The Epiphany Philosophers (EPs) were a group of Cambridge academics and contemplatives, active from the 1950s to the 1980s, working on the relationship between science and religion, and this website is intended to describe them, their activities and publications. Their approach to science and religion was distinctive: an interesting alternative to much conventional work in science and religion, less timid about both disciplines for the EPs were bold about both. Their radical approach to both science and religion is what is needed now to reinvigorate work on the interface between science and religion.
Few have been so willing to question the scientific orthodoxies of the day; the rigorous philosophy background of many of the EPs gave them the confidence to challenge the metaphysical assumptions that often go unchallenged in conventional science, and to take a serious, rigorous interests in unorthodox areas such as parapsychology. They were more concerned about truth than respectability. The group included people who were, or became, leading figures in physics, biology, linguistics, computation and psychology.
They also had a distinctive focus on contemplative religion, which provides an experiential and empirical approaches to theology. The contemplative emphasis on experience gives it some similarities to science. They were impatient with the Church of England which they saw as having limited horizons and being unwilling to change, though all were members of it, though with strong connections to the Quakers as well.
Their story begins with their inaugural conference held in Cambridge in 1951. Their most public output was the journal they edited, Theoria to Theory, which ran from 1966 to 1981, and their last output was the Whiteheadian ‘Pardshaw Dialogues’.
The genius of the group was Margaret Masterman (1910-86). She had been a pupil of Wittgenstein, and been in the seminar group that resulted in the ‘Blue Book’. She was a scientist as well as a philosopher, and a founding figure in the emerging field of computational linguistics and machine translation. For twenty years she led a free-standing research outfit, the Cambridge Language Research Unit, which did important and influential work. Some of her key papers in that field, were published under the title, Language, Cohesion and Form. She believed that metaphysics remained desperately important, and that empirical research on the nature of language would throw light on the nature of metaphysics. Some of her radical religious writings were collected posthumously by Yorick Wilks, whose research applied computational methods to showing the ways in which metaphysical language extended ordinary language senses..
Another key figure was Dorothy Emmet (1904-2000) who founded and, for many years, led the Philosophy Department at the University of Manchester. She led the way in the post-war rehabilitation of metaphysics with her book The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (Emmet, 1945). She edited Theoria to Theory from start to finish.
The third philosopher in the group was Margaret’s husband, Richard Braithwaite (1900-90), Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. He had a more distinguished career than his wife but probably regarded her as having the more creative mind. He is best known for his book, Scientific Explanation (Braithwaite, 1953), and his Eddington Memorial Lecture ‘An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief’ LINK. which demythologised religious belief, and founded a whole new area of study of the funcion of religious language, as did his inagural lecture “The theory of games as a tool for the moral philosopher”.
Another significant founding figure was Edward (Ted) Bastin (1926-2011), a physicist and mathematician who collaborated with David Bohm and others on quantum physics (e.g. Bastin, 1971. He helped found the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association (ANPA), which worked towards the current rapprochment between quatum physics and computing. Chris Clarke has continued the psychological focus of the early days of the Epiphany Philosophers, focusing particularly in the relation between psychosis and mysticism (Clarke, 2008), and they share an interest in exploring the interface between scientific and contemplative ways of knowing (Clarke, 2005).
The EP focus on contemplative religion is unusual in work on science and religion, as was their emphasis on religious practice and ritual as being something distinctively human and functional. The choice of contemplative religion is significant in the context of the dialogue with science, because it is one of the points at which theology becomes most directly empirical. Contemplative religion is both a tool for personal transformation and a gateway into a different mode of experience in which the spiritual aspects of reality are experienced more directly than is usually the case; this was the point of the journal title Theoria to Theory.
Contemplative religion is primarily a matter of practice. However, in as far as it is possible for experienced contemplatives to report on what they experience, it is also a mode of enquiry that makes it analogous to scientific enquiry. There are paths of investigation within alternative or romantic science, such as Goethe’s work on plants, that are actually quite close to contemplative practice.
The Epiphany Philosophers’ community life together was organised around quarterly residential and quasi-monastic meetings at a Mill in Norfolk. These Mill meetings were undertaken with high seriousness of purpose and were quite demanding for the participants. For example, they included a ‘chapter of faults’ in which there was examination of offences that had been given by one member of the group to another. Religious offices were an important part of their life together; they wore albs and sang plainsong. In their later years, Rowan Williams, then Dean of Clare College, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, celebrated the Eucharist for them.
One area of science that was a particular focus of interest from this point of view was biology. At the time of Theoria to Theory, biology was going through a very reductionist period, influenced by the success of biochemistry. Rupert Sheldrake, then a young member of the Epiphany Philosophers, played a key role in this developing critique of biology, which found expression in his A New Science of Life (Sheldrake, 1981), and continued in many other books such as The Presence of the Past (1988/2012). Meanwhile, Fraser Watts, in Cambridge explored the frontiers of religion and psychology and new forms of healing.
They also considered that there was a close analogy between scientific and theological theorising. Margaret Masterman published an influential series of articles in Theoria to Theory on ‘Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis’ (Masterman 1966/7) LINK which both argues for the relevance of theism to scientific theorising, and draws attention to the formal similarities between scientific theory and Christian doctrine. For EPs this theological possibility was closely tied to what the real function of metaphysics was and in particular, the scientific and logical notion of alternative models for a given formal theory.
