Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield CBE is a renowned neuroscientist and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University. She recently addressed bishops from the Anglican Communion Science Commission (ACSC) on matters of faith and science.
The Commission provides regular online discussions for Lead Science Bishops around the Communion, for peer learning, inspiration and resource sharing.
Held on the 26th and 27th of November 2025, several of the Provincial Lead Bishops of the ACSC, as well as clergy and lay people, attended the online meetings to hear from Baroness Greenfield as she was interviewed by Professor Andrew Briggs, who is a coordinator of the Commission.
The Revd Canon Dr Stephen Spencer, one of the coordinators of the ACSC and Director of Theology and Implementation for the Anglican Communion Office, attended the event. He shares his reflections and insights on the contents of the meetings:
Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield is a global expert on the impact of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases on the brain, diseases that affect many across the Communion. After a prestigious lifetime in science, she came to faith and was baptised and confirmed. Her life in science and her life of faith are deeply inspiring for those working to encourage the interface between science and faith.
Addressing bishops of the Science Commission as the guest speaker on a recent webinar, she covered her early life in a ‘ruthlessly atheistic’ household and her transition from studying Greek and Latin literature, history and philosophy to psychology and then from there to neuroscience, where she found her passion. Baroness Greenfield described her awareness that the rationality used in science and other areas of life is only one aspect of being human, and that our emotions, intuition and artistic sense also play a part – something artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Her work as a scientist has also focused on the neuroscience of consciousness, which she describes as an ‘astonishing phenomenon’ – there is no precise place within the brain where it can be located. Science can look at correlations in the brain to see its effects but cannot understand the thing in itself.
Baroness Greenfield considered how consciousness is ‘continuously variable’. For example, there are different levels of consciousness between a baby and an adult, and at different times and places in a person’s life. It can be shallow or deep. It is where our subjectivity resides and she hypothesises whether consciousness could be considered congruent with the soul. Our subjectivity is beyond our personality – it is our inner essence, which is who we are and Dementia diminishes this.
Baroness Greenfield expressed an interest in how we, as the clergy, bishops and archbishops, view the soul and suggested that leaders within the church can be a source of information and comfort during a time of increasing levels of mental health issues in a digital world. She said, ‘The role of bishops is to look after the people in their care, one of the biggest problems at the moment is mental health’. She sees a knowledge of the brain and mental disorders as a very beneficial tool for helping people and showing how science and faith are ‘complementary’, not ‘contradictory’.
She was clear that knowing more about how the brain works and the effect of drugs on the brain will help those who are facing mental health challenges and that the Church could really help with this ministry. The challenges to mental health around excessive use of social media were mentioned a number of times as a cause for concern, especially for young people.
Discussion touched on the impact of AI on mental health, our understanding of truth, the limitations of science, the complementarity of faith and science and the wisdom of Blaise Pascal’s saying that ‘the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know’. Expanding on her account of her recent path to faith, Baroness Greenfield spoke of her view of atheism as a ‘thin’ argument based on ‘logic’ and how it was ‘very healthy for us to feel something greater than us, and something we can't explain’.
The Science Commission continues to serve as a proactive platform of discussion as well as celebration of science as a God-given resource and to promote collaboration between faith and science communities for the betterment of people and the planet. As Baroness Greenfield said, paraphrasing William Bragg (a predecessor of hers at the Royal Institution), ‘Faith and science… Of course they’re opposed, just like the thumb and the forefinger, and it’s by having the two together that you grasp reality’.
Find out more about the Anglican Communion Science Commission here.