{"id":25947,"date":"2017-08-16T08:05:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T12:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/?p=25947"},"modified":"2022-08-17T13:56:36","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T17:56:36","slug":"at-oxford-food-for-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cccc.org\/news_blogs\/john\/2017\/08\/16\/at-oxford-food-for-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"At Oxford: Food for Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 4 of 4 in the series Oxford University<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

My second, and last, week at Oxford University consisted of another two courses: Christianity<\/strong> and Modern Thought<\/strong><\/em>, and C.S. Lewis<\/strong> and the Christian Imagination<\/em>. Here are some ideas that might be helpful for the church today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christianity and Modern Thought<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Science, Reason, and Religion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Many people try to pit science<\/strong> against religion<\/strong>, as if only one can be true. This is a false dichotomy. The popular assumption of a conflict would only be true if they both claimed to explain the same thing, and this simply isn’t the case. Albert Einstein aptly summed up the complementarian relationship between science and religion as: Religion without science is blind. Science without religion is empty<\/em>. Another way to phrase it would be that science answers the “What?<\/em>” and religion answers the “Why?<\/em>” Science explains how things work, and religion explains why things are. They are two very different topics that actually work quite well together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same logic can be applied to reason<\/strong> and religion. Most people believe that the Enlightenment was an age of reason that juxtaposed faith and reason, assuming again that only one could be true. However, all the early thinkers of the Enlightenment were sincere Christians who believed that reason was possible only because God exists and is orderly in his ways<\/em>. It is because of God’s orderliness that we can study and increase our knowledge about how God’s world works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some people believe that the more we understand how things work, the less we need God. They see God as a black box to explain what we do not yet understand. But this is not true either. It is still God who sustains<\/em> it all. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton, who originated the idea that there are Laws of Nature, believed that those laws proved God’s existence on the basis that if there is a law, then there must be a Law-Giver.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During much of the Enlightenment, reason and God went together quite well. In fact, John Locke (one of the heroes of the Enlightenment) wrote a book called The Reasonableness of Christianity<\/em> in which he made the case that the Bible, taken literally<\/em>, is entirely reasonable. However, the one downside to the work of the early Christian Enlightenment thinkers was that it had the effect of downgrading revelation as a source of knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What really turned modern thought anti-religious was when the French philosophers got involved. They were the first to pit reason against<\/em> religion. The French philosophers were very anti-Catholic, and by extension, anti-Christian and anti-religion. They did their best to replace God with reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than Reason<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

While many would like to depend upon reason alone as the infallible guide for acquiring knowledge, it turns out that reason alone is not up to the task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n