ABSTRACT

The meaning and use of the terms “religion” and “science” are contested and contentious, as the other chapters in this section of the Companion amply demonstrate. This chapter focuses on the challenges and opportunities that shifts within late modern philosophy of science and the study of religion have created for contemporary Christian theology, by altering the conceptual and pragmatic playing field within which interdisciplinary engagement can occur. These shifts also have broader intellectual and social implications because the Christian religion no longer plays the same political and cultural role that it once did in the West. I begin by pointing briefly to the complex relation between the Christian religion

and the emergence of early modern science, which is an important first step toward understanding our current context. Second, I trace some key developments in late modern philosophy of science that have contributed to the renewal of positive and concrete interaction between scientific and theological disciplines. The third part describes Ian Barbour’s influential taxonomy of ways of relating religion and science, and some of the responses to it by philosophers and theologians in the Christian tradition. I conclude by suggesting that Christian theologians in the “science and religion” field ought to complement their interaction with the sciences with a more rigorous engagement with developments in the study of religion (or religions), especially the increased interest in attending to otherness and difference.