From Physics to Metaphysics: Imagining the World that Scripture Imagines

In this address, Vanhoozer suggests that pastors engage science not head-on, but indirectly, at the metaphysical level, by using the Bible to help congregations imagine reality in theological rather than secular terms. Appeal to the philosophy of science helps to remind us that scientists depend on the imagination (world-pictures) too, and that physics and the other sciences can’t appeal to scientific evidence to establish a materialist or secular picture. In fact, the attempt to do so is a category mistake.

Biography

Kevin Vanhoozer (PhD, Cambridge University) is the Research Professor of Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Widely published, some of his more prominent books include Is There a Meaning in this Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Zondervan, 1998), The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Westminster John Knox, 2005; Christianity Today Best Theology Book of the Year, 2006), and Biblical Authority after Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity (Brazos Press, 2016).