Abstract

Rosemary Ruether’s writings, for example, emphasize a need both for a continued critical evaluation of current scientific and societal paradigms from an ecological perspective and a dialogue and new synthesis between science and religion based on contemporary developments in the physical and biological sciences. If science is to serve as a resource for eco-theology and eco-ethics, it is necessary for environmental thought to be consistent with a contemporary scientific worldview. In place of the mind/body dualism, which was prevalent in the Newtonian system, contemporary science supports a view of humanity as a psychosomatic unity. An ecologically relevant theological ethics also needs to be coherent with the orientation and findings of contemporary biological and ecological sciences. There is a need to think through ways that science and religion can most effectively be brought into a more systematic ecological interface.