Review of Paul Tyson, A Christian Theology of Science

I was delighted to see Paul Tyson's A Christian Theology of Science appear in print. By way of full disclosure, I was in the fortunate position of watching the book take shape in real time and to have had (at times, lively) discussions with its author about its central claims. Like any stimulating new work that seeks to lay out a new agenda, the book not only articulates a bold thesis, but at the same time raises a host of new questions. What follows is a brief summary of the book's argument as I understand it, followed by some of the questions I was left with having completed it. These mostly concern the overall framing device of the book—what Tyson refers to as ‘the first truth discourses’ of science and theology. A second, and relatively brief set of questions is to do with what follows from Tyson's analysis for our evaluation and understanding of modern science. A Christian Theology of Science is part of a relatively new and (literally) unapologetic trend to relocate the science-theology discussion into the heart of Christian theology.1 The central argument of the book is that modern science embodies a worldview that is incompatible with, and indeed opposed to, a genuinely Christian worldview. Tyson speaks in this context of the ‘first truth discourse of science’ which he opposes to ‘the first truth discourse of Christianity’ (1-3). The historical thesis is that in the West, from the seventeenth century onwards, the latter was gradually displaced by the former. Tyson identifies the first truth discourse of science with a form of reductive materialism (24-25), while the first truth discourse of Christianity entails belief in doctrinal propositions that coincide broadly with traditional symbols of faith such as the Apostle's Creed (12, 110). The normative thesis is that unless we recognize the implicit tension between these competing discourses, any attempt to understand the relationship between science and religion is doomed to failure. Tyson argues that this is true for most of such efforts since the nineteenth century: these are variously categorized as ‘adaptation’, ‘withdrawal’, and ‘appropriation’ (5-7, cf. 83-88). Adaptation, typified by liberal Protestantism, makes the relationship work by conceding territory to science and relinquishing central doctrinal claims. Withdrawal involves the privatization of religion, sealing it hermetically from the secular world. Appropriation seeks to bring the methods of science into Christian theology, exemplified in movements such as Young Earth Creationism, or Intelligent Design. What Tyson proposes in place of these unsatisfactory options is a genuinely Christian theology of science that openly confronts the radical difference in their basic orientations. This confrontation involves exposing the underlying metaphysical assumptions of the two enterprises in order to make their basic differences in perspective more explicit. Once this has been accomplished it then becomes possible to begin a reconceptualization of science that brings it under the umbrella of ‘the first truth discourse of Christianity’. Tyson's thesis, which is set out with great clarity, represents a bold reassertion of the authority and legitimacy of Christian theology. It takes as its point of departure the primacy of theology for religious believers over competing modes of discourse. He demonstrates a refreshing willingness to confront the possibility of genuine conflict between science and religion, and indeed to bring it to light where necessary. This is accompanied by an insistence that following the identification of conflict it should not always be Christian theology that makes the concessions, so that its history becomes one of constant adjustment and compromise of core doctrines in order to accommodate whatever happens to be the present scientific fashion. It holds out the promise of a significant re-imagining of the relationship between science and Christian theology. I am generally sympathetic to some of the aims of the book. However, it did leave me with a number of questions. These mostly concern the framing of the argument and the specifics of exactly what would follow for the present practice of science. An initial question would be about the structuring of the science-theology question in terms of what Tyson calls ‘competing first truth discourses’. This notion, perhaps of necessity, is rather abstract. Tyson refers to the first truth discourse of science in these terms: ‘today's empirical, rationalist, and reductively materialistic scientific knowledge’, ‘physical reductionism’, or ‘naturalistic materialism’ (3, 71, 110, and passim). But who, exactly, thinks about the world exclusively in these terms, and in what contexts? How, in other words, is this particular ‘first truth discourse’ instantiated? Such a perspective might be encountered in, or extrapolated from, some polemical and admittedly high profile works of popular science—the usual suspects would be Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Dennett, et al. But is it really exemplified in the actual practices of working scientists, and if so, how? More generally, is it the primary grid through which modern (and secular) Western individuals construct their world? On this point Tyson suggests that science is ‘the dominant public truth discourse’ (25, 174). I am not so sure. Either way, it would have been good to have had more concrete examples of what this ‘first truth discourse of science’ looks like in practice, what its implications are, and exactly who subscribes to it.2 Consider just these few examples. A majority of people in Europe believe that they have a soul, while 46% agree or mostly agree with the statement, ‘I feel a connection to something that cannot be seen or measured scientifically.’3 Most Americans (admittedly an exceptional case in some respects) believe in God. 40% of them also believe in ghosts or demons (with Republicans more likely than Democrats to entertain such beliefs).4 More evidence of a similar nature could be adduced, but the basic point is that these figures do not support a thesis of the ubiquity of reductive materialism, even if we restrict ourselves to the highly secularized West. Scientists themselves also exhibit a surprising commitment to religious conceptions of the world, with Elaine Howard Ecklund's work suggesting that about 50% of practicing scientists consider themselves to be religious.5 If this is correct, then not even a significant majority of scientists cherish ‘the first truth discourse of science’ as defined by Tyson. Who then, does? There is a danger here of constructing a straw man out of an imagined scientistic metaphysics to which a Christian metaphysics can then be opposed. I wonder, then, if some of the arguments of the book might rest upon a misdiagnosis of the Western condition. The statistics cited above suggest that the modern Western world—to say nothing of the rest of the globe—is less secularized and disenchanted than is sometimes imagined. Rather than a Manichean division between two opposing ‘truth discourses’—one religious and one reductively materialist—perhaps what we encounter in the West, as the observers of postmodernity have consistently maintained, is rather an absence of overarching metaphysical frameworks. The major threat to an imagined and unified ‘first truth discourse of Christianity’ would then not come from some competing scientific discourse, but from the conviction that all such universalising discourses have ceased to be credible. This would still be consistent with an elevated view of science, which could be understood in practical terms as facilitating technologies and affordances, rather than the embodiment of some overarching ‘truth discourse’. Science, adopted on purely instrumental grounds, requires no metaphysical commitments. To place all of this in the context of more general theories about Western modernization, the question is whether Tyson's thesis is another version of the secularization thesis, which over the past twenty years has been subjected to searching criticism.6 Or does Tyson regard his project as part of the phenomenon of post-secularity? If the latter, where does he locate himself in relation to other commentators on post-secularity?7 Moving from sociology to psychology, might it not also be the case that individuals operate with different frameworks that confer meaning in a range of diverse contexts? This, for example, is the rationale behind Christian advocacies of the adoption of methodological naturalism in scientific contexts. I suspect that in reality we all operate with a degree of cognitive dissonance, and that moving between frames of reference in different contexts is fairly typical. It strikes me as unlikely that all, or even most, scientists have a fixed allegiance to some overarching metaphysical position. In any event, the philosophical commitments of scientists, explicit or not, are matters of fact. Here we need recourse to the relevant empirical evidence, rather than the offering of broad generalisations. Similar considerations apply to the ‘first truth discourse of Christianity’. At the beginning of the book this seems to coincide with a minimalist Christian theology, spelt out in terms of credal statements (as it turns out, articles 2-6 of the Apostles’ Creed, although Tyson does not identify them as such) (11-12, 17). These seem to me of a different order to the metaphysical commitments said to comprise the ‘first truth discourse’ of science. Tyson does go on to suggest that these historical beliefs call for some metaphysical commitments, with the nature of those commitments being outlined later in the book. This step from doctrines to metaphysics is necessary for the overall argument to work, since the fundamental tensions between science and Christianity are understood as taking place at the metaphysical, rather than doctrinal, level. However, the move from the creedal, historical beliefs to metaphysics raises several questions. It is clear, for example, that the formalization of doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Trinity in the fourth- and fifth-century ecumenical creeds already required recourse to contemporary philosophical conceptions that had developed independently of special revelation. In the Middle Ages, the philosophical indebtedness of Christian theology would become even more explicit, with various figures drawing upon aspects of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian thought. Tyson, if I understand him rightly, largely endorses these medieval developments, expressing a preference for a Platonic/Aristotelian framing of Christian doctrines (111-22). If this is correct, then it seems that the ‘first truth discourse of Christianity’ turns out to be the first truth discourse of a broadly Platonic Christianity. I have no objection to this move as such, but it seems to me more a reflection of what philosophical orientation Tyson himself finds congenial than a definitive statement of what some ‘first truth discourse of Christianity’ must necessarily consist in. Historically, others have found alternative philosophical systems to be equally congenial. In other words, while the title of the book uses the indefinite article—‘a Christian theology of nature’—not much space is dedicated to a robust assessment of the possible alternative Christian theologies. One obvious candidate would be nominalist or voluntarist theologies. However, Tyson remarks in this context that he ‘cannot see how one can really adhere to key Christian doctrines … if one is a nominalist’ (59). Ockham, Buridan, and followers of the via moderna would no doubt beg to differ. Like it or not, nominalism was a major and significant development within Christian theology—one that it is generally agreed played a pivotal role in the development of core aspects of modernity, including science, as Tyson himself is well aware (8). My point is not to endorse an alternative metaphysical stance to that which Tyson champions. Rather it is to point out that we need more argument on this point than just the admission of a failure to understand how one might be, say, a nominalist and a Christian. Also relevant to this question is the situation of the early modern period, when we encounter a renewed discussion of which philosophical system is the best partner for Christianity: Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism—even Neostoicism. For a time, the Cambridge Platonists flew the flag for Neoplatonism, offering an intriguing prospect for a study of nature that might have taken another path (as John Milbank has recently detailed).8 But modern science mostly developed in a different direction. Oversimplifying somewhat, the new experimental science was premised upon an explicit rejection of Aristotelianism and the forging of a new and vibrant partnership with a Christianized Epicureanism. Arguably, it was this new partnership that provided the metaphysical foundations for modern science. Counterfactually, it is not clear that we would have science in its present form without it. This is the sense in which modern science is an heir to developments in Christian theology (although many other factors, including other elements of Christian thought, were involved too). It is also true, in my view, that the move towards a modified Epicurean matter theory, along with theological voluntarism, were preconditions for the emergence of modern naturalism. As Tyson points out, this transition to a naturalism was most fully realized in the nineteenth century (74-90). Whether that was a necessary implication of a voluntarist theology or a historical inevitability is difficult to say. But again, this raises the question of whether something like modern science would be possible with an alternative set of metaphysical commitments, and that is a counterfactual that is difficult to cash out. Moreover, classical and medieval metaphysics do not exhaust all of the possibilities for partnering a ‘first truth discourse of Christianity’. The trajectory of post-Kantian philosophy and theology suggests new alternatives, including idealism and existentialism.9 However, the book gives Kant short shrift and even implicates him in the rise of British analytic empiricism (22, n. 12, 42).10 Yet a number of post-Kantian philosophical developments involve more than just a ceding of doctrinal territory to the regnant natural sciences (although, admittedly, the physical sciences were taken seriously as offering an impressive model of empirical knowledge). They arose from a new understanding of the limitations of human knowledge and, hence, of traditional metaphysics. I would suggest that there is more going on here than just different versions of ‘adaptation’, ‘withdrawal’ and ‘appropriation’, and the subsequent rise to dominance of a reductive, materialistic worldview. I was a little surprised, for example, that Kierkegaard makes only a few brief appearances in this book, since Tyson has elsewhere offered a spirited defence of a Kierkegaardian approach.11 (Perhaps there is a connection in Tyson's rejection of a dispassionate philosophical approach to science and theology.) But figures such as Hamann, Hegel, Heidegger, Barth, and Bultmann, to name just a few, are also absent.12 Surely there is more to be said for the philosophical options of existentialism, pragmatism, or any number of post-Kantian philosophies. Obviously, a relatively short book cannot cover all the bases, but it would be helpful to have had at least a brief account of the putative deficiencies of these modern philosophical alternatives to a revived Platonism/Neoplatonism, along with some acknowledgement of how post-Kantian Christian thinkers have sought to deal with the deliverances of the natural sciences and their rising prestige. In all of this, I do think that it is possible to offer judgements about the relative merits of competing metaphysical frameworks, based on where they end up taking us. I am sympathetic to Tyson's argument that the combination of voluntarism and corpuscular matter theory gave rise to the conditions for a utilitarian approach, along with an exploitative attitude toward the natural world. This enables us to form a judgement about the negative consequences of adopting a particular metaphysical framework. It is true that all such judgements ultimately arise from the framework within which one is operating. But some outcomes are unambiguously negative as judged from a variety of perspectives. That said, when passing judgement on particular historical developments we lack the evidence of a ‘control’, which is to say some alternative history that we can be assured would have turned out better. Thus, in the absence of a counterfactual history in which medieval nominalism turned out to be a dead-end, it is difficult to say whether on balance we would have been better off had it never arisen. Beyond the issue of how we land on the correct ‘first truth discourse’ of Christianity or of science lies a broader concern about whether the analytic conception of ‘first truth discourse’ is an optimal way to approach the problem of the relations between science and religion. This goes back to some of my earlier reservations about how the putative first truth discourse of science is instantiated in practice. If the overall aim is to assert the primacy of the Christian revelation in all of our understandings, it would be reasonable to ask whether the notion of a ‘first truth discourse’ is itself a theological concept intrinsic to Christianity or a heteronomous analytic notion that is imported from elsewhere to help make sense of the relationship between science and theology. My sense is that the canonical documents of Christianity, the writings of the Fathers, the councils of the Church, do not speak of a ‘first truth discourse’ as such. It is possible that they assert something equivalent to this notion; if so, it would be good to see that spelt out. The notion of a ‘first truth discourse’ seems redolent of Aristotle's metaphysics or ‘first philosophy’, although at times it also sounds like an equivalent to Weltanschauung (worldview) or ‘social imaginary’. In posing this question I am not suggesting that we should abandon the use of analytic categories in our discussions. But it is important to understand that ‘meta’ categories come from somewhere, and that it is not a straightforward matter to justify their deployment from within the phenomena that they purport to describe. This is especially so if the argument is that the starting point for all intellectual activities of the committed Christian must be premises that are internal to the Christian tradition. More generally, framing the science-religion question in terms of competing ‘first truth discourses’—which may not be just an innocent and neutral analytic tool—has the potential to predetermine the outcome of the investigation. Given the content that Tyson ascribes to these first truth discourses that outcome looks very much to me like a form of conflict. Again, I have no objection to exposing conflict and dealing with it if it is genuine. But, not putting too fine a point on it, this seems perilously close to the general strategy employed by some recent scientistic critics of religion who define religious faith as ‘belief in spite of evidence’ and science as ‘evidence-based commitment’, and thus conclude that science necessarily conflicts with religion.13 I have argued elsewhere, along somewhat related lines, that once we accept the legitimacy of the modern categories ‘religion’ and ‘science’, we are locked into a predetermined range of possibilities about how they must relate to each other. My proposal is that instead of seeking to work within the constricting confines of these categories, we need to understand their history. This shows both their contingent nature (science and religion are not ‘natural kinds’ but cultural products) and also that they sometimes distort the historical phenomena that they are supposed to represent.14 Tyson is fully aware of this argument and I know is sympathetic to it. But I worry that talk of two competing ‘first truth discourses’ risks reinstating a similar reification. Two final questions about the book concern the ‘where to from here’ question. One is about the present status of the modern sciences, given the analysis that Tyson offers. I agree that the historical development of modern science follows the adoption of a nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics, and that by the nineteenth century this had been transformed into a naturalistic and secular outlook. A key question is whether modern science would have emerged without the metaphysical underpinning provided by these late medieval theological developments. (This relates to the broader question of why science in the West, and why the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century.15) Following on from this, we can ask what ‘science’ would look like, and whether it would even be possible, without this particular metaphysical foundation. Had modern science not followed the historical trajectory sketched out by Tyson, would we now be practicing just a more advanced form of Aristotelian science and speaking about occult qualities, substantial forms, teleology, and so on? (Along these lines some have recently argued that we do in fact need something like a Neo-Aristotelian picture if we are to make sense of some aspects of modern physics and biology.16 But Tyson does not engage these thinkers directly.) Towards the end of the book Tyson lauds modern science as ‘an amazing human practice’ and ‘a dazzling wonder and a triumph of human ingenuity’ (177). But is this really consistent with his own analysis? If modern science cannot be extricated from its own dubious ‘first truth discourse’—and, indeed, if it is impossible to arrive at without it—how can those committed to the competing ‘first truth discourse’ of Christianity entertain a positive view of it? Is there some imagined, alternative ‘science’ that is compatible with the ‘first truth discourse’ of Christianity and, if so, what would it look like? Should Christians be advocating for a Platonic or Aristotelian science; or perhaps for something along the lines of Alvin Plantinga's ‘Augustinian Science’; 17 or even, and I hesitate to mention it, something along the lines of Intelligent Design? My sense is that some of these latter options would be a bridge too far, and not ones that Tyson would wish to pursue. But it is not clear to me what exactly follows from his arguments for the content and conduct of modern science. Is it more or less alright as it is, in spite of its intrinsic reductionism and materialism, or does it need to be radically reshaped in order to liberate it from the patent deficiencies of its ‘first truth discourse’?18 In sum, Paul Tyson has set out a bold new agenda for science and theology, and has done so with great force and clarity. His book mounts a serious challenge to some of the default modes of conducting science-theology discussions. At the same time, it raises a number of questions for which there seem to be, at present, no easy answers. Long may the discussion continue!