It takes a resilient person to find the good in an insult from the biologist
and arch atheist Professor Richard Dawkins. When the Rev Professor Michael
Reiss was ousted from his post as director of education at the Royal
Society, the august scientific institution whose former presidents include
Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Chistopher Wren, Dawkins was typically scathing: “A
clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific
organisation — it’s a Monty Python sketch.”
Still, Reiss was able to see the funny side. “For my generation, to be
compared to a character in a Monty Python sketch is a singular
honour,” says the 51-year-old, who has only recently emerged from a
self-imposed purdah. As well as agreeing to this interview, he will appear
at The
Times Cheltenham Science Festival tonight, alongside Lord Winston and
Usama Hasan, a computer scientist and part-time imam, in a discussion about
faith and evolution.
Not much else about that episode was much of a laughing matter. Reiss, a
thoughtful and erudite figure with whom I became acquainted when we sat on a
Royal Society committee together many years ago, unwittingly sowed the seeds
of his downfall with a speech to a science festival in September. In it, he
argued that pupils who bring up the topic of creationism in a science lesson
on evolution should not necessarily have their viewpoint dismissed; instead
a teacher could use this “worldview” to start a scientific discussion.
A stream of articles followed, effecting a Chinese whispers-style, sexed-up
distortion of Reiss’s argument, suggesting that a Royal Society supremo was
advocating the teaching of creationism in science lessons. Within the space
of a few days, four years of Reiss’s careful academic research on how to
stop religiously minded pupils being turned off science had been reduced to
ruinous headlines.
That Reiss possessed better pro-evolution credentials than most (a PhD in
evolutionary biology from the University of Cambridge) counted for nothing
when weighed against a furious campaign by Fellows of the Royal Society
demanding his dismissal. In September, his contract — a secondment from his
permanent position as Professor of Science Education at London University’s
Institute of Education in Bloomsbury— was terminated.
Eight months on, the disappointment and hurt is obvious, but he is gracious in
defeat: “Because of [those headlines], I’m not surprised that members were
phoning up the President [Lord Rees of Ludlow] saying, ‘For crying out loud,
who is this person and why are we employing him?’. Then The Observer
carried a copy of a letter that three Fellows, all Nobel laureates, had
written to Lord Rees urging that I step down or be dismissed.
“I think the Society found itself in a very difficult position and I have
great sympathy for it. The Society is a member organisation, so it has to
listen to its members, and then of course it has to think about how it’s
seen by the wider world. To many people, it looked as if its director of
education was advocating the teaching of creationism in science lessons. The
society had to make a judgment — either to ride it out, which is initially
what it was doing, or cut its losses.” The fuming laureates, who included
Sir Harry Kroto, got their way.
Reiss’s sense of bewilderment is obvious: “Because this [the issue of whether
creationism can be dealt with in science lessons] is a sensitive issue that
I’d been thinking about for several years, I knew that nothing that I had
said or written contradicted either the Government’s line on creationism and
intelligent design (a pseudo-scientific form of creationism) or was contrary
to Royal Society policy or practice. I didn’t feel, ‘Oh Michael, you idiot,
you’ve made a complete mess of things’. I had taken a considerable amount of
care to make sure I didn’t put my foot in it.”
He acknowledges it was a turbulent time but says that his wife, Jenny, who
teaches earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, bore the brunt of the
stress. Compared with many people who get sucked into a media whirlwind, he
shrugs, “this was not the most pressurised situation of all time. I’m still
on good terms with many people at the Society and I’ve been touched by
messages of support, including from Fellows I didn’t know.”
The Monday after he was sacked, he returned to work at the Institute of
Education, where he researches, writes and advises on such matters as how
sex education should be taught (he edits a journal on the issue) and, of
course, how science teachers should deal with pupils who claim their
religious beliefs preclude them from believing in evolution or the Big Bang.
(For the record, Reiss believes that science teachers should not have to
address religious matters in science lessons if they don’t want to.) Now,
though, he believes it is time to take up the gauntlet again. His return to
the fray will challenge the growing orthodoxy in science that one cannot
subscribe fully to both science and religion. To be wedded to both
worldviews is, so the orthodoxy goes, intellectually bigamous.
Of course, Reiss, an evolutionary biologist by training and an ordained
minister, doesn’t see it like that. He believes that the exclusion of
religious believers from certain scientific positions amounts to
discrimination. For him, there is nothing dishonourable about believing in
the supremacy of the divine and of science. “Both positions can be held with
absolute integrity,” he says. So how does he reconcile the two realms?
“Evolution is God’s work. All of science is the outworking of God’s
activity.”
Michael Jonathan Reiss was brought up, with his younger sister Julia, in an
affluent, contentedly Godless household in North London. His father, an NHS
consultant, was an agnostic Jew; his midwife mother rebelled against her
Roman Catholic childhood by professing atheism in adulthood. Reiss was
agnostic until the age of 19; it was as a natural sciences student at
Cambridge, after attending some Christian meetings, that he decided religion
was for him after all.
It was not a dramatic conversion involving miracles or supernatural phenomena,
he explains, but “more of an inchoate feeling of it all making sense.” But
he was troubled by Genesis, whose account of the origins of the Universe ran
rather differently from those in his scientific textbooks. Comfortingly for
Reiss, theologians had long abandoned the idea that the Bible should be read
literally.
“It was completely clear to me, as an intelligent 19-year-old educated in
England at the end of the 20th century, that the Earth wasn’t just 6,000
years old. If you start from that position [not reading Genesis literally]
you’re not going to get yourself into all sorts of knots.”
Isn’t that simply cherry-picking the bits of religion you like and binning the
rest? Cherry-picking, he retorts, happens in science too; all great
scientists get things wrong. Newton believed that the planets would wobble
out of orbit, but that doesn’t invalidate the rest of his opus.
Wanting to carry out God’s work but not fancying life as a full-time vicar,
Reiss opted for the non-stipendiary ministry. The unpaid position suits him:
he holds one Sunday morning service a week, and officiates at the odd
wedding and funeral. His mother was “not exactly overjoyed” at his
ordination in 1990; his father bemused.
But Reiss finds that religion helps him to make sense of the world, to place
it in an overall framework. Where is the evidence for a God? “The evidence
is not the sort of evidence that stands up for a scientist,” he states.
“It’s not scientific evidence. It’s more what one might call inference.” I
tell him that it sounds like instinct, or intuition. Non-believers like me
have that too; and in any case, hasn’t science revealed that instinct is
simply the brain working very, very quickly? His view is that a scientific
worldview does not automatically invalidate a religious one.
“I’m extremely comfortable with the idea of scientific explanations for
instincts and intuition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that those
instincts and intuitions are mistaken. Our physiological perception of a
sunset, using rods and cones, doesn’t take away from the beauty of a sunset.
You can have beauty and science, in the same way you can have religion and
science, or moral philosophy and science. There’s no clash between them, in
my view.”
His conviction that science and religion can co-exist is symbolised neatly on
the front cover of a book, Teaching about Scientific Origins: Taking
Account of Creationism, that he co-wrote with the American educator
Leslie Jones: it features a Christian cross encircled by the DNA double
helix, with a primate sitting to one side.
“But nor do I think I see sunsets any more beautifully than Harry Kroto does,
just because I have religious faith,” Reiss adds quickly. “One might see
things differently, but religious belief doesn’t make you a morally better
person, a nicer person, a wiser person or anything like that.” While he
finds militant atheists wearing, it is still the religious fundamentalists,
with their agenda of hate and terror, who cause him most despair.
For some people, belief in a God — for which, by his own admission, there is
no scientific evidence — is akin to believing in fairies or astrology. Does
he find that offensive? “No, I am not offended,” he smiles. “Astrology
claims to be a science, in which the positions of planets influence things.
Those claims can be tested objectively and refuted.Good religion doesn’t
make those sorts of scientific claims so it’s in a different category.
“The thing about belief in fairies and Father Christmas is that we grow out of
them. It’s clear that religion is pretty different, in that there are not
millions of highly intelligent, well-functioning people who believe in
fairies and spend many hours each week devoted to persuading other people to
believe in fairies. One might just be able to erect an argument that they
are on a spectrum of belief, and that there’s some thread that connects
them, but, at the very least, they are orders of magnitude apart.”
And he lines up another analogy: the importance of religion to believers is a
bit like the importance of music to others. While music structures the lives
of some, for others it is incidental. His work as an education researcher —
he has never taught RE — is all about getting the music-lover (the believer)
and the musically deaf (the non-believer) to understand a little of where
the other is coming from.
He dismisses the idea that neither side can ever understand each other, a view
that has crept to our shores from across the Atlantic, where children are
not schooled in religious education because of the historic separation
between Church and State. As a result, one wing of American Christian
educators has fought long and hard to shoehorn religious accounts of the
world’s creation into science lessons, to the horror of the science
community.
In this country, he believes, Darwin’s grand idea, now in its bicentenary
year, should be taught to everyone before they leave school, alongside such
curriculum staples as mathematics and literature.
He is suddenly energised: “My interest has always been what to do if a pupil
brings up creationism as a reason for not accepting evolution or the
cosmological account of the origins of the Universe. If a science teacher
doesn’t want to discuss it, they shouldn’t have to, and that’s fine. But
supposing a teacher does feel comfortable allowing other children to discuss
it. Providing it’s a scientific discussion, about evidence, then I think its
a great opportunity to get pupils to understand how scientific knowledge
builds up. Too many 14 and 15-year-olds find school science uninteresting.
So if anyone asks a genuine question, we should use that question as a
vehicle for teaching good science.
“In the same way that PE teachers spend time thinking about how to deal with
children who are too embarrassed to do sports, or who think they can’t
catch, or can’t swim, biology educators have to deal with pupils whose
beliefs contradict the scientific viewpoint. That’s what teaching is all
about. Anyone can teach the one child in 20 who loves science — the real
challenge is to help the other pupils to understand it and perhaps come to
love it.”
