272 Roberts
Some scientifi c naturalists have claimed that science can account for
religion itself. The biologist Edward O. Wilson not only acknowledged
that religious impulses had conferred evolutionary advantage on human
beings but predicted that those feelings would remain powerful into the
foreseeable future. He also suggested, however, that “theology is not likely
to survive as an independent intellectual discipline.”^41
In recent years most participants in the contemporary science- and-
religion dialogue have resisted efforts to compartmentalize science and
theology. Some of those thinkers have invoked the work of philosophers,
sociologists, and historians of science who have challenged the notion
that science provides an objective understanding of nature or possesses a
privileged means of generating natural knowledge to deny sharp epistemic
distinctions between theology and science. For example, Nancey Murphy,
a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, has
drawn on the postmodernist claim that science, like other cultural en-
deavors, never fully escapes from the social context of its birth and hence
in important ways remains local and time- bound, as well as the work of
the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, to collapse the longstanding epis-
temological divide between science and theology. Contending that both
enterprises engage in “research programs” that employ “canons of prob-
able reasoning” and that “the purpose of theology, like that of science,
broadly speaking, is knowledge,” Murphy has concluded that “theology
is methodologically indistinguishable from the sciences.” This has led her
to endorse “theology’s scientifi c status.”^42
Other participants in the contemporary science- and- religion dia-
logue cite scientifi c knowledge in support of theological claims. Many
of the sponsors of this project have backgrounds in scientifi c investiga-
tion. John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and Fellow of the Royal So-
ciety who surrendered his chair at the University of Cambridge to enter
the Anglican priesthood (and subsequently became a highly respected
fi gure in science- and- religion circles), refuses to treat science and theol-
ogy in terms of a simple “dichotomy.” It is more reasonable, suggests
the knighted physicist priest, to affi rm their interaction, with “theology
explaining the source of the rational order and structure which science
both assumes and confi rms in its investigation of the world; [and] science
by its study of creation setting conditions of consonance which must be
satisfi ed by any account of the Creator and his activity.” Restricting re-
ligion to the realm of human values strikes Polkinghorne as “narrowly
parochial.” Thus he and other interactionist activists of the “new natural
theology” look for reasons for belief in God lying outside that realm. The