26 May 2016, The Tablet

Deep and complex discussions about science are a vital part of excellent RE

by Lauren Nicholson-Ward
 

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.

Get Instant Access

Continue Reading

Register for free to read this article in full

Register

Subscribe for unlimited access

SUBSCRIBE NOW

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)

Comment by: Speighdd
Posted: 04/06/2016 23:09:34
Like anyone else who believes science and theology to be entirely separate, Bernard is at pains to fill the imagined philosophical gap between them with a “scientific theology” or “theological science”, which, in order to be respectable as a philosophy, would have to be at least consistent and precise. To meet this requirement, Bernard would need to clarify how “all”, even inanimate (non-living), material can be animate (living), and how spiritual, and therefore, immaterial (non-material) “substance” can be material “(matter)”, how human beings can resemble God in anything but their non-material souls, how matter, as something indefinitely divisible into parts, and parts of parts, can ever unite anything, let alone humanity, and, still less, ever be spiritual, and how “personal” can be different from “individual bodies”, unless all human beings were the same person. He must also say whether “spiritual substance” is “universal” in the sense of being infinite and eternal, in which case, if it were ever “formless”, nothing would ever exist. In short, a sound philosophy of the difference and connection between material and immaterial reality, would be required, in order to make sense of Bernard’s scientifically theological, and theologically scientific comment.
Comment by: Bernard
Posted: 31/05/2016 10:29:28
All material substance is a living spiritual substance, much less than the spiritual essence of God.
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
Comment by: Speighdd
Posted: 31/05/2016 00:30:28
Lauren Nicholson-Ward’s perplexity over the wide acceptance of irreconcilability of science with religion, is partly answered by the common assumption, shared by Bernard, of separateness of science and theology as academic disciplines. That separation gives rise to the exclusive attribution of reason to science and irrationality to religion. If science and religion are not separate, then, what joins them? If they overlap, what is the name of the overlap? Science and religion are linked by philosophy, and joined by the findings of intuitive common sense. Philosophy is not easily taught, undiluted, to children, but care still needs to be taken, in teaching science and religion, not to mistake philosophy for
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
Comment by: http://ourownidentity.com
Posted: 27/05/2016 17:56:16
Suggestion: Lauren, have a look at Spitzer's Universe. Lots of stuff there!
http://www.ewtn.com/frspitzersuniverse/index.asp
Comment by: Bernard
Posted: 27/05/2016 16:16:52
It seems that there different cultures (approaches) within the separate worlds of science and theology. When scientists propose and publish a new theory, it is open for worldwide discussion by their peers.
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?