Commendations for The Imagined Conflict

John C Lennox:

Holm’s book is an excellent addition to the literature on science and religion.  With a delightful Scandinavian flavour, and with the keen insight of a practising research physicist, Holm takes a balanced three-pronged approach to the topic—historical, scientific and philosophical.   Amply supported by carefully curated, detailed research, he rehabilitates the science of the Middle Ages, illuminates in a fresh way the iconic historical controversies on the motion and age of the earth and reflects on contemporary thinking on the nature of evolution.  

Showing a clear grasp of the importance of distinguishing science from worldview, Holm traces how the idea of conflict between science and God developed and why that conflict is imagined rather than real. 

This book is a model of fair enquiry, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how science and the Christian faith can both coexist and thrive in fruitful dialogue.  

John C Lennox MA MMath MA(Bioethics) DPhil PhD DSc FISSR
Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford
Emeritus Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science
Green Templeton College, Oxford.

The Imagined Conflict

The imagined conflict: On Science and God. Coming soon at Wipf & Stock.

Based on the 2021 Norwegian original, 2nd edition.

Science with Overtones

Science with Overtones:

21 Natural Scientists and Their Belief in God.

Scientists with a belief in God have played a central role in the development of science for more than four hundred years. Some might think that belief in a creator God and the practice of science must have been a source of conflict, but the stories of the scientists tell a completely different story. They had a divine perspective on science, and it made their work better, not worse. Be inspired by 21 of the world's most important scientists!

The book has two authors. First, Professor Sverre Holm presents the scientist's life's work and beliefs, then Sven Aasmundtveit reflects on what this can mean for us today.

The book is in Norwegian and in sale from October 30 (2025).

The surprising faith of scientists

Equations representing many of the scientists in the book

"The surprising faith of scientists" is the tentative title of a book manuscript just submitted. 

The book stems from a discovery I made some time after I had completed my university studies where I had studied theories named after the likes of Pascal, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and Kelvin. The surprising thing was that all of these were devout Christians. It would turn out that there were many more of them.

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility

Lecture at the University of South-Eastern Norway, Faculty of Technology, Natural Sciences and Maritime Sciences, Horten, Norway 24 May 2024.

The quote is from Einstein and it continues like this "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." We now take for granted that nature can be rationally understood and follows laws, and that humans are equipped to understand nature. That was not obvious before the 16th century. I will discuss the life and work of several prominent scientists such as Kepler, Volta, Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, Lemaître, Kelvin, Anning, and Marconi. Their work gave us definitions of gravity, voltage, current, electromagnetism, paleontology, radio, and the Big Bang. Surprising to many, they all combined their science with a deep Christian faith and several of them even justified their science by that. Philosophers and historians of science like Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki have also explained the biblical basis for science. The talk is based on my book "Den innbilte konflikten. Om naturvitenskap og Gud" (The imagined conflict: On science and God), 2021.

Download manuscript here. 

The imagined conflict: On science and God

Last autumn, John Lennox, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Oxford, suggested I make an English version of my book from 2021, shown to the right. John has visited the University of Oslo several times (in 2018 and in 2024). 

The first step has now been taken in the form of an initial draft. John also helped me find someone to go through it, and it has now been read through by a native speaker of British English who is himself an author of several books.

Here is the outline with page numbers from Word (A4 paper format):

Introduction                                                                        6
    God has arranged all things
    The big questions

1 God's two books                                                            14
    Does science make religion unnecessary?
    A faith to be proud of
    Too much to doubt and too little to believe
    Seven different perspectives

Ten models for the solar system in the 1600's

Frontispiece of Riccioli's 1651 New
Almagest (Wikipedia)

In order to understand the debate around the Copernican heliocentric system and Galileo, it is important to understand the different alternatives that existed, once it was realized that the geocentric Ptolemaic system from antiquity no longer was correct. 

There were really three different classes of models:

• Geocentric - with the earth in the center and with roots in antiquity
• Geoheliocentric - with the earth in the center, and the sun orbiting the earth, but with most of the other planets orbiting the sun.
  If you don't understand why this class of models gained prominence in the first half of the 17th century, you cannot really understand the science of the Galileo conflict.
• Heliocentric - with the sun in the center, resembling our system today

And then there were variations of these. The ones I have identified are: