THEOLOGY, HISTORY, and ETHICS
A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF SCIENCE Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge Paul Tyson Foreword by David Bentley Hart This book reframes the discussion between Christian theology and contemporary science, arguing that when Christians treat theology as their first truth discourse, it is good for both science and religion. Paul Tyson argues that creedal Christianity has much to con- tribute to the ongoing conversation. He explains that the three usual approaches to science and religion—opposition, demarca- tion, and synthesis—assume that fixed and essential definitions of science and religion are possible. However, both science and religion as we actually practice them are historically situated ways of engaging with the natural world and transcendence that are in a continuous process of development and decay. We have come to separate natural knowledge (science) from faith and moral beliefs (religion), leading to serious difficulties in integrating knowledge and meaning, facts and values, and immanence and transcen- dence. At the root of these dissonances is the difficult relationship between a naturalistic philosophy that purports to be a scientific realism and the things that make us human: transcendence, faith, meaning, and purpose. This is the result of science displacing Christian theology as Western modernity’s first truth discourse. However, Christian theology contains deep resources in its ap- proach to knowledge and reality. This book contains an intellectual history of theology’s engagement with science during the modern period, critiques current ap- proaches, and makes a constructive proposal for how a Christian theological vision of natural knowledge can be better pursued. FROM THE FOREWORD “It was not very long ago, in relative terms, that academic po- lemicists could get away easily with simpleminded caricatures of ‘science’ and ‘religion,’ each term being construed as indicating a single fixed and invariable essence, and each being understood as inimical to the other. In a great deal of popular discourse, moreover, these caricatures persist. ‘Science,’ so the story told by many of religion’s cultured despisers goes, is a single, discrete, strictly empirical discipline, largely inductive and scrupulously purged of metaphysical assumptions, while ‘religion’ is the sphere of ‘unreasoning faith’ and consists in a collection of convictions based neither on logic nor on evidence but solely on authority, emotional dependency, and metaphysical prejudice. . . . The conversation must begin again, and on a far more intelligent, historically informed, and philosophically refined basis. This is where Tyson excels, and where this book makes a humble but signal contribution.” —David Bentley Hart
AUGUST 2022 • 208 pp. • paper • $24.99 • 9781540965516
Paul Tyson (PhD, Queensland University of Technology) is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland, where he serves as a principal investigator and the project co-coordinator for the After Science and Religion Project. His books include Returning to Reality , Kierkegaard’s Theological Sociology , and Theology and Climate Change .
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