One of my professors at CUNE, who also happens to be the physics and astronomy professor, is a theistic evolutionist. He tends to have us read more controversial philosophies in order to get discussion started (he likes to argue).
Right now we're reading 13 essays put forward by the Templeton Foundation. They can be found by clicking here. They're worth reading.
2 comments:
Those were interesting articles... Fundamentally, though, what they do best is simply show the tension between rationalism and mysticism, of which Christianity falls into neither. We do not speak of "god" in a generic sense, but rather of the Creator who broke into His creation and became flesh. Such a breaking in they cannot imagine the ramifications of.
For them, truth is something that is extra nos (outside of themselves), which they must study scientifically to reach a conclusion. For the Christian, truth is neither objective (in the scientific sense) nor subjective, but found in the God-man Jesus Christ, in Whom we have all been baptized.
The truth of Scripture is a tradition, handed down through the ages. The "truth" of these scientists cannot possibly exist in the realm of tradition. And so for them, science does one of two things: either it destroys the idea of god at the most fundamental level, or it separates creator and creation into a kind of mystical / rational divide (oddly, the creator being mystical and the creator's creation being rational).
Sorry for the rambling. :-) I have just been doing a lot of reading lately regarding the root of modern science (rationalism) and most contemporary religions (mysticism) and why Christianity is so different (which Christians don't seem to realize). And I find it interesting that when the question of "god" comes up, the automatic assumption is that it must be a mystical god being discussed, not a Creator who is involved with His Creation. They never have an answer for Jesus Christ.
I would not expect them to... They would just assume that Jesus wasn't God. But, in that way, I wonder if it possible for the Christian to dialogue with the rationalist scientist (to find common ground with them). My suspicion is not...
And now I will shut up. Interesting articles!
I find reading their articles interesting. Mainly because I approach everything from an artistic/aesthetic stand point, and almost none of them do.
I found Stenger's article especially interesting to me, simply because he said that even if God could create the unvierse, how on earth could God control or monitor every single particle at the same time? In Stenger's mind, God can't possibly exist outside the universe. The man's obviously never read C.S. Lewis.
They were interesting and provide food for thought.
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