a flair for writing and what was your first book? Nick Spencer (02:08.174) Well, I mean, if you're asking when I start getting a flair for writing, I was probably about five at the time. It just, I've always loved books. I'm a chronic, addicted bibliophile. And my parents will say to me, even when you, I mean, this is a bit of a tragic thing to admit really, even when went for a holiday, you're always kind of scribbling in a notebook and writing stories and that kind of stuff. Like any good literature graduate, I knew I was going to be the greatest novelist in history since I left university and wrote a novel. Sadly, none of the publishers I sent it to quite saw it the same way and it remains an unpublished masterpiece. But I first started writing books about just over 20 or so years ago and I've written about three or four in the last five years. Polymath World (02:56.556) Hmm. Yeah, it sounds a lot like my girls. They're both convinced that they're gonna be the next J.K. Rowling or sort of big fantasy author when they grow up. But you stuck with it. I forget. Did you go to Oxford or Cambridge? Nick Spencer (03:09.358) So my first degree, the Literature and History degree was at Oxford, Jesus College Oxford, and then I did a doctorate at Cambridge also, although quite coincidentally, Jesus College Cambridge 25 or so years later. Polymath World (03:23.318) What was your PhD thesis on? Nick Spencer (03:26.03) It was on the, broadly speaking, it's on the relationship between Christianity and the welfare state. And being a PhD, yeah, actually gets much more kind of specific and detailed than that. But the broad canvas is what, according to Christian thought, should the state do vis-a-vis the provision of welfare? Polymath World (03:51.511) Now when you're taking on a task like writing a book like Magisteria, where you're going through the whole history of science and religion, how does one even do that? Where do you start? That's such a massive, massive project and it is a pretty big book. So what was that process like? Nick Spencer (04:10.286) That's a really good question. I suppose it was helped, in fact, made possible by the fact that I'd been broadly speaking, reading around the history of science and religion for at least 10 years before I put pen to paper on that one. As I mentioned, I wrote this little book on Darwin. I got very interested in 19th century history of science and religion, which was a very, very important period of time. I was less well aware, but cognizant of other periods of history. I guess I would have had a very loose roadmap in my mind when I set out, but a general one. And the one piece of advice I give to anybody who says, you know, I'd like to write is get stuff down on paper and then start writing. If you see what I mean. Do not pause over a pure unblemished blank sheet of paper until the right form of words get into your mind, because they won't. Polymath World (05:00.248) Hmm. Nick Spencer (05:10.072) You get stuff down on paper, it's a bit more like sculpting really. You just start hacking away at the block and eventually the shape emerges, but it's certainly not going to be there with the first two hammer blows. Polymath World (05:23.948) Hmm. you have, you said the 19th century was obviously very, very important. Was that your favourite period to research? Nick Spencer (05:33.358) for the science and religion book. Ironically, no, because I had done quite a lot of work on that in the Darwin book. actually, it was discovering the history in other periods or getting better acquainted with history in other periods that was more interesting because it was fresher. Polymath World (05:35.501) Yes. Polymath World (05:53.753) Hmm. It's a difficult question, sort of, when did science begin? You've got, You've got the arguments from Aristotle and Democritus and the ancient Greeks. You have periods in China and Arabia, but they lose interest. They're sort of spurts of moments, but it doesn't stick. It sort of really seems like the Renaissance and the Reformation happening at the same time create the... the foundations for modern science to actually begin and flourish. How do you see science really beginning and taking off? Am I on the right lines there? Nick Spencer (06:35.862) You are, but interestingly, you use two slightly different phrases in your question. You asked about science at the beginning and then you switch to modern science towards the end. The reason I highlight that is that the answer to that question almost entirely depends on how you define science. Now, if science is a human inquiry into the operations of the material world, let's say that generally, it's always been there. There's not a civilization we've known. Polymath World (06:45.773) Yeah. Nick Spencer (07:05.217) that hasn't in some way been interested in that. However, most people would say that's a kind of a necessary but not sufficient definition for what we talk about as science. Now there is a massive philosophical discussion about how you define science. co-wrote a book on it, which came out this year, in fact. We can park that, you particularly want to, want to go down that rabbit hole. But I think critical to our conception of modern science is organized skepticism. Ironically, given the way that science is used in popular discourse, this is a scientific proof. Science is much better understood as organised skepticism, organised doubts. And in order to do that, you've got to reach a stage where you state, we don't know how this operates. And there were several massive shocks to the... European, the Latin European intellectual system in the 16th and 17th century that caused them to move in that direction. The first was the discovery of the New World, a whole continent that we didn't know about beforehand. But critically, part of that, a whole continent that the ancients, our great scientific authorities, our Aristotle, Ptolemy, Gaiann, etc. didn't know about. So all of a sudden we're cast into a state where we don't actually know that the sources of authority we thought we could trust we can't trust at the same time in various different ways Copernicus challenges another way in which the authority of the ancient world was previously believed in terms of his replacement of geocentrism with heliocentrism and a third even greater challenge is the Reformation and the way in which reformers challenged, this was almost kind of incidental, wasn't, but it was almost incidental, they challenged the authority of Aristotle again. Catholic theology was very heavily influenced by, was essentially Aristotelian, and they challenged that. So you get these three massive challenges that make people think, hang on a second, we aren't sure about the intellectual foundations. Nick Spencer (09:21.218) by means of which we navigate the world. And that, through other means, allows the development of what becomes known in 17th century as experimental natural philosophy. And that begins to look a lot closer to modern science, as we understand. Polymath World (09:39.417) Hmm. Now Arthur Eddington, who I did my doctorate on, sort of said that science is a... it's like climbing a mountain, it's a continual upward climb towards pure and pure truth. But then you've got people like Thomas Kuhn sort of say that science progresses one revolution after another. Who do you think is closer to the truth there? Is it Kuhn or is it Eddington? Is it just a... The body of knowledge is continuously growing drip by drip, bit by bit? Or is it lurching from one paradigm to another? Nick Spencer (10:15.36) I'm closer to Eddington on that one. I Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is enormously influential and he was definitely onto something in his challenge of the slightly complacent idea that science progresses naturally, smoothly and almost inevitably and it really doesn't. However... I hesitate to say this because there's probably some counter example somewhere, but I don't know of any great scientist who is not in the first instance schooled in the science of their day. so they are, they might famously in the case of Einstein, they might take the science of the day off in a radically new direction. And there can be periods of greater progress and more abrupt progress. So in that regard, think Kuhn is right. But I tend towards a more gradualist understanding of the progress of science. Polymath World (11:18.232) Why do you think the... how shall I phrase this... the Renaissance and the Reformation... I might have lost myself here... Can you hear me okay? Hmm. It's wifi. Can you hear me okay? Nick Spencer (11:48.12) I know. Polymath World (11:48.299) Right, great, sorry, technical problem again. Why do you think the Renaissance and the Reformation together created the fertile ground for science to really explode in the way it did? You mentioned sort of overthrowing Aristotle, but was it a worldview issue as well, do you think? Nick Spencer (12:11.34) Yeah, I I'm not sure this may be a controversial point, but I'm not sure the Renaissance was that influential, certainly in development of science. I what the Renaissance did, the Renaissance is a big, sprawling, messy term, it's not one single thing, but it recaptured and regrounded a lot of European thoughts in that of the classical world and reasserted the authority of a lot of the classical world. And I don't think that was particularly helpful in the long run. the development of science. What the Reformation did, as I mentioned, was challenge a lot of those assumptions. Now, this doesn't mean that the reformers naturally made good scientists. In fact, in one sense, made them very bad scientists, because you could argue that they simply replace one authority with another. But through a series of coincidences, particularly around what happened with the rediscovery of Augustine or in particular, not so much a rediscovery, but a re-appropriation of his idea of sin, Protestantism did move into that space and did cause the fruitful home for the development of science. But it was overall these challenges to the basic authority structures, the intellectual authority structures, how we know and how we understand the world that proved necessary for the development of we call the scientific revolution. Polymath World (13:40.909) Hmm. Well, let's let's segue into science and religion for a moment. Obviously, I mean, you put a lot of research into the end of the 19th. You've got Draper. You've got these these writers who talking about very much. Science has always been, you know, opposed by religion and religion has always been the enemy. You do five minutes of history of science. You know, that's not the case. But but. The idea that science and religion are always in conflict is still quite popular and I'm not entirely sure why but let's take the Galileo affair for example here. Can you break down what's the real story with Galileo and the church? Nick Spencer (14:31.726) So the popular story is the church point blank refused to acknowledge and then threatened Galileo with torture if he continued to broadcast the idea that the sun was the centre of the cosmos and solar system rather than the earth. There's lot of truth in that. mean, Galileo was threatened with torture and he was forced to shut up after 1632. But at first, the church, the Catholic Church, is actually reasonably receptive to these ideas. It is skeptical. At least one of the reasons it's skeptical is that there are plenty of very big outstanding questions that Galileo didn't, Galileo's theory didn't answer. So there was, as it were, quite proper scientific skepticism there. This was still a relatively new idea and the jury was out and the data wasn't in or not sufficiently. Secondly, the telescope that Galileo looked through in 1608, 1609 were impressive and allowed people to see things that hadn't been seen beforehand, but they were still pretty basic instruments. so, again, there was a question of how reliable is this? So there were scientific questions. There were theological questions, largely because Aristotle was central to the science and theology of the Catholic Church at the time. And there was a concern if you overthrew Aristotle within science, which Galileo's work effectively did, you would also be overthrowing him in theology as well. And that then challenged the reality of what was happening on the mass. So this was a theological fear as well as a scientific one. But there was also a basic social issue going on there, which was that this was in the time really of the wars of religion, mean slightly afterwards technically speaking, but before the 30 years war, when the church was afraid that any heterodox ideas might end up being another reformation, another Luther, another form of Protestantism. So there's an intellectual anxiety that makes the church at the beginning of the 17th century not particularly receptive. And then there's a whole personal beef that Galileo has. Nick Spencer (16:57.26) with the Pope who becomes Urban VIII. Galileo said he'd rather lose a friend than an argument. And he did that quite aptly with the way he effectively publicly mocked Urban VIII in the book that was banned. So there's a whole host of other stories that come in. It doesn't undermine the basic truth that for the next 150 years or so the Roman Catholic Church effectively banned the teaching of heliocentrism and it was a catastrophe. Polymath World (17:09.794) you Nick Spencer (17:27.052) But to say that the church was simply out to get a Galileo from the outset is a bit false. And it fails to understand the fact that up until that point, and indeed in many ways after that point, the Roman Catholic Church was hugely supportive of the natural sciences. Polymath World (17:46.679) Yeah, well what about Darwin then? Obviously you've written a book on Darwin as well as magisteria. I read quite a lot of Acer Grey during my master's degree and it certainly didn't seem at all that Christians right, left and centre were horrified or exasperated at Darwin. He seemed to be extremely welcomed by lot of theologians and a lot of scientists with religious faith. But taking the Wilberforce Huxley debate for example. How do you see the early reception of evolution in Britain when Darwin releases the Origin of Species? Nick Spencer (18:27.828) pretty shaky in the 1860s. Again you need a bit of context here. Darwin had obviously dreamt up the idea, thought up the idea 20 years earlier, but evolution or transmutation as it was called at the time was not only a heterotopic idea scientifically speaking but socially a very very challenging idea indeed and one of the reasons why Darwin delayed publication for so long was that he knew it was like throwing a stone into the pond socially speaking. Darwin himself recognised that there were scientific gaps in the idea. So there was a lot of criticism of it in the 1860s or so on some quite legitimate grounds. And even Darwin himself in the subsequent five editions, there were six in total of the Origin of Species, rode back on some aspects of his original idea. So there were scientific objections and there were theological objections. And again, one doesn't want to paper over the fact that Darwin received it. read one of his correspondence. Darwin received letters from clergymen roundly rebuking him and finger wagging him and basically threatening him with hell for saying what he'd said. But that wasn't the only response he got from clerics and theologians, as you point out, with Acer Gray or people like Charles Gingsley and others were quite positive and receptive. And the important point is within a relatively short period of time, Intellectual opinion on both sides of the Atlantic was Christian intellectual opinion was pretty much reconciled with evolution. Darwin died in 1882 and he was buried in Westminster. They didn't do that with heretics in the Victorian period. So there was a period of tumult and resistance. Some of it was quite legitimate and some of it is, as I said, down to the perceived social implications of Darwinism rather than the science itself. But some of them was, some of it was theologically driven. Polymath World (20:05.954) Hmm. Nick Spencer (20:23.756) within a generation it had settled down. Polymath World (20:26.562) Hmm. Yeah, you know, apart from the fact that it's a hundred years since the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, there's not really a lot more I can think of where you've had moments of science and religion being opposed. I mean, that's those are the kind of the big headlines, really. Darwin and Galileo. The Scopes Monkey Trial is sort of an interesting, strange social moment. but I can't really see a lot more conflict than that. can you make an argument that Christianity and Judaism have been quite helpful for the development of modern science? Nick Spencer (21:11.586) You undoubtedly can. Let me give just two or three very quick examples. Science, modern science and arguably ancient science, at least successful science, is predicated on the idea that a seemingly messy world is actually law governed. That idea was rooted in Christian thought. God is a law giver. The people of Israel were given a law, a moral and ritual law. But there are plenty of verses in the scriptures that talk about the creation also being law governed. So if it's law governed, we should be able to find out the laws. We should be able to find out the laws because mankind is made in the image of this creator and so arguably shares something of the rationality of the creator and the creation. So that gives a mandate to the idea that we are capable. cognitively speaking, of understanding the way the world works. I mentioned earlier in our conversation the importance of the rediscovery of Augustine in idea of sin. What that effectively meant in the Reformation period was that sin meant we were morally fallen, but it also probably, people argue, meant that we were intellectually fallen too. We couldn't simply think or reason our way to the truth. You had to feel or experience or experiment our way to the truth. So actually, what we talked about earlier about science being a form of organised scepticism, some of the idea of that scepticism derived from the Christian idea that we need to be sceptical of our own cognitive abilities because we're fallen creatures. One further example, when science, modern science, as we kind of discuss it, gets off the ground roughly late 17th century, doesn't achieve very much. It's a long time before it starts, as it were, cashing in and getting are bangs for our bucks. So it is ridiculed. There's some great, actually sometimes very funny ridicules of what's going on in the Royal Society in the late 17th, early 18th century. But one of the reasons it's continued is because people say, well, scripture says that we glorify God through the creation. And creation glorifies God. So how much more Nick Spencer (23:35.32) Does creation glorify God? If we understand it, not by, as it were, just looking at it outwardly, but looking at it inwardly, by understanding how it works, we glorify the works of the creator. So there are major kind of Protestant scientists or natural philosophers at the end of the 17th century, people like Hooke and Boyle, who say things like, science is allowed on the Sabbath, which is an extraordinary thing for Protestants to do because you rest on the Sabbath. But glorifying God is part of that rest and science is part of glorifying God. And so one of them, think it's Boyle, even suggests that natural philosophy is an activity we will undertake in heaven because it's a form of honouring God. So this protects and nurtures and feeds this very new discipline which we now call science. So in all those different ways, you can argue this is the reason why modern science takes off in Latin Christendom. in the 17th century in the way that it doesn't in other places. Polymath World (24:37.686) Yeah, it's staggering. There's all these little moves and ways of thinking about the history of science and religion that you wouldn't naturally think of today. Obviously Joseph Needham spent a lot of his career researching why science took off in the West in ways that it didn't elsewhere and put a lot of credit on that. We don't have a lot of time left, I know, and I want to get to your writings on bioethics. You wrote a book called Playing God, really breaking down some of the challenges going forward in terms of where science is going. Could you tell us about that? Nick Spencer (25:17.048) Yes, so the link between what we've just been talking about and playing God is this. I argue in the history books that the relationship between science and religion has been most interesting, most animated and sometimes most argumentative when it comes to the question of the human being. Contrary to what Stephen Jay Gould argued, I don't think science and religion are non-overlapping magisteria, noma. I think they are partially. overlapping magisteria or poma and that they overlap over the question of who we are and who gets to say who has the authority to adjudicate on that question. Now, magisteria ends with a brief detour, the very end on AI and the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me was that our ability, the ability of science to understand, to modify and to quote unquote improve the human is greater now. than it has been in our scientific history. Science has always kicked up questions of what should we do, but increasingly it looks like it's going to be kicking up questions of who should we be? And science itself is not, by definition, capable of answering either of those questions. It's not an ethical discourse. It's not a metaphysical discourse. By definition, its success has been because it's bracketed out those questions. So what that means is that science is going to kick up these incredibly important questions of what kind of being should we be? If we can modify the human genome, big if. To what end? What should we be trying to achieve? If we can extend human life by 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years, should we? What does that mean for relationships, for old age, for community? If we are designing AI to become more and more autonomous and better and better at absorbing and working through data and information, at what point, if ever, should we accord AI rights or begin to treat it with the same respect we might treat a living being? So these are fundamentally metaphysical and ethical questions. Nick Spencer (27:40.534) And I think that means that there is a real opportunity for a positive and thoughtful discussion between science and religion. There's certainly going to be a need for these deep conversations in the future, hence the Plain God book. Polymath World (27:54.307) Hmm, I think people have been caught off guard quite a bit by just how quickly it's boomed and permeated everyday life. I wonder if you could say a word on my own discipline of genetics and genetic engineering and these questions of what it will mean to be human going forward. Nick Spencer (28:13.198) Yeah, so the best way of looking at that is there's a kind of a sliding scale from the kind of genetic engineering that focuses on healing diseases at one end through one that looks towards healing or helping disabilities in the middle, all the way through to one that looks at enhancing abilities at the end. Most people would agree that the kind of genetic engineering that might be healing diseases, and in some instances is very successful. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a classic example that seems to be amenable to genetic medicine. Although it's worth pointing out that many diseases are far more polygenic and complex and are probably not quite so straightforwardly amenable. But when it comes to Polymath World (29:08.172) Yes. Nick Spencer (29:11.714) genetic response to a clear disease that destroys the human being and human good, people would accept that. But if you slide along the scale and think, well, look at blindness. Say if blindness was capable for genetic healing, should we? Well, in one sense, yes. But you don't want to imagine that being blind whilst it is a disability means that you are facing the same kind of disease and disability you have if you have Duchenne muscular dystrophy or that blind people can't and don't play a very significant and important contributive role in society. So the good you are trying to achieve at that point is a little bit more questionable. And then if you go right to the end to say something very hypothetical like intelligence, well, who wouldn't want to be more intelligent? We never use the word stupid as a compliment. But when it comes to enhancing abilities like that, should we really, if we could deploy genetic medicine to address something that isn't a disease, isn't a disability, it's just part of the human condition. At what point do we recognise that this is just our human nature and it isn't a problem to be solved even if genetic medicine holds out that possibility? Again, a contentious sliding scale which demands a kind of considered ethical response that is predicated on a certain understanding of who we are as humans and what should we value? in our humanity. Polymath World (30:41.56) I've gone back to Cambridge recently as part of the genomic medicine program and there really is a great desire in the NHS to be a world leader in this and a great sense that I share that genomic medicine really is the future if you're looking at a future of personalised precision medicine. But do you think everyone should get their genome sequenced? Every baby should have their genome sequenced. There are quite big questions and issues there. What are your thoughts on sequencing the genomes of every baby and every adult? Nick Spencer (31:17.678) I probably haven't thought deep enough about this. My instinctive reaction is one of hostility, primarily because it actually loops back into, we briefly touched on AI, I briefly talked about AI there. One of the concerns people use about AI is machines might take over. I don't really have that concern. I have much greater concern about the way that malign influences might deploy AI technology to take over. or to tilt the information playing field or to shut down various different infrastructure systems, so on and so forth. In other words, I have a greater concern about the that human beings will use technology than technology will use technology. And that's my concern with ubiquitous human genome decoding and registration. In theory, it could and should only be a good thing. But I do wonder about the famous example that's often used is the better able we are to understand and read the human genome. And even then, as you know, much better than me, that is very, very much more complex than the metaphor of code would have us believe. But the better we're able to read it, the more, the closer we'll come to understanding the long-term health prospects of human beings. That's gold dust to the insurance industry. So that's my concern. It's data leakage and data misuse is, I think, a very real concern and one that I would share. Polymath World (32:55.04) Yeah, health insurance one is a massive one. Maybe the biggest one. Penalizing people for their genes. You know, when your genes aren't you, it's often a misconception that your genes are who you are. Very quickly... Nick Spencer (33:09.486) So just on that, I do a podcast for Theos called Reading Our Times and interviews, know, authors about big, important, interesting books. And I spoke to the science writer, Philip Ball, about his most recent book, How Life Works. And it's brilliant, very technical, but brilliant take down of the idea that the gene, you are your genes, which has been so popular in the last 50 years or so. you know, he's absolutely fully sold up on the influence and significance of genes. There's nothing. There's absolutely no kind of cod science in there, but he points out that the idea that you can just simply draw a line between our genetic code and who we are misses out a whole load of other stages in the middle, which end up modifying and changing our nature. Polymath World (33:56.544) Yeah, absolutely. Very quickly, what other books are you working on at moment? Tell us about projects you've got coming up that we can look forward to. Nick Spencer (34:07.47) So I have a book coming out next year on the relationship between Christianity and the welfare state, which is based on the doctoral work that I mentioned. That's coming out with Cambridge University Press, some point in 2026, I'm not sure when. I'm working on a book proposal looking at the reason why secularism is failing around the world. If anywhere you really go, particularly in the big countries like India and Turkey. And even the USA and possibly in France, these big secular titans, secularism is failing. And it's an honest look at why that is the case. But in theory, the majority of my time should be spent working on a big project, looking at the rise of Christian nationalism, while I try to understand what it is, how wide a phenomenon, what its nature is, how theological it is, and how we might be able to respond to it constructively. Polymath World (34:44.344) Mm. Polymath World (35:01.804) Terrific, and people can find your books in every good bookshop, but if people want to find more about you and your work in particular, where should they go? Nick Spencer (35:10.88) At best places to the Theos website, that's theosthinktank.co.uk and there's lots of articles and podcasts and reports and that kind of stuff there. Polymath World (35:20.408) Thank you so much, it's always a pleasure to talk to you and I really love your work and I encourage people to check out your writing. Terrific historical writing, every good bookshop. Thank you so much Dr Spencer, it's been great. Nick Spencer (35:33.791) Real pleasure, thank you.