New Directions in Theology and Science

Beyond Dialogue

Peter Harrison, Paul Tyson, Peter Harrison, Paul Tyson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000538861
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book sets out a new agenda for science-theology interactions and offers examples of what that agenda might look like when implemented. It explores, in innovative ways, what follows for science-theology discussions from recent developments in the history of science. The contributions take seriously the historically conditioned nature of the categories 'science' and 'religion' and consider the ways in which these categories are reinforced in the public sphere. Reflecting on the balance of power between theology and the sciences, the authors demonstrate a commitment to moving beyond traditional models of one-sided dialogue and seek to give theology a more active role in determining the interdisciplinary agenda.

Part I Theology and the sciences

1 More history, more theology, more philosophy, more science: the state of theological engagement with science

Andrew Davison

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240334-1

Attention to natural science is indispensable for theology. That becomes clear once we define the task of theology sufficiently broadly. Science is a necessary field of theological concern once we define theology as thinking about God and everything as it relates to God, as Thomas Aquinas put it at the beginning of his Summa Theologiae.¹ That sort of definition of theology will call not only for clarity and accuracy in our thinking about God—the perennial challenge for theology—but also in our thinking about creatures. The theologian will not be able to think about creatures in relation to God as well as she might unless she understands those creatures as fully as she can: unless she understands what she is considering that way.²

If the task of theology is to consider everything, albeit under the aspect of its relation to God, then attention to the natural sciences will inevitably be part of theology’s task, since the sciences offer a perspective on the nature of reality—on that about which we want to think theologically—for which nothing else can stand-in. As Aquinas’s teacher, Albert the Great, put it, in matters that are open to empirical investigation, “experiment alone provides assurance.”³ His comment brings us to the heart of the sciences and their methods. In this domain, there are no theological shortcuts. Of course, to say that the natural sciences offer an irreplaceable resource is not to suggest that they allow us to dispense with other perspectives.

More widely, the early Dominican tradition to which Aquinas belonged sets an admirable example as to the value of broad learning. Other outlooks, then and now, may wish for the theologian to concern herself only with the teachings of theological texts, venturing further afield only for tightly delimited theological purposes, laid out in advance on theological grounds. In contrast, defending the intellectual perspective of the Dominican order, Aquinas contended that a wide knowledge of “secular matters” is worthwhile: “it is commendable among those professed in religious orders to devote themselves, not only to sacred learning, but to secular study.”⁴ We cannot know in advance where the bearing of things upon theology might lie, so wide-ranging study is good preparation.

Credibility and content

Further back, at the opening of the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo also argued for theological attention to what we would today call the natural sciences. To put it in contemporary terms, Augustine thought that those who represent the theological tradition should try to avoid “howlers”—egregious mistakes—for the sake of their wider credibility. They should be careful and accurate when talking about the workings of the world since, if they are seen to be obviously ignorant or careless in their treatment of earthly things, they will not command respect in their treatment of divine things.

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an unbeliever to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn… If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?⁵

These words have striking contemporary relevance. Whatever else might be said, one reason for having scholars with scientific training and expertise within the theological community is simply to help theological invocations of science be accurate, even if they are made in passing. In itself, however, this concern attaches no inherent value to scientific knowledge for the progress of theology. Getting the science wrong would risk the credibility of theology, not its accuracy.

Accuracy, however, ought also to be in view. Poor understanding of creation can threaten the content of theology. Consider Aquinas’s presentation of why the second book of his Summa contra gentiles was worth writing, dealing as it does with creation and creatures:

Errors about creatures sometimes lead one astray from the truth of faith, so far as the errors are inconsistent with true knowledge of God…It is, therefore, evident that the opinion is false of those who asserted that it made no difference to the truth of the faith what anyone holds about creatures, so long as one thinks rightly about God.⁶

Get our account of creatures wrong, and we will get our theology wrong more generally. The point is not that all theology is natural theology, as if it simply involved some extrapolation from creatures to creator. Rather, if the work of the theologian is to think about everything as it relates to God, if it is her task to think about creatures in light of God, then it matters that she think rightly about creatures themselves.

In that passage from the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas’s suggestion that errors about creatures lead to errors in theology is worked out with little reference to the study of nature in any scientific sense, but its theological logic gestures in that direction. The examples of “error” he gives there are not likely to strike us as particularly good examples of the usefulness of natural science today,⁷ but it is not difficult to think of cogent scientific examples with which to supplement his list. Our theology of the human being, for instance, will be compromised, and has been compromised in the past, if we think of women as deficient men (following the erroneous natural science of Aristotle on that score).⁸ Similarly, in theological ethics, attempts to respond to technological or scientific developments ought to proceed from a thorough understanding of the developments themselves. The church leader or spokeswoman who sets out to say something about mitochondrial DNA transfer, for instance, or about drugs that enhance mental function, would be severely limited without a solid understanding of the science at stake.

Some recent history

Theological interest in science goes a long way back, as we have seen. Nonetheless, it will be useful to focus on some more recent history, not least for the sake of assessing where we stand today.⁹ We might identify the 1960s and 70s as the decades when a field of “science and religion” emerged as a distinct sub-discipline within academic theology. The particular achievement of those years was the establishment of institutional and theoretical apparatus. Societies were founded, including the British Science and Religion Forum in 1975, for instance, as were journals such as Zygon, first published in 1966. Questions of methodology loomed large in the work of Ian Barbour (with later elaborations by John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke), not least in typologies of possible relations between science and religion. In this way, fruitful patterns of enquiry and discussion could at least be imagined, raising the possibility of something beyond either the narrative—so common at the time—of an intrinsic war between science and religion, or the sense that the best one could expect would be a relation of polite indifference between parties.

The decades from the 1980s into the early years of this millennium strike me as presenting a new phase in the science and theology project, with a welcome shift of focus to the study of particular questions. These largely fell into a limited number of scientific subject areas, as represented for instance by the topics covered by a series of conferences co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California (founded in 1981, and affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union), called the “Divine Action Project.”¹⁰ These conferences ran over a long decade from 1992 to 2003, leading to volumes on Quantum Cosmology, Chaos and Complexity, Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and the Person, and Quantum Mechanics.¹¹ Institutionally, and slightly earlier, the first European Conference on Science and Theology was held in 1986. In 1990, these conferences gave rise to the European Society for the Study of Science and Religion (ESSSAT).¹²

Broadly speaking, work in theology and science during this period was often, if not universally, responsive and revisionist. It was responsive in the sense that the agenda was often driven by the sense of a need to respond to particular topics in contemporary science, often seen as problems or challenges, whether in the reductive vision offered by neuroscience, for instance, or proposals about the very early universe, or concerns about the scope that physics might allow for God to act in the world. Work in this period also stands out for the prominence of writers working from theological revisionary perspectives, far from rooted in the classical Christian tradition, as understood historically by the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.¹³ In that, this revisionary outlook reflected the theological mood of the time. Within many Christian communities confidence was not running high when it came to the salience of historic creeds, or of texts previously invested with authority. Consider the situation in the Church of England (my own tradition), whose Doctrine Commission produced two distinctly sheepish reports (in 1976 and 1985) that evinced little by way of shared theological bearings. A significant proportion of those involved could no longer affirm core doctrines in anything like their traditional forms: doctrines that, at least in broad outline, had previously been the united confession of a range of Anglican traditions.¹⁴ In work between theology and science, the doctrinal frame of reference was most notably revisionary when it came to the doctrine of God, with pantheism or panentheism, and Process thought, as significant paradigms. Even at its more traditional, divine immutability and impassibility received little stress, or even support, in writing from this period.

It should be said that for every Arthur Peacocke, who described himself as “taking a broadly panentheistic view of the relation of the being of god to that of the world” and “a broadly “modalist” understanding of the Trinity,”¹⁵ there were others, such as Ted Peters or Robert Russell, working from a considerably less revisionary outlook. A more universal characterisation of work in this period, therefore, in terms of theological style, might come in noting how much of this writing proceeded without sustained discussion of particular, historical theological texts. Essays written in this period—taking the Divine Action Project volumes as indicative—can proceed almost entirely ungrounded in any historical theological writing. Indications of previous thought, where present, can be broad and made without discussion of specific texts.¹⁶ A citation instance, grounding discussion of a distinction between primary and secondary causation in the thought of Aquinas can be no more specific than a reference to a treatment of that tradition in a book by Austin Farrer.¹⁷

In this second of three stages I am laying out we also see notable work in historical scholarship, especially from the 1990s onwards, not least from John Hedley Brooke, Ronald Numbers, and Peter Harrison.¹⁸ Such historical study proved particularly important for further establishing the credibility of a conversation between science and theology beyond an assumed paradigm of inevitable opposition, by showing that the relationships between science and religion had often been very different in the past.¹⁹ Conflict is clearly not the only possible paradigm, once we see that other paradigms, often fruitful ones, have prevailed in other periods. In terms of institutional consolidation, the 1990s saw the endowment of chairs or lectureships in theology and natural science, for instance at Princeton Seminary, Cambridge, and Oxford.²⁰ The International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) was founded in 2001, and the journal Theology and Science in 2003 (published by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley). Its theological centre of gravity has typically been less revisionary than that of Zygon.

That brings us to the third stage in this proposed three-part scheme, which is where we stand today.²¹ I suppose, following Hegel, that there is always a tendency to see one’s own period as the third stage of something. As a demarcation between the current period and the previous one, I propose the short interval between the final conference in the “Divine Action Project” series (the “capstone” conference of 2003)²² and a conference convened just three years later in 2006 by the Vatican Observatory (this time without the co-sponsorship of the Berkeley Centre) on “Creatio ex Nihilo Today,” published as Creation and the God of Abraham ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Theology and the sciences
• Part II: ‘Science’ and ‘religion’ in the public sphere
• Part III: Theologies of science
• Afterword: The bigger picture: science, religion, and historical change
• Index