Editorial

Andrew Briggs and Michael J. Reiss, Human Flourishing: Scientific Insight and Spiritual Wisdom in Uncertain Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); 352 pp.: 9780198850267, £25 (hbk)

This book is not really written for theologians who have read deeply in recent science and religion literature, especially, say, Tom McLeish’s excellent 2014 book Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford University Press). Using a wide variety of books from this literature (including McLeish), Human Flourishing does not go into any profound detail. Instead, it intentionally adopts very broad and loosely defined understandings of both ‘science’ (including social science) and spirituality/transcendence; it contains many stories and anecdotes; and it has user-friendly pictures and charts. This is a book for a general reader who already suspects that the ‘scientism’ (the belief that science alone can establish truth) of the so-called new atheists is flawed.

Andrew Briggs is Professor of Nanomaterials at the University of Oxford and Michael J. Reiss is Professor of Science Education at University College London and an Anglican priest. They have combined their different spheres of expertise to argue that their long-held Christian faith is compatible with modern physical and social science despite the scepticism of many of their scientific colleagues. More than that, they maintain that there is empirical evidence that faith helps make sense of human flourishing rather better than thoroughgoing secularity. They state at the outset: ‘This book is based on the conviction that promoting human flourishing requires the best of scientific insight and the best of spiritual wisdom … We see a great need for scientific insight to help tackle humanity’s greatest challenges, and we also see a great need for spiritual wisdom to use the fruits of science well and to address questions which lie outside of the self-limited scope of science’ (p. vii) – especially questions relating to ‘truth, purpose and meaning’. While the new atheists are wedded to a conflict model of science and religion, they emphatically are compatibilists.

The authors identify three crucial, interrelated dimensions of flourishing: the material, the relational and the transcendent. Among the material are food, water, clothing, health and homes; among the relational are family and friends; and among the transcendent are beauty in nature, art, music and religion. They explain: ‘Although both authors are Christians, our intention in this book is not in writing apologetics for Christianity. Rather, we are more interested in showing how the transcendent dimension is a key part of human flourishing. One advantage of the term “transcendent” is that it sits comfortably within and without [religious] belief and practice’ (p. 314).

In using the term ‘transcendence’, they mention connections with the secular humanists Alain de Botton and, more profoundly, Ronald Dworkin (not to be confused with Richard Dawkins!). They could have used (but don’t use) the fascinating work of the philosophical doctor Raymond Tallis (see my 2019 dialogue with Tallis on transcendence in Theology, Vol. 122, no. 2, pp. 83–99). With such secular humanists they share a conviction that irreducible materialism fails to produce a satisfactory account of human flourishing; for all of us, despite our differences about God, the material is necessary but not sufficient.

It is in ‘disinterested love’ that Briggs and Reiss particularly locate significant human transcendence – arguing that such love goes well beyond those forms of self-interested love typically assumed by utilitarians, economists and social psychologists and evolutionists, but without dismissing them. Their inclusive approach to a wide variety of academic disciplines, tempered in the end by a strong appeal to transcendence, has much to be recommended.

They end their book, topically, with climate change, taking inspiration from Sir John Houghton, ‘one of Britain’s most distinguished climate scientists’, who wrote before he died in 2020: ‘although my science and my faith always sat comfortably together, it wasn’t until I started to work specifically on climate change that they began to interweave’. Briggs and Reiss conclude: ‘If scientific insight and spiritual wisdom [that the world is God’s creation] came together in Sir John Houghton’s passion for the climate, how much more should they support our passion for people!’ (p. 331).