Bit late getting back to the desk. Lovely weather in Ottawa and won’t last. Meanwhile, on the Sunday religion news beat relevant to our usual interests, here’s English prof Terry Scambray at American Thinker on “The truth about science and religion”:
In 1925 the renowned philosopher and mathematician, Alfred North Whitehead speaking to scholars at Harvard said that science originated in Christian Europe in the 13th century. Whitehead pointed out that science arose from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher”, from which it follows that human minds created in that image are capable of understanding nature.
The audience, assuming that science and Christianity are enemies, was astonished.
Equally astonished are scientists writing in the March 12 edition of Nature, the respected science journal. These scientists are studying a treatise written in 1225 by Robert Grosseteste, a bishop and theologian, which is “dense with mathematical thinking” as it describes the birth of the universe “four centuries before Newton proposed gravity and seven centuries before the Big Bang theory.” More.
Breaking: Rationality is underused, not overrated.
See also: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology) for today’s trend to crackpot cosmology.