Theological Methodology as Analogous to Scientific Method
Barbour, Murphy and Clayton claim that one can view
theological method as analogous to scientific method. (See Figure 2, adapted
from Barbour) I take their claim to be
both a description of the way many theologians actually work and a prescription
for progress in theological research.
Here doctrines are seen as theories, working hypotheses held fallibly
and constructed in light of the “data of theology” - for example, a combination
of scripture, tradition, reason, personal and community experience, and the
encounter with world cultures and with nature, including the discoveries and
conclusions of the social, psychological and natural sciences. They are held seriously but tentatively, and
they are open to being tested against such data. It is here in particular that the natural sciences are
particularly germane: the theories and discoveries of cosmology, physics,
evolutionary and molecular biology, anthropology, the neurosciences, and so on,
should serve as crucial sources of data for theology, both inspiring new
insights and challenging traditional, outmoded conceptions of nature.
Figure 2: Theological methodology as
analogous to scientific methodology.
(adapted from Barbour, 1990)
There
are, of course, important differences between the methods of theology and the
natural sciences. One is that
theologians lack criteria of theory choice which are agreed-upon in advance and
which fully transcend the influences of the theories under dispute. Another difference involves the extent to
which beliefs influence both the relevancy and the interpretation of data, and
the power of imagination, analogy and models in theory construction. A third difference is that, as in the social
sciences but unlike the natural sciences, much of the data for religious
scholars come from subjects; in effect, religious scholars are typically
seeking to interpret the interpretation of others - what Phil Clayton calls the
problem of the ‘double hermeneutic.’
Murphy, drawing on Lakatos, has underscored the importance of ‘novel
facts’ in settling disputes and the avoidance of ad hoc as a sign of epistemic progress in theology.
These
similarities and differences make the appropriation of scientific methodology
in theology both promising and challenging.
My hope is that as theologians begin to shape their work in this way we
will be able to decide whether such a move is genuinely fruitful.
Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell
|
