Ben Myers of Faith and Theology discusses Alister McGrath’s new book, A Fine-Tuned Universe, which is based on his 2009 Gifford Lectures:
McGrath’s argument is that the universe’s fine-tuning is consonant with a Christian picture of the world. At the core of the book is a scientific-theological reading of Augustine. In a series of engagements with contemporary science (the constants of the universe; the origins of life; the chemistry of water; the constraints of evolution; the teleology of evolution; and emergence), McGrath argues that Augustine’s creation theology provides resources for making theological sense of both the origins of the universe and the processes of Darwinian evolution.
There is no notion here of “proving” the existence of God or the truth of Christian teaching; instead, McGrath’s claim is that there is a coherent “fit” between the observable world and the imaginative resources of Christian tradition. “What is observed within the natural order resonates with the core themes of the Christian vision of God” (p. 95). More than that, he also argues that Darwin’s theory of natural selection opens the way to a theological reevaluation of Augustine’s creation theology: read retrospectively in the light of biological evolution, Augustine becomes an important resource for thinking of creation in terms of “both primordial actuality and emergent possibility” (p. 216).
Continue reading at Faith and Theology.
To ask the question “does God exist,” and by extension to thus try to prove that God exists, especially by the use of reason, is in effect, to affirm the negative proposition that God does not exist until absolutely proven otherwise by the same doubt filled mind that asks the question in the first place!
Plus to appeal to processes in nature whether at the subtle cellular level or the macro-cosmic level is to have already identified with a reductionist point of view and to confess, that despite all the hopeful God-talk, one is thoroughly convicted of the mortal meat-body vision.
What about Consciousness and Energy or Light, which are the two fundamental realities of our existence-being?
Hasn’t Einstein and other quantum theorists etc. told us that ALL of this is energy, or modifications of energy of varying degrees of solidity and subtlety.
What if all of this IS Conscious Energy or Light?
Quite literally de-light-full.
McGrath seldom if ever uses these two words. This is also the case with most of the other earnest Christian theologians who write books and give talks on this all important science and religion topic.