The question of whether theology is a ‘science’ has a history.Footnote ¹ Augustine, as Pannenberg,Footnote ² PolanyiFootnote ³ and Torrance all note, had categorised theology as sapientia, in rather sharp distinction from scientia, with important consequences for both theology and science for over a millennium. For Barth, the ‘scientific’ methods of his liberal Protestant teachers had both ensnared theology in a Procrustean Enlightenment bed,Footnote ⁴ and robbed it of its proper object.Footnote ⁵ His famous debate with ScholzFootnote ⁶ demonstrated that, if being scientific meant adhering to criteria too tightly implicated within a naturalistic and positivist schema derived from the pre-eminence of natural science, then theology had no choice but to reject such a predicate. Though Barth himself wished to designate theology a ‘science’Footnote ⁷ he understood that within the contemporary climate such a designation could only be obtained upon revisiting the content of the designation itself, and working with a minimal preconception of what was meant by ‘science’.Footnote ⁸ His reluctance therefore to engage with natural science in any depthFootnote ⁹ is often perhaps unfairly seen as a nostalgic attempt to put the modernist genie back into the bottle – unfair because it can equally well be seen as a prescient attempt to push through and past accepted notions, towards the foothills of post-modernism.Footnote ¹⁰ In particular, those on both sides who have worked within the ‘conflict’ hypothesis – conflict between the content of natural science and theological science – have tended to work uncritically with received understandings of the nature of science, at which level Barth cannot properly be drawn as friend or foe.

Barth's Scottish interpreter, Thomas Forsyth Torrance, thought that Barth's reluctance to travel down the road of engagement with natural scienceFootnote ¹¹ was motivated by errant dualistic notions within both natural science and, at the time, a nascent philosophy of science which was strongly positivist. Torrance's ambitious claim is that, since Barth, both natural science itself and the philosophy of science have made progress by re-examining and jettisoning simple dualisms, with the result that the natural science which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century was far more conducive to theological engagement.Footnote ¹² Torrance was blessed with the contacts and intellectual endowments which allowed him to engage deeply with natural science, a task which many other theologians have often shied away from. In particular, his analysis of epistemic commitments implicit within the holistic and unitary framework of Einstein's general relativity theory, as well as indeterminant features of quantum theory and the incompleteness of the Gödelian theorems, allow him to posit a unitary conception of ‘science’ which develops Barth's, founded around the conception of objectivity.Footnote ¹³ Such objectivity is again to be sharply distinguished from a dualistic ‘objectivism’ inherited by natural science, which posited an absolute Cartesian disjunction between object and subject, observed and observer.Footnote ¹⁴ Torrance's ‘new’ objectivity is based around developments in the philosophy of science, and in particular Michael Polanyi's conception of all knowledge as ‘personal knowledge’.Footnote ¹⁵

Whilst popular and non-expert opinion may lag behind, it is now a commonplace that the philosophy of science has ditched a discredited logical positivism and offers a nuanced variety of points of view, including those most closely associated with Torrance. However, the current cultural milieu offers fresh challenges in the form of post-modernism. It is not possible here to offer a definition or describe the detailed features of post-modernism – but it clearly represents a challenge to any ‘meta-narrative’ possessing the holistic and universalising tendencies of Torrance and Polanyi. Post-modernists, often lacking the necessary competencies, have often either bracketed out natural science from their hermeneutic of suspicion or applied such a hermeneutic in a clumsy manner.Footnote ¹⁶ Within the philosophy of science itself, most have seen post-modernism as something which natural science needs to be defended from, though often incorporating, taming and neutralising its unmasking of bourgeois networks of power. The one notable philosopher of science who embraced post-modernism and demanded that primarily it was society which needed defending from science was Paul Feyerabend.Footnote ¹⁷ Before we consider the salient features of Feyerabend's work we need first to understand the position he holds within the philosophy of science and second, how he is a useful challenge test to Torrance, in relation to the question of the scientific status of theology.

Like Torrance vis-à-vis Barth, Feyerabend was initially known as a pupil of Popper, though in his subsequent career he became Popper's enfant terrible, an avowed opponent of Popperianism in all its forms, often launching highly ad hominem attacks.Footnote ¹⁸ Whilst he shared with Popper, Polanyi, Lakatos and Kuhn a more elastic conception of science than the previous generation of logical positivists, his end-point was radically different. His basic charge against this cohort is timidity: for whilst they have, at a technical philosophical level, exposed the ambiguities and contradictions inherent within received notions of science, they have done so in order to defend science from misunderstanding and from imposters seeking to gain an advantage, whereas those ambiguities and contradictions in fact demand boldness in bringing the edifice of ‘science’ crashing down. His first and landmark book, Against Method, appeared in three distinct editions and entered the philosophy of science scene like ‘a stink bomb’.Footnote ¹⁹ In it Feyerabend argued that there was essentially no such thing as ‘the scientific method’, and exercised a hermeneutic of suspicion against not only such a method, but also notions of ‘rationality’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘truth’ – a critique that was to continue in subsequent publications where he applied the self-description ‘epistemological anarchist’.Footnote ²⁰ It has been difficult for commentators to know how seriously to take Feyerabend. His prose is witty, provocative and colourful – often championing unlikely and sometimes unpleasant causes. As his attack ridicules notions such as consistency, rigorousness and carefulness, he freely admits to being none of these things.Footnote ²¹ He always delights in pricking the pomposity of those he regards as taking themselves too seriously. Yet there is a seriousness and moral earnestness at the core of Feyerabend's project which demands proper consideration and meant that he was easily hurt by attacks on his work. Whilst some rationalists like Lakatos shared the joke with Feyerabend, and others like Kuhn shared concepts, the overall reaction to such anarchy was profoundly negative.Footnote ²² However, this rejection was met with an equally enthusiastic taking up of Feyerabend by post-modern commentators beyond the confines of the philosophy of science communityFootnote ²³ – for them he was to be the agent on the inside of the scientific community, subverting any imperialistic pretensions within it.

Second, therefore, this is why Feyerabend is a suitable dialogue partner for Torrance. Like Torrance his intellectual pedigree allowed him deeply to analyse natural science and to view it from the ‘inside’; like Torrance he was a fierce critic of positivistic notions of science; like Torrance he thought that most definitions of the ‘scientific’ were too narrow and too fashioned by natural science, particularly physics. However, his iconoclastic bearing towards all coherent formulations of ‘the scientific’ entails that he also rejects Torrance's reconstructed notions of objectivity and rationality and therefore provides a post-modern critique of Torrance. Time has shown Torrance's and others’ protest against narrow positivistic conceptions of science to have been correct, but the subsequent question is whether Torrance's revised conception can stand up to Feyerabend's post-modern anarchist onslaught.

In attempting to describe Torrance's understanding of ‘the scientific’ one immediately comes up against the ‘holism’Footnote ²⁴ of his schema, in that it can only be artificially distilled from its theological commitments. We cannot by way of a prolegomena describe Torrance's conception of the scientific in non-theological terms, and then demonstrate that his own theology meets such criteria – his understanding of the scientific quest is shot through with implicit theological concerns. For the intelligibility, the logos, of the material cosmos is gifted by the Logos of God in his act of creation, and that possibility is only actualised through grace.Footnote ²⁵ The possibility of this correspondence between the material world and our description of it leads Torrance to a conception of science which is strongly if critically realist.Footnote ²⁶ However, there is no algorithmic correspondence via the analogia entis between God and creation, for God in his transcendence has gifted creation its own subjective and independent rationality. Only by disciplined and faithful work within natural science can that correspondence be made actual, so that, to use McGrath's term, natural science is seen as ancilla theologiae. Footnote ²⁷

Like Feyerabend, Torrance is sceptical of too maximal an account of scientia generalis, preferring to work with minimal preconceptions with regard to scientific method – if method is only understood in this sense then Torrance too is ‘against method’. However Torrance agrees with Polanyi that method must be developed within each scientia speciales. Footnote ²⁸ Good scientific method for Torrance is fundamentally characterised by its ‘devotion to its proper object’Footnote ²⁹ – this is his version of objectivity, and the religious resonances of ‘devotion’ are anything but accidental or incidental. Good scientific method is determined posterior to an encounter, in accordance with the nature of the object revealed within that unfolding encounter (kata physin Footnote ³⁰), it is an ‘after-thought’ (nachdenken Footnote ³¹).

With regard to the character of theological science, we cannot abstract its methods a priori, but must allow its proper methods to be revealed in faithfulness to its object – God. Here immediately we encounter a problem, for this ‘object’ can never be coerced into being an object for our observation, but remains at all times Lord over us – God's subjectivity is ultimate, and our own subjectivity is revealed as derivative and relative.Footnote ³² Our proper bearing towards such an object is inevitably shifted from observer to worshipper. However this, according to Torrance's approach, is not necessarily unscientific – according to the nature of the object so will our description be inherently doxological. Furthermore as God himself is the ultimate source of our subjectivity, he will reveal himself as Person to personsFootnote ³³ – Deus loquentis persona – and the dynamic of our discovery of knowledge of God will be properly personal in both directions. However, according to the old Cartesian model of objectivity, such knowledge is judged disjunctively and pejoratively ‘subjective’. Following Kierkegaard at this point,Footnote ³⁴ Torrance maintains that objective personal knowledge is not simply possible but absolutely necessary. It is objective in that we attempt to minimise the influence of ‘unwarranted subjective features’ and seek to penetrate faithfully to the inherent nature of our object, but it ‘has a personal coefficient’,Footnote ³⁵ in that it is known by us as persons, and must be rendered in a form intelligible and appropriate to human knowing.

Thus, at one point in history, by his own will, does God become a personal object – Jesus Christ – wherein our inability to reach God by our own efforts is transcended by his own graceful condescension,Footnote ³⁶ and divine knowledge is accommodated to human language by an act of grace. Thus the divinity of Christ ensures a correspondence between the lalia of Jesus Christ and the Logos of God.Footnote ³⁷ Certainly such lalia does not become ‘super human’, it does not magically escape from its context and language game, but a correspondence, to be known with the aid of critical scholarship, is posited. Thus Torrance's (and as so often, but we shall omit saying it every time, here Torrance follows Barth's example) theological science becomes enmeshed with historical science and hermeneutics. The tools of these sciences are integral to the task of theological science but cannot dictate a priori results. The sciences operate in a mutually dependent many-body-problem in which the methods of each science inform those of others, but must not dictate them. For the theological scientist, history, especially the history of Jesus Christ, is a theological business, and therefore we cannot attempt to understand Jesus Christ within and without his context by stripping away theological concerns to reveal either comforting timeless truths or plain historical facts.

We are therefore beginning to see in this enmeshed holistic approach that both general and special theological scientific method come under the influence of theological commitments, just as theology cannot divorce itself from the embodied correlates of historical science and textual analysis. Barth and Torrance were working within a particular theological context and paradigm and, though we cannot hope to explicate that here, we may point out how certain features of that paradigm affect scientific method – at the same time being mindful of this spiralling and mutually dependent relation in which a change in one is always met by a corresponding change in the other. For Torrance, theological science, with its primarily christological focus is a posterior and abductive activity. God has revealed himself in various events of human history, in his election of the Israelite nation, and decisively in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. These events are narrated to us by the witness of the scriptures, and it is in the hearing of this witness by the witnessing community that the address of the Word of God is heard. Neither Barth nor Torrance are interested in questions of biblical inerrancyFootnote ³⁸ – the scriptures are clearly the (divinely inspired certainly) human record of witness to revelation, but even so we must submit to a ‘bondage to Scripture’.Footnote ³⁹ This is however no naïve bibliolatry, but cuts to the heart of any quest for the historical Jesus – first, second or third – for in any such quest, if we are, in preference to the Gospels, to turn to sources behind (constructed) or beyond those Gospels we are inevitably involved in a theological critique of the canon often accompanied by historical and theological presuppositions – not that such a critique is necessarily inappropriate or historically inefficacious, but we must first be aware and accountable for what we are doing, and second not replace the face in the well of Nicaea with our own faces. This rich account of the perichoretic relation of church, theology and canon which we find in Barth and Torrance results in an account of scripture which places it in an intimate spiral of interpretation, whereby it becomes a necessary but not sufficient criterion of theological knowledge. In Feyerabend's critique such a spiral is made suspect by the Enlightenment's foundational preference for linear epistemic structures, and its accompanying horror of circular reasoning. However that knee-jerk prejudice is the Enlightenment's problem, and Barth's approach is able to distinguish more carefully between ‘Circulus veritatis Dei’ and ‘circulus vitiosus’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Certainly there are questions to be asked here. Is the circle too tightly drawn? Does not the importance of the scriptures as witness elevate it over other witnesses to revelation – the continued witness of the church, the charismatic gifts of the SpiritFootnote ⁴¹ – so that, to be blunt, rather naked Calvinistic prejudices are on display? But we cannot tarry longer than simply to note such questions here.

We here arrive at an important analogy between theological and natural science. For Torrance the biblical material is analogous to the data of natural science, revelation is analogous to discovery,Footnote ⁴² and dogmatic theology is the theoretical and systemising reflection on that data.Footnote ⁴³ Though Moore might point out that there is also an important disanalogy here,Footnote ⁴⁴ I think his criticism is unfounded, because Torrance's guiding principle of ‘faithfulness to object’ implies that an abductive science concerned with a personal object will, by necessity, be dealing with unrepeatable data with different characteristics than the observables of natural science – analogies by their nature have discontinuities, but in this case they are not strong enough to break it. What is far more concerning is that the data of theological science, being so firmly set within its ‘theological circle’, are so thoroughly theory-infected that it offends deeply the sensibilities of all philosophers of science, most of all those who count themselves as positivists.

It is here that Feyerabend's critique mounts its stand. There is not space for a full account of Feyerabend's thought here.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, it is easy to fall either side of a Feyerabendian line – either to produce an account of his thought which is deductively programmatic in precisely the sense which he seeks to subvert, or conversely to see nothing but anarchy and lack of cohesion in his ideas. Instead we prefer Feyerabend's own analogy of a collage,Footnote ⁴⁶ in which (as in archaic styles of art) elements sit in non-relational proximity.

Logical positivism and falsificationism had both failed because both were dependent upon a water-tight division between observation and theoretical statements. This ‘theory-infection’ – a simple malady in need of rationalist therapy for others – is for Feyerabend a deadly cancer within nearly all natural science. Theory does not simply infect observation, it (Feyerabend rather lazily slips into saying) determines it.Footnote ⁴⁷ Therefore the ‘true’ scientist – a role which for Feyerabend must always retain its revolutionary and subversive character – is the one producing novel theories against the (theory-infected) empirical evidence – a counter-inductive theoretical pluralism which resists every demand of empirical cumulativism. Theories, according to Feyerabend, may therefore be ‘incommensurable’ because there is no theory-neutral observation language in which they can be decisively assessed. The crucial question for Feyerabend's incommensurability thesis is whether such theories can be compared – they must be, on the one hand comparable (if not, why not just accept both?), but at the same time such comparison must be ultimately incapable of pellucid exposition (or they have ceased to be incommensurable). Furthermore (as Torrance would agree) no universal abstract a priori rationality or scientific method is possible, for each is implicated within and relative to its theoretical framework. However, here Feyerabend makes his leap into the abyss – being Against Method and saying Farewell to Reason, he jumps into a relativism and voluntarism which is philosophically disreputable. Here commentators find Feyerabend at his most tricksyFootnote ⁴⁸ – he knows he has crossed a line, and after crossing it draws back, therefore at one stage suppressing his own objections to relativism and at another suppressing that suppression. It is typical of Feyerabend's provocative style that he avoids the challenge of defining and arguing for a thoroughgoing relativism – aware of such inner contradictions, HackingFootnote ⁴⁹ enumerates a typology of thirteen different qualifying adjectives which abut ‘relativism’ in the Feyerabendian canon. However relativism as a philosophical position is simply a stepping stone for Feyerabend to change tack to a sociology of knowledge agenda which characterises his later works. His debunking of method, rationality, objectivity and science, led, by way of a relativism which demurs from judging traditions on epistemic grounds, therefore to insisting that we must judge ‘traditions’ (latterly Feyerabend's favoured term) on ethical grounds. Here we do find a Feyerabendian programme – however not one related to epistemology, but a quite definite liberal social agenda, with a strong Millsian flavour.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is no coincidence that Feyerabend's (by far) most used analogy for what science has become is a ‘church’Footnote ⁵¹ – the ‘church’ as authority figure and guardian of the sacred deposit of truth. Science, according to Feyerabend, has lost its revolutionary zeal (a good description of Feyerabend's anarchy is that he is a Kuhnian who prefers revolutionary over normal science) and become ‘big business’.Footnote ⁵² It is engaged in a subtle campaign of suppression of other traditions, in order to defend its vested interests of money and prestige – Feyerabend can be forceful, even abusive, here.Footnote ⁵³ In claiming to found its theories on theory-neutral observation, observation which is in fact grossly theory-infected, it has, like all good totalitarian regimes, made a play at taking out a monopoly on truth. Of course it appears objective and rational, says Feyerabend, because it has staked out beforehand what those terms mean. It is easy to discredit incommensurable theories by using methods developed within the assumptions of the ruling paradigm. The true scientist will possess the quality of ‘tenacity’ (as per Galileo – Against Method in its original edition is entirely predicated upon a revisionist view of Galileo) in holding to unlikely and counter-intuitive theories.

In terms of the sociology of science Feyerabend is therefore rightly seen as heralding some of the most attractive features of a liberal post-modern approach – for instance in his championing of alternative medicine.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, philosophers of science have generally maintained that there is no real connection between his epistemic and his sociological viewpoints (unless one, for instance, takes the Kuhnian view that the only meaningful truth criteria is a show of hands). It is, for instance, perfectly consistent to maintain that in a liberal democracy – as long as they do not harm or infringe the freedom of others – any viewpoint has the right to be heard, and indeed with a certain critical mass to be rewarded with public monies – at the same time remaining absolutely sceptical about the epistemic merit of that viewpoint.

Feyerabend's hermeneutic of suspicion would therefore appear to be a potent post-modern weapon to aim at Torrance's theological science. Theology's data is massively, necessarily, even exultantly theory-infected. Furthermore, prior commitments of the most sensitive sociological nature – matters of faith, power, authority and money – are clearly absolutely rife within all theological discussion. After all, though it may be historically doubtful, there can scarcely be a more flagrant example of the intrusion of political factors in scientific debate than the Eusebian tradition that Constantine himself suggested the use of the term homoousios. Footnote ⁵⁵

My conclusion is that ultimately, however, Feyerabend's challenge fails – but not without posing illuminating and often instructive questions to theological science.

First, as I have already hinted, Feyerabend's coalescence of epistemic and sociological concerns prompts a prescription (anarchy) that is too severe for the malady in question. The medical metaphor is not incidental – Feyerabend quite rightly points out that his prescription was for anarchy as a ‘medicine’Footnote ⁵⁶ – something you take for a certain time to restore an imbalance to equilibrium. Those post-modernists who have become addicted and turned it into doctor's tonic are not faithful to Feyerabend. As ThisletonFootnote ⁵⁷ points out, suspicion as a tool is useful, suspicion as a worldview is self-refuting. Moderate philosophers of science, like Polanyi, maintain that the therapy demanded by Feyerabend's hermeneutic of suspicion is nothing more radical than carefulness and humility. It is quite proper to ask the scientist, at every point, to consider whether he or she might not be influenced by vested interests and inherited ways of thinking – and to derive strategies to compensate (double-blind trials for instance) – it is quite another to encourage them to join the outlaws. Feyerabend's response would be an idea which does have genuine utility – that of natural interpretations.Footnote ⁵⁸ Natural interpretations are not biases but unexamined commitments and preconceptions which slip below the level of conscious reflection. TorranceFootnote ⁵⁹ uses a similar idea in consideration of various antithetic dualisms – a ‘neo-Platonic inheritance’ – which lay dormant and passed unnoticed through various paradigm changes within natural and theological science over millennia, until being they are unveiled in a crisis leading to a paradigm shift, such as that which faced Newtonian science. The audaciousness of Torrance's claim is markedFootnote ⁶⁰ – it was Newton's ‘Arianism’ which pointed him in a certain direction, only to be corrected in the ‘religious’ outlook of MaxwellFootnote ⁶¹ and Einstein.

In general terms Feyerabend has an unhealthy taste for disjunctive and polarising ways of reasoning, often depending on one or two rather dubious examples (ironically rather like the falsificationist who determines one counter-example to be decisive!).Footnote ⁶² Very often he erects a strawman, demolishes it and ignores any mediating positions.Footnote ⁶³ For instance he sets up scientific method, and rationality, as being necessarily prior and universal. That is quite a simple strawman to knock down, as of course Torrance and many others do. However, quite why that entails Feyerabend's abandonment of method and rationality altogether is never made clear. Certainly one of the most attractive features of Feyerabend's rhetoric (for that is what it isFootnote ⁶⁴) is the breadth, diversity and number of examples (from art, music, psychology, linguistics, sociology as well as natural science) – but no such enumeration should blind us to the fact that plenty of others, including Torrance, provide mediating positions, in some detail and with great nuance and depth, where rationality and method are discovered in via. So too, as we have noted, Feyerabend moves from theory-laden to theory-determined data with little pause.

Another example of Feyerabend's likening for easy polarities is in his treatment of Wittgenstein. Feyerabend's hope of being Wittgenstein's pupil was frustrated by the latter's death, just as the former reached London.Footnote ⁶⁵ In Against Method, Feyerabend insists that it was discussing Wittgenstein's later philosophy with Elizabeth Anscombe which led to his developing his incommensurability thesis.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, Wittgenstein's instrumental theory of language, which Feyerabend claims as his inspiration, will not easily yield such a derivation, and Preston, with others, notes that Feyerabend simply overextends the theoryFootnote ⁶⁷ – in fact Wittgenstein's theories seem pace Feyerabend to rule out ‘hard’ incommensurability. In overextending the theory Feyerabend assumes that it is much the same as the strong conceptual relativist Sapir-Whorf theory. Without spelling out the details, Feyerabend implicitly takes the position that there are basically two options in linguistic philosophy – early Wittgenstein ‘picture language’ or late Wittgenstein ‘linguistic idealism’, even though the later Wittgenstein is not a linguistic idealist. Rather as MacDonald, WardFootnote ⁶⁸ and Kerr have sought to show, late Wittgenstein can be reconciled with Barthian theology. Though Torrance himself ‘condemns linguistic philosophy as a . . . superstitious veneration for ordinary language’, this too is, as Patterson says, to misrepresent Wittgenstein, being a ‘narrowness of Torrance's view of linguistic philosophy’.Footnote ⁶⁹ We therefore conclude that Feyerabend (in approval) and Torrance (in disapproval) both get Wittgenstein wrong. Ultimately Feyerabend colludes with the Enlightenment pejorative and disjunctive preference for foundational, deductive, inductive and linear reasoning, which relegates the spiralling yet still progressive patterns of hermeneutical thought, of which theological science is but one example, to the second division.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet even with the natural sciences the notion that scientists simply ‘deduce theories from the facts’ in anything like a mechanical manner has long since been superseded with more reflexive patterns.Footnote ⁷¹

Furthermore, whereas we likened Torrance's approach to a many-body problem, wherein he must keep various different balls in the air – to continue the analogy – in Feyerabend's approach various balls come crashing to the ground whilst he carries on, hoping that we have not noticed. Take for example realism. Torrance is a consistent critical realist. Feyerabend in his Popperian phase is a super-realist. He may employ a little local instrumentalism, but that does not imply a global instrumentalism, in fact it rather assumes a global realist backdrop. The incommensurability thesis only has teeth if we continue with a fairly robust form of realism. This thesis is a vital part of Feyerabend's later ‘anarchic’ phase, but by that time his super-realism is either downplayed, forgotten or abandoned. Whether Feyerabend does explicitly perform this volte-face remains a disputed issue.Footnote ⁷²

Perhaps Feyerabend's most serious error is in his use of his latterly preferred and rather unspecific term ‘tradition’. Traditions for Feyerabend are distinct and well-defined. They meet and encounter one another chiefly as rivals. When Western science is one of those ‘traditions’, its encounters are characterised by its imperialistic tendencies. Therefore Feyerabend wishes to encourage traditions to meet in ‘open’ rather than ‘closed’ exchanges, in which the ground rules of the encounter are not set out a priori. Footnote ⁷³ Ironically enough Feyerabend then sets out rules, indeed a method, by which such encounters should be conducted – the anthropological immersion method of Evans-Pritchard.Footnote ⁷⁴ Such a method assumes that the tradition under examination is suitably isolated, and Feyerabend gets into a rather horrible and entirely foreseeable muddle when he tries to commend such a method with regard to such unpleasant traditions as anti-SemitismFootnote ⁷⁵ (how are we good liberals to ‘immerse’ ourselves in such evil?). Specifically, Feyerabend's ecclesial metaphor can only ever imagine Christian theology encountering Western science within the ‘conflict’ hypothesis. Here the disjunctive choice, according to Feyerabend, is between ‘surrender monkeys’ such as BultmannFootnote ⁷⁶ and ‘Californian fundamentalists’Footnote ⁷⁷ – with neither of which Torrance (nor I) has much in common. The truth is that ‘traditions’ are not the solitary homogeneous monoliths which Feyerabend assumes. Certainly they can be, but they can also develop, mutate, syncretise, split, shift and absorb in manifoldly interesting ways. Put simply, ‘open exchanges’ can and do occur, even ones including natural science, and yet Feyerabend, for his own polemical reasons, chooses to ignore them. Whilst Feyerabend appeals for open exchanges he is too busy berating natural science for its rigging of such exchanges to imagine or identify those places where such an exchange occurs. I believe that, whilst not perfect, Torrance is at least attempting such an exchange,Footnote ⁷⁸ wherein the integrity of both natural and theological science is upheld.

Our conclusion is therefore that Torrance's theological science emerges from this challenge test as a strong candidate not only to resist older positivist notions of science, but also hardened against post-modern critiques.

Finally, however, we note those points at which Feyerabend's challenge does identify where further work needs to be done. First, only with a greater integration of dogmatic theology (historical theology) and church history than is attempted by Torrance can Feyerabend's hermeneutic of suspicion be rebutted. McGrath notesFootnote ⁷⁹ that Torrance's personal objective knowledge opens up fresh possibilities for a renewed integration of theology and spirituality, though again there is little actual progress in this direction within Torrance's corpus.Footnote ⁸⁰ Torrance's holism demands such a unified project, but it is understandable that, given the scale involved,Footnote ⁸¹ he can only point in the direction of travel. Torrance's largely ideational account of theological science reflects a more widespread division between these disciplines, which particular theologies, such as liberation theology, seek to overcome. Although Feyerabend's praise for liberation theology is purely on the criterion of praxis, it is surely no coincidence that it seeks to expose relations of power and inequality which have informed, consciously or unconsciously, the formation of Christian doctrine. Here Feyerabend does point to further work which theological science needs to do, and his critique gains real purchase.

Second, Feyerabend's Kuhnian shift towards historicalism highlights the fact that, in trying to exposit a ‘classic’ Christian tradition (analogous to ‘good science’), Torrance commits himself to various ‘distillations’Footnote ⁸² of historical theology. These distillations are at times both rather idiosyncratic, and it is also unclear whether such distillations are describing (something which is self-evidently ‘good science’, and therefore which our criterion of ‘classic’Footnote ⁸³ must conform with) or prescribing (something which deserves to be part of the classic tradition, because it has met those prior criteria of ‘good science’).

Third, whilst Torrance succeeds in showing how theology and natural science might coexist and cohere within a unitary epistemological framework, he does not succeed in showing that natural science has or will pay any particular attention to or benefit from the findings of theology.Footnote ⁸⁴ Subsequently, his almost totally uncritical appraisal of recent developments in natural science, particularly within modern physics, coupled to his contingent yet deep alliance between theology and natural science, means that theology appears more or less to have married the present physical paradigm: precisely the charge he levels at earlier attempts to force theology and natural science to the altar.Footnote ⁸⁵ The absence of any sense of tension between natural and theological science implies that theological science has conformed to natural science once again, and there is no real attempt to show how theology might inform or transform the current paradigms of natural science. This ‘all good news’ appraisal of contemporary developments in natural science may lead us to suspect with Feyerabend that Torrance is simply and unwittingly collaborating with Western science's imperialistic habit. Weightman's charge, ‘No less than Rudolf Bultmann (or Thomas Aquinas), Torrance has chosen to appropriate philosophy to help illuminate Christian faith’,Footnote ⁸⁶ is not justified, but the suspicion is that to outsiders this cohabitation looks too much like a marriage of convenience.