“Religion and science” without symmetry, plausibility, and harmony

Intellectual and religious problems in religion and science are traced back to three assumptions: symmetry between the two enterprises, concentration on explanatory plausibility, and the assumption of harmony or consonance. In contrast, it is argued that by acknowledging the (re)constructive nature of our religious life in an imaginative and technological culture, consonance becomes a constructive project rather than a descriptive claim. Plausibility is served better; it is claimed, by exploring religious options in relation to successes and limitations of a naturalistic understanding of the world than by advocating religious understanding as an alternative to such a naturalistic one. And the asymmetry of religion and science can be addressed fruitfully by considering carefully the character of theologies as ways of holding together, in tension perhaps, a cosmology and an axiology.