What Theology Can Do for Science¹

Abstract It is a quite common assumption that dialogue between science and theology is primarily about bringing theology up-to-date with the progress of scientific research. In this article, the author argues in favor of the fruitfulness of the reverse perspective. It is suggested that the experience and expertise that theologians have accumulated in the field of hermeneutics is an asset for scientists. The critical engagement with the art of interpreting and understanding is necessitated by both the potential of scientific concepts to build ideology and the role that metaphoric processes play, not only in the communication of science to non-scientists but also in scientific research and teaching. Questions of trust—crucial for science and scientists—call for a reflection that, in addition to philosophical hermeneutics, includes theological hermeneutics. This task is explicated in terms of the prophetic role of theology, which offers an alternative to worldviews that build on a dualism between the natural and the supernatural. Key words: ClownHermeneuticsIdeologyMetaphoric processMetaphors in scienceProphetic role of theologyScientific conceptsTheology and science Notes 1 This article is revised from a lecture presented at Yale Divinity School in March 2006. 2 Wolfhart Pannenberg und Christian Vogel, “Evolution-Kultur-Religion. Perspektiven und Schwierigkeiten des interdisziplinären Gespräches zwischen Evolutionsbiologie und Theologie,” in Kooperation und Wettbewerb: Zu Ethik und Biologie menschlichen Sozialverhaltens, eds. Hans May, Meinfried Striegnitz and Philip Hefner (Loccumer Protokolle 75/1988. Rehburg-Loccum: Evangelische Akademie), 163–193, here 187f. 3 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Theological Questions to Scientists,” in Beginning with the End: God, Science, and Wolfhart Pannenberg, eds. Carol Rausch Albright and Joel Haugen (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 38. Also published in Zygon, vol. 16 (March 1981): 65–77. 4 Occasionally, I have used the term eu-tonos to express the same thing: a beneficial tension in and between two bodies of knowledge. 5 Cf. David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 6 Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). 7 Cf. ibid.; David F. Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); idem, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin, 1999); and Sharon Traweek, “Pilgrim's Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York and London: Routledge), 525–542. 8 Francis Bacon, “The Masculine Birth of Time Or the Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man Over the Universe,” in The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Essay on its Development from 1603 to 1609 with New Translations of Fundamental Texts, ed. Benjamin Farrington (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, [1653] 1964), 62. 9 Pope John Paul II, “Message to George Coyne S. J., Director of the Vatican Observatory,” in Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, eds. Robert John Russell, Willliam R. Stoeger, George V. Coyne (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1998), M 13. 10 John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 156. 11 Antje Jackelén, The Dialogue Between Science and Religion: Challenges and Future Directions, Proceedings of the Third Annual Goshen Conference on Religion and Science, ed. Carl S. Helrich (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004). 12 Wertheim, Pythagoras' Trousers, 119–120. 13 Cf. Antje Jackelén, “Emergence Everywhere?! Reflections on Philip Clayton's Mind and Emergence,”Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (2006): 623–632. 14 Klaus Mainzer, Symmetry and Complexity: The Spirit and Beauty of Nonlinear Science (Singapore and Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific, 2005). 15 Ibid., 23. 16 Ibid., 272. 17 Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 49f. My emphasis. 18 Cf. Antje Jackelén, Time and Eternity: The Question of Time in Church, Science and Theology (Philadelphia and London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005), 155–159. 19 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, eds. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 327 [Spelling adapted by the author]. 20 I owe this insight to James Maxwell Kerr. 21 Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 327 [Spelling adapted by the author]. 22 Emily Martin, “Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State,” in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York and London: Routledge [1990] 1999), 363. 23 Ibid., 369. 24 About the role of metaphors and non-rational influences in science, see also Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [1934]); and Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1976). On the role of metaphor in theology, see for example Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1997). 25 Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 64. The last sentence of this quote is easy to misunderstand. Physicists do of course discuss the behavior of photons and electrons, yet the task is impossible, strictly speaking: metaphors are part and parcel of the language used. 26 “Wir sollen als Theologen von Gott reden. Wir sind aber Menschen und können als solche nicht von Gott reden. Wir sollen Beides, unser Sollen und unser Nicht-Können, wissen und eben damit Gott die Ehre geben. Das ist unsre Bedrängnis. Alles Andre ist daneben Kinderspiel.” Karl Barth, Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1929), 158. English: The Word of God and the Word of Man, 186 (emphasis in the original; translation adapted by the author). 27 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell, Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding, foreword by Paul Ricoeur (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1984), 100–101. 28 Ibid., 105. 29 Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell, New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (New York and London: Continuum, 2001), 208. 30 Cf. McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 13. 31 Bacon, “The Masculine Birth of Time Or the Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man Over the Universe,” 71. 32 Cf. Antje Jackelén, “What is ‘Secular’? Techno-Secularism and Spirituality,”Zygon, vol. 40, no. 4 (2005): 863–873. 33 The United States Public Health Service Study on “untreated syphilis in the Negro male” in Macon County, Alabama, conducted from 1932 to 1972. 34 Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 221.

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