1.1 Three Initial Reactions

Science-engaged theology is far from our own invention.Footnote ⁴ Lots of scholars have recently been calling their work ‘science engaged’ and, of course, different scholars mean different things by the phrase. Like all concepts, science-engaged theology emerged from within a community and continues to be shaped by the scholarly interactions of that community. One of the primary purposes of this Element is to allow that community to grow. As such, we thought it helpful to bring readers up to speed by outlining three initial reactions that we have heard over the last few years which have shaped our vision of science-engaged theology. One consequence of this choice, however, is that the remainder of this section jumps directly into some of this Element’s thorniest issues, most of which will be returned to with more introductory exposition at later points. Some readers may prefer to jump ahead to Section 1.2.

1.2 Science-Engaged Theology Done Well

In Section 1, we wrote that we don’t want our reminder to be simplistic, such as could happen if it became a mere slogan. Christians have more or less always seen the science of the day as a source for theology, but since the dawn of modernity, and especially since 1800 or so, a series of debates have muddied these waters. It would be naïve of us to simply endorse using science as a source for theology without consideration of these muddy waters, and likewise naïve to overlook the work that already has been done to clear the water – which has made science-engaged theology possible. We want to fill in all this background before giving our positive account of what science-engaged theology is in Section 5. It is helpful to phrase these prior debates as three questions, each of which we will address in a section of this Element.

• How can theologians use science as a source given the apparent fragile truce/war between science and religion? We will answer this question in Section 2 by discussing how science-engaged theology relates to the pre-existing field of science and religion.

• How can theologians employ scientific tools given theology’s marginal place in the modern university? In Section 3, we make an intervention into these ongoing debates about the identity and position of theology in relation to other disciplines.

• What is it that theology is meant to engage with? We will explore the question of scientific unity and disunity in Section 4 with the help of twentieth-century philosophy of science.

Having cleared these muddy waters our constructive proposal is built in response to a further three questions. Why science? What is a source? How should this source be used, exactly? In Section 5, we speak more positively of what it means to remember that the sciences are among the sources of theology.

Our overall argument might be summarized in the following way. It turns out that the much-hyped war/truce between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ is not what it appears, because these disciplines are not two distinct natural kinds or transhistorical categories, but socially contingent groupings of diverse and intertwined knowledge-seeking enterprises. On the one hand, some have used science as a proxy for rationality or emancipation and religion as a proxy for superstition and oppression. On the other hand, others have sought to declare theology queen of the sciences. Only after dissolving these petty power plays can we see that science-engaged theology is a sign of theologians’ quiet confidence in their position in the university. Developments in twentieth-century philosophy of science strengthen this claim further by speaking of the plurality of the sciences. The sciences only appear unified through the disjunctive continuity established by trading zones and pidgin languages. These are the spaces and skills that science-engaged theologians should seek to join and practise.

Science-engaged theology is a disposition for theologians to modestly use the best available tools when making empirical claims, alongside (and not in competition with) all the other sources and tools that a theologian uses to know God and all things in relation to God. We provide short examples of science-engaged theology by incorporating weblinks to the work of others throughout our text; offline readers will find the links collected in the appendix.Footnote ⁷ Using science as a source is one thing, doing so well is far more difficult. To that end, we conclude this Element with rules of thumb to point out where the pitfalls lie and how to best avoid them.

2.1 Double Mythbusting: The Myths (of the Myths) of Conflict and NOMA

We are not opposed to myths. As teachers, how could we be? Myths allow stories to convey lessons. Even apocryphal stories can be useful; the problem with myths is not necessarily their grounding in history. Whether or not Laplace ever told Napoleon, ‘I have no need of that hypothesis’, it can be a useful teaching tool to express the concern that the Newtonian universe can lead to Deism. Nor is it a problem that myths simplify complex stories. Good teachers simplify and narrate; it’s how teaching works. On the other hand, some myths include implicit lessons that the teacher does not intend, and the result is that the student is misled. The more often the teacher tells the myth, the more likely it is that they too are being misled by their own pedagogy.

2.2 Countless Typologies

The relationship between science and religion can be construed in many different ways, depending on the stories that you take as paradigmatic, or the historical event that you invest with mythological significance. Clearly there are more options on the table than the two models cited in the last section.

One of the ways that this field has tried to handle such an unruly and contentious history is to create typologies that simplify and organize the various stories into stable categories. The most famous typology, which in a sense founded ‘science and religion’ as its own academic discipline, is Ian Barbour’s fourfold typology: conflict, independence, dialogue and integration.Footnote ²¹ Barbour’s typology has been undeniably useful as a tool for challenging the monolith of the myth of conflict and reaching wider audiences because of its simplicity.Footnote ²² The possibility of conflict was maintained, but it was no longer the dominant theme. It is, therefore, unsurprising that since Barbour, anyone who is anyone in science and religion has tried their hand at the typology game.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s scholars made minor adjustments to the basic fourfold typology, seeking to account for historical complexity simply by adding more types or sub-types. In the 1980s Arthur Peacocke published an eightfold typology, which Robert Russell reformatted into a ‘four-dimensional model which allows for a continuum between opposite positions’.Footnote ²³ Nancey Murphy appropriated H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic culture and theology typology for science and theology, hoping that theology could transform science.Footnote ²⁴ In 1995, John Haught developed a fourfold (and alliterative!) typology: conflict, contrast, contact and confirmation, which closely paralleled Barbour.Footnote ²⁵ Willem Drees offered a ninefold typology in 1996 that sought to show new ideas interact with different areas where science and religion overlap.Footnote ²⁶ In 1997, Philip Clayton constructed a sevenfold typology around the power relations between science and theology.Footnote ²⁷ Reference PetersTed Peters’ 1998 eightfold typology distinguished between scientific materialists and scientific imperialists, as well as between Roman Catholic authoritarianism and Protestant fundamentalism.Footnote ²⁸ In 2004, John Polkinghorne tried to keep it simple by returning to a fourfold typology (deistic, theistic, revisionary and developmental). Polkinghorne saw all his categories as sub-categories within Barbour’s previous ‘dialogue’ type, which differed on theological method and epistemology.

By the turn of the century, constructing a new typology was becoming an increasingly complicated task. In 2010, Mikael Stenmark published a (very sophisticated) typology of all these typologies! Alvin Plantinga’s 2011 Where the Conflict Really Lies is slightly different, designed to make the argument that it is naturalism, and not natural science, that is incompatible with Christian theology. Plantinga’s contribution highlights that, despite appearances, typologies are not neutral. Like all maps, typologies prioritize some features, erase others and convey normative arguments. The most recent book-length typology is Neil Messer’s Science in Theology.Footnote ²⁹ The quest for the perfect typology has dominated the field of science and religion for several decades.

Typologies are not in themselves bad, but with such a proliferation, we should step back and evaluate their effect. There are three particularly interesting results from all this. The first is that when typologists organize various paradigmatic stories into separate categories, they perpetuate old myths and even create myths of their own. Contrary to his status as the poster-boy for the independence type, Gould’s famous essay, ‘Non-overlapping Magisteria’ is about the entanglements at the borders, not an apology for clear territories.Footnote ³⁰ Draper writes of an ‘antagonism’ between ‘two contending powers’ but these powers are not science and religion, but the political powers that had co-opted Christianity. Typologies are a way to standardize the stories that we tell about the stories and cast the storytellers into simple heroes and villains.

The second result of the age of typologies is a growing distinction between historical description and normative argument. Typologies create a buffet of choices for how the reader wants the fields to relate. It challenges the monolithic myth of conflict not by questioning the historicity of the paradigmatic stories of conflict in the past, but by offering alternative possibilities. The rhetorical move here is to say, ‘So what if the Church put Galileo on trial? That was then; now we are opened-minded and interdisciplinary. We have the choice to carve out a different future where science and religion unite – provided religion has learnt its lesson’. This co-opts the myth of progress in order to regain some modest place for religion in a scientific world. It is for this reason that typologies have been useful to the apologetic impulse within the science-and-religion field and also why they continuously place theology on the back foot. It must be emphasized that while typologies aim to create more choices, they can simultaneously limit the scope of possibility by giving pre-set options.

The third result, as exemplified in Stenmark’s work, is an increasing awareness that it is not only the relationship between science and religion that is up for debate, but that ‘science’ and ‘religion’ themselves are contested categories. If this logic is followed, it starts to erode the whole typology game.Footnote ³¹ Despite all the attempts to improve on Barbour, the reliance on typologies has entrenched another myth; the myth of science and religion as natural kinds or transhistorical categories.

Science-engaged theology should not be conceived as just another category within some wider typological framework. If the claim of science-engaged theology was only that theologians should use science as a source for theological research, then this might be a sub-category of the dialogue or integration types. But we have in mind a science-engaged theology that goes a step further by embracing the inherent instability of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as continually contested and entangled concepts. As such, it is important to recognize that science-engaged theology necessitates a theology of science. That is, an interrogation of the metaphysical foundations for what we happen to call ‘science’ here and now on a global level. We hope that this will further encourage a theology-engaged science, where scientists engage in theological-philosophical reflection on the concepts and methods they use on a local level.

2.3 It’s Complicated! An Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian

Bernard Lightman aptly summarizes what happened next among historians of science and religion: ‘instead of uncritically accepting it as an accurate description of what had occurred in the past, scholars began to treat the conflict thesis itself as a product of history, constructed by historical actors, and therefore requiring analysis’.Footnote ³³ The consequences of this move – which essentially proposed seeing the conflict model, and by extension other types, as products of historiographical manufacture – served to bolster a new thesis among these historians. This new thesis could be called, It’s … complicated.

And those historians are right; it is complicated! However, in the words of Ronald Numbers, ‘complexifying history seems to have little to recommend it besides its truth … the turn to complexity has left most people yawning’.Footnote ³⁴ Sometimes boring truth is exactly what’s needed. Still, can we say more than ‘It’s complicated’ without reverting back to, ‘Science and religion interact in exactly x number of ways’? Yes we can. Numbers pursued the mythbusting strategy (see his trademark book, Galileo Goes to Jail), but he also searched for what he called ‘mid-scale patterns’.Footnote ³⁵ Mid-scale patterns fall short of proposing a timeless metanarrative like Conflict or Harmony, but still assert discernible themes or trends within the contingencies of history.Footnote ³⁶

Our approach may at first glance look much the same as Numbers’ twofold strategy (mythbusting and mid-scale narratives), but we think we can go yet another step further. We can best introduce our approach by reference to three Gifford lecturers who all have contributed to what has been called, ‘the gospel of complexity’.Footnote ³⁷ From three recent Gifford lecturers – an Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian – we have found a version of complexity that we can sign up to defend and that shows why a different approach to the whole idea of science and religion is needed. John Hedley Brooke, David Livingstone and Peter Harrison each add a layer to the story and, taken together, they offer a way to progress beyond the study of ‘science’ and ‘religion’, thus conceived.

2.4 Conclusion

This section sought to answer the question: how can theologians engage science given the apparently fragile war or truce, between science and religion? The first part of our answer explored the myths behind the idea of either a war or a truce. The second part of our answer argued that no matter how carefully you negotiate, no matter how subtle your typology, this approach is riddled with myths that need to be deconstructed. The third part of our answer used the work of three historians to show one way that such a deconstruction might proceed. Simply put, the categories of science and religion, as they are understood in much contemporary discourse, are deeply misleading. Science-engaged theology is not simply another way of describing Ian Barbour’s category of dialogue since dialogue supposes discrete conversation partners.

3.1 ‘Science’ as Modernity’s Border Cop

The causes and character of modernity have been a much-debated topic in late-twentieth-century theology. Some point to Duns Scotus, others to the Reformation, some to the American founding, and the list goes on. We think that Louis Dupré is on the right track: ‘modernity has reached us in waves’.Footnote ⁵⁴ One significant wave portending theology’s modern fate was Rene Descartes’ foundationalist solution. But a solution to what? Dupré cites Descartes’ foundationalism as primarily ‘overcoming the scepticism that has resulted from the nominalist crisis’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This may be right but it strikes us as needlessly overintellectualizing. Put more simply, if all of Europe disagrees about what political and human life is for – or even if it is for anything at all – the basis for resolving political and moral disagreement disappears, and all of Europe could descend into violence. Which is exactly what Europe did in Descartes’ time, for thirty plus years.

Descartes and the rest of the boys in the band – Hume, Kant, Mill – each had their own spin on the solution. How to resolve moral, political and epistemological disagreements in a situation of reasonable pluralism? Perhaps no one put the problem more evocatively than John Locke:

If the summum bonum amounts to a taste preference – Lobster or cheese? Luther or Zwingli? Friendship or fornication? – then Christian natural law lacks the power to guide us to our own happiness. One way to diagnose modern theology’s crisis is as a series of failed attempts to meet this challenge; a way to keep natural law working in the face of pluralism.

An increasingly ideological generation of thinkers turned this quest for certainty into a movement for emancipation. Dupré mentions Voltaire and Gibbon, but the theme of liberation is widespread. For example, here’s Thomas Jefferson:

Of course, the irony of this statement was lost on Jefferson because, in his mind, there were exceptions. Some people – namely, Africans – were born predestined by race to wear saddles on their backs and Jefferson thought he had the science to prove it.Footnote ⁵⁹ We can see how the ciphers of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are being used not only to signal epistemic polarities of ignorance and insight, but political ideas of slavery and freedom.

When figures like Draper and White are read as late and minor characters within this larger narrative, we can better see what they were up to. They were two of many who joined Descartes and Locke on their quest for certainty and joined Voltaire and Jefferson on their quest for emancipation. They created something they called ‘science’ that was good, and something called ‘religion’ that was bad. Our interest, theologically speaking, is what all these figures share; namely, advocating for a universal and neutral criterion that could sort the rational wheat from the superstitious chaff. If deductive certainty or subjective taste preferences are the only options, into which box do theological and ethical claims fit? It was never clear. William Wood labels those who would exclude theology and ethics from the rational discourse of public institutions, such as universities, the field’s ‘border cop’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The intellectual descendants of these Enlightenment border cops are still with us. One well-known example is Russell McCutcheon, who not only lets in scholars with a so-called view from nowhere – Jefferson’s science – but has begun permitting academic work that critiques relations of power, sex, politics, class and race (i.e., uses the methods of critical theory).Footnote ⁶¹ This, finally, is something different from modernity’s standard policing strategy and it bodes well for theology. However, by playing this card, McCutcheon gives up on his sorting mechanism, which sought to exclude the (so called) non-scientific study of religion. Why so? Because plenty of confessional theologians use the tools of critical theory to address such power relations. In fact, Reference McCutcheonMcCutcheon’s 2013 article is ostensibly about how he wants to allow in all deconstructing critiques of religion but not Karl Barth’s. (His reason? Because, ‘science!’) The argument is, shall we say, strained.

Where we agree with McCutcheon is in his attempt to say that academics should make themselves open to challenges from all sorts of quarters, especially (but not exclusively) those concerning relations of power, politics, class, race and gender.Footnote ⁶³ But McCutcheon appears only willing to learn from religion provided that theology has learnt its lesson and now plays by science’s rules. Beyond mere inconsistency, this argument boils down to refusing to learn from the sources that disrupt the status quo: the modern capitalist order, or the feudal order, or bureaucratic management structures or – seemingly closest to McCutcheon’s heart – the liberal rationalist order. Put another way, ironically, McCutcheon’s sort of science is conservative and can be imperialistic or colonialist. Our preferred phrasing would be, theology, like the sciences, is not committed to being a good law-abiding citizen.Footnote ⁶⁴ Sometimes theology stirs up the reigning order – like it did in the British evangelical abolitionist movement over (need it be added) scientific objections that held that the races were fundamentally unequal. Sometimes it’s science that stirs things up – like findings that challenge gender binarism over (need it be added) theological objections to the contrary. Scholars need not abandon commitments to creed or tradition, but they must be willing to challenge, and be challenged by, prevailing assumptions.

3.2 Throwing the Furniture Around: Theology’s New Boldness

What were theologians up to amidst the border cops’ battles? For the most part, the church played defence by affecting a relation of harmony. Theologians of different traditions did so in different ways. The theologically conservative agreed to play the foundationalism game and doubled-down that the Bible could provide deductively certain, universal and neutral knowledge, from which we get the doctrine of inerrancy.Footnote ⁶⁵ The theologically liberal refused the game and, mostly via Kant and Schleiermacher, forced theology to seem more wissenschaftlich by (oddly enough) retreating into the private sphere of subjective religious feelings.Footnote ⁶⁶ Written the same decade as Draper’s book, Charles Hodge captures those two options, making clear his own preference for the former:

By asserting that ‘all the facts’ are knowable from an inerrant Bible, Hodge thought he was sticking to his guns, not retreating. However, seen in the context of the nineteenth-century university both paths were defensive manoeuvres.

One young Swiss theologian had a decidedly different take. Seeing the subsequent years as a ‘period of deep shadow’Footnote ⁶⁸ for theology, Karl Barth rejected the premise: Schleiermacher’s and Hodge’s options were not the only choices. Theology could still be real theology, in fact it could only be theology, by choosing none of the above. The problem with this aspect of the Barthian revolt was, ironically, what endeared Barth to so many. By so forcefully saying Nein! to the leading contenders of the age, he left himself less room for his alternative.Footnote ⁶⁹ As the novelist Flannery O’Connor said by way of praise, ‘I distrust folks who have ugly things to say about Karl Barth. I like old Barth. He throws the furniture around’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Barth wasn’t only throwing furniture; he was pointing to a different kind of theology. But O’Connor was right. A third way between modernity’s options would have to be extracted from Barth’s vision, rather than following directly from it. In this section and the next, we trace two of these theological movements that followed Barth out of the cul-de-sac of modernity: the Yale school, postliberalism associated with George Lindbeck and Stanley Hauerwas, and the Radical Orthodoxy of John Milbank.

George Lindbeck’s career became so associated with the founding of postliberal, Yale school theology, we sometimes forget where he started. Together with his colleague, Hans Frei – who was the premier interpreter of Barth for the American audience – Lindbeck’s Nature of Doctrine was written to make sense of doctrinal change in the ecumenical movements of the 1980s. Lindbeck and Frei endeavoured to carve a middle path between the conservative focus on doctrinal truth and the liberal non-cognitive view of human spirituality. Drawing on Clifford Geertz and building on the linguistic turn in philosophy, Lindbeck labelled the conservative position cognitive-propositional and the liberal view, experiential-expressive.

The Nature of Doctrine succeeded in naming, in a theoretical way, the theological cul-de-sacs of modernity (Hodge’s and Schleiermacher’s, as we have been calling them). Lindbeck’s third way was called the cultural-linguistic model. Theological knowledge is locally situated in the biblical narrative because all knowledge is situated in – take your pick – paradigms, traditions, practices, language games, and cultures. The only way to validate doctrinal statements is intratextually, from within a culturally specific system of signs and meanings. Not only was the foundationalist quest for certainty a sham and always bound to fail, theology can now be seen as on par with other sciences, which are similarly embedded within their own paradigms. Theology can speak with a newly recovered confidence and has room to accept the findings of other sciences, which are no longer a threat. As Kathryn Tanner once put it, this is theology’s ‘new boldness’.Footnote ⁷¹

The theological ethicist, Stanley Hauerwas, took this insight further. ‘In his reception of postliberalism, Hauerwas … added a flavor of cultural crisis to the discourse on postliberal theology, implying that intratextuality could be taken more ontologically as a way to propose an alternative social vision for theology (compared to the liberal and secular vision that permeated liberal theology)’.Footnote ⁷² Even the first few pages of Resident Aliens, Hauerwas’s most-read book, are enough to show how he advances the trajectory of Barth, Lindbeck and Frei. Hauerwas and co-author William Willimon relate the following anecdote:

Here Hauerwas extends Lindbeck’s grammatical metaphor of Christian doctrine, which conceived of theological claims being comprehensible only within a language, into something more. According to the anecdote, like diaspora Jews living as resident aliens in Babylon (or South Carolina), Christians not only have a distinctive language, but the church has its own culture, ethics, politics, culinary practices and even, according to Tanner, its own geography.Footnote ⁷⁴ What Hauerwas adds to the previous postliberalism is an element of countercultural politics. For Hauerwas, the church must resist the existing liberal order, with its false dogmas of separation of church and state, capitalism and inalienable rights.

Lindbeck, Hauerwas and others around this time placed theology on an equal footing with other disciplines by emphasizing that all knowledge exists within paradigms, traditions or frameworks. One can see this idea ripple across many aspects of academia in the late twentieth century, from Rudolf Carnap’s principle of semantic toleration, to Kuhn’s paradigms in natural science (see Section 4.2), to Alasdair MacIntyre’s traditions of ethical discourse. The shared insight is that the criteria for evaluating truth claims or ethical actions, for determining appropriate methods and practices, is tradition-specific. The most powerful critiques are those that come from within, rather than from some fanciful position of neutrality.

Before we get to the second post-Barthian response to modernity, we need to head off two objections that are especially relevant to using their thought for a science-engaged theology: George Lindbeck’s alleged relativism and Stanley Hauerwas’ alleged sectarianism.

Lindbeck had sought to clarify his position via what has become a ‘somewhat notorious’ illustration.Footnote ⁷⁵ ‘The crusader’s battle cry “Christus est Dominus,” for example, is false when used to authorize cleaving the skull of the infidel (even though the same words in other contexts may be a true utterance). When thus employed, it contradicts the Christian understanding of Lordship as embodying, for example, suffering servanthood’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Some interpreters worry that Lindbeck is downgrading the truth value of doctrinal claims.

If Christus est Dominus is a false utterance because of what the crusader has in his ‘heart’, it appears that truth is less than correspondence. This worry is parallel to what some philosophers of science have said about Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms (see Section 4.3). We suspect that much of this line of attack is rooted in a conflation of all non-foundationalist epistemologies with the extravagances of someone like Richard Rorty. In fact, Lindbeck’s view of truth is far from Rorty’s. The crusader’s words are indeed false, but not because Lindbeck thinks that truth can be less than correspondence. He thinks he is upgrading truth over the cognitive-propositional view that dominated conservative Protestant wings of the church throughout late modernity (e.g., Hodge’s). As Kevin Vanhoozer once put it, metaphors ‘are not susceptible to literal paraphrase, not because they are noncognitive but because they have a surplus of cognition’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Therefore, we judge that postliberal theology succeeds in pointing a way for theology’s new boldness without giving into the worry of relativism.

We can easily see why Hauerwas raises similar concerns. He declines to provide publicly accessible reasons for why Christians do and say the things they do, as the rabbi struggled to explain it to the Jewish youth of Greenville – apart from saying, ‘you are different’. Why are public reasons so important? If Christians themselves are convinced by the gospels and Jews by the Torah, isn’t that enough? Hauerwas’s primary critics in this regard have been Jeffery Stout and, Hauerwas’s own doctoral supervisor, James Gustafson.Footnote ⁷⁸

Gustafson’s worry is that Hauerwas’s theology is Wittengensteinian fideism. For such theologies, Gustafson argues, ‘there are various language games in culture: scientific, religious, aesthetic and moral. Among these it is clear that the language of science and the language of religion (including theology) are totally incommensurable. The language of religion is therefore exempt from critical assessment from any scientific perspective; it is free from criticism from all perspectives other than its Own’.Footnote ⁷⁹ If Christian theology is untouchable from other disciplines, if it exists in an intellectual ghetto, then Gustafson fears it ‘isolates Christianity from taking seriously the wider world of science and culture and limits the participation of Christians in the ambiguities of moral and social life in the patterns of interdependence in the world’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The heart of this worry is not that Hauerwas downgrades truth, which perhaps would be understandable: if everything is true (within its own game), perhaps nothing is true. No, the real concern is that Christians will have no way to self-correct our own traditions or settle disagreements internal to the church.

Here we return to our own ‘somewhat notorious’ example from Section 1.1.3. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that ‘gluten-free [breads] are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist’.Footnote ⁸¹ To a real Wittengensteinian fideist, this statement operates solely within the religious language game, so the key terms – Eucharist, invalid, bread and even gluten – can be defined however the Church wants. But the pope isn’t a Wittengensteinian fideist. Is Hauerwas himself guilty of such thinking? No. In his response to Gustafson, Hauerwas says explicitly: ‘I have avoided all appeals to a Kuhnian-like position [which is] … designed to protect theological conviction from possible scientific challenge’. Instead, Hauerwas – and here we agree – suggests that rather than granting ‘science qua science an overriding veridical status’, we should ‘indicate which scientific conclusions should be considered and why’.Footnote ⁸² We need to be specific and consider the implications of each scientific theory, study or discovery for theology on a case-by-case basis.

3.3 The Supreme Empress of the Sciences?

John Milbank, speaking for the perspective known as Radical Orthodoxy, has a different version of how theology can best relate to other fields of inquiry. Like Barth, Milbank sees that there is no neutral ground or view from nowhere. As he opens his influential Theology and Social Theory, ‘Once, there was no “secular”’.Footnote ⁸³ All knowledge is situated within paradigms, or as Milbank says, are ‘traditioned reason’ that cannot be abstracted ‘from the specificity of time and place’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus far, we can recognize how Milbank has influenced our own thinking, as he influenced Peter Harrison, and why he deserves his place alongside other post-Barthian movements that have given new confidence to theologians working in secular universities.

However, Radical Orthodoxy takes this logic a step too far. John Milbank’s boldness often morphs into an audacity that claims theology should dominate other disciplines, rather than receive the wisdom they have to offer. In the end, this only creates a new myth of conflict. Milbank’s conflict is not between science and religion, but between what he describes as competing theologies. Milbank takes the argument that all reasoning is traditioned a step further than the earlier postliberals (or us) by claiming that if the other sciences do not acknowledge that the world and our ways of knowing participate in God, then they are meaningless. We might say that Milbank has swapped out the Logical Positivists verificationism (theology is meaningless; see Section 4.2) for his own Platonic participationism (everything except theology is meaningless).

After modernity, Milbank writes, ‘theology, in the face of secular attack, is only on secure ground if it adopts the most extreme mode of counterattack: namely that unless other disciplines are (at least implicitly) ordered to theology … they are objectively and demonstrably null and void, altogether lacking in truth’.Footnote ⁸⁵ But what would it look like in practice to order other disciplines to theology? What does ‘demonstrably null and void’ imply about, say, a particular theory in biology or sociology? Demonstrably by whom? We could even go all the way down this path, and establish Departments of Christian Mathematics, a possibility that Milbank raises – jokingly, we think.Footnote ⁸⁶

What is Milbank’s solution to the problem that modernity created for theology? The last section of Theology and Social Theory begins with ‘an assertion: of theology as itself a social science, and the queen of the sciences for the inhabitants of the altera civitas, on pilgrimage through this temporary world’.Footnote ⁸⁷ It is critical that theology take up its place as queen of the sciences, Milbank argues, but not just for inhabitants of the city of God; all other disciplines quite literally depend upon it.

Note that very (very) few figures in the Christian tradition refer to theology as the queen of the sciences. It too is a much-told myth, a slice of revisionist history. Of late, the scholars who refer to theology as queen have been quick to add, Oh, but not the bad sort of queen. Not like ‘Boadicea, Queen Victoria, and the like’ (says Gavin D’Costa), ‘not a high-handed dominatrix’ (John Webster), ‘only a “queen” of the sciences if humility determines her work’ (Hauerwas).Footnote ⁸⁸ If you find yourself clarifying your metaphors so often, maybe find another metaphor.

Our problem is not with the hierarchic relations conveyed by the metaphor. Neither is our problem with the asymmetry. Nor indeed is our problem with saying theology studies a more excellent object than other fields, as unfashionable as it feels to say this out loud. We agree with Thomas that theology is the noblest in some respects. If, ex hypothesi, it so happens that one of the sciences concerns the happiness of all humans and the flourishing of non-human animals, the planet and the cosmos, that science would be noble. No, our problem with theology being ‘queen’ is that it’s not a part of the historic Christian tradition and, no one, it seems, has a solid understanding of what it would mean, even if it were.

The earliest recorded source that refers to theology by the exact phrase regina scientiarum seems to be from Galileo – more on this shortly. Other than a throwaway line from Erasmus’s notes, we get the language most immediately from Immanuel Kant, but he gave the crown to metaphysics.Footnote ⁸⁹ As far as we have found, the first writer to use a variant of the phrase is Philo, for whom queen of the sciences (βασιλίδα τών επιστημών) was astronomy.Footnote ⁹⁰ The first Christian writer to use the regal metaphor appears to be Clement of Alexandria, when he says, ‘wisdom is therefore queen [κυρία] of philosophy’, which is closer, but nowadays this is a minority translation.Footnote ⁹¹

Galileo turns out to be one of the few writers who takes a step back and asks, what does it mean to say that theology (or any discipline) is queen of the sciences? Like us, Galileo suspects some ‘equivocation in failing to specify the virtues which entitle sacred theology to the title of “queen”’.Footnote ⁹² He contrasts two main options for interpreting this metaphor. The first interpretation holds that a queenly discipline is one that includes all knowledge that is also learnt in other disciplines, but the queen alone has better methods. Imagine, he says, that both theology and geometry can tell you the area of a circle, theology by direct inspiration from God and geometry from careful study. If theology being queen means that, ‘these others must rather be referred to her [theology] as their supreme empress, changing and altering their conclusions according to her statutes and decrees’, Galileo concludes that this meaning ‘will not be affirmed by theologians who have any skill in the other sciences’. He knows full well that any scientist priest will not turn to the Bible for help with geometry; he will, and should, read Euclid. If theology was such a queen, she would be ‘an absolute despot’, who without having trained in medicine or architecture, undertakes ‘to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim – at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices’.Footnote ⁹³

According to the second interpretation offered by Galileo, a queenly discipline studies ‘a subject which excels in dignity all the subjects which compose the sciences, and because her teachings are divulged in more sublime ways’. This was Galileo’s preferred interpretation, and it is also quite close to the answer Thomas gives to the first question of the Summa. Thomas doesn’t say anything about a queen, of course, but he does say that theology is the noblest discipline. Why? His reason is that it studies the worthiest subject matter (God), is directed towards humanity’s true purpose and proper end (aeterna beatitudo) and is the most certain science (by revelation).Footnote ⁹⁴

The consistent teaching of the church has been that ‘other sciences are called the handmaidens [ancillae; literally, household servants] of’ theology, which, we guess, could maybe imply theology’s position as a noblewoman, but not necessarily a queen.Footnote ⁹⁵ We assume this is what Milbank and countless others – including us in a previous articleFootnote ⁹⁶ – had in mind when they perpetuate the myth that ‘everyone’ used to say that theology is the queen of the sciences. Bonaventure gives perhaps the most thorough analysis of theology’s relationship to other disciplines in the medieval period, though even he does not use the metaphor.Footnote ⁹⁷ What Bonaventure does say is very close to the view we are proposing in this Element. Namely, that ‘all branches of knowledge serve theology, and therefore she takes illustrations and uses terms pertaining to every kind of knowledge’.Footnote ⁹⁸

For Thomas, Bonaventure, Clement and, much later, John Henry Newman, the heart of the handmaiden metaphor is that theology needs the help of others to do its job. Theology is on the hook, as it were, to do great and purposeful things, but because human intelligence ‘is more easily led by what is known through natural reason’, theology cannot do its job without other disciplines.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thomas’s examples here all speak of a dependent relationship between the sciences. ‘Just as the musician accepts on authority the principles taught him by the mathematician’, as the science of perspective depends on geometry, and as political science needs military science (because ‘the good of the army is directed to the good of the state’, not the other way round), so also is theology related to other fields of inquiry.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Kathryn Tanner provides a more recent version of Thomas’ argument. Tanner speaks of the ‘both exalted and, at the same time, lowly’ vocation of theology.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Theology seeks to be ‘comprehensive’ and ‘exempt no element or aspect of the universe from theological comment’.Footnote ¹⁰² Yet, ‘theology does not try to insure this comprehensiveness by generating out of its own resources all there is to say on these matters’.Footnote ¹⁰³ Tanner is worth quoting at length, not least because of her use of different metaphors than the queen trope.

Like the queen, these metaphors are not perfect. With Hauerwas we want to retain that theology does have a habitation of its own to return to, the church, and a language to speak or key to sing in. And yet, when a theologian seeks to provide a comprehensive commentary on human life or creation, she needs all the tools and best insights that the wider academy can offer.

We think that this should be enough to express the sort of dependence relationship that the Christian tradition maintains.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In case more is needed, Clement makes his use of the metaphor unambiguous. He renders the analogate, household servant, as handmaiden, of which Hagar is the archetype: ‘Sarah having no child, assigned her maid, by name Hagar, the Egyptian, to Abraham, in order to get children. Wisdom, therefore, who dwells with the man of faith … was still barren and without child in that generation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ So in Clement, wisdom or theology needs other sciences in order to be generative, to do its job, as Abraham and Sarah needed Hagar. It is not even in view that Sarah is somehow made a queen through all of this, whatever we now make of the more abusive aspects of the original story.

Now that we have surveyed something of the (largely absent) history, what type of queen does Milbank have in mind when he gives his grand ‘assertion: of theology as itself a social science, and the queen of the sciences’? Milbank is closer to Galileo’s first interpretation: theology is not only a queen, but a supreme empress. The problem with such views is best summarized by Linn Marie Tonstad. Tonstad does not want to sacrifice the bold and prophetic voice of theology to a liberal accommodationism but worries that Milbank’s methods – his attempt to regain theology’s place as queen – tend towards authoritarianism. One clue of this authoritarianism is that Milbank cannot account for, nor abide, diversity within theology.

Tonstad points out that although Milbank’s theology submits ‘devotionally to the judgement of God, he nonetheless retains a God-like capacity in relation to the neighbour’ – or the neighbouring sciences.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For example, Milbank can pronounce that ‘other disciplines … [are] about nothing whatsoever’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This is why he needs to portray a unitive theology, nostalgic for Christendom, cannot admit theology’s past and present moral failures, and doesn’t abide ‘less aggressively certain Christianities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Such nostalgia is not only a problem for Milbank, John Webster’s ‘theological theology’, perhaps the leading post-Barthian alternative to Radical Orthodoxy, sometimes betrays a similar trend, according to Tonstad. Tonstad concludes that rather than merely claiming to be the only truly humble form of unmastery in the university, theology must ‘structure itself and its relations to other disciplines in ways that actually embody’ repentance for past failings. Namely, for theology to engage the other sciences as a resource for self-critique, and as Bonaventure taught, as a source for theological insight.

Milbank and Webster should be well-positioned to learn from diverse sources in precisely the way that Tonstad and us propose. When Milbank describes, Christianity as ‘the sociality of harmonious difference’ – we couldn’t agree more. But where Milbank then writes ‘it is so important to reassert theology as a master discourse’, we argue that harmony requires teachability.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Milbank, and to a lesser extent Webster, sometimes fail to acknowledge is that theology has spoken, at times, for a deeply unjust tradition and only with the aid of handmaidens has theology been able to learn to continually repent of this injustice.Footnote ¹¹¹ Christian theologians have often taken common terms and subverted them, often with countercultural effect: ‘Lord’, ‘love’ and ‘person’ come to mind.Footnote ¹¹² Perhaps something similar can be done with ‘queen’ – but if such subversion is to be genuine then it must be accompanied by a sincere repentance for past mistakes, present limitations and continual dependency on a wide range of sources.

We do not want to swing the pendulum back to where it was before Barth. There are more options than a theology that is either a serf or a queen. What such a conflict driven picture misses is the essentially porous nature of university faculties, including the faculty of theology. Theologians trained and teaching in university settings ‘depend heavily on insights from other disciplines in order to do their work’, just as academics housed in other departments frequently draw upon, and may need to presuppose, theological ideas; ‘theologians work inside the university, without the possibility of clearly separating its practices from their own’.Footnote ¹¹³ The boundaries between natural science and theology are already more porous than many have acknowledged, especially those who are engaged in a perceived struggle for either a true modern foundation like McCutcheon’s border cop or a postmodern master-narrative like Milbank’s queen.

3.4 Conclusion

In this section, we evaluated the totalizing narratives that come from Jefferson’s descendants (external to theology) and Barth’s descendants (internal to theology). In short, McCutcheon thinks that all theology is bad science, and Milbank thinks that all science is bad theology. But some of Barth’s other descendants, namely, the Yale School or postliberal theology, are more successful in the efforts to defend theology’s place in the university while retaining its bold, prophetic voice. If we are to avoid relativism and sectarianism, theology must claim that the Christian truth is the only truth, and it applies to everybody. Yet the Christian truth is not the same as any one theologian’s theology. If we need evidence for such a distinction, we need look no further than the abuse and injustice that characterises so much church history. Theology needs the help of other disciplines to speak truly of God and all things in relation to God.

4.1 From a Great Empire to Small Allotments – and Back Again

We’ve seen that the term ‘science’ doesn’t mean the same thing in all times and places, and it has sometimes served as a proxy for emancipation, rationality and progress – or a characteristically modernist version of these. What, then, is it that science-engaged theologians are meant to engage with? Here, we have in mind something narrower; the subset of academic disciplines which investigate the world with empirical tools, especially since the Scientific Revolution. But even science in this narrower sense has its own controversy and backstory. Telling this story, or at least selected episodes from it, is the purpose of this section.

Before that, a word about where we are headed. As we will see shortly, there have been many attempts to unify the various scientific disciplines and methods into ‘one thing’. None of these attempts have worked, and the effort is often politically motivated. Instead, we can embrace the disunity of the sciences. Doing so is good for theology because it forces theologians engaging with the sciences to stay local and specific. Not only does specificity allow for the kind of deep engagement that can shed genuinely novel insights on theological questions, but it also facilitates more equal interpersonal collaborations that lie at the heart of contemporary university research culture.

In the 1830s, after the decline of natural philosophy – which had held science together as scientia, the sum of the liberal arts – William Whewell bemoaned what was lost along the way.

This ‘evil’, as Whewell called it, was partly caused by the lack of ‘any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively’. He solved that problem by proposing a list of possible labels for the new profession. One from his list that he felt was ‘not generally palatable’ was the word, scientist.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It caught on nevertheless.

Fast forward one century. In the 1930s, long after the term proved more successful than Whewell could have hoped, some detected signs that the pendulum had swung too far. Philosopher Edgar Brightman – remembered today as the mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr – wrote of the consequences of this unification. Instead of ‘infinitely small allotments’, Brightman faced a too great empire: ‘to derive a concept of verification from one field and to clamp it down on all fields is, even when baptized by the sacred name of scientific method, not method, but methodological dogmatism … A mathematician verifies his results by one type of procedure, a physicist by another, an historian by another’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The very fact that Brightman had to argue for this was a sign of how much had changed since the 1830s. What should have been relevant differences between disciplines were elided or flattened out. Brightman was trying to counteract the myth that, seeing as they were all scientists, they were subject to the same methods, be they biologists, historians, anthropologists and so on.

Much of the work relevant to our question in this section – in science-engaged theology, what is theology meant to engage with – oscillates between these poles. Nowadays, outside the confines of philosophy of science journals, we appear to have gone too far towards Whewell’s empire. We don’t think anything is strange with the question, ‘What does science think about that?’ or the statement, ‘Science teaches us that …’, but we should. There is more than one type of unity and in what follows we look at various misguided attempts to unify the sciences.

4.2 The Unifiers

Whewell’s proposal for propping up the fallen empire by coining ‘scientist’ might seem a bit too silly to have much effect. In the same article, he reviewed Mary Somerville’s 1834 best-seller, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, and he there found a less silly effort:

Her strategy of looking for unity via the conjunction of language and math would prove prescient for the other unifiers who would shortly appear on the scene. Here, we mention four schools of thought that sought to unify science: via the language of laws, via logical analysis, via methodology and via reductionism.

From the start, the search for unity was indistinguishable from broader political and social concerns. The same individuals who formed the German School of 1847, seeking to unify human physiology in Newtonian physics, also fought to unify Germany in the Professor’s Revolution in 1848.Footnote ¹¹⁷ These German liberals wanted to revolt against feudalism without provoking the anarchy of the French Reign of Terror. Put simply, the hope to unify nature through universally applicable natural laws was bound up with the unification of Germany with common national laws.

An appeal to laws was not the only way to unify science. In order to know if the laws of one science (like physiology) could be inferred from another (like physics) we would first need a shared language. This was the kind of semantic unity of science sought by the logical empiricists, such as Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. One way to understand the context of such a project is to consider the following question: as Whewell’s empire of natural philosophy crumbled into the allotments of natural, human and social sciences, what was left for philosophy?Footnote ¹¹⁸ It seemed like all the substantial work was being annexed. The answer given by the logical empiricists was to focus on logic, which had recently undergone a revolution in the work of Gottlöb Frege and Bertrand Russell.

This, in turn, led to verificationism, popularized in the English-speaking world by A.J. Ayer, whereby synthetic statements were deemed meaningful (capable of being either true or false) only if they could be empirically tested, at least in principle. Statements that could be confirmed by observation or testing could be placed in a single logical language system, giving a unity to science. Statements, like theological and ethical claims, that could not be verified in this way were not only unscientific, they were deemed meaningless. Carnap and Neurath understood that for them, as for Jefferson in the eighteenth century, to be ‘scientific’ was to be emancipated, to join an open realm of debate based on evidence, to participate in a new international world order of cooperation realized in institutions such as UNESCO and the World Health Organization.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Karl Popper tried something slightly different. Rather than a shared language for verification, Popper tried to unify the sciences with a method that could demarcate science (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity) from non-science (e.g., Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis).Footnote ¹²⁰ What worried him most was that, to Marx or Freud, every economic event or aspect of human behaviour could be interpreted to confirm their own theory. For Popper, good science is risky; it sticks its neck out, so to speak. Scientists start off with bold, imaginative conjectures, but these must then form concrete predictions that the scientist attempts to falsify. We will return to defend a version of ‘riskiness’ in Section 5.3.1. For now, we can say that Popper provides a clear example of how unity and demarcation (and authority) go together.

Today, by far the most common meaning of the unity of science is closer to Hilary Putnam’s and Paul Oppenheim’s argument that microreduction is a hypothetical ideal for all science, towards which scientist should all work.Footnote ¹²¹ Microreduction pictures the unity of science in the following way. If we want to understand why Dundee United football fans act as they do – a sociological question – we should study the psychology of, for example, Cole, one of their biggest supporters. But Cole’s psychology is explained by his brain chemistry and genetics, which are neuroscientific and biological matters. However, if Cole cheers for Dundee because of his genes, what else is his DNA but fundamental particles, so really to understand Dundee United football fans comes down to physics. This picture of the sciences arises out of two convictions. First, that all you need to do to explain wholes (like the whole person) is explain the parts (the brain, the vital organs, the hormones) and once you have done that, there is nothing left to explain. The second conviction is that physics consists in discovering natural laws that determine the behaviour of all things everywhere in the universe. The result is the conclusion that if only we had a complete and perfect understanding of physics and the laws of nature, we would have a unified theory of everything. All knowledge and practical power would be within reach.

4.3 The Disunifiers

After this culmination of the hope in the unity of science, the pendulum started to swing back, away from seeing science as a great empire. Two philosophers of science were pivotal in this reversal, Mary Hesse and Thomas Kuhn. In 1961, Hesse published two books. The first, Science and the Human Imagination argued that ‘the sciences … have always been closely related to their cultural and religious environment’. Scientific practices not only have room ‘for recognition of the transcendent’ but also can be expected to change along with the cultural and religious systems in which it is found.Footnote ¹²² In the same year, Forces and Fields argued against a single scientific method, because a wide range of criteria might justify the acceptance of a hypothesis.Footnote ¹²³ Her most famous text, Models and Analogies in Science (1963) continues a more pluralistic view of scientific explanation by arguing for the eliminable role of models (not just theories) and analogy (not just deduction or inference) in scientific reasoning. Already in Hesse’s work we can begin to see why pluralism might be an equalizing force in interaction between scientific and theological research.

Where Hesse’s work was quietly appreciated, Thomas Kuhn’s was loudly critiqued. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) argued that standards of justification, the reasons we give for thinking something to be true or false, are influenced by the larger historical, psychological, religious and sociological contexts in which an idea is produced. He thus proposed a theory of scientific change, not as an inevitable march of progress, but as rare, revolutionary ‘paradigm’ shifts that change the fundamental assumptions under which ‘normal science’ is practiced. The classic examples of this are the shift from Ptolemy’s to Copernicus’ solar system, and from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. For Kuhn any two paradigms are incomparable, even ‘incommensurable’, because ‘scientists will work in a different world’ after the revolution.Footnote ¹²⁴

Kuhn did not disunify science as much as Hesse’s work had started to do. He still tended to lump different disciplines together and his all-encompassing paradigms stretched hundreds of years. But both thinkers historicizing of science opened the door to a more localized approach to the question of what science is and how it works. That so many followed Hesse and Kuhn through the door labelled Disunity (or Pluralism) is probably as much to do with the timing of their publications as it is their ground-breaking arguments.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the Cold War, to speak of disunities in science was tantamount to speaking against this vision of liberal, democratic, global peace. In the 1960s and 1970s the political landscape went through its own revolution. The backlash against McCarthyism, the rise of feminism and increasing multiculturalism interpreted scientific unity as hegemonic and imperialist.Footnote ¹²⁵ Today it is the disunity of science movement that champions progressive policies of protecting marginalized voices and celebrating diversity. This shift in the meaning of ‘unity’ is evident in the earliest dissents. In 1975, Paul Feyerabend advocated for anarchist science, because ‘[uniform] science that resists alternatives to the status quo’ must be overcome.Footnote ¹²⁶ In a much-cited speech a 1978, Patrick Suppes argued that “The irreducible pluralism of languages in science is as desirable a feature as is the irreducible plurality of political views in a democracy’.Footnote ¹²⁷ By 1980, the pendulum had swung back in favour of the infinitely small, specialized allotments that Whewell lamented.

So, where did philosophy of science go next? Imre Lakatos and Larry Lauden sought to moderate Kuhn’s picture of scientific change by introducing the idea of simultaneous competing research programmes and traditions of inquiry. This included more competition and localized differences than Kuhn’s paradigms. Others, under the heading of ‘Science Studies’ started to focus on how non-cognitive factors impact scientific enquiry. Still others, the so-called Stanford School, offer a daringly metaphysical version of disunity. Nancy Cartwright argues that the world is ‘dappled’, where physical laws work on a more regional rather than universal basis.Footnote ¹²⁸ John Dupré argued against essential natural kinds because things can be accurately described and categorized for different purposes, a view he called ‘promiscuous realism’. Although excitingly provocative, Cartwright’s and Dupré’s pluralism claims too much. There is no simple bridge from pluralism in scientific practice to a metaphysically disjunctive or promiscuous world. Instead, the most compelling form of scientific pluralism is more empirically restrained.

As characterized by Stephen Kellert, Helen Longio and C. Kenneth Waters, ‘the pluralist stance’ maintains that whether the world could ever, even in principle, be explained by a single, fundamental set of principles is ‘an open, empirical question’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Maybe the world and everything in it can be completely explained by a couple of perfect equations or laws, but maybe it cannot. In the current state of science, complete unification looks doubtful, but really, we have no way of knowing. In the meantime, scientific pluralists argue, it makes little sense to take unification to be the goal of science or the standard by which we judge all scientific methods and theories.

Rather than seeing the sciences as offering a pile of irrefutable facts about the world, we should think of scientific equipment, methods and theories as offering different perspectives on the world. Scientific perspectivism, as proposed by Ronald N. Giere, starts off with a comparison to ordinary colour vision. Most humans have three types of rods in their retina, but some have only two or even one (leading to colour blindness). Many birds have four rods, and bees even see ultraviolet. When asking ‘what colour is it?’ there is not just one correct answer. This irreducible diversity is not because of a metaphysically disunified world; it is because colour arises out of an interaction between the object and the observer. Different answers to the question, ‘what colour is it?’ can sometimes be incompatible (someone can be wrong), but they can sometimes be ‘consistent and complementary’ (someone can be using a different optical system). Colour perception is a real but partial perspective on the world.

What is true of ordinary visual observation, Giere argues, is also true of extended forms of observation using scientific instruments, and of theoretical perspectives. He writes, ‘as an instrument may be able to record either infrared or ultraviolet, but not both, theoretical principles may deal with mechanical forces or with electromagnetic forces, but not both. Newton’s equations, I would say, define a particular mechanical perspective on the world; Maxwell’s equations define an electromagnetic perspective’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Even Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is a more general replacement of these two, only offers a partial perspective, as shown by how it differs from the perspective of general relativity. Whether two perspectives can ever be unified, without losing information on either side, cannot be known in advance. Pluralism itself is a local rather than universal thesis.Footnote ¹³¹

Like maps, scientific theories, models and explanations represent the world in partial and selective ways. When faced with seemingly competing alternatives, we should choose the best map for the purpose in mind. Here, ‘best’ depends on what type of question one is seeking to answer, what type of intervention one is hoping to achieve. This is not relativism; not all maps are equally good, but neither are they all designed for the same purpose. The London Underground map is ideal if you want to travel by subway, but not if you want to have an accurate representation of distances, depth, or just about any other information. As Mary Midgley and John Ziman write, ‘scientific knowledge is incurably pluralistic … Like geographers, scientists “map” the world in different ways for different purposes. These “maps” often overlap, yet there is no proof that they can be extended and unified into a “theory of everything” that covers all reality’.Footnote ¹³²

This metaphor might remind readers of the work of Peter Harrison and David Livingstone discussed in Section 2.3. We can now see more clearly what the problem is with the idea of a single map for the territories of science and religion. It’s not only that, in modernity, such a map was drawn on disputed premises and with questionable motives, but that the sciences themselves consist in an almost uncountable number of different ‘maps’ (theories, models, explanations, methods, etc.) for understanding the natural world. Moreover, we do not have a ‘master map’, that explains how all the partial and limited versions fit together. The only practical response to such a situation is to continue to work at the local level, to create the best partial and limited pictures of the world we can, while looking out for possible connections to the maps that others are drawing.

Our advice to stay local should not be confused with disciplinary isolationism or theoretical protectionism. If disunity means saying, ‘psychologists should ignore biologists, and theologians ignore psychologists’, then this would undermine our vision for science-engaged theology. On the contrary, the questions that most need asking and the problems that humanity faces are big complex problems. These problems require both a heightened specialization and also deep and sustained collaboration. The best way to make progress on big questions is not for one person to tackle it all at once, which leads to simplified generalizations. The benefit of ‘staying local’ is that it allows us to speak across disciplinary lines and set up focused trading-zones.

4.4 Speaking Pidgin in Science-Engaged Theology

The pendulum might be swinging back yet again. The philosophers that have most championed scientific plurality and disunity now acknowledge that their view resembles some aspects of Neurath’s International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Neurath consistently attacked his colleagues’ reductionist views of unity, which supposed a common foundation of laws or sense-datum language.Footnote ¹³⁴ Instead, when asked what the unifying programme of his Encyclopedia entailed, Neurath answered, ‘the maximum of co-operation – that is the program!’Footnote ¹³⁵ The purpose was not to propose a new speculative system, ‘the system of sciences’, but to draw attention to the ‘gaps, difficulties, and points of discussion’. As John Dewey summarizes in his entry in the Encyclopedia, ‘it is essentially a co-operative movement, so that detailed and specific common standpoints and ideas must emerge out of the processes of co-operation’.Footnote ¹³⁶

So, what went wrong? How did Neurath get from co-operation, if that was all he really wanted, to the flawed idea of verificationism? His mistake was in thinking that ‘to establish unified [co-operative] science … a unified language with a unified syntax is needed’.Footnote ¹³⁷ The problem is, of course, different disciplines (scientific and otherwise) do not all use terms in the same way, nor do they employ the same logic or inference structures to draw conclusions. Moreover, if the last century has taught us anything it is that we should not all be made to speak the same language or reason in the same way – such a project of translation and homogenization can only be imperialistic. This would lead to a loss of knowledge that was uniquely encapsulated in a particular community’s way of speaking, reasoning and acting. If we can’t rely on translation to a single lingua franca, how can we communicate? One unappealing option is to follow Kuhn and give up on any hope of communicating across these incommensurable paradigms. But translation and incommensurability are not the only options.

Peter Galison argues that when we look at the history of science, we see neither absolute unity with a shared single language, nor incommensurable languages lost in a sea of relativism.Footnote ¹³⁸ Rather we find tireless, if halting, attempts to trade ideas and learn from one another. But without a shared system of logic, or ‘semantic hygiene’ as the logical empiricists sought to create, how does such collaboration work? Galison’s answer comes from a project created towards the end of the Second World War:

The various sub-cultures of science coordinate their practices and theories through a series of localized unifiers and disunifiers to form overlapping (interdigitating, Gould would say) trading zones. A ‘trading zone’, in Galison’s words is ‘an arena in which radically different activities could be locally, but not globally, coordinated’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In such trading zones, researchers collaborate not by a neat and wholistic translation from the language of one discipline to that of another, but instead in greatly simplified pidgin languages.

To theologians of a certain generation, our endorsement of pidgin languages may sound alarm bells. To understand and respond to the two worries that theologians may have, we first need to say a bit more about three stages in the life cycle of languages, as they interact with others: pidginization, creolization and repidginization.

As linguist John Holm describes, although pidginization results from the contact of two linguistic groups, this encounter is never an equal one.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The more powerful group’s language becomes the superstrate language, contributing far more than the weaker substrate. In the creation of a pidgin, both languages are changed (although unequally so); vocabulary is reduced, syntax is simplified, resonances of meaning are sacrificed and understanding can be severely compromised. So far, this is not a problem. However, the worry arises when a temporary pidgin becomes a creole, which is a new fully-fledged language with native speakers who never learnt the original two languages. It should be clear why theologians might be worried about the creolization of theology and science, particularly in a context where the sciences have more social capital than the church.

Theologians like Stanley Hauerwas have given voice to this concern. Infamously, Hauerwas has opposed Christians speaking of justice.Footnote ¹⁴³ Not because Christians should not care about justice, but because the only discourse with which Christians can do so with any currency is the discourse of ‘human rights’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ While the concept of human rights may have started out as a pidgin with roots in the Christian tradition, it has now become a creole that masks the biblical understanding; justice begins with obligation to others in covenant.

Repidginization is the stage in the death of a language when there are no fluent native speakers alive any longer, but their children still use occasional terms and phrases without living in the full linguistic world of their parents. Brent Strawn has expressed concern that the Old Testament is already undergoing repidginization within the church.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Of course, one can imagine a different scenario where repidginization occurs because of creolization; there are no native speakers anymore because everyone is speaking the new creole. We share Hauerwas’s and Strawn’s concern about creolization and repidginization, but it is misplaced if it is levelled against what we are proposing for science-engaged theology.

When we describe science-engaged theology as a trading zone, and advocate theologians using a pidgin to communicate with academics from other fields, we are not imagining a total translation of theology to a lowest common denominator language, deprived of Christianity’s embarrassing particularity. We are imagining using terms of particularity, temporarily abstracted from their wider linguistic framework. The key term here is temporarily; science-engaged theologians must remain always ready to explain the larger picture that lies behind their concepts, as well as to listen to scientists as they explain the foreign world that lies behind seemingly familiar language. A science-engaged theologian is, in this sense, like a merchant-sailor or an explorer and not a resident alien. Even as the theologian learns more and more ‘cog-sci’ or ‘evo-bio’ lingo, and the pidgin becomes more developed, they should not forget their own native tongue, nor should they uncritically adopt aspects of ‘sciencese’ into their everyday speech. To that end, science-engaged theology must remain, first and foremost, ‘theological theology’ done by theologians who belong to ecclesial communities.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Science-engaged theology should not be anyone’s first language; science-engaged theology must not become creole. For this reason, we should resist the pull towards setting up a Journal of Science-Engaged Theology or creating undergraduate or PhD programmes in such a field.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Maybe in the future it will be possible to speak of ‘scientific theology’ (or even better, biological theology, psychological theology, geological theology) the way we speak of historical theology, philosophical theology, or eco-theology – to refer to theologians who are particularly adept and attentive to the use of the tools of historical scholarship, philosophical analysis, or ecology in their constructive work – without fears that we are somehow diluting theology or selling-out (speaking creole or a secular lingua franca). But we are not there yet.

4.5 Conclusion

In this section we’ve sided with philosophers of science who express an empirically driven agnosticism about whether there will ever be a complete and unified description of the world. This may seem surprising for two reasons. First, Christian theology has an a priori reason to affirm the (at least theoretical) unity of science, namely the unity of creation and the divine mind. But remember, we are not claiming that the world is disunified, metaphysically. We are making an epistemological claim; we do not know how or if the perspectives and maps of empirical enquiry fit together. And, pragmatically, it does not always benefit the goals of a particular area of enquiry to prioritize such unity. One of the consequences of this pluralistic stance is that it curtails our ability to draw metaphysical conclusions from science. This is not to abandon realism, but to suggest that if one wants to do metaphysics then perhaps the tools and methods of metaphysicians should be closer to hand, rather than those of empirical scientists. Science might cast significant doubt on some metaphysical systems, but ‘science itself won’t answer many metaphysical questions associated with scientific inquiry’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ We need a theology-engaged science to help with such questions of determinism, order, intelligibility and flourishing. The result, we hope, will be a mutually enriching exchange of goods between theologians and scientists.

Second, it may seem odd for us as theologians not to join in Whewell’s grief over the loss of natural philosophy, which was an empire of knowledge ordered towards God. As argued in the previous section, we do not think that the only way for theologians to speak with boldness and positively contribute to the contemporary academy is to be queen of the sciences, empress of natural philosophy, or to remember with nostalgia the bygone days of Christendom. Christendom no longer exists, and what exists on roughly the same landmass that it once did is the fragile and imperfect European Union. The EU provides something of a metaphor for our vision of the university. It is a trading zone where national boarders remain, and cultural and linguistic differences can be celebrated, but where there is also a shared set of standards allowing for increased collaboration and the relatively free movement of goods and peoples.

The discussion of the unity and plurality of the sciences might seem like a roundabout way to answer the question, ‘what is this “science” that science-engaged theologians are meant to engage with?’ We’ve provided no universal criteria for science that might demarcate it from non-science. Part of the purpose of this section has been to show why we cannot give such a clear definition. The search for such a definition presupposes that there is a quality that both unifies all the various sciences and scientific pursuits, and does not include any other pursuits (history, philosophy, theology, etc.). There is simply no such quality. Science refers to a diversity of ways to understand the world for different purposes, many features of which will partially overlap with other pursuits.

But a lack of clear borders does not make the label of science meaningless. There is still a loose grouping of empirically driven perspectives on the natural world that we might term scientific. Nor does this blurred boarder license an anything goes relativism. There are still norms to each of these various practices and explanations. There are still better and worse ways to explain the world. It just does not get us very far to use the word science for all the good ways and non-science, pseudoscience, metaphysics or whatever else to describe the bad ways.

When theologians engage the sciences, they cannot engage them all at once, nor even a whole sub-discipline (biology), perhaps nor even a sub-area of sub-discipline (mood disorders). However, they must have sufficient awareness of the sub-discipline to make prudent choices about where to set up their stall, to use our metaphor of trading zones again. They will have to negotiate local customs and norms, without necessarily adopting them as norms for theology. Building such a knowledge base and, more importantly, establishing the relationships necessary for such work, may be hard and slow. Science-engaged theology is not for academic tourists.

5.1 Why Engage the Sciences as a Source?

We concluded Section 3 by writing of the porous nature of different fields of study. In Tonstad’s words, theologians ‘depend heavily on insights from other disciplines in order to do their work … theologians work inside the university, without the possibility of clearly separating its practices from their own’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ It’s almost beside the point to debate whether a given field, such as theology, engages with others; it always already does. Almost beside the point, but not entirely. Theology already engages other disciplines, but it does have some choice over which disciplines to engage at any given point. Throughout our argument, we took for granted that theologians will want to use science as a theological source – if only certain worries, some legitimate, some imagined – are overcome. We think this is a safe assumption, sociologically-speaking, but it might be objected that we haven’t fully motivated the claim that theologians should engage the empirically oriented disciplines.

Given the arguments made in preceding sections, we cannot rely on scientistic assumptions regarding the superiority or unity of science. Instead, we might follow philosopher of science John Dupré, who looks for a non-question-begging way to value empirical enquiry and exclude pseudo-science. He points us in the direction of intellectual virtues. Theology’s epistemic virtues will be numerous, but included in this list will surely be Dupré’s ‘empirical accountability’, ‘coherence with other things we know’, and ‘exposure to criticism from the widest variety of sources’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Theologians have additional reasons to esteem these virtues: the conviction that God speaks through the material world and that humanity is prone to idolatry. The question is not if theology should engage the sciences, but how and when to do so well. These are very broad reasons for why theologians should engage with findings of particular scientific fields and studies, which by their nature will be narrow. ‘But surely’, our imagined interlocutor might reply, ‘theology already has its own sources to help inculcate such epistemic virtues. Why does it need science too?’ To answer this retort, we need to take a closer look at the sources of theology.

5.2 What are Theological Sources?

Where do theologians get their ideas? Against what criteria are doctrines evaluated? It’s tempting to diffuse the question by drawing parallels to other disciplines – chemists have the periodic table, Catholics have the catechism – but it’s not that easy. When Protestant theologians debate sources, they primarily, almost exclusively, think of the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a principle articulated at the height of modernity, which claimed that doctrine should be revealed by ‘Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Some of our more erudite readers might think of Richard Hooker’s tripartite system of reason, revelation, and tradition.Footnote ¹⁵² John Owen wrote, ‘there is no need of Tradition … no need of the Authority of any Churches’, experience and Scripture are enough.Footnote ¹⁵³ So, how many sources should we have? Wesley counted Four, Hooker counted Three, Owen counted Two and Zwingli, at points, seem to count only One.

Some interlocutors have heard us call science a source for theology and asked, ‘Well, which one is it? Does science go along with reason, experience, or perhaps as a standalone fifth source?’ The typical framing of the debate about theological sources, taken from early modern England, leads to this framing. Such debates are red herrings. This very idea of counting sources only leads to placing them in competition and debating which level of revelation can be reduced to another. A classic example is seen in the question, are Scripture and tradition one source or two? Since Scripture is sacred text for a particular tradition, and a tradition is sustained reflection on these particular texts, there is no clear way to answer such a question. This desire to count and order sources is characteristically modern and deeply mistaken. Theological sources are not discrete pots of information. To follow this path is to head straight back to viewing science and religion as transhistorical categories, imagining that their sources (reason and faith) are natural kinds, further entrenching the myths of Conflict and NOMA. In short, if we answer the questions ‘how many sources?’ and ‘which pot does science go in?’ in a straightforward way, we just return to the faulty map from which we started.

To avoid this fate, we need to (again!) get behind these modern debates and see that sources are not discrete pots of information, nor are the categories natural kinds. There is no objective way to count theology’s sources. The same can be said for sources of scientific reflection. As Peter Godfrey-Smith reminds us,

There are helpful parallels to be drawn between the recent discussion of the reliability of science and the religious upheavals that precipitated the English Civil War. At root, both episodes are fuelled by disagreements about authority, social power and even epistemic justice. As such, our preferred answer to the question of where science fits among the sources is to say that sometimes it is helpful to view the sciences as an extension of one particular source, sometimes as implicated in all four Wesleyan sources, and sometimes as something a bit different from any.

We must be mindful then that labelling sources of knowledge can be a power-play, and so is deciding which source best fits science. This is what was really going on in Draper’s and White’s narratives, where science was a proxy for forms of Christianity that prioritized rationalism. One way to interpret the invention of ‘scientific creationism’ or ‘Genesis science’ is as another, rather less successful, attempt to co-opt the power of science to champion just one source, namely Scripture. The co-option of science into an internal theological debate about which source is king has been unhelpful. To dissolve these power-plays, such as whenever theologians say, ‘science is on my side’, it is helpful to see how scientific practice and activity is implicated within all four of the traditional sources.

Reason is the most obvious place to start, which of course is all that is meant by medieval scientia. It was natural philosophy that morphed into what we call natural science. As explored in Section 3.3, scientia and philosophy have long been considered the handmaids of theology. But the natural sciences as we currently understand them do not neatly fit into the category of reason. Although they are a discourse based on evidence, logic, debate and intellectual discernment, they are also practices of testing, observing, measuring and recording. There is a sense in which the practices of the sciences rationalize, by narrowing, replicating and operationalizing, the theological source of experience.

Experience is often thought of as ‘the runt of this epistemological litter’, but not because it is weak or unpersuasive.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ To the contrary, experience or rather ‘enthusiasm’ is shunned because it is too powerful. When religious experience is taken to be private, immediate and ‘self-validating in an uncontestable way’, then it can be used to grant unchecked power as well as to create unbridgeable divides between insiders and outsiders.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

The solution is clearly not to deny the place of experience in theological reflection. Instead, we should accept a much wider notion of experience than is portrayed in these early modern debates.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Experience includes the testimony of creation, the movements of providence and the political-material structures of human culture, practices of spiritual formation and liturgical participation, the intransient affects that move human bodies,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ in addition to the secret interior movements of the Holy Spirit. Some of these forms of experience are more readily publicly available than others. But this, in the end, is no different from the highly localized and specialized experiences that give rise to scientific knowledge, which require years of training, talent and the right environmental conditions.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ We do not want to be misunderstood; appeals to the authority of experience in theology and the contemporary sciences are not always the same kind of claims. Our point is that we cannot differentiate them, and claim legitimacy for one or the other, by simplistic appeals to a private-public or immediate-mediated divide. Furthermore, sometimes a scientific form of experience, such as an observation or an experiment, may also be a religiously significant experience.

Scientific discourse, and ever-changing groups of methods for investigation, can also be described as a tradition, as Larry Laudan argues.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Moreover, this empirical tradition has always been historically entangled with Christian commitments regarding the order and intelligibility of the universe, the cognitive consequences of sin and humanity’s place in creation. When we present scientists as doing something theologically neutral (or secular) we can forget that the empirical sciences are a traditioned perspective for reading the natural world in a particular way.

This brings us to the source of Scripture. When issues like Darwinian evolution and Genesis 1–2 dominate, as they too often do, then it seems inevitable that Scriptural authority will be pitted against scientific authority. If they are not in Conflict, the best we can hope for is a truce. Such a truce is sometimes captured in the divide between the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature metaphor, and the division of theology into ‘revealed theology’ and ‘natural theology’. But such categories conceal the constant interplay between the various methods of Scriptural interpretation and the methods of empirical investigation. It is impossible to disentangle the allegorical method of Scriptural interpretation and the delightful details of medieval bestiaries. Luther’s prioritizing of the plain-text readings, and Huldrych Zwingli’s more exclusive insistence on the ‘natural sense of Scripture’ should be part of any story of the intellectual origins of the scientific revolution.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The rise of historical-critical hermeneutics in the late nineteenth century was an attempt at a new scientific approach to Scripture, a correspondence that became explicit in Rudolf Bultmann’s project of demythologization. This story has not ended and we continue to see how new scientific methods for reading nature are applied to biblical scholarship, as in cognitive linguistics, and as postmodern theories of reading impact scientific thought and practice. A science-engaged theology project may use social psychology to evaluate Pauline exegesis, as Simeon Zahl has done, or it might use cognitive linguistics to analyse the Gospels, as Elizabeth Shively suggests, or it might draw on contemporary botany to explore the biblical metaphor of grafting, as in Kimberly Kroll’s work.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

The sciences can be used as a source in a myriad of ways. If we stick too closely to the Wesleyan quadrilateral then it might seem like, as part of experience, science can only vivify. What might it mean for a scientific theory to vivify doctrine? Hopefully it will not descend to what Jonathan Jong fears, ‘the old preacher’s trick of saying, after recounting some anodyne personal anecdote, “and doesn’t that rather remind us of Jesus?”. That which makes for bad preaching also makes for bad theology, science-engaged or otherwise’.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ This makes for bad theology because it is a trick. Like shady ad men in the sixties, it makes you feel like you experienced something real (engaged science in a meaningful way), whereas in reality it was just a catchy slogan. If the sciences are part of what Wesley means by ‘confirmed by reason’ then we are left with little more than fact checking. This runs the risk of treating science naïvely as a kind of data mine, rather than as diverse practices of inquiry and traditions of interpretation.

The sciences do not exhaust, and so are not identical to, what is often meant by religious experience, reason, Scripture and church tradition. Sometimes it might make sense to think of the sciences as a series of additional sources set apart from these traditional four, but much of the time it will not. What we end up with, then, is a reminder that the sources of theology are not natural kinds. There is a plurality of legitimate and helpful ways to count the sources of theology. Sometimes we need to say there is one source, the Holy Spirit, or God in God’s self-revelation, or something like that. Sometimes we need to say there are three or four sources, in order to make our claims from one source open to critique and accountability from others. Sometimes we might want to, ‘ask the beasts’ (Job 12:7), and say there are hundreds of sources in order to show the glory of God who is beyond all creaturely knowing and speaks through the diversity of the created world.

5.3 How to Engage the Sciences as Sources for Theology?

5.4 Conclusion

In this section we’ve given a more positive account of why theologians should want to engage the sciences, how the sciences relate to other sources for theological reflection, and suggested two ways that they might engage. We argued that the sciences aid theologians in hearing God’s voice in the world by training them in virtues like empirical accountability. When we consider how the sciences fit alongside other theological sources our argument was deconstructive. It is not helpful to count the sources or identify science with only one of the traditional four; such games only return to the errors of modernity explored in previous sections. Saying that the sciences should be engaged as sources of theological reflection does not yet tell us how to do so. We do not want to be too prescriptive here. There may be many more ways of engaging the sciences beyond our two ideas, but we emphasized entanglement and theology-as-risky as starting points.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

6.1 Rules of Thumb

Descriptions are always implicitly normative. The principle with which we began, memento naturam, is simple enough, but doing science-engaged theology well can be a difficult task. As such, here we have collected some of the practical take-home messages from the preceding sections.

Section 2: Beyond the Territories of Science and Religion

• Avoid using ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as if these were transhistorical or transgeographical categories.

• Recognize that thinkers in different (historical or geographical) cultures to your own may have a different understanding of what counts as a scientific or a theological claim, and a different idea of what gives such claims legitimacy.

• Consider the impact that mid-level historical patterns may be having on the scientific theory, methodology or sub-discipline that you are seeking to engage. Recognize that these patterns and their impact are contingent social factors.

• Be aware of the local, political and sociological issues surrounding particular studies and interpretations of data.

• Be suspicious if your localized science-engaged theology project or analysis fits too neatly and tidily into mythological categories or metanarratives.

Section 3: Neither Serf Nor Queen: Theology’s New Boldness in the University

• Do not attempt to use the sciences uncritically as a way to prove theology’s academic credentials in the university.

• Do not be embarrassed or coy about the particularity of theology’s truth claims.

• Science-engaged theology need not be a version of natural theology but should deal with the revelation of God in its historical and ecclesial particularity.

• Try not to lose sight of how Christian concepts and claims operate within a wider theological narrative even as you take such narrative-laden claims into a new linguistic context (just as we say for the scientific claims and pidgin languages in Section 4).

• Do not hesitate to use the sciences to further the aims and goals of theology, even when these aims are in tension with those of the scientific project you are engaging.

• Furthering the aims and goals of theology means that most science-engaged theology projects will start with a question or problem that arises out of a particular theological project.

• Do not suppose that theology has all the answers or can dictate the appropriate methods, frameworks, goals and content of other disciplines. To think of theology as the queen of the sciences in this way would only be to refuse to learn from what the Spirit might be doing in those other disciplines.

• Recognize theology’s need for helpers. Be confident enough in theology to recognize your own (and your theological hero’s) indebtedness to the patient endeavours of those outside of your own discipline.

Section 4: Unity and Pluralism in Science

• Be as specific as you can. Do your best to see if these claims can be corroborated with current knowledge in the relevant disciplines of enquiry that specialize in this topic.

• Find the concepts that scientists are currently using that seem to best match the ideas you seek to test. Remember that words change their meaning across intellectual traditions.

• Work hard at developing a trading zone and accept that your communication may be a pidgin language.

• Talking to people who speak a different ‘native language’ to your own, who can explain the different resonances of terms, will often allow you to develop a more useful pidgin than solely reading scientific work.

• This is not a project of translation or reduction. Make sure to return to your native tongue with your hard-earned learning. Don’t let your pidgin turn in to creole.

• Seek to understand the assumptions, aims and methods of the scientific field you are engaging. Bear these in mind when you are assessing the import of a particular finding for your own work.

• Rely on peer-review articles and literature reviews on particular topics, rather than popular level science books that unify and universalize particular findings.

Section 5: The Sciences among the Sources of Theology

• Make risky claims in your theology that might be tested in some way.

• Do not overuse your secateurs. You do not always need to abandon your theological idea or model simply because a few studies looking at analogous ideas seem to falsify it.

• Remember that data are theory-laden and theories are part of a wider web of meaning. These studies may motivate you to abandon your theological idea, but they do not mandate it.

• Recognize when your work is making claims that would benefit from the tools of other disciplines.

• Value epistemic virtues such as empirical accountability, coherence with other things we know (in theology and beyond) and be willing to expose your work to criticism from the widest variety of sources.

• Search for entangled claims or concepts, which require more than one discipline to understand.

• Although the balance between disciplinary perspectives in understanding entangled concepts may not always be equal, you should resist the temptation to resolve entangled concepts in any single disciplinary direction.

• Remember that the sciences are implicated in, but do not exhaust, the other standard sources of theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason and experience.

• Do not associate ‘science’ with just one source or use it as a trump card over against other theological traditions.

• Do not be shy about changing your mind.