Hanby, Michael

Michael Hanby is an American Catholic philosopher and theologian who serves as Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy of Science at the John Paul II Institute at the Catholic University of America. His work critically examines the relationship between modern science and theology, particularly focusing on how mechanistic and reductionist assumptions in contemporary biology and cosmology reflect underlying theological and metaphysical commitments. In his influential book No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (2013), Hanby argues that modern science's exclusion of formal and final causality represents not merely methodological naturalism but an implicit theology that shapes scientific inquiry itself. He contends that the mechanistic worldview underlying much of modern science paradoxically depends upon theological assumptions it explicitly rejects. His scholarship challenges both scientific materialism and attempts to harmonize Christian theology with neo-Darwinian evolution, advocating instead for a recovery of classical metaphysics in understanding nature and God's relationship to creation.