The five challenges to religion by the natural sciences as outlined by Ames and Camilleri are important and require careful and thoughtful responses from those of us professing religious convictions (in my case, Christian).

Let’s talk about the fifth challenge. This results from the view that an adequate philosophical position is provided by the natural sciences. Further it implies that the only reliable knowledge is provided by science. Let’s be clear. This is a worldview that ignores the fact that there are underlying metaphysical assumptions involved in doing science. For example:- the rationality of the world we investigate; our capacity to interrogate that natural world with the methods of science; while our knowledge is always incomplete, it is not meaningless. But such metaphysical assumptions, and others also needed, actually lie outside science [a point made forcibly many years ago by the late Sir Peter Medawar, though not a religious person himself].

So what is involved here is a worldview that bases its position on the primacy of science. To be able to respond from an informed religious perspective, Ames and Camilleri express the hope for constructive mutually critical conversation. As a practicing Christian and professional scientist for well over half a century, I have always found it liberating to understand that faith and science can be understood in harmony. But what stands against creative conversations is the difficulty of establishing a common vocabulary and the associated difficulty of teasing out the assumptions underpinning different points of view.

These days there is an extensive literature at the science-religion interface which provides fuel for the kind of creative conversation Ames and Camilleri would like to see. Perhaps most important of all is the need to listen in such a way that one grasps what people mean, not just what they say.

John Pilbrow
Emeritus Professor of Physics, Monash University

I agree with John and Kristian that human inquiry, including and especially the sciences, has presuppositions. In particular that the field being inquired into is intelligible and open to rational explanation, without prejudice to the forms of intelligibility and forms of rationality that might be needed.  I regard this as a metaphysical presupposition.  This is what inquirers bring to their inquiries. It’s what gets them going on inquiry.   This is of common interest in the conversation between science, theology and philosophy.   I think this presupposition of inquiry could well motivate and contribute to a form of metaphysics, within which scientific inquiries and what they yield, would have an unconstrained place.  I regard human inquiry as one of the most remarkable phenomena on planet earth, and wonder what can gives an adequate explanation of this phenomenon?  That is to ask about an explanation.  First we need an adequate account of human inquiry – the thing to be explained. If this is truncated any explanation might seem adequate. This also applies to a parallel conversation pursuing a theology of nature – in which human inquiry is interpreted in the light of the theology that is part of a religious tradition – and pursuing a natural theology – in which human inquiry is examined to see whether and in what ways it provides an argument for some key elements in that theology.  I would like to think these several conversations between science, philosophy and theology might converge.

Just some preliminary comments. 1. Physics is not the only science. Rutherford jokingly said there are two sciences - physics and stamp collecting. A very rich thought because the correct classification of stamps led to the discovery of the periodic table and with that the theory of atomic structure, and the correct classification of biological specimens led to the rise of the theory of evolution. We clinicians are still classifying clinical syndromes. 2. Every science is still a work in progress. Even within physics there are many more discoveries to be made. We see through a glass darkly. We are gradually seeing more clearly as we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Dark matter and dark energy would suggest that there is a long way to go. 3. Science and the Christian faith are on the same quest - to discover the hidden wisdom of a universe which is both ordered and chaotic - with the science of weather and earthquakes illustrating clearly how mysterious and unpredictable large scale natural events can be. 4. We need all the tools at our disposal - the arts, the sciences, literature and philosophy to try and explore more the hidden assumptions which both illuminate and cloud our perception of what we know and how we should live. 5. As a clinician struggling with the defining and refining of disease processes we are still in our infancy, and then we need to reflect on the human condition which leads humans to treat each other so badly and inconsiderately. 6. I used to think science and the Christian faith were two ways of looking at the one phenomena, but now I see that the faith is also about trying to understand the wisdom which shapes the world and which has mysteriously allowed seeming impersonal forces to shape human beings into sentient reflective beings capable of not just switching bits and bytes over the miles but to make meaningful comments riding on those bits and bytes which others with better analytical tools can engage with, evaluate and refine. Each of us brings our own values and meanings to our quest. For me (and for many over the centuries of the traditions of natural philosophy) our faith shapes our quest and provides both direction and boundaries to our search. Historians of science will also attest how frequently their quest was shaped by these larger considerations.

Kristian Camilleri raises the question as to what we really mean by science when he says,
“in speaking of "science", we often find ourselves caught between two meanings: (i) a practical conception of science as a normative (purpose-driven) human activity, and (ii) a conception of science as a body of knowledge, or an assemblage of truths, about the world.”

Category (i) encompasses the practice of science. Category (ii) raises the question as to what science actually achieves. The body of knowledge, assemblage of truths about the world is best thought of in terms of paradigms that address the big picture. Examples would be Big Bang Cosmology and Evolution.

His point about limiting (ii) to what physics says seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction, particularly in the light of the success that Evolution has had in accounting for biological diversity and much besides. So I would want to argue that in the case of category (ii), one must take into account the big picture paradigms from across the entire scientific spectrum.

A lot of work has been done over the past several decades concerning emergence, complexity and self-organisation, thus rubbing out simplistic notions of reductionism e.g. that “I am nothing but atoms and molecules’ or that ‘All science reduces to physics’ and so on. What is now known is that the properties at each level of complexity are not explicable on the basis of the properties of the constituent parts. For example, biology cannot simply be reduced to chemistry and physics, even though both are involved in biological processes.

Kristian is concerned about the relationship between the categories (i) and (ii) and that if one restricts the conversation to physics, then he thinks category (ii) offers no explanation for category (i). Actually this seems to me to be the wrong way to approach the issue. A robust philosophy of science should incorporate both (i) and (ii) and explore the relationship between them in terms of a mutual interaction or feedback process. Given that scientific knowledge will always be incomplete, there will be an inevitable going back and forward reviewing evidence, suggesting new experiments or observations and revision of aspects of the paradigm involved. This is the normal scientific process. In summary, (ii) is about making sense of the data gathered in (i). It is not a one-way process.

I agree with Kristian that the sort of conversation here opens up a space for creative dialogue. Such dialogue will need to encompass science, philosophy and theology. Something more than ‘philosophically-informed naturalism’ will be needed.

I happily testify to Kristian being staunchly anit-reductionist having had many conversations with him on this matter!  I would also like to make an initial response to Kristian's last sentence.  As I said in my previous comment inquiry presupposes the field being inquired into is intelligible but without prejudice to the forms of intelligibility that may be needed to understand our expriences, the 'data' of experiment and observation and the data of consciousness.   What I think is noteworthy is that human beings have brought forth and can hold together a multiplicity of different kinds of intelligibility, at least in the sense of moving from one to another, without yet integrating this multiplicity into a unity.  Perhaps an integration is not needed, perhaps not possible, perhaps not desireable, lest differences be overridden. Perhaps our 'holding together' of these different kinds of intelligibility is what is important.  If it is important, then equally important  is whether and on what basis we might assent to any proposed undersanding.  

Do science and religion belong to separate domains?

This question is of crucial importance to understanding whether science and religion are in conflict or consonance. Conflict requires shared intellectual territory, while consonance is only superficial if the two modes of inquiry cannot speak to the same issues.

Stephen Jay Gould famously suggested that science and religion occupied separate spheres – “nonoverlapping magisteria”. Scientific questions were considered empirical matters of what is, while religion dealt with matters of ultimate purpose and what ought to be.

This concept is not without significant basis. Moral imperatives are not typically generated by the inquiry of natural science, although naturalistic explanations of their existence are common. “Why” questions are dismissed as meaningless (e.g. Richard Dawkins) or simply conflated with “how” questions (e.g. Lawrence Krauss). Similarly, religion (mostly) does not claim to uncover knowledge of the natural world.

But do these different foci mean no overlap occurs? It seems unlikely. The natural world is obviously interesting to theologians, and questions of meaning and morality are important to many scientists. Areas of mutual interest clearly exist in practice.

As Dr Ames and Dr Camilleri suggested, it is easy to find conflict between a “new atheist” biologist and a fundamentalist proponent of “Intelligent Design” because they propose competing answers to the same questions. Similarly, attempts to create a scientific ethics (e.g. Sam Harris) often cause conflict by providing answers to previously religious (or philosophical) questions.

But overlap does not always mean tension. The most interesting examples of interaction between science and religion are those in which each mode of inquiry seeks to lend context to the other.

For example, neuroscience has provided fascinating insight into the brain’s activity during “religious experiences” that religious believers have found to illuminate God’s interaction with the human person. Conversely, theology aims to provide a richer understanding of the Anthropic Principle - the scientific unlikeliness of our particular universe – which is interestingly contextualised and perhaps explained by the existence of a supernatural creator. Thus, investigation into the natural world can provide an interesting and revealing context for thinking about God, and vice versa.

Of course, the existence and possibility of this dialogue does not mean that all scientists should find theology scientifically illuminating, or that religious believers should find science theologically illuminating. Dialogue does not necessitate agreement.

But it is easy to mistake this disagreement for a conflict between science and religion. Rather, these are debates between opposing philosophies (naturalistic and theistic) and their interpretations of science. It is fallacious to assume that science only produces one metaphysical worldview. Science rests upon a number of assumptions about natural laws, the intelligibility of the universe and the norms of inquiry, which can be plausibly explained by a supernatural worldview, perhaps even better than a naturalistic philosophy.

Dialogue between science and religion is essential, if only because exposure to new kinds of knowledge and alternative philosophical viewpoints inspires humility in both inquiries as they search for truth.

there are various levels of faith. I believe my patient has cancer because the biopsy shows that result. The evidence is conclusive. I can believe the patient has cancer because I suspect it is so, but only by doing the definitive test will my faith be confirmed. Thus we are already using faith in two different ways - one is belief because I suspect it to be the case, the other belief because I have evidence to show that it is. When I tell the patient the news I try to do it in such a way that the patient will have faith in our team that we will continue to support her as best we can on their journey to the end. She hopefully will put her trust in us that she will get the best curative or palliative treatment we can provide. She in turn may resort to all sorts of quackery to try for cures or she may trust us that we will not embark on futile treatments....In the new field of onco-psychiatry and palliative psychiatry clinicians then seek to help the patient to draw on her spiritual resources (personal and communal) to help her make sense of what us happening and to live a quality life for the rest of her days.

You can see there is also an element of trust involved in the sort interpersonal faith in each other.

Christians believe the Christian story because we think it makes the most sense of the way in which the world coheres, but we also are called on to trust God when things seem to be contrary to our sense of a trustworthy God. Hebrews 11, that great paean to the heroes of faith, eulogizes those who persisted in faith despite not being vindicated. They continued to trust in God's goodness and faithfulness in spite of the tough situation they faced. Such persistence is praised. The best analogy from the philosophical literature is continuing to trust a double agent in the war years even though he appears to be collaborating with the occupying regime.

Why then do we trust God? Because of the long tradition of divine faithfulness through the ages. We trust the witnesses who were there during the seminal events of the faith, and we continue to trust within the community of faith. We are also aware of shadows of doubt, of the fact that we do not have the whole truth, and that sometimes we can find our faith tested. We are not dogmatically certain for we recognize that there is a lot we do not know or have clear. But we also believe we have encountered the Higher Power and that we can speak to Him and that he is with us on our journey towards knowing more, trusting more and risking more...

I’d like to make a brief comment about each of the “five challenges to religion from science”. I think all are misplaced, so I’ll provoke discussion with my reasons why.

#1. “According to the natural sciences the universe operates according to blind natural processes, which reproduce the appearances of design and demand no reference to any purpose”; it would be more precise to say that “because the natural sciences do not deal in ultimate origins (notwithstanding Prof. Krauss’s ‘universe from nothing’ play on words), science does not need to concern itself with ‘non-natural’ mechanisms or entities. But it is only scientism that does not recognise the difference between this ‘methodological naturalism’ and a naturalistic worldview. More at #5.

#2. The “problem of evil” is profound; IMHO definitely the ‘hard problem of theism’. But let’s be fair; it also a thorn in the atheist’s flesh. An example: the same prominent atheist who rails against the evils of religion also said that we live in a pitiless universe where there is ultimately no good or evil. (Yes: Prof. Dawkins.)

#3. Faith as “belief in the face of contradictory evidence” is a caricatured straw person, which makes a mockery of serious-minded religiously convinced scientists through history. Fundamentalism (atheist and religious) may evidence blind belief, but that is not typical of sincere seekers for truth who accept, (e.g.) anthropogenic climate change or intrinsic human dignity or the resurrection of Jesus Christ, because in their best (evidence-based) judgement, they believe such things to be true. But ‘evidence’ is a many splendoured thing; evidence for black holes or for Nero’s intentions or for moral norms are three very different sorts of animals.

#4. It is true to say that “the Bible ... is outdated for anyone with a scientific view of the world”, but only if ... Only if one imposes that scientific view on Genesis and expects it to answer the questions we put to it (how many days did God take ...) and to do so in a manner of 21st century science. Is Macbeth outdated, talking as it does of kings and queens and of treachery, and war without lasers and night vision glasses? Does The Chronicles of Narnia have no truth to tell because it is pure fantasy? Rule #1 with interpreting any text is to think first about its original setting, genre, author(s) etc. and only then to ask questions about what it means to people reading it centuries later. No writer of Genesis ever dreamed of big bangs, Turing machines (do see “The Imitation Game”), or answering the questions we might put to them. Fundamentalists (on both sides) are to blame for pushing those poor dead authors into such anachronistic positions.

#5. Anyone who makes the claim that “the only way to find out about the world is to use the methods and standards used in the natural sciences ...” seems to commit a fallacy. In saying that only science tells us about ‘the world’ they either mean by ‘the world’ all that science can tell us about, in which case they are tied in tautology; or they mean by ‘the world’ everything there is to know, in which case they are caught in ‘performative contradiction’ because they have made a philosophical, ‘extra-scientific’ statement. Ultimately science depends on certain foundational beliefs that science itself cannot show to be true.

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion. I find the science-religion framing of the question a bit narrow, so want to open it out a little. First, in framing their opening foray, Stephen Ames and Kristian Camilleri, mention the problem of “natural” evil as characteristic of the problematic science poses for religion. While the question remains, and pertains to such issues as whether “predation” in certain carnivore and omnivore species is an evil or simply “natural”, i.e. part of who or what they are, the idea of “natural evil” in relation to such as tsumanis, hurricanes, floods, what have come to be understood as “extreme weather events”, cannot fully be separated from human action in this era of the Anthropocene, where humans as a species have themselves become agents of climactic and indeed geological change. This is not to separate humans from nature, but to understand that the old notion of “acts of God” that became “natural disasters” (somewhere around the Enlightenment) may also now involve a degree (not precisely calculable) of human agency. Second, beside the question of “natural evil” I want to sit a word that Ames and Camilleri have not used and that is beauty, perhaps also wonder, though the latter is implied in their words. Beauty and wonder are qualities that for many link science and religion; contemporary scientific cosmologies and ancient biblical accounts of creation. The documentaries of such as David Attenborough suggest, for example, if not precisely a religious, then a quasi-religious, attentiveness and veneration of the processes of evolutionary, planetary and cosmic unfolding, despite and perhaps also because of the tragic exigencies of predation, and events such as cyclones, and the reality of creaturely finitude.

Briefly, I would also point to the multiplicities of knowledge or “knowledges” that surround and may helpfully inform a debate framed in terms of two areas of human exploration and understanding, namely science and religion. I point to two. Firstly, Indigenous cultural knowledges about ecosystems and climate are often not constructed either as science or scientific, but will likely bring different nuances to the question of science and religion than the ones being addressed here. Secondly, poetry offers a way of engaging science and religion differently and potentially in ways that challenge or reframe tensions between the two. Even though the discourses differ, all three use metaphor to convey meaning.

I would like to say something also about matter, faith and the issue of climate change and a popular kind of anti-science relegation of scientific theory to the category “opinion”, but have passed my initial 500 words, so will write more in another post.

I hesitate to enter such a fraught philosophical area as the problem of evil - or even natural evil, but having listened as a clinician to a lot of people trying to make sense of their suffering, and seeking to provide some care for them in their addictions I realise how little both our 'answers' are and how unsatisfactory the standard syllogism is (that if God is all good and God is all powerful there would be no evil, but there is evil therefore either God is not all good or God is not all powerful or that there is no such thing as God).
I have no answers but I follow the man some would say was the one good man in the world. He only lasted three years before the religious establishment turned on him and put him to death. He almost expected it, in fact in some ways his outspokenness brought it on, as if he exposed most deeply the evil within religious humans. Furthermore he told his followers to expect similar, for a servant is not greater than his master, a grain of wheat need to fall into the ground and die to bring forth fruit. And his followers did - they confronted evil in all sorts of ways and died, not to enjoy paradise with 70 virgins, and not by killing others but by living good lives and caring for the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised the rejected. Of course subsequently his followers codified his teaching and became part of an establishment which in turn put away its victims.... and so the cycle continues, but there is a mystery here in Christ's call to suffer quite at odds with the comfortable life we are tempted to follow. But when we follow his life, we too get the courage to face evil embodied within the human structures.

I'm sorry I'm late to this debate, but I would like to make the following claim: religion has always deferred to science, since science was done. This is not necessarily the claim that all religion defers to all science, nor that all science conflicts with religious beliefs. However, as movements of thought, religion has always tended over relatively short periods of time to effectively adapt to the best science of the day.

I don't therefore mean that faith is subordinate to reason in religious traditions; in fact it seems to me that since the beginnings of the modern era, faith and reason have tended to become more independent of each other, but apparent dogmatic theology aside, as in the Reformation, religious thinkers have traditionally been the most educated intellectuals of their day, and have moved to accept science within the most liberal constraints of their theological traditions. Taking just the Catholic theological tradition, spherical earth, heliocentrism, post-Galenic medicine, developmental theories in biology, and of course evolution have all been accepted and even promoted by the theologically educated within a generation or two of it becoming accepted in the scientific community, and often within the same period in which scientific communities themselves have adopted new theories in their domain.

Whether that goes to the philosophical question of whether faith and reason complete each other, as the Thomist would have it, or whether they are simply disconnected, as the liberal Christian or existentialist theologians would have it, history is pretty unanimous about this. And the reason is fairly obvious - dogma is malleable over time and adapts to the social "ecology" of current knowledge. An example is the doctrine of transubstantiation: it relied upon a physics of Aristotelian substance/form - the accident or species of the host remains the same (as do all its "physical" properties, but the substance is changed at consecration to the literal body and blood of Christ. Daltonian, and later, chemistry and physics undercut this severely, leading to a shift in interpretation of "substance" from being an actual physical substance to a metaphysical one, around 1900. By a simple trick, science was taken to not conflict with the "eternal" dogma of the Church. Similar moves were made by the Church in the case of heliocentrism (the literal words were taken after to be allegorical or simply ordinary language expressions) and evolution (the soul moved from being an explanation of emotion, psychology and agency to being something more metaphysical and less explanatory of observed facts).

Once science began to make empirical progress, faith was subordinated to reason in matters of reason, and marked out its territory in areas that were (to date) empirically inoculated from disproof. And that process is continuing today. This is not Gould's "nonoverlapping magisteria" so much as a strategic reframing of doctrine. Where science is prized, similar things occur in other religions, which are not always uniform (witness Hindu rejections of the age of the earth as too young, or Mormon rejections of genetic evidence that native Americans are not closely related to lost Jewish tribes) but which occur over time. In the long view, religion ceds ground to science.