The Routledge Companion to Religion and Science

James W. Haag, Gregory R. Peterson, Michael L. Spezio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136634161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The field of religion and science is one of the most exciting and dynamic areas of research today. This Companion brings together an outstanding team of scholars to explore the ways in which science intersects with the major religions of the world and religious naturalism. The collection provides an overview of the field and also indicates ways in which it is developing. Its multicultural breadth and scientific rigor on topics that are and will be compelling issues in the first part of the twenty-first century and beyond will be welcomed by students and scholars alike.

Part I

Epistemology and History

(i) Frameworks and methods

1

Religion and Science in Christian Theology

F. LeRon Shults

The meaning and use of the terms “religion” and “science” are contested and contentious, as the other chapters in this section of the Companion amply demonstrate. This chapter focuses on the challenges and opportunities that shifts within late modern philosophy of science and the study of religion have created for contemporary Christian theology, by altering the conceptual and pragmatic playing field within which interdisciplinary engagement can occur. These shifts also have broader intellectual and social implications because the Christian religion no longer plays the same political and cultural role that it once did in the West.

I begin by pointing briefly to the complex relation between the Christian religion and the emergence of early modern science, which is an important first step toward understanding our current context. Second, I trace some key developments in late modern philosophy of science that have contributed to the renewal of positive and concrete interaction between scientific and theological disciplines. The third part describes Ian Barbour’s influential taxonomy of ways of relating religion and science, and some of the responses to it by philosophers and theologians in the Christian tradition. I conclude by suggesting that Christian theologians in the “science and religion” field ought to complement their interaction with the sciences with a more rigorous engagement with developments in the study of religion (or religions), especially the increased interest in attending to otherness and difference.

Christian Religion and Early Modern Science

The year 2009 marked the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The controversies around these two figures stand out in the public imagination as primary examples of what appears to be a basically negative relationship between science and Christianity. Indeed, discoveries and theoretical developments in the scientific disciplines they represent (cosmology and biology), as well as others, have clearly threatened traditional Christian views of the world and the place of humanity within it. During the middle ages, Christian theology could be articulated within a relatively stable understanding of the cosmos as a set of concentric spheres with the Earth fixed at its center and of human persons as immaterial souls housed within (or enlivening) material bodies. A mixture of Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions played a regulative role in shaping Christian doctrines such as creation and providence, sin and redemption. The undermining of these cosmological and anthropological assumptions by Galileo and Darwin, among many others, weakened the formulations that had been shaped by them.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many historians interpreted the role of the church in the Galileo and Darwin affairs simply as (failed) ecclesial attempts to suppress enlightened scientists. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, historical research into these (and other) episodes has shown that the “warfare” reading of the relationship between science and the Christian religion was too simplistic. As John Hedley Brooke (1991) has pointed out, there were several ways in which Christianity positively sponsored the development of the early modern sciences; for example, providing presuppositions (about order and causality), as well as sanctioning and even motivating empirical study of the world (as God’s good creation). There were Christians on both sides of the debates over the proposals of Galileo and Darwin (Lindberg and Numbers 1986; McMullin 2005). In cosmology and anthropology, as well as other sciences, deeper philosophical and broader cultural concerns were at play in the ongoing struggle to interpret human experience within the world.

Nevertheless, something radical happened to the Christian religion during the early modern period. “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (Taylor 2007: 25). The answer to this question is complex, but the rise of early modern science, which challenged the hegemony of the Christian interpretation of the world, clearly played an important role in this shift. Pre-modern people reflected on the world and themselves, and imaginatively attempted both to make sense and to make use of the forces that shaped their experience. But what we today call “science” emerged as part of modernity. Pre-modern people attended to their fears and desires in relation to that which they understood as ultimately conditioning the world and themselves, and developed ways of trying to orient themselves appropriately to that reality. However, the construction and segregation of what came to be called “religion” as a sphere of human life separated from other spheres was also a distinctly early modern phenomenon. The social and religious reformations of the sixteenth century, the ending of the Thirty Years’ War with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the growing independence and fragmentation of scientific inquiry in the eighteenth century all contributed to the separation between the sacred and the mundane, the religious and the secular.

For the purposes of this brief survey, we can focus on some of the key philosophical factors that shaped these developments. The dichotomy between “science” and “religion” is connected to dualisms of other kinds, both metaphysical and epistemological. In the early seventeenth century, Descartes argued for a strong distinction between extended thing (res extensa) and thinking thing (res cogitans). His assertion “I think, therefore I am,” which was intended as an indubitable foundation for the construction of rational knowledge of the world, was tied to an anthropological dualism between the immaterial soul and the material body. Intellectual certainty was the goal and mathematics was the ideal. By the end of the seventeenth century, the success of Newton’s laws of mechanics – the mathematical measurement of extended material bodies – had reinforced the growing sense that the study of “immaterial” things would require some other indubitable foundation (the Bible, the Church?) and some other methodological principles. In the eighteenth century, many theologians continued attempting to prove the existence of God based on causation or order in the external world, but others (as diverse as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Wesley) began to focus their energy on religious affections and the internal conviction of the soul as the basis for knowledge of immaterial (spiritual) realities.

The religious sphere might be passionate and subjective, but science should be neutral and objective. This attitude contributed to the rise of positivism as well as the academic division between the “natural” sciences and the “human” sciences in the late nineteenth century. Where did these developments leave theology? Charles Hodge tried to emulate the natural sciences (deducing propositions from “data” posited in the Bible), while Ernst Troeltsch refigured theology as a kind of human science (interpreting the social teaching of the Christian church). Others gave up on the idea that theology was a “science” at all: Religion has to do with faith and science has to do with reason, and never the twain shall meet. Each of these decisions impacted the way in which the task of (or need for) acquiring, formulating, and defending “knowledge” about religious issues was understood and executed. These epistemological dualisms, however, were inherently linked to early modern metaphysical dualisms, both of which have been challenged by developments within late modern philosophy and science. As we will see in Part III, these shifts have opened up new possibilities for the interaction between Christian theology and contemporary science.

Late Modern Philosophy of Science and Christian Theology

The “philosophy of science” deals with what counts as academic knowledge (scientia) and how it is properly acquired, formulated and defended. It explores the relations among, and self-understanding of, organized fields of human inquiry, analyzing the nature, process, and outcome of inquiry itself. This requires attending to broader epistemological and hermeneutical issues that reach across different fields. Two developments in the late modern philosophy of science are particularly relevant for understanding the resurgence of interest in the positive interaction between religion and science among Christian theologians in the early third millennium.

The first is a shift toward using relationality as a constitutive and generative category in both metaphysics and epistemology. Despite their differences, Plato and Aristotle both privileged the category of substance over relation. First and foremost, knowledge (episteme, scientia) of some thing requires identifying its substance (or essence); the way in which the thing is dynamically related to other things is secondary. The valorizing of inertial “substances” was still evident in much early modern cosmology and anthropology. Over time, however, the inadequacy of theories of being and knowing that failed to attend sufficiently to the relations between things became increasingly clear. By the end of the eighteenth century, Kant would argue that the concepts of substance and accidents are sub-categories “Of Relation.” The story of the philosophical turn to relationality is too complex to repeat here (cf. Shults 2003), but the outcome is evident in the role played by the category of “relation” in the dominant scientific cosmologies and anthropologies of the twentieth century. We can point, for example, to Einstein’s theories of relativity in physics and to Klein’s object relations theory in psychology.

Classical Christian theology had relied on the category of substance for most of its doctrinal formulations: For example, the Trinity is one substance but three persons; the Incarnation is a union of divine and human substances; and spiritual Redemption bears on the immaterial substance of the soul. For much of the Western tradition, theological knowing (scientia) was primarily about defining these substances; the “problem” was dealing with the relations inherent in each of these doctrines. Although many theologians have continued to hold onto the categories of substance metaphysics and the predication theories associated with it, others have actively participated in the turn to relationality that has transformed contemporary models of knowing and being. Perhaps the most obvious example is the revival of trinitarian doctrine in the twentieth century, in which relational and dynamic concepts of divine life have played a dominant role. It is no surprise that many of the Christian theologians who contributed to this doctrinal revival were also actively engaged in dialogue with contemporary philosophy and science.

A second development that is relevant to our topic is the shift toward accepting the contextuality of all knowledge. Much early modern philosophy of science (anachronistically speaking) idealized knowledge that was putatively universal – objective and certain knowledge accessible to any and all neutral observers who, dispassionately following the rules of logic, could deduce apodictic conclusions from rationally or empirically self-evident foundations. Increasingly, however, late modern philosophers of science have come to recognize that this ideal is not only impossible, but also undesirable. Like all human inquirers, scientists’ search for knowledge is embodied by and embedded in particular contexts, shaped by pre-understandings, and motivated by more or less passionate interests. Moreover, each science has its own disciplinary context that is guided by paradigms (Kuhn) or research programs (Lakatos). The positivists tried to separate evaluation from fact-finding; for them, scientists ought not to allow their subjective values to hinder the neutral observation of the posited data. Most post-positivist philosophers of science agree that, regardless of the phenomena under investigation, data are always and already theory-laden.

This can appear to force a choice between absolutism and relativism, and many Christian theologians have embraced one or other of these options. However, the appeal to contextuality has also opened up new opportunities in theology. The diversity and richness of the discourse has been enhanced by a growing recognition of ways in which the interpretative categories and embodied practices of other contexts can lead to creative insights and new possibilities for understanding one’s own context. Moreover, this philosophical shift has opened up conceptual space for overcoming the early modern dualism between faith and reason that hardened as “religion” and “science” drifted apart. If knowing something or someone requires some level of commitment within a context – a fiduciary connection to that which is known – and believing something or trusting someone requires some contextualized knowledge of that thing or person, then “faith” and “reason” are interwoven within every contextualized pursuit of knowledge. The dynamics of the dialectic between participation and distanciation may vary in accordance with each context, but human inquiry requires both faithful commitment and rational judgment.

The appeal of relationality and the appeal to contextuality have together contributed to a growing appeal for interdisciplinarity within and across the sciences. The dichotomy between the natural and human sciences was reinforced by other dualisms, including the metaphysical separation of reality into extended things and thinking things, and the epistemic division between “explaining” the former through nomological deduction and “understanding” the latter through ideographic description. The further fragmentation of the sciences and increased specialization was also encouraged by the ideal of detailed analysis of discrete phenomena. This methodological reduction, which is quite appropriate and often fruitful in various contexts, has sometimes been transmuted into a material reductionism that eclipses the value of other disciplines. This tendency is still dominant in some circles, but growing awareness of the relational complexity of the world and the contextual limitations of each field of inquiry has led to an increased openness toward interdisciplinary engagement. This is the context within which Christian theologians can now explore new possibilities for clarifying and enhancing the relation between religion and the scientific disciplines.

Ways of Relating Science and Religion

During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a surge of interest in “science and religion,” especially among Christian theologians and scientists. Ian Barbour’s Issues in Science and Religion (1966) is often considered largely responsible for initiating a new and creative phase in the relation between the fields. Several other founding figures contributed to the burgeoning conversation (cf. Torrance 1969; Peacocke 1971; Pannenberg 1976), and during the last quarter of the century, several societies and journals were founded on both sides of the Atlantic in order to facilitate this rapidly growing interdisciplinary discussion. The first volume of Barbour’s Gifford lectures – Religion in an Age of Science (1990) – set out a taxonomy of ways of relating science and religion that has been the starting point for methodological debate ever since. He distinguishes between four general types of relation: conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration.

Barbour uses examples of “scientific materialism” and “biblical literalism” to illustrate the first way of relating science and religion. Although these two positions are opposed at so many levels, they also have a great deal in common methodologically. He argues that their shared belief that religion and science are necessarily in conflict is based on a shared misunderstanding of the nature of science. Both approaches assume that sciences such as evolutionary theory are inherently atheistic, which leads to a forced choice: either science or (theistic) religion. The scientific materialist’s move from specific explanations of a phenomenon to broad claims about reality and knowledge, and the biblical literalist’s move from a particular reading of scripture to a general declaration about nature are both philosophically naïve. In this way of understanding the relation, each side of the “conflict” begins with its own allegedly sure foundation as the basis for making rival statements about the same domain, such as the history of nature.

In the second type, which Barbour calls “independence,” religion and science are understood as having contrasting methods that deal with different domains, or as simply having different languages that are used for distinctive purposes. Barbour illustrates this model with three examples: neo-orthodoxy, existentialism, and linguistic analysis. For Karl Barth and many of his followers, theology is based on self-authenticating divine revelation alone, while science is based on human observation and reason; each is valid but should not interfere with the other. Some existentialists (whether theistic or atheistic) separate the fields by saying that science has to do with “how” questions and religion has to do with ultimate “why” questions. Finally, George Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic approach minimizes the role of truth claims about reality in theology, arguing that religious language functions within a way of life, forming particular practices. Against such models, which attempt to immunize or isolate theology from science ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Epistemology and history
• Part II Scientific and religious models of the world
• Part III Religion and science, values, and public policy
• Index