Wednesday, January 25, 2006
'Science' and Revelation
Marco Gonzalez, writing at Reformation Theology had a fascinating post yesterday. He is looking at the relationship between psychology and theology. This topic fascinates me as the two have become far too deeply intwined in my opinion.
When I read the piece I must confess to being stunned. Here's why:
The roots of science do lie in exploring God by exploring His creation, and it is in fact a crying shame that such a view of science has largely been rejected by the scientific community. But even those origins do not rise to the level of a claim to revelation. If such were the case then all explorations into the character of God's creation must be categorized as revelation, from the writings of CS Lewis to Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe."
This is incidious in ways that I can just barely get my head around. Revelation proceeds from God. Science is our efforts and as such will always be somehow imperfect and flawed. To make this claim is to simply flip reality upside down, it makes God our conception, our creation.
I need to look into this more.
Related Tags: theology, psychology, science, revelation, Christianity, faith
When I read the piece I must confess to being stunned. Here's why:
All of us, at one time or another, have heard the expression, "All Truth is God's Truth." We need to understand that this assertion is the starting point for the integrationist's model without which their theological definitions could not stand. Theologically, it follows, that God makes known his truth through two sources: General and Special Revelation. Integrationists define special revelation as a proposition truth in scripture and general as a non-propositional truth given by God, which, must be discovered by man. James D. Guy, in the Journal of Theology and Psychology, contributed his article named "The Search for Truth in the Task of Integration." He stated the following:Let me rephrase what Guy is saying here. He is, if I read this correctly, saying that the study of God's creation, that is to say science, is revelation! I am truly stunned.If integration is conceptualized as the search for truth concerning human nature, and God is identified as the source of this truth, the next logical issue involved the revelation of this truth. It has traditionally been held that God reveals this truth to us through both general and special revelation, with both nature and the Bible serving as expressions or representations of this truth. The disciplines of psychology and theology are attempts to discover and systematize truth by means of the study of the natural sciences and biblical revelation.
The roots of science do lie in exploring God by exploring His creation, and it is in fact a crying shame that such a view of science has largely been rejected by the scientific community. But even those origins do not rise to the level of a claim to revelation. If such were the case then all explorations into the character of God's creation must be categorized as revelation, from the writings of CS Lewis to Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe."
This is incidious in ways that I can just barely get my head around. Revelation proceeds from God. Science is our efforts and as such will always be somehow imperfect and flawed. To make this claim is to simply flip reality upside down, it makes God our conception, our creation.
I need to look into this more.
Related Tags: theology, psychology, science, revelation, Christianity, faith
