Why Do Theologians Need to be Scientists

The postmodern situation has given rise to a quest for new understandings of the relationship between theology and science. Drawing illustrative material from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, I look at three paradigmatic answers to the question posed in the title -the modern empirical scientific, the renewed medieval, and the post-modern- with the goal of outlining a methodological approach for an engagement between Christian theology and science in the postmodern context. Drawing insight from post-empirical philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge, I argue that both science and theology engage in the task of constructing a world for human habitation.