From Eden to Interstellar Space: Thomas Nagel, Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Search for “the True Extent of Reality”

by Sarah Anne Beattie

Publisher:

Pickwick Publications

, 2025

Overview

This book is a response to two questions. The first concerns how we can do better as human beings in addressing the broken relationships between humankind, the environment in which we live, and the other species with which we coexist in an increasingly fragile world. The second concerns whether secular humanism can provide the answer, or if there is an important contribution that Christian faith can offer to an understanding of the human condition that will empower effective, transformational action. The book explores the possibility of developing an interpretive approach to biblical narrative that allows a biblical perspective of reality to provide an important complementary, rather than competing, supplement to developing scientific perspectives of reality. These are perspectives emerging from quantum mechanics and astrophysics that challenge both our conceptual ability and the limits of language in articulating mystery that, in resisting physical explanation, appears to demand new or different ways of thinking about ourselves and the world in which we live.

Praise for From Eden to Interstellar Space

This wonderful book provides a new map for thoughtful people looking for a way to understand the meaning of religion in the age of science. It discovers in the work of the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel an adventurous pathway toward a fresh and profound way of reading the Bible and other ancient religious texts. This sophisticated but readable work shows how sincere searchers can fully embrace science while also venturing far beyond what science can teach us.

——John F. Haught, distinguished research professor, Georgetown University

This book is astounding, cosmic in scope, yet grounded in a desire to communicate the Bible to Christians, whom the author witnessed becoming increasingly alienated from the church. Sarah Beattie is convinced that physics must be a story in continuity with a doctrine of creation and that the Bible must become less familiar before it can be understood. From Eden to Interstellar Space is an integrative approach that is truly needed in the twenty-first century.

——Nicola Hoggard Creegan, director, New Zealand Christians in Science

In Sarah Beattie’s fascinating engagement and application of Nagel’s proposition of a new expansive hermeneutical approach that overcomes scientific reductionism she makes an original and important contribution to the initially incompatible other world of biblical hermeneutics and biblical theology. Her contribution to the science/faith discourse is truly novel and is one of the finest, most intelligent renderings of the possibility of dialogue between science and religion that I have read.

——Yael Thomas Cameron, senior lecturer in education, Auckland University of Technology

Product Details

• Title: From Eden to Interstellar Space: Thomas Nagel, Biblical Hermeneutics, and the Search for “the True Extent of Reality”
• Author: Sarah Anne Beattie
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Print Publication Date: 2025
• Logos Release Date: 2025
• Pages: 288
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9798385205417, 9798385205400, 9798385205394
• Resource ID: LLS:9798385205417
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-23T00:20:11Z

About the Author

Sarah Anne Beattie (PhD, University of Divinity, Melbourne) is an independent researcher whose thinking about God is inspired by the wonders of nature and the joy of experiencing them with horses and dogs and through the eyes of her two-year-old grandson.