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, a Disciplinary Brief, 

The Radicalness of Love—for the Natural Sciences and the Research University.

The link above gives a PDF of my full article.  It is also available on the GFI website.

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.”

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.

Remembering Tom McLeish

I was very sad to hear that Tom McLeish died of cancer at the end of February. He was an extraordinary person, scientist, and Christian. Tom can been characterised as a polymath or a "renaissance man". He modeled an integrated life, as a Christian, a scientist, and a member of a university community. He showed what universities should be about and can be about, in stark contrast to what they have become [fragmented, commercialised, and micro-managed]. 

A small measure of Tom's influence on me is that there are eight posts on my science blog about his work and another seven posts on this blog.

Tom's academic career is briefly sketched in an obituary from the University of York, where for the last few years he held a position, created for him, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the physics department. Tom was best known in the scientific community for his work on the theory of soft matter, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. I highly recommend his Very Short Introduction on the subject. But the influence and recognition of his intellectual contributions go far beyond his work on soft matter. For example, after the publication of The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art by Oxford University Press in 2019, the following year the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews devoted a whole issue to seven different reviews of the book, with a response from Tom. 

Tom was a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation and was very supportive of the IFES Logos and Cosmos Initiative that the foundation funded and I am very involved in. He gave me valuable advice about many elements of this program and spoke at several training workshops. Participants have benefitted significantly from his books and talks about theology and the sciences.

David Bentley Hart has written a moving tribute to Tom. It contains a beautiful description of Tom's final days trusting in Christ, written by his wife. Tom was a model to me in life and in death.  

My condolences to Tom's family, friends, and colleagues. He died much too young and will be sorely missed.

Science, contemplation, theory, and theology: from Boyle to McLeish

 I really enjoyed watching the 2021 Boyle Lecture, given by Tom McLeish, "The Rediscovery of Contemplation Through Science."

A paper based on the lecture is here. I have extracted a few choice quotes below. 

McLeish suggests that there are four “wrong turns” concerning "science and religion" that occurred with the scientific revolution and the rise of a modernist worldview.

1. (1)  A turn from human contemplation of nature as subjects fully immersed in the world, toward an illusion of perfect objectivity.

2. (2)  A turn from the appreciation of imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, in partnership with reason, to an elevation of reason alone.

3. (3)  A turn from science as a shared cultural experience, to a restricted, professional, and institutional expertise.

4. (4)  A profound misreading of the Book of Nature—that traditional metaphor of the natural world and our epistemological relation to it as “God’s Second Book.” 

5. If we are to understand science theologically, I will propose that we should rediscover how to read the world, not as prose, but as poetry.

He makes a subtle point drawing on his experience working as a theoretical physicist on soft matter. At this point in the video, he gives a physical illustration of this in terms of modeling polymers [molecules that are very long chains of atoms].

1. The glorious paradox is that by negotiating our entropic relationship with the world, by formally knowing less in this way, we can arrange to understand more.

McLeish has discussed the Old Testament book of Job extensively in his wonderful book, Faith and Wisdom in Science. Here he states

1. Job, like modern science, needs a re-orientation in his relationship to an apparently chaotic cosmos more than he needs anything else.

2. In the long question-form poem, Yahweh points Job to his co-creating imaginative task to reach behind the surface of the world, into the ice, out to the star-clusters, onward to light itself. It remains a great pity that mainstream scholarship has tended to interpret this most healing and affirmative of texts as a form of petty divine put-down.

3. The textual encounter of Job, where the Creator, a human image of that Creator, and created nature meet, feeds our task to fashion a theologically conceived framing of science. Surprisingly to those attuned to the old “natural theology,” this re-orientation is entirely opposite to that tradition. It 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.  

A Scientist Looks at Genesis 1-3

This evening I am giving a talk on the first three chapters of Genesis to Village FOCUS at QUT Kelvin Grove, a Christian group for international students. Here are the slides. 

For background, I recommend comparing and contrasting Genesis with the Babylonian creation myth the Enuma Elish, which is nicely summarised in this short video.

Another helpful short video is Science and Genesis, featuring John Polkinghorne, Alister McGrath, N.T. Wright, and others.

I have found helpful the book How to Read Genesis by Tremper Longman.

An excellent introductory book that puts my talk in context is Let there be Science: Why God loves Science, and Science needs God, by David Hutchings and Tom McLeish

The multi-dimensional character of "science" and "religion"

We should pause before we dive into discussions that have names such as science and religion, science and the Bible, science versus faith, creation and evolution,  theology and science, Science and Christianity, ...

The words used often mean different things to different people, reducing communication, understanding, and meaningful dialogue. 

Previously, I have discussed how I prefer "science and theology" to "science and faith", particularly because science involves faith.

In Territories of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison shows how through history the nature of science and religion, and their boundaries, have been understood very differently from today.

With regard to both "science" and "religion" I suggest it may be helpful to consider four different dimensions: the life and experience of individuals, communities and institutions,  bodies of knowledge, and underlying realities.

I now expand on each of these four dimensions.

1. The life and experience of individuals

Professional scientists go to their laboratory, do experiments, write computer code, read journals, discuss with colleagues, and write articles and books. They do all this within a framework of a particular way of "thinking" and "doing". People who are not professional scientists also take on some elements of this "thinking" and "doing" with regard to their interactions with nature, technology, and others.

A "religious" person also has ways of "thinking" and "doing". This affects their beliefs, values, priorities, and behaviour.

In both science and religion we are talking about humans with all their potential, brilliance, creativity, honour, love, flaws, limitations, contradictions, and tragedy.

2. Communities and institutions

Science is not just an individual endeavour and individual experiences take place in the context of a community. Communication, collaboration, and consensus are essential. Over history, these scientific communities often evolve into institutions such as professional societies, research institutes, and university departments. (An institution is an entity that has the potential to endure beyond the lifetime of any of its current participants.)

Similarly, "religion" is manifest in communities such as home groups and local churches. They form based on commonalities of belief and practice. Over time such communities may evolve into institutions such as denominations, seminaries, universities, publishing houses, and mission organisations.

3. Bodies of knowledge

This concerns both the content of that body of knowledge and the methods that are used to gain that knowledge. Over time communities and institutions may produce new bodies of knowledge and usually engage significantly with prior knowledge. This is concrete information that is accessible (with enough education) to anyone and provides concrete things for investigation, interpretation, and discussion. The current state of knowledge is often recorded in "textbooks".

For science, these bodies of knowledge consist of (generally accepted) laws, theories, methods, and observations. Examples include the laws of thermodynamics, Einstein's theory of special relativity, the genetic code, protein structures, taxonomies of biological life forms, data bases, telescopes, radioactive dating, and computer codes.

Religion involves sacred texts, creeds, doctrines, and theologies. 

4. Underlying realities

The bodies of knowledge are believed by the communities to be the best possible representation of underlying realities. These realities reflect the absolute and objective truth, that exists independent of subjective human observers and interpreters.

For natural sciences the reality is the material world. For social sciences that reality is groups of people.

For Christianity, that reality is the triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the Creation (the material world in which we live).

Conflations of the different dimensions

Discussions of the true nature of science and of religion become confused or unhelpful when they conflate the four dimensions above. For example, many practicing scientists subscribe to a "naive" realism that conflates current scientific knowledge with objective reality. Advocates of the "sociology of knowledge" claim that science is nothing more than the communities and institutions of scientists. Some pentecostal Christians may conflate their own individual experience and intuition with the underlying reality of God and the Holy Spirit. Some conservative Christians may make a rigid identification of their own reading and understanding of the Bible (and/or the doctrines of their denomination) with the underlying reality of God.

The whole concept of "religion" is a construct of the Enlightenment. The academic approach of much "religious studies" is to define religion solely in terms of the beliefs and practices of individuals and communities. Sometimes it is claimed that all "religions" are in essence the same and all just different reflections of one underlying cosmic reality.

Now it becomes even more complex.

What are appropriate methods to relate science and religion?

Are the two in conflict, harmony, dialogue, complementary, or independent of one another? This is where considering the four distinct dimensions may be helpful. I suggest that there may be less confusion and the most insight to be gained when each is compared with respect to the same dimension.

For example, one can contrast and compare the life experiences of a scientist and of a follower of Jesus (possibly the same person). This is done very nicely in Let There Be Science by David Hutchings and Tom McLeish. These life experiences both involve very human experiences: faith, hope, pain, love, and suffering. There are many similarities and resonances. Hence, there is a strong and positive correlation, between the two spheres of science and religion.

If we consider the two bodies of knowledge, the nature of the dialogue and interaction, between science and religion may be quite different. The contents of a physics textbook and of the Bible do not have a lot in common. On the other hand, the relationship between the philosophical interpretation of the content of that textbook and of the Christian doctrine of creation is a rich and fruitful area to explore.

In summary, to have a meaningful discussion about science and religion, at least two things may be helpful. First, the respective dimensions of each that are being discussed need to be defined. Second, the discussion should focus on relating the same dimension in each. An exercise in contrasting and comparing may elucidate  similarities and differences.

I thank Charles Ringma for comments on Let There Be Science, that stimulated this post.

Finding order in the chaos of life

Life in this world often seems to be chaotic. Think of your experience of the weather, the economy, politics, and human relationships. It is hard to predict what will happen next. We yearn for order and sometimes seem to be able to create little oases of it, only to see them slip from our grasp. Sometimes things even seem to make sense; much of the time they don't. 

On the other hand, some claim there is a grand plan for the universe and it is all pre-determined. We just follow our destiny.

What is the relationship between order and chaos? Is the universe random or deterministic? Scientists have wrestled with these questions for centuries. How might different scientific views related to how the Bible addresses (or not) these questions?

I have enjoyed re-reading,  Let There Be Science: Why God Loves Science, and Science Needs God, by David Hutchings and Tom McLeish. This week we are discussing it in the theology reading group.  I think that this is the best introductory book I have encountered about the relationship between theology and science.

The questions above are nicely discussed in Chapter 6, entitled Order from Chaos. Here are some highlights.

chaotic systems are both predictable and random (p. 115)

The probabilistic approach shows us that order really can emerge from disorder (p. 118)

Theoretically predictable systems (can) collapse into randomness. Theoretically random systems coalesce into predictability. 

Is the future knowable, or not? It seems that science gives a rather unscientific answer: “sort of”. (p. 119)

Some related issues are discussed in posts I wrote a while back. 

The collective activity of many randomly moving actors can be effectively predictable, even if individual motions are not.

Random dynamics at one level can lead to deterministic dynamics at a higher level, and visa versa.

True randomness requires design. This is illustrated by the fact that it is very hard to make random number generators that are truly random.

Job struggled with the chaos of life. He lived a morally ordered life, yet he experienced chaos, reflected in his great suffering. He ranted at God.

Even if I summoned him and he responded, 

I do not believe he would give me a hearing. 

He would crush me with a storm and multiply my wounds for no reason. 

Job 9:16-17

In a development that is both surprising and entirely fitting, God does indeed respond to Job, speaking to him and his four counsellors from within a storm. This is our first clue that there may be far more to the apparent randomness of nature than Job had brought to his argument. (p. 122)

Job is being invited into a new way of thinking. God will push him to examine things afresh. Could it be that randomness and overall divine care can walk hand in hand somehow? (p. 122) 

God goes on to take full responsibility for the processes Job has raged about, but he suggests that Job has misunderstood the situation badly: 

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail, which I reserve for times of trouble, for days of war and battle?  

What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed, or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth? 

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain, and a path for the thunderstorm, to water a land where no one lives, an uninhabited desert, to satisfy a desolate wasteland and make it sprout with grass?

                     Job 38:22-27 

Here, God turns Job’s argument on its head. These events do not show a lack of control; they are actually how God brings about his plans. Job has seen them as individual, one-off uncertainties. He has seen them as uncontrolled events which terrorize mankind. God, though, is saying that they are not isolated instances at all; he is painting a bigger picture. The apparent randomness on the smaller scale is combining to form the order which emerges for creation as a whole. Job’s field of vision is far too narrow. God is telling him to widen it. (p. 123)

The authors then allude to some of the scientific research that McLeish has been involved in.

The mystery was solved when it was realized that billions of bumbling peptides had managed to glue themselves together into tapes. Their rapid, erratic motion was crucial to this: only by crashing around haphazardly would they eventually build up any kind of emergent structure. 

 The result of all this “randomness” is the formation of cell walls, the maintenance of correct chemical concentrations, overwhelming victories for the immune system and more. It is from within all the chaos that overall order is formed – and life exists.  

This video illustrates this with a computer simulation of an HIV virus capsid being surrounding by a drug, taken from this paper.

Modern scientists have learned that randomness and predictability are two sides of the same coin. (p. 124-5)

If our world was entirely random or entirely predictable, life as we know it would not be possible, and we could have no hope of any meaningful interaction with either nature or its Creator. 

We are told in the Bible that God has made it neither of these: he is found in both the chaos of the storm and the certainty of his love. (p. 125)

Science is wonder-ful

 Many books have been written about science and Christianity. Many of them I don't like, find helpful or recommend. I do like some because they present a good understanding of both science and Christianity, and engage in a constructive dialogue between the two. Even then, many books rehash the same old topics and same old arguments about creation, evolution, big bang cosmology, free will, reliability of the Bible, ...

The introductory book that I recommend is A User's Guide to Science and Christian Belief, by Michael Poole. Unfortunately, it is now out of print.

Writing a new book that brings a fresh perspective to the subject is necessary but also daunting. I am very happy that David Hutchings and Tom McLeish have done this with Let There Be Science: Why God Loves Science, and Science Needs God. The book is at the basic/popular/introductory level and is very accessible, so some non-scientist friends tell me. This accessibility may have been aided by the experience of Hutchings as a high school physics teacher. I am not surprised that McLeish would be involved in producing such a wonderful book given that I loved his Faith and Wisdom in Science, which is at the advanced academic level.

The book has many strengths. It is clear, engaging, interesting, creative, original, invitational, and balanced. The authors succeed because they believe that science is a human endeavour. Indeed, science is wonderful because `doing science is a fundamental part of what it means to be human'. Hence it is natural to use stories.

Stories get us thinking about people – their motivations, hopes, or pain; their moments of inspiration or moments of disaster. Stories are how we best understand ourselves and our beliefs. Stories, as we shall see, can be key in the search for a bigger picture.  

Some of the main ideas that are developed are the following. 

Science is a way of thinking. 

 ... we will count something as true science if – and only if – we can show it meets three distinct criteria. First, there must be observation of something in nature. Second, there must be a discussion of a possible physical cause. Third, there should be some form of analysis or testing involved. This last requirement might be through planned experiment, physical interaction, or by further observation. 

Although the term "scientist" did not exist until the nineteenth century, "science" has been around for a long time. Isaac Newton did natural philosophy, which might be defined as "Loving wisdom about nature".  (Chapter 2)

It is remarkable that humans can do science at all. The universe is rational and we do have the capacity to understand it. Furthermore, this rationality is seen in our ability to make connections between phenomena that may appear to have no connection to one another. (Chapter 3)

There are parallels in the manner that people change their minds about scientific theories, about God, and about how they should live their life.  (Chapter 4)

Science does not always go smoothly. It can be a source of personal pain for the scientist. Nevertheless, they persevere because they have scientific hope. (Chapter 5)

 “Order consistently emerges from apparent chaos, even at the very deepest levels of our current understanding.’’ (Chapter 6)

 In both science and theology it is important to ask the right questions. (Chapter 7)

 Love is even more important! (Chapter 8)

 our science stories will intermingle with faith stories – the two are bound together far more tightly than some modern commentators might have us believe. The big pictures painted by the history, the people and the findings of science look very much like those that emerge from the pages of the Bible – and we will go on to find, in Chapters 9 and 10, that this connection might just be of universal significance. 

The stories are captivating and the authors beautifully weave together sets of apparently disparate stories into single stories with a profound point. For example, chapter 3 covers silk, the philosophical question of the existence of numbers, the axioms of Euclidean geometry, weaving looms, the shape of pomegranates, Charles Babbage and the first computer, error correction in computers, and the book of Job. What is the point of all this?

The Bible’s answer to the mathematical debate we began this journey with is simple but profound: the reason that we can know about numbers, despite their lack of physicality, is because God has put wisdom in our minds. Far from being opposed to reason, Christianity gives us the basis for believing two things that are absolutely crucial if good science is ever to be carried out: that we are reasonable beings, and that the world is a reasonable place.

An excellent book on the theology of science

I have just finished reading the wonderful book Faith and Wisdom in Science by Tom McLeish. I think it may be one of the best (advanced) books about the relationship between science and theology.
Next monday night I will lead a discussion about the book at the monthly theology book club I am a part of.

Maybe the book partly resonates so much with me because like me, McLeish is both a theoretical condensed matter physicist and a Christian.

To get some of the flavour of the you can look at the associated blog which links to several reviews and a few videos where McLeish discusses the book.

The book is rich and highly original. Here are just a few ideas that I thought were particularly valuable.

Science should be be viewed as a richly human scholarly endeavour that should not be divorced from the humanities. Here he draws heavily on the classic book Real Presences by the literary critic George Steiner, who suggests

"Only art can go some way towards making accessible, towards waking into some measure of communicability, the sheer inhuman otherness of matter..."

McLeish takes this as a departure to explore that this is actually what science should really be about.

We should not think about "theology versus science" or "theology and science" but "a theology of science" and "a science of theology".

The book of Job, rather than Genesis, should be the starting point for a theology of science.

Science involves pain and love and worship. Science should be about "a meaningful reengagement  and reconciliation with nature".

Science today has lost this richness due to being instrumentalist and seen solely as a means of "wealth creation".

Drawing from a report about the safety of nanotechnology, McLeish considers several popular narratives for science, identified by the philosopher, Jean-Pierre Dupuy

1. Be careful what you wish for - the narrative of Desire
2. Pandora's Box - the narrative of Evil and Hope
3. Messing with Nature - the narrative of the Sacred
4. Kept in the Dark - the narrative of Alienation
5. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer - the narrative of Exploitation.

Science: what has love got to do with it?!

Science raises theological questions.
An important example is:
Why does science work?
This is not a question that science can answer. All it can say is that science works; and very well, often.

This week I realised there is another interesting question.
Why do scientists love what they do?
 It goes far beyond the joy of a successful businessman or plumber. There is sometimes something "religious" and "mystical" about scientists devotion and pleasure in their work. Furthermore, many young scientists are willing to work long hours, often with less financial reward and job security compared to other options available to them. Why do they do it?
Again, this is not a question that science can answer. But, theology does address.

Three different recent events brought this question to mind.

First, the atheist scientist Sean Carroll has just published a book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. He advocates a "religion" called poetic naturalism. A good critique of the book is by another atheist scientist Peter Woit. The relevant point here is that it highlights how even for atheist scientists there is something deeply religious about science.

Second, last week I saw the excellent movie, The Man Who Knew Infinity which nicely illustrates some of the joy and mystery of discovery in mathematics.

Finally, and most importantly I am finishing reading the wonderful book Faith and Wisdom in Science by Tom McLeish. He has a whole section entitled "Love" in the chapter, "A Theology of Science".
By "love" he means "the super-rational .... emotionally engaged delight in, and action to sustain the well being of another."
Love, pain, and perseverance cannot be separated.
"Above all it is a love that seeks to understand."
New scientific theories "need to loved into being".
He gives the example of the novel (and for long controversial) concept of reptation in polymers.

A highly creative engagement of science and theology

Tom McLeish is a Professor of Physics at Durham University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Next week, Oxford University Press is publishing his book Faith and Wisdom in Science. It looks like a refreshingly new and constructive approach to exploring the relationship between science and theology. Here is are some of the book highlights from the publisher website.

• Communicates science from within real stories over a timespan of millennia
• Argues that science can be a deeply religious activity
• Takes the most significant Biblical book for science to be Job (rather than e.g. Genesis)
• Takes the most significant science area for thinking about science and meaning/purpose as Statistical Mechanics (rather than e.g. Quantum Mechanics or Cosmology)
• Insists that rather than debating "science and theology" we need both "science of theology" and a "theology of science"
• Readers will be able to use suggestions practically, whether in church, politics or university

McLeish recently gave a seminar, related to the book, at the Faraday Institute. Here is a summary of the talk from Ruth Bancewicz and you can watch it here.

An article in The Conversation puts the book in the context of broader social debates.

I thank Leigh Trevaskis for bringing this to my attention.