God and Nature Winter 2023
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By Chris Barrigar
The Bible tells a remarkable story from beginning to end, a “grand narrative” of God’s creation from its origins in Genesis to new creation in Revelation. Many of us today puzzle about how science, the defining knowledge of our age, fits with this story of God’s creation, and our Christian understanding of humanity, the people of God, God with us in Jesus, and the eschaton. Addressing these issues has been the object of my work, and I have developed a proposal by which the mainstream findings of modern science (ranging from quantum physics to stochastic processes to evolution) can be understood to fit with God’s character, God’s purpose for creation, and God’s method of creation.
I call my proposal the “Agape/Many-Routes” account. “Agape” is the Greek New Testament word for “self-giving love,” and I propose that God’s intention in creation was to bring about the existence of “agape-capable beings.” The “many routes” part is about God’s strategy for designing a creation that would produce such agape-capable beings—namely, through the emergence of evolutionary processes that would converge on agape-capable beings through many possible evolutionary routes, potentially across the universe. I have previously described the science behind this proposal (PSCF, Sept. 2018), and I have presented these ideas to a number of ASA and CSCA chapters, and elsewhere as well (most recently at the Faraday Institute in Cambridge, UK). The science, statistics, and theology behind the proposal cover a wide range of disciplines, so I have often been asked for a simplified or popularized version—which I have produced and is now available as a 20-minute video. I invite you to watch it here, or on YouTube. If you find it helpful, feel free to share it on your social media channels!
The Bible tells a remarkable story from beginning to end, a “grand narrative” of God’s creation from its origins in Genesis to new creation in Revelation. Many of us today puzzle about how science, the defining knowledge of our age, fits with this story of God’s creation, and our Christian understanding of humanity, the people of God, God with us in Jesus, and the eschaton. Addressing these issues has been the object of my work, and I have developed a proposal by which the mainstream findings of modern science (ranging from quantum physics to stochastic processes to evolution) can be understood to fit with God’s character, God’s purpose for creation, and God’s method of creation.
I call my proposal the “Agape/Many-Routes” account. “Agape” is the Greek New Testament word for “self-giving love,” and I propose that God’s intention in creation was to bring about the existence of “agape-capable beings.” The “many routes” part is about God’s strategy for designing a creation that would produce such agape-capable beings—namely, through the emergence of evolutionary processes that would converge on agape-capable beings through many possible evolutionary routes, potentially across the universe. I have previously described the science behind this proposal (PSCF, Sept. 2018), and I have presented these ideas to a number of ASA and CSCA chapters, and elsewhere as well (most recently at the Faraday Institute in Cambridge, UK). The science, statistics, and theology behind the proposal cover a wide range of disciplines, so I have often been asked for a simplified or popularized version—which I have produced and is now available as a 20-minute video. I invite you to watch it here, or on YouTube. If you find it helpful, feel free to share it on your social media channels!
Chris Barrigar (PhD in Philosophy, McGill) is Pastor of the Church of St Mark & St Peter, Montreal, QC. He is author of Freedom All the Way Up: God and the Meaning of Life in a Scientific Age (Friesen, 2017), a member of the Montreal chapter of the CSCA, and a Fellow of the ASA.