Third Part - 10th November 2008

0:09:07 I went to Westcott House in 1979 just before my forty-ninth birthday; it was a funny experience becoming a student again; I was used to standing up and talking for an hour but it was much more difficult to sit and listen for an hour; there were many things I had to learn; I particularly enjoyed the New Testament courses; if you are a scientist, your instinct is to say what are the foundational phenomena which I can understand here, and for me Christianity is contained in the New Testament witness; I taught myself elementary New Testament Greek before I went to Westcott and I learnt a bit of Hebrew there, which was quite useful in using commentaries based on texts; I was the oldest person in the House and most of my contemporaries were talented young people in their late twenties; I felt very aged and wise at times; I also lived a double life; I got tired of being a student all the time and I could walk up Jesus Lane and turn into a Don again because although I had given up my Professorship the College kindly allowed me to work my way through Westcott by teaching for Trinity; I therefore remained a Fellow and could get away from student food from time to time; it was a very interesting two years leading to ordination; the Church of England believes in the apprentice system still so there are lots of things about being a clergyman that you can only learn on the beat; you have to do three years under the supervision of an experienced priest, serve your title as we call it; I did most of my title in a large working-class parish in Bedminster, south of Bristol; I was glad to go to Bristol as my mother was still alive and living in Wells, so we were quite close to her, and also Bristol was the big town of my youth, having grown up in Somerset; that was a very interesting experience; a lot of the time you just cruise around visiting the sick etc.; one of the things I learnt being in Bedminster in an area called Windmill Hill, that you could have a village within a big city; Windmill Hill was a working-class area, but typically people lived in what their parents had bought in the 1930's; it was a very stable community so they knew their neighbours; they had a constrained notion of the neighbourhood; I asked one old lady if she had any family nearby to which she replied that she had not as they lived at Whitchurch, a mile and a half away; the intellectual side wasn't exercised very much; there were one or two people in the parish interested in science and religion with whom I talked, but mostly I was just learning the job; after I had done that I was licensed to go solo and became vicar of a largish village outside Canterbury called Blean, a curiously, straggly place topographically, but very coherent socially; it was a community and the church had a real role within it; I would be expected to be at the flower show, the pensioners afternoons, they insisted on giving me a raffle ticket every time and I embarrassingly frequently won prizes; again the intellectual side was not too exercised though part of the agreement was that I would have some spare time to do a bit of writing; I wrote a book called 'One World' about science and religion which was quite successful; after I had been there for two years I went for a interview with the Bishop of Dover who ran the Diocese; I told him that I enjoyed being at Blean but in the longer term wanted something with a more intellectual component in it; I thought I was making a marker for several years hence; the Church of England is a very odd place in how you find jobs; some are advertised but you need to be watching your own interests really; within six months of having that conversation I was rung up by someone I knew in Trinity Hall who said they were looking for a new Dean and would like to interview me; after the interview they offered me the job; I then had to make up my mind whether to accept it because I had only been in Blean for two and a half years; my wife also was very reluctant to leave as she really enjoyed village life and the Women's Institute; I went to see the Bishop again and he said that he thought I had been offered the job I had described when I had last gone to see him - a wise and helpful thing to say; after a bit of hesitation I accepted the job and we returned to Cambridge; we had been away almost five years and people assumed we must be glad to be back; I said it was not as simple as that and Ruth just said "No"; she reconciled herself to being back; I enjoyed Trinity Hall; it was an interesting job as it had a liturgical and pastoral aspect, I ran the worship in Chapel and did what I could pastorally though I was not terribly good with undergraduates, bud did some with Dons and the staff; I also directed studies in theology in the College, and had a chance to write; I enjoyed the Hall very much; Trinity was large, grand and rich; Trinity Hall was comfortably off but small and domestic; they had this very good system where every Tuesday there would be a dinner for Fellows only and most of them came, a real binding occasion; I would have been perfectly happy to have stayed there for the rest of my academic life; then one day I was contacted by someone in Queens who said they were looking for a new President and would I like to be considered; I agreed though said I would have to think about it very carefully; after about three weeks the Vice President invited me to dinner, after which I was to be asked some questions; later I was invited with my wife for lunch; as it looked serious, I contacted three senior bishops, including the Archbishop of York, John Hapgood; I explained that I might be offered the Presidency of Queens but was unsure whether to take it as it was a secular job, though I knew I would have a role in the Chapel; they all independently said they thought there was some merit in some clergymen holding secular jobs it they had the experience to do it; eventually I was offered the job; then there was one final thing to be sorted out; Queens have double sets and there was agitation among the students to have mixed sharing of double sets which had not been allowed in College before, and the governing body was about to make up its mind; my own personal morality is pretty straight-forward - I believe that sexual relationships should be within lifelong marriage; I realize that not everybody agrees, and that Colleges no longer stand in loco parentis; I was not happy with the idea that colleges pry into people's relationships but to allow double sharing would be an institutional acceptance of something that I personally disagreed with; I said that if they decided to allow it then I couldn't accept the Presidency; in the end they didn't accept it so I became the President and moved into Queens; I was there for seven years; we lived in this wonderful Lodge, and had nice staff that helped us; just after we moved in there was a census which included a questionnaire about accommodation; we had twenty rooms  for the two of us; had a desire to write in the margin that this was not as scandalous as it sounded; I think that one of the key things in being head of house is to realise that you are not the CEO, you have to carry people with you; I liked that as I am not a CEO by temperament; of course, the governing body didn't always do what I thought was best but we didn't have any pitched battles; we did a lot of entertaining; I was not an enterprising sort of person so didn't produce enormous change; when I had been interviewed I said that I would do what I could for fundraising and be friendly with alumni; I had to essentially start from scratch as I didn't know any old Queens people and I did not have a natural taste for fundraising; two years after I retired in 1996 was the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the college; that was a big fundraising challenge for my successor, John Eatwell, who is a natural at that sort of thing

14:03:05 I had given up science although I had kept an interest in it, but I was able to do a fair amount of writing on science and religion; one of the things I missed in parish life was working with colleagues; parish life is fairly lonely; I used to go to chapter meetings with the local Deanery clergy, and people would stagger in with enormous diaries, I think to emphasise how busy they were; another thing I missed was the rhythm of term and vacation, although term is busy there is always vacation; parish life is fifty-two weeks a year chugging away; being the head of a house is not absolutely full time and gives you room for some of your own work; I think it important that heads of houses do have some sort of academic interest; I longed to be an FRS and it took me a little bit longer to be elected (1974) than I thought it might; I am very sad about this recent episode at the Royal Society, with their education advisor, Michael Reiss; he made it perfectly clear in a letter to the Times that what he had said at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was, of course, evolution is far and away the best explanation of the history and diversity of life; that creation science is not science and is not scientifically supported; but he also said that if in a science lesson somebody raised the creation question, you should not tell them not to, but explain that this wasn't the accepted way of thinking about things; they should be treated with some degree of respect; that seems to me to be an entirely reasonable thing to say; he was the victim of a sound bite which twisted his meaning so that he seemed to be saying that we should teach creation science in science lessons; my understanding is that the initial stance was to support him but then some fairly militant Fellows made such a fuss that they caved in; I very much regret that

18:29:01 I am interested in the history of Anglicanism and it is quite true that the English reformation was intellectually inspired from Cambridge; on the whole, Cambridge has played an interesting role over the centuries in this respect; one of the persons who got the old-fashioned natural theology going was John Ray who was a pioneer of taxonomy and wrote 'The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation'; William Paley represents the peak of that sort of movement was also a Cambridge man, a Christ's man; another Christ's man, Charles Darwin, gave a different form of the argument in 'Origin of Species'; in the nineteenth century the great strength of Cambridge was in New Testament studies, Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort were all people of very great scholarly ability and played a fundamental role in developing that kind of study in this country; the English style of doing that sort of study was careful but not as sceptically inclined as much of the German scholarship was; that has continued until fairly recently; Charles Simeon was an influential figure and CICCU has remained active here; I spoke earlier of my undergraduate involvement with it; one of the most extraordinary things has been the decline and disappearance of the SCM (Student Christian Movement) which was a more liberal counterpart to the evangelical Christian Union; it turned tremendously Marxist in the late sixties and withered away because of that and has not really re-established itself; Platonism has had an ambiguous influence on Christianity and has tended to encourage too spiritual a view at times; I think the dualistic view of the soul is not sustainable, nor a Biblical option either; most of the writers of the Bible saw human beings as animated bodies rather than souls; from my own belief I find Christian belief of a fairly orthodox kind more persuasive than a rather nebulous thing; think there is an explanatory power and comprehensiveness in a well articulated Christian theology than in a more nebulous spirituality

25:55:23 I think there is something in the idea that religion is necessary for science; the Abrahamic faiths all see the world as having a rational creator whose creation will have order to it, but the creator was also free to choose the order of the world, so you have to look and see the order that was chosen; that brings together the idea that there is order in the world, perhaps mathematically discernable, but you have empirically to look to see what that order is; moreover, if you believe the world to be God's creation then it is worthwhile to explore it, to read the book of nature as well as scripture; these things do combine together and provide some explanation of why the Ancient Greeks didn't quite get onto it, despite Archimedes, and the Chinese with their tremendous medieval civilization didn't get onto it either; I think you neither want an endlessly interfering celestial magician nor a deistic spectator; my picture, supported both by science and theology, is of a world of open process, not a clockwork deterministic world, but something more subtle and supple, and that God does act providentially within history just as we are allowed, in our small way, to act as agents; on the question of miracles, something I can't duck is my own belief that Jesus was raised from the dead; the problem of miracles is not such a scientific problem but a theological problem, that whatever God does he is surely not a celestial conjurer, capriciously doing today what He didn't think about doing yesterday; there is the question of divine consistency concerning miracles; God is not condemned never to do anything new, that is why we use personal language about Him; God is more like father than force; the force of gravity is always a force and will never change; God is more like a person and people can do things in particular circumstances which are unprecedented; that is the problem of the miracle; that is why, if you take the Christian view of the nature of Jesus, that he is God living a human life, then the fact that he was raised from the dead becomes not a random, capricious act, but a fulfilling and testifying act; miracles are not to be trivialized

31:02:24 I like Freeman Dyson's statement: "The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming"; what he means is that we have come to realize as we have understood the processes of cosmic history, that though this has happened through a whole sequence of evolutionary processes, nevertheless its possibility also depended on the given physical fabric of the world, the basic laws of nature taking a very particular and finely tuned form; only if the laws of physics lie within a very narrow range will it be possible for stars to make carbon, for example, on which life depends; there are many examples of this fine tuning; that is what Freeman Dyson is referring to; he phrases it in a curious way; I don't know what he means by saying the universe must have known that we were coming; Freeman has an ambiguous relationship to religious belief; he would call himself a cultural Christian but not a fully committed believer, and I think he was just trying to avoid the word God at that point; I would say that God intended that something like us (i.e. Self-conscious beings of some sort) should become; I believe that when I left science for the church, I turned my collar around but didn't forgo the search for truth; the question of truth seems to me absolutely central to religion as it is to science; I understand truth in a correspondence sense, matching our thinking and understanding to the nature of reality; of course, not a totally adequate or perfect match, but that is what we are aiming for; that is as essential to religion as anything else; religion is not, in my view, a technique for consolation or getting us through life; it is concerned with the reality within which we live; I think in both science and religion we are seeking truth through motivated belief; religious belief is not based on some unquestionable authority, some guaranteed sacred book that tells you all the answers, it is the understanding of particular events, persons and experiences which seem to be transparent to a sacred reality; of course, religion doesn't have the repeatable character that science does; of course, theology is much more difficult than science; we transcend the physical and biological world and put it to the test, God transcends us and can't be put to the test; I do not believe that when I moved from concentrating my intellectual efforts on science to theology that I changed all that much

35:40:00 Anthony Kenny's statement: "After all, if there is no God, then God is incalculably the greatest single creation of the human imagination", is another that I like and I think it is justified; Dawkins tells us how terribly malign belief in God has been; nobody could deny that belief has been misused and has lead to inquisitions, crusades, and all sorts of terrible things which religious people must take responsibility for and feel penitent; but equally, religion has been extraordinarily fruitful in individual human lives, in inspiring art and movements to improve human life - the abolition of slavery would be an example - it does seem to me that its highly suggestive, the influence so powerful and fruitful, that it is reasonable to think that there might be reality inspiring it; obviously, human beings have limited imaginative and intellectual resources, and we have to use what we can; seems to me that it is less misleading to think of God in personal terms than in impersonal terms; therefore we can't help having some sort of human images; of course, Christian belief would say that that is not wholly misleading as there is some analogical relationship between human beings and the true nature of God, but I don't want to make that an a priori principle; in physics we have the wonderful language of mathematics which seems so perfectly tailored to what we want to do; in almost everything else we try to do we don't have quite such apt resources to use; I think that it is an extraordinarily significant fact about the world that we are able to plumb it to its depths; obviously we have got to understand the everyday world, but the quantum world is quite different, and although there are some unresolved problems about our understanding of it, nevertheless we can make a great deal of sense of it; I do think that is a very striking fact about the world; incidentally, I find talking with non-believing physicist friends, that it is one of the things they find they are most uneasy about; the fact that the world is deeply intelligible and wonderfully ordered, does seem a non-trivial fact about the world in which we live; it would seem intellectually lazy to say it was just a bit of good luck and there was nothing more to say about it; it is difficult to know what to say about it other than that is seems to be evidence of some sort of cosmic mind; people can be made uneasy by this explanation, but I have personally not encountered any really serious counter-suggestion; of course, if you think that argument is really convincing it still gives you a very limited notion of God - God as the great mathematician or something like that; I think there is a lot more that we would want to know about God and can know about Him than that, but at least it puts the theistic question on the agenda; there is a possibility that our minds are not equipped to understand anyway, nevertheless I still think it is very significant that we can understand as much as we can; I don't want to claim that the human mind has unlimited ability to understand everything but it really is quite astonishing the range of our understanding; that in itself is sufficient to put the question on the agenda; as for encountering limits, the only way to find that out is to push the boundaries back and see what we find