Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harry Lee Poe is a Charles Colson Professor of Faith and Culture at Union University.

J. Stanley Mattson is the President of the C. S. Lewis Foundation, Managing Director of the C. S. Lewis Foundation (UK), and Director of the C. S. Lewis Summer Institute at Oxford and Cambridge.

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WHAT GOD KNOWS

Baylor University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments...............................................................................................ixPreface J. Stanley Mattson...................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..................................................................................................11 The Problem of Time Harry Lee Poe..........................................................................52 St. Augustine and the Mystery of Time Timothy George.......................................................273 On the Developing Scientific Understanding of Time Russell Stannard........................................474 Time in Physics and Theology John Polkinghorne.............................................................615 God, Time, and Eternity William Lane Craig.................................................................756 Eschatology and Scientific Cosmology: From Conflict to Interaction Robert John Russell.....................957 Time and the Physics of Sin Hugh Ross......................................................................1218 Meeting the Cosmic God in the Existential Now Tony Campolo.................................................137Conclusion Harry Lee Poe.....................................................................................161Notes.........................................................................................................177List of Contributors..........................................................................................193Index.........................................................................................................197

Chapter One

Harry Lee Poe

The Bible forms the background for any discussion of science and religion in the West. Whether one accepts its authority as revelation by God or regards it as a collection of culturally framed, disconnected beliefs collected over a period of centuries, the Bible forms the context for faith or skepticism. The dominant religious view in the West for the last fifteen hundred years has been Christianity. In this context, modern science as it is practiced all over the world developed. Each religious tradition that engages modern science has its own points of conflict with science that arise from each religion's understanding of the world as people experience it. Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, to name a few, have their own issues with science, and science likewise has issues of difference with each religion. In the West, however, one of the greatest areas of misunderstanding, but also of fruitful discussion, concerns time.

For centuries, the Bible served as the foundational source for the Western understanding of reality. People of learning saw no conflict between what the Bible could teach us as the revealed word of God and what the physical world could teach us as the handiwork of God. It seemed reasonable to suppose that God would be consistent in what he said and did. This situation continued for several centuries after the emergence of modern science from Copernicus onward. In conceiving the scientific method, Francis Bacon (d. 1625) observed that the obstacle to the discovery of new knowledge lay in the philosophical prejudices and presuppositions about the nature of reality through which people of learning viewed their data. Though Aristotle's philosophy had sparked an interest in the examination of the physical world during the high Middle Ages, it also provided a doctrinaire explanation for what one found in the physical world. Bacon developed the scientific method precisely to liberate the study of the physical world from tradition and the speculative metaphysics of philosophical systems, and of Aristotle's system in particular. The arrest of Galileo (d. 1642) illustrates Bacon's concern. The academic community could not tolerate his rejection of Aristotle's cosmology. The fact that his experimentation, by means of the telescope he had invented, demonstrated that the moon is not the perfect sphere Aristotle's philosophy had demanded held little weight against the ingrained philosophical view of the academy.

While the revolution in knowledge of the physical world received a great push by Bacon and Galileo, another of their contemporary scholars contributed to the revolution in biblical studies. James Ussher (d. 1656) made great strides in the critical study of the Hebrew texts of the Bible, as well as in the study of documents of the Patristic period in the early church. His study proceeded without reliance on tradition, but depended upon examination of the texts themselves. Most people know Ussher today, however, as the man who calculated the creation of the world at 4004 B.C. based on his study of the Hebrew texts. For 150 years, no one had any reason to question the calculations of such an eminent and "scientific" scholar, for Ussher embodied Bacon's scientific method. As the Protestant Archbishop of Armagh in the predominantly Catholic country of Ireland, Ussher had no difficulty dispensing with Rome's traditional understandings of patristic texts. The author of particularly pointed assaults on the Church of Rome and a well-known sympathizer with the Puritans, Ussher maintained an objective view when distinguishing genuine from spurious epistles by St. Ignatius of Antioch.

In the early nineteenth century, geologists and paleontologists made discoveries that challenged the long-established dating of the age of the world. Rather than a six thousand year old planet, the new sciences proposed that the earth must be millions of years old. Not only did the earth appear to be older than Ussher had said, but the forms of life preserved in the fossil record suggested that the creation itself had taken more than six days. Men of science rose to the occasion. In 1813 Robert Jameson, a Scottish geologist, proposed the "Age-Day Theory" of creation whereby the days of Genesis 1 should be understood as extended periods of time or ages. In 1823 William Buckland, the great Oxford geologist, proposed his famous "Gap Theory" to explain the discrepancy between the most recent discoveries of science and Ussher dating. The Gap Theory proposed a gap of extended time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 to account for the missing ages. Buckland argued that the geological catastrophes occurred during this gap. Though Jameson and Buckland believed that some interpretations of the Bible conflicted with the science of the day, they did not repudiate the Bible. The popular imagination, however, is not so subtle.

Once the popular imagination conceived of a discrepancy between the Bible and the new knowledge obtained through scientific investigation, Darwin's concept of natural selection as an explanation for the variety of life forms found fertile ground to grow. In the face of the nineteenth-century understanding of the certainty of scientific knowledge, the Bible began to be seen in some quarters as unreliable. In the eighteenth century, the intellectual conversation between science and religion had largely focused on making a case for the validity of general revelation (nature) in comparison with the certainty of specific revelation (the Bible). By the end of the nineteenth century the very notion of revelation from God was under serious attack.

Conflicting notions of the meaning of time played a major role in the fracture between...