September 2022 Blog Post
Feeling Science, Thinking Religion Donovan Schaefer On a warm autumn evening at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, a group of scientists, theologians, and philosophers sat down for a candle-lit dinner to discuss the relationship between science and religion. Our speaker was physicist Andrew Briggs, and his topic was “Theory in Science and Faith.” But instead of starting with God, Prof. Briggs began with science; and not science as an institution, as truth, or even as a set of ideas, but as an experience. “I confess,” he told us, “that my engagement with a scientific problem produces an extraordinary cycle of effects in me: until I have understood something to my satisfaction, or solved a problem—or even got an experiment to work—I go through a physical pain which can be