This special issue is one of many fruits from the Templeton Grant ‘Building Foundations in Science Engaged Theology’ which ran from 2020 to 2023. SET Foundations, as it was familiarly called, aimed to generate dialogue between theologians, philosophers of religion, and philosophers of science, primarily through summer workshops that centred on topics of interest to all three fields.

Despite the relevance of contemporary philosophy of science to many perennial questions in philosophy of religion and theology (e.g. questions concerning causation and explanation, theory building, inference, models, laws of nature, and natural kinds), there have been very few exchanges between these fields. While philosophers of religion and theologians often draw from research in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics, such interdisciplinary fluidity does not exist with respect to philosophy of science. This phenomenon is easily explained by historical and sociological factors. The contemporary field of philosophy of science sprung from the positivist project which dominated philosophical conversation in the first half of the twentieth century. Early iterations of the project focused on the reduction of all theoretical terms to observation terms and as a result were quite philosophically restrictive. Any concept that could not be fully reduced to some set of observation statements was deemed nonsense, and judged irrelevant to philosophical conversation. It is not hard to see how such restrictions resulted in a significant rift between philosophy of science and theology and philosophy of religion; the rigidity of positivism left little room for divine discussion.Footnote ¹

However, most philosophers of science are no longer positivists. One of the most significant outcomes of the pursuit of theoretical reduction, and perhaps the beginning of positivism’s end, was a deep recognition that any line we draw between the ‘observable’ and ‘unobservable’ is both arbitrary and ambiguous. This direct confrontation with the messiness of mapping the world into a formal language permeates ongoing research in philosophy of science. Rather than narrate science as a field with a unique ability to latch on to the one true description of reality, many philosophers view science as a reliable and messy human enterprise of knowledge construction. This deep paradigm shift has resulted in a variety of philosophical projects that centre on understanding and clarifying how different scientific communities construct reliable and useful empirical knowledge of a world that often remains shrouded in deep mystery.

This shift in dynamics made the field extremely relevant to theology and philosophy of religion. Philosophers of science began to pay very close attention to precisely how scientific inference works, its intersection with both epistemological and social values, varieties of explanations and how one might compare them, how knowledge is simultaneously transmitted and reconstructed over time, and how the categories of science are bound up in both the structure of nature itself and the structure of our minds. In addition to these big questions in general philosophy of science, there has been great attention paid to the nature and structure of particular sciences (e.g. physics, biology, chemistry, and geoscience) and the unique norms and methodologies prized in different empirical realms. This leads to two very important ways theologians and philosophers might benefit from deeper engagement with philosophy of science.

First, engaging with research on knowledge production in science is helpful in thinking about knowledge production in theology. How does theological inference work? How does a theological community come to accept doctrinal claims? Are there better and worse forms of theological inference? The first four papers in the volume focus on these kinds of questions.

The first paper ‘By what measure? A signpost theory of the truth of doctrine’ by Edward DeLaquil was the winner of an essay prize sponsored by the grant. DeLaquil argues that the truth of doctrine should be viewed as a signpost relation, according to which x is a true representation of y just in case x effectively points towards y. To illustrate how a representation might point towards its object without corresponding to it, DeLaquil draws on work from philosophy of science on the topic of measurement. Specifically, DeLaquil considers the modelling of entropy and the standardization of time, illustrating how the concepts we use in empirical measurements are embedded in the scaffolding of a scientific theory yet nevertheless point towards genuine worldly phenomena. These case studies ultimately serve as a springboard to develop a similar theory of how doctrine points towards God. Delaquil’s article beautifully illustrates the way scientific and theological knowledge production often face similar challenges, and solutions that have worked in one domain may themselves point to a related solution in the other domain, even if these solutions do not correspond exactly.

Meghan D. Page takes up the question of theological inference in her paper ‘Theology as social knowledge’. Generally speaking, an inference is the epistemic movement from the assertion of one statement to the assertion (or denial) of another. The study of scientific inference is at the heart of much work in philosophy of science; how is it that scientists move from data to theory, from evidence to hypothesis, or from theory to predictions? Originally, philosophers suspected these questions would have formal answers – resolvable purely by the study of scientific syntax. However, many of the breakthroughs that led to the fall of positivism showed this view to be too simplistic – the journey from data to evidence is not purely formal. Page suggests a similar kind of inferential gap exists in theology. There is no purely formal relationship between theological sources (e.g. scripture, reason, and tradition) and theological claims. Page then sketches Helen Longino’s view according to which good scientific inferences are not regulated primarily by linguistic rules but instead by social norms: good knowledge comes from good communities. Finally, Page considers what it might look like for theologians to develop similar norms in the governance of theological knowledge construction.

Gonzalo Recio, in his paper ‘A Harrean Perspective of Theology’, suggests that Christian theology can be fruitfully understood as a Harrean ‘theory’ in Rom Harré’s sense: a systematic mapping from one domain of entities to another. Recio reconstructs Harré’s framework of descriptive and explanatory models, showing how Christian theology can be cast as a Harrean theory: the descriptive model captures the events of salvation history (Scripture, tradition, community, individual lives), while the explanatory model draws on analogical sources (e.g. divine Fatherhood) to map causal‐mechanistic patterns onto theological realities. To illustrate how this works in practice, Recio develops case studies in conversion (understood as embedding one’s life into the Christian narrative) and prophecy (conceived not as predictive mechanism but as narrative foreshadowing within the descriptive model). In doing so, he argues that theology’s explanatory claims are analogue‐based, not literal causal inferences. Recio contends that this reinterpretation preserves both the coherence and the epistemic integrity of theological discourse.

The final paper of this group is ‘Exemplars in “science and religion”: a theological dialogue with Thomas Kuhn’, in which Josh Reeves contends that Kuhn’s insights about scientific exemplars offer a fruitful methodological lens for relating theology to science. By presenting Kuhn’s notion of paradigms as rooted in exemplar-based practice rather than abstract theory, Reeves argues that theology, too, may be understood in terms of its own exemplars – core Christian texts, narratives, practices – that guide problem-solving and interpretive judgment in theological communities. While theological exemplars differ from scientific ones, Reeves shows that the structure of exemplar-driven practice provides a rich model to compare science and theology. He uses this framework to suggest that theology’s exemplars allow for internal growth and self-correction.

The second way in which scholars dealing with theological questions might profit from a constructive dialogue with the philosophy of science is thus. Philosophy of science can offer detailed analysis of many concepts that are crucial not only in discussion of the natural world but also in discussions of the divine and even of the interactions between the two. Considering the ways philosophers of science have understood concepts like causation, laws, and natural kinds can offer a helpful scaffolding for thinking about how these concepts operate in broader theological discourse.

Dennis Bray, in his paper ‘Shared intentionality and divine persons’, analyses the notion of shared intentionality in the psychological sciences, and then explores ways this concept might be used in Ramified Natural Theology, a project that draws on natural science in defence of traditional, specific theological claims. Bray is particularly interested in arguments for the Trinity – the claim that the Divine is in fact three persons. In developing his argument, he draws on recent work in psychology that argues humans are unique in virtue of their ability to participate in shared intentionality. Shared intentionality just is the ability for multiple agents to share what they identify as a single intention or common goal. This is identified as a different state than two agents who have separate goals which align; in the case of shared intentionality, agents participate in the same goal. Bray goes on to argue that the uniqueness and importance of shared intentionality of humans offers evidence that the Divine must be understood as three persons. Bray explores several ways this argument might be formulated. This paper offers an example of how philosophy of science might be used to draw from the conceptual space of science and project it into the language of theology.

Buki Fatona uses recent work in philosophy of science on memory both to illuminate difficult passages in Augustine as well as to develop a novel view of her own called ‘embodied constructivism’ in her paper ‘Embodied constructivism: the imagination as a vehicle for mental time travel’. Fatona recounts Augustine’s struggle with the inadequacy of the model of memory favoured in his own time – the ‘wax model’ of memory, in which the world impresses memories on us like a seal upon wax – to account for three significant theological truths. First, how can we remember an immaterial God in a material world? Second, how can finite beings experience and interact with an infinite God? Finally, how can our knowledge of future events (such as the eschaton) be a form of recollection? Fatona argues these concerns led Augustine to develop a constructivist view of memory. The world provides us with the building blocks of our memories but they are organized and built in us rather than fully stamped upon us by the world. However, Augustine’s view of memory received little uptake due to his failure to respond to several major objections. Fatona draws on recent work and models of memory in philosophy of science to both answer these objections and outline a novel model of memory. Her view embodied constructivism, synthesizes autopoietic enactivism, a view according to which our memories are formed through navigation of our environment, with a constructivism that asserts a causal link between the world and our memory is not required for a memory to be veridical. Fatona’s powerful paper displays the important way dialogue between disciplines can produce new ways of thinking in both areas; not only does her work draw on philosophy of science to illuminate the theological views of Augustine, it draws on theological categories and thought to produce a novel model of memory.

In his ‘God, the Laws of Nature, and Occasionalism’, Jeffrey Koperski explores the relationship between a decretalist view of natural laws and the doctrine of occasionalism. Early modern accounts often described laws as divine decrees, a framework that suggests an inevitable denial of real causal powers in creatures, and hence an adoption of occasionalism. Koperski challenges this assumption by carefully distinguishing between two ways of conceiving laws: as dynamic producers of effects or as constraints on the behaviour of created things. Thus, he situates decretalism as a viable account that need not entail occasionalism. On his reading, laws understood as constraints allow God to ordain the structure of nature without undermining secondary causality. This distinction helps preserve a robust account of created causal powers while maintaining divine sovereignty.

In the final paper, ‘Causal and Non-causal Explanations in Theology: The Case of Aquinas’s Primary – Secondary Causation Distinction’, Ignacio Silva revisits Aquinas’ distinction between primary and secondary causation, attempting to map this doctrine to the contemporary models of causal and non-causal scientific explanation. In particular, Silva looks at the discussion about grounding, arguing that Aquinas’ understanding of primary divine causation accounts for the intelligibility of real created causes, thereby allowing for creaturely freedom and natural regularities. This perspective highlights the explanatory, rather than interventionist, role of divine action. By engaging Aquinas through the lens of philosophy of science, Silva offers some new insight into an often-misunderstood theological concept, demonstrating its relevance to current discussions about explanation in both science and theology.

Collectively, the essays in this volume demonstrate the intellectual fruitfulness of sustained engagement between philosophy of science, theology, and philosophy of religion. By drawing upon contemporary debates concerning inference, explanation, and models, the contributors show that categories developed in the analysis of scientific practice can both clarify and extend theological reflection. Ultimately, the papers in this special issue exemplify how attention to points of structural analogy and conceptual resonance can yield novel insights into both the rational architecture of theology and the metaphysical underpinnings of science.

We hope that this collection will encourage further research at this intersection in presenting some of the possibilities of cross-disciplinary dialogue as well as areas in which more work remains to be done. These papers, we believe, suggest that contemporary scholarship is well positioned to construct a fertile relationship, pointing towards an emerging research programme in which philosophy of science and theology function as mutually illuminating enterprises that, in their own ways, seek to understand a world both intelligible and mysterious.