Theology and Science: Critical Realism, Part B

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  This is the second part of my discussion of critical realism.

Critical Realism, Part B

This emphasis on the event of revelation in Christ among many Christian critical realists is not surprising, as many of them (including, notably, Alister McGrath), are connected to Barth through the work of Thomas Torrance.[1]  Barth, consistent with his understanding of revelation and philosophy, resisted any systematic definition of God:

The equation of God’s Word and God’s Son makes it radically impossible to say anything doctrinaire in understanding the Word of God.  In this equation, and in it alone, a real and effective barrier is set up against what is made of proclamation according to the Roman Catholic view and of Holy Scripture according to the later form of older Protestantism, namely, a fixed sum of revealed propositions which can be systematized like the sections of a corpus of law.  The only system in Holy Scripture and proclamation is revelation, i.e., Jesus Christ.[2]

But Barth – who, after all, over the course of thirty-five years wrote a Church Dogmatics comprised of about six million words of dense text – did not mean we can say nothing truthful about God.  After resisting what he understood as the Catholic and Scholastic Reformation’s too-neat methods of systematization, Barth emphasized the importance of words and speech:

Now the converse is also true, of course, namely that God’s Son is God’s Word.  Thus God does reveal Himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of human speech.  His word is always this or that word spoken by the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the Church.  The personal character of God’s Word is not, then, to be played off against its verbal or spiritual character.  It is not at all true that this second aspect under which we must understand it implies its irrationality and thus cancels out the first aspect under which we must understand it.[3]

Barth’s concern throughout his discussion of the Word in Volume I of the Church Dogmatics was to preserve the freedom and integrity of theology against Enlightenment rationalism.  Barth was particularly concerned with the way rationalism gave rise to nineteenth century liberal demythologizing Protestant thought.  Barth also resisted how rationalism underwrote both Protestant fundamentalism and the Scholastic Thomism of much Catholic nineteenth century Catholic thought.  Torrance worked from these basic Barthian premises to modify Barth’s famous “nein” to natural theology with a qualified “yes.”

The critical realist approach to theology and science results in a paradigm in which the disciplines of theology and natural science remain distinct but can contribute to each other at higher levels.  McGrath summarizes his version of this program as follows:

1. The natural sciences and the religions are quite distinct in terms of their methodologies and subject matters.  It is quite improper to attempt to limit them, for example by suggesting that the sciences have to do with the physical world and the religions with a distinct spiritual world.  The distinction between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ concerns more than subject-matter.
2. At points, despite their clear differences, those working in the fields of science and religion find themselves facing similar issues, expecially in relation to issues of representation and conceptualization.  At point after point, those interested in science and religion find themselves facing very similar questions, and even adopting similar approaches in the answers which they offer.
3. At points of major importance, the methods and theories of the natural sciences are genuinely illuminating to those concerned with religious matters.  Equally, there are points where religious beliefs and approaches cast considerable light on issues of scientific method.  The investigation of these convergences is mutually enlightening and significant.[4]

Critical realism as a model for interaction between theology and science seems promising.  Unlike NOMA approaches, critical realism does not hermetically seal the boundary between “science” and “religion.”  Critical realism does not represent a Kantian move in which religious or moral feeling is cordoned off from “pure reason,” and this is a genuine advance over the Kantian bent of much of the modern scientific establishment – as evidenced, for example, in the National Academies of Science statement quoted previously.  Moreover, critical realism creates genuine space for theological reform and development when certain theological claims plainly clash with reality.  Without some space in which the observations of the natural sciences can influence theology, it is impossible to avoid the intellectual and moral disaster of fundamentalist systems such as young earth creationism.  Certainly, if we seek to be faithful to the spirit of the Church Fathers, we will want to do theology with a keen eye towards the creation as it is given to us.[5]

However, within critical realism, the interaction between the two disciplines of science and theology tends to be pictured as happening only at a higher level of integration.  In this way, a kind of modest foundationalism underpins the entire project, even though many critical realists, including McGrath, strongly eschew foundationalism.  This hidden modest foundationalism establishes the boundaries in which the theological and scientific disciplines do their own original work and in which any integrative or work happens.  But if the Christian confession truly is “realist,” then there can be no autonomous space for a “science” that is not already “theological” in what it presumes about the nature of the universe, and there can be no neutral rule of correspondence that would adjudicate “between” theology and science.

Indeed, McGrath’s own effort at constructing a natural theology is expressly non-foundationalist and presumes as a first principle “that the logos through which the world was created is embedded in the structures of the created order, above all the human person, and incarnated in Christ.”[6]  Natural theology, for McGrath, is not an effort to obtain neutrally rational “proofs” of God’s existence, but rather to demonstrate “that there is an accumulation of considerations which, though not constituting logical proof (how could experience prove anything in such a way?), is at the very least consistent with the existence of a creator God.”[7]  Nevertheless, two basic questions lingers:  (1) from the perspective of Christian theology itself, does critical realism envision a sufficiently theological account of “reason” that enables “natural science” in the first instance?; and (2) does critical realism propose an understanding of “nature” that resembles a kind of natura pura – a realm of pure nature that is not also already a realm of grace?