“We must summon the audacity to say that modernity’s scientific/metaphysical metanarrative―at the moment told by astrophysicists and neo-Darwinians―is not the encompassing story within which all other accounts of reality must establish their places, or be discredited for failing to find one. It is instead a rather brutal abstraction from reality. The abstraction has proved to be magnificent in its intellectual power and practical benefits. Nevertheless, by these disciplines’ methodological eschewal of teleology, they prevent themselves from describing what actually is. As pop scientists urge over and over, the tale told by Scripture and the creed finds no comfortable place within modernity’s metanarrative. It is time for the church simply to reply: this is certainly the case, and the reason it is the case is that the tale told by Scripture is too comprehensive to find place within so drastically curtailed a version of the facts. Indeed, the gospel story cannot fit within any other would-be metanarrative because it is itself the only true metanarrative―or it is altogether false.”
Robert Jenson, Canon and Creed (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 120.
I am serving as the Project Lead for a Science for Seminaries Seed Grant that Providence Theological Seminary has been awarded by AAAS-DoSER. As part of the grant, we are hosting a Faith and Science Symposium on Saturday, March 19. Due to uncertainties surrounding the pandemic, we have been forced to host the event entirely online. While we will miss gathering in person, this does have two distinct advantages. First, because we are meeting online, we have been able to assemble a strong international lineup of speakers. Second, because the Symposium is online, you can participate from wherever in the world you happen to be located. See the poster below and visit prov.ca/scienceandfaith for more information.
I was recently interviewed by John Longhurst of the Winnipeg Free Press about the Science for Seminaries Seed Grant that Providence Theological Seminary has recently received. Overall, it’s a positive piece, although I was slightly misrepresented on one point. I mentioned that Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin were all interested in and acquainted with the best science of their day, not that they were scientists per se. You can read the full article here.
