Relating Theology and Science

By Paul Tyson

The nub of the complexity of [the relationship between Christian theology and modern science] is that, while Christian theology is the historical womb of modern science, science gradually displaced Christian theology as the West’s primary public truth discourse. This displacement was anything but intentional at the outset. Even so, modern science initiated an approach to demonstrable truth within a practical understanding of physical reality that, over time, became radically incommensurate with the core metaphysical and miraculous truth claims of Christian theology.

Significantly, this development started out being strongly religiously motivated. . . . [T]he high authority of established truth in matters theological and metaphysical gave way to the practical and down-to-earth claims of demonstrable evidence. The seventeenth-century motto of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge is “nullius in verba” (take no one’s word for it). This motto exemplifies a strongly Protestant rejection of any unconditional obedience to institutional religious authority, a firm commitment to the “plain meaning” of reality as grasped by sensible people, and it is an overt defiance of the metaphysical book learning of natural philosophers in the universities.

Between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century, the primary truth warrants of Western European culture noticeably shifted from the doctrinal authority of Christian theology to the demonstrable proofs of modern science. By the late eighteenth century, some theologians were keenly aware of this shift. In response, liberal Protestant theology adapted itself to the credibility criteria and knowledge modes of the new learning. After this, the metaphysical and miraculous truth claims of Christian theology became increasingly incredible to leading Enlightenment figures of the European intelligentsia. Through the nineteenth century, a growing discontent with traditional Christian outlooks on truth and reality steadily matured in Western academic circles. By this time the scientific secularization of Western European knowledge was firmly in motion.

By the early twentieth century, religious agnosticism and open disbelief toward traditional Christian truth claims were picking up serious momentum in the academy. The physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, as a historical fact, started to noticeably shift from being a common-sense public truth to being a hard-to-believe personal conviction. With the likes of Herbert Spencer and Bertrand Russell, serious attacks on the credibility of traditional Christian theology were launched in earnest by agnostic and atheist science advocates. Over the twentieth century, Western scientific knowledge increasingly became public truth at the cultural expense of the wisdom, morality, social organization, and metaphysical meaning framework of creedal Christian theology. Science was replacing Christian theology as the modern Western world’s first discourse of public truth. By the 1960s this process was pretty well complete, and we see a steep decline in the cultural influence of Christian theology on Western modernity in general thereafter.

Backing up to the early twentieth century, Christian theology was then responding to the transfer of its public truth standing to science in three main ways: adaptation, withdrawal, and appropriation.

Adaptation

The progressive trajectory forged by liberal Protestants sought to adapt Christian theology to the credibility parameters, knowledge methodologies, and functional materialism of modern science. This often involved jettisoning (or privatizing or mythologizing) the miraculous and the metaphysical from modern theology. Even so, more nuanced forms of adaptation that endeavored to hold fealty to both modern science and orthodox Christian doctrine were certainly being put forward. These largely operated by making some sort of Chalcedonian-style attempt not to confuse the two natures of science and religion in the one hypostatic unity of the Christian scientist. Whether this really worked is a complex question.

Withdrawal

The conservative trajectory in Christian theology withdrew from the public sphere and retreated into the discretely “religious” domain of systematic theology. This transformed traditional creedal Christianity into a hermetically sealed personal-salvation religion that had no real bearing on the natural sciences or on public knowledge in general. Here orthodoxy within “religious freedom” is bought at the high price of being in a bubble apart from the secular world.

Appropriation

The fundamentalist, anti-Darwinian tendency in—largely American—evangelical circles started up in earnest in the 1920s. This trajectory is continuous with pre-Darwinian natural theology, such as William Paley’s divine watchmaker apologetics (from the eighteenth century), and with the biblical positivism of Bishop James Ussher’s six-thousand-year biblical chronology (from the seventeenth century). This is a conservatively modern movement seeking to read Genesis as a natural history text while maintaining that the Bible—as revealed—has greater authority than the reconstructive speculations of secular natural historians. In cosmology, this stance views creation as being, though originally harmonious and peaceable, now sinful, violent, and evil due to a world-reordering fall. Salvation history shows God’s redemptive intervention in the order of the world via the incarnation and passion of Christ, though this intervention is yet to be fully consummated in the eschaton. This early modern creation cosmology holds that death, evil, and violence are aberrations in God’s originally good created order and that divinely caused catastrophic upheavals in the natural world are prominent features of recorded human history. In the nineteenth- and twentieth-century trajectories that are continuous with Ussher and Paley, the epistemic modes of modern science, guided by divine revelation, are employed against Charles Lyell’s geological uniformitarianism and Charles Darwin’s violently competitive evolutionary biology. This is an appropriation of modern science for a theological purpose that uses the inductive methodologies, evidential positivism, and rationalist assumptions of modern scientific proof but without accepting an agonistic and uniformitarian cosmology, or a reductively materialist philosophy of nature. In the Reformed positivist tradition that is so important in early modern science, this stance maintains a “plain meaning” biblical hermeneutic, with deference to the epistemic authority of divine revelation. Thus “creation science”—note the explicit appropriation of the word science here—is set against the mainstream of twentieth- and twenty-first-century secularized and functionally materialist biological science. However, the opposition of creation science to Darwinian evolution fed neatly into an already existing “conflict” understanding of science and religion, which had been promoted in the late nineteenth century by advocates of secularized and functionally materialist science. Thus, appropriation advanced the historically fictitious “conflict myth.”

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Adapted from A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge (Baker Academic, 2022), by Paul Tyson.

“This is a bold book, destined to become a classic. Cutting through the clutter of worn-out science-and-religion debates, Paul Tyson reclaims theology as the first truth discourse that tells us what science is and how it should function. Rather than look through the lens of science to theology, A Christian Theology of Science turns the telescope around and asks us to consider the scientific implications of creedal Christianity. Tyson's book is both erudite and lucid. Rarely have the foundations of modern science been subjected to a more penetrating critique.”

— Hans Boersma, Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology, Nashotah House Theological Seminary

Find A Christian Theology of Science at Amazon, Baker Academic, and other major booksellers.

— Paul Tyson is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he serves as a principal investigator and the project co-coordinator for the After Science and Religion Project.

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Truth Changes Everything

How People of Faith Can Transform the World In Times of Crisis

By Jeff Myers, Ph.D., President of Summit Ministries

As a university student, I was taught that the world was stuck in the Dark Ages until the Enlightenment, when reason replaced revelation. Smart people quit believing in a personal God. The rejection of God, I was told, paved the way to a new era in science, technology, the modern managed economy, and personal—especially sexual—freedom. This “just so” story is false.

In my book Truth Changes Everything, I share stories of theologians, educators, scientists, architects, political theorists, and artists whose full embrace of Truth as revealed in Jesus set the world on a self-correcting course of flourishing.

The battle over truth has reached a fever pitch in our own day. Against the trend of “speaking your truth,” it is up to believers to “seek the truth” and to remind the world that Truth isn’t just a set of logical propositions; it is a person. It is Jesus. And that truth changes everything.

“This book is perfectly titled because truth does change everything. It changes whether we live in hope, love, and faith or fear and despair. Dr. Myers lays out what is at stake in the battle for Truth and offers a road map for how Truth can be known and experienced. This is a timely, insightful, and story-filled book.”

Sean McDowell, Ph.D., author of Chasing Love and A Rebel's Manifesto

Get the first chapter online for free at TruthChangesEverything.com. Buy Truth Changes Everything at Amazon, Baker Publishing, and other major booksellers.

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War, Peace, and Violence

Four Christian Views

In a world of war, terrorism, and other geopolitical threats to global stability, how should committed Christians honor Jesus Christ and his Word?

How should Christians think and act when it comes to church-state relations, the preservation of order, the practice of just peacemaking, and the use of coercive force?

In this volume in IVP Academic's Spectrum series, four contributors—experts in Christian ethics, political philosophy, and international affairs—offer the best of current Christian thinking on issues of war and peace. They present four distinct views:

• Eric Patterson, just war view

• Myles Werntz, nonviolence view

• A. J. Nolte, Christian realist view

• Meic Pearse, church historical view

Each contributor makes a case for his own view and responds to the others, highlighting complexities and real-world implications of the various perspectives. Edited and with an introduction and conclusion by the philosopher Paul Copan, this book provides a helpful orientation to the key positions today.

“Key to understanding one's own views on a subject is the requirement that one charitably considers legitimate alternatives. These four authors reliably map the terrain on war, peace, and violence in a way that will help readers sort out their own views on these perennial topics.”

— C. Ben Mitchell, Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University

See our Worldview Bulletin excerpt from War, Peace, and Violence here.

Find War, Peace, and Violence: Four Christian Views at Amazon, InterVarsity Press, and other major booksellers.

*All the posts above are sponsored.

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