Fraser wants a modern day Christopher Wren, someone to bridge the gap between religion and science and allow them once again to share their wonder for the natural world. But what exactly would this latter day Wren do? Convert pubs back into churches again?
Wren was one of the elite scientific minds of his day, most of whom were believing Christians. Even the things Newton couldn’t explain about the cosmos he put down to God rather than the as yet unfathomable. Since then those things he couldn’t understand as well as things he never imagined have been fathomed so far that today’s elite scientists are, with a minority of exceptions, non-believers. Although there are those among the world’s most magnificent scientific minds that still believe in a god, the proportion is far less than it is amongst the general population. This is because an advanced understanding of the workings of the universe indicates to most that there is no intelligence behind the existence of the universe or the happenstance of life on this particular planet.
For that reason alone I think Fraser’s hopes for a new Wren are unlikely to be fulfilled. Anyone can marvel at nature, but any scientist trying to understand it today doesn’t upon hitting a dead end rest on his laurels and declare that God must have done that bit because I don’t get it. They’re hardly likely, therefore, to deviate from their pursuit of knowledge to celebrate or champion or side with an institution that still insists that God did it. Scientists of Wren’s day believed that, but 300 years of scientific endeavour later it is, at best, unsupported by the evidence to date.
The contemporary gulf between religion and science is not a matter of shifting cultural proclivities, it is a matter of fact.