Mark Vernon, a former Anglican priest and now popular author and scholar of philosophy in Britain reports on a recent conference held at the Physics Department Oxford hard by the storied halls of Keble College. (Keble is still one of main centers of Anglo-catholic learning in the Church of England.) The conference “celebrated and focused” on the work of John Polkinghorne, former Cambridge professor of Physics and now Anglican priest, and his work connecting the thinking of science and the thinking of theology.
From Vernon’s report at Religion Dispatches:
“Perhaps the most arresting paper of the conference was given by the philosopher of science, and non-believer, Nancy Cartwright. She is well known for her idea that science is not as unified a discipline as scientists tend to think it is. By carefully observing how science actually proceeds, she’s concluded that it deploys a diverse range of principles and theories to describe the phenomena it does, and that these cannot be boiled down to a few, simple laws that could be melded into a ‘theory of everything.’
What this might mean for believers, she suggested (tongue half in cheek) is that God is not a law-giver, but an engineer. A deity commensurate with modern science would be one who takes the rough stuff of nature and molds it into this, and then that. A seed would be an example of this divine engineering because, all else being equal, it produces a plant. In general, if the book of science appears to be written in multiple languages, that’s perhaps because the book of nature is too.
To Cartwright’s mind, this would actually make for a more attractive notion of divinity than the traditional one she was raised with, as it’s a God who loves the mess! ‘Glory be to God for dappled things,’ wrote Gerard Manly Hopkins. Quite, she agreed.”
More here.