Unity of knowledge is key to understanding

ANSLEM’S dictum, fides quarens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), is as relevant today as ever. We live in a postCopernican, post-Newtonian, postDarwinian, post-Einsteinian world, and faith cannot turn a blind eye to what science has revealed about God’s creation.

The instruction that we should love God not only with our heart and soul but also with our mind means that critical thinking and intellectual integrity are an integral part of faith. I will refrain from commenting upon the credibility or otherwise of the two young-Earth, Creationist organisations which Mr Ashton admits to having had a profound influence on his thinking (WM letters, August 11). Rather I would suggest, respectfully, that reading the works of theologians who are also eminently qualified scientists, authors such as Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne and Alister McGrath, would be far more beneficial.

Polkinghorne concludes: “Science and theology have a fraternal relationship and they are complementary, rather than antithetic, disciplines.” Professor Keith Ward – another who has made a significant and enlightened contribution to this debate – writes: “... a theistic interpretation of evolution and of the findings of the natural sciences is by far the most reasonable.”

Even the much-maligned Charles Darwin wrote in a letter of 1879: “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent theist and an evolutionist.”

One major criticism of biblical literalism is that it does a grave injustice to the Bible itself, as it fails to acknowledge that much of biblical language is manifestly metaphorical. Indeed, biblical literalism often distorts the Bible’s meaning. Those who wrote the opening chapters of Genesis did not think empirically, but rather symbolically and metaphorically, and it is by means of symbolism that they have conveyed to us fundamental truths about God’s world and humanity’s place within it. Marcus J Borg reminds us that “taking the Bible literally is not the same as taking it seriously”.

Polkinghorne argues that we are confronted today with a vociferous fundamentalism which manifests itself in either a totally omnicompetent science or an infallibly omniscient religion. What is needed is unity of knowledge which would give us “an integrated account of the whole of reality”. How true. Reverend Desmond Davies Carmarthen