Back Transdisciplinarity and the Unity of Knowledge: Beyond the Science and Religion Dialogue


Skip Navigation Links
Home
Agenda
Featured Speakers
Paper Presenters
Public Events
Information
Contact
Registration


Sign up for Conference
2009 Updates.




   

Nicola Hoggard Creegan
God, Strings, Emergence, and the Future of the World


Abstract

This paper will examine the disjunction which has previously existed between theological expectations of a personal and a corporate and cosmic after-life, and modernist science in which metaphors of randomness and the machine have been dominant. I argue that newer developments in both theology and in science allow more of a rapprochement.  On the one hand evolutionary theory is undergoing a paradigm shift away from a purely functionalist approach; the philosophy and science of emergence have given us an awareness of levels of reality; and string theory presents a world of almost infinite fluidity and depth and mystery. Together these developments present a world more compatible with the extravagant claims of Christian eschatology. God is always partly obscured, and partly revealed, but the new science makes room for partnership with theology and faith, and even with eschatology.

On the other hand there are also changes in theology. The twentieth century was not an easy time for a theology of nature. This was the century of Karl Barth and a turn away from nature in the interests of affirming the otherness and holiness of God. At the same time, neo-Darwinians taught us to look at all order as only design-like (spandrels). The indeterminacy of the quantum level, combined with the random nature of biological mutation, made any sense of divine presence in nature much more difficult to discern. The resulting mix of positions in science and theology tended to gravitate either towards a deism, like that espoused by John Barrow, or to the process-like position of many others, like Ian Barbour. Even with the latter, however, there is little sense that God is revealed innature.

Towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, however, there has been a pronounced turn back towards a theology of nature. This has been inspired in part by the growth of eco-theology and by an increasing awareness of the fragility of the planet. I will argue in this paper that we must re-instate a vestigial trinitiarian awareness in nature A theological seeing of nature involves an awareness of wisdom and spirit at work in the interconnectedness and semiotic nature of life and cosmos.  This willingness to see beyond a surface level of particulars is the theological inheritance of people like Bonaventure and Jonathan Edwards and has been re-presented in the contemporary theology by Denis Edwards and Celia Deane-Drummond and others.

Together these developments in both science and theology allow science and faith to speak to each other at the level of deep grammar. This new science speaks of a world of wonder and immensity and paradox, a world that can be seen as “re-enchanted” because it is more dense, more interconnected, and more numinous than it once appeared.  We  no longer need to attempt to reconcile transcendent religious longing and hope with the machine-like world of earlier science.

Biography
Nicola teaches systematic theology at the Laidlaw College and the Laidlaw/Carey Graduate School in Auckland, New Zealand.  Her undergraduate degrees were in mathematics (Victoria University of Wellington), and she also has some training in biology.  She has a masters degree from Gordon Conwell Seminary in Massachusetts, and a PhD from Drew University in New Jersey. She and Tim Meadowcroft are now editing the New Zealand and Australian theological journal, Colloquium.

Nicola was a Templeton course award winner in 1999 while teaching in North Carolina. She later received a course development award for teaching a similar course at the graduate school in Auckland.  Nicola was  a participant in the 2003-2005 Templeton Oxford Seminars in Science and Christian Faith, and is now working on a book on God and Nature, for which she received a Templeton Grant in 2005. She writes a regular column on science and theology for the New Zealand journal Stimulus.

Nicola chairs the LSI, TANSAA (Theology and the Natural Sciences in Aotearoa, Auckland) beginning in 2006.


 

1616 Walnut Street, Suite 1112, Philadelphia, PA 19103 USA  |  Voice: + 1 484.592.0304 Fax: +1 484.592.0313   |   Email  |  Privacy Policy