Posted by: gcarkner | October 25, 2013

Oliver O’Donavan, Ethics and Political Theology

Oliver O'Donavan

Oliver O’Donovan (born 1945) FBA FRSE, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the School of Divinity, New College, Edinburgh (since 2006). He has also made significant contributions to political theology, both contemporary and historical. He is one of the most reputable scholars in his field.

Previously O’Donovan was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church at the University of Oxford (1982–2006). Before that he taught at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford (1972–77) and at Wycliffe College, Toronto (1977–82). His doctoral thesis on the problem of self-love in St Augustine was completed under both Henry Chadwick at Oxford and Paul Ramsey at Princeton. He is a past President of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics.

In 2001 he delivered the Stob Lectures at Calvin Theological Seminary, in 2007 he delivered the New College Lectures at New College, University of New South Wales, and in 2008 he delivered a lecture at Princeton Theological Seminary upon receiving the Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life.

O’Donovan is an ordained priest of the Church of England, and has been active in ecumenical dialogue as well as serving on the General Synod. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2000 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 2009. He has held distinguished visiting lectureships in the Universities of Durham and Cambridge, the Gregorian University in Rome, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, St. Patricks College, Maynooth, the University of Hong Kong, and Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. With scholar wife Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, he has jointly authored two books on the history of Christian political thought. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 15, 2013

David Bentley Hart’s Provocative Take on Naturalism

David Bentley Hart’s Concerns about Naturalism/Materialism

~Provocative Quotes taken from The Experience of God: being, consciousness, bliss. (Yale University Press, 2013)

David Bentley Hart 

Naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range. The one thing of which it can give no account, and which its most fundamental principles make it entirely impossible to explain at all, is nature’s very existence. For existence is most definitely not a natural phenomenon; it is logically prior to any physical cause whatsoever…. In fact, it is impossible to say how, in terms naturalism allows, nature could exist at all. (18)

The God described by the new atheists definitely does not exist. (23)

I think it is fair to say that  a majority of academic philosophers these days tends  toward either a strict or qualified materialist or physicalist view of reality (though many might not use those terms), and that such a position rests upon a particularly sound  rational foundation. But, in fact, materialism is the most impoverished  in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been the fashion for a couple centuries or more. (48) See also Lawrence Bonjour, “Against Materialism” in Robert C. Coons and George Bealer, eds., The Waning of Materialsm (Oxford: OUP , 2010), pp.3-23.

Should Methodology ever become Ontology? An admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint [modern empirical science] has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions. This makes a mockery of real science. (71)

The sciences  concern certain facts as organized by certain theories, and certain theories as constrained by certain facts; they accumulate evidence and enucleate hypotheses within very strictly limited paradigms; but they do not provide proofs of where reality begins or ends, or for that matter what the dimensions of truth are. They cannot even establish their own working premises—the real existence of the phenomenal word, the power of the human intellect accurately to reflect that reality, the perfect lawfulness of nature, its interpretability, its mathematical regularity, and so forth—and should not seek to do so, but should confine themselves to the truths to which their method gives them access. They should also recognize what the boundaries of the scientific rescript are. There are, in fact, truths of reason that are far surer than even the most amply supported findings of empirical science. (71-2) Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 11, 2013

Charles Taylor on Secularity & Immanent Frame

Charles Taylor Articulates the Immanent Frame of the Secular

~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner~

 

We are offered a particularly insightful analysis of our current cultural ethos by McGill Philosophy Professor Charles Taylor. It arises in his most recent prize-winning tome A Secular Age. (2007). Richard Rorty spoke of Taylor as one the top twelve philosophers of our day. He captures the way in which we have located ourselves in the late modern world and the picture that has taken our minds captive: he calls it the immanent frame. This house of the mind and imagination constitutes a unique social imaginary (implicit understanding of the space in which we live) in human history. Our focus here will be to exposit the key insights of Chapter 15 of A Secular Age. In this critical analysis, he shows how religion has been philosophically and culturally marginalized in Western culture (even while it is in resurgence). Taylor gives us tough insights and leads us to think freshly and circumspectly about how we have arrived in this cultural space.

The core theme of this landmark book is (510) to study the fate of religious faith in the strong sense in the West, meaning:  a. belief in a transcendent reality, and b. the connected aspiration of personal transformation, which goes beyond ordinary human flourishing. He is deconstructing or calling into question the subtraction story or Western Master Narrative (one deeply embedded in our late modern consciousness), where science replaces religion after Christendom. Within this perspective, the growth of science entails the death of God and the recession of religion. Religion is taken to be replaced by science. Is this hermeneutically valid?, queries Taylor. When did science become equivalent to secularism and why? This is the crux of the investigation, and of a major confusion.

Ultimately, Taylor wants to explore with us the plausibility of the life-nurturing, transcendent dimensions of human culture. He does not believe that all citizens of late modernity need to deny the possibility of the transcendent within this immanent frame and live within a horizontal dimension only. From his perspective, the story of the rise of modern social spaces doesn’t need to be given an anti-religious spin (579). The actual reality of Western culture is closer to the truth that “a whole gamut of positions, from the most militant atheism to the most orthodox traditional theisms, passing through every possible position on the way, are represented and defended somewhere in our society.” (556) They are defended in various non-neutral contexts, institutions and communities. This creates for citizens of late modernity the sense of being cross-pressured by the different views (the plurality of positions) they encounter. The dialogue and debate of these perceptions is still very robust, with endless potential options to find meaning (the Nova Effect). Both belief and unbelief in God co-exist within society (secularity 3).

What does Taylor mean by the term immanent frame? The buffered identity (as opposed to the porous pre-modern) self is a key part of such a mental frame. It operates within a disenchanted world where supernatural beings or forces with teleological goals or intentions are deemed close to impossible (539). Final causes are eliminated from the picture. With this immanent frame, there is a loss of a cosmic order; everything important is this-worldly, explicable on its own terms; it fits within the time-space-energy-matter dimensions. Social and political orders are constructed by humans solely for mutual benefit, not to please a divine entity. Society is made up of individuals (the normative element). Each human is charged with finding her or his own way of being human (Nova Effect), their own individual spiritual path. Everyone has also become an individual measure of the good (auto-nomos). Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 10, 2013

Malcolm Guite, Chaplain-Poet-Lecturer

A Sonnet for Trinity Sunday by Malcolm Guite, Cambridge University

In the Beginning, not in time or space,

But in the quick before both space and time,

In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,

In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,

In music, in the whole creation story,

In His own image, His imagination,

The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,

And makes us each the other’s inspiration.

He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,

To improvise a music of our own,

To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,

Three notes resounding from a single tone,

To sing the End in whom we all begin;

Our God beyond, beside us and within.

~Malcolm Guite, Chaplain-Poet-Musician-Lecturer, Cambridge University
 

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 9, 2013

Owen Gingerich Harvard Astronomer-Historian of Science

Owen Gingerich

Owen Jay Gingerich (born 1930) is a former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University, and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he has written many books on the history of astronomy.

Gingerich is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Academy of the History of Science. He has been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists, and is on the Templeton Foundation’s Board of Trustees.

Career and Contributions

Due largely to Gingerich’s work, De revolutionibus (here the cover of the 2nd edition of 1566, Basel) has been researched and cataloged better than any first-edition historical text except for the original Gutenberg Bible. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | October 4, 2013

Ghost in the Machine

The Ongoing Debate about the Relationship between Mind & Brain

(Self, Soul, Mind, Consciousness?)

Brain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PniAu9XTW3Y

Is there a ghost in the machine? Mind-Brain Debate

Richard Swinburne (Oxford), Raymond Tallis (Manchester),

Martha Robinson (University College London) & Dr Stuart Derbyshire (Birmingham)

___________________

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfWGV9sZ3J4

William Lane Craig, The Materialist and the Mind

____________________

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku-GmndXDXo

Professor Raymond Tallis debates RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor

Neuromania: can neuroscience explain human behaviour and culture?

___________________

Thomas Nagel’s Big Question in Mind & Cosmos.

1. He discusses the conflict between reductionist and antireductionist views of reality: he is convinced as a philosopher that physicalistic and naturalistic view of the human brain (and the universe) is fundamentally flawed.

“My aim is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the consequences of rejecting it— to present the problem rather than to propose a solution. Materialist naturalism leads to reductionist ambitions because it seems unacceptable to deny the reality of all those familiar things that are not at first glance physical. But if no plausible reduction is available, and if denying reality to the mental continues to be unacceptable, that suggests that the original premise, materialist naturalism, is false, and not just around the edges.” (p. 15)

2. Nagel focuses on three different aspects of the the amazing world of mind: consciousness, cognition (mental functions such as thought, reasoning, and evaluation) and value. In each case, he explains why a reductionist explanation is inadequate. In the chapter on consciousness he writes:

“What kind of explanation of the development of these organisms, even one that includes evolutionary theory, could account for the appearance of organisms that are not only physically adapted to the environment but also conscious subjects? In brief, I believe it cannot be a purely physical explanation. What has to be explained is not just the lacing of organic life with a tincture of qualia but the coming into existence of subjective individual points of view— a type of existence logically distinct from anything describable by the physical sciences alone.” (p. 44)

“The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world.” (p. 53)

According to the reductionist point of view, every aspect of reality can be explained in terms of physics, chemistry and the initial conditions of the universe. The origin and development of life, consciousness, and the capacity of human beings to understand the universe via science can all be explained in terms of biochemical processes that are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. For an alternative well-informed perspective, see Alister McGrath’s excellent work A Fine-Tuned Universe. Philosophy of mind and Christian theism (to name just two domains of human knowledge) has long held there are problems with this view of reality. From these disciplines the explanation is offered that nearly every aspect of the life of the mind is best explained by appealing to a comparable cause, another mind.


Other Scholarly Reading on Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind & Religion

(in consultation with Dr. Judith Toronchuk, Biopsychology, Trinity Western University)

Barrett, Justin. Why would anyone believe in God? AltaMira Press, 2004.

Barrett, Justin. Cognitive Science, Religion, and Theology: From Human Minds to Divine Minds. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2011; Born Believers.

Beauregard, Mario. Brain Wars: The Scientific Battle Over the Existence of the Mind and the Proof That Will Change the Way We Live Our Lives, Harper One 2012.; The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist’s case for the existence of the soul. (with Denyse O’Leary)

Brown, Warren S. and Brad D. Strawn. The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Corcoran, Kevin. Rethinking Human Nature. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2006.

Green, Joel. Body, Soul and Human Life. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008.

Green, Joel, ed. What About the Soul? Neuroscience and Christian Anthropology. Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2004.

Green, Joel and Palmer, Stuart. In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body problem. Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005.

Hasker, William. The Emergent Self. Cornell University Press, 1999.

Jeeves, Malcolm, ed.  From cells to souls–and beyond: changing portraits of human nature. GrandRapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004..

Jeeves, Malcolm. Human Nature: Reflections on the Integration of Psychology and Christianity . Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006.

Jeeves, Malcom.ed., Rethinking Human Nature: A Multidisciplinary Approach.Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Jeeves, Malcom and Warren Brown. Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion. Conshohoken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press. 2009.

McNamara, Patrick. The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Markham, Paul N. Rewired: Exploring Religious Conversion. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2007.

Murphy, Nancey. Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? New York, NY: Cambridge, 2006.

Murphy, Nancey and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me do it?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.

Newberg, Andrew and Mark Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist. Ballantine Books, 2010.
Russell, Robert John et al (eds.) Neuroscience and the Person: scientific perspective on divine action 4. Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1999.

Schjoedt, Uffe. “The Religious Brain: A General Introduction to the Experimental Neuroscience of Religion”, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 21 (2009): 310-339.

Schloss, Jeffrey & Michael Murray (eds.) The Believing Primate: scientific, philosophical and theological reflections on the origin of religion.

Swinburne, Richard. The Evolution of the Soul. Oxford University Press.

Biola Conference on Neuroscience & the Soul http://cct.biola.edu/events/2013/May/10/neuroscience-and-soul-conference-cct-annual-confer/

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Posted by: gcarkner | September 30, 2013

Myths about Scientific Reason and Faith

Dr. Paul Davies on Scientific Reason and Religious Faith

Reprint from a thought provoking article on the nature of science and the laws of physics.

The New York Times, 
November 24, 2007

Tempe, Arizona, USA.

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue. 
 
The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.
 
The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour. Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | September 30, 2013

Research Disciplines

Research Disciplines that Make a Difference

1. Take lots of notes on your computer while reading; set up a sound filing system so that you have easy access. You never know when you are going to need that paper or quote in future. Perhaps you will use it in teaching eventually. Pen & paper notes are fine as long as you get them on your computer as soon as possible. Reference everything. Back up everything at least twice!

2. Discipline and design your work in two week chunks. This is enough time to master a new book, or get a handle on a new research method, or write a section of a chapter. Have either your supervisor or a friend hold you accountable to the goal of that period. Meeting regularly with someone to discuss what you learned is key to the process; this is the Oxford model of the tutorial. It is 900 years old and it works.

3. Only answer your email at a certain time of the day; don’t let it constantly distract you from the task at hand. The ping on your email system can be your enemy in disguise.

4. Get help when you get stuck or depressed, from a pastor, counsellor, a professor, or administrator. I met a psychiatrist once on a flight to England and her specialty was to help PhD students who got stuck right in the middle of their work. Imagine that. This is often when people quit–when the early novelty wears off and you see much work still ahead, and no light yet at the end of the tunnel. Remember the movie A Beautiful Mind. Help is available!

5. Write up a schedule with a series of milestones to accomplish by a specific date. You have no idea of what you can accomplish until you set the goal and try. Build that dissertation chapter by chapter like blocks in a building. One day you wake up and Voila you are a PhD!

6. Write, read, create, imagine in the early part of your day. Your mind is freshest and most open to new breakthrough thinking at this time. First four hours are usually the most fruitful for most. Busy work and administration should wait until late in the day, unless it is an emergency.

7. Learn from different types of writing: journalistic, artistic/creative, novel, technical, philosophical. Develop that art of good rhetoric throughout your graduate degree. Expand your vocabulary and grammar base. By all means, learn what makes a good argument in your field, with solid substantiation.

8.View your research as a diamond drill; day after day you are applying pressure to the rock of ignorance, and one day out pops a diamond, the breakthrough or big insight, a thesis proposal or concluding chapter. That’s how the Eurotunnel got completed–38 kilometres through rock from two continents. Perseverance, discipline and patience is of the essence. Keep drilling even when it is no longer thrilling.

9. Keep a regular journal of all your thoughts, but don’t try to integrate them all into your thesis. Only include what you need to get a PhD; save the rest for a conference or your book. That brilliant idea can wait to be developed later. You are not doing your magnum opus in your PhD; in one sense, you are just cutting your teeth on research and writing. I met a professor once who filled ten journals over the time of his PhD. Some of your thoughts are half way home … and that is a good start. Thoughts build momentum over time. Write down the questions you have not solved; they can simmer for awhile in your subconscious mind. It is also good therapy to look back and see how far you have come and how much your writing has improved. The degree is geared to make a new you with new abilities and work habits!

10. Don’t wallow in your weaknesses; get the training or the help from others that you need, whether a computer programming skill or lab technique. You are running a business and you cannot possibly have all the expertise or skills needed to run it at the outset. Enthusiasm and academic passion can only carry you so far. Sometimes you will need to take an extra course, or hire someone to train you. If you need expertise by another professor in your department, go through your own supervisor to maintain good protocol.

11. Build a nice circle of friends and have fun together; let off steam once in awhile. Other PhD students are often your marker of sanity; they pull you back from the workaholism abyss. Don’t sleep in your lab! Have a life outside work. Church can help immensely; build a prayer partner. Go to a movie, a dinner party, or a friend’s wedding. Some theology study can help to balance out your life as well. Feed your whole person and it will pay dividends in the creativity of your work. Remember the Sabbath principle and stay cool; be committed but don’t get obsessed with your project. UBC students have the luxury of Regent College and Bookstore next door with all of its rich resources.

~Reflections from Gord Carkner, a fellow sufferer in doing two graduate degrees, both of which seemed impossible at first, hard and burdensome in the middle, exhilarating to finish, but eventually they changed my life.

References:

How to Get a PhD by Philips and Hugh.

How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading. by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles van Doren.

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Posted by: gcarkner | September 27, 2013

Ann Voskamp Discovers Gratitude

Quotes from Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

for the Curious of Heart

Gratitude-Gifts-Grace-Glory-Goodness-Joy-Fullness-Meaning-Blessing

Eucharisteo: Ann’s Unique Hermeneutic on the Spirituality of Everyday Life

Eucharisteo (thanksgiving) always precedes the miracle. And don’t we all long for a miracle of grace.

See also Brene Brown TED Talk on Vulnerability 

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lXYZ6s3Dfk Louie Schwartzburg, Nature, Beauty, Gratitude

Kari Jobe, Revelation Song

Book of Philippians

“Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.”

“Humbly let go. Let go of trying to do, let go of trying to control, let go of my own way, let go of my own fears. Let God blow His wind, His trials, oxygen for joy’s fire. Leave the hand open and be. Be at peace. Bend the knee and be small and let God give what God chooses to give because He only gives love and whisper a surprised thanks. This is the fuel for joy’s flame. Fullness of joy is discovered only in the emptying of will. And I can empty. I can empty because counting His graces has awakened me to how He cherishes me, holds me, passionately values me. I can empty because I am full of His love. I can trust.”

“We don’t see the material world for what it is meant to be: the means to communion with God…. There is a belief missing, that God is good and that he gives good gifts.”

“When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us?”

“He does have surprising, secret purposes. I open a Bible, and His plans, startling, lie there barefaced. It’s hard to believe it, when I read it, and I have to come back to it many times, feel long across those words, make sure they are real. His love letter forever silences any doubts: “His secret purpose framed from the very beginning [is] to bring us to our full glory” (1 Corinthians 2:7 NEB).”

“The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live…. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: giving thanks for everything…. Saying Yes to God’s graces is the linchpin of it all.”

“Thank You, God, for the bread of now …

for your Son and sacrifice …

for the love song You keep singing, the gift of Yourself that You

keep giving …

for the wild wonder of You in this moment.”

“I don’t really want more time; I just want enough time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pressed, driven, or wild to get it all done–yesterday.”

“I have to seek God beauty. Because isn’t my internal circuitry wired to seek out something worthy of worship? …. True Beauty worship, worship of Creator Beauty Himself. God is present in all moments, but I do not deify the wind in the pines, the snow falling on the hemlocks, the moon over harvested wheat. Pantheism, seeing the natural world as divine, is a very different thing than seeing divine God present in all things …. Nature is not God but God revealing the weight of Himself, all His glory, through the looking glass of nature.”

“It is in the dark that God is passing by. The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite: God is passing by. God is in the tremors. Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by. In the blackest, God is closest, at work, forging His perfect and right will. Though it is black and we can’t see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present to us …” Read More…

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Posted by: gcarkner | September 25, 2013

Alvin Plantinga, October 2nd @ UBC

Alvin Plantinga

Dr. Alvin Plantinga, former John O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame University;

currently Jellema Chair in Philosophy, Calvin College.

Topic:  Science & Religion: Where the Conflict Really Lies

 Wednesday, October 2, 2013 @ 4:00 p.m.    Scarfe Building Room 100, UBC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pUF82TZFCs&feature=youtu.be

Abstract

Taking Christian belief as C.S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’, I’ll argue that there is no real conflict between science and Christian belief. I’ll go on to argue that there is a real conflict between science and naturalism, the thought that there is no such person as God or anything like God.  So if we take naturalism to be a religion or a quasi-religion, then there is indeed a science-religion conflict; it’s not between Christianity and science, however, but between naturalism and science.

Like any Christian (and indeed any theist), I believe that the world has been created by God, and hence “intelligently designed”. As far as I can see, God certainly could have used Darwinian processes to create the living world and direct it as he wanted to go; hence evolution as such does not imply that there is no direction in the history of life. What does have that implication is not evolutionary theory itself, but unguided evolution, the idea that neither God nor any other person has taken a hand in guiding, directing or orchestrating the course of evolution. But the scientific theory of evolution, sensibly enough, says nothing one way or the other about divine guidance. It doesn’t say that evolution is divinely guided; it also doesn’t say that it isn’t. Like almost any theist, I reject unguided evolution; but the contemporary scientific theory of evolution just as such—apart from philosophical or theological add-ons—doesn’t say that evolution is unguided. Like science in general, it makes no pronouncements on the existence or activity of God.

Biography

Dr. Plantinga is professor emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, was described by Time magazine in 1980 as “America’s leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God.”  He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including God and Other Minds: the Rational Justification of Religious Belief (Cornell 1967), God, Freedom and Evil (Eerdmans 1974), Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford 2000) and Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford 2012 from which he draws this lecture).  Among many honors, Plantinga is the past president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, and the Society of Christian Philosophers, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, Alvin Plantinga is widely known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. He delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, was a Guggenheim Fellow, 1971–1972. In 2012, the University of Pittsburgh’s Philosophy Department, History and Philosophy of Science Department, and the Center for the History and Philosophy of Science awarded him the Rescher Prize.

Handout for the Lecture: Science and Religion- where conflict handout

See also new book by David Bentley Hart called The Experience of God: Being ,Consciousness, Bliss

https://ubcgcu.org/2012/09/15/alvin-plantinga-where-the-conflict-really-lies/ Book review by Dr. Olav Slaymaker

https://ubcgcu.org/2013/09/24/where-the-conflict-really-lies-chapter-10/  Summary of argument on the Conflict between Science & Naturalism.

 Sample of Plantinga’s talk and good humour 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbjp9PrtPS8 Where the Conflict Really Lies Biola U.

See Thomas Nagel’s book which has fuelled much current debate: Mind and Cosmos: why naturalistic neo-Darwinism is almost certainly wrong.

Also see the detailed scholarly work on the subject of natural theology by Alister McGrath called A Fine-Tuned Universe.

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