Edinburgh, Where Christianity and Science are on Speaking Terms

Before I moved to Edinburgh, I heard the previous bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, interviewed on CBC's Tapestry about reconciling science and Christianity, so I already had reason to suspect that organized religion might be organized a little differently over here. In October, Mike and I got a first hand glimpse at the warm relationship that appears to exist between at least some sectors of Christianity here and at least some sectors of science through the Gifford Lectures.

In 1885, Lord Gifford bequeathed money to Scotland's four original universities (Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and St. Andrews) so that they could invite important, ground-breaking scientists and philosophers to come and talk about their work to the schools of divinity and to the public in general. I am paraphrasing and putting my own slant here. What Gifford actually left the money for was "natural theology", that is the idea that the work of God can as easily be seen in the findings of scientists as it can in "revealed religion". I'm not a theologian by any stretch of the imagination, so if you want to know more about natural theology you'll have to look elsewhere. In practice, the last will and testament of Lord Gifford appears to be interpreted in such a way as to lead to some of the most prominent scientists and philosophers in the world coming to talk in Edinburgh to interested listeners of all walks of life, who do not have to pay a penny to attend.

Some of the prominent figures who have been Gifford Lecturers include: Hannah Arendt, John Dewey (ditto), Paul Ricoeur, Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Werner Carl Heisenberg, Michael Polanyi and the list goes on. This year Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist from California who made his name studying people with split brains was invited to give six talks in Edinburgh. I managed to get to all of them, Mike just missed one.

Gazzaniga gave a fascinating overview of what brain research tells us about who we are. He only had six hours to cram in a lot of interesting research, so it was just a taster, but a tantalizing one. A few tidbits I got out of it:

• The left-brain, right-brain thingee is a lot more complicated than pop culture allows for
• We are wired from birth to be ethical beings
• Brains fire differently in different cultures
• We can be trained at the neuron-firing level to stop recognizing some people as humans. That is to say, we can be trained out of Levinas' response-ability
• There is a part of the brain whose sole purpose is to tell stories about our experiences and our decisions, this part is associated with out sense of self and this part comes into play after decisions have been made

If I've said enough to intrigue you, you can watch all 6 lectures on the University of Edinburgh's YouTube channel.

Gazzaniga did not talk directly about religion, though he did touch on implications of this research on our ideas of free will and on the legal system. However, our neighbour (literally) the current bishop of Edinburgh, Brian Smith, attended all of the lectures (we even sat with him for one of them) and he led a discussion on the lectures after the last one was finished. Unfortunately, Mike and I had other engagements that evening.