Hello, Homebrew Christianity listeners. This is Tripp, and I am talking to Andrew Davison, who is at Cambridge,

and he's a priest and a professor and a scholar, an author, an educator, and a really nice guy.

We got to meet at AAR and are part of the same Templeton Grant thing right now.

So how are you doing? I'm doing very well,

and it's good to join you and your listeners today. So you have an interesting biography in that

you both were invested in the sciences and a person of faith, and then later in life came to connect

the two. Maybe you could introduce

us to how those different streams of one's life came together. Yes, well, I went up to university

at 18 to read chemistry, and I was a churchgoer and I suppose pretty devout. I wouldn't say

that I'd read a great deal of theology.

I'd grown up in the middle of the road,

Church of England, sort of parish,

but as a teenager had got involved with a local house church,

so evangelical charismatic church,

and had more or less shook the dust of the Church of England off my feet.

And that's quite important part of my biography because I went up to university thinking the world was made in six days,

six thousand years ago. And that didn't stand up to scrutiny very well when I got to university

level science. So in a way, my whole later trajectory in theology and philosophy

comes from that experience in as much as having had two or three years of a pretty anguished

crisis of faith and thinking I wasn't really sure how much any of that was true or what I could

trust. When I came through the other side, I could talk about that.

I think that the humane liturgical witness of my college chapel was pretty important in that, and also meeting Roman Catholic friends who introduced me to the work of Aquinas and other scholastics, who just seemed to me they could take all these great scientific questions in their stride

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