Van Huyssteen J.W. (editor) Encyclopedia of Science and Religion

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will, but whose misuse of their powers nonetheless

falls within the range of possibilities provided for

in God’s creative purposes. There are various ac-

counts of how this creaturely freedom to act

against God’s will is nonetheless embraced within

God’s will, so that God’s good purposes remain

sovereign in fixing the destiny of creation. In the

sixteenth century, Luis de Molina (1535–1600) and

his followers developed the view that God’s om-

niscience includes knowledge of what every possi-

ble free creature would choose to do under every

conceivable circumstance. On this account, God is

able to take the free actions of creatures into ac-

count in the plan of creation, building in responses

that assure the final achievement of the good that

God intends. Even if divine omniscience does not

include this peculiar type of foreknowledge, some

modern thinkers have suggested that God, like a

master chess player, is always in a position to in-

corporate the finite agent’s actions into the process

of realizing God’s purposes. If God’s providential

governance of history involves this type of respon-

sive action, however, then theologians must grap-

ple with questions about how God’s special acts

engage and affect the ongoing course of events in

the world.

See also DETERMINISM; DIVINE ACTION; OMNISCIENCE;

PECIAL DIVINE ACTION; SPECIAL PROVIDENCE

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae (1266–1273), Ia,

QQ. 22–23, 103–105, ed. Timothy McDermott. Lon-

don: Blackfriars, 1964.

Augustine. The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R.

W. Dyson. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 1998.

Burrell, David. Freedom and Creation in Three Tradi-

tions. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1993.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion

(1535–1559), ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville, Ky.:

Westminster John Knox Press, 1960.

Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics (1935), Vol. 3, Pt. 3: Doc-

trine of Creation, the Creator, His Creature, eds. G.

W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrence. Edinburgh, UK:

T&T Clark, 1977.

Flint, Thomas. Divine Providence: The Molinist Account.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith

(1830–1831), Vols. 1 and 2, trans. H. R. Mackintosh.

Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 2001.

Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology.

London: Blackwell, 1988.

THOMAS F. TRACY

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is a broad-ranging discipline con-

cerned with human mind and emotion, experience

and behavior, and personality development and

disorder. It goes back at least to the pre-Socratics

of ancient Greece, and has always been a central

topic in philosophy. It has also been a concern of

many religious thinkers, perhaps especially in the

Christian and Buddhist traditions. However, psy-

chology as a distinct autonomous discipline only

goes back to the nineteenth century.

After considering the implications for theology

of the emergence of psychology as a distinct disci-

pline, three different strands in the relationship be-

tween psychology and religion will be examined.

First there are theological issues raised by the ap-

proach to human nature found within general psy-

chology. Second, there is the investigation of reli-

gion using the methods and theories of psychology.

Finally, there is the possibility of a psychological

contribution to a broad range of topics in theology.

Psychology as science

Modern psychology is self-consciously scientific. It

accepted the natural sciences as representing the

paradigm of rational inquiry and has sought to

mould itself in their image. That has often led to

giving priority to mechanistic and materialistic ap-

proaches, and to experimental method and repeat-

able observations.

One key problem for psychology has been de-

ciding what to use as its data. Much psychology is

based on self-report data, which includes people

reporting their own thought processes and experi-

ences, describing their attitudes or behavior, or

completing questionnaires about themselves.

Questionnaire research has become the stock

methodology of much psychology; it is an easy

method to use and has probably been overused.

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Other self-report data, such as the clinical data col-

lected by Sigmund Freud (1856–1958), may be

rich, but there are serious questions about its de-

pendability. One problem with self-report data is

that many people are not reliable observers of

themselves; the other is that people may not

choose to report accurately what they know.

Psychology has also made much use of ob-

servable behavior and performance, including ob-

servations of how people perform cognitive tasks

and how they interact with other people. There

was a period in the early twentieth century when

psychology imagined that it could base itself en-

tirely on the observation of behavior, and abandon

any attempt to study the human mind. However,

behaviorism, in its strict form, did not last, and

mind was readmitted under the heading of cogni-

tion. It proved impossible to study even condition-

ing in rats without inferring mental processes such

as expectations. Also, psychologists became in-

creasingly sophisticated in the use of task per-

formance to infer cognitive processes. In this more

emancipated climate, self-report data was re-ad-

mitted, but used cautiously.

The scientific movement out of which modern

psychology arose was explicitly secular in that it

deliberately avoided making any religious assump-

tions. The relation of modern secular psychology

to the more explicitly religious psychological re-

flection that preceded it is a complex matter. Some

would emphasize the parallelism between the two.

Even though psychology appears to be secular, it

can be argued that it is much indebted to its reli-

gious past and has often recycled theological ideas

in apparently secular form. For example, it has

been argued that the concept of original sin lies

just below the surface of Freud’s avowedly secular

psychology.

In contrast, John Milbank has robustly argued

that modern social theory, because it is avowedly

secular and has no place for God, should be re-

garded as antitheological and inconsistent with

Christian thought. The same might also be said

about modern psychology. Against that, however,

it could be argued that psychology has become re-

ligiously neutral and atheological, capable of being

combined either with religious or secular world-

views. The model of science that guided modern

psychology in the nineteenth century would now

be widely regarded as over-restrictive. However,

psychology has gradually become broader, more

pluralistic, and more flexible ideologically (i.e.,

more postmodern).

Psychological approaches to human nature

Psychology contains general assumptions about

human nature, and a key issue that arises at the in-

terface of psychology and theology is how com-

patible are their respective views of human nature.

Given the breadth of psychology as a discipline, it

is not surprising that it contains a variety of such

models, ranging from the biological to the social.

Psychology makes use of the radically different

methodologies of the social and biological sciences

within the same discipline. Not surprisingly, that

means that psychology tends to fragment, but it is

important that there should be a discipline that

tries to hold together these different approaches to

the human person. People are both biological and

social creatures, and no discipline that ignored one

or the other could hope to understand human na-

ture adequately.

There is a tendency for psychology to empha-

size the biological aspects of human nature and for

theology to emphasize the social and relational as-

pects. However, a polarized debate should be

avoided. An adequate psychology needs to be so-

cial as well as biological. Equally, there is no rea-

son why theology should be reticent about the bi-

ological aspects of human nature. It is part of the

Judeo-Christian tradition, especially in the Old Tes-

tament, that human beings come from the “dust”

and have much in common with the “beasts.”

There has been a growing recognition that both

theology and psychology in their different ways

emphasize the psychosomatic unity of human na-

ture. Theology and psychology both need to hold

together the biological and the social aspects of

human nature, and could learn from each other’s

attempts to do so.

One strand of biological psychology seeks to

understand human characteristics in terms of their

evolutionary origins. There were precursors of this

in the sociobiology of Edward O. Wilson (b. 1929),

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), and others; their ap-

proach has now been extended into evolutionary

psychology. A key issue for theology is how

strongly reductionist a form evolutionary psychol-

ogy takes. There is no theological objection to ex-

ploring the evolutionary origins of particular

human abilities and characteristics, and this has

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been fruitful in many areas, such as linguistic abil-

ity. Problems only arise when it is suggested that

the evolutionary approach can explain everything,

or that human characteristics are nothing more

than the products of their evolutionary origins. For-

tunately, cautious research-based approaches to

evolutionary psychology are available.

The other important strand of biological psy-

chology is concerned with the brain. Research in

neuropsychology has been especially fruitful and

has demonstrated close links between cognitive

functions and brain activity. The key issue for the-

ology is how this information should be inter-

preted, which is essentially a philosophical prob-

lem. There have been suggestions that the mind

and brain are identical, or that mind is an epiphe-

nomenon of the physical brain of no real signifi-

cance. However, there is no need for psychology

to take the kind of strong reductionist approach

represented by the biologist Francis Crick (b.

1916), who in 1994 described people as “nothing

but a pack of neurons” (p. 3).

Strong forms of social constructionism can be

equally reductionist. Human concepts are, of

course, the product of particular cultures, and in

some respects they are contingent and could be

conceptualized otherwise. Further, concepts are

psychologically influential, and human experience

and behavior is much influenced by how people

conceptualize their world. However, there is no

need for this to be linked to a nonrealist claim that

there is no reality to what concepts represent be-

yond cultural conventions, or that social constructs

completely determine social behavior.

A final area of psychology that carries strong

assumptions about human nature is the computer

modeling of human intelligence. The analogy be-

tween computers and the human mind has been

fruitful scientifically and has given cognitive psy-

chology much of its current rigor. However, the in-

dications are that human beings and computers

function in such different ways that the analogy

between them should not be pressed too far. There

is no warrant for asserting that all human functions

can be captured in computer form, or that the

human mind is nothing but a computer program.

Psychology of religion

The psychology of religion was an active area of

psychology in the early days of the discipline and,

after a period of decline, has regained some of its

former vigor. To realize its potential, it needs to

maintain close links with general psychology and

apply the most promising advances; generate a

broad theoretical approach to religion and relate

data to clear research hypotheses; use a range of

different methodologies and not rely too much on

questionnaire data; and explore the practical ap-

plications of psychology for religious life.

The issues about reductionism that arise in

general psychology recur in the psychology of re-

ligion and can be illustrated in connection with re-

ligious experience. There is growing interest in the

brain processes involved in religious experience.

An example is the research of Eugene d’Aquili and

Andrew Newberg, who have analyzed the holistic

and causal elements of some types of religious ex-

perience and tried to identify their neural sub-

strates. However, whatever progress is made in dis-

covering how the brain is involved in religious

experience, there is no reason to conclude that be-

cause the brain is involved religious experience

has nothing to do with God.

There has also been much interest in the social

constructionist approach to religious experience.

How people conceptualize experience in religious

terms is clearly influenced by the various faith tra-

ditions, and may explain the different emphases in

religious experiences within different faith tradi-

tions, despite the common elements that can also

be found. Some have suggested that reports of re-

ligious experience are entirely the product of such

cultural learning, but there is no basis for asserting

that religious experience is nothing more than

learning to use a particular set of constructs.

Broad-brush social constuctionism is being re-

placed by sophisticated theory and research on the

specific cognitive processes involved in religious

modes of understanding.

When particular examples of religious experi-

ences are studied, it becomes particularly clear that

it is valuable to combine a variety of psychological

approaches. This can be illustrated in relation to

glossolalia (speaking in tongues), the best investi-

gated of the charismatic phenomena. There is evi-

dence for an element of social learning, in that

people benefit from seeing other people speak in

tongues, and get better at it with practice. How-

ever, the dissociation of semantics from speech

production that occurs in glossolalia suggests an

unusual mode of cognitive functioning for which

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there must be a neurological substrate. There is no

incompatibility between approaches from social

psychology and from cognitive neuroscience, nor

is either of them incompatible with a religious ac-

count of the role of the Holy Spirit in glossolalia.

There is currently a growing interest in the

evolutionary approach to religion, though as yet it

is largely speculative. The capacity for religious

experience may well be related to the distinctive

capacity for self-consciousness of human beings. It

can also be seen as having advantages in natural

selection terms through the promotion of social co-

hesion, moral behavior, mental health, and so on.

This is supported by the fact that there is growing

evidence that religion is positively associated with

good personal adjustment.

The link between religion and personal adjust-

ment becomes clearer if religious people are sub-

divided, for example into those for whom religion

is intrinsic or central to their lives (who have good

mental health) and those for whom it is extrinsic or

serves other goals (who have poor mental health).

Though it is always difficult to move with confi-

dence from correlations to casual conclusions, the

mechanisms by which religion might promote

good adjustment are becoming clear and include

the therapeutic value of religious practices and the

support provided by the religious community.

Though religious experience illustrates the

breadth of the psychological approach needed in

studying religion, it is important to remember the

multifaceted nature of religion. There is an equally

fruitful psychology of religious beliefs and obser-

vances. Psychology has often found it fruitful to

study how people differ from one another, and

how they develop and change. Both have been

central to the psychology of religion.

Psychology and theology

Finally, there can be psychological contributions to

theology, although these have not been very fully

explored as of 2002. For example, the story of the

“fall” in Genesis and the doctrine of original sin in-

vite psychological elucidation. Though the story of

the “fall” is widely taken by theologians as making

an ontological point about human sinfulness, it can

equally well be taken as indicating, in narrative

form, the gradual evolutionary development of self-

conscious cognitive discrimination, represented by

the “knowledge of good and evil.” This would be,

in a sense, a fall upwards, but it would imply a new

capacity to do wrong deliberately, that is, to sin. In

addition, emerging self-consciousness would lead

to a new awareness of human limitations and falli-

bility, which would permit human awareness of

sinfulness and of separation from God.

Eschatology invites elucidation in terms of the

psychology of hope. Though there has been much

interest in the relation between cosmological pre-

dictions and theological eschatology, it would be a

misreading of eschatology to see it as solely con-

cerned with such objective predictions. Eschatol-

ogy is concerned with a good future that is a gift of

God, not just with survival of the universe, and

also with an attitude of hope in the present, not

just with predictions about the future. Psychology

can help to elucidate the nature of eschatological

hope. It seems to be not just a matter of optimism

(making positive predictions about the future), but

a hopeful attitude that can be sustained even when

there is little basis for optimism.

There are many theological topics that can be

complemented by a psychological approach that

does not compete with or displace the theological

one. For example, a theology of grace can be com-

plemented by a psychological account of how the

benefits of grace work themselves out at a human

level. Similarly, a theology of prayer can be com-

plemented by a psychological account of how the

activity of prayer helps to transform those who

participate in it. The act of thanksgiving, for exam-

ple, involves a reappraisal, both of the evaluation

of experiences as positive or negative, and of the

role of God in causal attributions.

See also ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE; BEHAVIORISM;

VOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY; EXPERIENCE,

ELIGIOUS:COGNITIVE AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL

ASPECTS; FREUD, SIGMUND; MIND-BRAIN

INTERACTION; NEUROPHYSIOLOGY;

EUROSCIENCES; PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION; SELF

Bibliography

Brown, Warren S.; Murphy, Nancey; and Malony, H. New-

ton, eds. Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific

and Theological Portraits of Human Nature. Min-

neapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1998.

Crick, Francis H. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scien-

tific Search for the Soul. London: Simon and Schus-

ter, 1994.

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D’Aquili, Eugene, and Newberg, Andrew B. The Mystical

Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience.

Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1999.

Hefner, Philip. The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and

Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1993.

Hood, Ralph W.; Spilka, Bernard; Hunsberger, Bruce; and

Gorsuch, Richard. The Psychology of Religion: An Em-

pirical Approach. 2nd edition. New York: Guilford

Press, 1996.

Jeeves, Malcolm A. Human Nature at the Millennium: Re-

flections on the Integration of Psychology and Chris-

tianity. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1997.

Meissner, William W. Life and Faith: Psychological Per-

spectives on Religious Experience. Washington, D.C.:

Georgetown University Press, 1987.

Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secu-

lar Reason. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.

Spilka, Bernard, and McIntosh, Daniel N., eds. The Psy-

chology of Religion: Theoretical Approaches. Boulder,

Colo.: Westview Press, 1997.

Watts, Fraser; Nye, Rebecca; and Savage, Sara. Psychology

for Christian Ministry. London: Routledge, 2001.

Watts, Fraser. Theology and Psychology. Aldershot, UK:

Ashgate, 2002.

FRASER WATTS

PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

From the perspective of science and religion, there

exist three kinds of psychology of religion. “Secu-

lar” empirical psychology (e.g., Hood) – the most

widely practiced – excludes the question of the

transcendent and researches religious experiences

and behavior in terms of meaningful psychological

concepts such as cognition, emotion, motivation,

attribution, social interaction, and development.

The two other kinds are more mission-oriented.

“Theistic” religious psychology (e.g., Koteskey; cf.

Reich) includes the transcendent and aims to un-

derstand God’s creation and make people more

God-like by improving their mental functioning,

their moral judgment, their empathy and so forth.

“Atheistic” psychology of religion (e.g. Kurtz; Vetter)

aims primarily to demonstrate the illusion of a per-

ceived transcendent and the regressive and op-

pressive effects of being religious.

See also FREUD, SIGMUND; PSYCHOLOGY; SELF

Bibliography

Hood, Ralph W., Jr.; Spilka, Bernard; Hunsberger, Bruce;

and Gorsuch, Richard L., eds. The Psychology of Reli-

gion. An Empirical Approach. New York: Guilford,

1996.

Koteskey, Ronald L. Psychology from a Christian Perspec-

tive. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002.

Kurtz, Paul. The Transcendental Temptation: A Critique of

Religion and the Paranormal. Buffalo, N.Y.:

Prometheus Books, 1991.

Reich, K. Helmut. “Scientist vs. Believer?: On Navigating

Between the Scilla of Scientific Norms and the

Charybdis of Personal Experience.” Journal of Psy-

chology and Theology 28, no. 3 (200): 190-200.

Vetter, George B. Magic and Religion: Their Psychological

Nature, Origin, and Function. New York: Philosophi-

cal Library, 1958.

Wulff, David M. Psychology of Religion: Classic and Con-

temporary. New York: Wiley, 1997.

K. HELMUT REICH

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

An addition to the neo-Darwinian theory of evolu-

tion proposed by paleontologists Stephen Jay

Gould and Niles Eldredge in 1972, punctuated

equilibrium is intended to explain the lack of inter-

mediate steps in fossil records. Gould and Eldredge

propose that biological species do not evolve grad-

ually (as in gradualism) but exist in a state of stable

equilibrium (stasis) with no or very slow evolution

followed by a burst of fast evolution that quickly,

by geological timescale, results in the formation of

new species. Gould and Eldredge also suggest that

not all evolutionary changes are adapted (as in

adaptationism) and that some evolution occurs at

the level of species. Punctuated equilibrium is

sometimes confused with saltationism, evolution

by sudden large changes due to macromutations.

See also CATASTROPHISM; EVOLUTION; GRADUALISM

ARN O. GYLDENHOLM

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QUANTUM COSMOLOGIES

Quantum cosmological theories attempt to extend

Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitation to include

quantum theory. There have been many attempts

to carry out this extension of Einstein’s work and

as yet there is no single satisfactory theory. A quan-

tum cosmology is needed in order to draw conclu-

sions about the nature of the initial state of the

universe and to interpret the meaning of the idea

that it might have quantum-mechanically tunneled

out of “nothing,” or some version of the quantum

vacuum. A quantum cosmological theory is ex-

pected to be a particular application of a full the-

ory of quantum gravity (sometimes referred to as a

“theory of everything”) that would unite and ex-

tend all existing theories of the forces of nature.

The favored candidate for such a theory at present

is M-theory, a version of the theory formally

known as superstring theory. Theories of this sort

are highly constrained by mathematical require-

ments of symmetry and finiteness, as well as by the

requirement of explaining all known elementary

particle physics. Quantum cosmologies lead natu-

rally to the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quan-

tum mechanics.

See also COSMOLOGY, PHYSICAL ASPECTS; GRAND

UNIFIED THEORY; SUPERSTRINGS

Bibliography

Smolin, Lee. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. London:

Weidenfield, 2001.

JOHN D. BARROW

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY

Quantum field theory is obtained by combining

special relativity and quantum mechanics. Until

1981 this was the primary tool for the understand-

ing of elementary particles of matter and the non-

gravitational forces of matter. However, such theo-

ries were known to possess deficiencies and many

calculations of observable quantities led, formally,

to infinite answers. Yet, by the application of well

defined rules these infinities could be removed to

leave finite answers that agree with observation to

as many as fourteen decimal places of precision. It

was then discovered that these deficiencies could

be avoided by replacing their theories of pointlike

particles by string theories that treated the most

fundamental entities in nature as lines or loops of

energy (strings) possessing a certain symmetry

(supersymmetry).

String theories avoid the infinities and para-

doxes of quantum field theories and are a promis-

ing candidate for a complete theory of all elemen-

tary particles and forces of nature. The stringlike

loops of energy in these theories possess a tension

that increases as the temperature of the environ-

ment falls. Thus at very high temperatures, for ex-

ample in the first moments of the expansion of the

universe, they would have behaved in an intrinsi-

cally stringy manner. As the universe expanded

and cooled, the string tensions would increase and

the loops of string would behave more and more

like single points of mass and energy. As a result,

in the low temperature world all the predictions of

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the earlier quantum field theories are expected to

be obtained, in agreement with experiment.

See also PHYSICS, QUANTUM; FIELD THEORIES; STRING

THEORY

Bibliography

Barrow, John. Theories of Everything. London: Vintage,

1992.

Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Norton,

1999.

JOHN D. BARROW

QUANTUM MECHANICS

See PHYSICS, QUANTUM

QUANTUM PHYSICS

See PHYSICS, QUANTUM

QUANTUM THEORY

See PHYSICS, QUANTUM

QUANTUM VACUUM STAT E

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows for

the rapid creation and annihilation of particles

even in a vacuum, which is by definition the state

of lowest possible energy. Careful experimentation

has confirmed that this picture of the vacuum as a

sea of virtual particles is accurate. For example, it

explains the so-called Casimir force between two

metal or dialectric plates and the so-called Van de

Waal’s force in chemistry. This conception of the

vacuum is significant for philosophical and reli-

gious cosmologies in at least three ways. First, the

concept of the quantum vacuum suggests a picture

of a primeval chaos of virtual particles being tamed

and ordered by conservation laws—the opposite

of the classical picture in which a quiescent, per-

fectly well-ordered state lies beneath the chaos of

matter and energy, with implications for the idea of

creation in western religious traditions. Second,

Daoist interpretations of reality as emergent from

an inexpressible state of highly structured dy-

namism seem resonant with the idea of the quan-

tum vacuum. Third, Buddhist ideas of dependent

coarising from emptiness seem amenable to inter-

pretation in terms of the quantum vacuum state.

Each of these possibilities, and others besides,

needs thorough study.

See also HEISENBERG’S UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

NIU SHI-WEI

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REALISM

Realism is the doctrine that existence is separate

from conceptions of it. People may think and talk

of different entities, but the entities themselves

have a reality that is logically independent of

thought and language. This may seem a matter of

common sense; surely chairs and tables do not

exist only in so far as one thinks of them, or per-

haps perceives them. People do not conjure things

into existence through their minds, in the way that

dreams create a world that vanishes when one

wakes up. Yet to appeal to common sense is to ap-

peal to the philosophical views of previous gener-

ations that have gained common currency. The po-

sition itself needs some philosophical justification.

Dr. Samuel Johnson is supposed to have dealt with

Bishop George Berkeley’s idealism by simply kick-

ing a stone and exclaiming “I refute it thus!”: This

is hardly an argument.

Contention with idealism

Realism is in fact most often opposed to idealism.

The latter claims that all reality is a construction

out of mental processes. As Berkeley (1685–1753)

said in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of

Human Knowledge, “To be is to be perceived.” In

other words, what exists does so because it is per-

ceived, and is not perceived because it exists. The

latter would be the realist position. Yet Berkeley’s

position not only makes all reality mental, it also

restricts what can exist to what is within the range

of someone perceiving it. Berkeley met this by

appealing to the omniscience of God, so that

everything is perceived by God, and therefore ex-

ists. The danger is that God is removed from the

picture; this is a move empiricism tends to encour-

age. The view then becomes one that ties reality to

actual or possible human experience. This, in turn,

makes reality anthropocentric. What humans can-

not perceive cannot exist. Since contemporary

physics wishes to deal with subatomic particles

and other unobservable entities, such as, say, the

interior of a black hole, this does not seem to give

an adequate account of the assumptions of

present-day science.

Although realism may be classically opposed

to idealist tying of existence to mind, realism

comes in many shapes and sizes. It can be a

global, metaphysical doctrine, or it can be limited

to particular areas of human activity. One could be

a realist about the objects of scientific investigation,

but not about the concerns of morality. The main

point of realism, though, is always to pull apart the

fact of existence from issues concerning how any-

one can know what exists. Ontology and episte-

mology should not be confused. (So-called critical

realism tends to link the two). The metaphysical

realist will stress the objectivity of the “world” or

whatever exists. It cannot depend in any way on

the way people think about it or discover it. Even

scientific realism may seem realist in its insistence

on the independent reality of the objects of sci-

ence. It can, however, become antirealist when it

asserts that only the objects of science can exist. In

other words, existence is then restricted to what

lies within the scope of actual or conceivable sci-

ence. Because that must be human science, reality

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is being artificially restricted to what is within the

scope of human capabilities to discover.

Ontological bases of science and religion

The focus of realism must always be reality, and

not issues of how one can come to know reality.

Otherwise questions about existence become

changed into questions about human abilities.

What lies beyond human abilities cannot even be

conceived to exist. A major motive for scientific re-

search is the knowledge of human ignorance. The

world is not limited to present knowledge, nor to

what people are able to discover. This becomes of

crucial importance in the field of religion, which is

normally understood as attempting to talk of what

is transcendent, or ontologically separate, from the

world with which people are normally familiar.

Empiricist philosophy from the time of David

Hume (1711–1776) has attempted to restrict lan-

guage to what is within human experience. This is

always to change the subject from reality to human

knowledge. Yet realism cannot rest content with

metaphysical assertions about the status of reality.

A reality to which people are oblivious is no better

than nothing at all. Ontology needs epistemology:

It is just not identical to it.

Both science and religion need a strong realist

underpinning. They must be about something. Sci-

ence has to assume that it is investigating a world

that has an independent existence. Otherwise it is

a mere social construction reflecting the conditions

of particular societies at a particular time. Similarly,

any religion must assume that it is concerned with

a reality that is not the creation of human imagina-

tion. Theism must have a realist outlook. It is mak-

ing claims about an objective reality that are con-

tradicted by atheism, itself also a realist view.

Indeed, if God or other spiritual realities are mere

projections of human thought or language, religion

is guilty of a massive bout of wishful thinking. If

the realities described do not actually exist, there is

no ground for any cosmic optimism. The antireal-

ist may complain that this is already assuming a re-

alist interpretation of religion. Yet, the idea that

neither religion nor science engage with anything

beyond themselves seems to negate their most im-

portant function of claiming truth. If they are con-

ceived of as conceptual schemes, practices, or

forms of life, with no external justification, there

seems no point in taking part in them. There can

be no justification or reason for being religious, or

doing science.

According to realist understanding, however,

there is an independent world for both science

and religion to relate to. Moreover, each purports

in various ways to describe parts of the same ob-

jective world. This in itself provides sufficient

ground for trying to show connections between

the two. Whatever their distinctive methods, one

can not rule out either the possibility of conflict or

of mutual support. For example, if this is God’s

world, this might give an explanation for the in-

herent order and regularity, which science needs

to assume, in order to generalise from particular

findings.