Clarity demands precise definitions in our overall discourse and our analysis of rapprochement.

By "science," I refer to the methodologies, findings, and ongoing research within the social sciences and physical disciplines—biology, chemistry, and physics. These fields excel in descriptive and predictive power, benefiting humanity significantly.

Yet, their success hinges on a reductionist focus, often by design, excluding normative, qualitative, and moral dimensions.

For instance, science can analyze aesthetic appreciation and human responses to beauty, addressing artistic technique, proportion, and the physiological or psychological effects of color, sound, and movement.

However, it cannot fully capture, predict, or explain human judgments on beauty, artistic genius, personal taste, or the broader impact of aesthetics on individuals and society. The experience and appreciation of beauty transcend reduction to molecules, neurons, or brain structures.

By "theology," I refer to diverse religious reasoning traditions, expressed through metaphor, symbol, ritual, and moral insights, blending mythopoetic, metaphorical, and philosophical language.

Theology ideally addresses normative issues, existential questions, matters of meaning and purpose (narrative), and morality.

Although some theology may lean toward reductionism, its greater risk is triumphalism—hubris that leads to overreach, believing it can dictate and supersede scientific and historical claims.

Much of the conflict between science and theology is unnecessary. Both examine the same reality, yet narrate different aspects using distinct languages and reasoning.

Advocates of rapprochement propose that science and theology can coexist, not merely tolerating each other, but mutually enriching human culture.

Human life integrates quantitative and qualitative concerns, weaving meaning with fact, and benefiting from the careful application of both disciplines.

Jürgen Habermas, a prominent European thinker, offers critical insights into post-secular culture and the evolving relationship between naturalism and religion.

At a funeral in 1992, amidst Germany’s rising xenophobic violence against immigrants, Jürgen Habermas felt a stirring realization about the need for rapprochement, infused with the role of religion in fostering unity.

The solemn gathering, steeped in shared grief and spiritual reflection, contrasted sharply with the societal divisions fueling weekly reports of hate and political apathy. Surrounded by mourners united in ritual, Habermas saw religion’s potential to bridge rifts through shared moral frameworks, complementing his vision of communicative action.

The funeral’s sacred space, where diverse voices found common ground in loss, echoed his call for rational discourse grounded in empathy. Religion, he recognized, could inspire inclusive dialogue, countering nationalism’s divisiveness by invoking universal values like compassion and justice.

This moment deepened his conviction that public reason, enriched by the ethical depth of religious traditions, was essential for reconciliation. Habermas later emphasized discourse ethics, viewing religion as a vital partner in creating a just public sphere, rather than a barrier to reason.

The funeral crystallized his belief that rapprochement required blending secular rationality with religion’s capacity to unite hearts across divides, ensuring marginalized groups are embraced in a shared moral vision, resisting exclusion, and fostering a cohesive, empathetic society.

In various essays and book-length works, Habermas argues that secularization reached its peak after World War II, marking the onset of a post-secular transition. Notably, he identifies as an atheist.

Habermas recognizes Christianity’s decline in Western culture but, akin to evolutionary theorists, asserts that the religious impulse is intrinsic to humanity. He argues that Christianity’s profound influence on Western culture resists eradication, and its removal would undermine the culture’s positive, foundational attributes.

In Notes on a Post-Secular Society, Habermas concludes that cultural and human progress in this post-secular, post-Christian era demands a rapprochement between Christianity and secularism.

While secularism’s intellectual frameworks—liberalism and naturalism—have enriched Western culture, they lack the normative capacity to forge a unifying social ethos. Instead, they exacerbate societal fragmentation, reinforcing individualism and isolation. Habermas posits that Christianity must provide these normative, unifying elements.

For Christianity to make a meaningful contribution to Western development, it must align and reformulate its theology with dominant cultural reasoning and human learning. It cannot dismiss science or perpetuate triumphalism.

Naturalism asserts that the scientific method—hypothesizing, predicting, testing, and repeating—offers the most effective approach to investigating reality, serving as the primary means to discern truth.

Science has uniquely benefited humanity through medical advances, technological progress, and a deeper understanding of the world and ourselves.

Humans thrive markedly due to scientific methodologies and their outcomes.

Naturalism and reliance on scientific methods represent fundamental epistemological commitments, often leading to an ontological stance that reality comprises only what science can explore. 

Physics, considered foundational by most naturalists, underpins this worldview, frequently manifesting as materialism or physicalism.

Naturalistic approaches to religion typically adopt a strategy: rejecting transcendent claims, explaining religious experiences through psychology and neurobiology, and delegating cultural analysis to the social sciences.

This perspective is straightforward. Naturalism defines itself by dismissing supernatural realities or transcendent ontologies that are unprovable by scientific inquiry, thus setting them aside or rejecting them outright.

During the Enlightenment, naturalism and scientific methods gained such success that mythopoeia lost credibility, with scientific rationalism emerging as the sole valid discourse on truth.

Consequently, many naturalists contend that scientific methods alone govern all human inquiry, including ethics, normative decisions, aesthetics, valuation, and relationships. American philosopher W.V.O. Quine championed this view.

Christianity often responded—and still does—with rejection of science or select claims, entrenching ideological theologies, and drifting toward fundamentalism and literalism.

Yet, some naturalists, including Hilary Putnam, Loyal Rue, Mario De Caro, David Macarthur, Wilfrid Sellars, and Lynne Rudder Baker, recognize that such scientism and reductionism misrepresent naturalism, hindering human learning and science itself. The assumption that strict scientific naturalism encompasses all naturalist theory appears flawed.

These thinkers have advanced nuanced forms—liberal naturalism, poetic naturalism, and near-naturalism—collectively referred to as liberal naturalism for brevity.

Liberal naturalism advocates respecting scientific explanations without presuming science as the sole resource for understanding humanity, our interactions, and the world.

It posits that persons, existential concerns, artistic beauty, institutions, rational norms, and moral values benefit from science but remain beyond its complete explanation.

Thus, liberal naturalism integrates scientific inquiry with philosophy, expanding into the realm of personal purpose and meaning-making.

Ontologically and methodologically broader than strict naturalism, it acknowledges non-scientific modes of understanding—reason, justification, valuing, and intention—unmappable onto physical science’s causal framework.

It harnesses the descriptive power of science while resisting reductionism. 

Theology’s purpose is not to encroach upon science or other disciplines better equipped to address their domains, but to connect the material universe—studied by science—to questions of ultimate concern: value and meaning, which science cannot fully elucidate and which belong to religion and philosophy.

Theological reasoning often involves normative and qualitative claims, resisting deduction, induction, or justification through scientific methods or strict logic.

Instead, it employs illative reasoning, weaving diverse arguments and partial …evidence—none of which are conclusive—into a reasonable synthesis, rather than mere spiritual assertions that fill gaps. This approach recognizes existential realities often overlooked by science, akin to the sea eluding a fisherman’s net.

Theology addresses questions of goodness, meaning, and purpose, requiring reflection rather than scientific answers. Physics cannot unveil the meaning of human life; insisting that all reality is physical matter risks nihilism.

Christianity must grasp its methodological contours, distinct from those of science, and avoid imitation.

First, theology must focus on meaning, morals, and normative aspects of life, leaving science, history, and other human disciplines to act according to their integrity. 

Sadly, many Christians, rooted in literalism, fundamentalism, or conservatism, resist adaptation, claiming unjustified theological privilege. Often, this includes nostalgic longing for outdated religious thinking, reinforced with fervor, which proves ineffective and detrimental.

The current emphasis on belief and faith in Christianity, a historical distortion, misframes religious truth as intellectual assent to unprovable doctrines beyond empirical data, often literalized.

Healthy theological reasoning supports wrestling with goodness, beauty, purpose, and meaning—existential issues central to its scope.

Existential convictions arise from accumulated reliable facts, authoritative sources, sound reasoning, and critical reflection on experience, corroborated over time, yielding tentative yet satisfactory conclusions. (See John Henry Newman, The Grammar of Assent.)

Truth unites all human inquiry, aligning with scientific demonstrations. Liberal naturalism rejects conjecture, magical thinking, or wish projection, a standard theology should adopt.

Science dispels superstition and illuminates our world, yet it cannot fully address spirituality’s core concerns, even sans supernaturalism.

Thus, theology and spirituality should explore life’s meaning and purpose, offering wisdom for living well and seeking wholeness.

Any meaningful rapprochement demands that the sciences acknowledge religion’s positive role in addressing normativity, morality, and human purpose, provided that religion speaks accurately and remains focused.

Reciprocity requires religion to focus on human meaning, purpose, and normative concerns while aligning its claims with scientific evidence and reason, and employing mythopoetic, metaphorical, and philosophical analysis.

Theology neither overrides, supersedes, nor negates verified findings from various disciplines, for truth remains unified across all methods of inquiry.

Naturalism has its limits. Adopting a liberal naturalist methodology does not render religion obsolete, valueless, or redundant. Instead, it challenges religion to refine and enhance itself.

Naturalism urges religion to justify its assertions, a process that strengthens it by moving beyond magical thinking, wishful projections, and repetitive claims of revealed “truths.”

Theology must rigorously evaluate its claims, ensuring they, too, don’t overreach. It should adopt humility, caution, and restraint, recognizing the difficulty of justifying meaning claims given the resistance such claims face in a secular culture.

The era of simplistic understandings based on inerrant, divinely authored texts, infallible teachers, personal deities akin to Santa Claus, or Jesus as an invisible companion and the source of magical bread has ended.

Clinging to such theology proves misguided, unjustified, and prideful.

Instead, theology must rationally and reasonably articulate its claims, interpreting virgin births, six-day creation, and resurrections in terms of their meaning and the existential truths they illuminate, while understanding that making reliable claims concerning historical and scientific facts is not its purpose.