BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

THEOLOGY AND SCIENCE IN CONVERSATION
Reviews of Anglo-American Postmodernity and of Alone in the World?

Daniel Hertzler

Anglo-American Postmodernity, by Nancey Murphy. Westview Press, 1997.

Alone in the World? Human Uniqueness in Science and Theology, by J. Wentzel van Huyssteen. Eerdmans, 2006.

These two theologians teach in seminaries at the opposite ends of the country. Murphy is at Fuller in California and van Huyssteen at Princeton in New Jersey. In the books reviewed here, neither appears to be aware of the other, although both are giving extended attention to the relations between theology and science. In this review, Murphy’s book serves as an introduction to van Huyssteen’s, although it is not her latest book and does not fully illustrate her engagement as a theologian with scientists.

Murphy would have us understand that theology rests on philosophy and that inadequate philosophy will foster inadequate theology. She observes that the philosophy which underlay modernity went back to Descartes, since whose time "the ideal of human knowledge has focused on the general, the timeless, the theoretical—in contrast to the local, the particular, the timely, the practical."

So, she says, these questions arose: "What is the nature or source of foundational beliefs—clear, distinct ideas, impressions, sense data? What kind of reasoning is to be used for the construction—deductive, inductive, constructive, hypothetical-deductive" (10)?

The result, she says, has been "foundationalism," the idea that any position one holds must be built on a solid foundation section by section up to where we are. But she reports that foundationalism has been found to be logically impossible. There is no way to start at the bottom. One always has some assumptions. On reflection we would think that smart people would have recognized this sooner, but so it goes.

Today, says Murphy, philosophers are inclined toward "holism," a strategy which recognizes "a complex mutual conditioning between part and whole. It recognizes different levels of complexity and recognizes as well that no one level can be thoroughly understood in isolation from its neighbors" (34).

She reports that theologians have been attracted to foundationalism and that it has been the source of ongoing controversy. What foundation should be appealed to? "The short answer is there have turned out to be only two options: Scripture or experience. Conservative theologians have chosen to build on Scripture; liberals are distinguished by their preference for experience" (89).

Such a forced choice is no doubt the source of the fundamentalists’ insistence on labeling Scripture as "inerrant and infallible." Anyone who studies Scripture carefully should be able to see that these are impossible standards. As for experience, this too seems like a foundation of sand. Who is to declare what experience is authentic?

A related issue is a question of interventionism versus immanentism. "Conservatives take an interventionist approach to divine action—God is sovereign over the laws of nature and is thus able to override them to produce special divine acts. Liberals take an immanentist approach, emphasizing God’s action in and through natural processes" (100). Murphy proposes that we need an approach to knowledge that gets off dead center.

After a wide-ranging review of philosophical strategies, she comes to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, who

has said that all traditions, religious and secular alike, are shaped by their interpretation and application of a formative text. He emphasizes that fruitful participation in an intellectual tradition requires prior formation of the character of the participants, the acquisition of virtues that allow them to participate in the practices constitutive of their tradition. This is in sharp contrast to the modern ideal of an enquiry in which the solitary knower was required first to rid the mind of all prejudice (tradition) before he could begin. (151)

With this behind her, Murphy is ready to reassess the relations between religion and science. How reply to the scientific charge that theology depends on subjectivism?

She finds an answer in what she calls "the theory of discernment that states that it is possible to recognize the activity of God in human life by means of signs or criteria, some of which are public and relatively objective." She holds that this theory "functions in Christian theology in exactly the same way as theories of instrumentation do in science."

Two criteria for theology she finds are "consistency and fruit." One issue among Christians, she observes, is who should discern. As a Church of the Brethren minister, Murphy highlights the Anabaptist-free church tradition where "discernment is a function exercised by the gathered community. That is, it is the job of the Church to decide who are the true and false prophets" (163-164).

From here she goes on to propose that ethics should be considered a science because, as she says, "the social sciences raise questions that they alone are not competent to answer. . . . So it would be useful if we could add to the top of the hierarchy of the social sciences the ‘science’ of ethics. Such a "science," she explains, "would be the science whose job is to compare and evaluate systematic theories for the good of humankind and help with spelling out the consequences when such theories are embodied in social practice" (185).

A model of relationships among the sciences which she illustrates in the book shows theology at the top with ethics just below it and physics at the bottom. But, she says, modernity tends toward reductionism, to seek "to reduce morality to something else" (201). This has been particularly true of biologists, but she asserts that in fact all moral systems are dependent, either explicitly or implicitly on beliefs about the nature of ultimate reality" (207).

Thus, as she holds, the bottoms-up position of reductionism is not possible. Everyone must have some assumptions. To operate on the basis of ethics and theology is no less logical than some other assumptions.

To me it seems a sensible argument, although I have not seen any responses from the reductionists. But I find, as stated above, that the Murphy book serves nicely as an introduction to van Huyssteen’s Alone in the World? based on the 2004 Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. This author’s concern is to find common ground with scientists.

In these lectures he proposed to pursue two issues: "repositioning a contemporary notion of interdisciplinary reflection, and pursuing as an interdisciplinary problem the issue of human uniqueness. I will argue that theology and the sciences find a shared research trajectory precisely in the topic of human uniqueness" (8). Keywords in his development are "transversality" and "contextuality." He assumes that if theologians and scientists take each other seriously, they can find common ground.

As does Murphy, van Huyssteen assumes the end of foundationalism and uses repeatedly the term post-foundational, an assumption which he perceives makes possible the theological and scientific conversations. The branch of science he has chosen for dialogue is paleontology—and he finds that some paleontologists are more satisfactory conversationalists than others. He particularly objects to reductionism among scientists and abstractions by theologians:

By recognizing the limitations of interdisciplinarity, the disciplinary integrity of theology and the sciences should be protected. On this view the theologian can caution the scientist to recognize the reductionism of scientific worldviews even as the scientist can caution the theologians against constructing esoteric and imperialistic worldviews. (219)

In opposition to reductionism, he holds that the religious impulse is culturally and not biologically driven. He finds evidence for the beginning of religion among our species in the cave drawings of southern France, which are dated some 40,000 years ago (176). He suggests that at this point there was a breakthrough in human development "the amazing emergence of what Stephen Mithen has called cognitive fluidity. Science, art, and religion are all deeply embedded in the cognitive fluidity of the embodied human mind/brain" (214).

A key word here is "embodied." He will respect and support the human connection with all other natural life.

Having made this connection, he goes on to discuss human uniqueness, drawing on both scientific and theological resources. In the final chapter, he reviews the issue of where interdisciplinary conversation may break down and emphasizes that it is important for the theologians to operate from theological assumptions and not concede too much.

As an example of the latter, he critiques theologian Edward Farley who, he says, seeks to develop a generic position beyond his Christian tradition. "He has a highly contextualized and concrete view of human nature, but the generic post-Christian theology that emerges does not even attempt to embed this embodied human condition into the concrete particularity of a specific religion or lived religious faith" (306).

At the end of the discussion he calls attention to "a remarkable embodied brain, a stunning mental cognitive fluidity expressed in imagination, creativity, linguistic abilities, and symbolic propensities." But he observes also that we are "inescapably caught between what we have come to call ‘good and evil.’" So the Reformed theologian is speaking, and his final words addressed to the scientists are that "theology offers a promising key to understanding these profoundly tragic dimensions of human existence, but also to understanding why religious belief has provided our distant ancestors, and us, with dimensions of hope, redemption, and grace" (325).

In my initial reading of the book, I overlooked the last phrase and perceived that he as a Reformed theologian was more aware of sin than of salvation. But I was wrong to overlook the fact that the last words in the book are "hope, redemption, and grace."

This review cannot do justice to these two wide ranging books, especially the second one. However, I found them useful, particularly the description of foundationalism and its limitations. I’m glad for an alternative to the debate between fundamentalists and liberals. I could never see a solution to that debate and Stanley Hauerwas has said that fundamentalist literalists and their liberal critics are "but two sides of the same coin, insofar that each assumes the text should be accessible to anyone without the mediation of the church" (Unleashing the Church: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America, Abingdon, 1993).

As for van Huyssteen’s conversation between theologians and scientists, it seems a step ahead. How fast and how far it will go remains to be seen. In the meantime I’m not often in conversation with anyone who raises questions such as these. But who knows when it could happen?

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is an editor, writer, and chair of the elders, Scottdale Mennonite Church.