This article is a response from the author to Antonios Kaldas’ review of New Directions in Theology and Science: Beyond Dialogue.

As one of the editors I am most appreciative of the Very Rev. Dr Antonios Kaldas’ thoughtful and constructive review of New Directions in Theology and Science. To have the book so carefully and constructively read by such an intelligent and informed interlocutor is a delight from this editor’s point of view.

Even so, there are two small points I would like to make by way of a response.

Dr Kaldas’ central point—that many of our contributors are actually trying to do something old, rather than something new—is something I agree with entirely. But, of course, trying to do something old in a new context is still a new direction if nobody else is trying it. Many of the volume’s contributors are wondering out loud if metaphysical theology, appealing to some of the patristic and medieval masters of our Christian theological heritage, and appealing to Milbank’s powerful analysis of modern secularism as itself a theological construct, can be critically interfaced with the contemporary sciences. This leads to the second point.

There are a range of views in the volume, some very affirming of a sympathy between modern science and biblical, patristic, and medieval understandings of the meaning of creation and knowledge, and some more critical. But I would not describe those critical voices (such as myself) as representative of Barbour’s conflict paradigm. As useful and domain enriching as Barbour’s Science and Religion models of independence, dialogue, integration, and conflict were, New Directions is not prepared to assume that any of these models can genuinely progress the “science and religion” domain now. As Dr Kaldas indicates, once one can no longer believe that “science” and “religion” are natural kinds, then Barbour’s models no longer adequately describe the sort of complex and ever moving relationship between the broad church of contemporary Western natural philosophies (the sciences) and the broad church of living Christian theologies. Which is to say that Peter Harrison’s work in exploding the conflict myth historically, and his work in exploding any natural kinds understanding of what science and religion “are,” requires an entirely new approach to the “science and religion” domain. Even if some of New Directions’ theological approaches to natural philosophy are critical of the widespread methodological and metaphysical assumptions embedded in the theory and practices of contemporary science, this is not a “science and religion” conflict problem if we no longer hold that science and religion themselves can be usefully defined into separate models of interaction (friendly or not) or non-interaction. How can we do “science and religion” scholarship after dropping essentialist and delineated definitions of science and religion? This is not a conflict question as this is a question outside of Barbour’s four models.

I think Harrison’s work forces us to acknowledge that relationships between our understanding of high meaning and the natural world are always intimately and inextricably entwined. This being so, we have to start thinking outside of the contained boxes of trans-historical, neatly separated, and conveniently definable Science and Religion. This is quite frightening, as we have become accustomed to those boxes as dependable and ordering features of our lifeworld. And I must say that trying to think after Science and Religion was decidedly more challenging that I had anticipated. And even if we can succeed, this does not mean that there is no use for these boxes, and it does not even mean that it would be possible for us to do without those boxes, in at least some regards. But Harrison’s insight does mean that the post-Christianisation of the West that has followed the territorial separation of Science from Religion—and the evolution of their mutually exclusive definitions—from roughly 1870 to 1970, does not leave us at a stable destination. New Directions is trying to conceptually name and theologically address our present instability, and it is a very provisional and exploratory attempt to so do.

It is also the case that conflict is complicated. The “myth of conflict” is now deeply integral with the de-Christianising educational formation of our pragmatic and functionally materialist lifeworld. This myth has no basis in history, but it remains a motherhood truth of our modern (and postmodern) secularised intellectual culture. There remains a live need to combat the conflict myth (nota bene, this combat is itself a form of conflict) by organisations such as ISCAST. But, I would argue, it is also the case that Christians have become overly scared of any sort of first order conflict with the secularising worldview that uses science as an ersatz and assumed anti-Christian theology. The twentieth-century battle between fundamentalist materialist Darwinians and fundamentalist six-day creationists is pretty well spent (thank God!), but that was always something of a sideshow to the relentless scientistic de-Christianisation of the West in the twentieth century. Scientism really has been the means of culturally transforming the West away from publicly accepted Christian assumptions. Lovers of science who are Christians should stop pretending this hasn’t happened. We need to be mature enough to not have to continuously display how much we accept the authority of modern science so that we can display ourselves as credible modern Christians.

As an explanatory addendum, the absence of US voices in the New Directions volume was not by design. We initially had 24 contributors to the “After Science and Religion Project”— including a number of Americans—so there were three edited collections that came out of the project, the other two being After Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison and John Milbank (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Astonishment and Science, edited by Paul Tyson (Cascade, 2023). There are five internationally reputed contributors from the USA in these other two volumes (David Hart, DC Schindler, etc.). Rev. Dr Robert Brennan kindly reviewed the Cambridge volume for CPOSAT last year, but if anyone wishes to review the Astonishment and Science volume as well, then CPOSAT readers will have a full view of the project outputs in the edited collections. The monograph of the project is A Christian Theology of Science by Paul Tyson, which is the subject of a special review feature by the journal Modern Theology later this year, with extensive review essays by John Betz, Peter Harrison, Michael Hanby, John Perry, and Simon Oliver.