"Modern Physics and Ancient Faith": The 2006 Thomas Merton Lecture, delivered by Professor Stephen Barr in St. Paul's Chapel, October 30^th.

"Science and Religion," "Faith and Reason" — buzzword dichotomies for the sound-bite arguments of our polarized political discourse. Given this, the absence of publicity surrounding Stephen Barr's lecture "Modern Physics and Ancient Faith" — a few green paper posters with a blurry photo of the theoretical physicist showed up in Hamilton on Monday — was astonishing. Perhaps the breadth of appeal of Barr's Merton Lecture, which is possibly the most prestigious religious lecture given annually at Columbia (though it is a specifically Catholic event) was not appreciated. Or, perhaps our appetites for anything remotely resembling the stale debate over intelligent design are simply satiated. Regardless, when St. Paul's Chapel filled Monday night, the white robes of Dominicans, and white hair in general, dominated.

Stephen Barr, a professor at the Bartol Research Institute and frequent contributor to the theoconservative journal First Things, has given this speech before. In fact, he published it in a more extensive form as the book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith in 2003. But, despite, or perhaps because of the speech's age, Barr provided something provocative: an impeccably organized account of science's development that challenged many common conceptions about our current understanding of the universe.

Barr began his speech with a familiar invective against materialism; materialism, he argued, is not science but a philosophical view about the nature of ultimate reality on equal standing with religious belief. There are, however, good reasons to think that, in accepting the findings of modern science, one ought to find oneself inevitably viewing the religious outlook as hopelessly anachronistic. Barr disagrees and centered his remarks on two fairly widespread claims with which he takes issue.