Science and Religion: Any Common Ground?

LB Turner

On 15 February 2023 an address was delivered at Evensong on the theme ‘Religion and Enterprise’ by Malcolm McKenzie who studied at King’s 1977–80 and co-founded the College's Entrepreneurship Lab in 2021. He is particularly interested in the question of how to make a real difference in the world through the innovative application of knowledge and skill in the market, together with the sense of responsibility that comes alongside spiritual and religious values. You can download the text of that address here or from the E-lab Events site here.

One engineering Kingsman who might have understood that the innovative application of knowledge can live happily alongside religion is the grandfatherly character shown here: Laurence Beddome Turner (1886-1963; King's College 1904-07 and 1919-41). His creative talents were exercised during the First and Second World Wars for developing better guns, better shortwave radios and better radar. On one occasion he surprised his Admi­ralty colleagues with a speech opposing the motion ‘that religion is unnecessary to the modern scientist’.

In honour of the Evensong address, documents from the College's special collections were shown in a pop-up exhibition in Chapel for the day. They relate particularly to two Kingsmen who prove that scientists can also be religious: William Oughtred, from c. 1600 when science, alchemy, mystic­ism, astrology, and mathematics were intricately intertwined, and Sir James Alfred Ewing from the c. 1900 post-Darwin reconciliation of science and religion.

For those of faith, isn’t science merely the study of Creation? What better way to know, and honour, God?

William Oughtred

William Oughtred (c. 1575-1660, King's College 1592-1605) was primarily a mathematician - he introduced the notation for sine, cosine and the "×" symbol for multiplication - but in his spare time he invented the slide rule and designed other apparatus such as a popular sundial and a plani­sphere (for astronomy and astrology).

He came up to King’s and studied theology (as required for 60 of the 70 Kingsmen at that time). As usual, he was made a Fellow three years after he came up. Five years later he was ordained, which was not usual - only about a dozen of the 70 Kingsmen were ordained. They are identifiable in the College accounts books (see first image below) as receiving, in addition to their quarterly allowance of 6 shillings 8 pence (for senior members of College), a further 3 shillings 4 pence 'pro ordine pres­biteris' (for being ordained priests).

Ordained members of King's got paid extra for saying exequies, or prayers for the dead who had left benefactions for that purpose. (All King's members were expected to participate in the services but the ordained members got paid extra, probably for playing a larger part in the service.) 'Outred' first appears among the 'Sociis presbiteris' for the 3 January and 29 March 1600 prayers for the Founder (Henry VI), for which each of those 13 ordained members got an extra 20 pence (see second image below).  

Oughtred stayed at King's until 1605 when he left to be a vicar and subsequently rector in livings near Guild­ford, Surrey.

In 1631 a student of Oughtred’s published a pamphlet against him, claiming the invention of certain of Oughtred’s devices (though not the linear slide rule) and apparently accusing him of neglecting his priestly duties to study mathematics. Oughtred published a pamphlet in his own defense, To the English Gentrie...The just Apologie of Wil[liam] Oughtred... (London: A.Mathewes, c. 1634). (See third and fourth images below.) Part of Oughtred's response was that God is found in Mathematics:

in all ages many of the most eminent in the sublimity of Theologie, have beene also conversant in the study of the Mathematicks; most profitably making them to serve and ancillate to their highest contemplations...And that in no other thing, after his sacred word, Almighty God (who creating all things in number, weight, and measure, doth most exactly Geometrize) hath left more expresse prints of his heavenly & infallible truth, then in these Sciences...

Digression 1: Alan Turing

About 325 years after Oughtred was in Guildford, another King's mathe­mat­ician, Alan Turing (KC 1931) was snapped on the streets there. He spent the ‘home from school’ years of his teenage life there.

Sir James Alfred Ewing

Sir James Alfred Ewing (1855-1935, King's College 1898-1903, then Honorary Fellow) was what nowadays would be called a materials scientist. His main area of research was magnetism. He was Professor of Engineering at Tokyo (where he developed a seismograph) before Cambridge University brought him back to be its second Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics. Under his Chair­manship (1890-1903) the Department expanded and the Mechanical Sciences tripos was instituted. In particular he was keen that engineers should be generalists before specialising.

Ewing was made a Fellow of King's eight years later. Although he grew up in the Scottish non-conformist tradition for which his father was a minister, he often attended services in the King's College Chapel, and he bequeathed £500 “for the purposes of the Chapel of the said College in token of my affection for the College, my enjoyment of its fellowship and my happiness in sharing its worship.”

He left Cambridge in 1903 to be the first Director of Naval Intelligence. When the First World War started he bootstrapped and headed-up Room 40 at the Admiralty 1914-17. Its decrypts were amongst Britain's advantages in the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland.

Amongst Ewing's honours were Fellow of the Royal Society and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In his 1932 Presidential address he pressed the importance of ethical developments being considered alongside scientific ones. After rehearsing the many benefits that technology had brought about, he noted that (see the second and third images below):

Man was ethically unprepared for so great a bounty. In the slow evolution of morals he is still unfit for the tremendous responsibility it entails. The command of Nature has been put into his hands before he knows how to command himself.

and he concluded:

I cannot think that man is destined to atrophy and cease through cultivating what after all is one of his most God-like faculties, the creative ingenuity of the engineer.

Ewing's funeral was held in the College Chapel and a few weeks later an address in his memory was delivered by the Dean of Chapel, Eric Milner-White (who invented the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols as we know it). (See fourth, fifth and sixth images below.) Milner-White began by saying '[T]o his eminence both as a man of learning and of practical achievement must be added this, which wonderfully suffused, deepened and beautified all, his greatness as a man of faith.' His address concluded with:

One of the most impressive and grandest things about the scientific advance of the last eighty years, has been the personal humility, and more often than not, the personal faith, of its great leaders. It is as if their knowledge...taught them first the limits of knowledge

and a piece of advice - that the road to deep and true knowledge, is to spend ten minutes every day quietly in the presence of God.

Digression 2: Alan Turing again

Room 40 - Sir Alfred Ewing’s wartime offshoot of Naval Intelligence - was the precursor to Bletchley Park, which brings Alan Turing to mind again. He too was FRS and was made a Fellow of King's two months after Ewing died.