Melbourne Archbishop Philip Freier, who holds a science degree, discusses how society has become less able to deal with new challenges as it has become more secular.
, a free weekly newsletter covering science with a sceptical, evidence-based eye, is sent every Tuesday. You’re reading an excerpt –A hymn echoes through the halls of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne. There’s a funeral today, the nave filled with mourners. Above, in a private office, the city’s most senior Anglican is speaking about black holes, about singularities, and about God.
It’s the first time I’ve been to church in … 30 years, perhaps? And I feel somewhat underdressed. Freier is in full regalia. The fat purple jewel set into his ecclesiastical ring catches the afternoon sunlight. That work “totally delegitimised” society’s ability to talk about moral philosophy, Freier argues. When World War II arrived, and science furnished us with new ways to kill and maim, we no longer had strong ethical principles to guide us, Freier argues. Atrocities ensued.“That’s a great danger with a totally empiric system for understanding of the world,” Freier says.
Freier does not see a conflict between science and faith. Science brings us new knowledge – Freier is no scriptural literalist – but cannot answer everything. That led him to study a bachelor of applied science at the Queensland Institute of Technology; he then went to work as a teacher in Indigenous Christian communities in Queensland’s north. There, Freier experienced what he later called a “powerful conversion”.
I ask him where he sees God in the discoveries of science. He nominates gravitational singularities – the point inside a black hole where existing theories of physics break down.
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