Dr. John C. Polkinghorne examines whether a personal, interacting God
is a credible concept in today's scientific age. Encouraging the belief
that there is a compatibility between the insights of science and the
insights of religion, this book focuses on the viewpoint that the world is one in which both
human beings and God have the freedom to act.
A modern
understanding of the physical world is applied to questions of prayer
and providence, such as: Do miracles happen? Can prayer change anything?
Why does evil exist? Why does God allow suffering? Why does God need us
to ask him?
God's involvement in time is considered, from both a
temporal and an eternal perspective. The roles of incarnation and
sacrament are discussed in terms of whether or not they have a credible
place in today's worldview. And the Final Anthropic Principle (FAP) is
presented, with its attempt at a physical eschatology, showing it to be
an inadequate basis for hope. Real hope can reside only with God,
Polkinghorne concludes.
Is there any connection between the vastness of the universes of stars and galaxies and the existence of life on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way? This book shows that there is. In their classic work, John Barrow and Frank Tipler examine the question of Mankind's place in the Universe, taking the reader on a tour of many scientific disciplines and offering fascinating insights into issues such as the nature of life, the serach for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the past history and fate of our universe.
John D. Barrow, Professor of Astronomy, University of Sussex, and Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University, New Orleans
