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Ted Peters, Theology and Science, Vol. 23, Issue 2 (2025), pp. 233–240.
ABSTRACT
This is a brief update on Theology and Science demonstrating continuity between speculative dialogue, on the one hand, and research aimed at public policy formulation, on the other hand. For more than three decades the field of Theology and Science has researched the ecological crisis, bioethical implications of genomics and gene editing, astrobiology with astroethics, the AI revolution, neuroscience, and, of course, the evolution controversy. New in the last two decades is the addition of post-colonial critical theory that relatives Science and Religion Discourse (SRD).
KEYWORDS:
- Science and religion
- theology and science
- Fraser Watts
- Robert John Russell
- Francis S. Collins
- CTNS
- CRISPR gene editing
- science and religion discourse
Writing for ISSR’s January 2025 blog, Fraser Watts provides a stimulating post, “Who is Working on Science and Religion? Changes in the Last 20 Years”. If you don’t know Fraser, he is an Anglican priest and psychologist whose leadership for decades has sparked new insights and drawn scholars together for generative dialogue.1 Along with Marius Dorobantu, Fraser has just published Perspectives on Spiritual Intelligence (2024) in the Routledge Science and Religion Series. In his IRAS article, Fraser makes the following observation about the last 20 year period.
The field of science and religion looks very different now from how it looked when ISSR was founded in 2002. For one thing, there is less interest in harmonising science and religion, or in defending religious convictions against scientific objections. Instead, there is increasing interest in the converging contributions of science and religion to challenges in human flourishing, such as ecology and the environmental crisis …
In me this stimulates two thoughts. First, I’d like to correct Fraser on the timetable for “ecology and the environmental crisis.” Second, I’d like to follow Fraser’s lead in updating who’s doing what in the field of Theology and Science.
The Ecological Crisis in Theology and Science
First, concern for ecology and the environmental crisis has not changed over the last 20 years. Rather, this has been a passionate concern all along. Dating it is insignificant. What is worth emphasizing, however, is that some of the scholars working on theology and science have been devoted to public theology. One responsibility of the public theologian is to provide both scientific and religious resources to combat climate change and environmental degradation.
Let’s remember Ian Barbour’s Technology, Environment, and Human Values (1980) as well as the prodigious works of Holmes Rolston III such as Environmental Ethics (1988) as well as my own modest contributions in Futures–Human and Divine (1977) and Fear, Faith, and the Future (1980).
Also, let’s not forget that in May 1992 Ian Barbour and Rober John Russell teamed up with Carl Sagan and 147 other luminaries in Washington DC to draft and sign the “Joint Appeal by Religion and Science for the Environment:
https://www.webofcreation.org/ DenominationalSt atements/joint.htm.
My point here is simply to show that scholars working on science and religion have given fervent attention to our ecological crisis for more than half a century. Not just in the last two decades.
Genetics, Bioethics, and Public Policy
Second, with Fraser Watts’ precedent in mind, perhaps I could mention a few additional frontiers being crossed by those currently working in theology and science. ESSSAT, ISCAST, IRAS, CTNS, DoSER at AAAS, BioLogos, and Science for the Church have been busy, busy, busy on matters pertaining to public policy. Let’s add a few items to Fraser’s list.
Beginning in 1990 we at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley began research into the Human Genome Project. This was followed by consultative work in both private and public sectors on human embryonic stem cell research. This included both the Geron Corporation (the funder for the first isolation of human embryonic stem cells) and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM).
We confronted philosophical questions raised by genetic determinism along with moral questions raised by gene editing. Other scientists and theologians around the world joined us in Berkeley during this period to propose public policy as well as advise religious organizations. Our publications included Genetics: Issues of Social Justice (Pilgrim 1998), Playing God? Genetic Determinism and Human Freedom (Routledge, 2nd ed., 2002), and Sacred Cells? Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research (Roman and Littlefield, 2008).
What about the more recent 20 years? Within the scientific community, genomics and stem cells eventually gave way to CRISPR gene editing. Just this year, geneticist Arvin Gouw and I have edited and published The CRISPR Revolution in Science, Religion, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2025).
Scholars working on theology and science earn an honest living. Productive scientific and theological reflection can lead to ethical discernment and public policy formulation.
Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Amplification, and Transhumanism
In his farewell speech to America on January 15, 2025, President Joe Biden warned his nation and the world about the technology to come.
Artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy and our security, our society, for humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation.
Artificial intelligence and related technologies are about to inundate global civilization with tremulous dyads: promise and peril, hope and fear, utopia and extinction. Might AI be a subject worthy of theologians reflecting on science?
Nearly two decades ago, a small group of scholars in Berkeley began meeting under the breastplate, “Theologians Testing Transhumanism.” We joined a Bay Area transhumanist association and immersed ourselves in growing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligence Amplification (IA). Transhumanists, as is widely known, plan to advance AI and IA technology to the point where, through genetic engineering, we achieve indefinite longevity or, through uploading our brain’s information pattern, we achieve cybernetic immortality. Transhumanist prophets have vaticinated the coming of Singularity, a threshold crossing where superintelligence takes over and we evolve into a posthuman species. AI related technologies are dazzling, enticing, and irresistible.
Like us in Berkeley, scholars elsewhere working on science and religion such as Celia Deane-Drummond in the UK, Tracy Trothen in Canada, and in the United States Anne Foerst, Ron Cole-Turner, Gregory Peterson, Mark Graves, and Calvin Mercer have for more than 20 years been rendering analyses that take up technical, philosophical, theological, and ethical dockets. The go-to-scholar on AI and related technologies, in my opinion, is a hybrid computer scientist and theologian, Noreen Herzfeld. See her stunning volume, The Artifice of Intelligence (2023).
Just a few years ago, the Christian Transhumanist Association was born. Some Buddhists, Unitarians, Mormons, and other religious devotees have become so charmed by the prospect of human enhancement that they give it eschatological meaning. A Berkeley cadre within the Theologians Testing Transhumanism group—Brian Patrick Green, Arvin Gouw, and I—have collected scholarly conjectures and put together an edited selection, Religious Transhumanism and Its Critics (Lexington 2022). Here in 2025 I’ve just published a similar collection of essays, The Promise and Peril of AI and IA: New Technology Meets Religion, Theology, and Ethics (ATF 2025). Hot off the press. Don’t burn your fingers.
When it comes to the AI revolution, scholars in theology and science are already on it. ISCAST in Australia, to mention one example, is investing considerable attention to “Technology and AI.” The Seattle based “AI and Faith”, initiated and still guided by David Brenner, collects experts in AI technology as well as scholars from the world’s religions to engage each new challenge that arises. Click to see what’s happening and you’ll see Mark Graves, among others, riding the AI horse like a theological jockey.
Thanks to a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, CTNS research is now underway on “Virtuous AI?: Cultural Evolution, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtue”. Braden Molhoek along with Robert John Russell are heading up this study.2 GTU African students Sunday Akande and Oluwatobi Ife-Adediran are already anticipating a liberating impact of this new technology.
Virtuous AI is herein conceived as a revolutionary technology that could help cure the ills associated with neocolonialism. In the context under consideration, virtuous AI should be accoutered with features that strengthen decoloniality in the African socio-cultural milieu.3
Keep your eyes open for a collection of new CTNS research papers to be published in 2025 in this journal, Theology and Science.
Old Fashioned Human Intelligence, the Brain, and the Mind
Is intelligence the decisive trait that defines the human person? Is intelligence located in the mind? Or in the brain? Can we reduce the mind to the brain? If so, where is that pesky soul? Neuro-theologians ask such questions.
“Did my neurons make me do it?” asks Fuller Seminary’s Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown. No, we cannot reduce the mental to the physical, they conclude. “Neurobiological reductionism has to be false.”4
Even if our consciousness is more than our anatomy, our mind remains inextricably connected to our physical make-up. This is a point frequently proclaimed by Fraser Watts.5
Scripps neuroscientist and Orthodox theologian Hermina Nedelescu then prognosticates that AI and IA can influence our soul.
Therefore, if the soul is associated with the self and our daily life, then AI will influence the human soul. Like all environmental stimuli AI can have a negative or a positive effect on the person, groups of people and societies.6
Will the influence of AI or IA cripple the soul? No. With or without such digital influence, “when empowered by the Holy Spirit the soul can center the self in God.”7
Alan Weissenbacher, Managing Editor of Theology and Science, has pressed such neurotheological conjectures into a handy dandy guide for practical living. Hot off the press is his new book, The Brain Change Program: 6 Steps to Renew Your Mind and Transform Your Life (Broadstreet 2024). The human will can elect to change our habits and—because “neurons that fire together wire together”—we can change our brain configuration to meet the demands of our will. Mind over matter, so to speak. The pursuit of virtue is possible, desirable, and within our reach.
Astrobiology, Astrotheology, and Astroethics
For more than 20 years, we at CTNS have enjoyed interacting with colleagues at both NASA and SETI. NASA now counts more than 5,000 exoplanets within the Milky Way. Some of these in the Goldilocks Zone—not too hot and not too cold—may host life. Might we terrestrials share our cosmos with extraterrestrial civilizations? If so, what might this imply for the imago Dei? The fall into sin? Atonement? Eschatology?
Should we believe the Copernican Principle?8 According to the Copernican Principle, Planet Earth is marginal. Peripheral. No prestigious cosmic address. Does our miniscule size and remote location imply that we are unimportant? Insignificant? Expendable? Let’s ask a theologian. After all, Jesus was in the habit of celebrating the humble and marginal.
It is time for the science of astrobiology to get quizzed by the astrotheologian and the astroethicist. We at CTNS sent up a balloon to test the wind direction for future discussions. It’s an innovative book, Astrotheology: Science and Theology Meet Extraterrestrial Life (2018). Paul Davies wrote the foreword. The editors included Martinez Hewlett, Joshua Moritz, Robert John Russell, and yours truly.
A creative metaphysical step has been taken by Andrew Davis at the Clarmont Center for Process Studies. Try his Metaphysics of Exo-Life: Toward a Constructive Whiteheadian Cosmotheology (2023). An additional synthetic step in constructive doctrine was just taken by Cambridge University scholar—now watch this name!—Andrew Davison. Read his master stroke, Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine (2024).
What might be an Islamic take on cosmology or even astrotheology? Iranian Shiite Medhi Goshani continues to update his book, Can Science Dispense with Religion?, now in its 5th edition. Two decades ago I teamed up with Muzaffar Iqbal and Syed Nomanul Haq to edit God, Life, and the Cosmos: Christian and Islamic Perspectives (Ashgate 2002). Today we have new scholars working on astrotheology. Shoaib Ahmed Malik has teamed up with Jörg Matthias Detterman to publish, Islamic Theology and Extraterrestrial Life (Tauris 2024).
What about astroethics? Sending earthlings to live in off-Earth habitats has already appeared on our ethical horizon. Konrad Szocik and Margaret Boone Rappaport along with Vatican Observatory astronomer Christopher Corbally have been speculating on the need for genetic engineering of future Mars settlers. This threesome also alerts us on Earth to prepare ourselves for ETI contact.
If Earth is visited by a species from a distant star system, humans need to be prepared with a set of procedures and a set of questions that will reveal the intentions of the visitors. This assessment must be rapid. Unless humans can devise a protocol that can quickly determine whether the visiting species has a sense of ethics, there may be great danger.9
Can theologians contribute to public policy through treatises on space ethics? Brian Patrick Green at Santa Clara University thinks so. See his thoughtful treatis, Space Ethics (2021).
The Evolution Controversy: Where Did It Go?
After the Kitzmiller v. Dover School District decision in 2004, the debate between a Darwinian account of biological evolution and an Intelligent Design account fizzled. Yawn.
During the first decade of this century, virologist Martinez Hewlett and I issued a number of publications dissecting the issues. Perhaps our most readable contribution was Can You Believe in God and Evolution? (Abingdon 2006). But it appears that the evolution v. creationism issue is now effete. Yawn.
Defending the science of evolution against the attacks of creationism or Intelligent Design is nearly forgotten. What has taken its place? Theodicy.
Over the last two decades, the theodicy question posed by creaturely suffering within evolution has become central within theology and science. British and continental scholars have provided the most thorough investigations into Darwinian biology and related fields such as genetics. No one can match the erudition or insight of Celia Deane-Drummond at Oxford, Christopher Southgate at Exeter, Bethany Sollereder at Edinburgh, or even Denis Edwards at Adelaide in Australia. Each has dappled the delicate texture intertwining the suffering of creatures in natural selection with divine providence, postulating that the trinitarian divine life takes up into itself creaturely victimization, agony, and death.
Two decades ago, University of Copenhagen professor Niels Henrik Gregersen introduced the term deep incarnation, which is now widely used in our field. “Deep incarnation means that the divine Logos … has assumed not merely humanity, but the whole malleable matrix of materiality.”10 Because in Jesus God absorbs into the divine life all the biology of creaturely life, God now experiences what all living organisms experience. This ubiquitous divine presence is requisite for redemption, contends Gregersen.
At CTNS our modest contribution to untying the theodicy knot came out as an edited volume, The Evolution of Evil.11
Such scholarly mind-churning over suffering in creation probably has no practical value. It is merely fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.
Scandinavian Creation Theology
Scandinavian Creation Theology or SCT is a new movement among Nordic Lutheran theologians that begins with the doctrine of creation augmented by classical naturalism. SCT is inspired by Martin Luther, N.F.S. Grundtvig, and Knud Løgstrup. It is theologically generated, not scientifically engendered. Even so, natural science may be admitted as a theological source. Here is the key theme of SCT: Earth is our home. As our home, we have an ethical responsibility to care for this home.
Oh, yes, there is suffering, pain, and death in our home. Evil bites us daily, just as evolutionary theists wrestling with theodicy report. Niels Gregersen’s deep incarnation helps provide justification for the ubiquity of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. God “is hidden as incarnated in everything, and revealed as incarnated in Jesus Christ,” writes Jacob Wolf at the University of Copenhagen.12 “Is Earth our home? My answer is: It certainly is.”13
Post-Colonial Critique of Science and Religion Discourse (SRD)
What else is new? One clear line of innovative thought developing over the last 20 years among those working in theology and science is the post-colonial critique. Four centuries ago, Enlightenment science augmented the industrial revolution to empower colonial Europe to gain global hegemony. European science and European religion together have been responsible for the suppression of indigenous knowledge systems. Lisa Stenmark, Whitney Bauman, and Jennifer Baldwin, among others, are building on foundations laid by Critical Theory and Liberation Theology to critique the dominant Science and Religion Discourse (SRD). In their foreword to the book edited by Baldwin, Navigating Post-Truth Alternative Facts (Lexington 2018), Stenmark and Bauman draw together “feminist, critical race theory, postcolonial, queer approaches within social sciences, and also legal theory and literary approaches. All of these discourses help to challenge dominant understandings of the world in order that multiple perspectives and experiences might be heard” (vii-viii).
From Evolution to Wisdom
Molecular biologist and former Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021, Francis S. Collins, helped found BioLogos in 2007. It’s motto: “God’s Word, God’s world.” Today the BioLogos Foundation supports the view that God created the world and providentially guides the world through evolution. Beyond knowledge, contends Collins in his book of 2024, we should mature into wisdom.
Wisdom includes the understanding and incorporation of a moral framework. But it goes even further. When it’s working, wisdom can lead to sober judgment about how to discern truth, and what decision to make when the path is not clear. It includes experience, common sense, and insight.14
Conclusion
Thanks to the ISSR initiative in which Fraser Watts provides an update on those working on science and religion, I have taken the opportunity to add a few selected items for updating the field of theology and science. This is by no means exhaustive. Only suggestive.
Here in Berkeley at CTNS we see ourselves as heirs to an earlier generation of pioneers such as Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, and Philip Hefner. Under the trailblazing leadership of Robert John Russell, we have invested ourselves mostly in theoretical matters such as tracking divine action in nature’s world. Even with this emphasis on the theoretical, we have still given considerable time and energy toward analyzing public issues of speculative and moral interest. Even matters of global urgency such as the ecological crisis.
At the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, we gladly mix together armchair speculation with public policy formulation.
Notes
1 This editorial is adapted and expanded from my Patheos blog post on public theology, “Working on Science and Religion: Update.”
2 See: “Hopes and Hazards of Artificial Intelligence: A CTNS Research Brief,” https://www.ctns.org/publications/ctns-briefs.
3 Sunday Akande and Oluwatobi Ife-Adeldiran, “AI in African Liberation,” in The Promise and Peril of AI and IA, ed. Ted Peters (Adelaide: ATF, 2025), 289–302, at 289.
4 Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), v.
5 Fraser Watts, A Plea for Embodied Spirituality: The Role of the Body in Religion (London: SCM Press, 2021).
6 Hermina Nedelsecu, “Intelligence Amplification and the Inner Life of the Soul,” in The Promise and Peril of AI and IA, ed. Ted Peters (Adelaide: ATF, 2025), 361–372, at 368.
7 Ibid., 369.
8 Herman Bondi (1919–2005) coined the term Copernican Principle to refer to the de-centering of Planet Earth and the demotion of the human race to marginal status in a giant universe. Herman Bondi, Cosmology (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 13.
9 Margaret Boone Rappaport, Christopher Corbally and Konrad Szocik, “Interstellar Ethics and the Goldilocks Evolutionary Sequence: Can We Expect ETI to be Moral?” in Astrobiology: Science, Ethics, and Publica Policy, eds. Octavio A. Chon-Torres, Ted Peters, Joseph Seckbach and Russell Gordon (Singapore: Wiley Scrivener, 2021), 335–356k, at 353.
10 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Deep Incarnation: Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology,” Toronto Journal of Theology 26:2 (Fall 2010): 173–187, at 176, Gregersen’s italics.
11 Gaymon Bennett, Martinez J. Hewlett, Ted Peters, and Robert John Russell, eds., The Evolution of Evil (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008).
12 Jakob Wolf, “AT Home in the Universe?” in Bodies Inhabiting the World: Scandinavian Creation Theology and the Question of Home, eds. Derek R. Nelson, Niels Henrik Gregersen and Bengt Kristensson Uggla (Lanham MD: Lexington, 2024), 163–176, at 172.
13 Ibid., 173.
14 Francis S. Collins, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2024), 7.