The sheer success and power of the scientific enterprise over the last three hundred years are without precedent in human history, as we have seen. This raises the obvious question and temptation. Is the success of science a model for all other human knowledge? Should we not make the scientific way of knowing the only way of knowing? The very success of science tempts us to overdo it, to ignore the limits of science.

However, we need to be cautious about prematurely drawing such limits. Science's success in explaining much of what may be thought to be beyond it should make us reluctant to draw a line before the matter has been investigated. Who can say today what it is we will know tomorrow?

(i) The limits of human decisions and history

A limit to science close at hand is simply human action and thought. Not that there is a bit of human beings that is not open to scientific investigation. Despite continuing arguments for a non-physical mind or soul, I think we need to acknowledge the success of the cognitive sciences and neuroscience which continue to promise a great deal of extra-rich understanding of human beings as physical organisms. I do not think we have even begun to plumb some of the rich depths that will be available in the next years through the scientific study of the structures and workings of the human brain.
The point is that science is limited in explaining human decisions and history in principle. That is, human decisions and what flow from them, human actions, are not reducible to simply descriptions of the application of physical laws and processes despite the possibility of significant understanding of so much of human nature and behaviour. For example, in science even this meeting cannot be explained. Science may well be able to explain a great deal of why we are who we are and how we got here, I don't mean to a meeting, but as human beings. But that the nature of my address and conversation cannot simply be explained in scientific terms. Rather we explain them in terms of certain thoughts and reasons. So the first limit of science is that there are realms of explanation " we say with humans but at some point it may also apply to animals " which science cannot in principle explain. Here we need history or other such disciplines.

(ii) The limits of actual miracles like the resurrection of Jesus

The Christian gospel makes claims which clearly show the limits of science. If Christ was raised from the dead, then on any terms such an event is without scientific explanation. In fact one could say that from a scientific point of view it's a claim that the impossible has happened. Here, truly, "then a miracle occurs".

We need to notice that such a claim of a resurrection from the dead is not incidental to the Christian faith but at the very heart of it. But so is the claim that the resurrection is not scientifically explicable. In fact, one way to overturn the Christian faith would be to show that the resurrection was a "natural" event. NT Wright in his magisterial The Resurrection of the Son of God draws our attention to the fact that the extraordinary nature of the resurrection is indeed part of its meaning:

the fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief. The early Christians insisted that what happened to Jesus was precisely something new; it was, indeed, the start of a whole new mode of existence, a new creation. The fact that Jesus' resurrection was, and remains, without analogy is not an objection to the early Christian claim. It is part of the claim itself. (2003 p. 712)

The same can be said of other genuine miracles. By miracle here I am talking not about events in which the remarkable timing of a natural event has significance, like possibly the wind blowing back the Red Sea in Exodus 15. I am rather talking about events which, on any knowledge of science, are frankly inexplicable and impossible, events like the multiplication of five loaves and two fishes to feed five thousand men, the instantaneous cure of diseases and so on.

Greater knowledge of science doesn't make such events less probable because on any understanding the events are, frankly, impossible. It is true that greater knowledge of science may make us understand something of the immensity of the impossibility, if I can use that phrase. The thought of a dead body after three days coming back to life is made more and more wondrous to us now that we know more and more about the actual deep structures of human life and the nature of decay.

A fatal mistake amongst Christians is to try to attempt to make the Christian faith believable or defensible within the limits imposed by science. This enterprise, which one still finds occasionally today, must by its very nature destroy the very heart of the gospel. If there is no truth other than scientific truth and if science is to define all that is real, then the Christian faith would be false.

One still finds proponents of the view that science alone is the source of our knowledge and therefore the Christian faith cannot be true. I recently debated one such man, Dr Peter Slezak of the University of Technology, Sydney. Dr Slezak rather helpfully shows that once you allow any chink in the belief that science alone explains reality, then you are permitted to have a full recourse to miracles. This occurred in his review some years ago of Paul Davies' book The Mind of God (1996). Davies, you may remember, does not believe that miracles can occur, but is prepared to allow that somehow behind science there is a supernatural mind or transcendent cause. Slezak pounces upon the inconsistency.

But one divine intervention more or less should make no difference. The possibility of an intelligent creation is no more consistent with the principles of science than the more mundane suspensions of the laws of nature. By accepting the possibility of "metaphysical' events transcending what can be known by science (p. 171), Davies has renounced the very principled intellectual grounds to which he appeals for rejecting miracles. Although Davies clearly prefers a highly attenuated notion of intelligent purpose, being just a little bit theological is like being a little bit pregnant. In the end, the difference between Professor Davies and the Jesuit priest is the difference between one big miracle and lots of little ones - a matter of minor theological disputation and who gets to wear the cassock. For a God who can make the whole universe in a "Big Bang', the odd resurrection should be child's play. (p. 207)

Indeed, though "child's play' is of course a polemical belittling of the great act of God beginning the new created order.

(iii) The limit of science itself

Surprisingly the very existence of science itself is inexplicable by science - though perhaps not so surprising, as Gödel's Theorem reminds us no system is self-explanatory. Here I have in mind not just the human enterprise of science but the very thing that science discovers. Richard Swinburne writes

So there is our universe. It is characterised by vast, all-pervasive temporal order, the conformity of nature to formula, recorded in scientific laws formulated by humans. It started off in such a way (or through eternity has been characterised by such features) as to lead to the evolution of animals and humans. These phenomena are clearly "too big' for science. They are where science stops. They constitute the framework of science itself.

Swinburne not unnaturally believes that this limit does give cause to hold the existence of God.

I have argued that it is not a rational conclusion to suppose that explanation stops where science does, and so we should look for a personal explanation of the existence, conformity to law, and evolutionary potential of the universe. " I am not postulating a "God of the Gaps" merely to explain things which science has not yet explained. I am postulating a God to explain what science explains; I do not deny that science explains, but I postulate God to explain why science explains. The very success of science in showing us how deeply orderly the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing there is a deeper cause of that order. (1997 p. 68)

Pope Benedict in his recent address to the University of Regensburg which caused the "outrage" among some Muslims concluded his discussion of science and faith with the observation that science cannot end the question of why.

Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought—to philosophy and theology. (2006)

I entirely agree that, as astoundingly fruitful as the scientific enterprise continues to be, it points beyond itself. We are talking of any obvious, or even simply objective "evidence' for God. But this limit to science is a "signal of transcendence'.

(iv) The Intelligent Design issue

Intelligent Design is really part of the great argument about where science ends. Science by its nature assumes natural ordering and workings. As I understand it, the Intelligent Design argument is that there are some existing processes, particularly biological ones, whose origin cannot be accounted for scientifically because of their undue complexity. The recent edition of the Briefing nicely shows the debate in such terms. The proponent William Dembski makes a big claim for the empirical verifiability of examples of Intelligent Design.

Only intelligent causes adequately explain the complex, informational-rich structures of biology, and that these causes are empirically detectable. To say that they are empirically detectable is to say that there exist well-defined methods that, based on observable features of the world, can reliably distinguish intelligent causes from undirected natural causes. Many special sciences have already developed such methods for drawing this distinction- notably forensic science, cryptology, archaeology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Essential to these methods is the ability to eliminate chance and necessity. (2006 p. 14)

It is not my place here to draw attention to the problems in the analogy of the methods of recognising design in individual human artefacts compared to being able to recognise it in living beings in the natural world. Later Dembski identifies these "empirically detectable" causes through finding cases of irreducible complexity, where no one part of an organism can be removed without the entire basic function failing. Here it is that we have presumably a "then a miracle occurs" moment as science cannot explain the organism. But how do we know that it can't explain this organism in question? Darrel Falk, a Christian critic of Intelligent Design, suggests that we need to be more patient than letting our present lack of knowledge set the standard.

Irreducible complexities are for the most part gaps in our knowledge. Obviously we don't have the answers to all the questions. That's what science is all about - finding things we don't understand and then doing experiments to try to understand them. The fact is, increasingly gaps are being filled. (2006 p.18)

I find Falk's arguments more convincing. Science has it limits. On that we are agreed, mostly. But where they are is still an open question.

Miracles: how we interpret the Bible

As miracles like the Virgin Birth are impossible to science, the question is whether or not we can accept them and other biblical miracles as a reality in a world as science understands it. This is the question of the limitation of science I have just mentioned.
The problem of science and the Bible is another question from the question of the miraculous. The problems typically arise when the Bible descriptions of the ordinary world seem to be at significant variance to that which is taught by modern science. For example, according to Psalm 93, "God has established the world: it can never be moved" (v. 1 NRSV). In Revelation 7:11, the earth has four corners and also "foundations' (Job 38:4 NRSV). According to Genesis 1, there is a firmament to keep the waters above it from those below and in which are the great lights and the stars. As descriptions of the world as we now know it to be, these are simply false. Darrel R Falk sees that the short age of the earth and the quick appearance of the varied rich forms of life on it, as seem to be asserted by Scripture, can only be defended as statements of fact at a great cost. In the face of overwhelming scientific evidence for the age and size of the universe and the gradual appearance of life,  the kind of moves needed for such a defence would be advocating "a view, that carried to its natural conclusion, leads to the position that the sciences of astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, geology and biology are fundamentally wrong" (2004 p. 24). The contrast between the surface biblical view and contemporary science is such that if, in fact, the earth was not old and life did not so gradually develop, it would be a catastrophic blow to the disciplines themselves. Quite a cost. What is the way forward?

One of the key assumptions in my approach to the question is that God does not teach what is false, and therefore the Bible, as the word of God, will not teach what is false. I think we can be certain that if the most basic observation tools or the most well-supported conclusions of science say that there is no water above the sky, that the earth does move, that it is very old and that life forms appeared gradually over a great deal of time, where the Bible appears to teach otherwise or to suggest otherwise, this cannot be what God is teaching. We have to change our interpretation of what God is saying to us in Scripture.

This may sound a somewhat circular way to interpret the Bible but what other beginning point can the evangelical Christian take? It is much more certain that our interpretation of Scripture is open to question than the whole foundations of the entire discipline of modern science are faulty. So we have to struggle with reading Scripture differently than we may have first thought.

There are ways, therefore, in which science does help us to interpret what is in the Bible. In fact, this has always been so. When the Bible describes Absalom mounting on his mule (2 Samuel 18.9) we don't have any way of knowing what a "mule' is simply by reading the rest of the Bible, except that it's something that you mount on and that it eats, but you simply have to go out and look around and find animals that are called this, in other words, by natural observation. It's the same with all the references to place. The Bible is not a contained, enclosed universe but needs other knowledge outside of it to understand it. We therefore shouldn't be shocked to find that science actually does help us to understand the Bible in a more substantial way than simply telling us what animals are.

Science helps us to discern literary types.

Science can help us identify what kind of literature we are dealing with. This is a point made with some force by Darrel Falk. His book Coming to Peace with Science (2004) is an argument that since Genesis may or may not be metaphorical and we can't determine decisively from the text which it is, looking at the world of science can help us decide what kind of literature it is. The same may be so in other texts: because we know that the world is not based on water or foundations, for example, one might be able to say this is a metaphorical or mythical description.

God vs man's teaching
Another way to proceed is to make a proper distinction between human and divine teaching. For example in his book Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks, Nicholas Wolterstorff discusses the issue of whether or not the psalmist's assertion in the opening verses of Psalm 93 that the earth cannot be moved is also an assertion that God makes (1995 p. 209ff). Wolterstorff makes a distinction between the main point of the passage which is attributed to God and the human author's particular way of making or developing that point. This is a move that Christians make whether they believe that the human authors of Scripture have erred (non- inerrancy) or were preserved from erring (inerrancy). This may make people feel a little nervous, but as Wolterstorff points out, whether you hold the Bible as with or without error, people do still read back into the Bible from their knowledge outside.

Some readers will say that although the human author asserted the what we now know to be false geocentric claim, God is not making that claim. This is my own position. Others, in order to preserve the inerrancy of the human author, will assert that the psalmist was speaking metaphorically or as it merely looks, and not literally asserting the immovability of the earth. However, asks Wolterstorff, on what do they base this claim?

Well, they don't base their conclusion on extensive research into the thought-patterns of ancient Hebrews. They haven't discovered a pocket of avant-garde solar-centrists among the ancient Hebrews, of which the psalmist was a member, on the basis of which knowledge they conclude that he must have been speaking metaphorically when he said the earth shall never be moved [. . .] Instead, their rejection of the literal interpretation is motivated by their conviction that if the author had been speaking literally, he would have said what is false. Since, on their view, biblical writers don't speak falsehoods, it just follows that the literal interpretation must be discarded. (pp. 228-29)

So either way scientific knowledge forces us to read the Bible differently, and more truthfully.

The one warning we need to heed is that scientific knowledge itself is provisional and incomplete, and therefore care and patience are needed in using it to assist us understand Scripture. There is nothing more pointless than defending a reading of Scripture that is built on outdated science, which some of the opposition to Galileo may well have been.

Science helps clarify old assumptions in the models we import to Scripture.

Science also helps us understand more clearly our models of God. One of the troubles with the words "Intelligent Design" is that they import the language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century engineering into descriptions of how God made the world. It is a kind of Isambard Kingdom Brunel on a grand scale, drawing up plans and designing a machine, the universe. Modern science suggests that this may be an inappropriate metaphor and, in fact, when one turns to the scriptural text, one finds that it is not a metaphor used in Scripture at all. Falk, for example, explores the concept that God creates the world by giving it freedom. He appeals to the form of the commands in Genesis 1, "Let the waters teem . . . Let the land produce" and so forth.

There is nothing to imply here that God built each individual creature in the way that a puppet builder builds his or her puppets. On the contrary, the key word of God's construction is "let'.  (2004 p. 150)

Falk goes on to suggest that perhaps the concept of the hovering of God's Spirit or the light shining in darkness is a more appropriate metaphor. "The analogy of the hovering Spirit and guiding light is biblical, while that of master engineer is a product of modern society and the industrial age" (2004 p. 150).

The Vatican astronomer George Coyne SJ raises a similar set of questions in a recent article in the Tablet (2005) attacking Intelligent Design. He first notes that the old ways of putting the question as is it pure chance or design is not correct.

In the universe, as known by science, there are essentially three processes at work: chance, necessity and the fertility of the universe. The classical question as to whether the human being came about by chance, and so has no need of God, or by necessity, and so through the action of a designer God, is no longer valid. And so any attempt to answer it is doomed to failure. The fertility of the universe, now well established by science, is an essential ingredient, and the meaning of chance and necessity must be seen in light of that fertility. 

This fertility of the universe - "The universe has a certain vitality of its own like a child does" -may indicate that new, but also biblical, analogous understandings of God are more truthful.

If they respect the results of modern science and, indeed, the best of modern biblical research, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly. Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words. Scripture is very rich in these thoughts.

The point here is not whether Father Coyne is on the right path in particular, but rather how science interacts with our interpretation of the Bible. Essentially new science challenges old images imported from old science.  The danger is that the present science is itself still provisional and may well itself be replaced. The Bible interpretation then will also share this provisionality.