How might love shape scholarship?

The Global Faculty Initiative is a wonderful enterprise to stimulate the interaction of university scholarship with theology. They employ the following methodology.

"Theology Brief: a longer essay by a leading theologian on a key theme in Christian theology

Disciplinary Briefs & Disciplinary Notes: short essays by research scholars that explore connections between their scholarly specialty and a Theology Brief"

The most recent Theology Brief is by Oliver O'Donovan, The Sovereignty of Love.

Here is my response, Love and the Natural Sciences.

The link above gives my full article. Here is the beginning.

Love should be primary for a Christian scholar

I was both surprised and challenged by O’Donovan’s argument that love should be primary for a Christian scholar. My prior perspective was that universities are primarily about thinking. Integrity, both intellectual and moral, should be the main characteristic of Christian scholars. This includes integrating disciplinary knowledge with theology. However, I now see that love should subsume integrity, just a Jesus challenged us.

O’Donovan states: “Those for whom specialised knowledge constitutes their sphere of work thus face a challenging question: how may they love that one aspect of the world which they know very well, while focussing their love finally upon God and their neighbours?” This challenge of a dual focus must be related to the question: how does one resist the temptation to worship the creation not the Creator (Romans 1:18-25)? As I discuss below, modern physics is truly amazing and beautiful. This has led some theoretical physicists (for example, authors of popular books such as Sean Carroll, Paul Davies, and Frank Wilczek) to follow the example of Albert Einstein and be in awe of nature and our ability to understand it. Unfortunately, they either deny the existence of God or at least his personal nature.

Love for others is particularly challenging as it includes love for enemies. A scholar may encounter many enemies (both real and perceived): colleagues who oppose their ideas, anonymous reviewers who make unjustified criticisms, bureaucrats who frustrate, impede, and burden with dubious administrative requirements, and increasingly members of the public or politicians who make ill-informed criticisms of their work, its value, or its applications.  

The concern for love enlivened a liturgy (from Every Moment Holy) that I often pray before commencing work. Here are a few lines 

“May I learn to love learning, O Lord,

for the world is yours,

and all things in it speak

-each in their way – of you:

of your mind,

your designs,

your artistry,

your power,

your unfolding purpose.

All knowledge is your knowledge.

All wisdom your wisdom….

Let me be in this school, even is small ways,

a bearer of love and light and reconciliation;

which is to say, let me in humility be your child…” 

Counter-cultural dimensions to love in the academy

The love commands of Jesus were counter-cultural in the first century. His followers were largely from the lower echelons of society and faced opposition from both Roman imperial and Jewish religious leaders. Obedience could come at a high cost. The commands are also radically counter-cultural in universities today, as they are dominated by four values: money, marketing, management, and metrics. The social and institutional pressure to conform is immense. In his Disciplinary Brief, responding to O’Donovan, Ian Hutchinson suggests “humility seems the most difficult value in the academy.” Peter Harrison recently discussed how, following the characterisations of Max Weber, secularisation has led to disenchantment, diminishment of virtue, and being trapped in the “iron cage” of bureaucracy. 

Tom McLeish argued that Christian natural scientists need to adopt a contemplative stance in their work.  He argued that the book of Job

“urges us not to look on the natural world for signs of God, nor through it as a window onto some dim divine image, but to learn to look on nature with God’s eyes, aligning our servant gaze with, not at, the divine. The same searching look of creative power and insight, of love, with which God participates in his created nature is to be the direction, if only in image, of our participation also.”

This resonates with O’Donovan’s definition of love as “affective and directive attention to a good.”

What is a university for?

Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime—a lifetime which has included 9 years as a student and 32 years as an academic, across 6 universities in Australia and the USA. Australian universities are receiving increasing media attention due to failures in management and governance, including a recent ABC Four Corners documentary.  Numerous books by academics lament the state of Australian universities.  They appear to be all about four M's: money, marketing, management, and metrics. Learning, understanding, and discovery for its own sake seems alien and marginalised. Questions that need more attention include What is a university for? and What values should a university embody? In the New College Lectures for 2025 Peter Harrison went much deeper than the public debates and considered the role of secularisation, values, and virtues. 

The beginning of an article I wrote and will appear in the next issue of the CASE Quarterly.

What is a university for? A Christian Vision for the Modern Secular University 

How might order and disorder shape scholarship?

 Order and Disorder: Nigel Biggar in Dialogue with the University, Edited By Terence C. Halliday and K. K. Yeo

has just been published by Langham.

In 1992, John Stott, the founder of Langham, made an “urgent plea for double listening” for Christians to listen to both the Word and the world. This book is a notable response to Stott’s plea, in the context of the highest levels of academia. There is an intellectual chasm between academic theology and the research that takes place in secular universities, even though the best ones have deeply Christian origins.

In this volume, Professor Nigel Biggar claims that the “existence of a given created order – be it physical or aesthetic or moral – implies that academic endeavour is properly about the discovery of the truth of reality as given by God.” However, given human finitude and fallibility, finding such truth is subtle, complex, multi-faceted, and ambiguous. Elucidating the nature and extent of the connections between theology and academic disciplines is a formidable multi-disciplinary challenge that must contend with overspecialisation, compartmentalisation, secularisation, institutional inertia, and political polarisation.

The Global Faculty Initiative (GFI) has developed a community and method that provides small concrete examples of how to make progress. Thanks be to God! This book is the wonderful fruit of their concerted labour and is the second in a series showcasing the work of GFI. Biggar provides a Theology Brief that elucidates the conceptual dialectic of order and disorder in creation to set the contour of a dialogue with Christian scholars from diverse academic disciplines. His Brief is succinct, accessible, balanced, profound, helpful, stimulating, and relevant. The responses are creative, concrete, stimulating, and gracious in disagreement and correction. Biggar’s final response is noteworthy: “We all learn from what should be a genuine dialogue. We all need to learn – non-theologians to think more Christianly, and theologians to think more realistically.”

Upon engaging with the book, my main disappointment was that I did not somehow make the time to contribute to the discussion. My own field of condensed matter physics is largely about how the interplay of order and disorder can lead to the emergence of hierarchical structures. Nevertheless, the book is a stimulus for future engagement with the ideas presented and with this vibrant alternative academic community. 

Growing old with grace

I am 65 years old. I have struggled with my mental health much of my adult life. My wife, Robin, is 70 and has Parkinson’s disease. We are both retired from formal paid work. Some of our close friends are older or have greater health challenges than us. The reflections that follow are prompted by a desire to grow old with grace and to stimulate discussions on the topic with family and friends.

The communal dimension

Affluent individuals in the West think in individualistic terms. Perhaps, when it comes to ageing, they may think in a little more in terms of being part of a couple, and perhaps a nuclear family. However, ageing increases our dependence on others: a spouse, children, relatives, friends, neighbours, organisations, and governments. Even if, as individuals, we come to terms with the issues discussed below, that does not mean that our loved ones will. This complicates things further.

Accepting reality

We are all going to die. Unless we have a sudden and unexpected death, we are all going to get older. Gradually, our minds and bodies will decay. Ailments will increase. Physical, mental, and emotional energy will decline along with agility. It is tempting to live in denial that this will ever happen, or to deny that it is happening right now. The truth can be too scary, complicated, disappointing, or uncertain to accept. Even if we accept it, our loved ones may not. Even if we acknowledge the reality at an intellectual level, will we deal with it emotionally and at a practical level?

Declining energy

As we age, we have less physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energy. We get tired more easily and our recovery time is longer. Today, I cannot function without a daily nap after lunch. I must carefully manage my limited energy. I cannot imagine doing many of the things I did a decade ago, let alone when I was young. 

Despite our declining energy, in retirement, we may have more time and freedom than ever before. We may have a new perspective on what really matters and want to use our freedom to avoid being sucked into the cares and anxieties of this world. What a blessing! The challenge is to make the most of our freedom with the energy we do have.

Some people retire from full-time employment and experience “a new lease on life.” Freed from a demanding work schedule and burdensome responsibilities, they have energy and enthusiasm for all sorts of activities.

On the positive side, what am I enjoying about this stage of life? How do I notice my energy changing? How am I adapting? Will I deal with practical and emotional issues while I still have the energy?

Practical dimensions

There is a whole range of financial, medical, legal, bureaucratic, transport, and housing dimensions to ageing. On the one hand, these complexities can come from individual affluence and living in a country with generous (by global standards) government support. On the other hand, navigating these complexities requires considerable time, energy, planning, technological savvy, and patience. It can be overwhelming. Furthermore, simply waiting until problems escalate to unsustainable levels risks creating unnecessary crises, placing burdens on others, and missing out on potential solutions. This is where accepting reality is important. At some point, we will have to stop driving, riding a bicycle, using ladders, writing books, travelling overseas, using stairs, and possibly living in our current house. Can we accept this? When do we think some of these things might happen? Do we have a plan for how we will adapt? When and how will we discuss this with family members?

Attitude

Facing reality is not easy. Our bodies are decaying. Opportunities and our influence on others are diminishing. Our legacy may be set. Not only are we changing, but so is the world around us. It is not what it used to be. Social and technological change is rapid, increasing, surprising, not necessarily for the better, and not easy to adapt to. Unlike during the bravado of youth, it is harder to deny our limitations and finitude. We now feel them in our bodies and brains. Loss rather than gain may be the norm. Funerals may outnumber weddings and births. Will we truly grieve our losses, whether it is the death of loved ones, a dream, or diminished mental capacity? Stages of grief may include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, not necessarily in a linear fashion.

Spiritual dimensions

The practical, intellectual, and emotional dimensions of ageing cannot be separated from the spiritual. My spiritual life can enable me to deal with the other challenges. Do I believe this life is all there is? Is it preparation for something better? Do I trust Jesus is walking next to me in this life stage, just as He has promised? As I experience weakness, is His grace sufficient for me? Am I looking back at past failures and disappointments with bitterness and shame? Or am I looking forward to being welcomed by Jesus into an eternal home? Do I have the hope of heaven, where there will be perfect love and justice, and no more death, tears, and pain?

A diversity of circumstances and experience

Everyone is different. Some people have excellent health and circumstances, and even when they are eighty years old, they don’t have to wrestle with some of the challenges I discuss here. Perhaps, they won’t have to for another decade. Some people die young. Some people have chronic health problems or disabilities their whole lives. Different family, social, or financial contexts can significantly affect the nature or extent of the challenges I discussed above. To illustrate the diversity I include a graph (at the end of this post) of the projected age of death for women in Australia who are 65 years old. It shows a large variation in life expectancy.

Some relevant books

Currently, Robin and I are reading three books. Each considers a different dimension of ageing.

"We need to talk about mum and dad" It is by the Australian comedian Jean Kittson and illustrated with cartoons by Patrick Cook. Although written for the children of ageing parents, it is helpful for anyone getting old. It discusses the complex family dynamics associated with ageing and how to navigate the many dimensions of the practical complexities of ageing. 

"Not Old, Not Young, Not Done: Following Jesus in Your 50s And 60s" by Christopher Ash.

"The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully" by Joan Chittister. Although the author is a Benedictine nun, the book is intended for a broad audience. The book challenges our attitudes to ageing, but may be a bit idealistic for some of us.

Comparing and contrasting Christian belief to others

For the last two meetings of the theology reading group we discussed I believe. Help my unbelief!: Christian beliefs for a religiously pluralistic and secular world by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen

It is a 400+ page summary of the author's five-volume systematic theology series called Constructive Christian Theology for the Church in the Pluralistic World.

The book is an ambitious and admirable project. The author not only discusses all the main topics in systematic theology but also attempts to bring each topic into dialogue with science (representing the secular world) and the major religions: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

I am in two minds as to how much the project has succeeded. I am glad Karkkainen tried. I learnt a lot about other religions. The compare and contrast approach was done in a respectful and honest way. I think there are two problematic extremes I have noticed in comparisons of religions. One is to force similarities that actually aren't there and to ignore or minimise real differences. The opposite extreme is to deny any similarities and demonise the religion of the "other". The author avoids both extremes.

I don't know enough about other religions to know if the author's descriptions were reasonable and accurate. I did learn a lot and found them helpful. It is interesting how in Judaism there is little emphasis on heaven and eternal life. How should that affect how Christians read the Old Testament? The discussion highlighted for me how certain Christian beliefs are distinctive, such as salvation by grace and the affirmation of the goodness of God's creation. I found it ironic that Buddhism and Hinduism are dominant in communal cultures but are highly individualistic in terms of their views of "salvation" and religious life.

I found Karkkainen's engagement with science somewhat disappointing. References on scientific topics were often popular websites such as space.com. Sometimes details were garbled, such as his description of quantum entanglement (page 90). He only mentioned a few authors on this topic, and some of the references were quite old. More recent authors such as Alister McGrath, Tom McLeish, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander, Peter Harrison, Alvin Plantinga, and Rodney Holder were not mentioned.

On theology, Karkkainen models "generous orthodoxy" in the sense of affirming central orthodox Christian beliefs while graciously acknowledging differences in how those beliefs are to be interpreted and lived out. He references authors from a range of traditions, convictions, and perspectives. Although he is Lutheran, he is comfortable criticising Martin Luther!

I looked through the index and counted page references to different theologians: Jurgen Moltmann (25), Augustine (23), Aquinas (15), Barth (14), Luther (14), and Pannenberg (7). I found this interesting, but I'm not sure what to conclude from it.

Introducing Genesis

This coming term at Village Church, we will have a sermon series on Genesis 1-11. We will also be doing Bible studies in our community groups. I am looking forward to it, particularly as I love these opening chapters of the Bible.

Here is Eugene Peterson's introduction from The Message

First, God. God is the subject of life. God is foundational for living. If we don’t have a sense of the primacy of God, we will never get it right, get life right, get our lives right. Not God at the margins; not God as an option; not God on the weekends. God at center and circumference; God first and last; God, God, God.

Genesis gets us off on the right foot. Genesis pulls us into a sense of reality that is God-shaped and God-filled. It gives us a vocabulary for speaking accurately and comprehensively about our lives, where we come from and where we are going, what we think and what we do, the people we live with and how to get along with them, the troubles we find ourselves in and the blessings that keep arriving.

Genesis uses words to make a foundation that is solid and true. Everything we think and do and feel is material in a building operation in which we are engaged all our life long. There is immense significance in everything that we do. Our speech and our actions and our prayers are all, every detail of them, involved in this vast building operation comprehensively known as the Kingdom of God. But we don’t build the foundation. The foundation is given. The foundation is firmly in place.

Jesus concluded his most famous teaching by telling us that there are two ways to go about our lives—we can build on sand or we can build on rock. No matter how wonderfully we build, if we build on sand it will all fall to pieces like a house of cards. We build on what is already there, on the rock. Genesis is a verbal witness to that rock: God’s creative acts, God’s intervening and gracious judgments, God’s call to a life of faith, God’s making covenant with us.

But Genesis presents none of this to us as an abstract, bloodless “truth” or “principle.” We are given a succession of stories with named people, people who loved and quarreled, believed and doubted, had children and married, experienced sin and grace. If we pay attention, we find that we ourselves are living variations on these very stories: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. The stories show clearly that we are never outsiders or spectators to anything in “heaven and earth.” God doesn’t work impersonally from space; he works with us where we are, as he finds us. No matter what we do, whether good or bad, we continue to be part of everything that God is doing. Nobody can drop out—there’s no place to drop out to. So we may as well get started and take our place in the story—at the beginning.

  

Here is the Bible Project video for the first 11 chapters

 

Here is a word cloud for the whole book

Science begins and ends with theology

In Ancient Greece, science was intimately connected with philosophy. Aristotle wrote about physics and metaphysics. They informed one another. Until the nineteenth century, science was known as natural philosophy. Peter Harrison has argued that theological ideas were central to the emergence of modern science. In that sense, science began with theology. However, due to the influence of Modernity, including naturalism, theology came to be considered irrelevant to science. But, scientific knowledge raises philosophical questions. Why does science work? What is the relationship between theory and reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the relationship between mind and brain? Do we have free will? Can science provide meaning, purpose, and values? Hence, science begins and ends with philosophy.

Sean Carroll claims that science leads to naturalism, which has the ultimate lesson:  “Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves” (p. 9, The Big Picture). This creates a need for “existential therapy” and leads to “the hardest problem of all”, which is “how to construct meaning and values in a cosmos without transcendent purpose” (p. 5). Hence, he ends up back at theology, in the sense of finding ways to avoid it.

Another atheist physicist who could not escape theological questions was Fred Hoyle. He resisted the idea of the Big Bang theory because he could not accept the idea of “creation” and of “causes unknown to science.” Yet, in the end he had to accept where science led: there was a beginning to the universe. Furthermore, his own work on the synthesis of carbon in stars led to the concept of fine-tuning. The questions it raises struggle to avoid being theological in nature.

I claim these ultimate philosophical questions are also theological, as Christian theology can address them. It does not provide definitive answers, but neither does philosophy.  

The atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel caused a controversy in 2012 with his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False.  Nagel published a helpful short summary of the book in The New York Times. He noted how the scientific revolution “depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose.” Consequently, physics is not a “theory of everything” as it cannot describe the mental dimension to reality. Nagel argued that there is a need to move beyond the current materialist presuppositions of science.

“This means that the scientific outlook, if it aspires to a more complete understanding of nature, must expand to include theories capable of explaining the appearance in the universe of mental phenomena and the subjective points of view in which they occur – theories of a different type from any we have seen so far.

There are two ways of resisting this conclusion, each of which has two versions. The first way is to deny that the mental is an irreducible aspect of reality, either (a) by holding that the mental can be identified with some aspect of the physical, such as patterns of behavior or patterns of neural activity, or (b) by denying that the mental is part of reality at all, being some kind of illusion (but then, illusion to whom?). The second way is to deny that the mental requires a scientific explanation through some new conception of the natural order, because either (c) we can regard it as a mere fluke or accident, an unexplained extra property of certain physical organisms – or else (d) we can believe that it has an explanation, but one that belongs not to science but to theology, in other words that mind has been added to the physical world in the course of evolution by divine intervention.

All four of these positions have their adherents.  I believe the wide popularity among philosophers and scientists of (a), the outlook of psychophysical reductionism, is due not only to the great prestige of the physical sciences but to the feeling that this is the best defense against the dreaded (d), the theistic interventionist outlook. But someone who finds (a) and (b) self-evidently false and (c) completely implausible need not accept (d), because a scientific understanding of nature need not be limited to a physical theory of the objective spatio-temporal order. It makes sense to seek an expanded form of understanding that includes the mental but that is still scientific — i.e. still a theory of the immanent order of nature.

That seems to me the most likely solution. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy. I would add that even some theists might find this acceptable; since they could maintain that God is ultimately responsible for such an expanded natural order, as they believe he is for the laws of physics.”

My goal in raising the views of Nagel here is modest. It is not to claim that of his four options (d) is the correct option, i.e., that the only possible explanation for the existence of mind is divine intervention. That is a God of the Gaps perspective. Rather, my point is that science leads to theological questions and that theological answers to the philosophical questions should be seriously considered. Again, there are competing traditions at play and ultimately, which we choose to give authority to is a matter of trust (faith).