‘Science tells us to ­first define our terms. Quakerism says there’s more to life than words.’

Freudian slip? Bob Johnson considers faith and science

In The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud used ‘science’ to demolish ‘religion’. Reading this as a teenager really set the cat among the pigeons for me. Was Quakerism doomed? At the time, ‘science’ was transcendent. ‘God’ less so. Exams required us to prove things scientifically. Get that wrong, and your school career withered. But applying the same logic to God earned fewer plaudits. A different type of thinking seemed to be called for.

I’ve now watched this tussle play out over seventy years, and a rather surprising winner has emerged – but it’s not the one you might have thought. Freud got his illusions the wrong way round. Even as he was lambasting ‘religion’ in 1927, the writing was on the wall for ‘science’. Like all reformations, it’s taking time to sink in. You don’t need to be Einstein, but you do have to have enough self-confidence to apply the scientific rigour we were taught all those years ago. More, you need a measure of what I like to call ‘spiritual stamina’. Why? Well, it’s because the enfeebling of science hits us all where it matters – our sense of certainty.

Everything looked rosy in the 1900s. But by the 1920s, closer scrutiny of the electron had put paid to that. Consider the epithet itself: the Uncertainty Principle, hardly the best slogan to inspire repeatability. And yet there it is. And there it stays. What it means is you have to choose either where an electron is, or where it’s going – you can never know both at the same time. Since nothing (including us) moves without electrons, that’s an eternal problem. So, for the brave-hearted, there’s at least as big a black hole in our knowledge of subatomic particles as ever there was with religion.

What to do? Technology succeeds not by going through the front door, but by that engineering stock-in-trade – the workaround. Can religion offer anything equivalent? Well, usually not. Most religions hanker after the certainty that science seemed for so long to offer. You are either one of us or a heretic, an infidel. For the myopic, certainty relies on sameness: keep the wagons circled, to keep uncertainty out.

Is Quakerism that different? Can it really step in to repair science? Well, it did for me. The workaround it gave me was to pay more attention to what worked, rather than to the words used to describe it. We seek to know each other in the things that are eternal but refuse to define precisely (scientifically) what those things are. Find out for yourself, or miss out altogether. Science tells us to ­first define our terms. Quakerism says there’s more to life than words: letting your life speak, speaks volumes.

In 1660 a bunch of Quakers told the king that violence didn’t work. For five years, I talked to murderers in Parkhurst prison, explaining that anger could be healthy but violence never was. ‘Science’ had insisted no psychopath could change. But for three years, there was no violence on one wing. What they taught me was that only overgrown toddlers kill – a line too heretical for today’s ‘science’.

Humans are notoriously unreliable; you can see this every day. It takes an unusual perspective to see beyond that, to see that, though uncertainty is ubiquitous, humans can be more reliable than electrons. Quakerism has proved to be oxygen for my own spiritual stamina – is it for yours?

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