Methodology in Science and Religion

Before reflecting theologically on scientific cosmology, I first want to discuss the question of method - namely how I intend to relate science and theology. In essence, I will make a two-fold proposal: that the sciences and the humanities, including theology, form an epistemic hierarchy which ensures both constraint and irreducibility, and that theological methodology is analogous to scientific methodology though with several important differences.

The idea of an epistemic hierarchy can be summarized here, but the methodological analogy will require further discussion below. In essence, the idea is that physics, for example, places constraints on biology: no biological theory should contradict physics, and so on up through the other sciences and humanities. On the other hand, the processes, properties, and laws of biology cannot be reduced without remainder to those of physics, and again on up through the other sciences and humanities. Though scholars differ on the precise ordering the disciplines, and the role that cross-disciplinary fields like genetics plays in the scheme, the idea of an epistemic ordering like this is crucial both to warding off the philosophical claims of reductionism and a ‘dualistic’ (or even more foliated) ontology of ‘levels’.

To make my case, particularly in regards to the analogy between scientific and theological method, I am drawing directly on the pioneering writings of Ian Barbouras well as on those of Arthur Peacocke,Nancey Murphy,Philip Clayton,John Polkinghorneand many others, each of whom has contributed to our growing understanding both of the hierarchy and the analogy. I will also suggest several ways we can expand on their work to portray the relationship as both genuinely asymmetrical and interactive. While these ways make the relationship explicitly asymmetrical, the underlying assumption of a hierarchy of knowledge in itself ensures an implicit asymmetry. Indeed, it will be the task of the paths to show that the asymmetry is not so entirely dominant that theological truth claims are irrelevant to those of science, as is implicit in most of the discussions of ‘theology and science’. In short, it will be the task of the paths to show that there are viable ways from theology to science, without, of course, any sense of appeal to theological ‘authority’.

Contributed by: Dr. Robert Russell