Rationality

God’s self-disclosure in the Word of God, the Logos, is parallel to our scientific knowledge of nature. This is so because, while the facts of nature are known through our rational experience, these facts do not derive their rationality from our experience, for that would be the end of science. Instead, science presupposes that the rationality of nature “transcends our experience of it” and we therefore let it “subject our formulations and apprehensions to its criticisms and guidance.” Torrance cites Polanyi who writes that “this reality beyond sense-experience” gives to science its sense of objectivity. Its reality is warranted by the fact that its scientific implications extend beyond their originating event/experience. (PK p. 37) Torrance then argues for the formal equivalence of scientific and theological knowledge. “Theological thinking is more like a listening than any other knowledge, a listening for and to a rational Word from beyond anything that we can tell to ourselves and distinct from our rational elaborations of it.”

Robert John Russell quoting Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).