Some Books on Science and Faith

Sir:

You have no doubt received quite a few responses to your request for references concerning science and faith, but at the risk of being redundant, I will refer you to the works of the Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, Anglican Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, USA. He has written too many books to list in toto, but a some titles that might interest you are Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Resurrection: Myth or Reality and Born of a Woman?, published by Harper San Francisco. Another book you might find interesting is "So You Think You're Not Religious?", by Kenneth Adams (I believe that is the correct name), the rector of a parish in Washington, D.C.

Both writers discuss ways of rethinking Christian dogma to allow people who are uncomfortable with the traditional literalist interpretations to grasp the real heart of doctrine; e.g., surely the point of the Incarnation is that in the life of Jesus of Nazareth his disciples saw something so powerful that they could describe it only in terms of God's having become a human being.

Bishop Spong goes a little too far for my taste in denying the reality of the miraculous, but some people need to strip away the elements with which they cannot deal before they can accede to the underlying reality. It's not so clear that we can discount the possibility of miracles; your views in " Why Not Six Days?" make the most sense of anything I've encountered.