Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Peacocke

Peacocke is doing triage on a century of bad blood between the lab and the pulpit. The sentence is engineered to sound like a concession to modernity, but it’s really a strategic reframing: if science has “unveiled” the world’s processes, theology doesn’t need to contest the unveiling. It needs to redescribe what those processes mean. The loaded phrase is “immanence of God as Creator in, with, and under.” That triple prepositional stack signals a deliberate move away from a God who intervenes from the outside (the nineteenth-century caricature in many science-religion polemics) toward a God whose creative agency is inseparable from the ordinary fabric of causation.

The intent isn’t to baptize science or smuggle miracles into evolution. It’s to protect religious speech from becoming a rival explanatory system. Peacocke is telling theologians: stop making God a gap-filler; read the gaps as your own epistemic embarrassment. At the same time he’s telling scientists and secular critics: the “debates of the nineteenth century” (Darwin, biblical literalism, the Victorian culture wars) don’t get to be the permanent template for what faith must be.

Subtext: he’s cashing in the authority of science without surrendering theology’s distinct claim. Notice the careful hedge, “certainly in accord,” which reads like peer-review language. He’s adopting scientific modesty as a rhetorical posture, implying that a credible theology today must be continuous with established knowledge, not insulated from it.

Context matters: Peacocke wrote as both scientist and theologian in an era when “conflict” narratives were being revised by thinkers pushing integration. The line is less about harmonizing for its own sake than about relocating God from the margins of explanation to the depth of reality.