Louisville Process Theology Network

The Root of Science and Theology

Apr 09, 2009

From Page 309 of ?“The Scientist As Rebel?” by Freeman Dyson.



?“It is a curious accident of history that Christian religion became heavily involved with theology. No other religion finds it necessary to formulate elaborately precise statements about the abstract relationships of gods and humans. There is nothing analogous to theology in Judaism or in Islam. I do not know much about Hinduism and Buddhism, but my Asian friends tell me that these religions also have no theology.

They have beliefs and stories and ceremonies and rules of behavior, but their literature is poetic rather than analytical. The idea that God may be approached and understood through intellectual analysis is uniquely Christian.

The prominence of theology in the Christian world has had two important consequences for the history of science. On the one hand, Western science grew out of Christian theology. It is probably not an accident that modern science grew explosively in Christian Europe and left the rest of the world behind.

A thousand years of theological disputes nurtured the habit of analytical thinking that could also be applied to the analysis of natural phenomena. On the other hand, the close historical relations between theology and science have caused conflicts between science and Christianity that do not exist between science and other religions.

It is more difficult for a modern scientist to be a serious Christian, like (John) Polkinghorne, than to be a serous Muslim, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Abdus Salam. Salam happily proclaimed his Muslim faith but did not feel any need to write books about it. For Salam, the idea of conflict between his faith and science was ludicrous.

Muslim faith has nothing to do with science. But Polkinghorne writes books to prove to himself and to us that his theology and his science can live together harmoniously. For him the possibility of conflict is real, because his theology and his science came from the same root.

The common root of modern science and Christian theology was Greek philosophy. The historical accident that caused the Christian theology to become heavily theological was the fact that Jesus was born in the eastern part of the Roman Empire at a time when the prevailing culture was profoundly Greek.?”