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   Sean Cleary on October 12, 2018 at 10:19 pm

   Well done for bringing this area of perceived conflict to the fore. Sadly, too many Christian students cannot engage in serious intellectual discussions around the deep questions of human origins, biblical validities and the ethical implications and conflicts within our implicit cultural models. Their churches, for the most part, feed them simplistic thinking about the nature of Biblical inerrancy and the book of Genesis, to name but two ‘battle grounds’. As a consequence, they arrive in the academic arena ill-equipped to see the vastness of the Christian faith’s relevance and intellectual integrity for engagement with their peers and professors. Christian students need to know that thinking about the nature of God, as shown to us in Jesus Christ, revealed through the Spirit in light of the insights of modern science and research will open up not confusion but a deeper, more profound and satisfying reality than ever they imagined. Perhaps a small word of personally testimony is relevant here. Despite studying Physics and a little philosophy at university, it has, sadly, taken me more than 35 years to ‘come out’ of the intellectual closet on this one. My time in TSCF in the late 70s to mid 80s enriched my faith in part, but did not equip me to engage with the pseudo war between faith and science. It has taken the last 15 years of reading and seeking to be able to rest more comfortably in a Christian belief holding to the ancient creeds, relationally anchored in Jesus Christ, and what he accomplished through the cross, yet also integrating the findings of our scientific milieu. I still have questions and doubts, and suspect I always will, but I am a little more relaxed about God’s ability to cope with the scientific challenges. With the psalmist I see the scientific endeavour as only further emphasising “the heavens declare the glory of the Lord…” (Ps. 19:1)

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