Is Holistic Justification Enough?

We find ourselves admiring, and even agreeing with, much of what is said by our colleagues in their contributions to Round I of this discussion. Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell in their paper, and Nancey Murphy in hers, do a fine job of locating numerous analogies and points of intersection between science and theology. As Gerhart and Russell point out, science constrains religious belief in the sense of establishing “what [it is] possible for human beings to believe in the light of what natural science has learned is highly probable about the world.” ¹ Also, they are certainly right that there is a continuum in the rigor of testability as one moves from mathematics through the natural sciences to theology: strict deduction, formal validity, and conclusive falsification characterize mathematical reasoning, whereas empirical testing, explicit predictions, and (at least partial) verification represent the distinctive strengths of natural scientific reasoning. By contrast, theological reasoning begins with “the lived experiences of human-being” ² ; its starting point is not (in the first place) empirical data but texts, symbols, and practices; and it must remain sensitive to the “world of meanings” of particular religious traditions. We disagree that theologians must as a result “forego” empirical truths, ³ if by this Gerhart and Russell mean that there are and can be no direct evidential or entailment relations between science and theology. Still, the methodological commonalities between the two fields, argued in recent works on Lakatos’s philosophy of science, must not be allowed to obscure the distinctive features of testing in the case of theology. ⁴