Science and Christian theology 1: The relationship between them

Alister McGrath, 2016. Enriching our vision of reality: Theology and the natural sciences in dialogue. London: SPCK

This is the first of three posts on McGrath’s book.

McGrath’s intention in this book is to show that the relationship between Christianity and science is different from the one presupposed by the ‘Science vs Religion’ standoff. Science and Christian faith are complementary, and, as his title says, together enrich our vision of reality. At the end of the book, McGrath says he has written it because he believes that the people best qualified to carry this enriched vision of the world forward are scientists who have a Christian faith. But it is not enough for individuals to enjoy this enriched vision. It is important to show publically that science and faith can be held together by practising scientists, in order to counter the myth that science and faith are at war.

There are more similarities, McGrath holds, between the methods of science and Christian theology than is commonly supposed. An important similarity is that they both construct theoretical models of the way the universe is. Both are inevitably incomplete, as there is always more to be learned, and each provides an account of relationships among things we think we know about. Doctrines do not come ready made in the Bible, and McGrath argues that Christian doctrines are akin to scientific theories, as they are models that have been hammered out over time by thinkers attempting to make sense of what they have learned from the Bible and from their own and others’ experiences. Scientific theories similarly are the outcomes of a variety of cognitive processes. They don’t emerge from empirical observation alone.

Theology and science both seek to understand the world. The scientistic view of the world claims that the only valid knowledge about the universe is knowledge obtained by science. This is unnecessarily restrictive. It offers no account, for example, of the sense of awe at seeing a clear night sky in the desert. ‘Science dismantles the world so that we can see how things work;’ McGrath writes, ‘the Christian faith reassembles them so we can see what they mean.’

Important to the complementarity of theology and science is natural theology. McGrath writes that natural theology has traditionally been thought of as finding non-theological evidence in nature that supports Christian faith or as pinpointing rational thought that tells us about God.

A major theme of the book is to turn this picture on its head. Instead of giving independent support to Christian belief, McGrath’s natural theology is based on Christian belief and on revelation. Its function is to contribute to a more satisfactory view of nature than science can provide alone.

McGrath has organised his book into three parts. The first is introductory, and refers among other things to the poverty of scientism. The second has three chapters, each devoted to the thinking of a practitioner who has crossed the science/faith divide. They are Charles Coulson, Thomas F. Torrance and John Polkinghorne. The third part has six chapters, each of which discusses an aspect of the relationship between science and Christianity. I must admit that I didn’t really warm to the book until I got into the chapters on Torrance (ch 3) and Polkinghorne (ch 4), but this is a reflection of my interests rather than on McGrath’s writing.

Thomas F. Torrance (1913–2007) was a theologian who believed that the mind could not be split into hermetically sealed compartments.¹  He was concerned that both scientists and theologians should have ‘a belief in the ultimate consistency of things as they are in themselves’. Science may uncover order in the universe, but it cannot explain it:

Science only informs us what light is thrown upon reality by the empirical observation of the facts of external nature. When science claims that this is all that can be said, it is no longer science but the species of philosophical theory called naturalism.

Torrance referred to theology as ‘theological science’, intending ‘science’ in its older and broader usage (like German Wissenschaft rather than its modern English denotation, natural science). McGrath writes that Torrance’s approach to theology as a science can be summed up in two basic principles. First, only Christian theology recognises God’s revelation of himself in Christ as its object and as the sole foundation of its basic statements. Second, theology means using human reason to produce an ordered account of what can be known about its object. It shares this desire to yield an ordered account of things with other sciences, including the natural sciences.

Torrance’s conviction was that there exists a real world outside the human mind, to be grasped – not constructed – by human reason. Reason engages with each aspect of that real world, including divine revelation, according to its distinct identity. Torrance insisted that each science had to let the object of its investigation speak for itself. In Grath’s words, ‘Physics, biology and psychology – to mention just a few examples – each have their own vocabularies and research methods, and engage with nature at their own distinctive levels.

The relationship between science and theology inevitably raises the question of the role of natural theology, ‘the manner and extent to which the natural world is able to disclose anything about the nature of God.’ Torrance’s mentor, Karl Barth, had objected to natural theology because it takes unaided human reason as its starting point. For Barth, all theology has as its starting point God’s self-revelation in Jesus, leaving no place for natural theology, as it poses the danger of creating an independent route to human knowledge of God. But Torrance sees natural theology, McGrath writes, as a ‘consequence of a properly Christian knowledge of God, rather than a necessary – though not sufficient – condition for our knowledge of God in the first place.’ McGrath thus sees natural theology as a subordinate aspect of revelation-based theology.

John Polkinghorne (1930-2021) was a mathematician and quantum physicist whose personal faith took him into the Anglican priesthood. Polkinghorne, like Torrance, rejects the idea that nature alone offers any proof of God’s existence, but claims that Christian faith, in McGrath’s words, ‘offers a more satisfying account of nature than its atheist alternatives.. . . While science itself does not appear to need any theological supplementation within its own distinctive domain, it nevertheless raises questions it cannot answer on the basis of its own working methods…’ These ‘metaquestions’ are the subject matter of Polkinghorne’s natural theology. Why is science possible? That is, why can we apprehend the physical universe (e.g. quantum mechanics) when it is so far from our everyday experience? Why is the universe apparently so well adjusted for life?

In answering these questions, the historical continuity of Christian theology is important. As scientific understanding changes, so theological revision may be appropriate. Polkinghorne regards theology as ‘a continuously unfolding exploration’, dynamic rather than static, but maintaining continuity with the past, in somewhat the same way as scientific disciplines. For Polkinghorne this search for understanding is the search for God.

Here is the second of three posts.