Especially in our postmodern environment, the emerging church appears to be struggling through a whole raft of philosophical questions. Science and faith is certainly one key area of confusion. The topic has been discussed in various nodes and threads on this site (as a search will show) but I feel that a conclusion is yet to be reached (if such is even possible?). Some fundamental questions do need to be tackled and these include areas like epistmology and what we believe about truth. I blogged on science and faith recently and received quite a few mails in response denoting a very wide array of perspectives all of which had theological implications.
How postmodern thinking interacts with science at all is a more general and foundational issue. The ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ agnosticism that is inherent in postmodernity clashes at various levels with a science that has reached a dominant cultural and philosophical position under modernity.
The modern church dealt with science in a rather schizophrenic way, accepting a lot of science wholesale while choosing to reject certain scientific hypotheses as being incompatible with the bible. Probably the rejection aspect was and is more pronounced in the American church community, e.g. where ideas like evolution are concerned.
At the heart of today’s debate, the creation accounts in the bible are a constant source of debate. Are these to be taken as interesting mythology, spiritual but not physical truth, parables, literature, metophors, analogies, true in some sense that we cannot yet fathom, relevant, irrelevant, or applied science? More generally, what do we do with the miraculous - something that pervades the bible from beginning to end?
Can/Should science deal at all with anything in the past? How does anything in history become scientifically testable or verifiable? What constitutes evidence? The questions are disturbing because they are so basic to scientific method. Yet science has not hesitated to produce theories about all sorts of past happenings from big bangs to the origin(s) of life and back them up with ‘scientific’ methodologies. Some scientists have questioned whether what science is attempting here is science or theology! But, the attempt is on and it is very much in the public eye for it purports to answer questions of importance to each individual. What am I, where did I come from, does life have any purpose, where am I going????? Inevitably, science has also tried to define morality, justice, ethics and belief.
Postmoderns have a healthy amount of distrust of any metanarrative including the scientific expedition. One option facing PoMo believers is to say that these are two separate worlds in the sense of ways of viewing reality and so it is silly to expect them to overlap meaningfully. Another approach is to deny that the bible has anything to say of a scientific nature. Both avoidances though leave me dissatisfied.
I personally like the Renaissance scientific approach which starts with ‘all truth is God’s truth’*, and specifically, that science is merely attempting to rediscover (the hard way) what God has done. Eventually, science has to affirm God - science by-and-large just doesn’t realise it. I don’t believe that science does lean towards atheism or even towards some sort of a clockwork image of God; ‘something started everything off but has since been a non-player’.
The existence of physical laws, time, cause and effect - the very things that make science possible, I believe are very strong evidences of God. But, God is scientifically untestable while an essential part of the scientific method is that the simplest hypothesis that adequately accounts for the phenomena under study is the best hypothesis.
So, where does all of this leave the interaction of science with your faith? do they intersect at all and if so how? Perhaps once we sort out what we believe and why we believe it, one effect will be to make both our praxis and our apologetic better! As Bernard of Clairveaux put it:
Some seek knowledge for
The sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that
They themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others
Who seek knowledge in
Order to serve and edify others;
And that is charity.
*that quote seems to come from Augustine.
Science and man's control of the world
Your post raises interesting questions.
As one general observation, I think it is important not to talk about “faith” as though it is a mental state. Faith is always faith in something and the something can be God, Winston Churchill, my brilliant but alcoholic husband or my star.
Obviously the faith referred to here is ‘faith in God’. People like Richard Dawkins want to interpret ‘faith in God’ to mean belief that God exists on either no evidence or insufficient evidence. This is simply a solecism. Faith in God takes as a given that God exists and itself means something like “acknowledging that I am a creature and that I owe reverence, praise and obedience to my Creator”. If Dawkins wants to attack the person of faith, then it is that which he must attack and not some straw man.
Personally, I do not believe that Post Modernism has much to offer in coming to grips with science v religion. It is attractive in some parts of academe but does not address the broad movements which have elevated science to its present pre-eminence.
The reason that science is attractive as an understanding of the world is that it has been the central element in the huge expansion of man’s control of his environment. Up to 1800 there had been little increase in world population or prosperity since Roman times. Science when mixed with democracy, the rule of law and market economics has produced explosive growth in GDP per head in the intervening 200 years. The popular view is that we control the world, that there are things we do not understand now but that in principle we can unlock every secret. Science encourages people to interpret the world in an instrumental way- how can it be manipulated to achieve my ends. It has thus led to a widespread belief in consequentialism in ethics; there is nothing intrinsically sacred, no act which itself is evil.
I agree with you that the problem cannot simply be dismissed by saying that science and religion are different ways of viewing the world and do not overlap. I think they do overlap and therefore that dialogue can occur between them. Only such dialogue could verify your suggestion, that science is merely attempting to rediscover (the hard way) what God has done.
However, for myself I doubt that will be the outcome.
man's control
Thank you Paul. One great danger of keeping science in a separate compartment is precisely the danger of consequentialism. Science is both rich and deep but that does not make it a comprehensive answer to all of our problems. I think that we must say that science may serve but cannot rule.
One of the popular modern christain responses to the theory of evolution was “Creationism”. This is now often softened to “Intelligent Design”. A key difference between the two is that Creationism went all out to attack the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution from an evidential standpoint, while ID prefers to just keep saying that there are too many unanswered questions for evolution to adequately explain. I don’t personally agree with the Creationist response primarily because I believe that it is based on a wrong reading of the bible but I prefer their approach for tackling the scientific data rather than the diffident ‘obviously, God did it, you just don’t know it - He’s hiding in there, somewhere’ of ID.
Science is not the home pitch of atheists. Science is ‘done’ admirably well by deists, theists, pantheists, panentheists… Dawkins is in a minority position and should not be taken as the voice of science. My own evolution professor, while vehemently antichristian, was himself (when pushed) an agnostic.
PoMo has value in this debate precisely because of its scepticism and inherent agnosticism. If modernism elevated science too far, we can hope that ostmodernity will bring back some sense of perspective about all the stuff that we don’t know!
Modern science has also been driven into a reductionistic mindset. An exclusive Ockham’s razor approach in science (the simplest is the best) very often functions as a guillotine, squishing real debate and holding science to a falsely simplistic theoretical viewpoint. The force is reductionist to the detriment of real science. I think we see the limitations of this sort of wrong science most clearly in theories that attempt to reconstruct the past, including theories of the origin of life and theories of the origins of the universe. We also can sense where science tries to be foolishly reductionist in its view of ‘human’ and, more broadly, of life.
A proper view of man is essential to counter the ‘with science as my footstool, I contol the world’ mentality. I believe that we can bring about a change in how we deal with science. At least within the body of Christ, we have to get back to doing proper science in the context of offering a more holistic view of what scripture does and does not teach.
Live to serve : Serve to live
Creationism and ID
I don’t personally agree with the Creationist response primarily because I believe that it is based on a wrong reading of the bible but I prefer their approach for tackling the scientific data rather than the diffident ‘obviously, God did it, you just don’t know it - He’s hiding in there, somewhere’ of ID.
I disagree strongly with you about this.
I have never been able to accept Creationism nor ID because they pretend to be scientific responses to the theory of evolution but are in fact motivated by religious views- in short, they are (in my opinion) intellectually dishonest. When ID explains what facts would falsify it and when it carries out research which expands our factual knowledge, I will take it seriously as a scientific hypothesis.
Re: Creationism and ID
I apologise if I gave the impression that I like ‘creationist science’. I don’t, not because of the religious motivation so much as because they have tried to force the data to fit a particular reading of the bible and it discredits both their science and the bible.
Why I have some respect for it is that it does try to tackle the evidence wheras ID just avoids the issues and that is the point that I wanted to make. The evidence for a simplistically evolutionary approach is actually very shaky and does need to be challenged as (often) bad science.
Whatever science we do as christians should be good, if possible the best, science and we should do our science with a quiet confidence that it cannot contradict what God has done.
Live to serve : Serve to live
seeds of life?
There is a fascinating (and ongoing) study of Dawkins latest offering over at jesuscreed. The posts and responses have been vigorous as well as informative. Underlying the debate is this question: How can we believe in a God who creates and sustains the creation and yet practice a science that denies this base?
Imo our science will be better if we do not assume God as a part of any of our hypotheses. In this view, I seem to be in a very small minority! My own theory is that science, good science, honestly and effectively done will eventually affirm what the bible does assert about the creation.
But, I happen to think that God’s ‘doing’ is invisible to us, just as the mind of God is invisible (though not uninferrable) without His specific self revelation. I draw on analogies when my logic fails to do justice and I am driven now to analogy! Mine is books - the book of creation, the book of history and the book of salvation. They do of course overlap but by reading just one book can we accurately reconstruct the others?
I also like the one-way-mirror analogy as very illustrative. God has created and God continues to sustain, but from my end, the harder I look for God the more clearly I will see my own reflection. I can access what God has and is doing through science but i can not see God. The creation indeed does cry out that it is creation but the harder i look for the Creator in the details the more circular and fruitless my search must be.
We are faced with a scientific establishment that seems to be hostile. It is not hostile for the sake of science but it is defensive about it’s current ruling paradigm. it was interesting recently to see that within the community of physicists, attempts to delineate how the anthropic principle could have worked out from the big bang by going backwards from where we now are have been criticised as closer to theology than physics.
i was also reminded again yesterday of Kuhn’s pioneering work (done some decades back) when I read the recent NASA releases on the initial studies of comet dust that contained unexpected organic chemicals. the fact is that given our understanding of how comets form, this comet could not have had these organics. i.e. our understanding of our solar system’s formation is fundamentally flawed. Yet, what’s being trumpeted is that comets must have been the ones that seeded life! Our paradigm is skewing our basic scientific common sense.
Good science is what is needed and if our more atheistically oriented scientists are going to insist on fighting for the paradigm, come what may, it is high time that we, as christians who are fundamentally interested in truth, should show a better way!
Live to serve : Serve to live
overlapping magisteria of everyday life
Twenty years ago few US evangelicals would have entertained (or admitted to entertaining) a mythic reading of the Biblical Creation narrative, mostly for fear of taking that first step onto the slippery slope away from inerrancy. As the evidence supporting Darwinism became so incontrovertible that even evangelicals couldn’t ignore it, reading Genesis 1 nonliterally served to prevent (or delay) a much more drastic slide away from the faith. The hermeneutical rationales are still being worked out, but the emerging church is more or less prepared to acknowledge evolution while taking offense at the intellectual coarseness of the hard-core atheists. This might prove an effective strategy in the public arena, since most people already find themselves intimidated and alienated by science. Christianity will ride out this particular storm.
Science, meanwhile, will continue to advance. Modern empirical science is methodologically committed to proposing and testing naturalistic explanations. God may or may not be the force underlying gravity and quantum physics and the expanding universe, but as long as nature continues on a regular and predictable course there’s no reason for science to invoke the supernatural in its hypotheses. Unless God contravenes nature in some empirically documentable way, there seems no reason for science to infer the presence of the divine hand behind the ordinary functioning of the universe. Even if science finds some way to test 10-dimensional string theory and the spontaneous propagation of alternative universes within black holes, there’s no real difference between that sort cosmic phenomenon and mundanities like momentum and friction. And there’s no big difference between doing science and driving a bus: you don’t need to say that God keeps his hand on the steering wheel any more than you need to assert that God causes sodium and chlorine atoms to combine in particular ways.
I think the threat of empiricism to Christianity is greatest not in cutting-edge science but in everyday life. When the world seems to run on automatic there doesn’t seem much reason to invoke the presence of God. What evidence is there that God hears prayer, or directs the course of one’s life, or makes people more kindly, or guides world leaders, or justifies hope in seemingly hopeless causes? If you eliminate the God hypothesis from everyday life does anything change? Science is only one manifestation of a materialistic, experiential, pragmatic worldview that goes all the way down. It’s here, in living day to day, that the magisteria overlap. Does God demonstrably ever do anything in this world that can’t be explained in naturalistic terms?
Who needs God?
The “the threat of empiricism to Christianity” has always been there. The world turns, life goes on, where is there a need to posit God? There was a time not long ago when science did not claim to be able to tackle any of the ‘ultimate questions’. Since the advent of Darwin, it was only a matter of time for that trend to be broken and this is where we are today.
There is an understandable attempt to read the bible metaphorically/allegorically/mythically whenever science calls it into question. The tendency goes beyond just the first 11 chapters of Genesis. Here, I think that we have been at fault mostly because we have been less than honest or thorough in delineating what the bible does and does not assert. Squeezing a topic like creation into less than 800 words (ESV) is a magnificent feat. Really understanding such a condensed account requires a lot of care and an honest acknowledgement that there are many things there that we simply cannot imagine. if we have difficulty imagining such mundane things as black holes, where will we search to adequately be able to picturise the creation of the entire universe?
Human life, culture, and that odd mixture of goodness and evil that we experience in life leaves us with a feeling of wonder or at least puzzlement, and something drives us towards asking “ultimate” questions.
Making science the bad guy as far as belief in God is concerned is not very sensible. Almost all of the scientists that I know (I can’t really think of any exceptions) are amazed by the complexities, simplicities, symmetries and asymmetries that keep appearing in whatever aspect of the physical world they happen to choose to dig most deeply into. Whether they call this ‘Nature’ or not, it still points us to things that are far beyond us (transcendence, immanence?).
While science appears to the public to be a great explicator and problem solver, in reality, for the scientist, the mystery gets deeper and more fascinating. Explanations, hypotheses and paradigms are found to be delightfully temporal leaving more and bigger questions that need to be answered.
The problems begin when science and the some odd scientists (like Dawkins) make the outrageous claim that science can monilithically solve all human problems or even that science can explain human personality, let alone eliminate ‘the need’ for God. The fact is that science is out of its elements when it attempts to answer the why questions, not just the how and what ones. However charismatically or forcefully this claim is made, it has to be debunked as nonsense not least because it is non science.
Singularities are there in our own experience and in history where God very visibly enters our experience. These are not the purview of science. By definition they are not testable and so trying to make them a part of the hypothesis is silly. But as a part of our experience we will have to conclude one way or another as to what these experiences mean. There then is the final barrier - meaning. Science, with all of its effects and causes, hypotheses and paradigms cannot provide meaning for life. the best it can hope to do on its own is to reduce everything to physicalities.
We do not then look for meaning in those areas that science is weakest. If there is meaning to existence then that meaning is pervasive and MUST include all of the physical that science delights explicating.
Live to serve : Serve to live