The Bible is not interested in science in two different ways. First, it shows no awareness of the scientific process of hypothesis, observation, experimentation, verification/ falsification, review, publication, etc. for the obvious reason. Second, more frustratingly, it shows precious little curiosity about those subjects that we normally group under the rubric of science, such as the origin, age, size, structure, processes, and diversity of the physical world.
Aside from a stray verse in 1 Kings 4 which boasts of King Solomon’s wisdom – “he spoke about plant life…he also spoke about animals and birds, reptiles and fish” – the only time the good book seems to ask proto-scientific questions is in moments of poetry, dialogue or aphorism, such as in Proverbs or the end of Job, the genre offering a pretty blunt clue as to how they should be read. For the most part, the Bible simply presupposes the physical world of the ancient near eastern cultures in which it was written and redacted, whilst relentlessly challenging their religious presuppositions and conclusions.
All of which means a book that hopes to retell the Bible as science promises to be a pretty thin thing. Steve Jones’ latest book, on “the Bible retold as Science”, isn’t thin but it is, appropriately, something of a curate’s egg.
Jones is an unbeliever with, if not quite hatred, certainly a healthy contempt for religion. Although he protests that he wishes to circumvent New Atheist vituperation, when he does writes about Christianity his attitude shows and does not make the book stronger.
Thus, the Bible was not, as he claims, “a handbook to help comprehend the world”, still less “the first scientific textbook”. Genesis is not “the world’s first biology textbook”. To criticise Psalm 19’s opening line (“the heavens declare the glory of the Lord”) for “empty logic” demonstrates a strangely wooden way of reading poetry. The scroll that hints that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene is not “early”. Thomas Jefferson was not “devout”. The clear-cut division between “implacable God” of the Hebrew scriptures and “altruism and inclusiveness” of gospels is clichéd (and wrong).
Jones critique of religion is essentially Marx and water, in which religion is something improbable invented by priests to keep themselves in power and the plebs in order. He explains how sorrow binds people together, and then remarks that the Church has not been slow to notice this, with “grief and recovery … at the heart of the Christian message”, in the process revealing not only an impressive level of cynicism but also the bizarre idea that the church somehow invented Good Friday and Easter Sunday as means of group therapy. Similarly, when he compares American fundamentalists and their corrupt pastors to Inca parents who “welcomed their screaming infants’ tears” as their priests tore the living hearts from their chests, you wonder how sincere his desire to avoid caricature really is.
Were this all that comprised The Serpent’s Promise, it wouldn’t be a curate’s egg so much as a rotten one. Thankfully, it isn’t. The book’s guilty secret is that the Bible angle is really not much more than a clever marketing ploy, a high-profile series of hooks on which Jones’ can hang some very engaging scientific discussions. The author clearly knows this, as he notes that the Bible “has much more interest in the universe of the spirit than in the banalities of the physical world”, and that he will “try to sketch out the Bible’s larger themes”, but the mask is not allowed to slip fully, presumably because books about how science disproves/ replaces/ retells religion sell more than books about science.
It is, however, the science book that hangs on the occasional biblical verse which is worth reading. Thus, Jones uses various biblical stories, a disproportionate number from Genesis, to discuss the origins of the universe (briefly), the origins of life, human evolution, the meaning of sex, the complex and unpredictable interaction of nature and nurture, life expectancy, floods, the development of language, and so forth. Here he is on home territory and he writes with a fluency and wit that makes him one of our best science popularisers.
The book ends with a rousing prophecy about how when the “shackles” of religion “are at last struck from [our] wrists”, we will be free “to form a single community united by an objective and unambiguous culture whose logic, language and practices are permanent and universal… science.” Mercifully, such rhetoric is rare today, being more at home in age before nerve gas and nuclear weaponry. Mercifully, it is also rare in this largely entertaining and informative book, which reminds us that when scientists write about science they are often good, and sometimes excellent, and when they don’t, they aren’t.
The Serpent’s Promise: the Bible Retold as Science is published by Little Brown at £25
A shorter version of this review first appeared in the New Statesman
Nick Spencer is research director of Theos
Image by MrHarrison1
