Review of The Science of God, the Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom, by Gerald Schroeder
Gerald Schroeder was a physicist who studied the God of the Bible and science side-by-side, to try to make sense of the whole of reality. I appreciate that he doesn’t try to ignore physical evidence that science provides, about origins and about how the cosmos works. At the same time, he doesn’t write off religious revelation, like so many empiricists do.
After reading The Science of God, I came away understanding Schroeder as arguing a teleological approach to evolution, but then I found myself wanting specifics – like exactly where does God take His hand off the wheel, so to speak, and let natural mechanisms take over. But after finishing the book and pondering the question, I decided it was unfair, really. How would Schroeder or anyone know? God intervened in space-time in ways that contravene natural processes often in history, and often did so in ways that were not obvious to all the witnesses to it, as with, in Schroeder’s example, the Egyptians not correctly reading events as being directed by God’s hands until it was too late and they were swallowed up by the sea during the Exodus. In this paradigm, it would be impossible to say when natural processes are exclusively at work, and when God intervenes. This makes sense with a broadened way of understanding the nature of God and also the nature of human consciousness inside a consciousness of God.
I’m going to read more of Schroeder’s work. He gets it that we can’t ignore physical evidence, in understanding God, and neither can we constrain our thinking about the ineffable, as by seeing everything through an empiricist lens and by assuming we have the capacity to fully understand Him.