Religion and Science

Two branches of philosophy are central to the analysis of the relationship between religion and science. The first is ontology, the study of what reality is, and the second is epistemology, the study of how humans can know anything about reality. However, there is huge disagreement among religions as to the nature of ultimate reality; there is also much contention among philosophers of science as to the status of scientific explanations of the world. In one sense science and theology are both rational enterprises aimed at exploring the same world, based on motivated faith commitments; in another sense they are utterly different because they operate from such different assumptions. Science aims to make matter an object of study, whereas theology aims ultimately to learn from a self-communicating God.

Much of the epistemological debate in science and religion has centered around "critical realism." This account of explanation within science and theology has been framed (slightly differently) by Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, and John Polkinghorne. It claims that both science and theology offer accounts of reality that, though they may be partial and corrigible and depend on the use of models and metaphors, nevertheless, by a process of inference to the best explanation, draw progressively closer to a description of things as they really are. This is definitely what most practicing scientists think is the case, and some claim that theology also follows such a method (though encounter with a personal God must always imply a slightly different sort of enquiry). The problem with critical realism is that it is so difficult ever to imagine how we would know we were closer to an explanation corresponding to reality. Postmodernism insists that all our formulations are culturally laden and must be treated with suspicion, and the development of science often involves the radical overturning of previous models (as with the Copernican revolution). Nancey Murphy, writing in Peters and Bennett, concludes that critical realism is not appropriate to a postmodern epistemology but that there still are methodological similarities between science and theology. Wentzel van Huyssteen makes a good case that the science-religion debate is postmodern thought at its most constructive and least corrosive, since it involves two rational communities in conversation about areas of genuine common concern.