I think it's very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
From John Polkinghorne
I'm a very passionate believer in the unity of knowledge. There is one world of reality - one world of our experience that we're seeking to describe.
People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.
Quantum theory also tells us that the world is not simply objective; somehow it's something more subtle than that. In some sense it is veiled from us, but it has a structure that we can understand.
Whitehead reacted strongly against the idea of God as a cosmic tyrant, one who brings about everything.
However, as the Eastern churches have always maintained, through Christ creation is intended eventually to share in the life of God, the life of divine nature.
Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like.
Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.
The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.
Evolution, of course, is not something that simply applies to life here on earth; it applies to the whole universe.
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