Imagination and Intellect
Here is a brief summary of the themes of the main sessions from our 2011 conference…
Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin
Talk 1: Imagining – optional extra or God given calling?
For many people, the notion of the imagination has positive connotations. We like to be called imaginative and to be able to think ‘outside the box.’ Others, however, associate the term with fiction and fancy – flights of the imagination which have no basis in reality and are better to be avoided. In the Bible the notion of heart (leb or kardia) comes closest to what we would nowadays understand as the imagination. The heart is the centre of all human thinking, willing, desiring and acting, and, as such the locus of all imagining, concerning the person in its entirety. Imagining is something profoundly human and part of our creaturely DNA. Using our imagination, therefore, is not an optional extra, but a God-given calling to be fully human as He intended it.
Talk 2: The Embodied Imagination
More often than not we think about the imagination primarily as a mental faculty, rather than a form of imaginative understanding rooted in our senses and experience. Since the Greeks, western culture has tended to privilege sight and vision – the “image” – as the most important and reliable of all senses. Hebrew thinking and sensing, by contrast, always implied a multi-sensory dynamic, involving not only the eyes and ears, but also smell, taste and touch. Most of our common metaphors – hard, soft, warm, porous, sticky and so on – are rooted in physical experiences of textures and surfaces. Both the scientific and the artistic imagination are rooted in physical, embodied engagements with the world, but with different foci of attention. Scientific research aims at a deeper, quantifiable understanding of the laws and structures of our world whereas the arts aim to articulate human affective experience.
Mike Clifford
On Science and the Imagination
The talk explored the apparent tension between objective science and creative thought. Examples of subconscious inspiration through dreams were discussed along with imaginative use of scientific knowledge in disparate scientific fields from pure mathematics to engineering. Concepts such as genius and inspiration were unpacked in sympathy with a Christian world-view.
Maithrie White
Imagination and Intellect: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass). Why should we believe six impossible things before breakfast? Starting the day imagining things with God can make a significant difference to our lives.
Imagination resurrects the creative child in us; Imagination is a result of being created in the image of God and ignoring it makes us and our world poorer; Imagination is a part of Faith and a bigger imagination results in a bigger Faith; Imagination can enhance our worship and relationship with God ; Imagination in our daily life will enrich our humanity; Imagining six impossible things before breakfast will transform our imaginations and minds as we engage in research and study.