In the world of education, ideas marketed as innovations are often old hat. When “cross-curricular” became the latest in a series of evermore cringe-inducing buzzwords, many teachers shook their heads and rolled their eyes, reminding each other that collaborative links between subjects had always existed.
In my subject, Religious Education, educators have, for a long time, emphasised the importance and benefit of working with other disciplines. Music, art, history, geography – even mathematics – have played a vital part in my teaching of RE this year. One thing that seems sorely missing though, from too many RE classrooms, is science.
I don’t just mean a brief mention when teaching topics such as “the difference between beliefs and facts” (something that is an altogether different pet hate of mine, what with the inference that beliefs are somehow, by definition, based on falsehoods rather than facts). I mean that deep and complex discussions about science are a vital part of excellent RE.
It is the single biggest hurdle with which many RE teachers find themselves challenged on a daily basis. For those of us in faith schools, it is even more of a concern since our role is both academic and evangelical.
I hear stories about Year 5 pupils, who are nine and 10 years old, routinely writing that they “don’t believe in God because I believe in science”. This assertion remains for many to the end of their schooling, when a good proportion leave as firm atheists, separated from a once-blossoming faith that evaporated at around the time that they learned about evolution and the Big Bang.
26 May 2016, The Tablet
Deep and complex discussions about science are a vital part of excellent RE
Get Instant Access
Continue Reading
Register for free to read this article in full
Subscribe for unlimited access
From just £30 quarterly
Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
The full weekly edition in print and digital including our 179 years archive.
PDF version to view on iPad, iPhone or computer.
Already a subscriber? Login
User Comments (5)
Spiritual substance (matter) is in the image of the spiritual essence of God. Matter is also the fallen spiritual substance common to all humanity – making humanity one. Jesus is head and source of this one body, as his mystical body, the perfect union of personal and individual bodies.
Universal spiritual substance is first formless, but in hierarchical order, the universal body and world-soul produces individual bodies and personal souls. So humanity emerges via evolution, with personal bodies and souls, but the universal is always present. The Three-in-One of the Trinity is then imaged in the two-in-one in love, man and woman in marriage. Procreation in marriage is in the image of the Trinity. The Father, generating the Son, is also imaged, by the male Adam generating Eve (female) in humanity – and by their union in flesh being procreative.
Thus creation, angels and humanity is eternally expressed in the divinity by a myriad of images of God’s attributes. Each image is a knowing, in God, which at transcendental level has a free choice, in perfect knowledge, to accept or reject God’s will.
Material substance is then a universal world-soul and world-body. This universal generates personal bodies and souls in humanity. Each person is then a concrete universal, as Jesus is, in his humanity and in his Divinity. This is the oneness Jesus prayed for at the Last Supper
either of them. When teaching evolution, for example, children must sooner or later be made aware that, scientifically, natural selection is indistinguishable from random selection, and theologically, natural selection is indistinguishable from supernatural intervention: only in philosophy is natural selection identifiable as participation of all things, intentionally rather than aimlessly, in the deliberate creativity of Nature, Cosmic Mind, or God
http://www.ewtn.com/frspitzersuniverse/index.asp
If a scientist (or theologian) publishes a theory that seems to go against accepted theological thinking he/she is simply reminded of the teaching of Augustine, or Aquinas with little or no debate e.g., the Church teaches that Original Sin was an historical event on planet Earth. In the light of the proven theory of Evolution some scientists, who are also Christians, cannot reconcile the truth of evolution with this particular Church teaching.
Is it not true that Genesis uses figurative language? Therefore, while this book, like the whole of scripture, is unchanging, is it not open to interpretation/reinterpretation. Might not Original Sin have been a transcendental catastrophe in the transcendental realm of Eden? Humanities’ abuse of freewill, with its freewill choice to know both good and evil? Result the Big Bang, the beginning of the evolutionary process, some 14 billion years ago, with the laws of good and evil written into every molecule. Pain and death in all animate matter, with decay in all inanimate matter.
The Book of Revelations gives us a good inkling of how it will all end. The universe/cosmos will stop expanding at near the speed of light, and begin imploding. A reversal of the Big Bang? Evolution, not annihilation, was God's mitigated punishment?