Metaphysical Scotland
Subtitled ‘our century-long struggle to reconcile science and religion’, this book is the story of the Gifford Lectures delivered in the ancient universities of Scotland – St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow. They are the legacy of the Scottish Law Lord, Adam Gifford, who had a lifelong interest in philosophy and religion and died in 1887. Before they became well-known, the honorarium of £800 (twice the annual salary of a professor) was a compelling attraction, but now their prestige is the equivalent of a Nobel prize in philosophy and theology. Larry Witham’s book skilfully depicts the changing intellectual landscape of the last hundred years. This means that the book is not only an account of the content of the Gifford lectures, but also fills in the necessary background from the wider history of ideas. At the beginning, for instance, Witham explains the significance of Hume, Reid, Kant and Hegel in fashioning the intellectual climate of the late 19th century in which philosophical idealism clashed with the emerging evolutionary theory.

The book is structured thematically, beginning with idealism and then moving on to anthropology, psychology, physics, sociology and history. Later chapters discuss the revolt against reason, God and the new sciences and the limits of knowledge. Needless to say, many famous names are discussed within these pages. Over 200 lectures series have been delivered since 1888 with more than 200 books from about 150 of these lecturers. The first commissioned lecturer was Friedrich Max Muller from Oxford, the editor of fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East, which I have in my library. Other famous anthropologists follow: Sir Edward Tylor, Sir J.G. Frazer and Andrew Lang. Tylor and Frazer are thoroughly imbued with evolutionism, a stance later questioned by Lang and William James. The idea that Western culture is superior in every respect looks slightly quaint a century on – these early anthropologists were writing before the First World War and the appearance of Spengler’s Decline of the West.

William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience is perhaps the most famous series of Gifford Lectures to be delivered. James challenged the medical materialism of his day in a way that is still relevant in a hundred years later. At the same time he introduced the concepts of radical empiricism, process and pluralism, which were to have so much influence. Unlike the anthropologists, he was less interested in the origins of religion than in a search for fruitful ends through what he called a proper connection with the higher powers. He wrote that ‘the real life of religion springs from what may be called the mystical stratum of human nature.’ We see how James’s legacy was taken forward by the organicism of Bergson, Driesch, Alexander and Whitehead.

In the late 1920s, physics comes to the fore with the famous Solvay Congresses and the Gifford Lectures delivered by Sir Arthur Eddington, the Cambridge astronomer. Witham discusses at length the controversy between Einstein and Bohr and the emergence and influence of such key ideas as the complementarity and uncertainty principles. These lead on to questions about the limits of human perception, the nature of reality and the way in which we formulate our questions and experiments. Moving on to sociology and the lectures of Reinhold Niebuhr, Witham fills in 19th-century background with Comte, Spencer and Marx. The scientific optimism of John Dewey now looks rather one-dimensional, while Archbishop Temple reminds us that we live in a sacramental universe. The lectures and impact of Albert Schweitzer are treated at some length as an introduction to the work of Arnold Toynbee and Herbert Butterfield.

The next section looks at Karl Barth and the Christian existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann, leading on to an analysis of John Robinson’s Honest to God. The fallout from the Manhattan project begins to highlight ethical issues in applied science, while a naïve faith in science hardens into an ideology of scientism, which is frequently called into question by Gifford lecturers. One of these, Michael Polanyi, espouses both tacit knowledge and the independence of science from political and military influence. Other figures continue the debate on a designer universe – Sir Alister Hardy, Freeman Dyson, Ian Barbour and Sir John Polkinghorne among them. The original battle lines between idealistic philosophy and scientific materialism complexified during the 20th century, resulting in a common search for truth across the disciplines and reconciliation between different religious traditions as in the pluralistic universes of John Hick and Keith Ward. These thinkers also sound a cautionary note about the prevalent relativism.

This fine book contains a few egregious errors to be corrected in a future edition. The British Academy is described as the Royal Academy, Newton’s former chair is located in Oxford instead of Cambridge, and the book The Truth of God Incarnate is called The Fact of God Incarnate. And personally I did not appreciate Swedenborg being described as a spiritualist. However, these are small quibbles. Anyone wishing to understand the larger currents off the changing debate between science and religion should read this book.