Introduction
It’s fatally easy for a discussion about the relation of the natural sciences and Christian theology to become hopelessly abstract. My long experience of teaching theology to undergraduates has convinced me that one of the best ways of helping students to grasp ideas is to introduce them to some interesting theologians rather than just lecture on the basic ideas of theology. Why?
A good theologian aims for a personal synthesis of ideas in which what is believed is woven into a way of life. A theologian is someone whose life has been affected by theology, not just someone who studies theology. He or she tries to weave together core theological themes in a way that seems to make sense and opens up new ways of understanding our world and acting within it. In 2014, I published an intellectual biography of the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966), in which I tried to track and explain the development of his distinctive theological vision. Although I found Brunner’s theology highly engaging, I was even more interested in seeing how he arrived at these ideas, how he held them together and the difference they made to his life. Theology is a way of seeing things that you inhabit, not just something that you think about. It’s about creating an intellectual and moral space in which you can live.
The same is true of the broad field that tries to reflect on what can be learned from the interaction of the natural sciences and Christian theology. There are relatively few people working in this field, partly because it makes such significant intellectual demands. If you’re going to write with authority on this theme, you need to have earned respect as either a scientist or theologian and preferably both. Happily, there are some who have done this and there is much to be learned from them. Each of the writers to be featured in this part of the book has a story to tell about how they became interested in the field, as well as what they found there.
In this part of the book, I will be considering the ideas of three writers who have made significant contributions to this discussion: the theoretical chemist Charles A. Coulson, the theologian Thomas F. Torrance and the physicist John Polkinghorne. Coulson and Polkinghorne are scientists who developed their theological interests; Torrance is a theologian who developed an interest in science. I have greatly enjoyed interacting with all three and know from my correspondence that many others have also found them helpful in exploring the relation between Christian theology and the natural sciences. Interestingly, each of these writers sees some form of ‘natural theology’ as intellectually legitimate and heuristically appropriate. In Chapter 10, we shall explore the potential of natural theology for developing the dialogue between science and theology. Although all three writers focus on the relation of the physical sciences and theology, their approaches are capable of being extended to the biological sciences and beyond.
In what follows, we shall consider how each became interested in these questions and identify some of their chief contributions to the discussion. Most of these themes will be developed further in Part 3. We begin with a writer who provided a critical stimulus to my own thinking about the relationship between science and faith in the early 1970s – Charles Coulson, Oxford University’s first Professor of Theoretical Chemistry.