This chapter is about the dialogue between psychology and theology. I will first briefly distinguish this specific topic from others to do more generally with the interface of psychology and religion. One of those is the practical application of psychology to the work of faith communities. Here the primary focus has been the area of pastoral care (although in Psychology for Christian Ministry I showed that the potential practical application of psychology to religion is much broader). In contrast, the dialogue between theology and psychology is focused more on truth questions and less on practical ones. Another intersection between psychology and religion is the psychology of religion - one of several human sciences, including sociology and social anthropology, which are concerned with religious belief and practice. The psychology of religion generally takes as detached a view as possible of religious phenomena. This observational approach to religion is not my central focus in this chapter, although I will return later to those aspects of the dialogue between theology and psychology which deal with the nature of religion itself. The dialogue between theology and science is notoriously one-sided, as will have been apparent from other chapters in this volume. Theology has been much more interested in science than science has been in theology. Individual scientists may be interested in theology, but it is difficult to argue that theology has much contribution to make to science as such.

Writing to Machiavelli in June 1509, his friend Filippo Casavecchia warned him that his “philosophy” (“la vostra filosofia”) would never be comprehended by fools and that there were not enough “wise” people who did understand it. Casavecchia was referring to Machiavelli's foresight in contributing to the recapture of Pisa through the institution of the militia, which is not what we mean by philosophy today. Nevertheless, Casavecchia put his finger on the quality that contemporaries admired about Machiavelli, namely, the originality of his thinking in a broader context. Machiavelli never wrote systematically about his understanding of philosophical issues, to which ancient thinkers contributed as much as contemporary politics and religion, nor are we sure that his ideas can be described as a coherent whole. On the contrary, his view of the cosmos and of man's nature as unchanging seems difficult to reconcile with the flexibility he demanded in the field of politics, where his ideas about republicanism, princely rule, and religion seem equally at odds. The starting point for describing Machiavelli's outlook has always been his letter to Francesco Vettori on December 10, 1513, describing the origins of The Prince as the outcome of both practical political experience and the influence of the classics. The practical experience consisted of his work in the chancery and diplomatic missions, which stressed the importance of rules, models, and necessary procedures and encouraged in him a skeptical and somewhat fatalistic approach to life.

When Gabriele D'Annunzio fantasized a new king of Rome in his 1894 novel, The Virgins of the Rocks, he supplied him with a Machiavellian motto, taken not from The Prince, as might be expected, but from the lesser known Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca: “I have taken her, not she me [Io ho preso lei, non ella me].” This pithy saying, in rhetorical terms a chiasmus, appears among the concluding list of witticisms purportedly drawn from the life of the exemplary Castruccio, who “in all fortunes acted the prince”: “Once there was a young woman with whom Castruccio associated intimately. For this, being reproached by a friend of his who said especially that it was bad for him to let himself be taken by a woman, “You are wrong,” said Castruccio; “I have taken her, not she me.”” / As the rhetorical figure that is a crossing of four terms which, through their crossing, are set up as belonging to two categories, the chiasmus is the figure par excellence of reversal and inversion. In Castruccio's case, the wittiness of his reply depends precisely upon such a reversal. The episode might encapsulate the relation of gendered subjects and their objects in Machiavelli's work as a whole and in the tradition of political thought that he inaugurated and to which D'Annunzio was heir. Male and masculine subjects of action are not to be themselves subjected by female or feminine actors, even as the very reversibility built into the rhetorical form of the chiasmus represents precisely this possibility.

“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” (Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics) / The past few years have seen a spate of books arguing that God does not exist and that religion is one of the most pernicious and dangerous aspects of modern culture. As it happens, the arguments of the new atheists are all over the place, ranging from criticisms of the traditional proofs of the existence of God to moral exhortations not to follow the prescriptions of the religious. However, the authors all presume to write in the name of science and certainly it is in that sense that most readers, receptive and antagonistic, have taken them. This chapter is offered as a reflection of the interest that these writers have obviously sparked. In the light of today's science, what can be said about the intellectual status of religion and the central claims that are made in its name? Defining and constraining the discussion, I shall focus on Western religion and of that primarily on Christianity. This is not unfair or mere chauvinism. Modern science emerged in a Christian context and much of the discussion today is framed explicitly in terms of Christianity. Where appropriate, the discussion can easily be extended. I shall consider science to range from the physical sciences through the biological sciences and on to the social sciences, and I shall understand it as an attempt to understand the world of experience in terms of causes, things which presuppose the universal rule of natural law. I take it therefore that modern science is rooted in naturalism.

Machiavelli introduces himself nowhere better than in his correspondence, particularly with challenging interlocutors like Francesco Guicciardini, his younger contemporary who, when they exchanged a memorable set of letters in 1521, had already risen to political prominence and written a lively history of Florence as well as several memoranda on Florentine government. Their friendship was made possible by a shift in Machiavelli's political fortunes. After eight years in which the Medici had shunned Machiavelli following the 1512 coup d'état that restored them to power in Florence, their antagonism finally softened. Friends intervened to win the assent of Pope Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici) for a Roman performance of Machiavelli's play, Mandragola, and smoothed the way for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici's approval of Machiavelli's commission from the university (the Studio) to write a history of Florence. In May 1521, the Florentine government, again with Cardinal Giulio in the background, sent Machiavelli, who had once negotiated with kings, emperors, and popes, as its representative to the chapter general of the Franciscans in Carpi, near Modena, with instructions to promote a plan for the separate administration of Franciscan convents in Florentine territory. When the consuls of Florence's guild of manufacturers of woolen cloth learned of Machiavelli's assignment, they gave him the additional task of finding a Lenten preacher for the cathedral, whose administration was the guild's responsibility. Machiavelli, formerly an influential chancery official, adviser, military organizer, and diplomatic envoy for the republican government displaced by the Medici, was now on a mission of almost comical modesty.

To write about Machiavelli and republicanism is to expose both writer and reader to a series of temptations and misunderstandings. There was an ideal of government to which we are used to applying the terms “republic” and “republicanism,” and Machiavelli addressed himself to it; but how far he or his contemporaries employed a vocabulary readily translated by these terms is another question, since res publica, or its English translation “commonwealth,” could be used to mean any political body, irrespective of whether it was ruled by a monarch or not. There is a historical process by which “republic” and “commonwealth” came to be used in English as denoting kingless government, and “republicanism” came to be opposed to “monarchism”; and as this happened, the two terms came to denote opposed political norms, each supported by a theory of government and even a philosophy of political life. For these reasons it is possible to use “republicanism” as denoting an intellectually complex and historically continuous ideology, and to assign Machiavelli his place in its history. A history of “Machiavelli and republicanism” can in principle be written as a history of how it became possible to see him and his role in this way. The history may well prove to have been going on for a long time, and even to have begun taking place in his lifetime and affecting his thoughts and intentions.

Philosopher Richard Rorty claims that it is 'pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions'. The picture that has predominated in discussions of the topics of this chapter, throughout the modern era, has been that of a hierarchy of sciences, each higher science studying more complex entities made up of the entities studied by the science below. Today the hierarchy is taken (unproblematically) to include various levels of physics, chemistry, and the many levels of biology from molecular biology to scientific ecology. Whether the human and social sciences can be added to the hierarchy has remained a contentious issue, one closely tied to debates about human nature. This chapter will explore the consequences of this picture for understanding scientific explanation, human freedom and God's action in the physical world. We shall see that when causal reductionism (the idea that all causation occurs at the bottom of the hierarchy of complexity) and the idea of deterministic laws of nature are added to the picture, it produces (apparently) insoluble problems in understanding human and divine action. In short, the combination of these three assumptions suggests that the determinism of physical laws 'works its way up' the hierarchy of complex systems, resulting in a fully determined natural world.

Machiavelli's Florentine Histories originated under Medici patronage at a moment in which, after the death of Lorenzo the younger in May 1519, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici controlled Florence (on behalf of Pope Leo X) and the regime seemed open to the possibility of major constitutional overhaul. In March 1520, Machiavelli was introduced to Giulio through the good offices of his friends in the Orti Oricellari and was warmly received. One result of the changed attitude of the Medici toward Machiavelli was the commission, finalized on November 8, 1520, and approved by the Officials of Florence's university (the Studio), headed by Giulio himself, to “compose the annals and chronicles of Florence [ad componendum annalia et cronacas florentinas].” The Florentine Histories thus owe their existence to these external circumstances, but the conceptualization and design of this last of Machiavelli's great works reflect long-standing interests integral to the development of both his political theory and the pragmatic requirements of his persistent critique of Florentine politics. This was not the first time Machiavelli had donned the historian's mantle. The first Decennale, written in 1504, is a verse summary of Italy's history in the decade 1494-1504, in which events involving Florence are tightly bound into the unfolding political situation. Moreover, if we accept the assertion of Machiavelli's friend and chancery colleague Agostino Vespucci in the dedication of the 1506 printed edition of the Decennale, a “more extensive” history of the same events was then “being forged” in Machiavelli's “workshop” - a work that was not realized.

“The pagan party . . . asserted that knowledge is to be obtained only by the laborious exercise of human observation and human reason. The Christian party asserted that all knowledge is to be found in the Scriptures and in the traditions of the Church; that, in the written revelation, God had not only given a criterion of truth, but had furnished us with all that he intended us to know. The Scriptures, therefore, contain the sum, the end of all knowledge. The clergy, with the emperor at their back, would endure no intellectual competition. / [O]ne finds a combination of factors behind 'the closing of the Western mind': the attack on Greek philosophy by [the apostle] Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christian theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order. The imposition of orthodoxy went hand in hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of 'mystery, magic, and authority.'” / A widespread myth that refuses to die, illustrated by these two quotations, maintains that consistent opposition of the Christian church to rational thought in general and the natural sciences in particular, throughout the patristic and medieval periods, retarded the development of a viable scientific tradition, thereby delaying the Scientific Revolution and the origins of modern science by more than a millennium. Historical scholarship of the past half-century demonstrates that the truth is otherwise.

Near the end of his epochal book On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin (1860) famously remarked that 'light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history'. Indeed it has. If Darwin were with us today we can be sure that he would be fascinated by the remarkable progress made over the past 150 years, but one suspects that he would not be over-surprised at the achievements to date. Molecular biology has confirmed our close relationships to the great apes while palaeontology has documented a series of dramatic changes, most obviously in brain size and tool cultures. In little more than a geological instant, a population of apes scattered thinly across Africa transmogrified into extremely complex societies numbered in billions, representatives of which have sent probes beyond the solar system and (at somewhat less expense) can determine the molecular profile of any living organism. These are two of many examples, and nobody needs to be reminded that whatever else humans have achieved, and however much we may take it for granted, the capacity to arrive at scientific understandings which are underpinned by the rational discourse of mathematics is not only astonishing, it is actually very odd indeed.

Historians of science have often emphasized the importance of natural theology in the development of modern science, invoking it in explanations of such diverse phenomena as the rapid spread of Newtonianism in Britain and the development of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theorizing. However, since the meaning of the term is not as transparent as might at first appear, it will be helpful to begin with some clarificatory remarks. A relatively stable definition of natural theology has prevailed among theologically informed writers, at least since the early modern era. This definition is nicely characterized in a British encyclopaedia of the 1840s, which describes natural theology as a theological system framed 'entirely out of the religious truths which may be learned from natural sources, that is, from the constitution of the human mind, and from the phenomena of the mental and material universe'. Thus defined, natural theology is a type of theology which relies on reason (which is natural), unaided by any evidence derived from God's revelation through scriptures, miracles or prophecies (which is supernatural). On this basis, the appropriate contrast for natural theology is revealed theology; it is the source of the theological knowledge that is natural, not its object. Such a definition is in broad agreement both with that offered by Francis Bacon in 1605 and with that offered by philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne in 2005, and it is the one that will be viewed here as having been generally normative in the modern era.

From June 19, 1498, to November 7, 1512, Niccolò Machiavelli served as a high-ranking official in the chancery of the Florentine republic. His election as second chancellor, aged twenty-nine, without previous notarial, secretarial, or administrative experience, was doubtless a political success. The faction supporting the firebrand preacher and fundamentalist religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola had reached the height of its power under Florence's new popular constitution at the end of 1497. Although by the beginning of 1498 its control was already teetering, it still managed to assert its influence in elections to the chancery in February, when Machiavelli lost, possibly because he was known to be critical of Savonarola in private, although he was not associated with any anti-Savonarolan faction. But the friar's party suffered a precipitate fall from power in April when its political leader, Francesco Valori, was murdered; at the end of May, Savonarola himself was tried and executed, and many of his supporters, including chancery staff, were removed from office. This gave Machiavelli his chance. Another circumstance favored Machiavelli after Savonarola's fall. Traditionally, the chancery was meant to be nonpolitical; unlike political magistrates who held power for short periods in order to limit, at least in theory, factional or personal influence over government, chancery officials served long periods, often for life.

For the past century and a half no issue has dominated discussions of science and religion more than evolution. Indeed, many people see the creation-evolution debates as the central issue in the continuing controversy. And for good reason. More than a century after the scientific community had embraced organic evolution, many laypersons continued to scorn the notion of common descent. In the United States, where polls since the early 1980s have shown a steady 44-47 per cent of Americans subscribing to the statement that 'God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so', nearly two-thirds (65.5 per cent), including 63 per cent of college graduates, according to a 2005 Gallup poll, regarded creationism as definitely or probably true. As we shall see, such ideas have been spreading around the world./Creation and Creationism / In 1929 an obscure biology teacher at a small church college in northern California self-published a book entitled Back to Creationism. This brief work, appearing just as the American anti-evolution movement of the 1920s was winding down, attracted little attention.

In the “Refutation of Idealism” that he added to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claims to refute what he calls problematic idealism. According to Kant, problematic idealism is a position, traceable to Descartes, which “declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be [ . . . ] doubtful and indemonstrable” (B 274). Against this position, Kant wants to prove “that even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only on the presupposition of outer experience” (B 275). Kant presents the following argument for this thesis: “(1) “I am conscious of my existence as determined in time” (B 275). / (2) “All time-determination presupposes something persistent in perception” (B 275). / (3) “This persisting thing, however, cannot be something in me, since my own existence in time can first be determined only through this persisting thing” (B 275). / (4) “Thus the perception of this persistent thing is possible only through a thing outside me” (B 275). / (5) “Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside me” (B 275).”

The reception of Kant's first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, by the main members of the German idealistic movement - that is, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) - is a complex and complicated story that is intimately connected with the history of the controversies to which the first Critique gave rise. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was not an immediate philosophical success. On the contrary, in the first couple of years after its appearance in 1781, there was, much to Kant's disappointment, little public reaction, and most of it was rather hostile, like the notorious review by Garve and Feder. This led Kant then to publish, in 1783, the Prolegomena, most of which he had already written down before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. 23:362ff.) with the explicit hope of making his teachings more accessible (4:261, 263f.). Then, four years later (1787), and again reacting to what he thought to be misunderstandings about the foundations of his theoretical philosophy (cf. footnote to the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations, 4:447ff.), he published a second edition of the Critique in which considerable parts of the original work were rewritten.

“The term 'neo-Kantianism' must be determined functionally rather than substantially [ . . . ]; it is a matter of a direction taken in question-posing.” / In the history of philosophy, there have been several waves of Kantianism since the first publication of the Critique of Pure Reason. They differ from each other not only with respect to the textual basis available at a certain point in time. They are also rooted in quite diverse motives of appropriation of Kant's philosophy and pursue different argumentative goals. The first wave appeared almost immediately after Kant had launched his critical project: Johann Schultz wrote the first commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason in 1784; Carl Christian Erhard Schmid published the first Kant dictionary in 1786; and in 1796, Jacob Sigismund Beck provided the rising German idealism with the Only possible standpoint from which the Critical Philosophy must be judged. Some of these early Kantians had an extensive correspondence with Kant, thereby supporting the development of Kant's philosophy in the first place. In contrast to the aims of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and other German idealists who no longer were Kant scholars, the aim of those Kantians was confined to a better understanding of Kant's critical works, starting with the Dissertation.