On the Border Between Science and Theology

Is where everything happens.

Marcelo Gleiser has written eloquently about what he calls the Island of Knowledge. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cosmos-quantum-and-consciousness-is-science-doomed-to-leave-some-questions-unanswered/  for an account of where he is coming from. Gleiser’s image of an island of knowledge that is always expanding raises the question of just what is the ocean into which it expands. What is that other part of reality into which knowledge expands, but which can never be fully known? 

Actually theologians and philosophers have a name for that other part of reality. It is called transcendence, that which is beyond the kind of human knowledge that science generates. The island that is known through science is then called immanence. 

Transcendence is the particular domain of reality that theology claims to explore with its particular ways of knowing. Those ways of knowing vary according to the culture in which theology takes its specific forms, as do the characterizations of transcendence. 

But regardless of these cultural (usually identified as religious) variations all theologies have this in common: Just as transcendence is the name of the space into which the scientific island of knowledge grows, immanence is the name of the space into which the theological island of knowledge grows. Indeed it has nowhere else to go. 

Whether a religion bases it’s understanding of transcendence on philosophical speculation or revelation, that understanding assumes and lives on the boundary between human knowing that belongs to the domain of immanence and the transcendent that it claims to know. And every expansion of its knowledge of the transcendent stretches the immanent capacity to know and pushes into the immanent domain of acting on that knowledge. 

So science and theology share a common boundary at which all increases in knowledge are possible, and that is the boundary between transcendence and immanence. And on the boundary are found all those currently contested issues about what it means to be human, since it is humans and humans alone who straddle that boundary with their personhood. 

This leaves us with two possibilities for understanding how science and theology interact. One is that there is an ever growing shared body of knowledge - what on a Venn diagram would represent the overlap between the expansion of science into transcendence and the expansion of theology into immanence. Thus, for example, as scientists push the boundaries of knowing into realms that directly affect our understanding of what it means to be human in relation with both other creatures and one another there is a clear overlap with theological reflection on the same relationships, but understood out of meditation on what is known through revelation or philosophical reflection. 

And each may, and should inform the other. The scientists' own boundary indicates the importance of transcendence to human self-understanding. Specifically to be human is to relate to transcendence out of the quest of knowledge. The theologian’s own boundary indicates the importance of immanence to human self-understanding because to be a knowing human is to be rooted in the immanent domain, more specifically to be a creature that grasps the immanent domain with its senses and seeks to extend the language of immanence into describing the transcendent. 

Yet there is a more intriguing possibility for shared knowledge. Rather than imaging relatively smooth overlapping boundaries between the knowledge of immanence and the knowledge of transcendence we might see them sharing a fractal boundary whose expansion can go on forever sharing only a boundary and never a domain. Transcendence and immanence always touch, but the one never crosses over into the other.

Rather than finding a shared domain, theologians and scientists will find new dimensions of their common boundary. 

And this is why scientists and theologians have much to discuss with each other. They are not only exploring a common boundary. At a macro level they have overlapping concerns related to what it means to be human on the boundary with transcendence in relation to society and the larger natural world. There is plenty about which to dialogue. But it will always be a dialogue at the border of their respective ways of knowing, lest either be deprived of having a voice at all.