Notes
Preface
1 Christopher P. Scheitle and Elaine Howard Ecklund, ‘The Influence of Science Popularizers on the Public’s View of Religion and Science: An Experimental Assessment’. Public Understanding of Science (2015). DOI: 10.1177/0963662515588432. Francis S. Collins was for many years director of the Human Genome Project. He is best known for his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, 2006.
1 Intelligibility and coherence: the Christian vision of reality
1 Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King. ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus’. Cognition and Emotion vol. 21, no. 7 (2007), pp. 1577–84. For the importance of this idea in sociology, see Jonathan H. Turner and David E. Boyns, ‘The Return of Grand Theory’, in Handbook of Sociological Theory, ed. Jonathan H. Turner. New York: Springer, 2001, pp. 353–78. Note especially their comments about how such a theory can hold together the ‘macro- and micro-levels of reality’.
2 Mark McIntosh, ‘Faith, Reason and the Mind of Christ’, in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhart Hütter. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005, pp. 119–42.
3 C. S. Lewis, Essay Collection. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 21.
4 See Christopher Hitchens’s puzzling suggestion that, for New Atheists such as himself, ‘Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith.’ Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007, p. 5. As its more critical readers can hardly overlook, this book is packed full of unacknowledged and undefended faith-commitments.
5 Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: An Autobiography. Boston: Beacon Press, 1954, p. 13.
6 See the famous essay by Karl R. Popper, ‘Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind’. Dialectica vol. 32, no. 3–4 (1978), pp. 339–55.
7 For an extended commentary on this image, see Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
8 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘El origen deportivo del estado’. Citius, Altius, Fortius vol. 9, no. 1–4 (1967), pp. 259–76; quote at p. 259.
9 Ortega, ‘El origen deportivo del estado’, p. 260.
10 See Hicks and King, ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture’.
11 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions. New York: Crown Publishers, 1954, pp. 41–9.
12 Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, pp. 41–9.
13 Peter B. Medawar and Jean Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas of Biology. London: Wildwood House, 1977, p. 171.
14 A good starting point is Michael J. MacKenzie and Roy F. Baumeister, ‘Meaning in Life: Nature, Needs, and Myth’, in Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netze. New York: Springer, 2014, pp. 25–38.
15 A point emphasized by John Polkinghorne, Science and Christian Belief. London: SPCK, 1994.
16 Paul Davies, The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. London: Penguin, 1992, p. 77.
17 This was the view of Logical Positivism and is still found in some variants of radical empiricism. See for example Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 202–3: ‘To be an empiricist is to withhold belief in anything that goes beyond the actual, observable phenomena.’
18 Michael Polanyi, ‘Science and Reality’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science vol. 18, no. 3 (1967), pp. 177–96, esp. pp. 177–9.
19 John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding. London: SPCK, 1988, pp. 20–1. More recently, see John C. Polkinghorne, ‘Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective’. Theology and Science vol. 1, no. 1 (2003), pp. 33–49.
20 See the discussion in Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
21 Robin Collins, ‘A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument’, in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999, pp. 47–75.
22 See for example Rodney D. Holder, God, the Multiverse, and Everything: Modern Cosmology and the Argument from Design. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
23 Martin J. Rees, Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe. London: Phoenix, 2000.
24 Alister E. McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009, esp. pp. 83–93.
25 Colossians 1.1–17.
26 John Donne, The First Anniversarie: An Anatomy of the World, line 213; in W. Milgate (ed.), The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978, p. 28. For the radical philosophies, such as Pyrrhonism, which so troubled Donne, see John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art. London: Faber & Faber, 2012, pp. 231–4.
27 Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
28 C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967, p. 65.
29 For an exploration of this theme, see Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, ‘La dimensione cristologica dell’intelligibilità del reale’, in L’intelligibilità del reale: Natura, uomo, macchina, ed. Sergio Rondinara. Rome: Città Nuova, 1999, pp. 213–25.
30 See Hans-Werner Goetz, Gott und die Welt: Religiöse Vorstellungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters. 2 vols. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012, vol. 2, pp. 9–168.
31 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. London: Oxford University Press, 1936, p. 142.
32 For the symbolism of harmony in Western culture, see the classic study of Leo Spitzer, ‘Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony’. Traditio vol. 2 (1944), pp. 409–64; 3 (1945), pp. 307–64.
33 C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 99.
34 Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd edn. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1985, p. 72.
35 Polanyi, ‘Science and Reality’, p. 192.
36 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, p. 294.
37 Michael Polanyi, ‘The Creative Imagination’. Psychological Issues vol. 6 (1969), pp. 59–91; quote at p. 90. Polanyi notes that there are no agreed criteria for validating such coherence.
38 John Keats, Complete Poems. 3rd edn. London: Penguin, 1988, p. 395.
39 For the process, see Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entstehungsgeschichte des modernen Rationalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998.
40 For a fuller exploration of this theme, see Alister McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
41 Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 26–8.
42 Midgley, The Myths We Live By, p. 40.
43 Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information, and Wonder: What Is Knowledge For? London: Routledge, 1995, p. 199.
44 Massimo Pigliucci, ‘New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy vol. 37, no. 1 (2013), pp. 142–53; quote at p. 144.
45 Mary Midgley, Are You an Illusion? Durham: Acumen, 2014, p. 5.
46 Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. Heusenstamm: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, pp. 10–11. The same problem arises with the kind of rationalism favoured by the Enlightenment, which is obliged to assume the truth of reason in defending reason. It thus makes reason both judge and jury in the question of its authority and scope, in that it recognizes no authority beyond reason.
47 Angela Potochnik, ‘Levels of Explanation Reconceived’. Philosophy of Science vol. 77, no. 1 (2010), pp. 59–72.
48 Philip S. Gorski, ‘What Is Critical Realism? And Why Should You Care?’ Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews vol. 42, no. 5 (2013), pp. 658–70. For my own detailed engagement with this philosophy, see Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology: 2 – Reality. London: T. & T. Clark, 2002.
49 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. 3rd edn. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 3.
50 For further discussion of this specific example, see McGrath, A Scientific Theology: 2 – Reality, pp. 226–31.
51 For the procedure, see Wei Chen, ‘Clinical Applications of PET in Brain Tumors’. Journal of Nuclear Medicine vol. 48, no. 9 (2007), pp. 1468–81.
52 This means that certain scientific theories actually inhibit scientific progress by closing down legitimate research options. For a lively and tendentious discussion of some interesting cases and themes, see John Brockman (ed.), This Idea Must Die: Scientific Ideas That Are Blocking Progress. New York: Harper Perennial, 2015.
53 For further discussion of this point, see Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000; Alister E. McGrath, ‘Theologie als Mathesis Universalis? Heinrich Scholz, Karl Barth und der wissenschaftliche Status der christlichen Theologie’. Theologische Zeitschrift vol. 63, no. 1 (2007), pp. 44–57.
54 Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self’. Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 25 (1996), pp. 19–43; Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 63–94.
55 As argued by Roy F. Baumeister, Meanings of Life. New York: Guilford Press, 1991.
56 John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960, p. 255.
57 Philip Weinstein, ‘The View from Somewhere’. Raritan vol. 32, no. 4 (2013), pp. 85–101.
58 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 67–89.
2 Charles A. Coulson
1 Coulson held this fellowship at Wadham on being appointed to the Rouse-Ball Professorship of Mathematics at Oxford in 1952. He retained this fellowship after his appointment to the newly established Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry 20 years later.
2 I dedicated my book Inventing the Universe (2015) to Coulson’s memory. It’s nice to be able to acknowledge debts of this kind, however belatedly.
3 For the best biography, see S. L. Altmann and E. J. Bowen, ‘Charles Alfred Coulson 1910–1974’. Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society vol. 20 (1974), pp. 75–134. This also includes a full bibliography of Coulson’s published works.
4 Coulson recalled this event in his 1969 Presidential Address to the Mathematical Association. For the text, see C. A. Coulson, ‘On liking Mathematics’. Mathematical Gazette vol. 53, no. 385 (1969), pp. 227–39, esp. pp. 228–9.
5 C. A. Coulson, ‘Self-Consistent Field for Molecular Hydrogen’. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society vol. 34, no. 2 (1938), pp. 204–12.
6 For the importance of this work, see Ana Simões, ‘Textbooks, Popular Lectures and Sermons: The Quantum Chemist Charles Alfred Coulson and the Crafting of Science’. British Journal for the History of Science vol. 37, no. 3 (2004), pp. 299–342, esp. pp. 309–16.
7 Charles A. Coulson, ‘The Christian Religion and Contemporary Science’. Modern Churchman vol. 40 (1950), pp. 205–15. The article clearly originated as a lecture, although I have not been able to identify the conference at which it was delivered.
8 Coulson, ‘The Christian Religion and Contemporary Science’, p. 212.
9 Coulson, ‘The Christian Religion and Contemporary Science’, p. 214.
10 Coulson, ‘The Christian Religion and Contemporary Science’, p. 214.
11 C. A. Coulson, Science and Religion: A Changing Relationship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955.
12 Altmann and Bowen, ‘Charles Alfred Coulson 1910–1974’, p. 84.
13 Note especially Charles A. Coulson, ‘The Natural Sciences’, in An Approach to Christian Education, ed. Rupert E. Davies. London: Epworth Press, 1957, pp. 41–57.
14 See his 1931 sermon ‘My Testimony’, quoted in Altmann and Bowen, ‘Charles Alfred Coulson 1910–1974’, pp. 76–7.
15 C. A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief. London: Oxford University Press, 1955, p. 19.
16 Alexander Wood, In Pursuit of Truth: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. London: Student Christian Movement, 1927.
17 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 112.
18 Wood, In Pursuit of Truth, p. 72.
19 Wood, In Pursuit of Truth, p. 73.
20 Wood, In Pursuit of Truth, p. 102.
21 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 3.
22 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 115. Note also his appreciative citation of Raven’s Science and the Christian Man (1952) in C. A. Coulson, Science and the Idea of God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958, p. 30.
23 For a biography, see A. Vibert Douglas, The Life of Arthur Stanley Eddington. London: Nelson, 1956. The best study of Eddington’s views on science and religion is Matthew Stanley, Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A. S. Eddington. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
24 Arthur Stanley Eddington, Science and the Unseen World. New York: Macmillan, 1929. The Swarthmore Lectures were given to the annual meeting of the Religious Society of Friends in London.
25 Eddington, Science and the Unseen World, pp. 90–1.
26 Coulson, Science and the Idea of God, pp. 7–8.
27 C. A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953, p. 6.
28 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 6.
29 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 7.
30 Coulson, Science and Religion, p. 3.
31 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 6. Faraday’s views on this matter were perhaps a little more complex than Coulson allowed, in that he was alert to the dangers of conflating science and religiosity, particularly as seen in the Romantic idealism of Coleridge and others. See Geoffrey Cantor, Michael Faraday: Sandemanian and Scientist. A Study of Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991.
32 Coulson, Science and the Idea of God, p. 8.
33 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 6.
34 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 7. Cf. Coulson’s discussion of a ‘wholeness and unity in life’: Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 108.
35 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 12. Coulson discussed the issue of coherence in greater detail at pp. 35–53.
36 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 25.
37 Coulson, Science and Religion, p. 8.
38 Coulson, Science and Religion, p. 22.
39 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 12.
40 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 15.
41 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, pp. 18–34.
42 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 19.
43 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 20.
44 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 21.
45 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 21.
46 C. A. Coulson, ‘Review of Herbert Dingle, The Scientific Adventure’. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science vol. 3, no. 12 (1953), pp. 382–6.
47 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 30.
48 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 30.
49 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 27.
50 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 99.
51 Coulson cites this lecture on three occasions: his review of Herbert Dingle’s The Scientific Adventure; Science and Christian Belief, p. 99; and Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 31. No publication details are provided in any of these accounts.
52 Lawrence Bragg, ‘Science and the Adventure of Living’. Advancement of Science vol. 7, no. 27 (1950), pp. 279–84.
53 On which see Jeff Astley, ‘Ian Ramsey and the Problem of Religious Knowledge’. Journal of Theological Studies vol. 35, no. 2 (1984), pp. 414–40.
54 The idea is, of course, found much earlier. Henry Drummond (1851–97), for example, was critical of Christian writers who appealed to ‘gaps which they will fill up with God’: see Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man. 14th edn. New York: J. Pott & Co., 1908, p. 333.
55 Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science, p. 8.
56 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 19.
57 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 21.
58 Coulson, Science and Religion, p. 7.
59 Coulson, Science and Religion, p. 32.
60 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 2.
61 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 98.
62 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 98.
63 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 100. We have already considered (see pp. 36–7) Coulson’s characteristic emphasis on the need for multiple ‘views’ of a complex reality, yielding a cumulative account of reality that transcends the limits of any single approach or method.
64 Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 101.
65 Coulson acknowledges this third point, though not the first two: Coulson, Science and Christian Belief, p. 103.
3 Thomas F. Torrance
1 For a biography, see Alister McGrath, T. F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1999.
2 To judge by his early lectures, Torrance was particularly influenced by two of his former Edinburgh lecturers: Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936) and Lamont (1869–1950).
3 Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science. London: SCM Press, 1953, p. 30 (the German original dates from 1949). Lamont’s quotations from Heim are all taken from his earlier work Glauben und Denken. For Heim’s importance for the dialogue between science and theology, see Hans Schwarz, ‘Karl Heim and John Polkinghorne: Theology and Natural Sciences in Dialogue’. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies vol. 9, no. 1–2 (1997), pp. 105–20.
4 The full text of these lectures has not been published, although I cite extensively from the 61-page typescript in McGrath, T. F. Torrance, pp. 199–205. The TS may be found in the Thomas F. Torrance Manuscript Collection in the Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.
5 Torrance, ‘Science and Theology’, fol. 11. Note also Torrance’s statement that ‘science simply describes the behaviour of things as phenomena’: Torrance, ‘Science and Theology’, fol. 42.
6 Torrance, ‘Science and Theology’, fol. 14.
7 For a detailed analysis, see Harold P. Nebelsick, ‘Karl Barth’s Understanding of Science’, in Theology beyond Christendom: Essays on the Centenary of the Birth of Karl Barth, ed. John Thompson. Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1986, pp. 165–214.
8 Note the contrast with Emil Brunner, who saw theology as having a mandate to engage secular world views, whether scientific or otherwise. For a discussion, see Alister E. McGrath, Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 41–78; 229–31.
9 This approach is more fully developed in the writings of Langdon Gilkey. See Langdon Gilkey, Nature, Reality and the Sacred: The Nexus of Science and Religion. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993.
10 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Non-overlapping Magisteria’. Natural History vol. 106, no. 2 (1997), pp. 16–22.
11 Summa Theologiae Ia q. 1 a. 2.
12 See the magisterial study of Johannes Zachhuber, Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
13 Note the opening comments in Thomas F. Torrance, ‘My Interaction with Karl Barth’, in How Karl Barth Changed my Mind, ed. Donald K. McKim. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1986, pp. 52–64.
14 Thomas F. Torrance, ‘Newton, Einstein and Scientific Theology’. Religious Studies vol. 8, no. 3 (1972), pp. 233–50; quote at p. 248. Cf. Thomas F. Torrance, Transformation & Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984, p. 282.
15 For a criticism of Pannenberg’s approach, see Daniel R. Alvarez, ‘A Critique of Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Scientific Theology’. Zygon vol. 11, no. 3 (2013), pp. 224–50.
16 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 10.
17 Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996, p. 9. Cf. pp. 85, 234, 273.
18 Torrance, Theological Science, p. 106.
19 Hans Hinrich Wendt, System der christlichen Lehre. 2 vols: Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1907, vol. 1, pp. 2–3.
20 See Martin Kähler, Die Wissenschaft der christlichen Lehre. Leipzig: Deichert, 1893, p. 5.
21 Karl Barth, Die christliche Theologie im Entwurf. Munich: Kaiser Verlag, 1927, p. 115.
22 John Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 22.
23 Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984, p. 108.
24 Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Scientific Theology. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985, p. 141.
25 J. Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding. London: Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 87.
26 Werner Heisenberg, Ordnung der Wirklichkeit. Munich: Piper, 1986, p. 44.
27 Torrance, Theological Science, p. 10.
28 Torrance, ‘Newton, Einstein and Scientific Theology’, p. 244.
29 Torrance, ‘Newton, Einstein and Scientific Theology’, p. 242.
30 Don Cupitt, The Sea of Faith. London: BBC Publications, 1985.
31 Cupitt, The Sea of Faith, p. 270.
32 Don Cupitt, Only Human. London: SCM Press, 1985, p. 9.
33 See Don Cupitt, The Worlds of Science and Religion. London: Sheldon Press, 1976.
34 For a critique of this general position, see Paul A. Macdonald, Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, pp. 3–42.
35 For reflections on this point, see John Douglas Morrison, Knowledge of the Self-Revealing God in the Thought of Thomas Forsyth Torrance. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.
36 Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003, p. 70.
37 For a good discussion, see W. Travis McMaken, ‘The Impossibility of Natural Knowledge of God in T. F. Torrance’s Reformulated Natural Theology’. International Journal of Systematic Theology vol. 12, no. 3 (2010), pp. 319–40.
38 Thomas F. Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth’. Religious Studies vol. 6, no. 2 (1970), pp. 121–35; quote at p. 125.
39 Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth’, pp. 128–9; emphasis in original.
40 Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth’, pp. 128–9.
41 Torrance, ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth’, pp. 128–9. Richard Muller’s thoughtful assessment of the place of natural theology in Protestant Orthodoxy should be noted here: Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003, pp. 307–8: Natural theology ‘exists as a result rather than as a basis for Christian doctrine. The truths of natural theology are not excluded from supernatural theology – they are included in the body of revealed doctrine – not because natural theology is the rational foundation of the system but because its truths belong to the higher truth.’
42 For reflections on Torrance’s relation to Barth at this point, see McMaken, ‘The Impossibility of Natural Knowledge of God in T. F. Torrance’s Reformulated Natural Theology’, pp. 337–9.
43 Note Polkinghorne’s comment: ‘Thomas Torrance is surely right to insist that natural theology must be integrated with the rest of the discipline of theology in the single search for the knowledge of God, if the theological enterprise is to prove to have sufficient richness and depth.’ John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, p. 15. This idea is often expressed in Polkinghorne’s works.
4 John Polkinghorne
1 Polkinghorne’s own views of his divergences from these two writers should be consulted. See John Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke and John Polkinghorne. London: SPCK, 1996.
2 Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians, p. 85. Polkinghorne holds that Peacocke was more successful in maintaining the integrity of theology, while registering disagreement with aspects of his theology.
3 John Polkinghorne, The Way the World Is: The Christian Perspective of a Scientist. London: Triangle, 1983, p. 2.
4 For Polkinghorne’s career, see Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson, Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion. Oxford: Monarch Books, 2011. Polkinghorne’s own account of his life and faith can be found in John C. Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography. London: SPCK, 2007.
5 Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest, p. 110.
6 For Polkinghorne’s own account of this period, see Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest, pp. 101–10.
7 John Polkinghorne, One World: The Interaction of Faith and Science. London: SPCK, 1986, p. 36. The best summaries of Polkinghorne’s approaches to date are in German: see Bernd Irlenborn, ‘Konsonanz von Theologie und Naturwissenschaft? Fundamentaltheologische Bemerkungen zum interdisziplinären Ansatz von John Polkinghorne’. Trierer Theologische Zeitung vol. 113 (2004), pp. 98–117; Johannes Maria Stenke, John Polkinghorne: Konzonanz von Naturwissenschaft und Theologie. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006. For a somewhat mixed collection of studies in English, see Fraser N. Watts and Christopher C. Knight (eds), God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.
8 John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding. London: SPCK, 1988, p. xii.
9 The British edition’s main title is Science and Christian Belief; the North American edition is entitled The Faith of a Physicist.
10 John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker. Faith in the Living God: A Dialogue. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001, p. 135.
11 John Polkinghorne, Faith, Science, and Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 19.
12 John Polkinghorne, Science and Christian Belief: Theological Reflections of a Bottom-up Thinker. London: SPCK, 1994, p. 46.
13 Polkinghorne, The Way the World Is, p. 2.
14 Note especially his critical comments in Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, p. 13: ‘The God of the Gaps is dead … No Theologian need weep.’
15 John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship. London: SPCK, 2007, p. 110. This statement is the climax of the argument throughout this work.
16 See especially John C. Polkinghorne, ‘Physics and Metaphysics in a Trinitarian Perspective’. Theology and Science vol. 1, no. 1 (2003), pp. 33–49.
17 John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 95.
18 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. xx.
19 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. 37.
20 Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, pp. 20–1.
21 Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions. New York: Bonanza, 1954, p. 292.
22 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. xx.
23 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, pp. 123–48.
24 Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology, p. 15.
25 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. 123. There are clear echoes of Thomas F. Torrance’s ‘kataphysical’ approach to theology here: see the discussion at pp. 50–1. Polkinghorne refers often to Torrance in some of his earlier writings, such as Science and Creation, although much less frequently in his later.
26 This general principle is set out in many of Polkinghorne’s writings, such as Theology in the Context of Science and Quantum Physics and Theology.
27 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, pp. 125–6.
28 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. 126.
29 Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science, p. 126.
30 Polkinghorne, One World, p. 35.
31 Polkinghorne, One World, p. 35.
32 For a good discussion, see Russell Re Manning, ‘On Revising Natural Theology: John Polkinghorne and the False Modesty of Liberal Theology’, in God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne, ed. Fraser N. Watts and Christopher C. Knight. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp. 197–215.
33 William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991, p. 289.
34 George Hayward Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1922, p. 1.
35 See especially Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, pp. 11–25.
36 Peter Harrison, ‘Physico-Theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy’, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, pp. 165–83.
37 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Trinity, Natural Theology, and a Theology of Nature’, in The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 88–103.
38 James Rurak, ‘Butler’s Analogy: A Still Interesting Synthesis of Reason and Revelation’. Anglican Theological Review vol. 62, no. 2 (1980), pp. 365–81.
39 For example, John Polkinghorne, Reason and Reality: The Relationship between Science and Theology. London: SPCK, 1991, pp. 74–84; ‘Where Is Natural Theology Today?’ Science and Christian Belief vol. 18, no. 2 (2006), pp. 169–79; Science and Creation, pp. 1–16.
40 John Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’. Studies in World Christianity vol. 1, no. 1 (1995), pp. 41–50.
41 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 42; emphasis in original.
42 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 43.
43 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 43.
44 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 44.
45 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 44.
46 Polkinghorne, ‘The New Natural Theology’, p. 50.
47 Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
48 For its most recent statement, see Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997. Polkinghorne points out that many of the issues raised by Barbour had already been discussed from a Thomist perspective in E. L. Mascall, Christian Theology and Natural Science. London: Longman, 1956.
49 Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Non-overlapping Magisteria’. Natural History vol. 106, no. 2 (1997), pp. 16–22.
50 For the problems, see Geoffrey Cantor and Chris Kenny. ‘Barbour’s Fourfold Way: Problems with His Taxonomy of Science–Religion Relationships’. Zygon vol. 36, no. 4 (2001), pp. 765–81. Alternative models have been proposed, although I have to confess doubts about their utility: see for example Niels Nenrik Gregersen and J. Wentzel van Huyssteen (eds), Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.
51 For a much more reliable approach, see Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
52 Although this issue is hinted at in earlier works, the most serious discussion of this theme is found in John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
53 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, pp. 1–32.
54 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 10.
55 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 10.
56 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 15.
57 See Paul Davies, God and the New Physics. London: Dent, 1983; The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning. London: Penguin, 1992.
58 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 16.
59 Arthur Peacocke, ‘Science and the Future of Theology: Critical Issues’. Zygon vol. 35, no. 1 (2000), pp. 119–40.
60 Peacocke, ‘Science and the Future of Theology’, pp. 129–30.
61 For example, Peacocke’s discussion of miracles in this article is disappointingly slight. It is philosophically lightweight, and does not really engage the obvious difficulties confronted by David Hume’s approach. For a much more critical response to Peacocke’s article, see Vítor Westhelle, ‘Theological Shamelessness? A Response to Arthur Peacocke and David A. Pailin’. Zygon vol. 35, no. 1 (2000), pp. 165–72.
62 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 26.
63 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 26.
64 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 26, drawing on a statement of his position set out in his Gifford Lectures of 1994.
65 The importance of Polkinghorne’s understanding of the scientific method of Michael Polanyi should be noted here: see Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 58.
66 Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity, p. 141.
67 Polkinghorne, Science and Creation, p. 43, citing from Lonergan’s influential work Insight.
Introduction to Part 3
1 For the history of this absurd idea, see Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians. New York: Praeger, 1991 and Christine Garwood, Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. London: Macmillan, 2007.
2 See especially Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015 and Ronald L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths About Science and Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
3 This point was clearly understood by the end of the 1980s: see for example Frank Miller Turner, ‘The Victorian Conflict between Science and Religion: A Professional Dimension’. Isis vol. 69, no. 3 (1978), pp. 356–76 and Colin A. Russell, ‘The Conflict Metaphor and Its Social Origins’. Science and Christian Faith vol. 1, no. 1 (1989), pp. 3–26.
4 I set this out more fully in Alister E. McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why we can’t stop Talking about Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
5 Theories and doctrines: ways of seeing reality
1 Victor F. Weisskopf, Knowledge and Wonder: The Natural World as Man Knows It. 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979.
2 See Mark J. Boda and Gordon T. Smith (eds), Repentance in Christian Theology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006.
3 Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001, p. 197.
4 Alister McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015.
5 Both C. S. Lewis (in Surprised by Joy) and Augustine of Hippo (in his Confessions) describe this process of realizing, in retrospect, the influence of divine grace on their spiritual journeys: for reflections on these two writers on this point, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Enigma of Autobiography: Critical Reflections on Surprised by Joy’, in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 7–30.
6 See the collection of important essays in Boda and Smith, Repentance in Christian Theology.
7 Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. Boston: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 127–8.
8 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967, p. 59.
9 Think for example of Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Penguin, 1998.
10 Peter Medawar, ‘Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?’ The Listener, 12 September 1963. For an excellent account of Medawar’s appeal to the imagination, see Neil Calver, ‘Sir Peter Medawar: Science, Creativity and the Popularization of Karl Popper’. Notes and Records of the Royal Society vol. 67, no. 4 (2013), pp. 301–14.
11 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 197.
12 For discussion of the date and nature of this conversion, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, pp. 135–51.
13 Alister E. McGrath, ‘An Enhanced Vision of Rationality: C. S. Lewis on the Reasonableness of Christian Faith’. Theology vol. 116, no. 6 (2013), pp. 410–17.
14 See for example Robin Downie, ‘Science and the Imagination in the Age of Reason’. Medical Humanities vol. 27, no. 2 (2001), pp. 58–63; Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
15 W. I. B. Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation. New York: Norton, 1957.
16 Beveridge, The Art of Scientific Investigation, p. 83, citing the philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937).
17 Albert Einstein, ‘Preface’ to Max Planck, Where is Science Going? New York: Norton, 1932, p. 12.
18 See for example Garrett Green, Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998; Paul D. L. Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol, and Myth in Religion and Theology. London: Routledge, 1999.
19 Dante, Paradiso XXXIII: 55–6.
20 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 209. See further Corbin Scott Carnell, Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999, pp. 60–76.
21 George Herbert, Complete English Poems. London: Penguin, 1991, p. 174. For the alchemical imagery of this poem, see Yaakov Mascetti, ‘“This Is the Famous Stone”: George Herbert’s Poetic Alchemy in “The Elixir”’, in Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture, ed. Stanton J. Linden. Brooklyn, NY: AMS Press, 2005, pp. 301–24.
22 John Polkinghorne, Science and the Trinity: The Christian Encounter with Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 99–100.
23 For further discussion, see Alister McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction. 6th edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
24 For example, see Charles Taliaferro, ‘A Narnian Theory of the Atonement’. Scottish Journal of Theology vol. 41, no. 1 (1988), pp. 75–92.
25 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1887, vol. 2, p. 155.
26 For comment, see Frank J. Sulloway, ‘Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend’. Journal of the History of Biology vol. 15, no. 1 (1982), pp. 1–53.
27 Joseph Rouse, ‘Kuhn’s Philosophy of Scientific Practice’, in Thomas Kuhn, ed. Thomas Nickles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 101–21; quote at pp. 110–11.
28 W. H. Brock, From Protyle to Proton: William Prout and the Nature of Matter, 1785–1985. Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1985.
29 As already noted, Prout did not know about neutrons!
30 Albert Einstein, ‘Erklärung der Perihelbewegung des Merkur aus der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’. Sitzungsberichte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften vol. 47 (1915), pp. 831–9.
31 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Phoenix, 1995, p. 133.
32 Jeff Vogel, ‘The Haste of Sin, the Slowness of Salvation: An Interpretation of Irenaeus on the Fall and Redemption’. Anglican Theological Review vol. 89, no. 3 (2007), pp. 455–71.
33 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 38.
34 See especially Paul S. Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. For the relevance of this theme to the relation of science and faith, see Tom McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
6 The legitimacy of faith: proof, justification and intelligibility
1 Amarnath Amarasingam, Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
2 Hence the famous – and probably apocryphal – experiment performed by Galileo, who dropped cannonballs of different sizes from the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa. They hit the ground at the same time. See Robert P. Crease, The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science. New York: Random House, 2003, pp. 21–35.
3 For a good introduction to the issues, see John C. Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
4 William Kingdon Clifford, The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999, pp. 70–96.
5 Joseph Rouse, Engaging Science: How to Understand Its Practices. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 124.
6 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 330.
7 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859, p. 171. For examples of such ‘difficulties’, see Abigail J. Lustig, ‘Darwin’s Difficulties’, in The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Origin of Species’, ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 109–28.
8 William James, ‘The Will to Believe’, in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897, p. 1–31.
9 The best account of this approach is Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2004.
10 Sami Paavola, ‘Peircean Abduction: Instinct or Inference?’ Semiotica vol. 153 (2005), pp. 131–54.
11 The text of the speech is reproduced in August Kekulé, ‘Benzolfest Rede’. Berichte der deutschen chemischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin vol. 23 (1890), pp. 1302–11.
12 See for example Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.
13 W. V. O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View. 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951, pp. 20–46.
14 Mary B. Hesse, Forces and Fields: The Concept of Action at a Distance in the History of Physics. London: Nelson, 2005, pp. 126–56.
15 This is an especially important point for John Polkinghorne: see especially the extended discussion in his earliest work, The Way the World Is: The Christian Perspective of a Scientist. London: Triangle, 1983, pp. 33–94.
16 A good example is Jürgen Moltmann. See Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008.
17 Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; Cherry Lewis, The Dating Game: One Man’s Search for the Age of the Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
18 Svante Arrhenius, Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. New York: Harper, 1908, p. xiv.
19 For the story, see Helge Kragh, Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
20 F. J. Tipler, C. J. S. Clarke and G. F. R. Ellis, ‘Singularities and Horizons – A Review Article’, in General Relativity and Gravitation: One Hundred Years after the Birth of Albert Einstein, ed. A. Held. New York: Plenum Press, 1980, pp. 97–206; quote at p. 110.
21 Carl Sagan, ‘Why We Need To Understand Science’. Skeptical Inquirer vol. 14, no. 3 (Spring 1990).
22 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Writings. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003, p. 81.
23 A. C. Grayling, The God Argument. London: Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 66.
24 Edward Harrison, ‘The Redshift-Distance and Velocity-Distance Laws’. Astrophysical Journal vol. 403, no. 1 (1993), pp. 28–31.
25 For the context of this remark, see John Polkinghorne, Theology in the Context of Science. London: SPCK, 2008, pp. 84–6.
26 William James. The Will to Believe. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, p. 51.
27 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, p. 24.
28 Letter to L. T. Duff, 10 May 1943; The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Volume II, 1937 to 1943, ed. Barbara Reynolds. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996, p. 401.
29 Letter to William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, 7 September 1943; The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Volume II, 1937 to 1943, p. 429.
30 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks. London: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 147.
31 For some of the issues, see Scott A. Kleiner, ‘Explanatory Coherence and Empirical Adequacy: The Problem of Abduction, and the Justification of Evolutionary Models’. Biology and Philosophy vol. 18, no. 4 (2003), pp. 513–27; David H. Glass, ‘Coherence Measures and Inference to the Best Explanation’. Synthese vol. 157, no. 3 (2007), pp. 275–96; Stathis Psillos, ‘The Fine Structure of Inference to the Best Explanation’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 74, no. 2 (2007), pp. 441–8.
32 I explore the contours of Lewis’s conversion (or ‘re-conversion’) in Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, pp. 135–51.
33 This statement is found in the manuscript known as ‘Early Prose Joy’, held at the Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.
34 See Alister E. McGrath, ‘Reason, Experience, and Imagination: Lewis’s Apologetic Method’, in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 129–46.
35 Alister E. McGrath, ‘Arrows of Joy: Lewis’s Argument from Desire’, in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 105–28.
36 G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Return of the Angels’. Daily News, 14 March 1903.
37 Chesterton, ‘Return of the Angels’.
38 William Whewell. Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker, 1847, vol. 2, p. 36.
39 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species. 6th edn. London: John Murray, 1872, p. 444. This comment is not present in earlier editions of the work.
40 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1887, vol. 2, p. 155.
41 Terry Eagleton, ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching: A Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion’. London Review of Books, 19 October 2006.
7 Analogies, models and mystery: representing a complex reality
1 One of the best discussions of this approach is found in Mary B. Hesse, ‘Models and Analogy in Science’, in Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards. New York & London: Macmillan, 1967, pp. 354–9. There is also much useful material in Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
2 The model was introduced in 1972: see S. Jonathan Singer and Garth L. Nicolson, ‘The Fluid Mosaic Model of the Structure of Cell Membranes’. Science vol. 175, no. 4023 (1972), pp. 720–31.
3 The famous Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916) refused to believe in atoms as late as 1909, because they couldn’t be seen: see Erwin Hiebert, ‘The Genesis of Mach’s Early Views on Atomism’, in Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philosopher, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Raymond J. Seeger. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1970, pp. 79–106.
4 Ernest Rutherford, ‘The Scattering of α and β Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom’. Philosophical Magazine vol. 21 (1911), pp. 669–88.
5 For the experiment and its implications, see Jeroen van Dongen, ‘On the Role of the Michelson–Morley Experiment: Einstein in Chicago’. Archive for the History of the Exact Sciences vol. 63, no. 6 (2009), pp. 655–63.
6 Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred? The Herbert Read Memorial Lecture 1990. Cambridge: Granta, 1990, p. 8.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, §610.
8 See E. Jennifer Ashworth, Les théories de l'analogie du XIIe au XVIe siècle. Paris: Vrin, 2008.
9 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 128–39.
10 On which see Colin E. Gunton, The Actuality of Atonement: A Study of Metaphor, Rationality, and the Christian Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989.
11 C. William Marx, The Devil’s Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995, pp. 7–46.
12 See Donald Evans, ‘Ian Ramsey on Talk about God’. Religious Studies vol. 7, no. 2 (1971), pp. 125–40.
13 Albert Einstein, ‘Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt’. Annalen der Physik vol. 17 (1905), pp. 132–48.
14 See Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr’s Times in Physics, Philosophy and Polity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
15 For an accessible account of this development and its context, see Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
16 For comment on this issue, see Christopher B. Kaiser, ‘Quantum Complementarity and Christological Dialectic’, in Religion and Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman. London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 291–300.
17 For this development, see Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
18 For discussion, see Alister E. McGrath, Heresy. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009.
19 On which see Thomas G. Weinandy, Athanasius: A Theological Introduction. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 27–101.
20 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Writings. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003, p. 19.
21 For the importance of this theme in particle physics, see George Johnson, Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.
22 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. London: Oxford University Press, 1943.
23 For helpful studies, see Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983; Merold Westphal, ‘The Importance of Mystery for the Life of Faith’. Faith and Philosophy vol. 24, no. 4 (2007), pp. 367–84.
24 Emil Brunner, Dogmatik I: Die christliche Lehre von Gott. Zurich: Zwingli-Verlag, 1959, p. 206.
25 Philip Dixon, Nice and Hot Disputes: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century. London: T. & T. Clark, 2003.
26 Paul Chang-Ha Lim, Mystery Unveiled: The Crisis of the Trinity in Early Modern England, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
27 See Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins (eds), The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
28 Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 52, 16.
29 For the details, see Alister E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013, pp. 131–51.
30 C. S. Lewis, Letters. 3 vols. London: HarperCollins, 2002–6, vol. 2, pp. 145–6.
31 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 162.
8 Religious and scientific faith: the case of Charles Darwin
1 Carl R. Woese, ‘On the Evolution of Cells’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 99, no. 13 (2002), pp. 8742–7.
2 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
3 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
4 Note that all three of the practitioners I consider in Part 2 of this book focus primarily on the relation of physics and theology. For an example of the relatively rare exploration of the relation of evolutionary biology and theology at a popular level, see Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. New York: Free Press, 2006. At a more academic level, the biochemist Arthur Peacocke (1924–2006) contributed works such as Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith? Selected Essays. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2004.
5 Richard Dawkins’s book The Blind Watchmaker (1986) picks up on Paley’s image: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. For the specifics of Paley’s approach in its historical context, see Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 85–107.
6 Bill Jenkins, ‘Henry H. Cheek and Transformism: New Light on Charles Darwin’s Edinburgh Background’. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London vol. 69, no. 2 (2015), pp. 155–71.
7 Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, ‘On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection’. Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Zoology vol. 3 (20 August 1858), pp. 45–62.
8 Pietro Corsi, ‘Before Darwin: Transformist Concepts in European Natural History’. Journal of the History of Biology vol. 38, no. 1 (2005), pp. 67–83.
9 For a good account, see Christiane Chauviré, ‘Peirce, Popper, Abduction, and the Idea of Logic of Discovery’. Semiotica vol. 153 (2005), pp. 209–21.
10 See the reflections of Scott A. Kleiner, ‘The Logic of Discovery and Darwin’s Pre-Malthusian Researches’. Biology and Philosophy vol. 3, no. 3 (1988), pp. 293–315.
11 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. F. Darwin. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1887, vol. 2, p. 155. Hutton deserves much greater attention as a perceptive interpreter of Darwin: see for example John Stenhouse, ‘Darwin’s Captain: F. W. Hutton and the Nineteenth-Century Darwinian Debates’. Journal of the History of Biology vol. 23, no. 3 (1990), pp. 411–42.
12 Scott A. Kleiner, ‘Problem Solving and Discovery in the Growth of Darwin’s Theories of Evolution’. Synthese vol. 47, no. 1 (1981), pp. 119–62, esp. pp. 127–9. The first apparent direct proofs of evolution by means of natural selection in natural populations began to accumulate in the 1920s, particularly in the case of the emergence of industrial melanism in the peppered moth, Biston betularia.
13 Charles Darwin. The Origin of Species. 6th edn. London: John Murray, 1872, p. 164.
14 For the best general statement of this method, see Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation. 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2004.
15 See especially the detailed study of Elisabeth Anne Lloyd, ‘The Nature of Darwin’s Support for the Theory of Natural Selection’, in Science, Politics, and Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 1–19.
16 Karl R. Popper, ‘Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind’. Dialectica vol. 32, no. 3–4 (1978), pp. 339–55.
17 Laura J. Snyder, ‘The Mill–Whewell Debate: Much Ado about Induction’. Perspectives on Science vol. 5 (1997), pp. 159–98. Snyder elsewhere argues that Whewell’s views on induction have been misunderstood and merit closer attention as a distinctive approach: Laura J. Snyder, ‘Discoverers’ Induction’. Philosophy of Science vol. 64, no. 4 (1997), pp. 580–604.
18 Christopher Hitchcock and Elliott Sober. ‘Prediction vs. Accommodation and the Risk of Overfitting’. British Journal for Philosophy of Science vol. 55, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1–34.
19 Gerald E. Myers, William James, His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986, p. 460.
20 Spencer used the phrase in his Principles of Biology (1864); Darwin incorporated it into the fifth edition: ‘This preservation of favourable variations, and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.’ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. 5th edn. London: John Murray, 1869, pp. 91–2.
21 There is a substantial literature. A good starting point is James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
22 On which see Michael Bulmer, ‘Did Jenkin’s Swamping Argument invalidate Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection?’ The British Journal for the History of Science vol. 37, no. 3 (2004), pp. 281–97.
23 Jean Gayon, Darwin’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
24 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. 3rd edn. London: John Murray, 1861, p. 296.
25 Vítezslav Orel, Gregor Mendel: The First Geneticist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 193.
26 John Hedley Brooke, ‘The Relations between Darwin’s Science and His Religion’, in Darwinism and Divinity, ed. John Durant. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, pp. 40–75.
28 Note especially the comments at Charles Kingsley, ‘The Natural Theology of the Future’, in Westminster Sermons. London: Macmillan, 1874, pp. xii–xiv.
29 Randal Keynes, Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution. London: Fourth Estate, 2001, p. 222: ‘After Annie’s death, Charles set the Christian faith firmly behind him.’ The evidence presented by Keynes does actually not support the suggestion that the occasion of Annie’s death marked the cessation of Darwin’s churchgoing.
30 See the critical study of John van Wyhe and Mark J. Pallen, ‘The “Annie Hypothesis”: Did the Death of His Daughter Cause Darwin to “Give up Christianity”?’ Centaurus vol. 54, no. 2 (2012), pp. 105–23.
31 See the analysis in John Hedley Brooke, ‘“Laws Impressed on Matter by the Creator”? The Origins and the Question of Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Origin of Species’, ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 256–74.
32 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, p. 202.
33 William James, The Will to Believe. New York: Dover Publications, 1956, p. 51.
34 For the ability of Christian theology to cope with such theoretical anomalies, see Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology: 3 – Theory. London: T. & T. Clark, 2003, pp. 198–213.
35 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859, p. 171. For examples of such ‘difficulties’, see Abigail J. Lustig, ‘Darwin’s Difficulties’, in The Cambridge Companion to the ‘Origin of Species’, ed. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 109–28.
9 Human identity: scientific and theological perspectives
1 Peter Medawar, The Limits of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 66.
2 For a detailed account of the origins and core themes of this book, and their contemporary evaluation by evolutionary biologists, see Alister E. McGrath, Dawkins’ God: From the Selfish Gene to the God Delusion. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 32–56.
3 Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. London: Phoenix, 1995, p. 19.
4 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 21.
5 Richard Dawkins, ‘Replicators and Vehicles’, in Current Problems in Sociobiology, ed. King’s College Sociobiology Group. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 45–64.
6 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 21.
7 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. xxi.
8 For this point and wider implications, see Giovanni Boniolo, ‘The Ontogenesis of Human Identity’, in Philosophy, Biology, and Life, ed. Anthony O’Hear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 49–82.
9 For this point, see Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 32–40; John Cottingham, ‘The Meaning of Life and Darwinism’. Environmental Values vol. 20, no. 3 (2011), pp. 299–308.
10 Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. London: Simon & Schuster, 1994, p. 3.
11 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. This sentence is sometimes translated as ‘political animal’. Aristotle, however, here uses the Greek adjective politikos to mean ‘pertaining to a polis’ – i.e. a community or society.
12 See for example Claus Emmeche, Simo Koppe and Frederick Stjernfelt, ‘Explaining Emergence: Towards an Ontology of Levels’. Journal for General Philosophy of Science vol. 28, no. 1 (1997), pp. 83–119; Philip Clayton, ‘The Emergence of Spirit: From Complexity to Anthropology to Theology’. Theology and Science vol. 4, no. 3 (2006), pp. 291–307.
13 Dennis Noble, ‘Biophysics and Systems Biology’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A vol. 368, no. 1914 (2010), pp. 1125–39.
14 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, pp. 200–1. The first edition (1976) ended at this point; the second edition (1989) added two further chapters.
15 Richard Dawkins, A Devil’s Chaplain: Selected Writings. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2003, pp. 10–11.
16 Jared M. Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. New York: HarperCollins, 1992, p. 2.
17 See for example Ajit Varki and Tasha K. Altheide, ‘Comparing the Human and Chimpanzee Genomes: Searching for Needles in a Haystack’. Genome Research vol. 15 (2005), pp. 1746–58.
18 Jeremy Taylor, Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
19 Jonathan Marks, ‘The Biological Myth of Human Evolution’. Contemporary Social Science vol. 7, no. 2 (2012), pp. 139–65.
20 Joshua A. Hicks and Laura A. King, ‘Meaning in Life and Seeing the Big Picture: Positive Affect and Global Focus’. Cognition and Emotion vol. 21, no. 7 (2007), pp. 1577–84.
21 For example, see Job 28. This does not mean that wisdom is physically located in a given place; it merely highlights the need for discernment and commitment in finding it, and the need to avoid ‘surface’ readings of nature.
22 Michael J. MacKenzie and Roy F. Baumeister, ‘Meaning in Life: Nature, Needs, and Myth’, in Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, ed. Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netze. New York: Springer, 2014, pp. 25–38.
23 Eric Klinger, ‘The Search for Meaning in Evolutionary Perspective and Its Clinical Implications’, in The Human Quest for Meaning: A Handbook of Psychological Research and Clinical Applications, ed. P. T. P. Wong and P. S. Fry. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1998, pp. 27–50.
24 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘El origen deportivo del estado’. Citius, Altius, Fortius vol. 9, no. 1–4 (1967), pp. 259–76; quote at p. 260.
25 Crystal L. Park, ‘Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework in Coping with Life Stress’. Journal of Social Issues vol. 61, no. 4 (2005), pp. 707–29.
26 For an important discussion of this point, see Joanna Collicutt McGrath, ‘Post-Traumatic Growth and the Origins of Early Christianity’. Mental Health, Religion and Culture vol. 9, no. 3 (2006), pp. 291–306.
27 Francis Quarle, Emblems. London: Hogg, 1778, p. 202.
28 See John Haldane, ‘Philosophy, the Restless Heart, and the Meaning of Theism’. Ratio vol. 19, no. 4 (2006), pp. 421–40.
29 For useful discussions, see Colin Gunton, ‘Trinity, Ontology and Anthropology: Towards a Renewal of the Doctrine of Imago Dei’, in Persons Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology, ed. Christoph Schwöbel and Colin Gunton. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991, pp. 47–64; Daniel K. Miller, ‘Responsible Relationship: Imago Dei and the Moral Distinction between Humans and Other Animals’. International Journal of Systematic Theology vol. 13, no. 3 (2011), pp. 329–39.
30 J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf. London: HarperCollins, 2001, p. 56.
31 Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, p. 71. See further Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. Kent, OH: Kent State University, 2002.
32 Augustine, de Trinitate XVI.iv.6.
33 Alister E. McGrath, ‘Arrows of Joy: Lewis’s Argument from Desire’, in The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 105–28.
34 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy. London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 258.
35 Key works in the field include Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001; Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004.
36 See here Jonathan Jong, Christopher Kavanagh and Aku Visala, ‘Born Idolaters: The Limits of the Philosophical Implications of the Cognitive Science of Religion’. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie vol. 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 244–66.
37 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, I.1.1.
38 Robert N. McCauley, ‘The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science’, in Explanation and Cognition, ed. F. Keil and R. Wilson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 61–85.
39 This approach is found in Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006.
40 Justin L. Barrett, ‘Is the Spell Really Broken? Bio-Psychological Explanations of Religion and Theistic Belief’. Theology and Science vol. 5, no. 1 (2007), pp. 57–72.
10 Natural theology: the interface of science and theology
1 For a full discussion, see Alister McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
2 G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993, p. 105.
3 Bronwen Haralambous and Thomas W. Nielsen, ‘Wonder as a Gateway Experience’, in Wonderful Education: The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning, ed. Kieran Egan, Annabella Cant and Gillian Judson. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 219–38.
4 Eric G. Forbes, ‘The Pre-Discovery Observations of Uranus’, in Uranus and the Outer Planets, ed. Garry Hunt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 67–70.
5 David Fergusson, ‘Types of Natural Theology’, in The Evolution of Rationality: Interdisciplinary Essays in Honor of J. Wentzel Van Huyssteen, ed. F. LeRon Schults 3. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007, pp. 380–9.
6 For my own approach, especially in relation to the natural sciences, see Alister E. McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008; A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009; Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011; Re-Imagining Nature.
7 See Peter Harrison, ‘Physico-Theology and the Mixed Sciences: The Role of Theology in Early Modern Natural Philosophy’, in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter Anstey and John Schuster. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005, pp. 165–83.
8 Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The Uses of Natural Theology in Seventeenth-Century England’. Science in Context vol. 20, no. 3 (2007), pp. 451–80. For the wider European context, see Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘Natural History, Ethics, and Physico-Theology’, in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005, pp. 75–103.
9 Sarah Thesiger, ‘The Orchestra of Sir John Davies and the Image of the Dance’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes vol. 36 (1973), pp. 277–304.
10 The opening words of the ‘Ode’ are: ‘The spacious firmament on high’.
11 The other great artistic work of this age to engage both this biblical text and a more general sense of cosmic harmony was Josef Haydn’s Creation: see especially Mark Berry, ‘Haydn’s “Creation” and Enlightenment Theology’. Austrian History Yearbook vol. 39 (2008), pp. 25–44.
12 Joseph Addison, Works. 6 vols. London: Vernor & Hood, 1804, vol. 2, p. 465.
13 Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, ‘The Two Books Prior to the Scientific Revolution’. Annales Theologici vol. 18, no. 1 (2004), pp. 51–83.
14 For comment, see Rob Illiffe, ‘Newton, God, and the Mathematics of the Two Books’, in Mathematicians and Their Gods: Interactions between Mathematics and Religious Beliefs, ed. Snezana Lawrence and Mark McCartney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 121–44.
15 Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity. London: SPCK, 1997, pp. 159–84.
16 Justin L. Barrett, ‘Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences vol. 4, no. 1 (2000), pp. 29–34. For a fuller statement of this position, see Justin L. Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004. Caution is necessary in interpreting these findings: see especially the comments of Jonathan Jong, Christopher Kavanagh and Aku Visala, ‘Born Idolaters: The Limits of the Philosophical Implications of the Cognitive Science of Religion’. Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie vol. 57, no. 2 (2015), pp. 244–66.
17 See for example William F. Brewer and Bruce L. Lamber, ‘The Theory-Ladenness of Observation and the Theory-Ladenness of the Rest of the Scientific Process’. Philosophy of Science vol. 68, no. 3 (2001), pp. 176–86.
18 William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. 2 vols. 2nd edn. London: John W. Parker, 1847, vol. 1, p. 1.
19 Colin E. Gunton, ‘The Trinity, Natural Theology, and a Theology of Nature’, in The Trinity in a Pluralistic Age, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 88–103.
20 I explore this point in detail in McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature.
21 See McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature.
22 Morna D. Hooker, ‘Chalcedon and the New Testament’, in The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine, ed. Sarah Coakley and David A. Pailin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 73–93.
23 Bonaventure, Itinerarium mentis in Deum, 1259, II, 10.
24 For Brunner’s account of this ‘eristic’ aspect of theology, see Alister McGrath, Emil Brunner: A Reappraisal. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 62–74.
25 John Keats, Complete Poems. 3rd edn. London: Penguin, 1988, p. 395. For discussion, see Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
26 Keats, Complete Poems, p. 395.
27 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Penguin, 1998.
28 Reinhold Niebuhr, Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Chicago: Willett, Clark & Colby, 1929, p. 141. Note that the term ‘fundamentalism’ had only entered into general circulation a few years earlier.
29 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture. New York: Anchor, 1969, p. 229; emphasis in original.
30 For example, see Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, pp. 364–5.
31 See the analysis of naturalism in Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
32 Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 311–20.
33 Jonathan Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 108, in Works. 26 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977–2009, vol. 13, p. 279.
34 Edwards, Miscellanies, no. 108.
35 For this point, see Roger Scruton, ‘Scientism in the Arts and Humanities’. The New Atlantis no. 40 (Fall 2013), pp. 33–46.
36 For my own reflections on this, see Alister McGrath, Inventing the Universe: Why We Can’t Stop Talking about Science, Faith and God. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2015, pp. 1–2.
37 Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1746).
38 Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, ‘Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual and Aesthetic Emotion’. Cognition and Emotion vol. 17, no. 2 (2003), pp. 297–314. See also the later study by Michelle N. Shiota, Dacher Keltner and Amanda Mossman, ‘The Nature of Awe: Elicitors, Appraisals, and Effects on Self-Concept’. Cognition and Emotion vol. 21, no. 5 (2007), pp. 944–63.
39 Guy R. Lefrançois, Theories of Human Learning. 3rd edn. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishers, 1995, pp. 329–30.
40 B. Campos, M. N. Shiota, D. Keltner, G. C. Gonzaga and J. L. Goetz, ‘What Is Shared, What Is Different? Core Relational Themes and Expressive Displays of Eight Positive Emotions’. Cognition and Emotion vol. 27, no. 1 (2013), pp. 37–52.
41 Patty van Cappellen and Vassilis Saroglou, ‘Awe Activates Religious and Spiritual Feelings and Behavioral Intentions’. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality vol. 4, no. 3 (2012), pp. 223–36.
42 For an extended reflection on this image, see Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
43 David Brewster, Life of Sir Isaac Newton. New edn., rev. W. T. Lynn. London: Tegg, 1875, p. 303.
Conclusion
1 Evelyn Waugh, letter to Edward Sackville-West, cited in Michael de-la-Noy, Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West. London: Bodley Head, 1988, p. 237.
2 ‘Naturalist E. O. Wilson is Optimistic’. Harvard University Gazette 15 June 2006; <http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/06.15/03-biodiversity.html>.
3 See especially Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
4 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage, 1999, p. 294.