The Revd Prof Andrew Davison is the Starbridge Professor of Theology and Natural Science, holding the professorship endowed by the novelist Susan Howatch. He is a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he is also Dean of Chapel. He is an honorary canon of St Albans Cathedral. 

His book, Astrobiology and the Christian Doctrine, discusses the question of life beyond earth with a focus on science and religion. Attention to this topic has a long history in Christian theology but has rarely been pursued at any depth.  

We spoke to Revd Prof Andrew Davison about his book, research and the projects that inspire him. Read his blog post below. 

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Written by Revd Prof Andrew Davison 

Well before anyone launched rockets or satellites, we knew we belong to an unfathomably large cosmos. In fact, before the effects of light pollution, the stars featured more prominently in daily experience than they do today. They were vital for navigation, and for working out the dates and directions of religious observance, such as how to orient a church, or the direction of Mecca.  

I started work on Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine in Princeton in 2016–17, as part of a group of scholars at the Center of Theological Inquiry, gathered for a programme on life beyond Earth and funded by NASA.

Andrew Davison 

I started work on Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine in Princeton in 2016–17, as part of a group of scholars at the Center of Theological Inquiry, gathered for a programme on life beyond Earth and funded by NASA. I soon learned that Christian theologians had written more on extraterrestrial life than I’d expected. In fact, there’s five-and-a-half centuries of it. I also learned that little of it pushed the topic very far.  

From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, we get a comment here, a paragraph there, but rarely more than a couple of pages on this theme, whether from Nicholas of Cusa, Philip Melanchthon, Richard Baxter, Anne Viscountess Conway, Charles Spurgeon, Alice Meynell, C. S. Lewis, or Paul Tillich. Only one person on that list – Melanchthon – found the idea of life beyond Earth theologically distasteful and unsettling. The others took it in their stride, but they didn’t write a great deal, either. The idea usually features only as an aside within some other discussion. There’s the irony: they noted the prospect of life beyond Earth (which is fascinating), then moved on (which is frustrating). They weren’t worried enough about it to write more. 

My book sets out to do one thing: to ask what difference the discovery of other life in the universe would make for a wide range of topics that fall within what’s often called ‘systematic theology’. Those topics include creation, Christ, sin, redemption, and the life of the world to come. I’ve tried to do that in greater detail than has been attempted before, and with as much rigour as a I could muster.  

“Theology at its best generally draws on the resources of some tradition or another. Rootless theology is rarely good theology”

Andrew Davison 

Theology at its best generally draws on the resources of some tradition or another. Rootless theology is rarely good theology. My starting point is the great Dominican friar of the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas (which makes me a ‘Thomist’). Since almost everyone today recognises Aquinas as a luminary among luminaries, and representative of much that Christians hold in common, you don’t need to be a signed-up member of his club to get something out of the book. (My previous book with Cambridge University Press, Participation in God, also draws a good deal on Aquinas.) 

Just as I was finishing the book, a grant application I’d had a hand in was successful, and the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Life in the Universe started taking shape. My responsibility has been dreaming up its Arts and Humanities programme, not least in philosophy. That made for an ideal next step: from a book that’s largely about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe to thinking now about life per se, and how it might get going.  

I started off at university as a scientist, first with a degree in chemistry, then a DPhil in biochemistry. (That was all at Oxford; I came to Cambridge to study theology.)

“It’s a joy to dust off some of that science, to be involved in the work of that industrious centre”

Andrew Davison

It’s a joy to dust off some of that science, to be involved in the work of that industrious centre, and to find the community of scientists so glad to promote work in the arts and humanities. There’s a universality of interest there that puts the ‘uni’ back in ‘university’. It’s a vision that my favourite mediaeval friar would have recognised immediately.  

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The Cambridge Festival is an interdisciplinary festival held in the heart of Cambridge. Its aim is to illuminate a selection of some of the fantastic ideas and research that flows through Cambridge each year. Revd Prof Andrew Davison will host an online event at the Cambridge Festival on Wednesday 20 March 2024. Book your free place.