The following are some useful resources for the reader who wishes to follow the exploration of this book further. In no way can I pretend the list is exhaustive but I hope it will nevertheless be useful. It is intended to supplement the references given at the end of the chapters and is biased towards the chapters’ particular themes.
The recent version of Ian Barbour’s well-known text Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (London: SCM Press, 1998) continues to be a valuable and comprehensive source, fair and impartial in its judgements. Barbour has now produced a shorter version for the general reader, When Science Meets Religion (San Francisco: Harper, 2000).
The textbook God, Humanity and the Cosmos, edited by C. Southgate and other contributors (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999) is noteworthy both for its smooth, readable style and for its careful treatment of continuing controversies. Science and Religion: A Critical Survey by Holmes Rolston, III (New York: Random House, 1987) is a stimulating book and is especially significant for its treatment of the biological, psychological and social sciences.
John Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) provides a highly readable, indeed elegant, defence of such belief for the general reader; it could usefully be read in conjunction with his Science and Theology: An Introduction (London: SPCK, and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), which contains a carefully selected bibliography particularly helpful to newcomers to the field.
Religion and Science: History, Method and Dialogue, edited by W.M. Richardson and W. J. Wildman (New York and London: Routledge, 1996) is an important collection of in-depth essays by individuals currently involved in the field.
Different epistemological perspectives on science and theology are cogently presented in Rethinking Theology and Science: Six Models for the Current Dialogue, edited by N.H. Gregersen and J.W. van Huysteen (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmnans, 1998).
An influential research procedure for theology based on that of science has been proposed by Nancey Murphy in Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and a significant comparison between the epistemologies of science and theology is given by Philip Clayton in his Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989).
The best source for an account of IBE is Peter Lipton’s Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1991).
To the general reader are strongly recommended the very readable, yet philosophically and theologically sophisticated treatments of a whole range of science–theology issues by Keith Ward in God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996) and God, Faith and the New Millennium (Oxford: Oneworld, 1998).
A useful account of the problem of God’s relation to time, as it has been discussed over the centuries, is given by Grace Jantzen in ‘Time and Timelessness’, in the New Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. A. Richardson and J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1983), pp. 571–4. Current issues are outlined by C.J. Isham and J. Polkinghorne in ‘The Debate over the Block Universe’, in Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham (Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 135–44, and (an elaboration of my own views) in my Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine and Human (TSA), 2nd edn (London: SCM Press and Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 128–33.
The physico-chemical (kinetic and thermodynamic) interpretations of biological organisation and its origins are surveyed in my An Introduction to the Physical Chemistry of Biological Organization (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The work of the Göttingen school (led by M. Eigen) is expounded by R. Winkler and M. Eigen in Laws of the Game (New York: Knopf, and London: Allen Lane, 1982), and its relevance to the origin of life by M. Eigen in Steps towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The studies of the Brussels school (led by I. Prigogine) are expounded by him in From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980), and their general consequences in his and I. Stengers’ Order out of Chaos (London: Heinemann, 1984).
In the 1990s scientists analysed more generally the theoretical basis of self-organisation of systems in critical states, which are on the edge of chaos and can switch suddenly into new patterns of organisation (P. Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); S. Kaufmann, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Complexity (London: Penguin, 1996)).
The notion of ‘intelligent design’ based on the supposed ‘irreducible complexity’ of, especially, biochemical and genetic systems has been strongly promoted not only by M.J. Behe (Chapter 4, note 3) but also by W.A. Dembski in The Design Inference: Estimating Chance through Small Probabilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For cogent refutations see H.J. van Till, ‘The Creation: Intelligently Designed or Optimally Equipped?’, Theology Today, 55, 1998, pp. 344–65; K. Miller, ‘God the Mechanic’, in Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientists’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1999), ch. 5; N. Shanks and K.H. Joplin, ‘Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry’, Philosophy of Science, 66, June 1999, pp. 268–82; and F.J. Ayala, ‘Arguing for Evolution’, The Science Teacher, 67(2), 2000, pp. 30–2.
A fuller discussion of the anthropic principle and the possibility of there being an ‘ensemble of universes’ is given in my TSA, pp. 106–12. For its use in an ‘argument to design’, see the statistically argued treatment of D.J. Bartholomew in God of Chance (London: SCM Press, 1984), pp. 64–5, and, more recently, his Uncertain Belief: Is it Rational to be a Christian? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), ch. 6 and pp. 255–6.
Philip Hefner expounds persuasively in his The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture and Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) the general theological significance of the epic of evolution for the relation between God and humanity in terms of humanity as ‘created co-creator’, a much discussed and fruitful concept.
The series of research conferences convened since 1987 by the Vatican Observatory with the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley, CA, have resulted in a series of state-of-the art volumes with the general subtitle Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. The individual volumes are: Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and C.J. Isham, 1993); Chaos and Complexity (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy and A.R. Peacocke, 1995); Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (ed. R.J. Russell, W.R. Stoeger and F.J. Ayala, 1998); and Neuroscience and the Person (ed. R.J. Russell, N. Murphy, T.C. Meyering and M.A. Arbib, 1999) – all distributed by the University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN. They are the best source for the detailed cut and thrust of the discussions concerning divine action between leading representatives of various interpretations, including those depending on chaos theory, quantum processes and whole–part (top-down) influences.
For an interesting exposition of a ‘radical naturalist’ viewpoint, see Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) by Willem B. Drees.
Panentheism has been defended by Philip Clayton in his God and Contemporary Science (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), ch. 4; ‘The Case for Christian Panentheism’, Dialog, 37(3), 1998, pp. 201–8; and ‘The Panentheistic Turn in Christian Theology’, Dialog, 38(4), 1999, pp. 289 – 93. I have long argued for the usefulness of the model this term denotes in my Creation and the World of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 141, 207, 238–9, 352; and TSA, pp. 158, and 370–2, where references to other sources are given. For a fuller development of the philosophical and theological implications of this approach, see Christopher Knight’s forthcoming Wrestling with the Divine: Science, Religion and Revelation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).
The concept of Wisdom as a resource for relating the divine activity of creation, human experience and the processes of the natural world is increasingly coming into the spotlight, notably in Celia Deane-Drummond’s Creation through Wisdom: Theology and the New Biology (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000). A valuable discussion of ‘Jesus as the Wisdom of God’ is also to be found in The God of Evolution by Denis Edwards (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), pp. 113–28 – a work very much in tune with the direction of my explorations here.
The ground work for a more global theology is to be found in Christian Systematic Theology in a World Context by N. Smart and S. Konstantine (London: HarperCollins, 1991); The Fifth Dimension: An Exploration of the Spiritual Realm by John Hick (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999); and the distinguished series of volumes by Keith Ward (Oxford: Clarendon Press): Religion and Revelation (1994), Religion and Creation (1996), Religion and Human Nature (1998), Religion and Community (1999).