Book Review

Science and the Christian Faith: A Guide for the Perplexed by Christopher C. Knight, PhD (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021, 232 pages)

The subtitle, “A Guide for the Perplexed,” piqued my interest in the ad one morning a few months ago. The author is an Orthodox priest who started out as an astrophysicist. He is a Senior Research Associate of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England. The book is part of the Foundations Series put out by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

While I don’t see myself as perplexed, I do have a lot of questions in view of the world-wide scientific knowledge concerning creation that exists today. What light, if any, could Christopher C. Knight shine on how to understand our views of God’s immanence in our world today? A large thrust of the book is the attempt to understand some of the controversy over miracles. Do they happen now, and did they ever happen? Would science be able to explain them?

            A good deal of the first half of the book explains both the beliefs and what they were based on in the centuries before and since the time of Christ. Some readers may have trouble sticking to reading the differences between the approach of the “Western” influences and the early “Eastern” church elders and monastics. Plowing through the book, it does help to be able to understand the real meat in the second half of the book. Father Christopher’s description of the current “Western” theological issues seem to be rather accurate, although I know the “Western” mentality is no more “one” than what I experience reading our own “Eastern” Orthodox mentality to be reduced to only “one” view.

            Being able to sense the way God, the Logos, is in the world, helps us understand how to view things we cannot at this time explain scientifically. To quote just a couple of passages as an example of his message:  

“The Orthodox view of the cosmos is, as we have also seen, one that is based on what is sometimes called panentheism: the notion that the world is not separated from God but is, in some sense “in God.” This panentheistic dimension of Orthodox understanding is not of the somewhat vague kind that has recently found a place in Western Christian thinking, but it has roots in important doctrinal understandings. It is perhaps manifested most clearly in the notion of divine energies in the work of St. Gregory Palamas.  …made clearer in the work of St. Maximos the Confessor, who—in a way that reflects the range of meanings of the Greek term logos—speaks, not only about the divine Logos incarnate in Christ (Jn 1.1-14) but also about the logos of each created thing, which he sees as being, in some sense, a manifestation of the divine Logos.” (pages 213-214)

“Miracles, for this understanding, are often at least implicitly seen in the same way as the sacraments explicitly are: not as “supernatural” events in the Western sense of that term, but as a restoration of the world’s “natural” state—i.e., as an anticipation of its eschatological transformation, brought about through the faithful response of creatures to their Creator.” (page 215)

The statement “God is everywhere and nowhere” is not directly mentioned in this book. However, the explanation for the possibility of “miracles” to occur is a way of also understanding how our God is everywhere and nowhere.      

We will no doubt always have our questions, but the ideas expressed in this book could be a real eye-opener for many.   Sister Cecelia