The Oikodome Foundation, the UBC Murrin Fund, Trinity Western University, TWU’s Faith & Science Club, and the CSCA present a lecture by Dr. Tom McLeish (Prof. Physics, Chemistry, Durham University) at Simon Fraser University.
Tom McLeish is a very accomplished prize-winning biophysics professor at Durham University. In 2014, he published a very important book called Faith and Wisdom in Science (OUP). He shows the common sentiment between the search for/love of wisdom about natural things in Job and other wisdom literature of the Bible and the history of scientific investigations. It stretches the mind and offers a new paradigm that avoids some of the traditional conflicts and narrow thinking of this discussion (on both sides). McLeish finds that science can be seen as a deeply religious activity, and the current form of a deep and continuous thread in human culture. He longs to equip churches to work with science as God’s gift, and for secular scientists to see the search for wisdom about the world in science.
Read more at our Tom McLeish Lecture Tour page.
Free Public Lecture: Campus Talk in SFU’s God & Reason Forum, critiquing the myth of conflict between science and faith.
Monday, October 31 @ 3:30 PM | Simon Fraser University
“Science, Religion and the Search for Wisdom”
Location: West Mall Center # 3210
Abstract: Tom McLeish takes a scientist’s reading of a historical series of texts (the oldest is the celebrated nature poem from the ancient Middle-Eastern ‘wisdom’ text – the Book of Job) describing the search for understanding of nature. He makes the case for science as a deeply human, social and ancient activity, embedded in some of the oldest stories told about human desire to understand the natural world. Drawing on stories from the modern science of chaos and uncertainty alongside these medieval, patristic, classical and Biblical sources, this narrative approach challenges much of the current ‘science and religion’ debate as operating with the wrong assumptions and in the wrong space. It also develops a natural critique of the cultural separation of sciences and humanities, suggesting an approach to science, or in its more ancient form natural philosophy – the ‘love of wisdom of natural things’ – that can draw on theological and cultural roots that remain highly relevant today. McLeish suggests that deriving a human narrative for science in this way can transform the way political discussions of ‘troubled technologies’ are framed, the way we approach science in education and the media, and reframe the modes in which faith traditions engage with science.
