Scientific and Religious Worldviews

The second principle moral that is drawn from this historical case-study is that in the historical and contemporary interplay between sciences and theologies, it is the atheological naturalistic worldview based on the assumptions and narratives of the natural sciences that is often most important, rather than the individual facts and theories of empirical science. The emergence of a physiologically conceived concept of ‘emotions’ illustrates the fact that the rise of scientific modes of thought at the expense of theological ones is sometimes as much a consequence of adopting the assumptions and narratives of science as of applying the empirical results of science. Another way of putting this idea is that while in the past some ‘Science and Theology’ writers have sought to find similarities between science and theology by treating them both as sorts of science, I propose to investigate the ways in which both can be seen as sorts of theology. ‘Worldview commitments’ - beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality, how to learn the truth about it, and how to explain and narrate it - can be derived from scientific practice and theory as well as from religion.

Contributed by: Thomas Dixon