One worldview, deliberately woven: theology re-read in light of science, science interpreted inside a doctrine of creation.
Integration goes further than dialogue: it seeks a coherent worldview in which scientific findings and theological claims inform one another’s content. Historical forms include natural theology (deriving the Creator’s attributes from the creation’s order), the theology of nature (beginning from faith and re-reading doctrine in light of science), and metaphysical syntheses in process thought and in Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionary mysticism.
Integration is the most ambitious model and the most fragile: tie doctrine tightly to a scientific theory and the doctrine shares the theory’s fate. Its practitioners answer that a faith that cannot risk contact with the facts has already chosen irrelevance.
References
- Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (1997)
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955)