DOES SCIENCE CLARIFY GOD'S RELATION TO THE WORLD?

Abstract. Central to the work of Arthur Peacocke on science and religion is the intention to develop a reasonable faith within an intelligible framework of meaning. Showing the inadequacy of reductionism is necessary for this purpose. Knowledge of God is related to what science can tell us about creation. From an evolutionary framework, characterized as a delicate balance that issued in humans, and manifested through contingency and chance, God's actions are expressed as exploring the potentialities of creation. The creation is understood to be in God, but God is more than the world, as in panentheism. God suffers with the creation in love, and the focus of human meaning is expressed in Jesus Christ, the Incarnation, the sacrament of God.     

Patterns of maternal responding in postpartum mothers with schizophrenia

Little is known about how schizophrenia might affect how a mother responds to her infant, such as whether responding is reduced or impaired. The aim was to identify, from brief videotaped interactions, whether the responses of mothers with schizophrenia were fewer, less positive, more negative, and more ‘abnormal’ than mothers with affective disorder, and whether their infants (mean age: 15 weeks) lacked activity or initiation to which mothers could respond. Mothers with schizophrenia (N = 14) were as responsive as mothers with affective disorder (N = 31), but they showed markedly low positive responsiveness. Only the schizophrenia group exhibited non-responses as a result of being psychologically withdrawn from the interaction, and abnormal behaviors. Inconsistent to our hypothesis, infants in both groups showed similar levels of activity, initiative and negativity. The findings highlight the need for further research to examine the contribution of maternal response impairments to the developmental vulnerability of this genetically high-risk group.     

Exploratory analysis of contingency tables by loglinear formulation and generalizations of correspondence analysis

Goodman's (1979, 1981, 1985) loglinear formulation for bi-way contingency tables is extended to tables with or without missing cells and is used for exploratory purposes. A similar formulation is done for three-way tables and generalizations of correspondence analysis are deduced. A generalized version of Goodman's algorithm, based on Newton's elementary unidimensional method is used to estimate the scores in all cases.This research was partially supported by National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Grant No. A8724. The author is grateful to the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments.     

PROBLEMS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY IN THE COURSE OF THEIR MODERN HISTORY

Abstract. It is misleading to speak of warfare between science and Christian theology, as Andrew White did in 1896. White also was mistaken in exaggerating the conflict between the church and Galileo and Copernicus. The more important issue between science and theology has to do with the mechanistic interpretation of nature. When he introduced the principle of inertia in his natural philosophy, René Descartes insisted that God's immutability renders it impossible for God to intervene in the creation. He reduced the idea of God to a deistic notion by speaking of motion exclusively as a property of bodies. Even though Isaac Newton offered a different view, the Cartesian view dominated subsequent thinking. This made dialogue with theology difficult. Michael Faraday, followed by Albert Einstein, introduced the idea of field; bodily phenomena were subordinated as manifestations of fields. The precursor of the idea of field is the Stoic idea of spirit, which is close to the biblical concept of spirit. Thomas Torrance and I have taken this concept of field as an occasion to reopen dialogue. Mechanistic thinking accounts for the tension between Darwinian thought and theology. In principle the tension can be resolved, because the Bible itself asserts that all living things were brought from the earth—that is, organic life emerged from inorganic matter. Thus, emergence, contingency, and novelty are consistent with Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Contingency can be related conceptually to the activity of God in creation.