The Territories of Human Reason

Alister McGrath is Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford and an important voice in the science and religion field, with a background in both molecular biophysics and Christian theology. An indication of the distance travelled over the last 40 years can be gleaned from critiques of Sir JG Frazer with his monumental The Golden Bough dating from 1890 depicting religion as a primitive form of science and cosmology 'offering explanations of the world which are refuted by modern science' and which compete for the same conceptual space (p. 12). Frazer was also writing at a time when the conflict thesis had been strongly put forward by JW Draper and AD White. This position is still maintained by contemporary new atheists while anthropology and sociology of science have moved on considerably. It is no longer permissible to use epithets such as primitive and savage that were common a hundred years ago and that presupposed the absolute superiority of the Western scientific worldview. Not is it tenable to insist on a single universal rationality based on Enlightenment thinking. As McGrath points out, there has been an evolution towards 'a plurality of cultural and domain-specific methodologies and rationalities (p. 2) resulting in a radical epistemological pluralism. Later he refers to intellectual colonisation and the need for epistemological decolonisation, a process already underway in universities.

The limits of science in relation to values and meaning were already noted by John Dewey. Science and religion constitute culturally and socially constructed 'organising myths' that shape our interpretation of the world. Debate takes place within respective epistemic communities, while the ontological unity of nature does not necessitate a single valid research method. The first part of the book explores these multiple rationalities, also across disciplinary boundaries and considering social aspects embodied in epistemic communities. Given that we are physically embodied as well as culturally embedded, we need to recognise that our cognition also has a psychological and affective component, so that what we consider reasonable falls within the context of the metanarrative we accept. McGrath is well aware of the danger of uncritically accepted presuppositions and argues that enlightenment rationality has been transmuted from the category of culturally contingent to intellectually necessary, an illegitimate epistemological or rather ideological move. Interestingly, he points out that Newton did not use a single rational methodology in his scientific and theological studies, but rather a series of different working assumptions.

There is a very good section on the background of scientism, pointing out that it makes second-order philosophical claims about science and also drawing on the arguments of Mary Midgley and Roy Bhaskar. McGrath argues that science and theology are distinct perspectives on and levels of reality. He then goes on to contend that the 'given' for science is the world of nature, and 'in the case of theological science, it is God's self-revelation in Christ.' (p. 68) It seems to me that the status of the term 'given' is very different in these two cases - obvious in terms of nature, but in terms of 'the narrative of Jesus Christ' the basis in the Gospels is already a cultural and theological construction. McGrath says as much himself (p. 99) that Christianity is an interpretation of the identity and significance of Jesus of Nazareth, set out in the New Testament, later adding that 'Christian theology is an extended reflection on essentially empirical data' (p. 208) - again, the sense of empirical is much wider in the theological context. However, it is true to say that there is an implicit metaphysic both within empirical science and Christian theology. Prior commitments will play a decisive role in acceptance of these positions.

A wider issue is the sense-making capacity of religion in general and Christianity in particular. McGrath quotes criteria put forward by William Wainwright for good metaphysical theories: they must be logically consistent, coherent and simple. From this angle, Christianity is a way of seeing things, a metanarrative, as also maintained by Tolkien and CS Lewis in discussing rational explanation science and religion. McGrath considers the meaning of explanation and the role of causality and unification in this respect, distinguishing between ontic and epistemic levels. This leads on to a discussion of religious explanation looking at the Christian vision of reality as a whole. Here McGrath quotes Keith Yandell: 'a religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions and practices. (p. 138) From this point of view, sense-making is the key criterion, but this is necessarily subjective and one can see the circularity in Quine's argument that the only valid test of a belief is whether our experience fits into an overall interconnected web of beliefs. Lewis is very explicit in this respect when he says that he sees everything through a Christian lens. McGrath goes on to point out that such self0evidencing and self-referential explanations are also found in cosmology.

The last two chapters discuss the limits of rationality in science and religion in the light of complexity and mystery, and the notion of rational consilience. McGrath formulates his approach to mystery in terms of the limits of the human mind, including in science the notion of dark matter but also criticising the 'exclusive sufficiency' and promissory materialism of scientism with its contention that everything will ultimately be explained in these terms. Drawing on Gabriel Marcel, McGrath proposes that mystery is 'something we cannot view objectively, precisely because we cannot separate ourselves from it' (p. 192) – hence Marcel's remark that life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. For me, this is most succinctly expressed in the work of Meister Eckhart.

EO Wilson's notion of consilience is well known as an attempt to unify knowledge within a single framework, but this privileges the Enlightenment view generally and science in particular - a form of intellectual colonisation and hegemony already questioned earlier in the book but recently affirmed in a new book by Steven Pinker. McGrath proposes instead 'webs of disciplinary interconnection and cross-fertilisation' thus avoiding privileging specific disciplines and approaches. Here he uses Whewell's term 'colligation' in constructing a big picture 'capable of accommodating and interconnecting multiple notions of insights, drawn from across intellectual disciplines, distinguished by their operative rationalities (p. 211). This seems a much more hospitable and less imperialistic approach that can respect a plurality of perspectives, reminding one of systems theory – not in fact mentioned here. This suggests the need for wisdom beyond knowledge and an appreciation of 'coherence-making and meaning-generating properties' eliciting complementarity. Overall, the book is a rigorous delineation of the territories of human reason and a useful discussion of multiple nationalities in scientific and theological terms - even if not all readers will be able to accept McGrath's theological arguments.