Learner:     Brent A. Gray, ID #77812

Convener:   Kevin Sharpe, Ph.D.

Location:    Oxford, England

Learning Objectives

 

 

 

 

                             OXFORD INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE AND SPIRIT

 

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Elliott, Little Gidding

 

I cannot better delineate my Learning Objectives than the above line by T. S. Elliot, and the following statement by Arthur Peacocke in his recent Book, Paths From Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring.  Peacocke states the following:

Any exploration from the world of science into the mystery of God will, if genuine, ipso factor, be consummated in a deeper insight into the same one 'than which nothing greater can be thought', who was only partially and more fallibly discerned at the start of any reflection or the created order illuminated by the sciences.  It will not be God who has changed in our quest, but we in our perception and experience of the divine.  Hence, the forging of a Christian theory in the white heat of the scientific world of the twenty-first century is a task not of iconoclasm, but of the disclosure of profounder and more comprehensive ways of building on the well-winnowed insights of generations of seekers after God.

 

Like Eliot's line, there seems to be an openness and interest in the scientific community to perhaps reacquaint itself with religious and spiritual thought and understanding.  Perhaps turning away from Christian orthodoxy was part of a pendulum swing required by scientist to create space for their voice and discoveries that religious institutions were threatened by.  Now that the world has been opened to such an extent that couples with more recent discoveries and ideas, such as found in quantum physics, there appears to be a desire by many to review and renew their beliefs and passions toward the Creator God.  According to John Barbour in his book, When Science Meets Religion, the number of books published per year under the subject heading, 'Religion and Science', tripled from 71 during the 1950's to 211 in the 1990's.

As a Christian who studies and works in the social sciences (counseling psychology), much of physical science information is new to me.  I have very much enjoyed  the assigned reading while, at the same time, reading and studying similar tensions related to my own fields of the science of psychology, theology and spirituality.

It is thrilling for me as a Christian to learn more through science concerning the intricacies of God's designing and ever-changing and mysterious creations.  What I am most interested in is the science of the soul (psyche) of human kind.  This is the area of my work.

I hope, during the two weeks, we have some learning on God's creation concerning spirit and soul, the conscious and the unconscious, morality, the social self, and neurobiology with insights on the mind/brain processes.

I understand that the C. S. Lewis Institute will be having lecture series during our time together, and would love to participate as a listener.  I have, in preparation, been reading quite a bit of his writings.  I will write my five page pre-seminar paper, with permission, on this new reading that concerns itself with my more particular interests of science and spirit.  This being a review of tensions between psychology and religion.