Most people believe that everything happens for a reason. Whether it is “God’s will,” “karma” or “fate,” we want to believe that an overarching purpose undergirds everything, that nothing in the world--especially a disaster or tragedy--is a random, meaningless event. This dilemma presents itself provocatively in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that, in the conventional scientific understanding, is driven by random chance. Reconciling chance and divine purpose poses challenges to the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the Hebrew Scriptures, in the ancient and (...) powerful story of Job, reveal that questions of purpose and order have long been a part of the conversation. Although the Bible generally affirms that God blesses the righteous in an orderly way, the story of Job is a powerful counterexample to this orderly scheme. The achingly beautiful but tragic story of Job, in concert with the modern quantum picture of the world, push back against the idea that “everything happens for a reason.”. (shrink)

God's action in the world poses a challenge for the Christian scholar. At the scholarly level of one's discipline, invocations of divine Providence as an explanatory category are considered unacceptable. Yet the scholar-believer necessarily acknowledges that God is indeed active in His Creation. Generally, this tension is resolved via the assumption of methodological naturalism at the level of one's discipline and the embrace of theism at the level of one's faith. This can result in an incoherence between the commitments of (...) one's discipline and one's faith. Yet both theology and physics suggest that this tension may be relieved somewhat by acknowledging that the physical universe is no longer understood to be closed to the possibility of divine action. Consequently, Christian historians may want to reconsider the value of Providence as an explanatory category. (shrink)

The Anthropic Principle suggests that the universe may have been designed for human life. This anthropocentric, anti-Copernican, notion elicits a variety of responses from scientists, including some elaborate attempts to invalidate it by trying to show that there may be an infinity of alternative universes. These attempts may be challenged as unreasonably speculative and presumptive. What emerges is the suggestion that cosmology may at last be in possession of some raw material for a postmodern creation myth. If the Anthropic Principle (...) can be integrated with biological explanations of human origins, and the result joined to the traditional Biblical Creation story, what emerges is a possible recovery of a religiously traditional, yet scientifically coherent, creation story for our generation. (shrink)