Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has flatly dismissed famed scientist Stephen Hawking’s claim that gravity, not God, was responsible for creating the universe.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has flatly dismissed famed scientist Stephen Hawking’s claim that gravity, not God, was responsible for creating the universe.
Thanks, Kendall, for bringing this item to our attention. So much of interest would be missed otherwise.
“But in a magazine excerpt published in The Times newspaper in London, the archbishop wrote that ‘belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe.’â€
A slightly fuller rendering of this view would go something like this: “Belief in God and our understanding of how God works in the world are not about God’s plugging a gap in our understanding of areas that are now unexplained by natural science, such as the creation of the universe.”
This point is important. Too many Christians believe in a God “of the gaps and the zaps” and thus have trouble with this whole question of how God acts.
The subject is philosophical theology, and a place to begin is the work of Austin Farrer. But, given that Farrer’s work is a hard assignment for anyone to begin with, I’ll take this opportunity to recommend the work of Edward Hugh Henderson (LSU), who has written with amazing clarity and cogency on Farrer’s views on “double agency.” Henderson’s essays are available in all the recent book-length treatments of Farrer’s work. Henderson directly addresses problems with understandings which limit God’s activity to “gaps and zaps.” (The latter would be direct violations by God of the usual order of nature.)
“Rather, Williams continued, ‘it is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.’â€
That’s right–and a taste here of the cosmological argument. On this point, natural science would have trouble either confirming or refuting.
Rowan Williams may not be so great at aspects of church administration, but on the big topics of philosophical theology, systematic theology, practical theology, theology and literature, and so on, he is often very much worth listening to.
Thank you, David Hein for pointing us to the kind of real scholarship that matters.
There’s a lot of tail chasing in this whole area of engagement with unbelief and natural science. Let me put it crudely. As a parish priest I hear all kinds of reasons why people don’t go to church, but virtually none of them have to do with what actually drives people Sunday morning to stay home. More often than not, the science vs religion debates are of the same order.