Toward a Covenant Theology of Science

This paper is born out of many years of thinking about the issues relating science and theology. I started out as an undergraduate, pondering such questions as those regarding the nature of physical law and the puzzle of why mathematics works in describing nature. Over the years of reflection, I have come to believe that if Christians are to take their faith seriously into the realm of science, then a thorough re-examining of the relation between theology and science is warranted. In particular, as we learn from the philosophy of science and from the Dutch Reformed tradition that we cannot avoid our presuppositions when theorizing about science, for Christians it becomes all the more obvious that whatever lies at the foundation of faith commitments for any scientist cannot be avoided. Thus we must ask the pro-active question: just how does our faith give a foundation for our own way of understanding science? This paper is an attempt to address that question from the perspective of the Reformed tradition. My task is of course a highly integrative effort, combining ideas from science with those from philosophy, theology and history. As a physicist without formal training in these other disciplines, I fully expect that my story is incomplete; I expect that there are important sources I have missed while writing this paper which would provide an even fuller picture. On the other hand, integration by its very nature should be viewed as a community effort, so I welcome comments and suggestions which might serve to add to the story and provide us all with a richer and fuller view of God’s good gift of creation to us, and our interaction with it. Finally I would like to stress that the journey I have taken in writing this paper has been more haphazard than I might have liked. This is partly the consequence of trying to cover a broad subject, which entails weaving together several smaller topics each of which could warrant whole papers or books in themselves. I could have perhaps limited the scope, but I decided rather to attempt to present a broad perspective of my present framework for approaching the sciences. Without the broad framework, I believe that the interpretation of any individual part would suffer. My paper then is an attempt to sketch out in a general way the contours of a ‘theology of science’ philosophically, theologically and historically and then to flesh out its implications for our understanding of the laws of nature. Other topics could have been examined in the light of the broader framework, but I think that would go far beyond what can be handled in one paper. I begin my paper with an introduction to the idea of a ‘theology of science’ in the first section; this is then placed in the broader context of current scholarly discussion about the relation of science and religion in the second section of the paper. In the third section, I present some arguments from theology for my main thesis that an understanding of the role of God’s covenant with creation is needed to better understand what would go into a theology of science. This is followed in the fourth section by a historical survey of past views of nature and its relation to the Deity. This historical investigation has led me to appreciate more fully the ecumenicity of Christian scholarship; God works through individuals throughout history to increase the collective understanding of his church, especially in areas which might be considered tangent to theology proper such as the theology of science. The fifth section then focuses more specifically on the consideration of the laws of nature by working out some of the implications of the theological positions proposed in the previous sections. In this discussion I also consider the nature of mathematics because it is a crucial part of an understanding of scientific law. Hopefully it illustrates some of the points I am trying to make about our conception of natural law. I close the paper with some comments concerning our attitude toward creation.