Theology and its mojo

I noted previously that the great materialist project that dominated thinking about who we are as persons (and much else) may be, in Mary Midgely’s word, “fraying”(Midgley 2014, 14). This is seen specifically in avowedly materialist attempts, emanating from the neurosciences, to give a rigorously physical/material account of our conscious, internal, subjective, first-person states (i.e. mental states), within a materialist metaphysical framework that claims that not only is this doable, but once done there will be nothing left to say about who/what we are. The problem is, the science is basically confused and the metaphysical claims seem suffused with overreach (for reasons discussed here). But might theology (leaving to one side for the moment what is meant by theology) have something to offer in this space?

First, a step back to what seems like a different time (i.e. the last quarter of the twentieth century). Within the broadly evangelical camp, some, like theologian Joel Green and philosopher Nancy Murphy (both influential voices from Fuller Seminary), viewed science, specifically neuroscience (and explicitly in Green’s case Churchlandian neurophilosophy) as having a role in framing their views of human ontology, requiring a degree of reinterpretation of classic theological texts and teaching (Green 2008, 16). Now it is clearly true that neuroscience has an important contribution to make to our self-understanding (particularly with regard to our present embodied state), but they appeared to hand to neuroscience (or particular implications that were argued to flow from it) an overarching authority, allowing it to be an arbiter of what can, and what cannot, be said. This seems to be complimentary to the approach of other materialists/physicalists who went much further and argued that science in general, and with regards to human human ontology that neuroscience in particular, were able to provide, by themselves, a full understanding of who we are, what the universe is, and what our place in it is. Outside theology, there was a reaction to such claims, which were criticised in the general case as scientism, and in the specific case of neuroscience as “neurohype” and “neuromania” (Midgley 1994, 108; 2014, 5; Tallis 2011; Lilienfeld et al. 2017). Another aspect of the reaction is the claim that in the twenty-first century “[w]e are witnessing a resurgence in substance dualism” partly because “promissory materialism” has not delivered an explanation of everything, including consciousness (Rickabaugh and Moreland 2024, 5–6). Given these observations and the “fraying” described by Midgley, might it be that far from being irrelevant and to be eliminated by the materialist project (claims that emanated from scientists like Crick on one hand, and philosophers like the Churchlands on the other), theology is in a position to make a positive contribution?

If theology is to make such a contribution then “it cannot allow its agenda and suppositions to be determined by current theories of mind or brain any more than than by the prevalent sociological, philosophical, or cultural analyses of personhood”; there needs to be clarity “about what is proper to the theological and scientific fields of enquiry respectively” (Torrance 2004, 213,214). This is a view obviously at odds with, among others, Crick, summarised in the final chapter of “The Astonishing Hypothesis” which had the intriguing title of “Dr Crick’s Sunday Morning Service” (Crick 1994, 255–63). Writing of religious beliefs, rather than theology (but in Crick’s view they surely amounted to the same thing), he asserted that “by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable”; “true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong” (Crick 1994, 258). Hardly a recipe for a fruitful dialogue. But some thirty plus years after this was written neither should it be assumed to be representative (e.g. see Rodzeń and Polak 2025 and the various contributions in the Special Issue they introduce).

Theological anthropology developed in a number of ways during the twentieth century and in one interesting respect it is Karl Barth who figures predominantly and whose influence continues to be important (Anderson 1982, 18; Torrance 2004, 207). Barth grounded his anthropology in christology, a move he characterised himself as “deviating from tradition” (see Skaff 2019, 186). Cortez, who examined the mind/brain debate (including Murphy’s non-reductive physicalism) in detail, claimed that “the significance of this christological shift … cannot be overstated. Indeed a growing number of Christian theologians locate modernity’s inability to understand human nature in the fundamentally misguided attempt to derive a complete picture of the human person independently of the perspective provided by the person of Jesus Christ” (Cortez 2008, 4). With regard to Murphy, Cortez notes that there was a movement in the opposite direction, explicitly working from the implications of the mind/brain debate (configured within a framework provided by neuroscience) to christology, with no consideration of movement from christology to anthropology (Cortez 2008, 5; quoting from Murphy 1998, 23).

Christology is, of course, a theological construct, not a scientific or neuroscientific one. It is examined and developed using theological tools and methods. It can of course all become very technical. But this is just as true of modern science. The relative inaccessibility of the cutting edge of where science is at any one time is not taken to provide a reason for it to be dismissed as untrue or unbelievable just because it is only truly accessible to professional practitioners. For those whose expertise is not theological to make claims about theological constructs being intrinsically unbelievable or irrelevant (essentially claims like Crick’s) out of ignorance about appropriate tools, methods, data, history and so on, would be just as ridiculous. But this is what has been going on for a while and has had far more credibility as an approach than it ever deserved.

For those wedded to the conflict metaphor for the interaction between science and theology, as representing inevitably conflicting ways of looking at reality, such developments within theology (like christological anthropology) will simply be taken to indicate the continuation of the conflict. But the conflict metaphor has long been acknowledged by historians of science as a polemical Victorian myth, albeit with some recent popular proponents (Russell 1985; Harrison 2017). Precisely because christological anthropologies spring from theology doing a theological task using appropriate theological methods, the categories involved are distinct from those of neuroscience. But this also means that they can be related to contemporary debates which are usually configured exclusively in terms of neuroscience and brain functions in interesting ways. It is significant that the incarnation (a thoroughly theological concept) has been argued to be compatible with both physicalism and dualism (two very different approaches to the mind/brain problem) by different proponents in the mind/brain debate (Cortez 2008, 5; see footnote 12). But it takes careful work and thought to relate the incarnational and the neural, and much of this work remains to be done. There are other intriguing convergences between christologcial anthropology and developments in neuroscience. In his discussion of “personhood”, Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas argued for the fundamental ontological importance of “a movement of communion”, where ontological identity is to be found “only in a being which is free from the boundaries of the ‘self’”(Zizioulas 1975). This strongly relational view, which both looks back to Barth and is consistent with the work of a long list of key figures in recent theological anthropology, parallels and potentially compliments developments in neuroscience represented by research into “theory of mind” and social cognition both of which stress the relational (Torrance 2004, 208; Brüne and Brüne-Cohrs 2006; Frith 2008). How deep this convergence goes, also requires work and thought.

In gaining a rounded understanding of ourselves, there is clearly an important role for neuroscience to play. It is able provide information from a third-person perspective about the physical brain mechanisms involved in the generation of human experience (now explicitly including conscious experience), how these mechanisms develop, the ways in which they change as we age and about aspects of what happens when eventually our embodied existence fades. But this information is partial not exhaustive, it generates a particular kind of map guiding our self-understanding. Theology has the role of providing another kind of map for some of the same terrain. The challenge is in aligning the different maps, not assuming a priori that one is right and one is wrong (Midgley 2005).

Materialism is fraying, theology is perhaps getting its mojo back. Just as well. There’s work to do.

Anderson, Ray S. 1982. On Being Human: Essays in Theological Anthropology. Eerdmans.

Brüne, Martin, and Ute Brüne-Cohrs. 2006. “Theory of Mind—Evolution, Ontogeny, Brain Mechanisms and Psychopathology.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (4): 437–55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.08.001.

Cortez, Marc. 2008. Embodies Souls, Ensouled Bodies. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology. T &T Clark.

Crick, F. H. C. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. Macmillan.

Frith, Chris D. 2008. “Social Cognition.” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 363: 2033–39.

Harrison, Peter. 2017. The Territories of Science and Religion. Paperback edition. University of Chicago Press.

Lilienfeld, Scott O, Elizabeth Aslinger, Julia Marshall, and Sally Satel. 2017. “Neurohype: A Field Guide to Exaggerated Brain-Based Claims.” In The Routledge Handbook of Neuroethics. Routledge.

Midgley, M. 2014. Are You an Illusion? Heretics (Durham, England). Acumen. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6hHtnQEACAAJ.

Midgley, Mary. 1994. Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and It Meaning. Paperback edition. Routledge.

Midgley, Mary. 2005. “Mapping Science: In Memory of John Ziman.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 (3): 195–97.

Murphy, Nancey. 1998. “Human Nature: Historical, Scientific, and Religious Issues.” In Whatever Happened to the Soul. Fortress Press.

Rickabaugh, Brandon, and J.P. Moreland. 2024. The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contrmporary Substance Dualism. John Wiley and Sons.

Rodzeń, Jacek, and Paweł Polak. 2025. “Introduction to This Religions Special Issue: Natural Sciences as a Contemporary Locus Theologicus.” Religions 16 (8). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16081020.

Russell, Colin R. 1985. Crosscurrents: Interactions Between Science and Faith. IVP.

Skaff, Jeffrey. 2019. “Barth on Theological Anthropology.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth: Barth and Dogmatics, 185–96.

Tallis, Raymond. 2011. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Acumen Publishing.

Torrance, Alan J. 2004. “What Is a Person?” In From Cells to Souls and Beyond. Eerdmans.

Zizioulas, John D. 1975. “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood.” Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (5): 401–47

The insufficiency of science

There are scientists who talk about a “theory of everything” although it turns out they do not literally mean a theory of “everything”. There are others who have claimed that science can basically supply the correct answer to any correctly formulated question (at least any question worth asking). This is sometimes tempered to the view that science provides, at least in principle, an approach that can rigorously establish the truth about a given state of affairs even if in practice it’s currently difficult to see how. At one point it looked as though this was becoming a dominant view. Proponents of this sort of view, passionately and (usually) elegantly expressed, were the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett and Harris. Let us call them collectively Ditchkinetteris (with apologies to Terry Eagleton who coined the term Ditchkins to refer to two of them; 1). As an aside, the power of this sort of view seems to be in decline, as I have discussed previously. In general, Ditchkinetteris’s take might be termed the sufficiency of science (SoS for short). It would be wrong to assume that SoS was ever a majority view even among scientists, although such things are hard to establish, erm… scientifically. It was certainly a minority view among philosophers (eg see Kaufman’s review of Harris’ “The Moral Landscape”;2). But SoS has now been implicitly undermined but one of its former (if only tacit) supporters, the journal Nature.

Nature published an editorial on the 27^th February entitled: “A code of ethics to get scientists talking”. This reports on a document produced by a group of scientists convened by the World Economic Forum and heartily recommends it. As the editorial points out, such codes are not new in science. Many funding and governmental bodies have their own codes. Interestingly the editorial claims that there’s a problem getting scientist to take them seriously and adhere to them. But what intrigues me is the question of what kind of thing is this code?

If SoS is true, then presumably such codes will be scientific. That would mean they would consist of hypotheses, predictions, experiments, results and conclusions. Or if not hypothesis driven (because not all science fits this pattern comfortably) they would consist of observations, measurements and conclusions. But there will be measurements and data, there will be stats, there will be theory; all the familiar elements of science. Right? Wrong. Actually what the particular code referred to consists of (and this would be true of all the other codes) are well meaning, sensible and pretty obvious advice about the kind of things we expect of responsible science. For example, responsible science seeks to minimise harm to citizens. Such a rule doesn’t appear to be scientific rule. It’s sensible, it’s the kind of thing tax payers expect, but it is not itself a scientific statement or a scientific rule. It’s the kind of thing I’d be happy to adhere to, as would all my colleagues, and practically any scientist anywhere I know of. But it’s not science.

The reasons given for why such a code is necessary are also interesting. It is valuable because “the code contextualizes natural sciences in a time of rapid technological change and popular questioning of expertise.” Not sure I understand the first point, but the questioning of expertise is familiar enough. The proponents of the code want to meet such questioning by “infusing research with “the most irreproachable behaviours”. But again, these are not scientific statements or aims, laudable though they may be. They depend on historical, sociological and ethical analysis, not science. So to properly practice science, we must look outside science, indeed our conduct must be ruled by principles which are not themselves scientific principles. This seems to be a blow against SoS.

Of course SoS never was true. Science always stood on foundations that were not themselves scientific. Principles, assumptions and commitments always lurked in the background that were rarely talked about. We all have them, use them and depend on them, and we’ve always known it. It was Bacon who suggested that we ought to purge ourselves of such “idols” in 1620, only for Kant to argue in the 18^th century that some of them are built into the very structure of our minds, they are wired in. Better to be aware of them, and control them, than deny that they exist at all.

Personally, I’ve always tried to be clear about my prior commitments. I’m drawn to science because it tackles an ordered universe in an ordered way. That order flows from the God who made the universe, and has sustained it ever since. He is the ultimate source of truth, so I only progress because He reveals His truth as I employ the tools that science provides, allied to the tools that He has provided. He also reveals His truth to others, even although they do not recognise Him or acknowledge Him in any way (indeed many of them are much better at this science game than me). I study the book of His works, and “think God’s thoughts after Him” (to slightly misquote Kepler).

While I’m actually running an experiment, collecting and analysing data, drawing inferences from it, accepting or rejecting hypotheses, I behave (and probably look) like a naturalist. I explain my results, accept or reject my hypotheses, in terms of mechanisms that are familiar in the field. But ultimately, on reflection, I know it is Him I’m studying. Because of that, I want to do it in way that honours rather than dishonours Him,  just like the Christian plumber, carpenter, bus driver, dentist or lawyer. I don’t work to please my boss, or the head of my Institution, or really for the good of the community or for the honour of science. All of these things are good things to do. But they are secondary. My aim is to “serve wholeheartedly as if (I) were serving the Lord, not men” (Ephesians 6:7). All these are prior, outside commitments. But it turns out it’s not just me that has them, indeed needs them, because science is insufficient. At least I’m (reasonably) coherent about it.

1. Eagleton, T. (2009) Reason, faith and revolution: reflections on the God debate. Yale University Press.

2. Kaufman, WRP (2012) Can science determine moral value? A reply to Sam Harris. Neuroethics 5:55-65.

Scientism

If “new atheism” (NA) is, if not dead, perhaps terminally ill, then one of the contributory factors to its demise is the scrutiny that its supporting doctrines have come under. Whether cause or consequence, NA has always been closely linked with “scientism”. Scientism is not science, does not work in the same way as science, and does not (or should not) have the same authority as science. A bit like NA itself, it’s not new; it has probably been around in one form or another as long as science itself. But it really began to emerge in the late 19^th century with the desire of some in science to paint the only possible relationship between science and other disciplines, or between science and religious faith, as a war in which there had to be a winner and a loser. It kicked around in the background for a while, probably pooped up in many undergraduate science courses, and came to public prominence more recently as a supporting pillar of NA.

What is it? Definitions abound, but at its heart it’s an understandable (and now familiar) view. The only truth that counts is scientific truth, and therefore the scientific method is the only means of discovering truth. A series of classic statements can be found in Peter Atkins short essay “Science as truth” published in in 1995. Speaking of science, Atkins claims that “There appear to be no bounds to its competence… This claim of universal competence may seem arrogant, but it appears to be justified.” All religion (grouped with studies of the paranormal) is dismissed as an “obscurantist pursuit”. Science is the “greatest of humanity’s intellectual achievements”; in contrast he thinks it a defensible proposition that “no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature”! I commenced my own scientific journey in 1979 when I began my science degree at the University of Glasgow. There were certainly some lecturers to us first-year biology students who weren’t backward at dropping such sentiments into their lectures. I now suspect that this was because their own historical and philosophical education was sadly lacking. As student, I found such views baffling; as a scientist, more than thirty years Iater I find them embarrassing.

There have been and are lots of responses to scientism. Some have come from those of a theological disposition. I rather like John Polkinghorne’s comment on scientism (in “Theology in the Context of Science, p46), that it is “the rash and implausible claim that science tells us all that is worth knowing, or even that could ever be known. Embracing that belief is to take an arid and dreary view of reality..” . Polkinghorne writes as a theologian and former (distinguished) physicist. For a wide ranging and eloquent critique from a scientist’s standpoint, read Austin Hughes’ “The Folly of Scientism”. Hughes writes for more than just the sake of an argument. He has a real concern that scientism’s overreach will eventually cause science big problems: “Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole.” With contemporary attacks on expertise ringing in our ears, and with science now worrying within about the reproducibility crisis, I think he’s right to be concerned.  

Part of Hughes’ case is that philosophers are far from innocent when it comes to the scientism. Some schools of philosophy provided a major impetus to it (ie the logical positivists), while others colluded in its rise. It always bemused me that 19^th century theology gave up the tussle so easily. But philosophy being philosophy, scientism didn’t have it entirely its own way. At least now there does seem to be something of a fight back going on whether it’s Roger Scruton’s approach from art history, or Peter Hacker’s more analytical analytical critique.  

To my non-philosophical mind, many of those objecting to scientism seem to be united in a common reaction to the ignorance of those who promulgate scientism. This is a version of the disdain for other approaches that has been so much a part of NA. From their different perspectives, scientism’s critics have pointed out that it often derides and dismisses ideas that are never fully defined or fairly discussed. Some have objected to its selective memory when it comes to the history of science itself. Others have pointed out that it has a habit of blundering to other areas of academic endeavour, oblivious to important concepts and developments, constructing weak arguments and reaching fallacious conclusions. Particularly in popular accounts, this leads to a series of illusory battles against straw men, which of course, are convincingly won.  

It’s always struck me that this is something that often marks NA’s attacks on religious belief. Of course if you take the very weakest form of an argument it will be easy to defeat it. Having defeated the weakest form, it’s a short step to the claim that all arguments of that type are also therefore defeated. Showing that diverse beliefs in fairies, Santa Claus and large lizards controlling earth from the moon are irrational is not likely to be that relevant to debunking beliefs in well attested and evidenced ancient events that believers claim to have transformative power today. Such debunking may be possible, but it was always likely to take much more careful work than many in NA were apparently able or inclined to do. And the sheer logical inappropriateness of the natural science to do this work, was clearly lost on them.

As with the reported death of NA, it’s unclear to me what the fate of scientism will be. As Hughes argued, its fate will likely have important effects on science itself. As a scientist, I’m committed to the scientific endeavour, and think that within its area of competence science offers the best way to answer certain types of questions. But it can’t answer every type of question. For that we need the tools of philosophy, history, anthropology and the rest. And for that most important type of question (the why rather than the how)? If I were you I’d turn to Scripture rather than scientism (or even science).  

Mellowing with age….?

I was struck by an article in yesterday’s Times (“It’s time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam” p32, 30/1/16) in which Richard Dawkins opined about the decency he detects in the Church of England, the cultural value of Biblical language, feminism, Islam and the Koran, and even about his own death. As an aside, over the years he has been an expert and interesting evolutionary biologist; he’s worth listening to and reading on these topics. He talks with deep knowledge, based on years of skillful practice. He is an authority on such things, although I suppose it’s possible that now (in his 74^th year) he’s a bit out of touch with his specialist field. It’s not my field, so I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative view. On that other long list of topics, he clearly has opinions that people want to hear (otherwise they wouldn’t send journalists to interview him). I have no doubt that his opinions are sincerely held. He may even have thought about them deeply. But the authority he has in the one realm should not carry over into the others. His views carry the weight of an interesting, articulate, generally well educated amateur, nothing more.

Back to the article. A couple of things in it struck me as particularly interesting. First is the almost wistful way in which he thinks about the Church of England and the Bible (or at least some of its language). These things seem to have some useful role to play in our culture. Is this a mellowing with age? Well, maybe. As he makes equally clear, he still has no time for the God whom the Bible reveals. Presumably he still thinks that both this God, and the morality He would have us follow is pernicious and despicable. Or at least that his reading and interpretation of these are. But can you really recommend the one thing without the other? And if the basic premise of even beautiful language is wrong, can the language really be said to be beautiful? I suppose it might have a beautiful sound. But this of course was the trick of the Sirens, the sound of whose beautiful voices lured innocent sailors to their doom. Given all that Dawkins has said and written about not just the irrationality of religion (particularly that based on the Bible), but its dangers, it’s clearly highly illogical, perhaps even dangerous, to now say that some of it is worth having because it’s “nice”. One can imagine the fulminations of the younger Dawkins against such talk.

The other thing is that is striking is the reason for some of this wistfulness. The problem is that Dawkins fears cuddly Christianity being replaced by fundamentalist Islam. To be fair he probably objects any sort of religious view that is fundamentalist in his terms. Sadly, these days he appears to encounter few Bible-believers who are prepared to stick to their guns – “Christians have grown out of that. They don’t believe every word of the Bible.” He thinks that this is a blip. But as so often happens when one strays outwith their area of expertise, he’s probably missing the point. 

Religion is not an unfortunate accident or diversion from the true path of intellectual progress, it is basic to it. Indeed, all that happens when you deny this, is that you set up another religion in the place of those which you seek to deny. So we have the idol of scientism, or its close cousins rationalism and naturalism. These have all the hallmarks of the religion that they condemn, including creeds, rituals and priesthood. They don’t stand outside the game, they are part of the game. They are not the referees and umpires of the competition between other strange, barbaric, teams, they are on the field of play themselves competing hard. Except that these “isms” (note the distinction here between science and scientism) haven’t actually produced much of worth. No, that’s harsh. They’ve occasionally produced nice words, I’ll grant them that.

The problem is that it was and is the truth of the Bible that produced a society in which science developed and flourished and in which questioning, challenging skepticism (“virtues” in Dawkins’ view) were not just tolerated but encouraged. It was centuries of Christianity which conditioned minds and developed intellectual life to the point where advance was possible beyond a certain point. While one cannot rule out the possibility that a different network of beliefs and truth might have led to the same end, it’s a brute fact of history that we came from where we were, not some other starting point.

So, maybe the eponymous Professor is mellowing. Although I suspect that even old mellow Dawkins bridled when he read the first sentence of the article, in which he was introduced as “the high priest of atheism”.