As we think about the future of the science–faith interface, I want to spend a little time taking stock.[1] I spend a great deal of effort looking at the ways in which we can think theologically about science and the places in which science does (and should) really inform theology. But in this short article, I want to step back with some level of discouragement and admit that all of this has had very little impact on the church in general.
In this interdisciplinary space, we spend much energy on mapping the territory and making arguments. We have all waded in, confident that just a few more arguments will make all the difference. But at some stage, one must step back and say, why is it still so hard? There are over fifty years of arguments about how science and faith can be held together, how scientists can be people of faith, and Christian believers should study and consider scientific evidence. The surveys include wide historical purviews as well as integration with the latest genomic and string theory models. We have examined epistemology, imagination, narrative, evolutionary Christology and eschatology, animal lives and sentience, and animal suffering. We will keep doing all that because reflecting on how we know and think is fascinating. But still, the arguments often fail to penetrate very deeply or fail to take at all.
Conflict and Contrast
John Haught, for example, was one of the early categorisers of different modes of relating science and faith. One of these is outright conflict and another is indifference, or contrast. We find the contrast model (which includes the idea that religion and science are different worlds that don’t need integration, accompanied by indifference to any synthesis) operating a great deal in Anglican and mainline church circles where people have the off-the-cuff saying: “I have no problem with science.” You know they haven’t thought about science or delved deeply into it either, or at least, not far enough to be either troubled or moved by its findings. This phrase is more a thing you say that positions you in social terms rather than anything else, communicating: “We are liberal and open-minded Anglicans / Methodists / Presbyterians.” When this phrase is used, it is meant to be agreeable, but I find myself dismayed. Science and religion are now different worlds, and if you don’t feel the tension, something is wrong. And on the other side, scientists who are people of faith often feel that the church does not get them. It isn’t a place that deeply engages with science at a metaphysical or an ethical level. All of this typifies what Haught describes as the Contrast Model.[2] But the classification and the observation that all of this is happening doesn’t get us any further to integration.
If contrast is problematic, the ongoing perpetuation of the Conflict Model is ever more concerning and puzzling. Creationism continues to be the default position in many large interdenominational and Pentecostal churches. These are the churches attended most by young university students. At university, they are being taught critical thinking and analysis, and even science, but they keep their religious views under wraps, with authorities and culture in universities not overlapping with those in their churches. For a long time, I thought it was just that New Zealand seemed to be too far away from anything to be properly grounded. But I was surprised in a trip to the Netherlands in 2018 for a Metaphysics in Evolution conference, to see that creationism is also a huge problem in liberal Holland. This, of course, is Haught’s conflict model.
Creationism is often a deep belief that isn’t even openly discussed or articulated. A few years ago, I was surprised to find a group of Christian medical students who assured us they loved science. But in the same discussion, it became clear that they did not love evolution. Yet they had already learned cell biology, genomics, and other disciplines that rely on an evolutionary model. The students know enough to be silent in their dissenting. When I related this to one of their deans, he was flabbergasted. Why does this resistance to evolution persist even with all the evidence in its favour and when these students are being trained in a strictly evidence-based profession? Why were they uncurious and, in fact, disturbed by the vast body of material that allows them to think of these disciplines together?
I have often assumed that one of the reasons for this is that there is an implicitly materialist aspect to evolutionary teaching. At times this comes across as a form of triumphant atheism. This is the conflict model from the other side, which leads me to admit that all these arguments and books over fifty years also make little difference to science. The science side is revealed in the persistently anti-teleological framing of even neutrally presented evolution; in many science classrooms the evolutionary process and natural selection which drives it are presented as blind and automatic. Conflict is also seen in the persistence of reductionist materialism that hangs around science as it is often practiced.
This is despite the changing of evolutionary paradigms in the last few decades. I think of the work of Simon Conway Morris, Agustín Fuentes, Denis Noble, and what is known as the “extended evolutionary synthesis.” Even the Guardian has recently asked if we need to reframe the Theory of Evolution.[3] The tight calculus between evolutionary progress and blind competition to the death has been broken, though it is still upheld by some. But this makes little difference to biology’s overall sense that it is incompatible with faith, and its reluctance to investigate how the changes affect us metaphysically.
Culture and Our Ways of Knowing
I think there is another aspect to all of this. It is the cultures of the churches we belong to and the deep impact they have on our commitments. If we are honest, all knowing happens through cultures and cultural filters. There isn’t any neutral way of seeing, even if some sciences try to approximate that. Michael Polanyi and others have put the lie to the idea that science is just objective seeing.[4] There is wide attention paid to the fact that we only know things within communities of knowledge. World views, knowledge systems, and cultures enable narratives, evidence gathering, and transmission of knowledge, whether in Indigenous societies or modern, highly industrial ones. Within these deeply cultural frameworks, one form of Christianity becomes almost alien to other forms. Clusters of belief and dogma are attached to different kinds of church culture, but I would postulate that they are much less referencing reality out there and more pragmatic social cues to one’s place in the world. The dogmatic attachments of culture are a way of referencing one’s identity, even if they do, in the end, produce continuing cognitive dissonance.
The particular sub-disciplines within the sciences and the denominations within the church all act as particular communities of knowing and remembering. And yet, we often approach discussion about science and faith as though arguments will make all the difference. For instance, we say Genesis 1–3 wasn’t meant to be read literally, and if you don’t read it literally and you do read it seriously, you no longer have any problem with science and faith. Except that it often doesn’t work that way. The person who takes the early biblical stories literally has authorities and a culture of support in a church that incidentally makes a literal reading of Genesis almost a litmus test of belonging. The only way to really take on the newer integrated worldview is to leave the old family or culture behind. The history of faith has a rich narrative of people going out and leaving their families behind to hear the Word of God, with Abraham being the most important and the most pivotal. But it is hard.
Never has it been truer what John Brookes long ago argued, that there is no one religion and one science, but many forms of both. Brooke refers to the complex ways in which sciences and religious faith have mutually affected one another, sometimes for good and at other times not throughout the modern era. His thesis is that complexity, rather than harmony or conflict is the norm.[5]
Christians have probably never been more divided on the overarching narrative of faith. Do we survive death? Are we just bodies, or is there really a soul? Is the fall literal or symbolic? What does the future hold? What does salvation mean? Many Christian churches deny evolution without ever mentioning it. They resist it with tightly interweaving doctrines centred around a literal fall, which is logically incompatible with evolution. Nobody has to mention evolution. It just becomes a shadowy threat to the central kernel of faith.
On the other side, scientists and universities are their own authorities and tend to make religion a taboo. While there is now a rich literature on the subject of how one can be a Christian and a scientist at the same time, one might not be able to be a particular kind of Christian in a particular science context. Adopting science might require leaving a home community or family, or it might be associated with feeling alienation among one’s science colleagues as well. We should acknowledge that this is asking a great deal of people, especially the young, and that it is not surprising that many end up choosing faith over science or vice versa, despite all the reasons we provide for integration.
Finding God in the Waves
An example: Some of you will have read the book Finding God in the Waves by Mike McHargue, also known online as “Science Mike.”[6] Science Mike grew up in a Baptist church. He was a bit of a loner and didn’t have many friends, but he had a great childhood talking to Jesus. He married his Baptist childhood sweetheart and had several lovely, God-loving children within a large Baptist church. He loved the culture of the church, but unlike many there, he was also interested in science, and ideas. He had read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell and knew you didn’t have to take the whole Bible literally. He was also active online. To cut a long story short, at one stage he was challenged to read Dawkins’ The God Delusion. In exchange, the atheist behind the challenge was happy to read Velvet Elvis. Unfortunately, Science Mike was completely persuaded. He lost his faith almost overnight. But he couldn’t tell anyone. This went on for two years, because he knew if he did say anything he risked his life, his marriage, his family, and his church community. He privately dissented, as I think often happens in less dramatic ways in church communities. In the end, he confessed, but only because his wife sensed something was up. They agreed not to tell the church. His mother, however, told him she was praying, and that God was coming. There is a very dramatic denouement in which he has a profound religious experience of deep symbolic significance in and after a Rob Bell seminar. He came back to faith, albeit a less certain and more chastened faith, but could not return to the church. He and his family struggled but ended up finding a small Methodist community. The huge wrench here was the cultural one, giving up a community, and authority, risking marriage and family. What brought him back to faith was not arguments, but rather an experience. As the subtitle of the book suggests however, this initial experience was in a context where he found a group of Christians who were taking science seriously. That was enough to then set him on a journey of re-interpreting his previous polarised thinking. In this case Science Mike did have access to the integrating literature, but only after a re-conversion experience.
Another example: I have an ex-student who ended up doing a course in science and theology with me at Otago as part of the requirements for her doctorate. I had known her and taught her for probably fifteen years, on and off. I was always talking about science in the context of theology. She had come from a family of deep faith but completely oblivious to science. She was never antagonistic, just blissfully un-alert to any talk of science. But doing this course, fifteen years later, she suddenly had an epiphany that science was important for theology. It was only a sustained period of looking at science and theology together that overcame her family/cultural indifference to science. Through all the previous years, although she was embracing theology, she was defecting in place when it came to science until it all got through one day. Again, this shows that the challenges to integration are surmountable, but they don’t come easily.
These vignettes show that culture and belief are tightly bound, as they should be. Mary Douglas talks about how institutions allow us to think, but institutions also reflect different levels of hierarchy, role differentiation, and bonding, with non-egalitarian groups, especially, finding it hard to change.[7] It is far easier to silently dissent than to struggle with the cultural displacement that changing your mind brings. There are always individuals who do end up thinking hard and finding their way. But it is easy to see how they then easily adopt the alternative secular public culture in which all religious claims are implausible, as they were for Science Mike, and this implausibility is something of which we have probably all felt the power. By far the most common way out of the creationist culture is to get taken up into a science research culture and abandon faith, as Science Mike did at first, skipping one culture to land in another.
Science Engaged Theology
In the two years since I first gave an earlier version of this paper at the Australian and New Zealand Association of Theological Schools conference (ANZATS) in COVID-run Sydney, there has been an interesting development in the science–theology dialogue. Science Engaged Theology (SET) has been made popular by Joanna Leidenhag and John Perry’s book Science Engaged Theology.[8] SET changes the conversational emphasis because it is led from the theology side by theologians who are engaging a particular science. They are not necessarily trained in science and are not trying to give an overall picture of the field or fields. SET is humbler—a particular tradition within theology engages a particular science. It may end up helping the academic conversation because the dialogue between science and faith is now taking place not only in dedicated conferences but in general theology conferences, classes, and seminars as well. So, watch this space.
But I also promised to think about ways out of the conundrums I have listed above, none of which have yet been fundamentally resolved. I am advocating for modes and methods that might make our job of communication more effective. We are often people who move between worlds, and who inhabit multiple cultures. How then can we enhance the conversation between cultures?
Experience
Our work is often too rational. We need to embrace religious experience and the spirituality of people like Richard Rohr, who routinely expresses prayer, nature, theology, and science in one breath. He seems to do so effortlessly, deeply inspired by one of the first theologians of science, Teilhard de Chardin, but also, of course, by his Franciscan heritage.[9] This kind of science and theology orients us to nature and to what Sarah Coakley would call “unmastery.” It leads inevitably not only to speculation about our place in nature, but also to a love of nature as a window to God, and to a desire for ecological healing and awareness.[10]
This then becomes an invitation to look deeper into the way in which the natural world works: its laws of evolutionary production, its deep interconnections, and its framework, all of which open grids of thinking that work so powerfully but also reveal hidden paradoxes and hints of transcendence. Whatever our theologising does, it has to avoid the flattening of reality that can so often be the result of a materialist outlook. The novelist and theologian Marilynne Robinson says this very aptly:
To some extent even theology has embraced impoverishment, often under the name of secularism, in order to blend more thoroughly into a disheartened cultural landscape. To the great degree that theology has accommodated the parascientific world view, it too has tended to forget the beauty and strangeness of the individual soul, that is, of the world as perceived in the course of a human life, of the mind as it exists in time … the beauty and strangeness persist just the same. And theology persists, even when it has absorbed as truth theories and interpretations that could reasonably be expected to kill it off. This suggests that its real life is elsewhere.[11]
Mainline Churches
It is hard to become an authority in some of the more fundamentalist churches. But that makes the middle mainline churches all the more important as places where this thinking can occur, and as places of refuge from creationist culture. It is mostly the churches that are there for the long haul for people. It is mostly in churches that relationships endure over the length of time that can enable a change of mind. Churches are also needed as places where scientists can be free to dialogue in ways that are not possible in the secular university.
Elephants in the Theological Room
It is also important when we are doing the rational argument to tackle the elephants in the theological room. One such elephant is the nature of evolution, the importance of our prehistory in knowing who we are, and the theology of the fall and the problem of evil. So much Christian reaction to evolution is ignorant of recent radical changes in evolutionary theory and of how evolutionary theory has always been quite heterodox in its interpretation. Evolution has changed and we need to be telling people this quite unequivocally. It has changed in ways that make a difference theologically.
The reluctance to engage with evolution means that Christians do not openly engage with our prehistory. We have to think about how we crossed the species boundary, our dozens of hominin cousins, the traits our ancestors came with, and the conditions that seemed to help with peaceful coexistence. Lastly, we must consider what all of this says about traditional understandings of the fall. This should take us deep into theologies from the early centuries, which emphasised different understandings of the fall and of salvation. But to do all that is to ask a lot from people.
The Immensity of the Cosmos
Long ago C. P. Snow decried the ignorance of those in the humanities when it comes to science.[12] This situation remains. Most Christians know very little about the universe and its unintuitive and unbelievably long history. What they do know makes them feel alienated and alone. Yet the physics story is one that is full of majestic details, a largely hidden territory (dark energy and dark matter), and paradox. It is fitting subject matter for people who believe in a creator God. In a recent book, Doru Costache interacts with this physics (an example of SET), showing also that our consciousness is made to be in relationship with all of this. Rather than feeling alienated, we should recognise how this enhances our sense of self and connection to God.[13]
Indigenous Worldviews
Finally, we should not just keep re-hashing old arguments but also sense where the Spirit is moving in the world. In New Zealand that is definitely into the world of Mātauranga Māori. Mātauranga Māori is the holistic understanding of knowledge in Maoritanga. Next year these conversations will be a part of the New Zealand National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) high school science curriculum. Christians, I think, should welcome this. It breaks the secular materialist worldview of science to some extent. In New Zealand society the primary wedge against pure secularism is the growing Māori renaissance, and the acceptability of karakia (Māori for prayer) in the public domain. Faith and science, and Mātauranga Māori and Science conversations are parallels. But more importantly this emphasis helps us to critique the close and sometimes exclusive partnership between Western enlightenment thinking and faith.
To summarise, our arguments over the past fifty years have been ambitious and comprehensive, yet the church has remained largely unmoved, as has the scientific academy. The mainline church, which could be so helpful, remains largely disengaged. Larger congregations perpetuate the conflict model, as do many university science departments. We need to reimagine where we might find traction—perhaps in a more spiritual, ecologically-oriented narrative, or by persuading the mainline to re-engage with science. The future cannot simply mirror the past; it must be different in some way.
[1] This paper was first given at ANZATS in Sydney in 2022 when the theme was the Future.
[2] John Haught, Science and Faith: A New Introduction (New York: Paulist Press, 2013), Chapter 1.
[3] See Stephen Buranyi, “Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution?”, The Guardian, 28 June 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jun/28/do-we-need-a-new-theory-of-evolution; Denis Noble, Dance to the Tune of Life: Biological Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2017); Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
[4] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (The University of Chicago Press, 1974).
[5] John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reprint, 2014), 5. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107589018
[6] Michael McHargue, Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found it Again through Science (Colorado Springs: Convergent Books, 2016). Michael McHargue is known online as “Science Mike.”
[7] Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), Chapter 1.
[8] John Perry and Joanna Leidenhag, Science Engaged Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009091350
[9] See, for instance, Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ (London: SPCK, 2019).
[10] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay in the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 43-51. https://doi.org/10.1111/rirt.12404
[11] Marilyn Robinson, Absence of Mind: Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 13. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300166477
[12] C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959).
[13] Doru Costache and Geraint F. Lewis, A New Copernican Turn: Contemporary Cosmology, the Self, and Orthodox Science-Engaged Theology, Routledge Focus on Religion (London and New York: Routledge, 2025). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003527138