We'll be hearing today from Andrew Katay, another of Justin's good friends, and Senior Minister at Christ Church Inner West Anglican Community.
Here's a taste of what Andrew will be challenging us with today:
Here's a taste of what Andrew will be challenging us with today:
(I note the word "challenge", perhaps I wanted to join discussion, or be interested, or even entertained, or maybe I wanted to give a challenge...see my previous post on this.)
One reason I'd have liked to attend was that Mr Katay was known while ministering to students at Sydney University, to espouse a mediating line that allowed the blend of, well, not science, but materialist dogma and Christian faith; I don't know that it worked then, but I would have been keen to hear what he said this time.
There's plenty on this topic, of course, a few items new (James Hannam's God's Philosophers, for example) , and some old (The Origin of Science, which includes links to Stanley Jaki's work), and of course, Peter Harrison's great work on the genesis of modern science in orthodox Christian belief (notable a short duration and recent creation!).
The preliminary position I would take is that the notion of a conflict between 'science' and Christian faith is at root mistaken, Science has arisen out of a world story that rests in the Bible. Where conflict arises is when science equivocates into materialism or naturalism, and the conflict then is a natural outcome of world views.
This type of science promotes a world story that eliminates the creator and has the creation making itself: entirely as a result of forces acting within the cosmos. The world story of Christian faith is to the contrary.
Much theology is, in my view, insufficiently critical of the materialist world story, and insufficiently reflective of the biblical world story and its ramifications for our way of thinking, or approach to the world around us and finally for christology and then soteriology. Previous posts will give sufficient for me to not repeat myself here.
A postscript 7 Dec 09
But why, is there no conflict between science and Christian faith? This is the question I didn't address. Materialism would have it that it disinterestedly looks at the world and draws its conclusions simply from what it sees, unadorned by 'theory' or metaphysics.
Wrong. Materialism has no more direct contact with the world than any other endeavour. It is as embedded in a metaphysic as any religion is; that is, it proceed on the basis of a set of axioms, a view of the world that it takes as truly basic which is beyond its assessment.
Oddly, I think that materialism trades on the investment of Christian faith. The Bible has introduced a metaphysic which, while it has been centuries in development, has taken us far further than Greek empiricism ever did, or could; Aristotle notwithstanding. There is a certain reliance that must be made on the nature and state of the world before its examination can proceed reliably. If you truly think the world is subject to randomness, then science will likely drift into mysticism. If you truly think that the world proceeded from the hand of God in an orderly and realist manner...modern science; as Harrison has shown (and Jaki too, for that matter).
Science is the examination of the world on the principle that the world is genuinely and reliably examinable, and that we can draw robust and valid conclusions; however, for all its complexity, it is at the philosophical level of mechanics: it tells what is (exageration for effect, sorry!).
The first scientific gesture, I like to think, is Adam naming the animals in the book of Genesis: he more than named, on my understanding of the Hebrew cultural implication of that act, he identified them; that is he assigned a level of understanding to them to govern relationships between him and them.
