Tradition and Discovery: The Polanyi Society Periodical

Volume 29, Issue 3, 2002/2003

God, Contemporary Science and Metaphysics
A Response to Philip D. Clayton

This paper is a response read at a joint session of the Polanyi Society and the Religion and Science Group at the AAR Annual Meeting in Denver, November 16, 2001. Though a paradigm example of the conversation between systematic theology and contemporary science, Philip Clayton’s God and Contemporary Science is questioned for taking the natural sciences too seriously: it endangers the autonomy of theology and by implicitly advocating a grand metaphysics, it creates an unbridgeable gap with ordinary religious meaning, and in regard to some theological doctrines, with science as well.