ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a model for understanding the relations among the sciences, both natural and social, and for relating the sciences to both theology and ethics. Theology and Social Theory argues that the presuppositions of modern social sciences are inherently theological. Immanuel Kant distinguished not only two subject matters—science and ethics— but also two reasoning faculties—pure reason and practical reason. In addition, Alasdair MacIntyre argues, such theories of human flourishing can only be fully understood insofar as we know how they have been or could be socially embodied, so the social sciences are the descriptive side of a coin whose reverse, normative, side is ethics. A more thorough-going argument for the inescapability of ethics in social science comes from recognition that the very methods of social-scientific research involve ethical judgments. Recall the branching hierarchy of the sciences, with the natural sciences completed in one branch, the human sciences comprising the other.
