Thoughtful Religiosity by Jonathan Dower

I found this article in the Times magazine (27.12.08) a few days ago.
Admittedly I was drawn to opening it by the wonderful shot of Scarlett Johansson wearing not particularly much (joking, honest!) but then I found this in the year in view section.
It was an interview with Dr Brian Cox, a British physicist who was involved in the LHC collider at CERN, who also has made a few television programs on particle physics and the like. He, to me, is generally awesome, a physicist who (as Alan Franks puts it in the article), “resembles some potential Doctor Who of the distant future, or else a pop star of the less distant past. Which is what he was as keyboard player with D:Ream, the band that gave us, and the first Blair campaign, that anthem of general improvement, Things Can Only Get Better. He talks of impossibly difficult subjects in a way that lets the layman in, and it is to this skill that he owes his newer, more solidly stellar role. As well as presenting TV science programmes, he made a great impact on Newsnight earlier this year when he explained the problems of the Collider. He is from Oldham and one of Manchester University’s High Energy Physics group.”

Okay times online makes it too easy to copy entire chunks of texts (and i’m not plagiarising here as I am saying right now that all the text here that it in quotation marks was written by Alan Franks) but that sums this guy up really.
On the opposite page is a picture of Dr Cox holding 2 pretty big circuit boards up and looking exactly like a keyboardist from the past or a doctor who of the future. It’s true.

I read on through the article, mainly about how the LHC had broken down and what the hopes for 2009 were…. and then at the end there was a wonderful little section on religion. I’m just going to copy the last 2 paragraphs (which were written by Alan Franks, okay?) and let you read it for youselves if you can be bothered… I would recommend it though as it is really thoughtful and makes a lot of sense really.

“Talking of Einstein, where is God, and what might “His” future be? Einstein said he was religious in the sense that, “Behind anything that can be experienced, there is something our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection,” but he also said he did not believe in a personal God. What of Dr Cox? “I think that when you are a scientist, you are comfortable with the answer, ‘I don’t know.’ The wrong thing is to guess; scientific training should make you know what you know and what you don’t know, and to be comfortable sitting on the edge. That’s where I am. It comes up a lot in the US, and I say, ‘I don’t know how the universe began, and I think God is a guess.’ I don’t care about the legitimacy of the guess – it’s a guess.

“I have a very good friend [the Rev Victor Stock, dean of Guildford Cathedral], and we agree pretty much on everything. So, thoughtful religiosity doesn’t close doors. The human condition is an interesting thing, and a reaction to it is to try to understand the way the world works. Another reaction is religion, which is a common one because you want to find meaning in the world. In that technical sense, they are both valid reactions. I don’t think they intersect because they are different approaches to the same thing. There is no conflict at all unless they are forced to intersect by some sort of misunderstanding. Religious people wanting to treat the Bible as a textbook force them to intersect, and then you do get a problem because it is clearly wrong. St Augustine knew that to treat it as a manual for reality was a disservice to a philosophical text.” "

It’s true. I’m a catholic and I believe strongly that it is true.
Too many people still treat the bible as a ‘manual for reality’, when it so clearly isn’t. But at the same time, aetheism too is not necessarily ‘correct’ – we simply don’t know.
I say I’m a catholic but I think I’m much more agnostic- and this is what I would hope a lot of people are, even if we don’t realise it. We sit on the fence.
“Yehh well there could be a God…. or maybe there isn’t. Umm…”
To me that is the most open way to be – prepared to accept either way even if we choose to believe a certain way in particular at some point.
Meanwhile, aetheists who choose to actually look down on religion (and I know just a few) are perhaps blind to the fact that we really don’t know. A lot of religion does have to be looked down upon- particularly parts that treat the bible as said ‘manual for reality’. But to completely discredit and disgrace it, saying those who follow it are all misled fools, is very simply, wrong.

“This kind of collision, he (Cox) agrees, is likely to be observed well beyond 2009.”