Thursday, December 16, 2010
Evolutionary Christianity Gives Me Hope
Somehow learned of this site recently titled Evolutionary Christianity. Michael Dowd is interviewing a number of scientists and religious leaders along the general theme not of reconciling evolution and Christianity but of exploring how evolution can aid, inform, and deepen religious faith. Have listened to interviews with Ian Barbour, Dennis Lamoreaux, Ross Hostetter and Karl Giberson so far. Very interesting, informative, and enjoyable.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 02, 2010
More Thoughts from Deeper than Darwin
Haven't posted much lately. Work has been so demanding. My mind in the off moments has settled on the superficial. In some brief moments, however, have been savoring . . . slowly . . . the book Deeper than Darwin by John Haught. Here are some quotes that jump out or me.
This is for the new atheists:
Speaking of Alfred North Whitehead
Physical reality in an evolving universe is made up, he observes, of moments, events or occasions, not chunks of spatialized stuff. It is an illusory abstraction to assume, as old-fashioned materialists do, that the fundamental units of nature are particles of lifeless matter. If nature is a process of becoming, then its reality is temporal; and time, logically speaking, is composed of happenings, not atoms. What we think of as mechanisms or bits of matter are not concretely real, but at best useful scientific abstractions. If nature is in evolution, then its fundamentally temporal character can be broken down concretely only into events, not materialized monads.
As one trained and entranced by science and in particular physics, where one goal is the study and the pursuit of the understanding of the tiny bits of matter that constitute everything, it is little wonder that some of us would see the world as mechanism. But that is not the whole story. The book his helpful in seeing that.
This is for the new atheists:
Only cosmic literalists will claim to have read the world all the way down, and what they take for ultimate depth sooner or later turns out to be merely surface.
....Speaking of Alfred North Whitehead
Physical reality in an evolving universe is made up, he observes, of moments, events or occasions, not chunks of spatialized stuff. It is an illusory abstraction to assume, as old-fashioned materialists do, that the fundamental units of nature are particles of lifeless matter. If nature is a process of becoming, then its reality is temporal; and time, logically speaking, is composed of happenings, not atoms. What we think of as mechanisms or bits of matter are not concretely real, but at best useful scientific abstractions. If nature is in evolution, then its fundamentally temporal character can be broken down concretely only into events, not materialized monads.
As one trained and entranced by science and in particular physics, where one goal is the study and the pursuit of the understanding of the tiny bits of matter that constitute everything, it is little wonder that some of us would see the world as mechanism. But that is not the whole story. The book his helpful in seeing that.
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