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