Buckden was the picturesque setting earlier this week for an inter-church Lent lunch group studying The Mystery of Everything. They kindly invited me over to speak on how faith and science are friends not foes, and we had great fun putting the record straight - with quite a bit of head-scratching too of course. Thankyou! I'm adding my notes below:

A bit of history

• Augustine rules OK: how science and scripture together

• Bishop and Big Head: how Grossteste did great science as a bishop, had theory of the Big Bang, and beat LIGO to the draw

• Why Galileo and Copernicus really came a cropper

• The invention of the Scientist

• What really happened at the “Monkey” debate

• The fundamentalist wars

• A peculiarly shared problem of public engagement

For discussion 

4. Where do we come from? Genesis 1

God and the Big Bang – cosmological theories and creation stories

i. What do the scriptures really say?

ii. What do “creationists” actually believe?

iii. Big Bang, Steady-state, Big Bounce, Big Crunch, Multiverse …?

5. What are we? Genesis 2 - 3

Evolution and the Garden of Eden

i. Minding the Gap: how can things be so good but go so wrong?

ii. Adding in evolution: is it a problem?

iii. Is anyone at home? Is there really a “me” and do I really choose? Can current thinking about complexity and emergence help?

6. Where are we going? Revelation 21 – 22

What’s the Plan? Or are we just all Doomed?

i. Ticket to ride: are we just living out a pre-set plan? 

ii. Old ideas and new information: patterns in the numbers

iii. The power of attraction: convergence in evolution and morality