This volume is an exceptionally valuable contribution to the debate on the relation between theology and science. In what follows I want to take up three major issues that deserve further attention. First, whether her arguments about the success of science are sufficient to trump intuitions driven by such phenomena as consciousness are successful. Second,…

I am grateful to all the participants for their thoughtful comments on my book and to Hans Madueme for inviting me to participate in this symposium. Response to Jennifer Frey I appreciate Jennifer Frey’s careful summary of the main themes of the book, especially her emphasis on the distinction between univocal and analogical causality. Her…

Michael Dodds’s Unlocking Divine Action is an impressive and deeply learned attempt to deepen conversation about the relationship between divine action and scientific understanding of the natural world. Dodds claims, quite reasonably, (1) that important ways of understanding action and causation were lost in the transition from Aristotelian/Thomistic thought to what he calls “Newtonian science,”…

Michael Dodds’s proposal for understanding divine action is fundamentally analogical. It is based on an understanding of ex nihilo creation that also can only be expressed analogically. Because there are different orders or levels of reality, our language of creation in general and causation in particular must be able to stretch across such levels. Whether…

I am grateful for the opportunity to read and comment on Fr. Michael J. Dodds’s excellent work, Unlocking Divine Action. In the interest of space, I have been asked to confine my remarks to one or two areas of divine action discussed by Fr. Dodds. I have chosen, therefore, to focus on his use of…

While the stated topic of the book is divine action, the subtitle does a lot of work: Contemporary Science & Thomas Aquinas. Dodds believes that modern views of causality are impoverished, and that Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics provides the remedy. While this is doubtful in my opinion, the mapping of medieval concepts to contemporary science should be…

At any given time of year, it’s not difficult to find two or three used pianos listed for free in local online marketplaces. The catch, of course, is that you have to go and pick up the piano yourself. As an amateur furniture restoration enthusiast, this stuck me as an opportunity too good to pass…

A Review of Gerard M. Verschuuren, Aquinas and Modern Science: A New Synthesis of Faith & Reason The goal of this ambitious book is twofold: first, to introduce Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy; second, to interpret the modern sciences in light of that philosophy. The intended audience is primarily scientists who are philosophical greenhorns and students. Despite the…

A Review of Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator In many ways, the doctrine of creation in modern theology has been a doctrine in flux. Since the late eighteenth century, it has commonly been presupposed that legitimate theological knowledge extends only so far as empirical experience can…

In a well-known passage from his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas makes a distinction between two different kinds of doctrine, each of which “pertain to the faith” in different ways. First, there are doctrines that constitute “the substance of the faith in itself” (per se substantia fidei); second, there are doctrines…

In Adam’s fall we sinned all. In spite of what this well-known pithy summary of the Christian doctrine of original sin might suggest, things are a bit more complicated. Daniel Houck will be joining the Creation Project in the second year as a research fellow to explore how the thought of Thomas Aquinas provides helpful…