Especially in our postmodern environment, the emerging church appears to be struggling through a whole raft of philosophical questions. Science and faith is certainly one key area of confusion. The topic has been discussed in various nodes and threads on this site (as a search will show) but I feel that a conclusion is yet to be reached (if such is even possible?). Some fundamental questions do need to be tackled and these include areas like epistmology and what we believe about truth. I blogged on science and faith recently and received quite a few mails in response denoting a very wide array of perspectives all of which had theological implications.

How postmodern thinking interacts with science at all is a more general and foundational issue. The ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ agnosticism that is inherent in postmodernity clashes at various levels with a science that has reached a dominant cultural and philosophical position under modernity.

The modern church dealt with science in a rather schizophrenic way, accepting a lot of science wholesale while choosing to reject certain scientific hypotheses as being incompatible with the bible. Probably the rejection aspect was and is more pronounced in the American church community, e.g. where ideas like evolution are concerned.

At the heart of today’s debate, the creation accounts in the bible are a constant source of debate. Are these to be taken as interesting mythology, spiritual but not physical truth, parables, literature, metophors, analogies, true in some sense that we cannot yet fathom, relevant, irrelevant, or applied science? More generally, what do we do with the miraculous - something that pervades the bible from beginning to end?

Can/Should science deal at all with anything in the past? How does anything in history become scientifically testable or verifiable? What constitutes evidence? The questions are disturbing because they are so basic to scientific method. Yet science has not hesitated to produce theories about all sorts of past happenings from big bangs to the origin(s) of life and back them up with ‘scientific’ methodologies. Some scientists have questioned whether what science is attempting here is science or theology! But, the attempt is on and it is very much in the public eye for it purports to answer questions of importance to each individual. What am I, where did I come from, does life have any purpose, where am I going????? Inevitably, science has also tried to define morality, justice, ethics and belief.

Postmoderns have a healthy amount of distrust of any metanarrative including the scientific expedition. One option facing PoMo believers is to say that these are two separate worlds in the sense of ways of viewing reality and so it is silly to expect them to overlap meaningfully. Another approach is to deny that the bible has anything to say of a scientific nature. Both avoidances though leave me dissatisfied.

I personally like the Renaissance scientific approach which starts with ‘all truth is God’s truth’*, and specifically, that science is merely attempting to rediscover (the hard way) what God has done. Eventually, science has to affirm God - science by-and-large just doesn’t realise it. I don’t believe that science does lean towards atheism or even towards some sort of a clockwork image of God; ‘something started everything off but has since been a non-player’.

The existence of physical laws, time, cause and effect - the very things that make science possible, I believe are very strong evidences of God. But, God is scientifically untestable while an essential part of the scientific method is that the simplest hypothesis that adequately accounts for the phenomena under study is the best hypothesis.

So, where does all of this leave the interaction of science with your faith? do they intersect at all and if so how? Perhaps once we sort out what we believe and why we believe it, one effect will be to make both our praxis and our apologetic better! As Bernard of Clairveaux put it:

Some seek knowledge for
The sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that
They themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others
Who seek knowledge in
Order to serve and edify others;
And that is charity.

*that quote seems to come from Augustine.