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It is a great honour for me to have been invited to give this year’s Dr Perse’s Sermon. I have worked in science and education all my professional life. Early in my career I taught at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge for six years; I then moved to the University’s Department of Education where I ran a secondary combined science initial teacher education cohort for six years. Unsurprisingly, for me, therefore, in common I suspect with most people, Dr Perse is associated more with what in those days were called ‘The Perse School’ and ‘The Perse School for Girls’ than with his annual sermon. Some of you will know that Ronald Searle, who grew up in Cambridge, drew on The Perse School for Girls as one of the inspirations for his iconic St Trinian’s cartoons. As the headmistress, Miss Millicent Fritton (acted by Alistair Sim), put it in the films that followed: “In other schools, girls are sent out quite unprepared into a merciless world, but when our girls leave here, it is the merciless world which has to be prepared”.

My understanding is that Dr Perse gave no instructions as to the subject matter of the sermons, unlike, for example, Robert Boyle who, also in the seventeenth century, instituted annual addresses that also fell into abeyance only to be revived in the twentieth century. The Boyle lectures were set up with the stipulation, in the language and spirit of the time, that the Boyle Lecturer would “preach eight sermons in the year, for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews, Mahometans, not descending to any controversies that are among Christians themselves”. Like my sermon today, the Boyle lectures concern the relationship between science and religion.

After Cally Hammond contacted me about the arrangements for this evening, I asked what the readings would be, only to be told that I could choose them myself. As you have heard, I went, after some thought, for 2 Kings 20: 1-11 and Matthew 16: 1-4. Let me begin with 2 Kings. If you have ever read the books of Kings or Chronicles, they are a bit like the description of the monarchs in 1066 and All That. In Seller and Yeatman’s book the kings of England are either good or bad. In 1 and 2 Kings they are either righteous or evil. Our passage tells of an event in Hezekiah’s life. Hezekiah was considered a righteous king because he did his best to ensure that only Yahweh was worshipped, and because he restored the temple. His defeat of Sennacherib was commemorated by Byron in his famed poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’ with its wonderful first line ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold’.

Our reading begins with Hezekiah close to death. The prophet Isaiah tells him that he should set his affairs in order, for he is not going to recover. Isaiah then leaves Hezekiah but before he has gone any distance, the word of the Lord comes to him and he is told that God has listened to Hezekiah’s prayer and he will recover. In fact, Hezekiah goes on to live another 15 years.

However, in common with many other biblical figures who ask for assurance that what God has foretold will come to pass – think Gideon and his fleece, for example – Hezekiah doesn’t simply accept what Isaiah tells him but asks for a sign. And Isaiah says, “This is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing that he has promised: shall the shadow go forward ten steps, or go back ten steps?”. And Hezekiah answers, “It is an easy thing for the shadow to lengthen ten steps; rather let the shadow go back ten steps”. And Isaiah cries to the Lord who brings the shadow back ten steps.

There is a large literature on this ‘miracle’ and you might like to ask yourself what you think you would have seen the shadow do if you had been there. By and large, asking God for signs is not regarded very positively in scripture. As it says in our other reading, from Matthew’s gospel “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign”. Do you remember the passage in John chapter 12 where Jesus anticipates his death? He prays out loud, saying “Father, glorify thy name”. Then a voice comes from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again”. I said of our first reading that you might like to ask yourself what you think you would have seen the shadow do if you had been there. In John 12, we are explicitly told that people differed in what they heard: Some of the crowd standing by hear it and say that it had thundered. Others say, “An angel has spoken to him”. Jesus says, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine”.

Think now of the first of Jesus’ miracles in John’s gospel, at the Wedding in Cana. Here no one asks for a sign. Indeed, much of the power of the story comes from the fact that the ruler of the feast, along with most others there, doesn’t realise that a miracle has occurred and simply congratulates the presumably somewhat bemused bridegroom for keeping the best wine until last. But in the account it is clear that everyone tastes the water as wine, just as all 5000 ate of the fish and the loaves. For the writers of these passages, you and I, had we been there, would have benefitted, even if we didn’t realise the miraculous nature of the provision.

I said earlier that I have worked in science and education all my professional life. I am also a priest in the Church of England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am sometimes asked how I see the relationship between science and religion. Let me give you the short answer and then I’ll explain my thinking in a bit more detail. The short answer is that I see science as a partial way of understanding the world. Other ways of seeing the word, including religion, provide additional understandings.

Let me start with an uncontroversial example: pure mathematics. I was taught mathematics rather well at my first school, and very well at my secondary school. At my first school, I can still remember undertaking an exercise where we were asked to draw triangles of a range of shapes of our choosing and, in each case, to measure, using a protractor, the three internal angles of the triangle and then add them up. I remember, of course, always getting values of between about 179 and 181 degrees. I can still recall my puzzlement at this and drawing a very tall thin triangle in case it generated a different value; it didn’t.

Now my point is that mathematicians derive their conclusions in ways that are utterly distinct from how virtually all natural scientists derive their conclusions. To state the obvious, a professional mathematician, as opposed to a schoolboy aged about ten, does not determine the sum of the internal angles of a flat triangle in the way that I did. In contradistinction, it would make complete sense for a professional scientist, wishing to establish some truth about triangles, to gather samples of them, carefully undertake measurements on them and then use standard statistics to establish values of averages and variance or range.

Similarly, while science has a certain amount to say about beauty – for example, we typically consider people to be more beautiful if their faces have a high degree of symmetry – the discipline of aesthetics cannot be reduced to the natural sciences any more than the discipline of moral philosophy can. These various disciplines are not entirely independent of one another but none of them entirely subsumes the other.

This isn’t a bad way of considering religion but it’s not a perfect way. For one thing, religion isn’t a discipline in the way that the natural sciences, mathematics, aesthetics and moral philosophy are. A bit like education, it’s more of a field that draws on various disciplines as well as having a particular focus of its own.

For those who, like me, have a religious faith, one way of seeing science is therefore that it provides a partial way of understanding the world. My own field within science was evolutionary biology and population genetics. Among the many quite outstanding scientists who were members of this College, R A Fisher is undoubtedly the most famous population geneticist. His The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is perhaps the second most important biology book ever written, surpassed only by Darwin’s On The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. One of the areas much studied by evolutionary biologists and population geneticists is reproduction. Now, my point is that when it comes to understanding what it is like to be in love, both evolutionary biology and population genetics have something to say, as do physiology and neuroscience. But what we learn from these subjects does not fully explain what it is like to be in love. For that, most of us turn to personal experience and the accounts of others, sometimes aided by great literature.

William Blake put it well: “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty”. When I see a kestrel, I sometimes think of Hopkins’ The Windhover; when I look at the paintings of Stanley Spencer, I see the work of someone for whom the everyday was a portal to the eternal.

Standard accounts of the difference between science and religion tend to talk about the objectivity of science and the subjectivity of religion, or to stress that religion requires faith unlike science. There is much truth in these distinctions but the point I want to emphasise is somewhat different. It is that if we want to understand the world, science on its own will provide a narrower understanding than that provided by religion that builds on science. Now, some of you may reject anything that departs from the methods of science when attempting to build on science. In that sense you are a materialist, not in the way that the term is sometimes used nowadays of someone who seeks to accrue possessions to excess but in the sense that you are probably doubtful that anything exists beyond the material, beyond matter.

For many people who have a religious set of beliefs and engage in religious practices and perhaps even have religious experiences, those beliefs, practices and experiences help provide meaning to their lives. This is not, of course, patronisingly to maintain that those who do not have a religious faith lack meaning in their lives; rather, it is that such a meaning that needs to be constructed. As the website for Humanists UK puts it, a humanist “believes that, in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same”. 

Let me end by saying that while I am all in favour of seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same, for the Christian, of course, true happiness is most likely to follow from seeking to conform one’s life to the will of God. Note that while we can learn much from paying attention to the words of Jesus and his recorded actions, confirming one’s life to the will of God is not quite the same as asking oneself ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ – the guiding principle of those who wear WWJD wristbands or have WWJD stickers on their cars. Recent attempts of mine to change water into wine have not been entirely successful. The religious believer seeks to locate the pearl of great value, to discern the meaning that is there in the fabric of the universe.