Decades ago, when I first started writing about science, I would often ask the scientist I happened to be quizzing whether he or she believed in God. (I probably started reading Richard Dawkins at about the same time). I stopped doing so quite soon, because a surprising number of distinguished researchers cheerfully volunteered that they were active Christians with a role within their churches.

I should not have been surprised. At that time, people who never normally gave religion a thought still got married in a church, sang carols at Christmas and were buried by a vicar. There were bibles in every hotel room. Many of us went to church schools, not because they were “better” schools but because they were there. We learned about metaphysical poets and physical chemistry and the four gospels and Charles Darwin and thought nothing of it.

Newton and Faraday were more than usually devout readers of the scriptures, there was a long English tradition of the cleric-experimenters and vicar-naturalists and Einstein invoked God even when he didn’t believe in him. Religion was an inertial force: it was just there, like football and Shakespeare

As Tom McLeish points out in this rich, crowded and discursive book, there are a multitude of historical, cultural and anthropological reasons to explore science and theology as part of a single cultural “city”. He doesn’t buy the argument that religion is about turning untested belief into truth: science, he points out, also makes claims that turn out to be false. “Good science is arguably about being false in a constructive way that takes us nearer to truth.”

In Faith and Wisdom in Science, McLeish delivers a picture of science as a questioning discipline nested within a much older, wider set of questions about the world, as represented by the searches for wisdom and a better understanding of creation in the books of Genesis, in Proverbs, in the letters of St Paul, in Isaiah and Hosea but most of all in that wonderful hymn to earth system science known as the Book of Job.

For those who haven’t opened Job recently, this is the story of the rich man subject to an experiment staged by God and Satan: an oligarch who loses his camels, his cattle, his tents, his children and his servants and finally the integrity of his own skin. Job sits on a dung heap, covered with boils, and debates his condition with a set of disputing comforters who tell him it is probably all his own fault. God, concealed in a whirlwind, puts in an appearance with some cogent questions, some of them about the meteorology of the Middle East.

McLeish uses a new translation but I quote from the Authorised Version:

Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath engendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

Whoever wrote these lines was thinking as much about the hydrological cycle as about poetry or theology. McLeish’s achievement is to show that these and many other verses reflect a tension between chaos and order that underpin all sorts of phenomena investigated by modern science, including of course meteorology, but also cometary ellipses, pendulums, gels and jellies, the crystallisation of snowflakes, earthquakes, hourglasses, dunes and the force chains in a pile of sand.

“The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology … all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them,” he writes, and since he is a soft matter physicist as well as pro-vice-chancellor for research at the University of Durham, he must know.

So for him (and for me) Job becomes not just a sublime contemplation of life’s pain and beauty but also a wonderful opening statement of all the glorious puzzles of the planet, the solar system and the distant stars. It isn’t science as we know it now. But it poses all the questions that scientists now explore.

McLeish has no patience with Young Earth Creationists and other people in “the dark cells of ignorance” who think the bible offers a story that is literally true. Even so, this 267-page book isn’t necessarily easy to read. I called it rich and crowded: in just a few pages he discusses the arguments against religion by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Peter Atkins and Christopher Hitchens; he invokes Tom Paine, the poet Keats and the old argument by Bryan Appleyard that science is somehow dehumanising; he considers the debate between CP Snow and F R Leavis about the “two cultures”; a lecture by George Steiner and the famous hoax by Alan Sokal, the American physicist who composed some academic gobbledegook and got it published in a serious sociological journal.

He examines Gregory, the 4th century bishop of Nyssa and his sister Macrina, the Venerable Bede of the 8th century in Jarrow, and Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln in the 13th century, all of whom posed scientific questions. “First, doing science is very old,” says McLeish. “Second, doing science is a deeply human activity … real science can take place at an elderly woman’s bedside, in a medieval bishop’s house and on a sailing ship anchored by Van Diemen’s land just as much as in a modern university laboratory.”

He has a lot to say about Brownian motion, peptide molecules and the strange behaviour of jelly; also about science education, government policy, academic pressures, the public understanding of science, the differing demands and rewards of science and technology, the invocation of Frankenstein and Pandora’s Box as metaphors for scientific discovery, and the sometimes distorting stories we tell ourselves about science and scientists.

These include the ideas that scientists are “messing with nature” and that scientists make up a priesthood intent on keeping the rest of us in the dark. No one can accuse McLeish of messing with nature, or of keeping any of us in the dark. Some will find the book too crowded, almost indigestibly so. My advice is: take it slowly. It has a lot to offer.

Tim Radford’s geographical memoir The Address Book: Our Place in the Scheme of Things is published by Fourth Estate

Science book prize

The Royal Society has announced the shortlist for its annual science book prize. In the week preceding the announcement of the winner on 10 November, the Science Book Club will review all the shortlisted titles:

• Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics by Philip Ball. Download the first chapter of this book (PDF)
  
• Seven Elements that Have Changed the World: Iron, Carbon, Gold, Silver, Uranium, Titanium, Silicon by John Browne. First chapter (PDF)
  
• The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity by Pedro G Ferreira. First chapter (PDF)
  
• The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery by George Johnson. First chapter (PDF)
  
• Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik. First chapter (PDF)
  
• Gulp: Adventures of the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. First chapter (PDF)