Science and Religion – More Together Than Not?

John Halford

It's high time I paid tribute to two good friends who are/were trailblazers in the world of bridging the gap between Science and Religion.

One was the well-known GCI speaker and editor John Halford, now deceased, whose name was instantly recognizeable in the church we all fellowshipped in. John was a superb writer and especially title-maker for our publications. Called to interview ex-President Jimmy Carter building houses in the Dakotas, the story became "Little Houses on the Prairie." A German visit became "The View from Hitler's Mountain." As an Engishman, John loved to tinker with science and its religious implications.

Thus in 1993-1994 he was busy writing "Bridging the Gap" of which glossy booklet the sub-head "Groping in the Light" cut to the heart of his presentation. John knew what our theologian of note, Thomas Torrance of Scotland had seen in the work of Einstein, Bohr and Planck – that generation from about 1890-1925 who launched the New Physics. This was a needed updating to the "clockwork theories" of the universe make famous by such great minds as Galileo and Newton among others.

John McKenna

The New Physics and its espousal of a radically new world below the mechanistic concepts of the 1600s and 1700s made new ventures into reality possible. Those ideas were traced out in our fellowship by another brilliant thinker, Dr. John McKenna, a favorite pupil of John Wheeler, describer of Black Holes and other cosmological upgrades that have left both scientists and religious thinkers aghast at the marvelous complexity of the cosmos that is only now reaching the mass audiences.

Messrs Halford and McKenna were all over this important cosmological shift in our time that, as Torrance explained, created a universe where new things continue to happen (such as discovering quarks and neutrinos and God particles) and thus opned the door to the possibility of resurrections and God among us in the person of Jesus once knowledge was added from another subject.

This web site explores these ideas in as much depth as the editor's limited scienctific background allows. But Halford and McKenna set the bearings for new chapters in the Science/Religion discussion. You can read about some of this from the gci.org website. Grace Communion International (GCI) President Joseph Tkach has also been a promoter of these intriguing subjects and GCI's online seminary offers a class titled "The Scientific Theology of Thomas Torrance" taught by Dr. John McKenna.

Check this out of you'd like to stretch your intellectual muscles.