Protecting God from Science and Technology: How Religious Criticisms of Biotechnologies Backfire

Many religious critics argue that biotechnology (such as cloning and genetic engineering) intrudes on God's domain, or plays God, or revolts against God. While some of these criticisms are standard complaints about human hubris, I argue that some of the recent criticism represents a "Promethean" concern, in which believers unreflectively seem to fear that science and technology are actually replicating or stealing God's special deity–defining powers. These criticisms backfire theologically, because they diminish God, portraying God as an anthropomorphic superbeing whose relevance and special nature are increasingly rivaled by human power.     

God and Evolutionary Evil: Theodicy in the Light of Darwinism

Pain, suffering, death, and extinction have been intrinsic to the process of evolution by natural selection. This leads to a real problem of evolutionary theodicy, little addressed up to now in Christian theologies of creation. The problem has ontological, teleological, and soteriological aspects. The recent literature contains efforts to dismiss, disregard, or reframe the problem. The radical proposal that God has no long–term goals for creation, but merely keeps company with its unfolding, is one way forward. An alternative strategy to tackle the problem of evolutionary theodicy is outlined, with an implication for environmental ethics and suggestions for further work.     

Science and Religion: Getting Ready for the Future

I explore three challenges for the current dialogue between science and religion: the challenges from hermeneutics, feminisms, and postmodernisms. Hermeneutics, defined as the practice and theory of interpretation and understanding, not only deals with questions of interpreting texts and data but also examines the role and use of language in religion and in science, but it should not stop there. Results of the post‐Kuhnian discussion are used to exemplify a wider range of hermeneutical issues, such as the ideological potential of scientific concepts, the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, and the significance of the socioeconomic situatedness of science and religion. Feminist research analyzes the consequences of the interplay of masculine, feminine, and gender typologies in religion and science. Examples from the history of science as well as current scientific conceptualizations indicate that beliefs in the inferiority of woman form part of our inherited scientific, religious, and metaphysical framework. It is argued that postmodernism in its most constructive form shares the best fruits of modernity, especially of the Enlightenment, while avoiding some of its most serious mistakes. In conclusion, reflecting on the three publics engaged in the dialogue between science and religion—academe, religious communities, and societies—I offer constructive suggestions and critical observations concerning the future of this dialogue.     

Religion, Science, and Evolution: Paul Tillich's Fourth Way

Abstract. In his book God After Darwin John Haught provides a useful categorization of theological approaches to evolution: some theologians actively oppose Darwinian evolution, another group maintains that science and religion have nothing to say to one another, and a third seeks to engage evolution. Haught wishes to pursue the third way. But many theological attempts to talk about divine action in the world, including divine involvement in the process of evolution, run afoul of the scientific principle of the conservation of matter‐energy. Haught's reliance on the now‐familiar notion that information can have causal efficacy does not in fact escape this difficulty. I suggest a fourth approach, represented by a constructive reading of Paul Tillich's theology. The central argument is that Tillich offers a way of taking Darwinian evolution up into one's ultimate concern without claiming that God has any causal relation to evolution. God provides no historical telos for evolution, but rather a “depth teleology” that springs from the manner in which God, as the depth of the structure of finite being, is the object of Christian faith.     

Yeshayahu Leibowitz's Axiology

This essay explicates and assesses Yeshayahu Leibowitz's axiology, and its relation to the value he claims halakhic (Jewish legal) practice instantiates: service of God. It argues that, while Leibowitz often affirms a relativist “polytheism of values,” he sometimes implies that the religious value is the “most valuable value.” However, this is not due to its material content, because serving God is objectively best; rather it is because, consonant with his negative theology, it most fully instantiates the formal properties of a value. The essay concludes by assessing the tenability of Leibowitz's metaethics as well as the argument for positing this contentless value as an intention and reason for halakhic practice.     

THE THEOLOGICAL ETHICS OF HERBERT McCABE, OP: A REVIEW ESSAY

Herbert Mc Cabe, OP (d. 2001), was a significant theological figure in England in the last century. A scholar of Aquinas, he was also influenced by Wittgenstein and Marx, his reading of whom helped him articulate a distinctive Thomistic account of human embodiment that serves as a critique of other dominant approaches in ethics. This article shows McCabe's contribution to moral theology by placing his work in conversation with other important approaches, namely, situation ethics, proportionalism, and the New Natural Law Theory.     

Getting it Right

In addition to noting significant differences of interpretation between me and Kristopher Norris on understanding classic just war thought and judging its importance, this Comment flags errors of fact and faulty logic in the Norris essay.     

IS A MESSIANIC POLITICAL ETHIC POSSIBLE? Recent Work by and about John Howard Yoder

In his landmark monograph, The Politics of Jesus, John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially Preface to Theology, in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and The Jewish‐Christian Schism Revisited, Yoder's proposal for a renewed Jewish–Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics.     

BEFORE THE ORIGINAL POSITION: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls

This paper examines a remarkable document that has escaped critical attention within the vast literature on John Rawls, religion, and liberalism: Rawls's undergraduate thesis, “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community” (1942). The thesis shows the extent to which a once regnant version of Protestant theology has retreated into seminaries and divinity schools where it now also meets resistance. Ironically, the young Rawls rejected social contract liberalism for reasons that anticipate many of the claims later made against him by secular and religious critics. The thesis and Rawls's late unpublished remarks on religion and World War II offer a new dimension to his intellectual biography. They show the significance of his humanist response to the moral impossibility of political theology. Moreover, they also reveal a kind of Rawlsian piety marginalized by contemporary debates over religion and liberalism.