Dr. Yonghua Ge joined Regent College in August 2015 as Post-Doctoral Fellow in Theology for the period 2015-2018.nnMost recently, Dr. Ge has been engaged in a postdoctoral research project on the relationship between the Christian doctrine of creation and ancient Chinese ontology at the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at Cambridge University in England.nnA native of China, Yonghua Ge studied physics as an undergraduate at Fudan University and began graduate work in physics at the University of Toledo in the United States. He worked as a teacher of science and English before enrolling as a student at Regent College. In 2011, he graduated from Regent with a Master of Christian Studies degree, writing a thesis on creatio ex nihilo and Thomas Aquinas under Professors John G. Stackhouse and Loren Wilkinson. After earning the MPhil degree at Cambridge University, he continued this line of research on the doctrine of creation in a PhD thesis supervised by Professor Janet Martin Soskice (who is also a graduate of Regent College). Completed in January 2015, Dr. Ge's dissertation was titled 'The Many and the One: The Metaphysics of Participation in Connection to creatio ex nihilo in Augustine and Aquinas.'nnAlong with researching the doctrine of creation and its relation to medieval theology and ancient Chinese philosophy, Yonghua Ge desires to strengthen the bridge between Christian and Chinese scholarship. nnYonghua Ge has taught general sciences, physics, and mathematics in China, Thailand, and the US. He has published articles in Tyndale Bulletin, The Heythrop Journal, Chinese Social Studies Today, and the Regent Review of Christian Thoughts. He is currently working on publishing his doctoral dissertation in both English and Mandarin.
Aquinas on Creation and Its Implications for Modern Science-Religion Dialogues
Speaker(s): Yonghua Ge
Date: September 30, 2015
Length: 1h
Product ID: RGDL4502AM
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Description
The Christian doctrine of creation, which states that all that is has been created by God from nothing and thus completely depends on God for its existence, is a radical departure from the Greek philosophical worldview. It is not against reason, however. Rather, Aquinas was able to use reason to demonstrate nearly all the truths of creation and to show that creation out of nothing is the summit of philosophy.
In his exposition of this doctrine, Aquinas stresses that creation is not a change and therefore not a scientific event. Nor is creation, he suggests, the same as the temporal beginning of the world. Such an understanding of creation, Dr. Ge argues, has important implications for contemporary science-religion dialogues, especially in the areas of the Big Bang Theory and the so-called creation-evolution debate.
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