Book reviewed by Andrew Brown, August 2025
A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge
by Paul Tyson
Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022; 182 pages
ISBN 9781540965516, first edition, paperback
AU$29

Paul Tyson is that person who has read all the books you know you ought to have read and have not. Reading A Christian Theology of Science is like visiting an inveterate scholar and bibliophile at home. I used to visit Frank Andersen in his Melbourne, Australia home before he passed away, and books were stacked around his lounge room like ragged skyscrapers. This is the feeling when reading Tyson’s book. A digital reference manager is essential for quick pillaging of all of his citations!

There are Christian works available that undertake a scientific view of theology, or place Christian theology and science side-by-side, but when we seek Christian theologies of science as we might a theology of the environment, a theology of work, or the like, they seem distinctly thin on the ground. Tyson’s title caught my eye soon after its publication for that reason. It begins to fill a space where theological reflection seems to have been lacking, despite the Christian’s sense that all domains of life deserve and need such reflection.

To take one step back for a moment, Paul was at the time of this book’s publication a senior research fellow at The University of Queensland’s (UQ) Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, an institute now apparently mothballed given that the former weblink now simply leads back to UQ’s Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences website. This UQ department of constantly evolving name and scope was where I completed my PhD studies. Chief amongst Tyson’s many stimulating academic colleagues in that Institute and department was an esteemed name in the field of science and religion, Peter Harrison, my co-supervisor. Harrison is well known for serious definitional and intellectual-historical work on the supposed domains of science and religion—especially his 2015 Territories of Science and Religion.

In an earlier venture into this topical domain, Harrison wrote “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” Journal of Religion 86.1 (2006): 81–106. A passage in that article functions as a conceptual jumping-off point for Tyson’s book, so I quote a section here (p. 88):

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that over the course of the past 150 years a remarkable reversal has taken place. Whereas once the investigation of nature had derived status from its intimate connections with the more elevated disciplines of ethics and theology, increasingly during the twentieth century these latter disciplines have humbly sought associations with science in order to bask in its reflected glory—whence bioethics and science-and-religion.

This “remarkable reversal” is the cultural moment that plays a fundamental conceptual role in Tyson’s book. He refers to it first on page 31 and offers several complementary definitions of the term thereafter. The remarkable reversal is “a first-order interpretive transition concerning where the locus of truth itself lies: it shifts from the divine Creator to the human knower” (p. 32). It is “the most important lifeworld transition in the historical relationship between Christian theology and modern science” (p. 71) when “in the late nineteenth century modern science displaced Christian theology as the dominant public truth discourse of Western European knowledge” (p. 72). Shortly afterward the entirety of Chapter 5 is devoted to the exposition of this turn in intellectual history.

This epochal shift in the ground rules of legitimate knowledge, Tyson feels, renders contemporary science-and-religion discussions rather futile, since they take place on modern science’s terms, and these terms are stacked against Christian belief, which would see God as the ground and origin of ultimate reality and simultaneously the source and basis of reliable knowledge about that reality, including the realities of the natural world. To rule theological language and indeed all metaphysics as out of bounds in the truth conversation, as Tyson thinks contemporary science does, hobbles the Christian thinker from the get-go and predefines the terms of any discussion according to naturalistic and even materialistic parameters. Christian participants in science–religion discussion are subject to a kind of antimetaphysical gag order. What Christian scientists would often describe as a methodological naturalism, a willingness to set aside transcendent factors for the sake of exploring natural phenomena on a level plane with people of different beliefs or none, Tyson thinks readily washes over into a philosophical naturalism, doubting the ability of real humans to demarcate belief and practice in such a clinical way. Tyson’s closing call is for Christian thinkers about science to abandon efforts to discuss ultimate truth with non-Christian scientists on the implicit and severely limiting conversational terms set for them by naturalistic science, and to rediscover “a new conceptual language and a new integrative outlook” (pp. 181–82) that is bold enough to redefine the conversation in ways that actually permit Christians to speak of truths beyond naturalistic limits.

Readers who are Christian scientists might react with some dismay, I suspect (speaking as a biblical exegete, from the outside) to Tyson’s despair over the science–religion enterprise, notwithstanding the backing of intellectual historians such as Harrison, who would see even these categories as a recent construction. Some Christian scientists might have more faith than Tyson in the efforts of thinkers such as John Polkinghorne, Ernan McMullin, or Alister McGrath (a rather androcentric, Anglocentric, and ancient sample, now that I think about it) to explore the interface of these constructed territories, despite the limitations of the enterprise. Nonetheless, his challenge is worth hearing. If an inherent dysfunction of unrecognised clashing philosophical assumptions and values is destined to frustrate efforts at détente until they are brought to the surface, the sooner we realise this, the better. If Tyson is too jaded about this, much can still be learned in testing the point.

In place of an engagement with existing science–religion discourse, then, Tyson’s book represents an intellectual ground-clearing operation, like the bulldozing of some inner-city slum ready for a new construction project. The prospect of construction of a positive theology of science is an exciting and I think really necessary one. What we largely have here is cleared ground ready for such a task. Readers who have mentally co-operated with Tyson’s argument might have laid aside allusions that secular and Christian scientists largely share an intellectual basis for understanding and practice and, to boot, might have absorbed a healthy consciousness of the epistemic damage done by the fall of humanity, something Tyson takes very seriously. They have learned that even scientific knowledge is always, as Michael Polanyi would say, personal knowledge and never truly objective (p. 176). They stand warned to “stop pretending that there are no serious problems with [between] the prevailing reductively naturalistic theoretical framework of modern science and orthodox Christian theology” (pp. 174–75). Yet by the end of the book, the constructive work of framing out a Christian theology of science largely remains at the blueprint stage.

So, I appreciated Tyson’s awareness of the huge influence of philosophical first principles and theological assumptions on all intellectual pursuits, his theological orthodoxy and postmodern-tinged sense of the contextualised nature of all knowledge and his sassy impertinence. But as a lover of the details of science, the texture of rocks, the behaviour of birds, the variety of landforms, the fluid mechanics of waves, what I hungered for were clearer signs of a love for the detail, the tangible stuff of science. Such a prolegomenon as this could not be chiefly a catalogue of natural phenomena (or better, created phenomena), but I wanted to see more examples, more breaking out of abstractions and contact with the phenomenal muddiness of the physical realm. I felt that Tyson shared with Plato, as he himself hints, a preference for the invisible, transcendent realm as the ultimately real (pp. 105–107) and sympathised less with Aristotle’s focus on the tangible things. Certainly, Tyson is right to say that the early church found greatest philosophical rapport in the Logos-generated ontology of all its existing philosophical neighbours. But the scientist who loves the very textures of the tangible things might find little of that kind into which to sink her fingers here.

This book is a blue cheese of sorts: sharp, strident, of an unmistakable flavour, not to be ignored, probably not to everyone’s taste. It is very much worth obtaining and reading. And it awaits a volume 2, whether from Tyson or some other thinker, a constructive Christian theology of science that utilises the ground that has been cleared here in order to build.