HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE: CONCLUDING SESSION

Adapted from a 16th Century woodcut; Bettmann Archive

How does God act in a universe understood to be governed by fixed laws of nature?

Some Models of God’s Action in Nature • Denial of God’s existence. • Deism - God designs the fundamental laws of nature, but then does not

interfere. • Supernatural miracles - God suspends laws of nature in human or natural

history. • Miracles as unlikely events - God brings about the intersection of unlikely

events. • Primary & secondary causes - God’s purposes are primary causes, while

scientific description of laws are secondary causes. • God imparts information, which need not violate laws of matter & energy. • Bottom-up causality - God is the determiner of quantum indeterminacies,

which can be magnified by non-linear dynamics. • Top-down causality - God acts in the universe as a mind controls the body. • Process theology - God attracts, encourages and persuades rather than

coerce; God experiments with creation.

“Painting the Stars” – Science, Religion & an Evolving Faith

[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous… Your heavenly father feeds [the birds of the air]… God clothes the grass of the field [with flowers]…Matthew 5:45, 6:26 & 30

Theodicy: the problem of evil & suffering

• Theodicy is raised in the bible (e.g. book of Job); multiple approaches offered

• Incarnational message of Christ

• Modernism fails to address central problem

• Process theology offers a solution (but raises other concerns)

• Kenosis - God voluntarily limits his sovereignty and shares in the experience of creation.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Attributed to Albert Einstein

What are your most siginificant insights gained from the history & philosophy of science? What are your most important unanswered questions?

Reiner Marie Rilke: “Live the questions”

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to

love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” [Letter to a young poet; 1903]

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:12-13

What is at the core of your research programme?