© 1996 Meredith Sprunger
© 1996 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
| Significant Books: Science, Anthropology, and Archaeology in The Urantia Book by Ken. T. Glasziou | Fall 1996 — Index | More Psalms Today: The Universal Father |
Dorset Press, 1991, 179 pp.
This perceptive book succinctly traces the relationship of science and religion in Western Civilization. Starting with the natural theology inherent in medicine, Foster observes the progressive decline of religion in our culture effected by Darwin’s theory of evolution, the dominant influence of the second law of thermodynamics, and the pervasive belief in the mechanical models of scientism. He then points to new discoveries in physics and molecular biology which portend a new era of science that he calls “supernatural science.”
Foster spent thirty-two years in the process of writing the book. “I started this book with the realization that the developments in modern physics had opened new doors to philosophical thought. The centre for such ideas was Cambridge University and the ideas being put forward by Eddington, James, and Whitehead in the 1930’s, whose main tenet was ‘The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”’ (p. vii)
After surveying the contemporary findings of science that do not fit into the old concepts of chance and determinism, David Foster makes some interesting observations:
“Darwinism was wrong…The significance of Darwin being wrong is immense, for it implies the admission of the supernatural into science. There is no known procedure whereby specificities such as the 10650 of hemoglobin (the probability that this basic protein could have evolved by chance-p. 78-84) can be explained without introducing a supernatural intelligence into science, an intelligence which can ignore statistics and create unique purpose. Furthermore, this same situation dethrones the Second Law of Thermodynamics from its preeminent position in physics, and permits the credibility that this Law can be reversed by the quiet voice of Clerk Maxwell and his ‘conscious sorting demons.’ Put simply, GOD EXISTS.” (p. 170-1)
The book ends by asking the question, “Can science now agree with religion?” And Foster’s answer is: “We have seen that up until 1900 science dealt heavy blows to religion based on ‘proofs’ related to chance and necessity and attributable to Darwinism, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and single-level mechanical models of reality. All these three ideologies have been progressively demolished from 1900 onwards, particularly by Planck, Einstein, and Heisenberg, and latterly by molecular biology. They are replaced by a new idea of the importance and dominance of specificity in the universe, with the inevitable implication that God exists. What implications this may hold for humanity is outside the range of our present discussion.” (p. 179) If you are interested in a brief review of the philosophical-religious implications of some of the basic positions of contemporary science, The Philosophical Scientists is a stimulating book to read.
| Significant Books: Science, Anthropology, and Archaeology in The Urantia Book by Ken. T. Glasziou | Fall 1996 — Index | More Psalms Today: The Universal Father |