What is Truth?

Any attempt to explain religion today must address the issue of science.

It is simply impossible to communicate with any reasonably informed person today about religion and not be able to relate what is said to what science says.

This means we have to being with what we understand science to be about. I would identify three important characteristics of science:

1. A scientific theory exists within a community of expertise, and it enables the community to work collectively on its area of expertise, in such a way that the community is able to objectively evaluate new theories. So, for example, an experiment must be reproducible, a theory must say something that is capable of being disproved, and a theory must make sense of the available relevant data.

2. Any theory is liable to change - because some new experiment suggests a different explanation to the current data, or because a new paradigm explains the existing data in a more elegant way, and perhaps is able to explain data that had not previously been included in previous scientific paradigms. Data by itself does not disprove a theory - a theory may continue to be held by scientists, even if there exist experiments that "disprove" the theory if there is no suitable new paradigm available to better explain both the new data and the old.

3. The idea of purely objective knowledge does not exist in science - scientific knowledge is always provisional, and liable to change, it is simply the best explanation we have at any one time, and it is expected that in time the current theory will be discarded for a better theory.

This makes it very difficult to "build" what we usually understand by theology into any relationship with science. Theology deals with the eternal and unchanging revelation of God. Unlike science it is not expected that this revelation will continually change and develop, and that new revelations will replace previous ones.

This means if we suggest some theological explanation X for a scientific theory, we may in time need to revise X if the scientific theory it was built on now changes. We can't propose some theology that will always be true when we make that theology dependent on science, because that science will change.

So how then do we do theology? Do we not let it have any relationship with science? Some people would do this - it would keep "unchanging" theology away from "changeable" science. But if we do this, theology no longer relates to the world around us.

So instead, do we relate theology to science? Of course, but if we do this we must immediately recognise that theology now becomes as provisional and changeable as science. Indeed, more so that science - science can change based on the views of the scientific community, but theology then needs to change itself, if the science it was based on was faulty in some way, or has now been succeeded by some new science.

But here is the problem - theology isn't a science - it doesn't provide an objective explanation of the data using a theory that is shared by the theological community. Instead theology is simply interpretation - it is speculation - as one person's argument is as good as anyone else's. There is no established method to objectively change and develop theology, so its worth or merit lies in how we make sense of what we know from science, plus other areas that are not completely under the rule of science - e.g. ethics.

So now theology becomes as changeable and variable as any other part of modern society. We have to make what sense we can from science, and then build on that with our understanding of the rest of the world. That understanding may and will change - if the past is anything to go by.

Therefore theology becomes a story to explain our lives, given the discoveries of science. Theology is a human creation - no more objective than a novel or a poem - and we need to see those who attempt to practise theology as creative artists - who are able to wrestle with language and make some sense of our lives.