Reviews
Re-Vision: A New Look at the Relationship between Science and Religion.
By Clifford Chalmers Cain. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2015. xii + 164 pages. US $29.99.
Clifford Cain, editor and also author of six of the ten chapters in this book, is the
Harrod–C.S. Lewis Professor of Religious Studies at Westminster College, Fulton,
Missouri. He solicited contributions by colleagues from the sciences—biology and
physics—as well as from philosophy from his home institution to address the issue
of cosmology (Laura Stumpe, “The Big Bang Theory,” 17–34), evolution (Gabe
McNett, “Seeing the Reality of Evolution,” 45–71), genetics (Jane Kenney-Hunt,
“The Complex Relationship between Nature and Nurture,” 95–112), and intelligent design (Rich Green, “Intelligent Design,” 123–43), providing theological
commentaries himself to each of these topics besides writing the Introduction
(1–15) and the Conclusion (153–58). The book “is intentionally directed toward
a general, nonspecialist audience, because the contributors believe that the attempt to relate science and religion should not be reserved for, or monopolized
by, experts talking only to each other” (ix). This overarching goal is well achieved.
The individual contributors not only explain almost every technical term they use
and provide essential references in “notes” at the end of their chapters, but also
unfold complex matters in plain language and in such a way that these easily can
be grasped (a nice proof of their didactic skills).
While, then, nothing much needs to be said regarding the straightforward, very
basic presentations of the scientific topics; it is the theological interpretations that
warrant a closer examination, because it is these to which the book’s title refers
when speaking of “re-vision.” What is revised and reimagined here is not scientific
theory or research as such, but the theological interpretation of scientific and, as
in the case of intelligent design, pseudo-scientific theories and research in light of
process theology. Process theology “picks up on both the God of the philosophers
and the God of the Bible” (147, original emphasis), “promotes a view of the
world that involves change, development, novelty, and organic unity,” and “posits
a concept of God as having two natures . . . a transcendent aspect and also an
immanent” one (76). Properly understood, process theology abolishes the concept
of an omnipotent God and renders the literalistic, fundamentalist interpretation
of the Bible impossible. To thus revise the concept of God and the study of the
Bible “is critical” because in light of scientific findings “it is no longer tenable” to
cling to a religiously informed deterministic worldview by asserting “a notion of
God as divine Regulator with infinite power and meticulous providence” (154).
The same applies to “biblical literalism,” for this “not only creates (unnecessary)
conflict with science, it also does not do justice to religion’s scriptures themselves”
(153; original parenthesis).
With an almost pastoral concern, Cain pleads for a nonconfrontational “conversation” (12) between science and religion for mutual benefit, since both “are
needed for a complete picture of reality . . . and make necessary contributions to
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human understanding” (148). He also shows how process theological categories
like “divine lure,” “persuasion,” and “enticement” (77, 154) prove to be helpful in
this conversation, whereas holding on to concepts of divine omnipotence, determinism, and coercion will lead to unnecessary confrontation (154). If science and
religion do not “join forces” the author sees cause for serious worry, especially with
regard to “solving the environmental crisis which besets the planet” (90, 156).
Only the “understanding of a God who acts through influence”—as conceived by
process theology—“is a concept of God that could resonate today with science,
with theodicy, and with environmental challenges” (156).
While the purpose and methodology of this publication are well taken, and
while Cain’s comments, which draw heavily on contemporary theology and biblical scholarship besides making occasional reference to other religions, are trying
seriously to do justice to the challenges presented by today’s science, the book,
actually, is not the conversation its editor claims it is. The book, rather, presents
four scientific topics, which give cause for serious controversies in certain Christian
circles, accompanied by very considerate theological commentaries apologetic in
character. Statements like a theory “allows a possible place for God” (38; original
emphasis), “can preserve a role for God” (80), “allows ‘room’ for a role for the
Divine” (145, original emphasis), and that “theology and religion want to preserve
a role for the divine in the world” (146), to name just a few, reveal a perception
of the task that does not challenge scientific monism at all as expected. Christian
theology at least is not about making room for God; it is about reflecting intelligently and critically on the biblical witness of God as revealed in Jesus Christ,
the history of this witness throughout the centuries, and its meaning for today,
whereas religion is the socially and ritualistically formalized lived expression of such
witness. Instead of truly conversing with science, Cain accommodates theology
and religion to scientific monism by looking for spaces to insert what truly can be
known in personal encounter only. Trying to reconcile religion and science in this
way ignores the incommensurability of the different approaches to life that faith
and science represent. Both are human means to cope with the challenges of life,
science being concerned with finding practical solutions and satisfying curiosity by
means of critical reflection and observation, while faith is concerned with finding
existentially trustworthy, dependable answers to live by, trusting the witness to the
living God as revealed in Christ and handed down within the Church. Since mastery of the challenges of life is their common concern, science and faith/religion
belong together. That they have fallen apart in such a way that they appear today
to be mutually exclusive is a grave distortion which any genuine conversation
between these estranged siblings has to be aware of. What is needed is not an
accommodation of one to the other but a critical, thoroughgoing discussion of
their methodological differences in order not to fall prey to sham controversies.
CHRISTOFFER H. GRUNDMANN
John R. Eckrich University Chair in Religion and the Healing Arts,
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN
Christoffer.Grundmann@valpo.edu
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The Atom of the Universe: The Life and Work of Georges Lemaı̂tre.
By Dominque Lambert. Kraków, Poland: Copernicus Center Press,
2015. 464 pages. Photographs. Hardcover or eBook, €49.90.
A few days before his death on June 20, 1966, the Belgian cosmologist Georges
Lemaı̂tre heard from his collaborator Odon Godart of the discovery of the cosmic
background radiation, the “fossil” radiation of the hot dense early phase of the
universe. As the visitor recalled: “Despite being very sick, he [Lemaı̂tre] lucidly
expressed his satisfaction regarding the discovery of a type of cosmic microwave
radiation that seemed to confirm the idea of an explosive origin of the universe”
(415).
Lemaı̂tre, born in 1894, has been one of the fathers of modern cosmology,
contributing to the development of mathematical models for the universe based on
Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Though this should not be overemphasized,
he is more specifically known for his imaginative terminology, “a primeval atom.”
He was from the “pays noir,” the area were the coal mines were. After high school
he entered a program that would have made him a mining engineer. He served
on the allied side at the Belgian front in WWI, and returned to the university
in 1919 to pursue mathematics and physics. A year later, he also entered the
seminary to become a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. In his dissertation La
physique d’ Einstein he discussed philosophical presuppositions as well as scientific
issues. In 1923, he received grants to work in Cambridge, England, with Arthur
Eddington, a British cosmologist, science communicator, and committed Quaker,
as well as thereafter to make a trip to Canada and the United States, where
he studied at Harvard. In his Harvard PhD thesis, he showed how solutions
to the equations of general relativity as found by Einstein and by De Sitter
could be considered two limiting cases of a more general class of models of the
universe. In a subsequent article in 1927, in French, Lemaı̂tre derived a linear
relation between the distance of a source and its recessional velocity, using data
from Hubble to determine what nowadays has become known as the Hubble
Constant—after Edwin Hubble who two years later, not knowing of Lemaı̂tre’s
work, published more data supporting this linear relationship. After Eddington
learned of Lemaı̂tre’s paper in 1930, an English translation of Lemaı̂tre’s paper was
published—but without the computation on the expansion rate based on the data
available in 1927, because Hubble had more accurate data in his 1929 publication.
In addition to his life as a scientist, which is also of serious interest in the period
after the 1920s, Lemaı̂tre was a priest. In an interview in New York Times Magazine
in 1933, he defended the coexistence of religious and scientific perspectives as
complementary paths, with different aims. Biblical passages need not be taken
literally (211):
But the Bible says creation was accomplished in six days, you protest. “Isn’t
that a direct, literal statement?”
“What of it?” retorts the priest. “There is no reason to abandon the Bible
because we now believe that it took perhaps ten thousand million years to
create what we think is the universe. Genesis simply tries to teach us that
one day in seven should be devoted to rest, worship and reverence—all [of]
which are necessary for salvation.”
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For Lemaı̂tre, all his scientific work, including the speculative work on a
primeval atom, is metaphysically neutral. “It leaves the materialist free to deny
any transcendental Being. . . . For the believer, it removes any attempts to familiarity with God. . . . It is consonant with Isaias speaking of the ‘hidden God,’
hidden even at the beginning of creation” (Notes for a lecture in 1958; see 332).
Distinguishing the two had been his position all those years, but for “materialists,” including Fred Hoyle and Russian cosmologists, he remained a Roman
Catholic priest whose scientific work was suspect of bias by an interest in proving
creation. And, sadly enough, Catholic authorities had used modern cosmology
in this way. In a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on November 22,
1951, Pope Pius XII said: “Indeed, it seems that the science of today by going
back in one leap millions of centuries, has succeeded in being a witness to that
primordial Fiat Lux, when out of nothing, there burst forth along with matter a sea
of light and radiation” (quoted at 338). Lemaı̂tre was one of the members of the
Academy present at that speech. Lemaı̂tre never criticized the Pope publicly, but
from other sources it seems clear that he was not too happy about the conflation
of scientific and metaphysical issues. Let me add a source Lambert seems to have
missed. In the paper “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?,” often seen
as the paper that introduced the notion of “consonance” in the modern religion
and science discourse (a word I saw in this biography also in writings of Lemaı̂tre),
Ernan McMullin—himself a priest and philosopher of science—discusses the
papal address of 1951. McMullin was a student in Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, at
that time. McMullin (1981, 53 n25) adds a footnote of which I quote here the
initial lines.
The present writer [i.e., McMullin] was attending a graduate seminar with
Lemaı̂tre in 1951, and can recall very vividly Lemaı̂tre storming into class on
his return from the Academy meeting in Rome, his usual jocularity entirely
missing. He was emphatic in his insistence that the Big Bang model was
still very tentative, and further that one could not exclude the possibility
of a previous cosmic stage of contraction. Lemaı̂tre was not mentioned in
the Pope’s speech, though a member of the Academy. It was said at the
time that the principal author of the speech was Fr. Augustini Gemelli, a
Franciscan priest-psychologist from Milan on whom the Pope frequently
relied in matters scientific.
Lambert does not mention Gemelli in this context, but as the first president
of the Pontifical Academy he does appear in his study at various places. Lemaı̂tre
succeeded him in 1960 as the second president of the Academy, broadening its
horizon, adding more non-Catholic scientists including seven Nobel laureates,
and initiating study weeks on a wide range of topics.
This is merely a limited sample of the rich and detailed information in
the biography written by Dominque Lambert. This biography of Lemaı̂tre was
published initially in French in 1999. It has been translated for this edition by
Luc Ampleman and edited by Karl von Bibber, who have done an excellent job.
There is a preface by P. J. E. Peebles and an afterword by Michael Heller, relating
the work of Lemaı̂tre to developments and orientations that continue to be most
relevant. However, most praise should go to Dominique Lambert of the University
of Namur, Belgium, for drawing extensively on archives and scientific papers to
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bring us a biography of this major scientist, who was also a priest and thus had
to reflect on the philosophical issues involved in the co-existence of these two
languages and disciplines.
WILLEM B. DREES
Professor of Philosophy of the Humanities, Tilburg University,
Tilburg, the Netherlands
w.b.drees@tilburguniversity.edu
REFERENCE
McMullin, Ernan. 1981. “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?” In The Sciences and
Theology in the Twentieth Century, edited by Arthur R. Peacocke, 17–57. Stocksfield, UK:
Oriel Press and Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Christ and the Cosmos—A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine. By
Keith Ward. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015. xvii
+ 271 pages. US $29.99.
The book reviewed here is the most recent of more than thirty by this prolific
author, philosopher of religion, and Church of England priest Keith Ward, Fellow
of the British Academy and former Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of
Christ Church, University of Oxford, to mention only a few of his many prestigious
positions. Involved for many years in the interdisciplinary discourse between
science and religion, of which his God, Chance, and Necessity (1996), Pascal’s
Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding (2006), and The Big Questions
in Science and Religion (2008) give ample proof, Ward in this new publication
reinterprets the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in light of new cosmological
insights. In this book, a sequel to his earlier The Concept of God (1977), he states
“now that we are aware for the first time in history of the vast extent of the universe
and the possibility of many forms of life very different from our own” (260–61)
the established anthropomorphic and anthropocentric concepts of God require a
“reformulation” so to enable an authentic, meaningful re-appropriation of faith
in God today. His reformulation Ward calls “cosmic,” since “it conceives of God
in relation to a hugely expanded cosmos and not just to humans on this planet”
(221).
The book comes with a strange cover showing a small full body x-ray image
of a corpse (of a mummy it seems), set against the backdrop of a starry night sky
in between a partial blue Earth below and a partial reddish planet above. This
trivializes, and thus distorts, the truly demanding content of what follows, which
“raises deep human questions about the nature of ultimate reality and of how
much humans can hope to understand that reality” (xv). The book consists of five
“parts” conveniently divided into forty comparatively short chapters: The threefold
nature of the Divine being (1–30), the biblical sources of Trinitarian thought
(33–82), the Trinity, immanent and economic (85–142), the social Trinity (145–
216), and the cosmic Trinity (219–62); the bibliography and (incomplete) indices
of names and subjects follow (263–71). Also supplied is a disclosing “Preface”
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(ix–xvi) in which Ward explains the aim of the book and the methodology he uses.
“This is not a historical work, detailing the development of Trinitarian doctrine.
. . . I look at some of the best-known theological proposals in recent theology
. . . By critical engagement with them [viz. Karl Barth, Jürgen Moltmann, Karl
Rahner, Catherine LaCugna, John Zizioulas, Richard Swinburne, Hans Urs von
Balthasar, D. Brown, Brian Leftow, William Craig, William Hasker, and John
Macquarrie, besides a constant critical dialogue with Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle,
and Neo-Platonism], I build up a doctrine of the Trinity which is meant to be not
a rejection but an authentic development of traditional concerns and to constitute
a reworking of the doctrine that will have plausibility and practical significance
in the scientific age” (xiv). As an analytical philosopher and “critical realist” (129)
Ward insists “on clarity, precision, and the formal analysis of language” when
providing his “contribution . . . to contemporary debate about the Trinity and to
reflection on the nature of what most religious believers call God . . . ” (xv–xvi),
thereby indicating an inter-religious agenda, too. He argues passionately from an
explicitly, well articulated, sometimes very bold judgmental personal perspective,
not minding some redundancies and rephrasing. This approach not only leaves its
mark on the casual style in which he presents issues; this also limits the argument
somewhat since the author, who self-mockingly admits of “loving” his “own
reflection” (179), is more interested in making his point known than engaging in
elaborate scholastic disputes. Yet, his lively, at times still very technical, style will
engage readers of all disciplines and cultures because he not only avoids footnotes
and acronyms but repeatedly reminds his audience of similarities and parallels
in other cultures and religions (see 20–21, 75–76, 93, 136, 194, 247, 260); the
author, after all, was a Joint President of the World Congress of Faiths for almost
ten years.
While one might ask if Ward does full justice to the various Trinitarian concepts
he disagrees with when mounting his “resolute defense of monotheism” and
insisting—not the least also out of consideration for Islam and Judaism—“upon
a unitive view of the Trinity” (145), he certainly is on a clear mission, namely to
show that (and how) it is possible to reformulate Christian belief in the Triune
God as expressed in the Athanasian Creed (see 3, 5, 239) even though “the God of
a hundred billion galaxies will be far beyond human imagination” (106). Holding
that all “visual representations of the Trinity are misleading” (140) and that “the
representation of God as a male human is grossly inadequate, if not actually
idolatrous” (139) since rooted in “the desire for a naively realistic idea of God”
(128), Ward is convinced that the newly acquired cosmological knowledge “does
help the imagination think that God may really be known by other beings in very
different ways than those in which God is known by us” (250).
Admitting that “it is very difficult to find suitable words to use when . . .
trying to describe relationships which are unique and probably beyond complete
human understanding” (247) the author, like everyone else attempting to do this
before, honestly struggles with giving adequate expression to what is beyond words,
because “we have no independent access to the innermost being of God” (91).
What can be done is “to draw distinctions between different meanings that words
may have and point out what may be helpful and what may be misleading” (247).
While the reformulation of Trinitarian doctrine will thus become more abstract
and universal, it allows for an authentic re-appreciation of God as “the name of
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that Mystery which sets a goal of supreme value to the cosmos [the ‘Father’ in the
creation], mediates signs of that goal and value to those who are open to receive
them [the ‘Son’], and evokes a commitment to hope that the goal can ultimately
be realized [through the ‘Spirit’]” (257). Put in more general terms, speaking about
Trinity in light of today’s cosmological knowledge means speaking “about how,
in this universe, Being by its very nature generates beings, expresses itself in and
through beings, and unites them to Being, thus fulfilling a goal inherent in the
cosmos as a whole” (259–60).
Christians base their knowledge of the Trinity on God’s revelation in Christ
according to biblical witness (see Part II). This knowledge rests upon God’s contingent self-disclosure in time which surely reveals something of what and who
God truly is, but not necessarily everything, especially when pondering cosmic
dimensions with “localized symbols for the divine” (139). Even on planet Earth
“there may be diverse forms of revelation as the infinite God is disclosed to and
responded to by different peoples with different histories and cultures” (261) and
where “vestiges of the Trinity” (260) can be found throughout. However, humans
have to be made aware that they are called to “participate in the union” with “the
divine,” to “theosis, or sharing the nature of God,” that is, becoming “fully indwelt
by the Spirit, being united in a communion of being with Christ, and knowing
and loving the ultimate ground of all being as ‘Father’” (244). For Ward this “is
not just a very abstruse theoretical matter” or an idle intellectual exercise, but,
rather, “a way of living in relation to a reality which fulfills and perfects human
life” (244–45).
This book certainly contains a lot of valuable material for stimulating interdisciplinary as well as interreligious discussion. It not only challenges conventional ideas
and concepts about God and Trinity, but also provides innovative and excitingly
new perspectives begging for further in-depth exploration and study.
CHRISTOFFER H. GRUNDMANN
John R. Eckrich University Chair in Religion and the Healing Arts,
Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, IN
Christoffer.Grundmann@valpo.edu