Methodology for Faith and Science: Radical Orthodoxy, Part I

This continues my series on “method” in theology and science.  In this post I begin to discuss what contribution, if any, “radical orthodoxy” might make to the conversation.

Radical Orthodoxy occupies a curious, and perhaps ill-defined, space in this matrix.  The founding charter for Radical Orthodoxy is John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (“TST”), which is a sustained critique of the presumed neutrality of the modern social sciences.[1]  In a chapter on “Science, Power, and Reality,” Milbank attempts to distinguish social science, which describes human behavior, from natural science.[2]  Social science, Milbank argues, differs from natural science in that “human interaction in all its variety can only be narrated, and not explained / understood after the manner of natural science.”[3]  Here Milbank’s critique of social science sounds like the longstanding argument in the broader academy about whether disciplines such as sociology, political science, economics and psychology can truly be considered “scientific.”[4]  Milbank accepts a phenomenological / narratival perspective on persons and cultures:  “’Narrating,’” he says ,”turns out to be a more basic category than either explanation or understanding:  unlike either of these it does not assume particular facts or discrete meanings.  Neither is it concerned with universal laws, nor universal truths of the spirit.”[5]  Narrative “is the final mode of comprehension of human society,” and “[t]o understand or explain a social phenomenon is simply to narrate it….”[6] 

But this does not only apply to the social sciences.  Even for the natural sciences, Milbank argues, “[a]s the phrase ‘natural history’ suggests, natural science does not rid itself of narrative, and indeed, it is just as possible to tell a story in which the characters are atoms, plants, animals, or quasars, as one where they are human beings.”[7]  The modern natural sciences have largely lost this sense of narrative because of the influence of reductive positivism.[8]  Citing Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method, Milbank notes that the observation of “data” is never a merely neutral activity because the act of constructing the context of an observation already requires a theoretical structure.[9]  All data is interpreted and there is no method without theory. 

Therefore, for Milbank, scientific investigation always involves narrative.  Milbank can then set aside as pretentious the claim of the modern social sciences to provide an objective, “scientific” account of society that atomizes social relations into discrete quantities, which always in the end implies relationships of competition and violence.[10]   And, following Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of traditioned inquiry, Milbank can offer an alternative narrative, that of Christian charity, in which human society is encompassed in an ontology of relational peace that begins with the ecstatic plenitude of the Triune God’s self-giving in creation.[11]

It is unclear precisely how Milbank’s account of the natural sciences in TST contrasts with McGrath’s critical realism.  Milbank’s references to the philosophy of science literature are extremely limited – in addition to Feyerabend, he refers only to Descartes, Kant, Whewell, Mill, Popper and Lakatos (and that all in one sentence!).[12]  Much of what Milbank says in TST about the social and pre-empirical theoretical basis for the conduct and interpretation of experiments is entirely consistent with Polanyi’s critically realist personalism, which Polanyi fleshes out it much greater detail.  Perhaps there are two basic differences:  (1) Milbank’s narratival approach does not accord the sciences a methodologically separate space from theology even at a pre-integrative level; and (2) Milbank’s approach makes less space – although some space does seem to be given – for the alteration of the Christian theological narrative at a higher level of integration with discrete truths gleaned from the sciences.  At a basic level, it is a difference between an analytic (critical realism) and phenomenological (narrative) frame of reference.

Milbank’s approach is attractive for a number of reasons.  First, it deflates the presumed historic warfare between “faith” and “science” by offering a holistic account of “reason” that is already embedded in the Christian tradition.  There is no possibility of “conflict” between “faith” and “science” here because those terms simply have no meaning in isolation.  There is, rather, a grand narrative of God’s self-giving creative love, which allows for human beings as creatures to observe and study and delight in the creation.  Second, it exposes the pretentions of reductive positivistic “science” as itself a kind of a-theology, with pre-empirical theoretical commitments not derived from its own supposedly objective methods.  Finally, it points toward a different form of apologetic in which the Christian narrative is offered in the robust sense of a true apologia rather than as an “apology” before the bar of a totalizing modernity.[13]

A potential problem with Milbank’s approach is evident in his reference to Feyerabend.  Like other constructivist philosophers of science, Feyerabend was an anti-realist and a nominalist.[14]  Milbank’s theological project and the broader “Radical Orthodoxy,” movement it spawned, of course, involves a sustained historical critique of the univocity of being, nominalism, and voluntarism.[15]  While postmodern philosophers of science such as Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn offer helpful resources concerning the social context of the natural sciences, their conclusions are finally incompatible with a realist participatory ontology grounded in the Christian doctrine of creation.  It remains unclear how Milbank’s “narrative” construal of the natural sciences in TST can cohere with his and Radical Orthodoxy’s other broad commitments.