Monday, December 05, 2011

E. L. Mascall on Science and Unbelief

Somewhere along my intellectual journey I came across the name of E. L. Mascall. Last year I read his Boyle Lectures from 1965 entitled The Christian Universe. It's a great book, and because I enjoyed it so much I started looking online for cheap copies of some of his other works. 

A couple of nights ago I started reading Christian Theology and Natural Science which is based on his 1956 Bampton Lectures. I'm still working my way through the first chapter, but it has been a great read thus far. Here's a quote that I particularly enjoyed:

On three different questions, then, the nature of matter, the nature of space, and the nature of time, we have seen science quite recently abandoning the views which had prevailed for more than three hundred years and adopting a standpoint more congenial to the outlook of Christian theology. The significance of this fact ought not to be exaggerated, but it is perhaps of interest, and not least for the reason that, when people declare themselves unable to accept the Christian religion because of the outlook of science, the science involved very frequently turns out to be the now largely abandoned science of the nineteenth century. [p. 32]


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