Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,PERIODICAL LITERATURE

— 767—

Faith, the official journal of the American Scientific

Affiliation (ASA), which serves about 2,500 readers.

Founded in 1941, the ASA and its journal promote

the idea that both the Bible and science are reve-

lations from God. Most of the articles relate to the

creation-evolution controversy, and the journal has

become a primary vehicle for the critical discussion

of theistic evolution and Intelligent Design. A more

conservative journal, Origins and Design, founded

in 1980 and published by the Access Research Net-

work, is devoted almost exclusively to the promo-

tion of Intelligent Design. The quarterly glossy

magazine, Facts and Faith, founded in 1987 (now

discontinued), had almost seven thousand paid

subscribers, and was published by the apologetics

organization Reasons to Believe. It used design ar-

guments to bolster faith in the Bible.

A number of fundamentalist publications pro-

mote a more conservative, biblically literalist view

of science and religion. Two of the most influential

are Acts and Facts, founded in 1971, a free

monthly newsletter sponsored by the Institute for

Creation Research in Santee, California, and Cre-

ation Magazine, founded in 1978, a more populist

and politically oriented publication published by

the Back to Genesis group.

Reports of the National Center for Science Edu-

cation is a bimonthly newsletter founded in 1980

that reaches more than four thousand readers with

articles and resources to refute creationism. These

journals reflect America’s ongoing struggle with

Darwinism.

Outside of the United States, the science and re-

ligion conversation is much less intense but no less

diverse. The ambitious semiannual journal Science

and Christian Belief is the product of two organi-

zations based in Britain. The Victoria Institute,

founded in 1865 as the first anti-evolution group,

merged its journal in 1989 with that of Christians in

Science. The resulting journal, launched in 1988, re-

sembles ASA’s Perspectives, though it has a more

scholarly and theologically eclectic approach. Given

the journal’s British roots, the editorial bent leans

less toward the creation-evolution controversy,

which is primarily an American phenomenon.

Other European science and religion publica-

tions include the twice-yearly book review com-

pendium Reviews, founded in 1983 and published

by the British Science and Religion Forum. The Eu-

ropean Society for the Study of Science and Theol-

ogy (ESSSAT) publishes two biennial texts: Issues

in Science and Theology (2000) and Studies in Sci-

ence and Theology (1987), which are basically

book series.

In India, the Muslim Association for the Ad-

vancement of Science publishes the Journal of Is-

lamic Science, founded in 1984, which looks at the

historical and philosophical questions raised by

science from an Islamic perspective. The South

African Science and Religion Forum, founded in

1993, is a newsletter that reaches about five hun-

dred readers, published by the Research Institute

for Theology and Religion at the University of

South Africa.

Two web sites, Metanexus and Counterbal-

ance, span the geographic borders of science and

religion and provide timely, comprehensive inter-

net resources. Metanexus was launched in 1998

and by 2002 had thousands of subscribers in nearly

sixty countries. It operates several electronic list

servers that disseminate news updates daily and it

publishes a monthly email newsletter. Since 1996,

Counterbalance has provided a tightly woven web

of materials that encapsulate the discussions taking

place in the science and religion field, including

such resources as video clips of lectures.

There are also two popular publications that

support the field of science and religion: Science

and Spirit is a bimonthly glossy magazine, and Re-

search News and Opportunities in Science and

Theology is a monthly newspaper. Science and

Spirit, launched in 1989 and repositioned in 2001

for a general audience, explores the religious di-

mensions of scientific discoveries and technologi-

cal advances. Brief, timely, articles by well-known

thinkers illuminate the nexus of science and spiri-

tuality, while incorporating the wisdom of a world

of faiths. Paid subscribers exceeded nine thousand

in 2002. Research News and Opportunities in Sci-

ence and Theology was launched in 2000 as a gen-

eral clearinghouse of information for the field of

science and religion. This monthly paper reports

on the science and religion community’s activities,

organizations, and opinion leaders, and it pub-

lishes book reviews and interviews that address

emerging and established topics of scientific and

religious inquiry. Research News also serves the

former readership of Bridgebuilding and Progress

in Theology, two small specialized publications dis-

banded in 2000. Research News, in 2002, had a

paid circulation over five thousand and readership

of about thirty thousand.

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 767

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 768—

Beyond the established scholarly periodicals

and the emerging popular ones are a number of

newsletters that, while connected to specific sci-

ence and religion centers, often contain articles

and reviews of general interest. Some of the more

significant are The Pascal Centre Notebook from the

Pascal Centre for Advanced Studies in Science and

Faith at Redeemer College in Ancaster, Ontario;

Science and Religion Forum from the Institute on

Religion in an Age of Science (IRAS); and the Jour-

nal of the Faith and Science Exchange, published

by the Boston Theological Institute.

See also SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN PUBLIC

COMMUNICATION

KARL GIBERSON

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,

ESEARCH IN

It is essential to begin by noting that research in

science and religion covers a wide range of explo-

ration. The frequent use of the terms “science-and-

religion field” and “science-religion debate” tends

to obscure not only the range of relationships be-

tween different sciences and different religions, but

also different approaches to researching these re-

lationships. There is a diverse matrix of relation-

ships between the cognitive claims of different sci-

ences and different religions. As argued by Willem

B. Drees in Religion, Science, and Naturalism

(1996), religions have different aspects, which

have different relations to the science under con-

sideration, and the phenomenon of religion is itself

a proper object of scientific study. But the matrix is

yet broader and more intricate than that—sciences

do not consist only of propositional claims being

tested by experiment, but of communities of indi-

vidual scholars whose work is informed both by

their individual spiritual attitudes and by the ethos

of their community. That ethos is in turn informed

by social, cultural, and political factors.

Some historical considerations

That the matrix of relationships mentioned above

has been in constant shift throughout the last few

hundred years has been an emphasis in the work

of historians such as John Hedley Brooke. Brooke’s

determined insistence that, viewed historically, the

unfolding of these relationships is often more sur-

prising and paradoxical than might have been sup-

posed has been a significant counter to the devising

of overly simplistic grand narratives of the relation-

ship between science and religion. In Brooke’s

book with Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature

(1998), he explores the range of approaches by

which history can enrich and subvert trite precon-

ceptions, and includes a fascinating chapter on

chemistry, a subject too often omitted from histori-

cal surveys of the science-religion matrix.

A problem that will continue to beset historical

research in science and religion is: What was it

about European Renaissance Christendom that par-

ticularly predisposed it to give rise to modern

Western science? Important markers in this debate

have been Reijer Hooykaas’s stress on the impor-

tance of Protestantism, Stanley Jaki’s emphasis on

the contribution of Catholic thinking, and Amos

Funkenstein’s important Theology and the Scien-

tific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Sev-

enteenth Century (1986). The question can be put

another way: How can we account for the “failure

of early science,” as Philip Luscombe puts it in

Groundwork of Science and Religion (2000)? Nei-

ther Ancient Greek culture, nor the “Golden Age of

Islam” in the tenth and eleventh centuries, nor in-

deed Chinese or Indian civilization, gave rise to

any expansion of experimental enquiry and tech-

nological development that remotely parallels that

of the modern West. This question will need par-

ticularly sensitive handling in the twenty-first cen-

tury, when religious conviction and political and

economic aspiration have become so evidently in-

tertangled with the question of what is a truth to be

lived by.

The character of the science-religion debate

The apparent unity of the science-religion debate

in the Western world has had much to do with two

particular dynamics. First, certain prominent scien-

tists continue to make assertions about the reach of

science, claiming that in some way it falsifies the

truth-claims of religion. Names that come to mind

include Stephen Hawking and Peter Atkins (in

their different ways) in respect of physics, and Ed-

ward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins (again in

their different ways) in respect of biology. These

assertions tap into a perception in the public mind

that indeed religion is in headlong retreat before

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 768

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 769—

science. People therefore seek overviews of how

this supposed battle is going, overviews which

have been provided with consistent distinction

over many years by the Minnesota-based philoso-

pher and theologian Ian Barbour, whose typolo-

gies of possible relationships between the disci-

plines—in terms of conflict, independence,

dialogue, and integration—have done so much to

put the “conflict” hypothesis in perspective.

The second ingredient tending to promote a

sense of the unity of the field is the eloquent and

sustained contribution made since the 1970s by

four scholars in particular. Barbour has already

been mentioned. His name is often linked with

those of the British scientist-theologians Arthur

Peacocke and John Polkinghorne, but the contri-

bution of the American philosopher Holmes Rol-

ston III has been of comparable stature. All

emerged from a background in hard sciences—

Peacocke in physical biochemistry, the other three

in physics itself. All have surveyed the relationship

between sciences and religions as being a unity; all

have explicitly taken issue with the “falsifiers”

mentioned above. Though they differ in the degree

of their debt to process philosophy, and in their

theological inclinations, all remain deeply commit-

ted to a critical-realist view of human enquiry. Sci-

ence finds things out; over time, it tells us more

and more about the world. Science is therefore an

ally in enquiring more faithfully into the creativity

of God. Theology too is a realist discipline; over

time, it can expect to rid itself of formulations that

are not coherent with other robust understandings

of the world and of ourselves. For all four, in their

different ways, Christian monotheism is at the cut-

ting-edge of this exploration.

The relationship of ecological theology to

science-religion research

For far too long ecological theology has lived in a

separate ghetto from what is usually thought of as

research into science-and-religion. It is interesting

to consider why this might have been so. “Scien-

tist-theologians” (as Barbour, Peacocke, and Polk-

inghorne were dubbed in Polkinghorne’s compar-

ative study Scientists as Theologians [1996]) all take

an essentially positive view of science and seek to

learn how theology in the Christian tradition might

resemble it. Much ecological thinking, however,

has reflected on how the discoveries of science

have been used to develop technologies that op-

press and destroy nature—also on how patriarchal

monotheism has seemed to be an ally of that op-

pression, and in parallel also of the oppression of

women. Ecological theology, then, has been the

home not, typically, of the celebration of science

but of suspicious readings of the texts of power—

scientific as well as scriptural. It has also been a

domain of remythologizations: for example, the

universe as the body of God as in Sallie McFague’s

The Body of God (1993); the planet Earth (Gaia) as

the sacred space on which human beings depend

as in Anne Primavesi’s Sacred Gaia (2000).

Barbour has written extensively on the ethics

of technology, but it is Rolston who has been a key

figure in this uneasy relationship, since he has

made significant contributions both on science-

and-religion and in environmental ethics. He has

carefully analyzed how value is intrinsic to all liv-

ing things and the systems within which they func-

tion, but he has also insisted that a practical ap-

proach to environmentalism must insist on an

element of philosophical realism. Science is not

only a vital diagnostic aid as to the extent of the

environmental crisis because it does tell us things

about the way the world is; it is also a source of

potential solutions. There is much work to do to

widen the bridge Rolston has begun to build.

The divine action debate

Central in the divine action debate has been the

contribution made by six Vatican Conferences on

science and theology held between 1987 and 2000,

the first subtitled “A Common Quest for Under-

standing” and the last five “Scientific Perspectives

on Divine Action.” All the proceedings have been

edited by Robert John Russell and colleagues

(1988, 1993, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2001). The debate

about God’s providential activity and how it might

be related to the story of the universe has been the

biggest single engine driving research in science

and theology in this period. At two poles of the de-

bate have been (1) the Thomist understanding of

“double agency,” according to which God’s pri-

mary agency lies behind each and every event, but

God’s providence operates through secondary

causes, such as human activity, the stress being on

the ultimate sovereignty of God; and (2) the proc-

ess-theological view that divine persuasion is an

ingredient of every event, luring entities toward

harmony and creativity, but never determining

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 769

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 770—

outcomes. Here the stress is on God the fellow-

suffering persuader. Neither of these positions in it-

self makes for easy conversation with the sciences.

Important markers in the effort to understand

divine action within a scientifically described uni-

verse include (1) the proposal, going back to

William Pollard in the 1950s, but further developed

in particular by Russell and the South African

physicist George F. R. Ellis, that quantum indeter-

minacy provides the “gap” in which God can act

undetectably on the physical universe; (2) Polk-

inghorne’s provocative assertion in his Science

and Providence (1989) that we should look for the

locus of God’s action in the openness and indeter-

minacy of the universe at the macroscopic level, as

illustrated by the equations of chaos theory; (3)

Peacocke’s insistence on the importance of “top-

down causation,” later “whole-part influence”; and

(4) Nancey Murphy’s masterly assessment of these

views, which can be found in the Vatican Confer-

ence proceedings published as Chaos and Com-

plexity (1995). The divine action conferences have

covered physics and cosmology, chaos theory,

evolutionary and molecular biology, and neuro-

science. These subjects will be touched on further

below. The current state of the argument on quan-

tum indeterminacy is summarized in the Vatican

Conference proceedings entitled Quantum Me-

chanics (2001).

The Vatican Conferences have been invaluable

conversations among eminent thinkers, and essen-

tial resources for research students. However, the

overall conclusion from the debate must be that ef-

forts to press too closely the question of God’s ac-

tion, to allow the relevant science to frame too

closely how that action might be formulated, have

consistently failed. Polkinghorne, the most ambi-

tious thinker in this area, retreated in books such as

Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998) into much

more theological and less physical formulations.

One of the key theological issues underlying

the debate is that of God’s relation to time. Again

this sharply divides the classical Thomist approach,

which places God beyond time, from process-in-

fluenced schemes. The relation of this debate to

understanding of time in physics is much debated.

Polkinghorne has insisted that an omnipresent

God can be in time but equally present to every

point in space. Drees has objected that relativistic

understandings of space-time permit no such van-

tage point.

Another key issue is that of divine kenosis—

self-emptying. Two meetings of senior scholars on

this topic in 1998 and 1999 led to an important se-

ries of essays, The Work of Love (2001), edited by

Polkinghorne. Does God’s creative activity involve

an element of self-limitation, reaching a climax (for

Christians) at the Incarnation and Passion of Christ?

A particular importance of these meetings was that

they not only brought together the four senior fig-

ures in the debate—Barbour, Peacocke, Polking-

horne, and Rolston—but also a major philosopher

of religion, Keith Ward, and eminent figures from

the rest of the theological world, including Jürgen

Moltmann, Paul Fiddes, and Sarah Coakley. It is

vital to the future of explorations in this interdisci-

plinary area that research does not remain con-

fined within its own little interest group, but hears

from and responds to other branches of theology.

The contribution of philosophy of science

Research in science and religion necessarily in-

volves asking what sort of enterprise is the science

in question? Reference to the philosophy of sci-

ence, however, is complicated by the fact that most

practicing scientists would not recognize the de-

scriptions of their activity offered by most contem-

porary philosophy. Philosophers, working in the

context of postmodern critiques of foundational-

ism, and with a profound awareness of the cultural

embeddedness of all descriptions, tend to stress

the practice of science as the activity of a particu-

lar community, a particular type of rational enter-

prise. Most scientists simply think of themselves as

finding out more about the way things really are.

This is no doubt why the thinkers who have done

most to develop theological conversation with

working scientists have tended to espouse a fairly

strong form of critical realism. Significant support

for critical realism, particularly with respect to sci-

ence, has come from Ernan McMullin; an even

more robust insistence on realism can be found in

Roger Trigg’s Rationality and Religion (1998).

Among the philosophers who have most en-

gaged with the challenge of postmodernism, it is

important to mention the work of Murphy and of J.

Wentzel van Huyssteen. Murphy made a bold

bridge from the methodology of science into the-

ology in her Theology in the Age of Scientific Rea-

soning (1990), using the model of core and auxil-

iary hypotheses developed by Imre Lakatos. In the

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 770

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 771—

process, she rejected critical realism in theology on

the grounds that it makes too great a claim as to

our knowledge of elements of reality beyond our

ordinary human ways of knowing. Since then,

Murphy has worked with Ellis to develop a model

in which cosmology might inform ethics, as in their

On the Moral Nature of the Universe (1996).

In contrast to Murphy, van Huyssteen wants to

defend “a weak form of critical realism,” essentially

as an inference from the evolved capacity of

human beings to make sense of the cosmos. He

has made a telling diagnosis of the predicament of

contemporary theology as being, in a sense, be-

tween a rock and a soft place, between the strong

progressivist truth-claims of science and post-

modernity’s relativizing suspicion of all grand nar-

ratives. Yet van Huyssteen asserts that this makes

the conversation between science and theology a

particularly important one. As he claims in The

Shaping of Rationality (1999), if any rational com-

munities are to be in conversation, it should be

these two.

The conversation with the physicists

This conversation is best known through the works

of the Australia-based British physicist Paul Davies,

in particular God and the New Physics (1983) and

The Mind of God (1992). Davies is a fascinating ex-

ample of a physicist of no particular religious affil-

iation whose explorations of the lawfulness and

fruitfulness of the cosmos draw him to God-

language. It led him in his early days to postulate

that there are senses in which science may teach

us more about God than religion can; later he was

disposed to remark not only on the astonishing in-

telligibility of the universe but also on the limits of

human understanding—the laws of nature will not

of themselves answer every question about exis-

tence. Interestingly, Davies has also explored the

theologically intriguing question as to whether life

on Earth may have extraterrestrial origins.

Two arguments at the boundary of physics and

metaphysics currently generate a lot of energy and

lead to a great deal of God-talk, if not always of

the most informed or nuanced kind. The first con-

cerns the so-called anthropic coincidences. If cer-

tain fundamental constants were even minutely dif-

ferent, or if the early history of the universe had

unfolded even slightly differently, this universe

could not be fruitful of life. So, did God fine-tune

the cosmos? This is a discussion dogged by impre-

cision of terms and by the temptation to try and re-

solve a metaphysical issue by argument in physics

(a mistake against which Polkinghorne has consis-

tently argued). The main alternative to divine fine-

tuning is the many-universes theory, and neither

alternative is subject to physical test. However, it

must be admitted that developments in theoretical

physics, in particular those concerning the possi-

bility of universes giving rise to other universes

(see for example Lee Smolin’s The Life of the Cos-

mos [1997], for a different approach see Hawking’s

The Universe in a Nutshell [2001]) could influence

the balance of the argument, though they could

not settle it. A change in the balance would be a

change in the apparent consonance between the

picture physical science offers and the notion of a

God designing the universe. If the universe as de-

scribed by science looks unique and precisely fine-

tuned for life, the consonance is high. If this looks

like one of many trillion universes constantly bud-

ding off from one another, the anthropic coinci-

dences look less suggestive, and consonance is

lower. Consonance is a felicitous term, first devel-

oped by McMullin and further explored by Ted Pe-

ters, for describing the way scientific and theolog-

ical formulations seem sometimes to come into

harmony. But apparent consonances come and go;

mature interdisciplinary research in this area re-

quires that they not be too much relied upon.

This is nowhere more important than in the

other major area of debate between physics and

philosophical theism—the question of the origin

and cause of the universe. The enthusiasm of Pope

Pius XII for the apparent consonance between

early Big Bang cosmology and Genesis 1 has long

been subverted by a series of alternative proposals

in physics. The Big Bang model continues as a de-

scription of the development of the universe, in-

cluding its apparent rapid early inflation. However,

various models of the origin of the universe and its

very early growth, in a context in which quantum

effects may have dominated, now suggest that the

arising of this fourteen-billion-year-old universe,

containing a hundred billion galaxies, may have

been some form of chance fluctuation in a pre-

existing state of zero net energy. This has been

taken by some to challenge both the Christian doc-

trine of creation-out-of-nothing (creatio ex nihilo)

and the notion of “God’s moment” before the laws

of physics took effect. However, more rigorous

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 771

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 772—

thinking shows that the “nothing” of the quantum

vacuum is a highly structured state, hardly nihil in

theological terms. Robert John Russell’s analysis,

published in Religion and Science: History,

Method, Dialogue (edited by W. Mark Richardson

and Wesley J. Wildman, 1996), shows that a dis-

crete temporal moment of becoming would be an

interesting consonance with Genesis but is not

necessary to a Christian theology of creation.

Russell has also remarked that accounts of the

end of the universe will necessarily exhibit a dis-

sonance between scientific prediction and Christ-

ian formulation. All the different scientific accounts

suggest that this universe will have a finite lifespan,

and even if new universes bud off from it or are

born out of it, there seems little likelihood that

structure or information, let alone living things,

could survive such a transition. The Christian hope,

however, anticipates a new creation and a contin-

ued bodily existence of persons. Perhaps because

of this dissonance there has been surprisingly little

work in this area of the science-religion debate.

Some interesting new science continues to emerge

(for a summary see Martin Rees’ Our Cosmic Habi-

tat [2002]), but few theologians have explored the

territory, honorable exceptions being Polkinghorne

and Welker’s edited work The Ends of the World

and the Ends of God (2000) and Arnold Benz’s The

Future of the Universe (2000).

Theology and biology

In 1996, Holmes Rolston contributed an interesting

essay entitled “Science, Religion and the Future” to

Richardson and Wildman’s Religion and Science.

In it he remarks that “Outspokenly monotheistic

biologists are as rare as those who think physics is

compatible with monotheisms are common” (p.

65). There is a contrast between the tone of mutual

curiosity in much of the conversation between

philosophical theism and physics and the often ac-

rimonious conversation between theologians and

certain biologists, particularly Dawkins, Wilson,

and Lewis Wolpert. It may be argued that Dawkins

has had his uses in stirring up the debate, as

Jacques Monod did before him. Strongly reduc-

tionist denials of the significance of human exis-

tence and humans’ search for God did much to

provoke Peacocke’s long engagement with theol-

ogy’s relation to evolutionary biology, as summa-

rized in his Paths from Science towards God (2001).

The British philosopher Mary Midgley has also

been important for her rejection of trite reduction-

ism, and her insistence that there can be many

“maps” of the character of existence and that these

maps are not mutually exclusive, that mortgages

are in a sense as real as membranes or muons.

However, too much adversarial writing some-

times distracts theologians from their central task.

The long battle, especially in the United States,

over creationism has distracted attention from the

fascinating questions that arise if a generally Dar-

winian picture is accepted. Two questions particu-

larly come to mind.

First, when and how did evolving hominids

develop the status Christian theology accords hu-

mans as being in the image and likeness of God?

When did they develop the capacity for worship,

and what view of the world did this early religious

practice reflect? Beyond the oft-repeated state-

ment, much insisted on by Peacocke, that theol-

ogy must discard a picture of a historical fall from

a preparadisal state, little progress has been made

in this area. Perhaps theologians are right to be

cautious, since the paleontological evidence

changes continually and seems to push the devel-

opment of artistic and symbolic skills further and

further back in time.

Many of the details of the second question

were already known to Charles Darwin by the

mid-1800s. It concerns the theodicy problem raised

by evolution through natural selection. How could

a loving God use a process so replete in casual-

ties—individual organisms that never grow to their

potential or die in horrible pain, species that go ex-

tinct—to realize other ends, such as the evolution

of humans? Again, scientist-theologians need to

learn from ecotheologians and move beyond the

very anthropocentric ambit of theodicy as it has

tended to be done. Some early evolutionary theod-

icies can be seen in Ruth Page’s God and the Web

of Creation (1996), John Haught’s God After Dar-

win (2000), and Christopher Southgate’s “God and

Evolutionary Evil” (2002).

One of the most intense areas of ethical debate

in the early twenty-first century is the area of ge-

netic manipulation and cloning. This focuses ques-

tions as to the role and status of the human person.

Are we “plain citizens of the biotic community” as

Aldo Leopold stated, or the “created co-creators”

(suggested by Philip Hefner in The Human Factor

(1993)? Issues of genetic reductionism also stalk

the debate—to what extent do we understand an

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 772

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 773—

organism by understanding the location and func-

tion of its genes? Ted Peters has made an interest-

ing move here, arguing in Playing God? (1997) that

much of the opposition to genetic technologies is

itself reductionist. Celia Deane-Drummond in her

survey Biology and Theology Today (2001) insists

that the missing ingredient in the debate is an ap-

peal to wisdom, a promising route by which Chris-

tian theology might inform this branch of ethics.

A further question, still embryonic, is to what

extent work on chaos and complexity theory, the

self-organizing behavior of systems such as those

that gave rise to and nurtured life on Earth, may

alter our perspective on the evolutionary history of

the biosphere. The Danish scholar Niels Gregersen

has been at work on the significance of autopoiesis

in ways which may bear rich fruit in addressing

questions of the “designedness” of the biosphere

and the theology of God’s interaction with evolv-

ing life.

Theology and psychology

This conversation between theology and psychol-

ogy promises to be a great growth area in the first

half of the twenty-first century. As Philip Clayton

has noted in his God and Contemporary Science

(1997), human agency is the best analogy, however

weak it may be, to the agency of a personal God.

It is therefore of the first importance that theolo-

gians track research into the psychology of agency.

Secondly, religious experience (a particular re-

search interest of Fraser Watts, the Starbridge Lec-

turer at Cambridge) is properly the subject of both

theological and scientific investigation. Thirdly, our

view of the attributes of human personhood has

historically been profoundly influenced by theo-

logical formulations. In Christian societies this has

often been expressed in terms of “soul” language.

Yet in contemporary Western society it is science

that principally informs ethical and legal judgments

as to when personhood begins and ends. Hence

the special significance of the project involving

Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton

Maloney, helped by (among others) a distin-

guished evolutionary biologist in Francisco Ayala

and an eminent neuroscientist in Malcolm Jeeves.

This led to the book Whatever Happened to the

Soul? (1999), in which the authors explore a nonre-

ductive physicalist model of the mind-brain rela-

tion. On this model, soul language becomes adjec-

tival, not in any way an assertion that some sort of

separate entity exists within each human which

carries the spiritual life of the person. The ethical

implications of such a model are still to be worked

out, though John Habgood’s gradualist model of

the beginning and end of personhood in his Being

a Person (1998) is a challenging starting point, par-

ticularly in relation to terminal illness, dementia,

and persistent vegetative state.

Religions other than Christianity

There are good, if hotly debated, reasons why

Christian theologians have led the debate on the

relationship of theology to Western sciences. How-

ever, the science-religion debate must not consist

solely of a retelling of some Christian story that

Christendom fostered modern science, made a

brief mistake with Galileo, survived the assaults of

atheism and Darwinism, and now flourishes as a

trendy partner to contemporary cosmology. It is

self-evident that science’s relationships with reli-

gions and theologies other than the Christian are

not only important in themselves but may supply

wholly new perspectives from which to under-

stand interdisciplinary conversation of this type.

The Christian theologian must not seek to

mold other traditions into the particular thought-

patterns that happen to have informed the debate

between sciences and textual, critically aware

Christian theology. However, long established

questions are bound to occur to that theologian

such as (1) does the radical monotheism of Islam,

with its great emphasis on the authority of the lit-

eral text of the Qurhan, provide a climate for con-

versation with the forms of knowledge offered by

various sciences; and (2) can the apparently non-

realist attitude to matter in much Eastern thought

be reconciled with a realist cosmology?

The answer to these questions needs much

further exploration. Recent accounts by practicing

Muslims who are scientists, such as Mehdi Gol-

shani and Bruno Guiderdoni in Richardson and

Slack’s Faith in Science (2001), suggest that sci-

ence can be regarded as worship, as responding to

the Qurhanic command to see Allah’s signs in the

universe, yet there is no question that for many Is-

lamic thinkers a theory such as Darwinian evolu-

tion is profoundly unpalatable. As Michael Robert

Negus relates in the textbook God, Humanity, and

the Cosmos (1999, edited by Southgate), two of the

approaches in K. A. Wood’s classification of ways

to account for the sciences as compatible with

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 773

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 774—

Islam—compartmentalism and a phenomenologi-

cal approach to scriptural texts—would seem to

show promise in encouraging distinguished Mus-

lim scientists and theologians in the integration of

contemporary science with an Islamic metaphysics.

The third approach, scientific exegesis, seeking to

infer scientific truths from the scriptural texts them-

selves, seems fraught with problems.

As for Eastern thought, it does seem that its ap-

parently nonrealist attitude toward matter can be,

up to a point, reconciled with a realist cosmology.

An article by Vaharaja V. Raman on Hinduism in

When Worlds Converge (2002, edited by Matthews,

Tucker, and Hefner) suggests that indeed the ma-

terial world, and scientific conclusions about it, can

be taken seriously in Hindu thought, provided

there is no suggestion that the descriptions arrived

at have objective reference or that they are of par-

allel importance to the discoveries of the spiritual

masters. Points of contact can be noted here with

the debate within Christian theology. Likewise an

article on Buddhism by Pinit Ratanakul (in the

same volume) indicates an openness to the find-

ings of science, as long as the central moral

insights of the faith remain preeminent. The Bud-

dhist concepts of nonharming and interdepend-

ence remain important resources for developing

ecological ethics.

Resources, sponsors, and key organizations

It is enormously challenging to engage with the

complex matrix that is the science-religion debate,

and books that can function as textbooks for the

student remain few. Rolston’s Science and Religion

(1987) was an early example, and Barbour has pro-

duced a series of overviews, of which Religion

and Science (1997) is perhaps the most useful. The

first comprehensive, purpose-designed textbook to

appear was God, Humanity, and the Cosmos

(1999), edited by Southgate.

The extraordinary patronage of conversations

between science and religion by Sir John Temple-

ton, far and away the biggest single sponsor of

this type of research, has done much to build a

single community of enquirers. Extensive funding

has been made available for the Templeton Foun-

dation’s Science and Religion Course Program,

which has supported courses in several hundred

colleges throughout the world, and other types of

workshops and symposia on the classic issues dis-

cussed above. An important element in this has

been the exploration of the spiritualities of practic-

ing scientists and the effect faith, or lack of it, has

on their work.

A couple of centers of excellence in the cur-

rent debate also deserve mention. Long-term re-

search into profoundly difficult problems—cosmo-

logical, theological, and ethical—is conducted

with rigor and passion at the Center for Theology

and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California,

under the direction of Robert John Russell. Also

important is the Zygon Center for Religion and

Science in Chicago, from which Philip Hefner

edits Zygon, the premier journal in the field. The

two most prominent chairs in the field are the

James I. McCord Chair in Theology and Science at

Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey,

occupied by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, and the

Andreas Idreos Chair at Oxford University, occu-

pied by John Brooke. The novelist Susan Howatch

has endowed another important post at Cam-

bridge University, the Starbridge Lectureship. Eu-

rope has the most vigorous society: the European

Society of the Study of Science and Theology (ES-

SSAT), whose biennial meetings are not only a

major encouragement to scholars from poorly re-

sourced institutions in Eastern Europe, but pro-

foundly generative in themselves. Extensive infor-

mation can be found at www.metanexus.net and

www.counterbalance.org, which have done much

to make current research available online.

Concluding thoughts

The conversations between scientists and theolo-

gians that have been discussed above have had a

wider impact than might be thought simply by not-

ing the main developments. It is slowly coming to

be recognized that it is respectable for those

trained in the humanities to know about science.

Novels and poems based on scientific ideas and

images are now proliferating. Well-known theolo-

gians who have specialized in other areas in the

past are being drawn into the debate, including,

strikingly, the British evangelical scholar Alister

McGrath, who published two books on science

and religion in 1998. Likewise, eminent scientists

are now entering the conversation not, as in the

past, to dismiss theology, nor yet to defend it,

but to remark on the relationship between disci-

plines, as in Stephen Jay Gould’s model of “non-

overlapping magisteria” in his Rocks of Ages (1999).

If van Huyssteen is indeed right that the science-

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 774

SCIENCE AND RELIGION,RESEARCH IN

— 775—

theology debate is the paradigmatic case of the

possibilities of conversation between two rational

communities, these “cross-over” works are of par-

ticular significance for the unfolding of human ra-

tionality and creativity.

See also SCIENCE AND RELIGION; SCIENCE AND

RELIGION, HISTORY OF FIELD; SCIENCE AND

RELIGION IN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION; SCIENCE

AND

RELIGION, METHODOLOGIES; SCIENCE AND

RELIGION, MODELS AND RELATIONS; SCIENCE AND

RELIGION, PERIODICAL LITERATURE

Bibliography

Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Con-

temporary Issues. San Francisco: Harper, 1997.

Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion: Enemies,

Strangers or Partners? San Francisco: Harper, 2000.

Benz, Arnold. The Future of the Universe: Chance,

Chaos, God? New York and London: Continuum,

2000.

Brooke, John Hedley, and Cantor, Geoffrey. Reconstruct-

ing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion.

Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1998.

Brown, Warren; Murphy, Nancey; and Maloney, Newton

H. Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and

Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Minneapolis,

Minn.: Fortress Press, 1998.

Clayton, Philip. God and Contemporary Science. Edin-

burgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.

Davies, Paul. God and the New Physics. Harmondsworth,

UK: Penguin, 1983.

Davies, Paul. The Mind of God: Science and the Search for

Ultimate Meaning. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin,

1992.

Davies, Paul. The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin

of Life. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998.

Deane-Drummond, Celia. Biology and Theology Today:

Exploring the Boundaries. London: SCM Press, 2000.

Drees, Willem B. Religion, Science, and Naturalism. Cam-

bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Funkenstein, Amos. Theology and the Scientific Imagina-

tion from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century.

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion

in the Fullness of Life. London: Jonathan Cape; New

York: Ballantine, 1999.

Gregersen, Niels H. “Autopoiesis: Less than Self-Constitu-

tion, More than Self-organization.” Zygon 34, no. 1

(1999):117–138.

Habgood, John. Being A Person: Where Faith and Science

Meet. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998.

Haught, John F. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution.

Oxford and Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000.

Hawking, Stephen. The Universe in a Nutshell. London:

Bantam, 2001.

Hefner, Philip. The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and

Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993.

Luscombe, Philip. Groundwork of Science and Religion.

London: Epworth Press, 2000.

McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology.

London: SCM Press, 1993.

McGrath, Alister. The Foundations of Dialogue in Science

and Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.

McMullin, Ernan. “The Case for Scientific Realism.” In Sci-

entific Realism, ed. Jarrett Leplin. Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.

Matthews, Clifford N.; Tucker, Mary Evelyn; and Hefner,

Philip, eds. When Worlds Converge: What Science

and Religion Tell Us About the Story of the Universe

and Our Place in It. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 2002.

Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. New York and Lon-

don: Routledge, 2001.

Murphy, Nancey. Theology in the Age of Scientific Reason-

ing. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Murphy, Nancey, and Ellis, George F. R. On the Moral Na-

ture of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1996.

Page, Ruth. God and the Web of Creation. London: SCM

Press, 1996.

Peacocke, Arthur. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and

Becoming—Natural, Divine, and Human, Rev. edi-

tion. London: SCM Press, 1993.

Peacocke, Arthur. Paths from Science Towards God: The

End of all our Exploring. Oxford: Oneworld, 2001.

Peters, Ted. Playing God? Genetic Determinism and

Human Freedom. New York and London: Routledge,

1997.

Peters, Ted, ed. Science and Theology: The New Conso-

nance. Oxford and Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press,

1998.

Polkinghorne, John. Science and Providence: God’s Inter-

action With the World. London: SPCK, 1989.

Polkinghorne, John. Scientists as Theologians. London:

SPCK, 1996.

Polkinghorne, John. Belief in God in an Age of Science.

New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 775

SCIENCE FICTION

— 776—

Polkinghorne, John, ed. The Work of Love: Creation as

Kenosis. London: SPCK; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd-

mans, 2001.

Polkinghorne, John, and Welker, Michael, eds. The Ends

of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theol-

ogy on Eschatology. Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press In-

ternational, 2000.

Primavesi, Anne. Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth

Science. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Rees, Martin. Our Cosmic Habitat. London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson, 2002.

Richardson, W. Mark, and Slack, Gordy. Faith in Science:

Scientists Search for Truth. New York and London:

Routledge, 2001.

Richardson, W. Mark, and Wildman, Wesley J. Religion

and Science: History, Method, Dialogue. New York

and London: Routledge, 1996.

Rolston, Holmes, III. Science and Religion: A Critical Sur-

vey. New York: Random House, 1987.

Rolston, Holmes, III. Environmental Ethics: Duties to and

Values in the Natural World. Philadelphia, Pa.: Tem-

ple University Press, 1988.

Rolston, Holmes, III. Genes, Genesis, and God: Values

and their Origins in Natural and Human History.

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Russell, Robert J.; Clayton, Philip; Wegter-McNelly, Kirk;

and Polkinghorne, John, eds. Quantum Mechanics:

Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City:

Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, Calif.: Center for The-

ology and the Natural Sciences, 2001.

Russell, Robert J.; Murphy, Nancey; and Isham, C. J., eds.

Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scien-

tific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City: Vati-

can Observatory; Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Theol-

ogy and the Natural Sciences, 1993.

Russell, Robert J.; Murphy, Nancey; Meyering, Theo C.;

and Arbib, Michael A., eds. Neuroscience and the

Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vati-

can City: Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, Calif.: Center

for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999.

Russell, Robert J.; Murphy, Nancey; and Peacocke, Arthur,

eds. Chaos and Complexity: Scientific Perspectives on

Divine Action. Vatican City: Vatican Observatory;

Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Theology and the Natural

Sciences, 1995.

Russell, Robert J.; Stoeger, William R.; and Coyne, George

V., eds. Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Com-

mon Quest for Understanding. Vatican City: Vatican

City Publications, 1988.

Russell, Robert J.; Stoeger, William R.; and Ayala, Fran-

cisco, eds. Evolutionary and Molecular Biology:

Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action. Vatican City:

Vatican Observatory; Berkeley, Calif.: Center for The-

ology and the Natural Sciences, 1998.

Smolin, Lee. The Life of the Cosmos. London: Weidenfeld

and Nicolson; New York: Oxford University Press,

1997.

Southgate, Christopher, ed. God, Humanity, and the Cos-

mos: A Textbook in Science and Religion. Edinburgh,

UK: T&T Clark; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press Interna-

tional, 1999.

Southgate, Christopher. “God and Evolutionary Evil:

Theodicy in the Light of Darwinism.” Zygon 37, no.4

(2002): 803–824.

Trigg, Roger. Rationality and Religion. Oxford: Blackwell,

1998.

van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. Duet or Duel? Theology and

Science in a Postmodern World. London: SCM Press,

1998.

van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel. The Shaping of Rationality: To-

ward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science.

Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.

Ward, Keith. God, Chance, and Necessity. Oxford:

Oneworld, 1996.

Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

New York: Knopf, 1998.

Wood, K. A. “The Scientific Exegesis of the Qurhan.” Per-

spectives on Science and Christian Faith (Journal of

the American Scientific Affiliation) 45, no. 2 (1993):

90–94.

CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE

SCIENCE FICTION

Science fiction is the genre of stories and film in

which a significant element of the plot depends on

the laws of mathematics and the physical sciences,

or on the use of technology as currently known or

as developed in a credible way. Stories in which

natural laws are suspended or violated fall into the

realm of fantasy rather than science fiction. Most

science fiction plots take place in the future, on a

fictional planet, or posit the use of a new technol-

ogy. They explore the best and worst case scenar-

ios that could result from the application of tech-

nology or from a variation in the natural world,

LetterS.qxd 3/18/03 1:07 PM Page 776