Dialling down the drama in the science and religion debate

In the first of a new series, biologist and priest Andrew Davison explores the perceived tension between science and religion, and the role identities play.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Vails containing growing plants sit in a lab's fridge.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Evolution isn’t just an idea for me; thinking about it has changed the course of my life. I arrived at university in the 1990s having been a member of a house church, full of the kindest people, but fundamentalist when it came to the Bible. I thought that the world was made in six days, six thousand years ago. When I realised that the evidence is stacked against the idea – to say theleast – it almost cost me my faith.

I got through that crisis because friends introduced me to Christian thinkers from the Middle Ages, especially Thomas Aquinas (1224–1274). Far from representing an age of fear and ignorance (the ‘Dark Ages’), I found there an intellectual world that thrived on questions, with such philosophical sophistication that I was sure any of its chief exponents could have taken evolution in their stride. The struggle between faith and science lifted. Eventually, the sorts of questions that had previously kept me awake at night in worry, kept me awake in wonder. That was almost thirty years ago. Today, contemporary developments in evolutionary theory are one of the main strands of my work as a theologian.

In two further articles, I will describe some of what’s so interesting, and disputed, in biology and evolution at the moment. In one, I’ll talk about the shift away from the idea that we can reduce everything down to the working of genes. That’s sometimes called an example of ‘nothing-but-ery’: here, the claim that our destiny is ultimately about ‘nothing but’ genes. In the other, I’ll talk about some of the ethical repercussions that those contemporary evolutionary developments might suggest, on such practical matters as good housing.

In the rest of this piece, however, I will stick with the idea that it’s useful to see the idea of a tension between religion and science, not least over evolution, as being as much personal as intellectual. In particular, tensions over evolution in ‘science vs religion’ are caught up with questions of identity. Seeing oneself as a ‘religious crusader against science’ or a ‘scientific crusader against religion’ is an identity. It’s part of the story you tell about yourself, part of what you take pride in. Since these are also identities that define themselves in opposition to one another, they tend to extremes. Reconciliation involves renegotiating one’s identity.

Nor is money insignificant. There’s money to be made in writing shrill and divisive books, but in calm and conciliatory books, not so much. Angry books create interest on social media. They find to an already energised readership. Moderate books, and authors who try to dampen the flames of animosity, don’t sell that well; neither do books that are willing to say ‘actually, these questions are more complex, or nuanced’.

Evolution and economics

Crucial in these questions of identity is the gulf between those seen as the ‘elite’ and those who don’t see themselves that way (a common theme in politics today). Why is a denial of evolution more common in poorer communities? It’s not only that these are people without educational advantages. It’s also that they feel on the disadvantaged side of an economic and cultural system. In that situation, people are typically all the more invested in what the system can’t take from them, such as their ethnicity, their religion, and its culture. Good on them for that. People in that situation will be all the more unwilling for others – whom they perceive as an elite, who enjoy all sorts of worldly advantages – to tell them what to think about their biological origins, bound up, as they are, with dignity, faith, and self-understanding.

As an economically disadvantaged Muslim man once put it to me, ‘No one’s telling me that my faith’s stupid, or that I’m just some sort of monkey.’ There’s so much more going on in that statement than ‘being wrong about the science’.

Moreover, disadvantaged people, and especially the majority who don’t have white skin, have been on the receiving end of prejudice cast in evolutionary terms. Teaching the theory of evolution – glorious though it is as a work of science – has a checkered moral history. That brings us back to monkeys. The ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ (1925) has achieved iconic status, as the triumph of science over superstition in rural Tennessee, but it’s more complex than that. The prosecution, with its anti-evolutionary stance, was wrong to dismiss evolution as a matter of science. They weren’t wrong to be repelled by the science textbook at the heart of the case, which was uncomplicatedly racist, and indeed racist on supposedly evolutionary grounds. Evolution, it claimed, had produced lesser (black) and more advanced (white) races. As historians have also shown in recent decades, evolution was a powerful inspiration, into the early century, for advocates of cut-throat economics and politics: winner-takes-all, survival of the fittest, let the poor go to the wall.

I’m not saying that every bit of opposition to evolution among poorer communities rests only on the ways that evolutionary theory has been used against them, but it is useful to remember that some of the religious opposition to evolution in the twentieth century came from a principled response to the unpleasant ethical, political, and economic positions to which – they were told – evolution gave support, including full-on advocacy for eugenic programmes of sterilisation of the poor, and contempt for the physically weak: all clothed in evolutionary garb.

Drama critique

The spectacle of a ‘science vs religion’ drama turns out to be about more than science, and also about more than theology or religious belief. It’s also about identity, advantage and disadvantage, about some deeply unpalatable economic and social positions, and even about making money out of writing books. There’s everything to be said for teaching biology well, and for arguing about the truth of evolution on scientific terms. I do a fair bit of that myself. There’s everything to be said for teaching theology well, and for arguing that it can take evolution in its stride. That’s even more my aim. But neither offers the full picture, and it’s not helpful to think that anyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is simply stupid or wicked. We won’t get very far, not even as advocates of science, unless are willing to listen. Unexpectedly, my experience is that the flagship scientific societies in the United States (where tension over evolution run so high) are better at this than they are in United Kingdom.

Getting trapped in one end of some mutually reinforcing antagonism is hard to shake. It’s difficult to get to a nuanced position when you’re dealing with positions that are defined against each other. Whether arguments about evolution are part of your experience or not, there’s a wider message here, which we might all do well to take on board, asking ourselves whether positions of animosity can become unhelpfully baked into our sense of ourselves.

Accepting evolution does not naturally, or inevitably, lead to brutal social Darwinism, but it’s been used that way in the past, more often than coverage of science today often lets on. We are by no means out of its shadow, even from under the shadow of eugenics. Being aware of that big, historical picture is useful, but it shouldn’t obscure the message from the beginning of this article, that these matters are fundamentally personal, and as much about how we see ourselves, and others, as they are about ideas. Reconciliation and understanding happen person by person, and person-to-person.

You might think the work I’d most relish as a priest and scientist, or think most useful, would be reassuring religious people that evolution isn’t their enemy. That’s a good thing to do, but I’m actually even more thankful for opportunities to reassure scientists that religion can be thoughtful, unafraid, and even downright passionate about science. Turning up to dinner in my college still in my cassock after evensong, sitting next to visiting scientists, and asking intelligent, enthusiastic questions about their science can do as much good as all the lectures I give in churches or to theology students about the irreplicable value of science.

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Leading

Psychology

Theatre

21 October 2025

6 min read

Are you a narcissist?

We all have a little bit of narcissism in us – the question is whether we’re a Moses or an Iago

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

An Elizabethan man holds a dagger up while grinning.

Kenneth Brannagh's Iago in the 1995 film of Othello.

Sony Pictures.

Is everyone a narcissist these days? It sometimes feels so. Google Trends data shows an eleven-fold increase in searches for “narcissism” between 2010 and 2023, and the term has become a social media buzzword. Online quizzes asking, “Am I a narcissist?” are everywhere, offering dubious self-diagnosis at the click of a button. Genuine Narcissistic Personality Disorder, however, is complex and painful – especially for those in close relationships with someone who cannot acknowledge the harm that they are able to cause or feel any sense of remorse. Narcissus, in Greek mythology, was a handsome young man who was cursed to fall in love with his own reflection, but it was not until the early 20th century that the term “narcissism” was then picked up by the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Initially, Sigmund Freud adopted it in a non-pejorative way to describe the stage in child development when an infant is aware only of their own need for love and attention. Eventually, as that infant grows into a child it begins to experiment with showing others love and attention, and if surrounded by the right relationships, the child learns that love can be reciprocal – a back-and-forth pattern of give and take. Freud wrote:

“Loving, then, contributes to the lowering of self‑regard. Having one’s love returned, however, restores one’s self‑regard and replenishes one’s narcissism.”

In its healthiest form, narcissism reflects a positive sense of self – a recognition of one’s own needs and a reasonable desire for them to be met, whilst also knowing that we must give of ourselves, again within reason, to meet the needs of others. In this sense, yes, we are all a little bit of a narcissist. It is only occasionally, most commonly when the early bond between a child and their caregivers is inconsistent or unstable, that this self-focus can become problematically distorted, sometimes leading to a personality disorder. For such a person, a constant hunger for attention and affirmation, often combined with a lack of empathy or a tendency to use empathy as a means to manipulate others, leads to a life of take-take-take; one which can cause significant harm to others and ultimately to themselves.

Estimates for Narcissistic Personality Disorder are that it affects about one to two per cent of the population, a number which is intriguingly high. The unfortunate news is that true Narcissistic Personality Disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, precisely because key tenets of the condition include a lack of self-awareness and an overinflated sense of self belief. The classic response of the one with Narcissistic Personality Disorder is, of course, “How dare my therapist say that I am a narcissist? They must be the problem!”

However, much more prevalent are what might be called “sub-clinical narcissists” – people who act selfishly, arrogantly, or manipulatively, influencing others to conform to their desires. We all know one or more of those – sometimes we meet one when we look in the mirror. Whilst this may make us feel pretty rotten, whether we are the giver or the receiver of such treatment, it does not always warrant a clinical intervention. Even so, it can still be extremely difficult to process how and why human narcissistic tendencies are able to cause others so much pain. If, as Freud proposes, a certain degree of narcissism is hardwired into human nature, what can we do about its tendency to evil?

In Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, the character of Iago is a master manipulator who displays all the cold-hearted indifference of a true narcissist. Early in Act 1 he expresses his indignation that he has been passed over for promotion. Firmly convinced of his own superiority, he slyly boasts that he will play a false self to Othello, feigning loyalty for his own ends and stating: “I am not what I am.”

These words are a clever and rather chilling inversion of a famous phrase from the Bible. In the story of the Exodus, God meets with Moses in the form of a burning bush, and when Moses asks for the name of God a voice replies: “I am what I am.” As Moses stands before God, barefoot and awestruck, he hears that enigmatic statement and is forced to confront the question of who he truly is – an ashamed murderer, a fugitive, a short-tempered man of slow speech but hasty acts. Moses acknowledges all these awkward truths about himself and declares himself wholly unfit to be called by God as a leader. Yet God uses Moses anyway, and at the end of his life, Moses dies a celebrated hero – a deliverer who is mourned by all his people.

Not so Iago. As the tale of Othello draws to its tragic close, Iago is wounded, arrested and escorted from the stage. The audience knows that he has been condemned to execution, but unlike pretty much every other character in that fateful final scene, Iago’s death does not take place onstage. He is simply removed, dismissed from everybody’s notice – a narcissist’s worst nightmare.

One can see the crucial difference between Moses and Iago – whilst Moses is concerned that his own flawed nature makes him unfit to be become a great leader, Iago is driven to grasp at leadership by a belief in his own grandiosity and acts vengefully when passed over. Right to the end, Iago expresses not one word of self-doubt or regret for his actions. Indeed, he refuses to account for himself at all. “Demand me nothing,” he says at the close; “What you know, you know.”

Seemingly, the problem of narcissism’s tendency towards evil lies not in actions, but in methods of self-evaluation. While we all make regrettable mistakes, and sometimes it can be hard to judge the difference between unreasonable selfishness and reasonable self-preservation, the true narcissist is afraid to explain themselves, unwilling to bear the judgement of outside scrutiny. The narcissist will look only in the mirror.

But whereas a mirror only reflects light, a burning bush produces it. In the end, the resources of the Christian tradition do not simply diagnose our narcissism, they offer us a way through it. They offer an outside perspective from which we can truly evaluate our own actions – a light that shines through the mirror.

If you have ever clicked the link for the online quiz, or been tempted to, then that is an encouraging sign of willingness to be open to outside scrutiny. But of all things, would we really want to trust only human voices, especially the unknown and unknowable voices of the internet, as an authoritative arbiter? If narcissism is so inherent to human nature, it logically takes something higher and brighter than our fellow human beings to really bring it into the light. But in any case, you can save yourself the time of completing that dubious online diagnostic quiz since the whole enterprise can be summed up in just one question:

Have you ever wondered if you have Narcissistic Personality Disorder? If the answer is yes, you probably do not. So demand yourself nothing, what you know you know.

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