The Palace of Glory: God's World and Science

Arthur Peacocke is a physical biochemist and an Anglican priest who for 25 years taught and did research on DNA and other biological macromolecules. Since then he has worked on the relation of theology and science as Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, and then as Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre, Theology Faculty, University of Oxford. In 2001 he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. This volume is a representative cross-section of the recent thinking of Arthur Peacocke on how to conceive of divine and human relations - broadly, of God as the world's creator and the world itself created by God. Such an enterprise has many variegated facets and the various chapters of the book reflect this diversity; the possibility, especially in a sceptical culture, of finding paths from the scientific understanding of the world that can lead and point to God; the need for wisdom in the interpretation of the map of scientific knowledge in relation to its applications; the challenge of culture impressed by the success and standards of the sciences to critical religious thinking; the immense change in the perspective of humanity wrought by Darwin's introduction of evolutionary principles; the way in which the traditional dichotomy of 'matter' and 'spirit' can be transcended by combining and understanding of the sacramental in the Christian tradition with an evolutionary perspective; and how the re-emergence of emergence as an interpretation of the hierarchy of complexity of the world provides a new resource for understanding in the nature of humanity as thinking persons and of divine action in the world