Introduction: what makes science unique?
Scientists have a tremendous amount of prestige and moral authority in Western culture, which is partly attributable to the instrumental power of science. The technological conveniences of modern life are the tangible fruit of scientific labor, as are the weapons that threaten to destroy human civilization. While scientists often lament the state of scientific literacy among the public, surveys show that public regard for science could scarcely be higher.1 The representation of science in the mass media is overwhelmingly positive, supplying a receptive public with scientific information that also reinforces popular perceptions of science itself.2
The prestige of science can be seen in the way that disciplines outside the natural sciences have tried to appropriate the methodology or philosophy of science for their own subject matter. Emerging disciplines often strive to show how they meet the standards of scientific knowledge, especially physics, in order to gain respect and support. If the natural sciences are the clearest example of the success of human rationalityâeradicating diseases and putting humans in spaceâwhy would other disciplines not try to follow their lead? The desire to emulate physics is seen in the way disciplines such as economics and psychology create pedantically stated hypotheses and endlessly manipulate marginal statistical data.3 Theologians likewise in the last fifty years have been keen to show that theology can meet the standards of scientific inquiry, for to admit otherwise would be to acknowledge that theology lacks intellectual content and does not deserve a place in modern intellectual life.
To argue that a discipline should be counted as a science, one needs a theory about what distinguishes science from nonscience. The problem, from the point of view of aspiring scientific disciplines, is that there is no philosophical consensus about the nature of scientific inquiry. There have been intractable debates since the Scientific Revolution about what makes science successful and how to distinguish science from pseudoscience. When one surveys the literature, one sees three main approaches to characterizing the essence of science, appealing to scientific realism, method, or rationality. Each of these approaches comes with different implications for how disciplines outside the natural sciences might be made scientific.
The realist approach says science is objective because its theories about nature are at least approximately true. Because we inhabit a world with a determinate structure, scientists can sort those beliefs that accurately describe it from those that do not.4 Scientific theories are objective if they correspond with a reality external to the human mind rather than reflecting the influence of local circumstances or individual perspectives.5 As long as oneâs beliefs are grounded in evidenceâabove all demonstrated by technological successâthen those beliefs count as scientific knowledge.
The methodological approach, by contrast, does not require that our current scientific theories be approximately true. Science may be instrumentally successful, but scientific theories themselves seem to have a shelf life.6 As scientists readily acknowledge, science has yet to produce a final or complete view of the world, and even entrenched theories may be overturned with the passage of time. Thus, a better way to understand the nature of science is through a theory of scientific method. From this perspective, one can have confidence that scientific knowledge is progressing toward a true account of the world because it is guided by a uniquely effective set of procedures for generating knowledge or testing knowledge claims.
The third wayâwhat I will call the rationality approachâdenies that there is any single method or philosophy of science undergirding science. It instead presents a broad and flexible picture of human rationality and then situates scientific and theological reasoning as points along a single continuum since they both draw upon the same sources of human rationality. Scientists and theologians both seek to employ skillful judgment in their quest to make sense of experience while also attempting to make the best possible choices within a specific context and community.
With three major approachesâmethod, realism, and rationalityâfor understanding science, there are three different ways for arguing for the intellectual legitimacy of theology. In this book, I pick one representative of the method (Nancey Murphy), realism (Alister McGrath), and rationality (Wentzel van Huyssteen) approaches and evaluate the ways they use science to support the rationality of religious belief. While each of these proposals has individual problems, I will argue that all three have a common failing. Each approach makes assumptions incompatible with the best of recent scholarship in the history and philosophy of science. While an explicit goal of most scholars in the field of science and religion is to question how the terms science and religion are set in opposition, most work does so by accepting âscienceâ as a universal categoryâa position that is labeled by historians as essentialism. By accepting the view that all sciences share some essential characteristic, this methodological work ironically serves to reinforce the central assumption that underlies various narratives of conflict between science and religion.7
Like Paul Feyerabend in his classic work Against Method, I will argue that no method or theory of rationality can explain all successful science. However, unlike Feyerabend, my conclusion is not presented as a controversial philosophical thesis meant to provoke positivist philosophers, but as a conclusion that represents the methodological consensus of most recent scholarship in the philosophy and history of science. The rejection of essentialism emerged clearly in the work of historians of science in the last three decades of the twentieth century. Though early historians were influenced by classical philosophy of science (pre-Kuhnian), historians over time began to operate with different assumptions, critical standards, and goals from classical philosophy of science.8 The differences in epistemological assumptions are often evident when comparing histories of science written by scientists and philosophers with those of historians.9 Though recent work in philosophy of science is more nuanced on this point, philosophers tend to be interested in evaluating the rationality of key scientific ideas, usually through the close analysis of central texts, whereas historians attempt to supplement textual analysis with the sociohistorical context of the ideas.10
If the history of science and classical philosophy of science offer differing perspectives on science, then it is significant that most works that compare the methodologies of science and religion use twentieth-century philosophers of science, and not historians, as their primary dialogue partners. Their preference for philosophers of science is understandable since many in the science and religion conversation were trained in philosophy of religion, which makes it natural to appropriate the work of others in their discipline. Yet, the almost exclusive engagement of science and religion scholars with philosophers of science means that the science and religion literature has been disproportionately shaped by traditional philosophical issues of realism, method, and justification. Following other writers in the field of science studies, I will argue that classical philosophy of science has been too isolated from the actual practice of scienceâbetraying its positivist heritageâto put forward plausible explanations about its character. The philosophy implicit within some recent approaches to the history of science offers a helpful corrective element to traditional philosophical approaches to science. One aim of this book is to see what difference a more considered appreciation of the history of science might make for methodological comparisons between science and religion.
Nevertheless, I do not want to portray debates over essentialism as one of historians versus philosophers. Historians tend to address the problem more directly because they need some rationale for including material in their historical narratives and, on a more practical level, determining which content to include in their courses.11 But as I will discuss in the final chapter, the same trend toward anti-essentialism is discernible in recent philosophy of science. Philosophers of science over the past thirty years have become considerably less interested in demarcating science from pseudoscience and have instead turned to work on specific problems within specific disciplines.12
The move to anti-essentialism is evident in Peter Harrisonâs recently published The Territories of Science and Religion, which represents perhaps the most sophisticated work of scholarship produced on the history of the relationship between science and religion. Rather than seeing the categories of science and religion as picking out real features of the world, he shows how the meanings of these termsâand thus their implied boundariesâhave constantly shifted through time. The lesson is clear for scholars who study the relationship of science and religion: once we realize that no common essence unites what we group together under the categories of science and religion, then we will not feel the same impulse to solve the problem of how they fit together.
This book can be understood as an application of Harrisonâs work to methodological debates between science and religion. If anti-essentialism dissolves the categories of science and religion, does that mean the field itself dissolves? The book concludes that there are several ways scholarship in science and religion can move forward even if the terms âscienceâ and âreligionâ do not refer to something universally valid.
Outline of the book
The organization of the book is as follows. The second chapter contextualizes the methodological debates in the field of science and religion, showing the issues and concerns that motivate the debates. The main concern is one of legitimacy: if theology or religion cannot be shown to be a rational inquiry, then dialogue between science and religion is pointless. Scholars were also responding to developments in philosophy of science that implied that science and religion had more in common as attempts to understand the world than has been assumed by philosophers in the positivist tradition.
The next three chapters analyze three prominent models for relating theology and science, each one representing the method, realist, and rationalist approaches to science, respectively. The second chapter focuses on applying the philosophy of science of Imre Lakatos to theology, which has been the most popular methodological option among scholars of science and religion (e.g., Nancey Murphy, Philip Clayton, Robert Russell, Philip Hefner). Lakatosâs work is significant because it presents an explicit method for demarcating science from nonscience, even while recognizing and allowing for the complexity of actual history. If theological doctrines can be recast as Lakatosian research programs, then they meet the intellectual standards of scientific inquiry. I will argue that any theological appropriation of Imre Lakatosâs philosophy of science fails because of flaws in Lakatosâs methodology: his philosophy is too rigid to account for the history of actual scientific practice. Drawing upon the work of historians of science, I will show how he distorts episodes in the history of science in order to fit them into his schema. Lakatosâs philosophy illustrates the problems that are encountered when trying to develop a one-size-fits-all theory of science.
The third chapter examines the proposal of Alister McGrath, perhaps the most well-known theologian in recent years to advocate for the scientific status of theology. McGrath represents a realist approach, arguing that the basic feature that underlies all proper science is its âengagement with the real world,â independent of human beliefs or preconceptions. Moreover, following the work of philosopher Roy Bhaskar, the proper methods that constitute this engagement are determined by the level of nature being studied. Because theology for McGrath is an a posteriori discipline that offers explanations appropriate to the reality it encounters, he argues that it should be considered scientific. Several problems with McGrathâs account will be presented; for example, his criteria for identifying science are widely over-permissive: bankers, gardeners, football players, and so forth all engage reality, but this does not mean their activities are scientific. And it is not clear why âcritical realismâ in science justifies the same approach in theology.
The fourth chapter examines the postfoundationalist project of J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Those familiar with his work may be surprised to see his project as a target of criticism, for he has eloquently argued for many of the same points that I present against Murphy and McGrath. For example, Van Huyssteen has specifically argued that Murphyâs work accepts too many Enlightenment assumptions by accepting triumphalist accounts of scientific rationality.13 Even though Van Huyssteen presumes less than Murphy and McGrath about the universal rationality of scientific practice, he s...
