Introduction

Since the dawn of modernity, “the relationship between the physical sciences and the religious dimension of life has radically altered,” as noted by Michael Buckley (1998, 31). Buckley outlines four significantly different relationships that have shaped the interaction between science (in the modern sense) and theology: subsumption, separation or isolation, alienation, and correlation. By subsumption, Buckley refers to the early modern tendency of theologians to turn to the natural sciences to secure warrants for their fundamental assertions about God, first rendering the sciences functionally subservient to theology, then creating the possibility for the denial of God as an unnecessary hypothesis (Buckley 1987, 2004). Subsequently, theology and science became increasingly isolated and methodologically indifferent to one another (separation). With the advent of the nineteenth-century evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, this separation escalated into alienation and conflict, though the extent of this conflict was often exaggerated and overstated. Surprisingly, Buckley observes, the twentieth century saw the emergence of a new trend: correlating science and theology, which encompasses multiple possibilities.

This new trend is indicated by the leading voices in contemporary theology and science engagement. For example, consider the last two of Ian Barbour’s (2000, 7–38) widely recognized four models of interaction between science and theology—conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration. Some later developments, such as Elizabeth Johnson’s (2014, 11–12) work, introduce a fifth model that highlights another aspect of correlating the two fields: practical cooperation.1

However, these widely known “taxonomies” do not seem entirely satisfying. Most importantly, they fail to sufficiently account for what might be called new forms of “subsumption” (to use Buckley’s term) of one field by the other. Such subsumption appears to work in two directions: the subsumption of theology by science and the subsumption of science by theology.2 The former (what I call a “theology from science” approach) seems to repeat the early modern mistake of seeking the warrant for theology’s proper claims in science. The latter (what I call a “theology above science” approach) entails reverting to premodern models of engagement, reclaiming theology as the “queen of sciences.” As we will see in greater detail later, this latter move aligns with the interests of radical orthodoxy (Tyson 2022).

This article seeks to explore and confront the newly emerging risks of subsumption. If we are to move beyond the conflict between theology and science—whether real or perceived—what viable paths lie ahead? In particular, what sustains the “and” that enables their genuine engagement, and what causes this conjunction to shift into something else, such as “or,” “from,” or “above”? This article shows that answering such questions requires making explicit the latent philosophical commitments that are de facto operative in the interaction between theology and science. The approach taken here builds on Bernard J. F. Lonergan’s philosophy of self-appropriation. Drawing on Lonergan’s generalized empirical method, I contend that the possibility of genuine engagement between theology and science lies in the dynamic unity of consciousness—a unity that remains a unity-in-distinction, thus preserving the relative autonomy of each field.

My argument proceeds in two parts. First, I frame the problem by examining several contemporary accounts of the theology–science relationship, resulting in a typology of three untenable alternatives. In the second part, I discuss a fourth, more promising alternative, what I call a “theology and science” approach, clarifying its philosophical foundations through the lens of Lonergan’s work. While my focus here is primarily on theology’s engagement with the natural sciences—arguably the epicenter of the alienation between theology and science—I believe that, mutatis mutandis, this reflection is also applicable to theology’s engagement with other disciplines.

Part One: Clarifying the Problem

What Buckley termed “correlation” between theology and science is multifaceted, and I propose that some of its dimensions still need to be made more explicit—a primary goal of this first part. As the title of this article suggests, the three untenable alternatives for a viable engagement between theology and science can be summarized as the “theology or science,” “theology from science,” and “theology above science” approaches.

Theology or Science

The “theology or science” approach hermeneutically seals theology off from science. This approach is relevant for our purposes for two reasons: first, it is often marked less by an active stance than by a tacit lack of mutual engagement from both sides—a dynamic that needs to be made explicit. Second, it affirms the distinction between theology and science, which results in a limited but still significant overlap with the objectives of this study. However, as we will briefly see, contrary to the desideratum endorsed here, the “theology or science” approach readily transforms distinction into separation.

No doubt, very few contemporary theologians would actively oppose theology’s engagement with science or advocate for the nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) thesis, which calls for respectful noninterference between religion and science (e.g., see Gould 1999, 4–6). This is especially true for Roman Catholic theologians whose vision is shaped by ecclesial commitments. The post-Vatican II magisterial documents have consistently advocated for theology’s interdisciplinary engagement. For example, John Paul II’s often-cited 1988 letter to George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, affirms: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”

More recently, Pope Francis’s (2023, §3; translation mine) apostolic letter motu proprio, Ad theologiam promovendam, underscores that “a synodal, missionary and ‘outgoing’ Church can only be matched by an ‘outgoing’ theology.” This letter urges theology “not to close itself up in self-referentiality, which leads to isolation and insignificance, but to grasp itself as embedded in a web of relationships, first and foremost with other disciplines and other knowledge” (Francis 2023, §3). Following Veritatis Gaudium (Francis 2017), Pope Francis envisions a theology that is not merely interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary but, above all, cross-disciplinary:

[The approach endorsed here] is of cross-disciplinarity, that is, interdisciplinarity in a strong sense, as distinct from multidisciplinarity, understood as interdisciplinarity in a weak sense. The latter certainly fosters a better understanding of the object of study by considering it from multiple points of view, which nevertheless remain complementary and separate. Instead, cross-disciplinarity should be thought of as “situating and stimulating all disciplines against the backdrop of the Light and Life offered by the Wisdom streaming from God’s Revelation.” (Apostolic Constitution Veritatis Gaudium, Proem, 4c) (Francis 2023, §5)

This magisterial incentive notwithstanding, one cannot help but wonder to what extent theologians are actually equipped for this task. As Buckley (1998, 35) puts it, rather bluntly, “how many members of the Catholic Theological Society of America or of Catholic Theology Departments have anything that could qualify as scientific literacy?” Apparently, without such literacy, verbal endorsements of engagement may amount to little more than a de facto endorsement of the “theology or science” approach.

As Buckley (1998, 35) reminds us, without engaging other disciplines, “theology loses [its] vitality.” When theologians overlook challenging scientific questions—whether due to scientific naïveté or personal preference—they risk missing an opportunity to, as Lonergan puts it, rise to “the level of our own time” (Crowe 2017, 3–4). For example, can a theologian today truly discuss death as a punishment for sin without considering how this aligns with current understandings of biological evolution? Can contemporary theological discussions of suffering, sin, and human complicity in them be adequately addressed without reference to social and human sciences?

At the same time, as I explore in greater detail later, proponents of the “theology or science” approach are right to maintain the distinction between the two fields. In the words of John Paul II (1988), “[b]y encouraging openness between the Church and the scientific communities, we are not envisioning a disciplinary unity between theology and science like that which exists within a given scientific field or within theology proper.”

Barbour’s (2000, 17) discussion of the “independence” model of engagement between religion and science explicitly clarifies the specifics of this distinction: the two fields are “distinguished according to the questions they ask, the domains to which they refer, and the methods they employ.” The independence approach also rightly acknowledges that “each mode of inquiry is selective and has its limitations” (Barbour 2000, 17). However, when the distinction implied in the relative autonomy of the two fields turns into separation, with each field asserting absolute autonomy, it results in an unacceptable compartmentalization of natural and supernatural knowledge. Distinction turned into separation yields the zero-sum fallacy of “either nature or God,” thus foreclosing the possibility of genuine cross-disciplinarity.

Michael Hanby (2013, 1–37) argues that such a separation is symptomatic of modern naturalism, which takes science to be the first truth discourse—a recurring theme within radical orthodoxy, explored further in the later section on Paul Tyson’s work. Hanby locates the root of the problem in what he terms an “extrinsicist” understanding of the relation between science, metaphysics, and theology, one that ignores the tacit metaphysical and theological assumptions constitutive of science as knowledge of the parts within the whole order of being. Were these assumptions made explicit, they would at least raise the question of the ontological ground of being. However, extrinsicism is willfully ignorant of ontology or sound theology. By casting science as an alternative to metaphysics and theology, it “incoherently makes God into a finite object … regarding divine and natural agency as mutually exclusive alternatives in the order of being,” and thereby rendering science and theology mutually exclusive forms of explanation in the order of knowledge (Hanby 2013, 34).

The foregoing brings us back to my original question: How do we bridge the divide between science and theology? The next two sections examine what happens when this question is answered by the de facto revival of either the early modern or medieval models of “subsumption.” Let us begin by considering the risk of subordinating theology to science.

Theology from Science

What might be called the “theology from science” approach risks reshaping theological commitments to fit the confines of empiricist and reductionist epistemologies. While proponents of this approach may claim to integrate science and theology, in practice, they risk subordinating theology to science as the primary authority on knowledge.

As Buckley’s analysis of the modern origins of atheism shows, this move has a precedent. According to Buckley, the early modern Christian apologists’ fascination with the arguments from design eventually led to the denial of the very thing they were trying to protect: the existence of God. Buckley (1987, 67) observes: “In the absence of a rich and comprehensive Christology and a Pneumatology of religious experience, Christianity entered into the defense of the existence of the Christian God without appeal to anything Christian.” The apologists’ bracketing of what was uniquely religious in theology (e.g., scripture and liturgy), and their reliance on the physics of the time to “prove” God’s existence, was as good as acknowledging that, in Charles Taylor’s (2007, 226) words, “religion must retreat before reason.” Theism that sought to prove God’s existence from Isaac Newton’s universal mechanics—explaining all of reality save the ultimate cause in terms of natural reasons—ultimately negated itself. Turning the apologists’ argumentative strategy on its head, the intellectuals with atheistic inclinations soon replaced Newton’s nonmechanical First Cause, God, with the notion of dynamic matter. Once science had filled in enough gaps, the “God of gaps” was no longer needed (Buckley 2004, 30–36).

The contemporary forms of subordinating theology to science differ from the early modern deist arguments from design both in content and in their fundamental theological commitments. For instance, they no longer support an impersonal model of the God–world interaction but rather a relational one. Similarly, they are concerned not with proving God’s existence but with —in accord with theology’s “turn to history”—proving the credibility of God’s compassion.

To provide an example of this new subordination of theology to science, consider the twentieth-century transmutations of the theological notion of kenosis. Isolated from its biblical Christological context, kenosis is often reinterpreted to reject classical theism in favor of process thought and panentheistic metaphysics of creation. This trend can be illustrated by the apparently uncritical application of the term kenosis—which the Bible reserves for speaking of the mystery of the Word Incarnate—to the inner life of the Trinity and the doctrine of creation.3 This seems to reflect a subtle epistemological reductionism, as an empirical view of a dynamic and changing world is attributed to God in se. This trend is made fully explicit in process theology’s concept of the “dipolar God.”4 Process theology posits divine dipolarity as a kenotic act, where the Creator enters into a relationship with creation by acquiring a temporal aspect within God’s own being (e.g., Clayton 2015). The “God of classical attributes” is rejected, with even divine omniscience no longer deemed acceptable. As John Polkinghorne (2008, 68) observes: “The idea [of a dipolar God] seems to imply a kenosis of divine omniscience, resulting in God’s possession of a current omniscience (knowing all that is now knowable) rather than an absolute omniscience (knowing all that will ever be knowable).” Rather defensively, he adds, “It would not be a divine imperfection not to know the future, if the future is not yet there to be known” (Polkinghorne 2008, 68).

Although such a perspective may hold pastoral appeal, it raises fundamental questions: What becomes of a God who is perpetually in the process of becoming? Is a suffering Trinity genuinely good news for a suffering world? If all of God’s creative acts are inherently kenotic, what then is the significance of Christ’s historical incarnation in Palestine? Though engaging, such questions fall outside the scope of the present discussion. They highlight the confusion, rather than clarity, that often arises when theology is epistemologically subsumed by science.

Similarly, though less conspicuously than in process theology, the risk of deriving theology from science (as mediated by natural empiricism) can be discerned in the various new forms of panentheism, such as Philip Clayton’s (2015) “open kenotic panentheism,” Ilia Delio’s (2013, 79) “christification” of the cosmos, and John Haught’s (2005a, 16–17) “evolutionary descent of God,” which allows speaking of “God’s kenotic relationship to the entirety of nature” and “God’s own suffering.”5 To be sure, panentheism is far from a homogenous phenomenon. Thus, Haught (2005b, 68) might be right that “in many instances [panentheism] is a completely orthodox theological position.” In itself, its intention to find a middle ground between classical theism and pantheism manifests a laudable effort to integrate the shift in scientific paradigm with the Christian theological commitment to God’s transcendence-in-immanence (Brierley 2004, 3).

However, as Niels Gregersen (2004, 20) notes, all forms of panentheism still “share the intuition of a living two-way relation between God and world, within the inclusive reality of God.”6 If this is true, the question remains whether one can metaphysically differentiate between pantheism (“all God”) and panentheism (“all in God”). We still need to ask, following Janet Soskice’s (2018, 50) insight, whether any version of panentheism allows a theistic affirmation that “[t]he world is entirely dependent on God, but God is not dependent on the world.” Furthermore, as Celia Deane-Drummond (2009, 40) notes with respect to Teilhard de Chardin’s apparent panentheism—a source of inspiration for both Delio and Haught—his understanding of the cosmic Christ “seems to rest on metaphysical theory and cosmology rather than the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin.” However, contemporary versions of panentheism do not seem equally equipped to incorporate adequate metaphysics, insofar as they subscribe to ontological monism and, in Deane-Drummond’s (2004, 233) words, fail to affirm “the radical particularity of Christ as the revelation of God expressed in the mystery of the incarnation.”7

The foregoing reflection is not intended to dismiss the need to critique any elements within classical theism that may support “dominologies” (Keller 2003). However, when it comes to offering an equally intellectually coherent alternative to classical theism, it will not suffice to fall back on process theology or dismiss metaphysics altogether. At the very least, an adequate critique should carefully examine its own potential for error—particularly the tendency to mistake divine impassibility as a psychological rather than ontological category. Even more importantly for the purposes of this article, it must interrogate its own epistemic commitments.

Theology above Science

Paul Tyson’s recent book, A Christian Theology of Science: Reimagining a Theological Vision of Natural Knowledge, brings the epistemological commitments involved in the theology and science dialogue to the forefront, arguing that the contemporary culture accords science the status of the “first truth discourse” (Tyson 2022, 7). Theology, lacking the properties of an empirical science, then finds itself looking up to science for guidance and approval—even when it comes to its properly theological claims. Similarly to other representatives of the radical orthodoxy perspective on science and theology (e.g., Cunningham 2010; Hanby 2013), Tyson is rightly worried about the dangers this poses.

As both Tyson and Conor Cunningham remind us, when science is uncritically enthroned as the measure of all things, tacitly accepting the hegemony of reductive ontological naturalism, both theists and atheists are worse off. Crucially, they both overlook that science develops; therefore, grounding their arguments about God on this or that new scientific discovery alone is like building a house on sand. In Cunningham’s witty idiom, “the theology that marries the science of today will be the widow of tomorrow,” and, mutatis mutandis, the same holds for militant atheism of the sort promulgated by Richard Dawkins (Cunningham 2010, 266). Tyson (2022, 73), for his part, is especially concerned with theology’s fate: by capitulating to reductive naturalism, he contends, “Christian theology largely produced its own demise.”

Tyson’s “theology of science” provides valuable diagnostic insights. Unfortunately, the book effectively exemplifies what I call the “theology above science” approach—an instance of ordering not theology to science (as discussed in the previous section) but science to theology. Tyson (2022, 3) advocates for a theological framework that “incorporates science into itself and purports to be in a position to stand, in some sense, above science and to explore the validity of the warrants of scientific truth that science itself must simply assume.” This effort to unify science and theology by subordinating science to theology as the primary truth discourse, within which the meaning of natural knowledge is to be interpreted, yields a new kind of subsumption that denies a relative autonomy of science.

Though Tyson’s solution is ultimately dissatisfying, his diagnosis is quite insightful. He rightly laments the compartmentalization of knowledge into smaller and more controllable silos, suggesting that “specialization and domain limitation” give “our aspirations to know and control reality a semblance of plausibility” but complicate the integration of knowledge (Tyson 2022, 1). The unity of truth has been discarded as a vestige of an outdated worldview, and now competing epistemic commitments drive a wedge between natural and supernatural knowledge. The result, Tyson (e.g., 2022, 31) argues, is a “remarkable reversal”—the nineteenth-century shift from Christian theology as the public first truth discourse to modern science. Tyson (2022, 2) observes: “In our present times, the functionally materialist knowledge categories of science act as the dominant first truth discourse of Western modernity’s overarching framework of academic meaning … [T]he reductively naturalist first truth discourse of our academy tacitly disciplines whatever is on the other side of science (say, religion) to be commensurate with its own functionally materialist first truth commitments.”

Tyson argues that this reversal has turned the relationship between the two interpretive commitments upside down. While premoderns engaged in a theology-to-science dialogue, interpreting the natural world within a theological framework aimed at understanding higher meaning and value, post-Victorians unreflectively subscribe to a science-to-theology interpretive framework.8 As a result, modern science now feels entitled to pass judgment on the true meaning of Christian theology. Because modern science is reductively physicalist, religious beliefs are often deemed backward, mythical, or outright delusional and thus relegated to the private sphere. The major problem, Tyson (2022, 32–33) argues, is epistemological: the shift from a theocentric ontological foundationalism that trusts God as the ultimate source of being and knowing to an egocentric epistemological foundationalism that grounds reasoned understanding in the individual knower. Moreover, this “remarkable reversal” remains unacknowledged, as participants are blind to their own latent metaphysical and epistemological commitments (see Tyson 2022, 132, 143).

Instead of attempting to relate the various silos through a range of “interdisciplinary knowledge adventures, usually defined by the conjunction and,” Tyson (2022, 98) advocates for theology to reclaim its place as the queen of sciences by reviving “a religion-to-science interpretative outlook on natural knowledge.” He unapologetically favors the radical orthodoxy approach to the relationship between theology and science, as evidenced both by his penchant for rhetorical inflation9 and his call for theologians to leave the secular academy behind to establish uncontaminated centers of Christian learning (Tyson 2022, 127, 170–76). Even more disappointingly, Tyson’s (2022, 1) otherwise commendable search for a framework that “enables us to organize disparate types of knowledge into a single framework of meaning”—which aligns with his radical criticism of secular culture—ultimately rests on a confusing retrieval of Platonic epistemology.

Tyson’s return to the key insight of classical realism—such as he discerns in Plato—is rather helpful. After all, only if the true is the intelligible (as well as the good, the beautiful, etc.) can one affirm God as real (Tyson 2022, 112–22). However, his attempt to translate Plato’s epistemological categories into contemporary terms comes across as both awkward and underdeveloped. The greatest issue lies in Tyson’s peculiar juxtaposition of knowledge and understanding: natural sciences typically wield “bare knowledge,” while theology holds genuine understanding (see Tyson 2022, 119–21, 124–26).10 The lack of clarity regarding the relationship between understanding and knowledge—terms Tyson does not clearly define—arguably leads to an oversight, obfuscating the fact that both theology and science offer distinct instances of genuine understanding.11

In summary, an attempt to reverse the modern relationship between theology and science by flipping it upside down—such as by Tyson—effectively denies the relative autonomy of both fields and suggests a reductionism of its own kind: the “supernaturalization” of all knowledge. By extension, it fails to make a compelling case for bringing theologians and scientists together as equal partners in an ongoing conversation. In light of these concerns with the “theology above science” approach, an alternative means of reclaiming the unity of knowledge seems necessary, to which we turn next.

Part Two—Theology and Science: Unity in Distinction

Tyson’s attempt to reclaim theology as the “first truth discourse” risks what Lonergan (2018, 274) calls illegitimate sacralization, which must be resisted by liberating “a secular domain from the once but no longer appropriate extension of the sacral.”12 While Tyson (2022, 143) blames historical criticism for delivering the final blow in theology’s dethroning, Lonergan (2018, 274) suggests that the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic defensive suppression of engaging with the signs of the times was an instance of an (illegitimate) extension of “the medieval sacralization of philosophy and science, of society and law.” Analogous to Buckley’s analysis of Christianity’s complicity in the origins of modern atheism, Lonergan (2018, 274) proposes that it was a “[p]ersistent age-long rearguard action … maintained in the Roman Catholic Church” that, more than a hundred years later, contributed to the rise of secularism—“the outraged and outright rejection of all religion as the futile champion of a dead and unlamented past.”

Hence, Lonergan proposes that the spheres of the sacred and the secular (and, by extension, of theology and science) should have their relative autonomy: there is a legitimate secularization, and it is to be fostered. In Lonergan’s (2018, 273) terse assessment, the sacralization of the secular that came with the advent of Constantine, which made culture, sociopolitical life, economy, technology, philosophy, and science subordinate parts of a religious worldview, was like “building one’s house not on a rock but upon sand.” The Babylonian cosmology implicit in scripture readily aligned with Ptolemaic astronomy, and the Greek influences in the New Testament and the apocrypha allowed for a merger between the biblical understanding of humanity and Aristotelian views of human nature. However, the rise of modern science revealed the inherent fragility of subordinating science to theology and sacralizing specific scientific paradigms. As Lonergan (2018, 273) observes, the “sacralized construct of [human beings] and [their] universe was impugned, and impugned successfully, by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, by Darwin and Freud, and by the swarm of philosophies and counter-philosophies that began at least with Descartes.”

In light of the foregoing, the main aim of what follows is to examine the conditions for the possibility of a unity-in-distinction between theology and science—that is, the possibility of asserting their relative autonomy without turning that autonomy into separation. I believe this possibility lies in the application of what Lonergan calls “generalized empirical method.” The following four sections progressively make this claim explicit by: (1) explaining the isomorphism between theological and scientific inquiry; (2) clarifying Lonergan’s notion of self-appropriation; (3) identifying the transcultural aspect of generalized empirical method; and (4) bringing these elements to bear on the unity-in-distinction of theology and science.

Common Search for Understanding

In his pre-Method essay, “Isomorphism of Thomist and Scientific Thought,” Lonergan proposes that the isomorphism between theology and science—and, by extension, the possibility of their dialogue—is grounded in the common search for understanding, not simply in the fact that the same mind carries out the search. In response to the question, “Why are Thomist metaphysics and scientific thought isomorphic?,” he wrote:

Clearly, it is not enough to say that both types of thought proceed from the same human mind, for it is quite easy to point to a variety of philosophies that proceed from the human mind without exhibiting any notable isomorphism with scientific thought. The answer, then, must envisage the human mind under some precise aspect; and the relevant aspect, I submit, is neither truth nor certitude nor deduction nor necessity nor universality nor conception nor inquiry nor intuition nor experience nor a priori synthesis nor apperceptive unity nor description nor phenomenology nor induction nor, indeed, any mere combination of these. The relevant aspect is understanding. (Lonergan 2005, 138)

This suggests that, as we will see Lonergan proposing later, the unity of theology and science does not rest on a shared set of propositions or common beliefs but on a common search for understanding: insofar as people are engaged in the genuine search for understanding, they will be able to hold tensions arising from incommensurate theoretical frameworks and even apparent contradictions and clashes between scientific inquiry and dogmatic assertions. In the words of Cardinal John Henry Newman (2008, 224), despite “momentary collisions, awkward appearances, and many forebodings and prophecies of contrariety,” both sides must continue their work “with full faith in the consistency of [the] multiform truth.”

As Lonergan (2017, 168) explains, an act of understanding or insight precedes concepts rather than follows them; it is “a prepropositional, preverbal, preconceptual event.” Insight “consists in a grasp of intelligible unity or relation in the data or image or symbol. It is the active ground whence proceed conception, definition, hypothesis, theory, system” (Lonergan 2017, 200). Hence, understanding is not to be confused with one’s formulation of the meaning of what has been understood or with the judgments concerning the truth of one’s understanding and formulation. In order to develop a concept and discern its validity, one must first understand (Lonergan 2017, 151), and there are multiple ways to express the content of an insight in concepts (Lonergan 2017, 201).

Insofar as both science and theology seek understanding that is always prior to conceptualization or formulation, they can find common ground. However, finding common ground does not mean collapsing the two fields into one. According to Lonergan, the relative autonomy of science and theology is not just a desideratum that follows from legitimate secularization. It is also a mark of humanity’s cultural development, which he theorizes in terms of the three “stages of meaning.” These stages represent the expansion of human capacity to control meaning beyond the linguistic and symbolic means of common everyday communication (the realm of “common sense”): “In the first stage conscious and intentional operations follow the mode of common sense. In a second stage besides the mode of common sense there is also the mode of theory, where the theory is controlled by a logic. In a third stage the modes of common sense and theory remain, science asserts its autonomy from philosophy, and there occur philosophies that leave theory to science and take their stand on interiority” (Lonergan 2017, 85).

Lonergan’s two best-known works, Insight (Lonergan 1992) and Method in Theology (Lonergan 2017), are fundamentally devoted to fully articulating the third stage of meaning, interiority. This stage emerges when cultural conditions empower the human mind—on an unprecedented scale—to grasp both the polymorphism of consciousness and the unified dynamism of cognition across diverse contexts, including ordinary, religious, and scientific domains.13 This self-possession of the mind, an interiorly differentiated consciousness—which, in Insight’s terms, begins as a “sufficiently cultured consciousness” (Lonergan 1992, 22)—also makes it possible to account for interdisciplinary differences without making distinctions into separations.

Lonergan’s contribution demonstrates that the engagement between theology and science cannot be grounded merely in their complementarity, what David Fergusson (2012) terms “compossibility,” or the modification of core Christian beliefs to suit the whims of the latest scientific discovery.14 Nor can their unity arise from reinstating theology as “the queen of sciences.” Neither is it grounded, first and foremost, in latent metaphysics and theologia naturalis as intrinsic to the sciences, as Hanby (2013, 21) would have it. For Lonergan, the unity-in-distinction between science and theology originates from the fundamental structures of inquiry that underlie its every form. These structures, disclosed through the practice of Lonergan’s “first philosophy”—self-appropriation—illuminate and unify different domains of knowledge, thus avoiding false dichotomies.15

Self-Appropriation

Self-appropriation provides a pathway for unifying theology and science by going behind the activities of inquiry and insight in the plurality of contexts, including daily life (common sense), scientific exploration (theory), and theological reflection (religion). It examines the cognitional processes underlying all forms of human knowing. Through the practice of self-appropriation, Lonergan firmly aligns with realism.16 Like Tyson (2022, 97–98), Lonergan rejects the idea that the ultimate criterion of truth lies in the empirical measurement of sensory data. Instead, truth, for Lonergan, is grasped through critically reflective understanding that is attentive, intelligent, rational, and responsible.

Through self-appropriation, Lonergan’s voyage into the realm of interiority yields what he in Insight terms a generalized empirical method—an approach that explicitly identifies the basic pattern of human cognition by applying empirical method to the data of consciousness. In Method in Theology, Lonergan calls it “transcendental method,” insofar as it concerns human self-transcendence in knowing, willing, and loving.17 Transcendental method makes explicit that human knowing is a dynamic structure characterized by the fourfold enlargement of consciousness: experience is sublated (that is, enriched and transformed) by the desire to understand, understanding by the desire to judge based on evidence, and judgment by the desire to ground responsible decisions in genuine value. To know in a full sense, therefore, is to understand correctly and responsibly (or to take responsibility for one’s correct knowing). Moreover, to know what we do when we know (cognition) and why doing that really counts as knowing (epistemology) demands self-reflexivity that is akin to reduplication of the cognitional operations of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding.18

The basic pattern of coming to know—through experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding—is normative, though not in a foundationalist sense. That is, transcendental method does not rest on self-evident principles or beliefs derived from revealed knowledge. It rests on “making explicit the basic normative pattern of the recurrent and related operations of human cognitional process” (Lonergan 2017, 26) that results in self-appropriation, a kind of inductive thinking. Its normativity lies in the fact that one cannot truly know without asking and answering all relevant questions: questions for understanding (e.g., What? Why? How? When? Where?), questions for reflection (Yes? No? Is it so?), and questions for evaluation, deliberation, and decision (Is it good? Is it worthwhile?). For Lonergan (2017, 17), this “normative pattern of recurrent and related [cognitional] operations” is empirically verifiable. Denying it would result in a performative contradiction, as passing judgment against it would itself involve engaging in the very process of asking and answering the relevant questions, as outlined earlier (Lonergan 2017, 23).

Lonergan’s transcendental method helps clarify what makes the three approaches to the theology and science relationship discussed earlier in this article philosophically unacceptable. In a nutshell, they all rest on false premises about human cognition.

The “theology or science” approach rests on the premise that there is no way to genuinely reconcile the valid (but insufficient) insights of idealism (that we know the intelligible) and materialism (that we know through sense experience). In contrast, taking idealism to be a “half-way house” between his own critical realism and materialism, Lonergan (1992, 22) shows that what constitutes knowing is a correct understanding of data supplied by both sense and consciousness.

The “theology from science” approach betrays a penchant for what Lonergan (2017, 247) calls naïve realism—that knowing amounts to extroversion, as if we know by “taking a good look.” This is illustrated, for instance, by Polkinghorne’s (2001, 98) endorsement of the scientist’s “instinctive realism,” which endeavors to “align epistemology and ontology as closely as possible” (Polkinghorne 2001, 100), in effect tacitly collapsing knowing and being. Accordingly, to affirm that “God knows things as they really are,” Polkinghorne (2001, 103) feels the need to posit a temporal pole in God.19

Finally, the “theology above science” approach, as exemplified here by Tyson, tacitly succumbs to philosophical postmodernity’s view of reason as a “foundationed” process, fated to undo itself due to the incommensurability of competing first premises (such as “either theocentrism or egocentrism”). Instead, Lonergan disambiguates the foundations of knowing as “logically first premises” from foundations understood as an authentic person, circumventing the foundationalist problem tout court. For him, it is human authenticity—understood as ongoing self-transcendence in pursuit of genuine understanding, truth, and value—that is the remote principle of every truly human inquiry and progress (Lonergan 2017, 106, 272, 380).

Lonergan (2017, 370) argues that generalized empirical (or transcendental) method, as briefly explained earlier, is central to sustaining unity across diverse fields of inquiry: “Through the self-knowledge, self-appropriation, and self-possession that result from making explicit the basic normative pattern of the recurrent and related operations of human cognitional process, it becomes possible to envisage a future in which all workers in all fields can find in transcendental method common norms, common critical, dialectical, heuristic procedures, common foundations, and systematics.” This statement suggests that generalized empirical method possesses a transcultural foundation from which both specific methodologies and common norms are derived. Allow me to explore these aspects further, beginning with the transcultural basis.

Transcultural Basis

As explored earlier, Tyson’s radical orthodoxy argument can be encapsulated as “one (propositional) truth, therefore one first truth discourse.” Lonergan, however, contends that the unity of theology and science can no longer rest on a shared set of premises that emerge from a common field of knowledge or propositional truths held in common; the era of Aristotelian science is over. Yet, from moving beyond common premises “does not follow that there are to be no foundations at all” (Lonergan 2017, 367). Lonergan (2017, 367) further explains: “As there are firsts in the order of premises, so too there is a first in the order of methods. That first is transcendental method, and its function is to provide foundations when one moves from the abstractness of logic and the Posterior Analytics, of human nature and the human soul, to the concreteness of individual human subjects in their historical milieux working at modern sciences in accord with their appropriate methods.”

Does this proposal imply a return to the premodern pretensions of universality, which, in Sarah Coakley’s (2012, 17) terms, cling to “the belief in a shared ‘flat plane’ of universal reason, on which philosophers, scientists and theologians might meet to do genuine battle”? The answer would be yes only if the options were strictly dichotomous: universality versus historicism, or universal reason versus the Babel of incommensurable rationalities. However, in keeping with the Catholic tradition, Lonergan wants to affirm both/and: transcendental method and its specific determinations, particularity of cultures and the transcultural validity of cognitional performance.20 His preference in later works, such as Method in Theology (Lonergan 2017, 125, see also 146n2), for the language of “comprehensive viewpoint” over the earlier “universal viewpoint” found in Insight underscores that, over time, this affirmation becomes more explicit. Yet even the earlier term does not assume a “flat plane”; rather, it refers to a heuristic structure of knowing—an anticipation of the “potential totality of genetically and dialectically ordered viewpoints” (Lonergan 1992, 587).21

Regarding the transcultural aspect of transcendental method, Lonergan (2017, 264) explains: “Transcendental method … is, in a sense, transcultural. Clearly it is not transcultural inasmuch as it is explicitly formulated. But it is transcultural in the realities to which the formulation refers, for these realities are not the product of any culture but, on the contrary, the principles that produce cultures, preserve them, develop them.” This articulation underscores that affirming a transcultural basis does not imply an a-historic account of rationality, for which postmodernity has little patience.22 Lonergan clarifies this point further by situating transcendental method in relation to what he terms transcendental notions. He notes that his method is transcendental because the results envisaged “are not confined categorially to some particular field or subject, but regard any result that could be intended by the completely open transcendental notions” (Lonergan 2017, 17–18). These notions refer to humanity’s innate “capacity for seeking and, when found, for recognizing instances of the intelligible, the true, the real, the good” (Lonergan 2017, 264). Transcendental notions make questions and answers possible, while categories render them determinate. As Lonergan (2017, 264) explains, “[a] question can be put differently with every cultural difference, but it is the same fundamental question that is arising.” By the same token, transcendental notions are general, while categories are specific—not only to various cultures but to various fields of inquiry.

In other words, while the concrete ways of posing and answering questions are specific to each culture and context, the underlying wonder—the drive to seek understanding, judgment, and evaluation—as well as the resulting dynamic pattern of human cognition, is transcultural. Correspondingly, for Lonergan, the fourfold dynamic structure of human knowing—constituted by experience being sublated by understanding, understanding by judgment of truth, and judgment of truth by judgment of value—is invariant across both cultures and fields of inquiry. By contrast, the historicist alternative, which embraces a proliferation of incommensurate and localized rationalities, might appear compelling. Yet, consistent with its own principles, on what grounds could it justify such a stance?

Specific Methodologies, Common Norms

Endorsing cross-disciplinary engagement between science and theology on a transcendental basis necessitates affirming their relative methodological autonomy. As discussed earlier, Lonergan (2017, 264) asserts that “[w]hile the transcendental notions make questions and answers possible, categories make them determinate.” Conceiving method concretely, therefore, does not mean reducing it to “principles and rules, but [seeing it] as a normative pattern of operations with cumulative and progressive results” that facilitate distinguishing “the methods appropriate to particular fields” (Lonergan 2017, 17n11).

Thus, transcendental method serves a heuristic function: it makes the known unknowns explicit. However, the transformation of the unknown into the known occurs only through the gradual accumulation of determinations specific to each discipline. This underscores that, in the common search for truth, the methodologies and concrete means of adjudicating conclusions will necessarily differ across fields. For example, both a theologian and a biologist might agree that a theory of intelligent design is wrong. Yet, their justifications would differ: a theologian would argue from faith claims that give rise to the speculative affirmation of the noncompetitive character of divine action, while a biologist would rely on empirical evidence that refutes the examples (or gaps) intelligent-design theorists invoke. In other words, each would approach the same truth by employing methodologies, procedures, and specific norms appropriate to their fields. The adequate judges of their success will be those with expertise in the relevant domain, as special methods “derive their proper norms from the accumulated experience of investigators in their several separate fields” (Lonergan 2017, 369). Therefore, cross-disciplinarity depends on the condition of mutual engagement.

Such engagement proves fruitful to the extent that the transcultural normativity inherent in human cognition—at least implicitly—provides a foundation for negotiating real or apparent disagreements, addressing dialectical oppositions, and fostering practical cooperation. If Lonergan (2017, 361) is correct in asserting that “all special methods are adaptations and complications of the completely general pattern of transcendental method,” then transcendental method should indeed facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration. But how? Lonergan’s (2017, 368) response grounds this facilitation in the transcultural normativity of what he calls transcendental precepts: “All special methods consist in making specific the transcendental precepts, Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.”23 He elaborates: “However true it is that one attends, understands, judges, decides differently in the natural sciences, in the human sciences, and in theology, still these differences in no way imply or suggest a transition from attention to inattention, from intelligence to stupidity, from reasonableness to silliness, from responsibility to irresponsibility” (Lonergan 2017, 370).

The foregoing highlights that the normativity of transcendental precepts involves resisting the temptation to prematurely conclude one’s inquiry, expanding one’s horizon of knowing, uncovering biases, addressing distortions, and committing to causes that are genuinely worthwhile. Therefore, the transcendental precepts are not only meant to guide the development of methodologies specific to each field but also to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue.24 Regarding “the foundational function” of transcendental method, Lonergan (2017, 369) observes:

Besides the tasks of each field, there are interdisciplinary problems. Underneath the consent of men as scientists, there is their dissent on matters of ultimate significance and concern. It is in the measure that special methods acknowledge their common core in transcendental method that norms common to all the sciences will be acknowledged, that a secure basis will be attained for attacking interdisciplinary problems, and that the sciences will be mobilized within a higher unity.

As noted, Lonergan’s advice for addressing interdisciplinary challenges— directed at both theologians and scientists—is to make their underlying philosophical commitments explicit.25 One way to achieve this is by studying transcendental method, as unapologetically promoted in Lonergan’s (2017, 371) own succinct endorsement: “To study transcendental method is not to study theology, or human science, or natural science. On the other hand, to study theology or human science or natural science is to use one’s mind, and, if one is not merely to do so but also to know what one is doing, to know basically what others are doing in other fields, to be able to communicate with them, then one must study transcendental method.”

To conclude this second part of the article, insofar as the unrestricted desire to know underlies all cognitional acts, truth remains the horizon toward which both the scientist and the theologian move. Lonergan is not unique in advocating for both the unity and relative autonomy of theology and science. Nor is he more eloquent than others in describing the implications of accepting that truth is one—despite being frequently distorted by our shortsightedness or culpable ignorance, and despite being apprehended through a multiplicity of concepts. Buckley (1998), among others, makes a very similar and perhaps even more compelling argument for the mutual engagement between religion and science as an intrinsic part of the mission of the church. Lonergan’s unique contribution, however, lies in grounding the unity-in-distinction of theology and science in the unity of transcendental method, fully fleshing out the conditions for authentic knowing.

Conclusion

The engagement between theology and science seems to be entering a new era where science is, on the one hand, capable of pointing toward ultimate questions on an unprecedented scale and, on the other, assumes, whether tacitly or explicitly, a “flat plane” of rational interdisciplinary dialogue confined to reductive empiricism and physicalism. Theology, in turn, is equally affected by both the new possibilities and the threat of being subsumed by science as the first truth discourse. This may provoke—as seen in the radical orthodoxy approach—a reactive attempt to subordinate science to theology. Alternatively, as argued in the second part of this article, it may prompt an effort to explore human cognitional processes as transcultural and transdisciplinary, affirming both the unity and distinction of theology and science.

Such an effort provides rational—but not rationalist—avenues for rethinking the reasons why and how theology and science should cooperate on practical solutions to pressing challenges, such as the ecological crisis. Moreover, it enables a reimagining of the engagement between theology and science that respects the canons of each field, avoiding the quick condemnation or dismissal of the other. Most importantly, it prevents the premature closure of doors to new insights that can only emerge through real dialogue. As genuinely, though provisionally, true—since new data will always raise further relevant questions—these insights can only be developed by applying the expertise of both fields.

As recently demonstrated by Coakley and Martin Novak, it is not only science that informs new understandings of the faith mysteries (Nowak and Coakley 2013). Christian ideas—perhaps no less, and perhaps even more—can expand the horizon of the known unknowns in science, prompting new scientific insights. For instance, I believe Coakley is right in asserting that it takes a Christian mindset to discern and be motivated to mathematically verify the possibility that costly cooperation (in the case of humans, altruism) is the third driving principle of evolution, alongside mutations and natural selection. She may be equally right in arguing that this does not mean subordinating science to theology, as evidenced by the fact that both the procedure and conclusions of Novak’s work are approved by the scientific community, which does not necessarily share his Christian beliefs (Coakley 2012, 24–25). The implicit norm governing this approval is a tacit recognition of the internal integrity of an inquiry that asks and answers all relevant (and highly specialized) questions. In Lonergan’s (2017, 368) terms, such integrity is the result of following the transcendental precepts: “Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be reasonable, Be responsible.”

The unity of theology and science, as the papal magisterium discussed in the beginning of this article reminds us, cannot be an identity. This study focused on predominantly philosophical reasoning regarding the relative autonomy of the religious and the secular. However, there are equally important theological reasons for upholding such autonomy. In his essay on secularization, Lonergan (2018, 269) articulates these reasons by drawing on the mysteries of incarnation and redemption: in Christ, we see the unity of human and divine, the secular and the religious—the unity concretely manifested only dialectically in his death and resurrection. In his reflection on Elizabeth Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love, Brian Robinette (2016, 475) offers another theological reason for the relative autonomy of theology and science. He reminds us that “at the heart of Christian faith itself is a caesura—an interruption or break that casts a radically new light upon what we take for granted about creatureliness.” That caesura, as evidenced in Christ’s resurrection, not only gives hope for “all the dead of Darwin’s tree of life” (Robinette 2016, 478) but also cautions against indiscriminate accommodations in theology’s engagement with science. In Robinette’s (2016, 475) words, “[t]hat caesura is an eschatological perspective that a scientific account of life cannot provide.”

However, unlike Karl Barth, these Catholic thinkers do not reject natural theology or the relative autonomy of science.26 For Lonergan, the unification of all things in Christ is both continuous with and transformative of the emerging world order (Ryliškytė 2023, 386–438). For Robinette (2016, 478), “the resurrection is not an explanation for anything, but it is a response”—the divine response that grounds eschatological hope for creation in the one who is “the firstborn of all the dead of Darwin’s tree of life.” In this way, science and theology—not unlike the natural and supernatural orders in the tradition they represent—maintain a relative autonomy that resists both separation and the subsumption of one by the other.

Notes

  1. I believe the critical interrogation of both science and theology in order to make explicit the liberating and oppressive capacities of both, undertaken by some scholars working with the critical theories lens, also falls under the category of “practical collaboration.” For an example, see Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ahmed Ragab, and Terence Keel (2023). [^]
  2. Because “science” here is used in the modern sense (i.e., natural sciences and, possibly, human sciences), this framing of the problem highlights a modern departure from the Aristotelian-Thomist understanding of science. It also raises the question of whether theology can still be considered “scientific” in some sense. Within the Aristotelian paradigm, St. Thomas Aquinas regarded theology as the highest science. However, with the shift to natural (physical) sciences as the paradigmatic form of science, theology came to be seen as distinct from “science.” For an illuminating discussion of the Thomistic notion of theology as a science, see Bernard Lonergan (2005, 117–27). For contemporary insights into the conditions under which theology might still be conceived as a science, see David Piché (2010) and Olivier Boulnois (2011). [^]
  3. For instance, see Jürgen Moltmann’s (1991, 88) kenotic theology of creation. See also John Haught’s (2007, 73) endorsement of this idea in proposing that the self-effacing of the Creator entails the “smallness” of divine omnipotence and omnipresence. For contemporary attempts to offer viable theologies of kenosis that reckon with the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy (broadly conceived), see C. Stephen Evans (2006). [^]
  4. As later expounded by John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin, the concept of the dipolar God originates with the process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead (1978) and Charles Hartshorne (1948). In his later rebuttal of criticisms that the necessary being cannot also be contingent, Hartshorne argues that “the apparent inconsistency disappears when one takes into account the distinction between the divine existence and the divine actuality” (Hartshorne and Hahn 1991, 619). To a classical theologian, this raises the question of how one can introduce potency into God’s nature without undermining divine simplicity. In turn, without affirming divine simplicity, an argument for God as an uncaused cause seems to collapse, and one needs to posit an infinite recess of gods, none actually being God the Creator of all that exists (for this line of reasoning, see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I q. 3. aa. 1–8, esp. a. 7 co.). For more on the Thomistic reasons for affirming divine impassibility, see James Keating and Thomas Joseph White (2009). [^]
  5. My engagement with Haught here also draws on Gloria Schaab’s (2010) appraisal of his broader work. [^]
  6. Gregersen’s three varieties of panentheism include: soteriological panentheism (exemplified by John Zizioulas), expressivist panentheism (exemplified by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling), and the dipolar panentheism (inspired by Whitehead and Hartshorne); see Gregersen (2004). For a helpful review and revision of Gregersen’s position, see Jospeh A. Bracken (2014). [^]
  7. To my mind, the primary issue with ontological monism—even Philip Clayton’s (2000) emergentist monism—is that it upholds the unity of the universe at the cost of denying its spiritual (nonphysical) dimension. Without such a dimension, affirming divine causality in the world becomes either impossible (since God’s immanence cannot be reduced to physical phenomena) or collapses into a physicalist reduction in which God is somehow present in all matter, whatever that presence might mean. [^]
  8. Tyson (2022, 73) aligns with Michael Buckley’s and Charles Taylor’s analyses of secularization, claiming that “Christian theology largely produced its own demise as the West’s primary truth discourse.” His original contribution lies in attributing the blame to historical criticism: “It was not the Darwinian account of evolution that dealt a death blow to modern Western Christian theology; it was late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century historical-critical biblical scholarship that did it” (Tyson 2022, 143). [^]
  9. For instance, he writes that theology should “treat ‘science’ as if it does not exist” (Tyson 2022, 90) and that the proponents of late nineteenth-century scientific naturalism “have killed and eaten” Christian theology (Tyson 2022, 131). [^]
  10. In contrast, as explored in the second part of this article, Lonergan (1992, 22) clarifies that understanding is always constitutive of genuine knowing: for him, knowing is understanding correctly. [^]
  11. Rather than providing general definitions of both terms, Tyson proposes two distinct types of knowledge and understanding, approximately describing the meaning of each type in relation to Plato’s epistemological categories: Knowledge I (eikasia in Plato) pertains to sensory perception, while Knowledge II (dianoia in Plato) pertains to mathematical reasoning (both of which are “minimally theorized”) (Tyson 2022, 119–20, 187). Meanwhile, Understanding I (pistis in Plato) is described as “existentially situated” and Understanding II (noēsis in Plato) as “essentially situated meaning, valuing, and purposeful understanding” (Tyson 2022, 192). [^]
  12. Lonergan (2018, 264) distinguishes four possibilities: “(1) a sacralization to be dropped and (2) a sacralization to be fostered; (3) a secularization to be welcomed and (4) a secularization to be resisted.” [^]
  13. For example, interiorly differentiated consciousness enables the meta-thinking necessary to reconcile Eddington’s two tables: “[T]he bulky, solid, colored desk at which he worked, and the manifold of colorless ‘wavicles’ so minute that the desk was mostly empty space” (Lonergan 2017, 81). [^]
  14. In his 2009 Gifford Lectures, Fergusson argued that the postmodern condition leaves only two viable options for natural theology. Sarah Coakley (2012, 17) summarizes these as, on the one hand, what she terms “‘the defeating the defeater’ ploy,” which challenges the background presuppositions of secularism (a strategy well illustrated, I believe, by Tyson), and, on the other hand, “the ‘compossibility’ option for ‘natural theology,’” which asserts that there is no inherent logical failure in a personal Christian decision to interpret evolutionary history as the hand of God—“even though I dare not, or for Barthian reasons will not, attempt any evidential demonstration of such.” See also Fergusson (2012, 78–95). [^]
  15. For more on cognitional theory, or philosophy of self-appropriation, as his first philosophy, see Lonergan (2016, 232; 2018, 357). [^]
  16. Lonergan terms this “critical realism,” using “critical” in at least two senses: it serves as a critique of philosophies of knowing as well as affirms the role of reflective understanding and judgment as the final increment in the process of coming to know. [^]
  17. Strictly speaking, Lonergan’s (2017, 17 n11) method is transcendental in two senses: in the Scholastic sense, as opposed to categorial, and in the Kantian sense, as clarifying the conditions for the possibility of an a priori knowing. Lonergan appears to have returned to using “generalized empirical method” in at least some of his post-Method work. See, for instance, Lonergan 2018 (381) and Lonergan 2021 (171, 173). [^]
  18. In Lonergan’s technical formulation, self-appropriation entails applying operations as intentional (intending themselves as an object of inquiry) to the operations as conscious (given in the flow of waking consciousness): “To apply the operations as intentional to the operations as conscious is a fourfold matter of (1) experiencing one’s experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding, (2) understanding the unity and relations of one’s experienced experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding, (3) affirming the reality of one’s experienced and understood experiencing, understanding, judging, deciding, and (4) deciding to operate in accord with the norms immanent in the spontaneous relatedness of one’s experienced, understood, affirmed experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding” (Lonergan 2017, 18). [^]
  19. The charge of naïve realism can be further supported by adverting to Polkinghorne’s (2001, 102, 104) dismissal of Thomist creation metaphysics on the grounds of its alleged mysteriousness, even to the point of making God into a cause among other causes. What makes St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of transcendent causality “too mysterious,” Polkinghorne ” (2001, 102) does not explain. However, one might suspect that his real concern is that a transcendent cause is unimaginable. But if unimaginable is taken to mean obscure or unintelligible and unreasonable, one cannot but conclude that knowing indeed means little more than taking a good look. [^]
  20. For instance, see Lonergan’s (2017, 3, 120, 281, 293, 307) discussion of the classicist and empirical notions of culture in Method in Theology. [^]
  21. For more on the continuity and development between Insight’s notion of the universal viewpoint and Method in Theology’s comprehensive viewpoint, see Ivo Coelho (2001). Coelho (2001, 10) convincingly shows that in Method in Theology, “the functions of the universal viewpoint are taken over by transcendental method.” [^]
  22. According to postmodern anthropologies, rationality is so localized and historicized that the categories of other cultures are considered untranslatable. Alasdair C. MacIntyre (2020) suggests that the only possible way to “rationally” vindicate the truth of competing traditions of inquiry is by comparing “the adequacy and explanatory power” of their historical traditions. However, if MacIntyre (2020, 403) is correct that “there are no tradition-independent standards of argument,” it becomes unclear on what basis this “adequacy” can be adjudicated and why one should regard the outcome of such adjudication as in any way superior to rival alternatives. [^]
  23. In another passage, he adds the highest precept, “Be in love,” which takes into account the en-graced transformation of human cognition and volition (Lonergan 2017, 252). [^]
  24. A notable example of such facilitation is the interdisciplinary collaboration applying Lonergan’s generalized empirical method at several universities in the United States, including Seton Hall and Boston College. Another compelling instance is the dialogue between environmental sciences and philosophy, as exemplified by Patrick H. Byrne’s (2024) work in environmental ethics. Other notable contributions to Lonergan scholarship on the interaction between theology and science include works by Byrne (2005), Robert M. Doran (1971), Daniel A. Helminiak (1996, 1998), Neil Ormerod (2007, 2015), and Cyril Orji (2018). [^]
  25. In line with Lonergan, the concrete implementation of this cross-disciplinary dialogue is something theology must address in relation to its functional specialties—a task that lies beyond the scope of this article. [^]
  26. For an appraisal of Barth’s approach to natural theology, see Andrew Torrance (2019). For a helpful account of Lonergan’s views on natural theology, which also sheds light on their distinction from the Barthian position, see Ormerod (2015). [^]

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