Recommended Reading: God and the Cosmos

Harry Lee Poe

I’ve now read Harry Lee Poe and Jimmy H. Davis’s God and the Cosmos: Divine Activity in Space, Time and History (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012). It was a good read; hopefully my full, 1800-word review will be out soon in American Theological Journal, explaining why I regard it so.

While reading God and the Cosmos, I detected four major themes:

1. Current popular and much academic thinking about God and the natural sciences is dominated by an Aristotelian framework that modern science has actually discredited.

2. Modern research in the natural sciences demonstrates that far from being a closed order, the universe is open to interaction, interference, modification, and so on by both humans and God.

Jimmy H. Davis

3. The world consists of different levels of organization, and God relates differently to each level. This means that God could act deterministically at one level while indeterministically at another.

4. In all this, “God” must be understood as the triune God testified to in the story of Scripture. No other conception of God will do, as no other God is both transcendent and immanent.

So, in short, if you’re researching divine action, you should give God and the Cosmos some time. It deserves it.