CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: Assumption that science has done away with religion is completely erroneous
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Everyone has heard of Albert Einstein. Far fewer of us are aware of the Galloway-based scientist and academic James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79). Yet Einstein claimed that in accomplishing his work he stood on Maxwell’s shoulders.
Recently, a deeply-researched biography of Maxwell was published. It’s by Dr Bruce Ritchie, of Inverness, former minister of Castle Street Church of Scotland in Dingwall, and a lecturer at Highland Theological College.
The book is a reminder that the widespread assumption that science has done away with religion is completely erroneous. Maxwell had a first-rate mind. His innovative work on electromagnetism, light, the science of colour, the rings of Saturn and much else, deployed both experimentation and mathematics to understand how the universe works. But this fearless exploration of issues in science, philosophy and ethics took place in the context of an orthodox, unshakeable Christian faith.
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His profoundest contribution to science lay in the equations which inspired Einstein. Building on earlier work by Michael Faraday, another Christian, Maxwell showed that the universe is not so much like an engine room, with individual components at work, as like a quilt where every point is in relationship with every other point, held together by force fields. And it is the relationships between the points which affects what they are and what they do.
This revolutionary perception ‘underpins all modern information and communications technologies’.
James Clerk Maxwell was sure that the material universe can be fully understood and explained by science. But he also believed in the permeating presence of an invisible spiritual reality which holds the universe in being. In humans, the body is physical, but the mind, the soul is spiritual.
Maxwell tells us that the universe ‘cries out for God’. There is no physical or philosophical answer to the question: ‘How did it all begin?’ The smallest particles science can find (and today we know of the mysterious quantum level) must, Maxwell reasoned have come into being fully-formed.
It’s been suggested that his belief in God as a Trinity of relationships – Father, Son, Holy Spirit – predisposed him to see relationship as the heart of the material universe. He certainly realised that we become our truest selves only in relationship – fundamentally in relationship with Christ.
Maxwell’s personal life was marked by devotion to God, by kindness, humility, service to others. A comment he made to his wife Katherine reveals his intimate sense of relationship with God. He wrote of the two of them ‘being drawn up into Christ’s love and receiving into our little selves the fulness of God’.
Bruce Ritchie has produced a challenging, wonderful book about this man Maxwell, whose life encourages us today - as his mother encouraged him - ‘to look through nature to nature’s God’.
