Transcript
Now yesterday, I spoke of the fact that many of our contemporaries are afraid of relating theology and science, and that behind that lies a false view of science as well as a false view of theology. If science is equated merely with instrumentalist science or technology, how do we master and manipulate nature for our own ends, then how can that kind of science be applied to God? And that is a good question. But how can we base
theology on science? That is a question that people keep on asking me, especially if it is of that sort. Now yesterday, I tried to show that the whole picture has changed and that a new world has opened up with basic changes in science. And how even determinism has been disposed of or set aside. And a number of you have been asking for literature on that point. And I would suggest that perhaps one of the latest books
written by William Berkson, B-E-R-K-S-O-N, called Fields of Force, might be the easiest and most useful book for you. He deals with the whole development from Newton to Einstein and later. He is a professor somewhere in the United States, I think in the Harvard area. Now today, I want to show that far from theology being based on natural science, the opposite, if anything, is nearer the truth. That science is grounded upon
theology, and by theology, I mean proper theology, not the bogus stuff that goes about under the name of religion or religious studies. The deeper scientific inquiry probes, the more it is clear that in science we are concerned to penetrate into the intrinsic structures of the universe in such a way that its basic design becomes disclosed. Hence we are forced to grapple with cosmological questions and to develop an attitude to the universe as a whole, a veldt
built, not a veldt and schoen, which is a naturalistic one, but a veldt built. Now, natural science cannot be pursued scientifically without being committed to a fundamental attitude to the world, which affects all theory and all theory-laden experiment. This is more and more true. In theological science, on the other hand, we are concerned, as I shall show later in more detail, not with god-man relation, but with god-man world or god-world-man relations,
so that an understanding of the world enters into the coefficients of theological concepts and statements. Theological science, then, cannot be pursued scientifically without being committed to a fundamental attitude to the world. Hence, the more rigorous we pursue our science today and the more rigorously we pursue our theology, we find they're breaking out a proper and inevitable dialogue between theological science and natural science if only because both are concerned to develop fundamental attitudes to the world. Now,
I want to demonstrate that by looking at the early church, where we have the rise of classical theology. And by classical theology, I mean the Nicene theology and that which followed in the next two centuries, where especially in Greek theology, we have the foundations of that theology upon which all Christendom rests and upon all our creeds ultimately goes back. Now in this period in the early church, we find the church struggling to break through the pagan
outlook upon the world with its identification of cosmology and theology. And often the identification of god with the world. The Stoics, for example, held that god was the soul of the world, and the world, the physical world, was the body of the universe. So that just as man is soul and body, so god is the soul, the animating soul of the universe. And this way, theology and cosmology were bound together, and it's much the same with
Aristotle and his finite view of god and finite view of the universe. And when you read Aristotle, you find that theology comes under cosmology, part of it. Now here we have then a profound confrontation in the early centuries between the Judeo-Christian doctrine of god with the fundamental outlook upon god and the universe in Greek, Greco-Roman thought. But in its heart there was a confrontation between the Judeo-Christian doctrine of god with the dualist structures
of the ancient world. Think for example of the Old Testament concepts of creation and of the Old Testament concept of the living god, and of how that was related to the notion of god who was timeless, changeless, bound up with the eternal forms, finite that they may have been. And so there was a head-on conflict at the very fundamental points and the foundational structures of thought. Now particularly when Christianity came upon the scene with its
doctrines of incarnation and resurrection, where we are concerned with the interaction of god with this world in its space-time structures, that we have the clash reaching its profoundest point. Now this involved, on the part of Christian theology, a reconstruction of the very foundations of ancient philosophy, science, and culture. And only as it was able to and did carry through a reconstruction of the very foundations of culture, did the Christian gospel take root in that world.
Now pause for a moment to contrast what has been happening today. What happens today is that Christian thought tends to be expounded within contemporary culture and patterns of thought. Thomas Kuhn in this universite in his book, widely known on the structures of scientific revolution, has shown that the scientist is concerned normally, as he speaks of it, of developing his thought within certain ongoing paradigms that belong to a community and society in which he lives. But when
the scientist undertakes any creative thought, he breaks ahead of society and he develops new concepts which are then in fundamental conflict to the paradigms of the community. So the scientist acts in conflict with the paradigms of the community and it is only as these new concepts change the paradigms of the community that the new concepts of science advance. Now looked at from that point of view, modern theology has been doing the opposite of the scientists. Instead
of trying to change the paradigms of the community, we have a whole generation, several generations of theologians and preachers who have been trying to say, how do we preach the gospel and make it relevant to the modern world? We try to fit it into the paradigms of the community, otherwise they won't understand what we're talking about. And in that sense, they fit the gospel into the paradigms of the community and so while science advances, the theologians
and the preachers become more and more obsolescent. And that is why in the last 30 years, the more we have tried to make the gospel relevant, the more it has been irrelevant to our contemporaries. And that is a shame I think on our whole way of operating and it is here the preachers and the homiletics and the New Testament scholars above all who I think are guilty of this. And I'm not ashamed to say that because
I think it is something that has to be said and here we can take a leaf out of the work of the scientists. But when we look at the early church and we see the staggering conquering of the world by the Galilean, this took place precisely as early Christian theology instead of trying to develop within the paradigms of the ancient world, undertook the enormous task of recreating the very foundations of science and philosophy and culture and
in that way the gospel took root and developed. Now in that process it was particularly the incarnation with the passion and the resurrection of Christ, the incarnation as related to the doctrine of creation which forced the church to come into that conflict and forced it to develop a world outlook, a relation between God and the universe which challenged the ancient world and finally shook the very foundations of philosophy and science and culture. Now it was in
this process by the way that we had the development of proper theology. Now by proper theology I mean, and I'm not simply blowing the trumpet of the kind of chair I occupy, dogmatics. Now what is the meaning of dogmatics, may I just pause a moment or two to explain that. Now in the ancient world you had after Plato and Aristotle and the great philosophers the so-called new academy who were concerned to ask questions and questions
and questions and questions but were not prepared to receive any positive answers, the kind of questions that people ask in the ecumenical movement, let's say questions which do not yield positive answers through which you are committed to decision and change. Now at the same time in the last two centuries before Christ and the two centuries after Christ there arose a group of people who are the precursors of modern science and these people were nicknamed by the
people who asked only academic questions, the people from the new academy, the dogmatics, dogmaticoi, because the dogmaticoi were the kind of people who were concerned with positive knowledge, positive questions, yielding positive answers. And these people said we're not concerned with your abstract questions, we're concerned with asking questions of the world and of nature and with the kind of answers that are forced upon us by the structures of the world and which we cannot refrain from accepting.
So the dogmatic person, the dogmatic, namely the scientist, is the kind of person who thinks only as he is compelled to think by the objective and intrinsic structures of the world around him. Now it was in that direction that Christianity came and it took that up and developed it remarkably, changed it, changed its foundations and it developed what Cyril of Alexandria calls dogmaticae episteme, dogmatic science. And theology, the kind of theology that we have in the
councils is that kind of theology which is not free thinking, it is that kind of theology of God and of Christ that is forced upon us by the interaction of God in the universe and as we allow our minds to fall under its power we find ourselves committed to saying fundamental things about God and the world and out of that dogmatic science and theology arose certain fundamental ideas which changed the whole course of science and that
is about which I wish to speak today. But before I do so, let me indicate that the word of course dogmatic has changed in parlance and it tends to have become to mean the opposite of what it used to mean. Dogmatic means that which, laying down certain foundations, certain statements apart from any evidence merely upon external authority or ecclesiastical authority, traditional authority and not statements that are forced upon you by the actual structures of reality. Now
it's interesting to note in the modern world and by the modern world I mean the world from the Renaissance up to the beginning of this century, 1900 or so, in the modern world when science took its new way the first name it gave itself was dogmatic science and that's interesting because with Francis Bacon people said we don't want these academic questions, these philosophers' questions, they can't tell us anything about nature, anything about science and that's exactly
what the scientists today say to the linguistic philosophers, we can't learn anything from you in this kind of academic questioning, we want the kind of questions that allow nature to disclose itself where nature pulls apart her curtains as Bacon said and allows us to see into its inner form and structure and we think as we are compelled to think by the structures of nature and in order to distinguish that from medieval science or the philosopher's approach
they called physics dogmatic science and it's that tradition that theology then recovered the concept from the fathers and developed dogmatic science and that's the kind of chair that I'm supposed to profess theology in Edinburgh. Well get back then to my point that in this reconstruction of the foundations of Christian theology's reconstruction of the foundations of classical science and culture, Christian theology developed three masterful ideas which have had an enormous impact upon all subsequent thought, science and
theology and these subsequent ideas as I said arose out of a careful and thinking through of the relation between the incarnation of the Logos of God, the son of God and the doctrine of creation of the world out of nothing. Now the first of these ideas is what I might call the rational unity of the universe. Now this is something that has become to accept so readily that we hardly realize it is a distinctively Judeo-Christian
concept. Now here we have the doctrine of the one God, the creator of all things visible and invisible. The doctrine of the one God who creates the forms as well as the material structures of the world to use the Greek thought. The doctrine of the one God who is the ultimate source of all order and rationality and this carried with it the rejection of all political atheism and of all dualism and pluralism and polymorphism of the
ancient religions and philosophies and sciences and it produced the concept of one harmonious system of things characterized by one pervasive multivariable unity. Now if you want to get the clearest understanding of that as it arose read the Contigentes of Athanasius and see how again and again he employs musical terms to describe the kind of harmonious texture that the order of the universe under one God the creator has. It's a staggering concept of a unified rationality which
sweeps away the Aristotelian as well as the Patonic and certainly the Ptolemaic duality between celestial world and terrestrial, celestial mechanics and terrestrial mechanics. It sweeps that all away and all the pluralism and dualism that goes with it and says that the universe has one pervading Texas or order everywhere and wherever you go it is accessible to rational inquiry. Now that is the correlate to the doctrine of the one God who created the world out of nothing
and it's upon that doctrine of the rationality of the universe that we have the confidence of all scientific inquiry ever since. Now second the doctrine of the contingent intelligibility or rationality of the universe. Now this is an enormous step forward it's the idea that rationality itself is contingent that there is an order in the universe that is an impossible concept for Greeks or Orientals alike, impossible concept. And so you can see how again and again when
the Christians taught the doctrine of God as creation out of nothing the Greeks could say that was impiety, it was atheism, an attack upon the rationality that they were concerned with eternal forms and even in its original polymorphic state. So that the Christian doctrine is treated as impossible and yet it was precisely to the doctrine of the one God overcoming polytheism that this doctrine took root. God creates the universe out of nothing and along with that
creation of the universe he creates space and time out of nothing. Now this had two effects. This had the effect of changing the whole concept of space and time and I haven't time to develop that but this was one of the greatest changes imaginable and indeed we have only caught up on these changes in our own day especially with general relativity theory. So you can see the profound changes that were introduced by Christian theology right away.
These concepts of space and time were developed by the first great Christian physicist, a gentleman called John Philoponus of Alexandria whose work later had some influence on the West through al-Ghazali and Grosseteste but I won't pursue that. Now here we have not only a fundamental change in the concepts of space and time and the destruction of the container notion of space but we have at the same time the idea that space and time are now
functions of the created world and space and time are the bearers of all rational order. So that if space and time is created out of nothing, all rational order in the universe is created out of nothing. Now that's a staggering concept for the ancient world. Along with that was the twin concept that God has created man out of nothing. Man endowed with mind as well as with body and soul so that the mind of man is
created out of nothing. Now this again is a staggering concept because all Greek thought was somehow informed by the Orphic idea that the mind intelligence is a spark of the divine and you know how many modern people hold this pagan idea as well. But the idea that the light of the reason is itself created out of nothing was so revolting again they said this is impious because that's an attack upon God. Even if you have a
God that's an attack upon God. But no man himself with his mind as well as his body and soul is created out of nothing. So when God created the universe out of nothing including man posited with space and time, God created the universe in such a way that he conferred upon the creation a rationality of its own independent of God's rationality but contingent upon God's rationality. Now I grant you this is a difficult concept. This does
not mean that the rationality of the universe is a sharing in God. This does not mean that the created light of the universe or the created light of the human mind is an ontologistic participation in the mind of God. And as the Platonists or Neoplatonists thought a mathexis on the contrary here we have a created light which certainly derives from the uncreated light of God and is dependent upon it. And so the created light while rational
depends upon the rationality of God but it is independent of it and it is not self-sufficient as God's light, God's rationality is. Now the creation which meant that if you are to understand any natural process in the universe you can understand it only by penetrating into the intrinsic structures of that rational process not by thinking out a priori, not by thinking of God in relation to it because God has created the universe out of nothing.
You can understand the universe only by going to the universe and probing into its inquiries so that the doctrine of contingent rationality is the foundation of all empirical science to this day. But the relation of contingent character to rationality, the idea of contingent rationality means the inseparable connection between empirical and theoretical activity in science. Now today this is even more as I shall show a masterful idea. Now here then we have a fundamental doctrine which is
impossible for the pagan mind but it is a direct product of the Christian faith and it is on that doctrine of contingent rationality that all subsequent history in one way or the other and today more than ever rests. And so you see far from theology being based upon science the fundamental ideas that I am mentioning derive from theology. But now we have a third concept and that is the doctrine of the freedom of the universe or
the doctrine of contingent freedom. The early church developed a staggering doctrine of the freedom of God and this is part of its struggle to divorce theology from cosmology. God is the creator of the universe out of nothing the Lord of all space and time. He is not indebted to the universe in any way as for example process theology thinks or Aristotelian theology thinks. The universe is indebted to God. Its rationality is indebted to God but God's
rationality is not indebted to the universe. God is therefore free transcendent Lord over all space and time. Now it is because the universe is contingent upon that God and his freedom that the universe became emancipated from the determinisms of fate and fatalism that characterize the ancient world from necessity. Now we can see as we look all through the early church go back to Athanasius or Clement of Alexandria who struggled with this concept of the prunaya of
God. The providence of God liberating the world from a deterministic fate where the world is in the shackles of a cyclic universe and the lives of people are governed by astrology. The ways in which the stars go around determine the lives of men is what you find in women's magazines today everywhere. It's a return to paganism. Now here we have the emancipation of men's minds from that kind of slavery and it comes from realizing that the
universe derives from the free love of God and is contingent upon the free love of God. So that there is in the universe a contingent freedom. That is the third basic concept. A contingent freedom which derives from the unlimited freedom of God. Now it is a contingent freedom and therefore a limited freedom. An unlimited contingent freedom would be a contradiction in terms. It would be sheer arbitrariness. But this is the point. The freedom of the contingent
universe is limited by the freedom of God, limited by that freedom upon which its own freedom rests. Now again if you like that's a difficult concept but it's a concept that is more and more important for science as well as theology. So that in the universe we have a contingent freedom, a limited freedom. But it is a freedom which is genuine freedom, the proper freedom to a contingent finite universe. But because it is contingent upon the
unlimited freedom of God, this is a freedom that contains in it inexhaustible possibilities. And that is why the universe as we explore it surprises us all the time by revealing to us ideas, concepts, patterns which we could never, never anticipate on our own. And that is the excitement of science. That is the hallmark of a scientific theory. That it indicates far more than it expresses. And that the more we probe into it the more exciting are
the patterns of the universe that become disclosed to it which we couldn't anticipate in any way whatsoever. That universe takes us by surprise because it is correlated with the infinite inexhaustible freedom of God who always takes us by surprise. And therefore it's understandable that people should say creation is grounded upon the grace of God. Well then that was the third of the masterful ideas that gave rise, that the early church developed. Now I wish I had
time to show you how these three masterful ideas. First of all developed in theology and they formed the structure of the whole Christian outlook between God and the world that informs the great creed. But then the time came when they were translated, they had to be translated from theology into physics. And it was this gentleman John Philoponus who was the first great Christian physicist who translated them into physics following based upon the thought of Athanasius and
Cyril of Alexandria in such a way that he gave us the first physics of light, the first physics of motion in which motion is tied up with the movement of light and indeed with relational views of space and time which are staggering anticipations in physics of Einsteinian thought. But which became smothered? Now why did they become smothered? And so I have to ask the question what became of these three masterful ideas in the history of Western
civilization? What happened was an enormous upsurge in the culture of the ancient world of the old dualisms. Now to a large extent this was through certain neoplatonic influences in reinterpretation of Aristotle and reinterpretation of Plato and in certain other areas of law and interpretation of law and logic above all. A resurgence of dualist thought which took the form of Augustinian thought in the East so that from the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries on the new dualism set
in and the great masterful ideas especially as translated into physics by people like Philoponus were swamped or submerged. Now over against the dualist concepts that were developed by especially by Latin Christianity poor old John Philoponus was dubbed a Monophysite. Now a Monophysite is a person who denies that there are two natures in Christ namely but nature is then interpreted in the Aristotelian way you see. But John Philoponus didn't think in an Aristotelian way. His concept of
nature meant reality. He developed on the scientific ground of the theologians who said when you think of the universe you think according to its nature and when you think according to its nature you're thinking in accordance with reality so that nature and reality were identical and to speak of Jesus as one meant for John Philoponus one reality. He wasn't a Schizoid reality. He wasn't a Monophysite. He was the opponent of all dualisms in Aristotle or Plato
or the Neoplatonists but unfortunately as so often happens a pioneering thinker becomes denigrated in this kind of a way much as Barth has done today by the misunderstanding people and basic thoughts are submerged and that's one of the greatest tragedies in my view in the history of science as well as the history of theology. And interestingly the one who in our day has done more to resurrect Philoponus is a great Jewish physicist and historian Professor Samburski
whom I had the privilege of discussing his ideas with a few months ago in Israel. He himself was a teacher of Dr. Katzir the president of Israel a world renowned chemist and physicist himself and we discussed these concepts together most excitingly because they are aware of the interrelations within theology and science and they were aware of some of my own writings so we had some real debates or dialogue on these issues. Well then what became of
these masterful ideas? Now I said they were swamped on the whole and submerged but the doctrine of the one thought with its correlate the unitary rationality of the universe remained and this had a considerable development in western medieval thought which helped considerably toward the development of modern science. Medieval thought developed the idea that the whole universe is rational it had its problems I grant you its problems in the Ptolemaic outlook in which it could not extend
that to celestial mechanics and only considered in relation to terrestrial mechanics and that had to be destroyed by Galileo before modern astronomy could get marching. But by and large the medieval world was concerned with the fact that nature wherever we have it is a rational system and this rational system comes from God and so on that basis of the rationality the objective rationality of nature modern science has lent very very heavily. But while that first idea
remained there was a fundamental change in the doctrine of God. Again it was Christian theology that is now to influence the development of science in a bad way instead of in a good way. Now here Christian theology took up certain patristic ideas of the immutability of God which were influenced by Jewish and Hellenic thought and the impassibility of God the fact that God does not suffer, suffer change or suffer hurt or suffer pain. And it took
up these ideas of the immutability and impassibility of God and it correlated them with the old Aristotelian notion of God as the unmoved mover and here we have therefore a static concept of God. Now this is not really changed I must say by process theology with its doctrine of God correlated universe and I grant you it doesn't have a doctrine of God as the unmoved mover but it has a doctrine of God as the good unmover
which is even worse in many ways than the medieval concept of God. Well now the difficulty with this new concept of God is this. If God is immutable and impossible then we have a concept of God who whatever you say remains detached from the universe and he constitutes what in science we would call an inertial system. That's to say he is a God who affects the universe but affects it without interacting with it. He affects it
inertially. Now the correlate to that God with this universe is a universe of necessity and we can see already in the medieval world that this meant the loss of contingence and you see even the Greeks had great difficulty in thinking of contingence because they identified the necessary with the rational and so they could only think contingence rationally if there was an element of necessity inherent in contingence and so to think contingence they thought it away in
order to think the element of necessity in it. That's why they couldn't hold to the radical doctrine of contingence in the early church. But the medieval laps back into that. You find discussion after discussion about contingentia especially in relation to whether God can foresee free contingent events and relation therefore between the freedom of the universe and the freedom of God and we can see again and again how the doctrine of the immutable, impassable God brings as
its correlate a necessitarian universe, a universe bound up through causal relations and Aristotle's doctrine of causality is brought back and so we have the universe as a causal determined system correlated with an inertial God, an immutable and impassable God. Now of course the doctrine of the immutability and the impassability of God as we can see it say in patristic theology is ambiguous. The immutability and the impassability of God mean that God is not moved by, not
changed by anything outside himself and the impassability means that God is not affected by anything beyond him. He does not suffer from anything beyond him. But on that sense the immutability and the impassability refer to the eternal tranquility and the serenity of God that he is transcendent over all the changes and chances and pain and hurt of our world but it does not mean that God does not move himself. It does not mean that God in
himself is devoid of passion, devoid of love, devoid of mercy as for example Schleier Marco could teach who held the doctrine of the impassibility of God. As a doctrine of Bultmann teachers who says that the love of God is not a fact within the universe. So here we have again from Schleier Marco or Bultmann the same idea you have in the middle ages of a doctrine of God who is immutably, impassibly related to our world so
that our world is a closed continuum of cause and effect. That's the medieval doctrine. But the early church did not have that doctrine. It had the doctrine, I grant you it was tempted more and more by the thrust of Greek thought to change the concepts of immutability and impassibility but it had the doctrine of the living God who moves himself, who is in himself love and through his love moves himself, through his love created the world
and through his love became incarnate. Now just think for a moment of what that means and you can see Greek thought in Athanasius or even later and John of Damascus wrestling with this thought. God was not eternally creator. Athanasius rejects the idea of the eternity of the world and therefore God is not eternally creator. He created the world out of nothing when it wasn't existing so that even in the life of God there is a change.
He becomes creator when you created the world out of nothing or take the incarnation. God was not eternally incarnate. He created Jesus. Jesus is the son of God incarnate and Jesus is a creature and the creator becomes a creature without ceasing to be the creator. But here in the incarnation something new happens even for God and in the incarnation God moved outside of himself without leaving himself. A staggering thought. This is part of the problem of
the extra carbanisticum so called. So here we have a doctrine of the living God who moves, who is full of love, a communion of love and therefore not a doctrine of a God inertially, passively related to our world but on the contrary a doctrine of God who in his living movement interacts with our world. Now this changed the doctrine of God in the early church and I mentioned yesterday in Athanasius where we have the mutuality of
relation between the act of God and the being of God. In Athanasius doctrine of the Energia Enusios, the act inherent in the being of God as also it had the doctrine of the Logos Enusios inherent in the being of God. Now that is the fundamental doctrine of God which in our day has been resurrected in the most massive way by Karl Barth. Yes there's no question about it. He is the one great theologian in our day
who has resurrected this doctrine from Athanasius and Cyril and given massive exposition of it in which the being and the act of God are inseparable in the freedom of God and no theologian in the western world has ever given such an exposition of the freedom of God as Barth in this way and therefore that doctrine has correlated with it an entirely different notion of the universe than that which arose out of the medieval world because deism
and necessity go together but a God who is living moving acting creates a world which is correspondingly also living moving acting and free contingent upon the freedom and the movement of God and the being created being is parallel to contingent upon the eternal living moving being of God. Now what became of these ideas in the modern world beginning with Newton and alas my time is now galloping and I meant to spend at least quarter of an
hour on this. The problem of all modern theology as in modern science is rooted upon the bad theology of Newton. Now there was good theology and bad theology in Newton and let me put it this way. Newton tried to accepted the idea of the rationality and stability of the universe as grounded in the rationality and stability of God and in order to explain that he developed the idea as I spoke of yesterday of the absolute time
and space which are the mind of God containing the universe but God contains it without being affected by the universe impassively immovably and that's what he meant by absolute and inertial so God inertially contains and regulates the universe without being affected by it. There is no interaction in that sense and so Newton developed on the one hand a great synthesis of God and the universe which allowed him to explain the immutable eternal laws of nature as
they are grounded in the immutability and unchangeability of God and it is that that rise to the mechanistic system of the world. On the other hand however Newton felt that there were certain irregularities in the planetary and stellar system which he could not tame by his laws of motion and he brought in God to deal with these gaps in nature so he brought in God within the system of efficient causes in order to regulate the harmony
of the universe and to prevent further irregularities so he had a second role of God. Now it is the confusion that this involves that is very difficult for the history of thought. Now let me explain it the two roles of God in this way. On the one hand Newton thought of the universe in this way as correlated to God but somehow the universe is correlated in such a way that it is open to God because Newton
said the universe is determined by causal connections everywhere but the kind of order you have within the universe, causal order, does not explain how the universe came into being so that the relation between God and the universe cannot be a causal order. This was the problem of the many evils. It must be quite a different kind of order. Now this was very important because it meant that for Newton the universe is not a consistent and complete
system in itself, explanatory out of itself. It is a system of rational order that is only intelligible if there is a sufficient reason beyond it, the ground of it. So that even though he thought of God as deistically related to the universe, he thought of God as grounding the rationality of the universe so that the universe is not complete or consistent. But then the other role was that God somehow comes within the universe and here and
there he affects the universe in controlling and regulating its order, the God of the gaps. Now in the history of thought Laplace rubbed out the second idea of God, the second role of God because Laplace claimed to explain the systematic order of the universe in terms of eternal self-regulating principles and the internal stability of the universe which did not need that hypothesis God and he was right in that sense. But that did not destroy Newton's
first relation between God and the universe and all subsequent thought has demonstrated the opposite of that, that the universe is not complete and consistent in itself and who more than could Gödel who still lives in this city through his Gedeleon theorems which apply to mechanics as well as to astrologic or arithmetic or semantic systems who demonstrated that you cannot get any rational system which is complete and consistent in itself, it is only intelligible that is say
consistent if it is related to a sufficient reason beyond it. Now that's what Newton already demonstrated but the problem of western thought is this, because Newton's second role was ousted by Laplace they lost the first one and so you had a mass Newton's deistic relation dominated the whole of western thought and that's why demythologizing arises because people cannot think that God interferes or interacts with our world that's why miracles explain wrongly as interference in our world
all these false concepts go back to Newton's false doctrine of God, one side of it. But now all that is changed, that whole way of thinking of the universe and the space and time has gone and I haven't time to expound that but let me say that this in closing that in our day and this for theology is terribly exciting in our day coming from the side of pure scientific rigor there has come massively to the
front the ideas of contingent intelligibility and contingent freedom. Now last week I told you I was at a conference of two international academies where we were concerned with these problems and every scientist there showed the end of determinism, they spoke about the open universe even from the side of thermodynamics that that is the contingent freedom of the universe but they realized that this means that you do not have an eternal necessitarian relationship you see and therefore
the idea of thinking contingent in terms of necessity also goes and of course general relativity is a massive resurrection of the whole concept of the contingent universe. So here from the side of pure science what has happened? The ancient ideas created by Christian theology upon which the science rests have come at last to the surface again and have now become dominant in the modern world so that the three basic ideas I spoke of the rationality of
the universe under one god, the contingent rationality of the universe and the contingent freedom of the universe are now three primary ideas which dominate the whole of modern science as we, not the whole of it but as we more and more penetrate into structures. Now what does this mean? This doesn't mean that theology is grounded upon natural science, it means that theology today is by natural science liberated from the old pseudo concepts in order again to
be genuine theology, the theology of the creation and resurrection and incarnation. So that from the side of the scientists we have people saying have done with all that rubbish you've been talking and think through carefully the relation between creation, incarnation that's what we want. They see the interconnection here which most of our contemporary theologians do not see and so today in the dialogue between science and theology, theology becomes liberated from pseudo concepts of the medieval or
the Newtonian era and is able again to take its stand upon the foundations of classical Christian theology in the post-Nicene period in such a way that instead of having to recreate the foundations of modern science and philosophy as the ancients had to do, it finds that the ancients work has now at last borne fruit and that the destructions of duality, the destructions of a closed system in the universe are now from science itself emerging to
the top so that we live today in a new world changed by science which is far more congenial to classical Christian theology than any period in the history of western civilization and it is due to the classical ideas developed out of Nicene theology having at last borne fruit over the centuries. Now I could show you for example, I'll just give this one example because time is now gone. One of the most important ideas in all this
development is the concept of the field. Now the concept of the field comes straight out of theology and if you want to read that, read the work I indicated by William Berkson on Fields of Force or read, I've been trying to remember his name, a book published two years ago by someone in the Princeton University Press called Scottish Physics and British Philosophy or rather, I'm sorry, Scottish Philosophy and British Physics in which he shows that the
concept of the field as developed by James Clark Maxwell whose death we commemorate next year, 100 years ago. James Clark Maxwell took his basic ideas of the field from the lectures of Sir William Hamilton in Edinburgh on metaphysics where they were controlled by theological concepts. He was able then to relate them later on to the concepts developed another way by Faraday and so came the great concept upon which Einstein has changed the face of modern science.
They have theological roots and it is because God interacts with the whole field of space-time that we have this kind of dynamic view of the universe which yields the concept of the dynamic field and that concept alone which has changed our thought we can trace clearly in theological roots. So don't be afraid of the dialogue of theology and science and don't base your theology on natural science. Allow natural science to liberate you from false theological
concepts and pseudo scientific concepts and see with thanks to God that our exploration of the universe rests upon fundamental concepts developed out of the gospel itself.