4. Making Connections: Science and Religion
4
Making Connections: Science and Religion
ALL THEOLOGIANS HAVE a personal history, which to some extent shapes and directs their theological vision. Several elements of my own history have played an important role in shaping my theological agendas. One is my growing realization that my earlier embrace of atheism was a result of failing to understand the nature of Christianity, and grasp the capaciousness of its intellectual vision. Another is my lingering intellectual respect for Marxism, particularly as a tool for cultural analysis. (I sometimes like to think of myself in Gramscian terms as an ‘organic theologian’.) Yet perhaps the most important is my ongoing love for the natural sciences, which has remained with me throughout my life. How, I often wondered during the early 1970s, might it be possible to hold the natural sciences and the Christian faith together?
One intellectual strategy that was popular in Oxford Christian student circles in the early 1970s was to allocate science and faith to different mental compartments. Each was valued, yet they were considered to be compatible yet independent, existing alongside each other in a splendid isolation which was resistant to conceptual clarification. I was not satisfied with this approach, feeling it was essential to develop some form of intellectual framework that would enable me to see my science and faith as parts of a greater whole, rather than disconnected and unrelated intellectual zones. I found a temporary solution to this dilemma in the early 1970s through Charles A. Coulson’s idea that science and religion offer multiple perspectives on reality.
Coulson was then Oxford’s Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and a Methodist local preacher, and I respected both his professional standing as a scientist, and his concern to integrate his faith and science. Coulson offered me a holding position which was perfectly adequate while I explored other possibilities. Over the next thirty years, I assessed multiple frameworks of interpretation which might illuminate this relationship, including Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, Nicolai Hartmann’s stratified ontology, Mary Midgley’s idea of the multiple mapping of a complex reality, Edgar Morin’s pensée complexe, Ken Wilber’s integral theory, and E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience. In the end, I came to the conclusion that while none of these was capable of universal application, each offered at least some degree of clarification concerning how the natural sciences and Christian theology could be seen as elements of a greater vision of human knowledge.
It was clear to me, coming from an interdisciplinary scientific research culture, that Christian theology and different scientific disciplines used different research methods. I found a congenial dialogue partner in exploring this theme in the works of the leading Scottish theologian Thomas F. Torrance, especially his major work Theological Science (1969) which I first read in June 1979. Theologically, the question I had to engage was whether using such different research methods led simply to an uncorrelated and unintegrated plurality of outcomes, or whether there was some way of weaving these outcomes together to disclose a coherent greater picture.
Today, after a thorough and extended exploration of the options, I tend to focus in my teaching and public engagement on three main imaginative representations of the relation and possibilities for correlation of the natural sciences and Christian theology. Each begins from the fundamental recognition of the ontological unity of our complex world, which entails a methodological pluralism in its proper investigation. As these approaches are developed in detail in my more recent works, I shall simply offer some brief comments on each.
1.Science and theology represent different perspectives on our complex world. This is the view I was introduced to by Charles Coulson back in the 1970s, and it remains important to me today. Coulson, an enthusiastic mountaineer, illustrated his approach by asking his readers to join him in an imagined walk around the great Scottish mountain Ben Nevis, and to reflect on how the mountain appeared when it was seen viewed from different angles. Each observer gives the best account they can of Ben Nevis, as seen from their perspective, and then combines these with the perspectives of other observers. The complex structure of Ben Nevis cannot be grasped fully from any single angle of approach. A full description requires these different perspectives to be brought together, and integrated into a single coherent picture. The whole is the sum of these multiple perspectives; no single perspective can be seen as offering a satisfactory account of the greater whole. It is a simple analogy, and it is easily applied to the relation of science and faith. Yet more needs to be said.
2.Science and theology engage different levels of our complex world. This approach recognizes that reality is multi-layered, and that each of these layers needs to be explored in its own distinct way, using a research method adapted to its special characteristics. I came across this way of thinking during the 1990s in the ‘critical realism’ of the social philosopher Roy Bhaskar, and I was the first theologian to make active use of his approach. I lectured twice on critical realist approaches to theology at the annual meetings of the International Association for Critical Realism.
For Bhaskar, each individual science deals with a different stratum of reality, and so has to develop and use methods of investigation that are adapted and appropriate to this stratum. Ontology thus determines epistemology. The insights derived from investigating multiple levels of reality in accord with their distinct identities need then to be brought together to give a coherent and comprehensive account of this complex reality. The scientific method thus simply cannot engage theological questions, or displace theology as a discipline. Scientism improperly assumes, without any compelling evidence, that a method which works well at one level can – and must – be used at every level.
3.Science and theology offer different maps of our complex world.
The philosopher Mary Midgley invites us to think of using ‘multiple maps’ to do justice to the complexity of reality. Different maps provide different information about the same reality. We need multiple mappings of reality because each such mapping is incomplete, and focusses on some specific question that is being asked. The critical task is to lay these maps over one another, and combine the information that each conveys.
A physical map of North America thus does not make a political map of that same region irrelevant, in that we need to map both physical and social realities. Each map is to be respected, but it depends on a specific way of exploring our world, and is incomplete. It needs supplementation with other maps. A scientific map helps us understand how we, as human beings, function – which is important medically. Yet a theological map helps us understand our deeper needs – which is important spiritually.
It will be clear that, in briefly setting out these three approaches to visualizing the relation of the natural sciences and theology, I am implicitly rejecting two significant and influential approaches to the question, both of which I regard as inadequate in terms of their intellectual foundations and outcomes.
1.Dialogue is impossible or pointless. Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of ‘non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA)’ is framed in terms of maintaining and respecting intellectual and professional integrity. Yet Gould’s intellectual isolationism prematurely closes down some potentially significant conversations, and effectively forces individuals who are both scientists and believers to bifurcate their thinking into Gould’s isolated compartments.
2.Theology (or science) can answer all meaningful questions. This intellectually colonialist view holds that certain disciplines are superior to others, and are able to answer all of life’s fundamental questions. There is therefore no point in consulting other disciplines on such matters. Such claims to epistemic privilege are, unfortunately, especially associated with scientific popularism, such as the simplistic and unevidenced assertion that science has rendered philosophy redundant. For some popular scientific writers, such as Peter Atkins or Richard Dawkins, philosophical questions are either meaningless, or can be answered far more effectively and reliably by science.
This intellectually imperialist view is often referred to as ‘scientism’, which can be formally defined as ‘a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.’ Scientism has become the undergirding philosophy of the ‘New Atheism,’ the populist atheist movement that weaponized science in its attempt to discredit and marginalize religion. The movement’s intellectual overreach, which eventually led to its unravelling, was mainly due to its unwise embrace of an aggressive form of scientism which turned out to be vulnerable to charges of superficiality and intellectual circularity.
This leads me to emphasize an important function of Christian theology – the challenging of inadequate secular accounts of nature and humanity. Emil Brunner spoke of the ‘other’ task of theology, namely the critique or subversion of purely naturalist accounts of humanity and nature. One of the reasons why I have been so interested in ‘natural theology’ is that it opens up a deeper way of rendering nature which is much more aesthetically and imaginatively engaging than the somewhat emaciated and impoverished account of nature offered by the scientism of Dawkins and others.
While some, overlooking recent scholarship, still speak of an intrinsic and essential conflict between the natural sciences and theology, I prefer to focus on how an appropriate angle of approach allows us to think of their potential mutual enrichment. I recognize that the natural sciences and Christian theology use quite different methods in their production of knowledge. While dogmatic rationalists assert that this demonstrates that they are incompatible, they are in fact merely different. In recent years, I have made extensive use of Mary Midgley’s notion of multiple intellectual toolkits to cope with the complexity of reality. Midgley sets out this idea as follows:
No one pattern of thought – not even in physics – is so ‘fundamental’ that all others will eventually be reduced to it. Instead, for most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.
Every intellectual discipline develops its own distinct method of engagement and criteria of evaluation, developed specifically to deal with its own area of research. Yet these disciplines may subsequently be brought into conversation with each other, in that their insights, though derived in different manners and relating to different aspects of our world, might lead to an enriched understanding of our world and life as a whole.
Why does this matter? While I personally think that the philosopher John Dewey overstated things when he declared that the ‘deepest problem of modern life’ is that we have failed to integrate our ‘thoughts about the world’ with our thoughts about ‘value and purpose’, I entirely agree with him in recognizing the need to weave together different insights about the world and human existence. To simplify a complex argument, presented in much greater detail in my later writings, science helps us understand how things work; theology helps us grasp what things mean. We need to hold these together, seeing them as integral elements of a ‘Big Picture’ of reality.
And that, in my view, is what theology helps us to do – to recapture the coherence and unity of our world, which is so easily lost, compromised or obscured by the rise of disciplinary specificity on the one hand, and reductionist approaches to nature on the other.
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For a more detailed account, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘Loving Science, Discovering God: An Autobiographical Reflection on Science and Theology’, Theology & Science 17 (2019): 431–43.
For the outcome of this process, see the cautious position outlined in Alister E. McGrath, The Territories of Human Reason: Science and Theology in an Age of Multiple Rationalities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
For the importance of this work to my thinking, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘A Manifesto for Intellectual Engagement: Reflections on Thomas F. Torrance’s Theological Science (1969)’, Participatio 7 (2018): 1–16.
C. A. Coulson, Christianity in an Age of Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 18–34.
Brad Shipway, ‘The Theological Application of Bhaskar’s Stratified Reality: The Scientific Theology of A. E. McGrath’, Journal of Critical Realism 3 (2004): 191–203.
For my critical engagement with this approach, see Alister E. McGrath, ‘The Owl of Minerva: Reflections on the Theological Significance of Mary Midgley’, Heythrop Journal 61, no. 5 (2020): 852–64, especially 853–6.
Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Nonoverlapping Magisteria’, Natural History 106 (1997), 16–22.
See the hopeless overstatements in Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010).
Massimo Pigliucci, ‘New Atheism and the Scientistic Turn in the Atheism Movement’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2013): 142–53; quote at 144.
Emil Brunner, ‘Die andere Aufgabe der Theologie’ in Ein offenes Wort: Vorträge und Aufsätze 1917–1962. 2 vols. Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981, vol. 1, 171–93.
See, for example, Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 156–63.
Mary Midgley, ‘Dover Beach: Understanding the Pains of Bereavement’, Philosophy 81, no. 316 (2006): 209–30; quote at 219. Cf. McGrath, ‘Owl of Minerva’, 853–7.
John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), 255.