The Rev. Dr Arthur Robert Peacocke MBE (29 November 1924, Watford - 21 October 2006) was the Vice President of the Science and Religion Forum and of Modern Church People's Union. He was also a Council Member of ESSSAT - The European Society for the Study of Science And Theology. In 1971, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England. In 1973, he was appointed Dean of Clare College, Cambridge. In 2001, he was awarded the Templeton Prize. 1924 (MCMXXIV) was a leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Watford is a town and district in Hertfordshire, England and is situated 27 km (17 miles) northwest of central London and within the bounds of the M25 motorway. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Modern Churchpeoples Union is an Anglican society which promotes liberal theology. ... Science in the broadest sense refers to any system of knowledge attained by verifiable means. ... Theology (Greek θεος, theos, God, + λογος, logos, word or reason) means reasoned discourse concerning religion, spirituality and God. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1971 calendar). ... The Church of England is the officially established Christian church[1] in England, and acts as the mother and senior branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, as well as a founding member of the Porvoo Communion. ... 1973 (MCMLXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday. ... Full name Clare College Motto - Named after Elizabeth de Clare Previous names University Hall (1326), Clare Hall (1338), Clare College (1856) Established 1326 Sister College Oriel College St Hughs College Master Prof. ... 2001: A Space Odyssey. ... The Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities was until 2001 awarded for Progress in Religion. ...

Peacocke is perhaps best known for his attempts to rigorously argue that Evolution and Christianity need not be at odds. He may be the most well-known theological advocate of theistic evolution as author of the essay Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?. A phylogenetic tree of all extant organisms, based on 16S rRNA gene sequence data, showing the evolutionary history of the three domains of life, bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. ... Christianity is a monotheistic[1] religion centered on Jesus of Nazareth, and on his life and teachings as presented in the New Testament. ... The creation-evolution controversy (also termed the creation vs. ... Theistic evolution, less commonly known as evolutionary creationism, is not a theory in the scientific sense, but a particular view about how the science of evolution relates to some religious interpretations. ...

Peacocke's views

Arthur Peacocke describes a position which is referred to elsewhere as “front-loading”, after the fact that it suggests that evolution is entirely consistent with an all-knowing, all-powerful God who exists throughout time, sets initial conditions and natural laws, and knows what the result will be. An implication of Peacocke’s particular stance is that all scientific analyses of physical processes reveal God’s actions. All scientific propositions are thus necessarily coherent with religious ones. Omniscience is the capacity to know everything, or at least everything that can be known about a character/s including thoughts, feelings, etc. ... Omnipotence (literally, all power) is power with no limits or inexhaustible, in other words, unlimited power. ... This article discusses the term God in the context of monotheism and henotheism. ... Two distinct views exist on the meaning of time. ... In mathematics, boundary conditions are imposed on the solutions of ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations, to fit the solutions to the actual problem. ... In law, natural law is the doctrine that just laws are immanent in nature (that can be claimed as discovered but not created by such things as a bill of rights) and/or that they can emerge by natural process of resolving conflicts (as embodied by common law). ...

According to Peacocke, Darwinism is not an enemy to religion, but a friend (thus the title of his piece, “The Disguised Friend”). Peacocke offers five basic arguments in support of his position outlined below. Charles Darwin Darwinism is a term for the underlying theory in those ideas of Charles Darwin concerning evolution and natural selection. ...

Process as immanence

The process-as-immanence argument is meant to deal with Philip Johnson’s contention that naturalism reduces God to a distant entity. According to Peacoke, God continuously creates the world and sustains it in its general order and structure; He makes things make themselves. Biological evolution is an example of this and, according to Peacocke, should be taken as a reminder of God’s immanence. It shows us that “God is the Immanent Creator creating in and through the processes of natural order.” (473, original italics) Evolution is the continuous action of God in the world. All “the processes revealed by the sciences, especially evolutionary biology, are in themselves God-acting-as-Creator”. (474) IDS Center in Minneapolis, one of Johnsons most instantly recognizable works. ... Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that reject the validity of explanations or theories making use of entities inaccessible to natural science. ... An origin belief is any story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe (cosmogony). ... This article is about biological evolution. ...

Chance optimizing initial conditions

The chance-optimizing-initial-conditions argument runs as follows: the role of chance in biological evolution can be reconciled with a purposive creator because “there is a creative interplay of “chance” and law apparent in the evolution of living matter by natural selection.” (475) There is no metaphysical implication of the physical fact of “chance”; randomness in mutation of DNA “does not, in itself, preclude these events from displaying regular trends of manifesting inbuilt propensities at the higher levels of organisms, populations and eco-systems.” (476) Chance is to be seen as “eliciting the potentialities that the physical cosmos possessed ab initio.” (477) Chance can be used in any of the following contexts: Probability Luck Randomness Chance is also a 2002 film starring Amber Benson. ... The word random is used to express lack of purpose, cause, order, or predictability in non-scientific parlance. ...

Random process of evolution as purposive

The random-process-of-evolution-as-purposive argument is perhaps best considered an adjunct to the process-as-immanence argument, and a direct response to Johnson’s continued references to evolution as “purposeless.” Peacocke suggests “that the evolutionary process is characterized by propensities towards increase in complexity, information-processing and –storage, consciousness, sensitivity to pain, and even self-consciousness… the actual physical form of the organisms in which these propensities are actualized and instantiated is contingent on the history of the confluence of disparate chains of events, including the survival of the mass extinctions that have occurred.” (478) For the Computer Science term, see Computational complexity theory. ... Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ... Look up Pain in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Natural evil as necessity

The natural-evil-as-necessity argument is meant to be a response to the classic philosophical argument of the Problem of Evil, which contends that an all-powerful, all-knowing and beneficent God cannot exist as such because natural evil (mudslides which crush the legs of innocent children, for instance) occurs. Peacocke contends that the capacities necessary for consciousness and thus a relationship with God also enable their possessors to experience pain, as necessary for identifying injury and disease. Preventing the experience of pain would prevent the possibility of consciousness. Peacocke also takes an eastern argument for natural evil of that which made must be unmade for a new making to occur; there is no creation without destruction. To Peacocke, it is necessary that organisms go out of existence for others to come into it. Thus, pain, suffering and death are necessary evils in a universe which will result in beings capable of having a relationship with God. God is said to suffer with His creation because He loves creation, conforming the deity to be consistent with the Christian God. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article may require cleanup. ... In the philosophy of religion and theology, the problem of evil is the problem of reconciling the existence of evil or suffering in the world with the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God or Gods. ... It has been suggested that Surd_Evil be merged into this article or section. ... This article is about landslides of mud; a mudslide is also an alcoholic drink. ... Religions, sects and denominations Note that the classification hereunder is only one of several possible. ... A German Thrash metal band formed in Lörrach, Germany in 1983. ... In biology and ecology, an organism (in Greek organon = instrument) is a living being. ... For other uses, see Death (disambiguation). ... The deepest visible-light image of the cosmos, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. ... The term God is used to designate a Supreme Being, however, there are countless definitions of God. ...

Jesus as pinnacle of human evolution

The Jesus-as-pinnacle-of-human-evolution argument proposed by Peacocke is that Jesus Christ is “the actualization of [evolutionary] potentiality can properly be regarded as the consummation of the purposes of God already incompletely manifested in evolving humanity…. The paradigm of what God intends for all human beings, now revealed as having the potentiality of responding to, of being open to, of becoming united with, God.” (484-5) Similar propositions had previously been put by writers such as C.S. Lewis (in Mere Christianity) and Teilhard de Chardin. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis, was an author and scholar. ... Mere Christianity is a book by C. S. Lewis, adapted from a 1943 series of BBC radio chats broadcast while Lewis was an Oxford don during World War II and it is considered a classic work in Christian apologetics. ... This article needs cleanup. ...

Implications of Peacocke's theology

This framework, and particular aspects of Peacocke’s argument, are at work in a number of positions actually taken by various Christian denominations. The mainstream Evangelical Lutheran Church in America made the following statement in corrleation with many of Peacocke's arguments: “The ELCA doesn't have an official position on creation vs. evolution, but we subscribe to the historical-critical method of biblical interpretation, so we believe God created the universe and all that is therein, only not necessarily in six 24-hour days, and that he may actually have used evolution in the process of creation.” Similarly, the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A., in a 2002 resolution by the 214th assembly of the church, stated: “…the universe, as God’s free creation, has a genuine autonomy given to it, within the providence of God, so that the structure and the history of the universe can only be known by means of an empirical inquiry of nature itself…. Therefore, for Christians the affirmation of God as Creator can be understood as compatible with a fully natural explanation of the history of nature.” List of Christian denominations ordered by historical and doctrinal relationships. ... The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) is a mainline Protestant denomination headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. ...

External links

• Arthur Peacocke and Humanities Place in Cosmic Evolution
• "Evolution: The Disguised Friend of Faith?"
• Society of Ordained Scientists article by him
• Critical view by Christianity Today
• Chaos, Complexity, and God: Divine Action and Scientism A critical assessment of Arthur Peacocke's theological ideas, comparing them to the ideas of John Polkinghorne.