Without in any way endorsing the intensely problematical assumptions of Thomas Kuhn s model of scientific revolutions, there can be no doubt that Kuhn has demonstrated that today s scientific certainties are routinely overthrown by a later generation. The study of the history of Christian theology indicates the need to avoid becoming committed to the accepted scientific wisdom of the day. As we have already noted, English theologians of the eighteenth century developed quite sophisticated understandings of the interaction of science and theology, based on the assumption that the Newtonian worldview had been demonstrated to be correct beyond reasonable doubt. As a result, there was intense resistance to new approaches to biblical interpretation which called these settled Aristotelian presuppositions into question. Through a subtle and largely unconscious process of reasoning, a text which was originally interpreted in the light of Aristotelian presuppositions subsequently became regarded as proof of those Aristotelian presuppositions.
Paradigm shifts happen, and are important for theology.
To fail to appreciate this is to trap theology in the latest equivalent of Newtonian mechanics, which will be displaced at some future point. Max Planck, A Scientific Autobiography . Robert A. Millikan, The Autobiography of Robert A. Millikan . Free Press, 1998. See William Dampier, A History of Science .