Praise for It Keeps Me Seeking

Giulio Prisco
Turing Church
Published in
4 min readOct 18, 2019

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I highly recommend “It Keeps Me Seeking: The Invitation from Science, Philosophy and Religion” (2018), by Andrew Briggs, Andrew Steane, and Hans Halvorson.

The authors, three top scientists, are Christians believers, which is often the case (much more often than you might have been persuaded to believe). The authors “use the word ‘Christianity’ to mean something close to the notion of learning from Jesus of Nazareth, as opposed to the power games that have sometimes self-identified under this label.”

Four main themes run through the book:

  1. God is a being to be known, not a hypothesis to be tested.
  2. We set a high bar on what constitutes good argument.
  3. Uncertainty is OK.
  4. We are allowed to open up the window that the natural world offers us.

I am in total agreement with the last three points.

Concerning the first point, it seems to me that only believers can adopt this attitude. Believers don’t need arguments for the God “hypothesis,” because they are already persuaded deep inside their heart. In the words of the authors:

“The person who does not know God may find it helpful to think about the evidence that God is there... The person who already knows God may rather quickly lose interest in discussing God’s existence.”

The authors of “It Keeps Me Seeking” have been blessed with a deep faith, but this is not everyone’s case. For example, I have not been blessed with such a deep faith.

You can’t strive to know God if you are not prepared to consider the possibility that God might somehow exist. Science-minded people (like me) need some persuasion. Not “evidence that God is there,” but at least ways to suspend disbelief, without disowning our scientific mindset and knowledge, and mental pictures of God somewhat compatible with science [*].

The authors are right that science can’t “prove” God (and, in accordance with point 2, demolish some weak arguments), but we need to be persuaded that the possibility of God (and afterlife and all that) is not ruled out by science.

The authors don’t try to persuade skeptical readers, but offer soberly understated arguments to suggest that, indeed, the possibility of God (and afterlife and all that) is not ruled out by science. Excerpts:

“Thus, the most reasonable prediction is that in the future, science will march forward explaining more and more … and that there will always be more things that science does not yet explain. This picture of science… also happens to sit most comfortably with a theistic outlook. For if the universe has a transcendent source, then the call to understand the universe will never be satisfied by finite beings…”

“What one may claim, with good intellectual credentials, is that the notions of human free will and responsibility are not ruled out by what we know of quantum physics… the notion of human responsibility is not ruled out by our scientific knowledge of the world… If humans can enact personal encounters without breaking out of the patterns we call ‘laws of nature’, then so can God… our own actions can be meaningful. We may add that processes going on around us in the world can also be meaningful. This is what the question of divine action is really about.”

“The no-cloning theorem does not prevent a quantum state being passed on from one physical embodiment to another, as long as the first embodiment loses the state when the other one gains it. One way this can happen is through a process known as quantum teleportation… there is nothing here to prevent the Christian idea of Resurrection from having intellectual coherence.”

But, as I noted, while much (actually a lot) of “It Keeps Me Seeking” is valuable to skeptics and those who wish to find faith, the book is really addressed to believers, to whom the author offer a powerful Christian narrative. Excerpts:

“We followers of Jesus… think it makes sense to say that the foundational reality that is the root of physical existence is also the root or source of the richer realities that human life can embody: love, trust, commitment, perseverance, and so on.

“We don’t want to run away to somewhere else, some other-worldly place of inane or smug forgetfulness. We want the peace and justice of our true home to be realized right here in the physical house of life on Earth. That is what genuinely Christian community life is about… the hope expressed in New Testament Christianity is not well captured by the modern idiom of getting ‘out of the world’ and ‘going to heaven’. It is much more to do with transformation of the whole natural order, culminating in a New Creation which is not so much a replacement as a blossoming, or something brought to birth.”

[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle and paperback editions).

Please buy my book, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.

Cover picture from Andrew Briggs.

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Writer, futurist, sometime philosopher. Author of “Tales of the Turing Church” and “Futurist spaceflight meditations.”