God and the order of nature: unity and plurality

Tue 3 May 2016

St Edmund's College

The idea of a single omnipotent Creator has often functioned in the history of science to ratify the notion of a ‘unified nature’, and vice versa. Concepts of God, usually Christian, have for centuries found alliance with scientific evidences for a natural order tidied by an apparent unity of physical laws. At times theological views seem to have driven unifying scientific projects, in natural philosophy and then physics. Recent philosophers of science, however, have challenged a belief that nature may be reduced to a grand mathematical formula like a so-called theory of everything. An interesting problem and opportunity arises for Christian thought if entering into this conversation, which is that some among the ‘metaphysical pluralist’ philosophers consider the same God not a ‘Unifier’ of nature, but a divine guarantor of the diversity they proclaim. God by their reckoning may be a lover of plurality, or a kind of divine metaphysical ‘Pluralist’. Which is the Christian God, then—Unifier or Pluralist? In this seminar we shall look at several underlying metaphysical elements in this dialogue between physics, philosophy, and theology. In particular one can ask whether a full Christian Trinitarian theology of God, making explicit some of the concepts implicit in the debate, might hypothetically alter the conversation

Cost: Free