god still vs. science

Richard Handler, the CBC radio’s “Ideas” man, wrote what I think is a fair and balanced report on the God vs. Science debate. Take a look see here. There’s one sentence though that I’d like to comment on: “And when He wants, He can break the laws of physics and create a miracle.” I prefer the theologian Torrance’s idea as is expressed in his treatment of the resurrection: “In fulfillment of his eternal design God has acted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead in such a way that, far from setting aside or infringing or interfering with the spatio-temporal order of the universe which he created (and which we try to formulate in what we call ‘laws of nature’), he accepts and affirms its reality, but he introduces into the situation a transcendently new factor which brings about an utterly astonishing transformation of it which is quite inexplicable in terms of anything we are able to conceive merely within the intelligible structures of the world, or in accordance with our scientific formulations of them” (Torrance, THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE).

In other words, what we define as a radically new miracle that breaks the natural laws, Torrance believed that the resurrection was God’s way of introducing or revealing or exposing a new dimension that we were previously unaware of. He agreed with Einstein who said that either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle. He was also a devout studier of Polanyi, the Hungarian born polymath and scientist, who asserted that “the natural sciences reveal the universe to be multi-levelled, with successive levels interrelated by a ‘principle of marginal control’“. He believed there were levels of reality that we are not yet aware of, but that would be mind-blowing to us because they would challenge our categories.

I plan on reading Dawkins (nicknamed “Darwin’s rottweiler“) THE GOD DELUSION.

Oh, find some time to read a lecture given by Torrance on Einstein and God. Excellent! Torrance quotes Einstein as saying, “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.“