Facets Of Faith And Science

This first volume explores the specific roles of metaphysical and religious beliefs in explanation and theory construction in the natural sciences. It surveys modes of interaction between religion and science, paying attention to the sensitivities required for their historiography.

This third volume explores the specific roles of metaphysical and religious beliefs in explanation and theory construction in the natural sciences. It presents case studies covering astronomy, biology, cosmology and physics.

This third volume explores the specific roles of metaphysical and religious beliefs in explanation and theory construction in the natural sciences. It presents case studies covering astronomy, biology, cosmology and physics.

This fourth volume of Facets of Faith and Science focuses on how to interpret God's action in nature and surveys recent thought on divine agency, proposes a new understanding of double agency, and addresses the relation of divine action and omniscience to natural causation, randomness and evolutionary theory. Chapters Include: Recent Thoughts on Divine Agency; The Dressage Ring and the Ballroom: Loci of Double Agency; The Law of Nature and the Nature of God; Randomness, Omniscience, and Divine Action; Theism, Christianity, and the Grand Evolutionary Story; On Craig's Defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument; Demarcation and Design; Transcendent Causes and Computational Miracles; Design, Chance, and Necessity in Recent Science and Philosophy; Religious Apologetics and the Transmutation of Knowledge: Was a Chemico-Theology Possible in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Britain?; Natural Theology and a Christian Witness in Chemistry and Physics; The Gulf between Design and Descent: Charles Darwin's Rejection of As a Gray's Apologia; Chiasmic Cosmology and The Same Old Story: Two Lutheran Approaches to Natural Theology; Faith and Science in Biblical Perspective: Human Responsibility before God; Copernicanism and the Bible in Early Modern Science; An Interactive Theory of the Relation between Science and Scripture; A Reformational Look at the Authority of Scripture; Natural Science and Scriptural Revelation; The Exodus and Jericho: Interpretation and Belief in Biblical Geography and Archaeology; Galileo and the History of Hermenutics; Creation and Separation. Co-published with The Pascal Centre for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science.

divdivIn this captivating book, one of the most highly regarded scientist-theologians of our time explores aspects of the interaction of science and theology. John Polkinghorne defends the place of theology in the university (it is part of the human search for truth) and discusses the role of revelation in religion (it is a record of experience and not the communication of unchallengeable propositions). Throughout his thought-provoking conversation, Polkinghorne speaks with an honesty and openness that derives from his many years of experience in scientific research. A central concern of Polkinghorne’s collection of writings is to reconcile what science can say about the processes of the universe with theology’s belief in a God active within creation. The author examines two related concepts in depth. The first is the divine self-limitation involved in creation that leads to an important reappraisal of the traditional claim that God does not act as a cause among causes. The other is the nature of time and God’s involvement with it, an issue that Polkinghorne shows can link metascience and theological understandings. In the final section of the book, the author reviews three centuries of the science and theology debate and assesses the work of major contemporary contributors to the discussion: Wolfhart Pannenberg, Thomas Torrance, and Paul Davies. He also considers why the science-theology discussion has for several centuries been a particular preoccupation of the English. /DIV/DIV