This is a brief introduction to a special issue highlighting the relevance of philosophy of science to many core topics in theology and philosophy of religion. Several points of intersection between knowledge production in the sciences and knowledge production in philosophy and theology are discussed.

This article summarizes how problems in formalizing scientific inference led to the production of social accounts of science, offering Helen Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism as a way forward. Rather than focus on rules of inference that connect knowledge-claims, Longino constructs norms for knowledge-producing communities which, when followed, ensure equitable dialogue and transformative criticism. It is further argued communities engaged in Christian systematic theology would benefit from developing a similar set of norms, given that theological inference is similarly rooted in social cognition and faces many problems analogous to those with which Longino is concerned. Finally, the extent to which Longino’s norms may serve as a starting point for theological communities is explored.

This article examines the role of historical science in clarifying the causal structure of complex natural processes. I reject the pervasive view that historical science does not uncover natural regularities. To show why, I consider an important methodological distinction in geology between uniformitarianism and actualism; methodological actualism, the preferred method of geologists, often relies on historical reconstructions to test the stability of currently observed processes. I provide several case studies that illustrate this, including one that highlights how historical narratives can improve predictive models.