I argue for the centrality of the concepts of biophysical and human nature in science-and-religion studies, consider five different metaphors, or “visions,” of nature, and explore possibilities and challenges in reconciling them. These visions include (a) evolutionary nature, built on the powerful explanatory framework of evolutionary theory; (b) emergent nature, arising from recent research in complex systems and self-organization; (c) malleable nature, indicating both the recombinant potential of biotechnology and the postmodern challenge to a fixed ontology; (d) nature as sacred, (...) a diffuse popular concept fundamental to cultural analysis; and (e) nature as culture, an admission of epistemological constructivism. These multiple visions suggest the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, in which each man made the classic mistake of part-whole substitution in believing that what he grasped (the tail, for example) represented the elephant as a whole. Indeed, given the inescapability of metaphor, we may have to admit that the ultimate truth about the “elephant” (nature, or the reality toward which science and religion point) is a mystery, and the best we can hope for is to confess the limitations of any particular vision. (shrink)

A Christian approach to scholarship, directed by the central biblical motive of creation, fall and redemption and guided by the theoretical idea that God subjected all of creation to His Law-Word, delimiting and determining the cohering diversity we experience within reality, in principle safe-guards those in the grip of this ultimate commitment and theoretical orientation from absolutizing or deifying anything within creation. In this article my over-all approach is focused on the one-sided legacy of mathematics, starting with Pythagorean arithmeticism (“everything (...) is number”), continuing with the geometrization of mathematics after the discovery of irrational numbers and once again, during the nineteenth century returning to an arithmeticistic position. The third option, never explored during the history of mathematics, guides our analysis: instead of reducing space to number or number to space it is argued that both the uniqueness of these two aspects and their mutual coherence ought to direct mathematics. The presence of different schools of thought is highlighted and then the argument proceeds by distinguishing numerical and spatial facts, while accounting for the strict correlation of operations on the law side of the numerical aspect and their correlated numerical subjects (numbers). Discussing the examples of 2 + 2 = 4 and the definition of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points provide the background for a brief sketch of the third alternative proposed (inter alia against the background of an assessment of infinity and continuity and the vicious circles present in contemporary mathematical arithmeticistic claims). (shrink)