Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, religion, and naturalism
Alvin Plantinga
OUP £17.99 (978-0-19-981209-7)
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Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not
Robert N. McCauley
OUP £18.99 (978-0-19-982726-8)
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ALVIN PLANTINGA lays out his argument on the first page. Any supposed conflict between science and theology is merely superficial, while underneath there is a deep concord. This goes against the common assumption that the real synergy of world-view is between science and naturalism: broadly speaking, the contention that matter is all there is. For Plantinga that is an illusion: the concord between science and naturalism is only superficial, veiling deep conflicts.

There is plenty here of what we would expect from any foray into science and religion: a history of the relationship, for instance, and a reflection on the limitations of science. Most of the book, however, is given over to a consideration of the relation of science to religion, on the one hand, and to naturalism, on the other, laid out in terms of those conflicts and consonances, some deep and some superficial.

Plantinga has a reputation as a champion of the Christian faith among those who are hostile to it, and especially for attempting to give an account of the faith which will hold water among philosophers. It has never been clearer than with this book that this comes at a price.

Take his embrace of the notion of "possible worlds", and his willingness to use a phrase such as "the proportion of [. . .] possible worlds in which there is such a person as God". Nothing is more important for the interaction between theology and science than our account of the doctrine of God, and yet, at one stroke, God both becomes one more thing in the world, and is subordinated to the reign of possibility. I cannot resist quoting Aquinas in reaction: "Nothing is prior to God, either in reality or in concept."

Then there are the three occasions on which Plantinga describes human beings as "immaterial selves" merely "connected" to "a particular physical body". Whatever else the science-and-theology dialogue has taught us, it has shown that this is a terrible account of what constitutes a human person.

Plantinga's science is generally secure, with the odd slip. It is not, for instance, that we aren't clever enough to predict how three or more bodies will behave. On the contrary, we are clever enough to see that no mathematical account can be given. These are minor problems. More troubling is the sense that naturalism is wrong because at some level science cannot offer a scientific account of why organisms are as they are. (He invokes Behe's "irreducible complexity".) Justifying God by finding gaps in science is a dangerous endeavour. Plantinga may be one of the biggest of big names in the philosophy of religion, but his book makes one wince surprisingly often.

Robert N. McCauley's book also wears its thesis on its sleeve: religion is natural, and science is not. Science may not be "natural", but that does not stop it from setting McCauley's terms. "Natural" is judged according to the perspective of evolutionary cognitive science. "Natural", in a good turn of phrase, means "ideas that human minds find good to think". The argument is marshalled around a handful of simple conjectures, such as the proposal that religion deals with meaning, while science can explain. An example of science's being good at explaining is that it can explain the origin of that very distinction.

Religion is natural, but that certainly does not mean "good" (other than it "sells well"). Nor does natural imply "true". Religion is probably no more than the side-effect of mental functions (or "modules") that are (otherwise) useful for survival, such as recognising people or agency. Religion may be to human beings like the eye-tongue reflex of a frog, which will whip out its tongue towards a ball-bearing, and catch and swallow it, if one is fired across its visual field, as a consequence of having good reflexes for snatching flies when they do the same.

Religion is natural because it taps into some of the basic aptitudes and tendencies that develop in all well-adjusted people, such as perceptions of agency and the idea of contamination. These are so basic that religion need fear little or nothing from atheist detractors: religion is here to stay.

Note that religion is here to stay, as a perennial demotic urge. The same cannot necessarily be said for theology. Theology is like religion in dealing with life-derived concepts, but rather like science in thinking about them in "unnatural" ways, which is to say, ways that are abstract, counter-intuitive, and technically hard work. The problem with this analysis is that it reduces religion to one thing, independent of any tradition. It also ignores the extent to which Christian theology, for instance, developed out of a concern to make sense of Christian experience, or the extent to which even practical responses to practical matters can be shaped by a specific theological world-view.

As an example, McCauley thinks that we can explain the growth of the Early Church on account of its "benign" treatment of women and the sick. But if early Christians were bucking a trend in that regard, why were they doing so? The behaviour of those ordinary Christians was shaped by the theology that McCauley takes to be the abstract preserve of the intellectual few: the sort who can think thoughts that don't come naturally. In this, and in his treatment of science, he short-changes the masses.

Religion is safe, theology is perhaps a little precarious, but science is under threat. The final chapter is an unexpected warning that science has so little conceptual purchase on the brain that ideologies and economic disasters can sweep it aside. The warning is welcome, but perhaps overdone. Human beings ask those bigger questions a little more naturally than McCauley suggests, questions that we need both science and theology to address.

The Revd Dr Andrew Davison is Tutor in Doctrine at Westcott House, Cambridge.