A Five-Part Series
Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?
The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia. The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances. Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities. Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17th and 18th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.” The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.
Human reason did not prove equal to the task. Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.
The Enlightenment was a monumental and complicated movement which revolutionized European life in many important ways. It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe the movement as a whole. We are here concerned only with one question, namely, the relationship between science and religion. With that in mind, it bears noting that there were a number of Enlightenment scholars and intellectuals who departed significantly from the biblical synthesis. Their influence over society and culture was great, and indeed, it persists to our own time.
David Hume (1711-1776) was an influential Scottish philosopher who insisted that miracles are impossible. “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature,” he said;
and as firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.
The argument is circular: Hume presupposes that miracles are impossible, which forces the conclusion that they have never occurred. Since we already know the conclusion, investigation and observation are superfluous. But how does Hume know that miracles are impossible without investigating? “Miracles can happen” is a fact-claim; it is either true or false, and if investigation were made which found even one miracle, then the claim would be true. Hume’s fallacious reasoning has been exposed thousands of times, and yet not everyone has gotten the message. To this day a few atheists still appeal to Hume.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) maintained that religion belonged to an earlier, less advanced form of knowledge, in which people would invoke the gods to explain natural phenomena which they were otherwise unable to explain. This is the “God of the gaps” objection, and it is often charged against theists today. Stephen C. Meyer writes that “According to Comte, human beings only attained real, or ‘positive,’ knowledge when they replaced such superstitions and explained natural phenomena by reference to natural laws or strictly material mechanisms.”1
It is true, of course, that believers have sometimes been guilty of what Comte was complaining about. But it doesn’t logically follow, merely because theists have at times mistakenly ascribed natural events to miracle, that everything can and must be explained naturalistically. Indeed, there are phenomena which are explicable quite nicely as miracles, but as natural, not at all. Take the origin of the universe, for instance, the origin of the first life, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, or the information content of DNA.
Orthodox science teaches us that there was an absolute beginning of the cosmos at which all matter, energy, space, and time came into being. It follows, then, that the universe had a cause and that the cause was timeless, immaterial, and stupendously powerful.2 What’s more, if matter and energy came into being at the Big Bang, then until then there were no physical laws for a miracle to violate. The first single-celled life form bore all the hallmarks of design: complex, unaccountable by any mechanistic explanation, and conforming to a known extrinsic standard (life). These are not God-of-the-gaps arguments: they are based on positive, empirical findings.
Christians themselves, engaging in speculations of their own, sometimes contributed to the eroding of the biblical consensus. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) believed that the universe was static and infinite. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) correctly observed that if that were the case, then the universe would not have had a beginning; and if there was no beginning, then there was no need for a cause. Matter and energy could then be all that there is.
Newton did not know about the recession of the galaxies. Space is not infinite, and the universe, with all matter and energy, did have a beginning. Since the universe and all matter had a beginning, they must have had an immaterial cause; therefore, there is something other than matter and energy; there is something immaterial. That something is real, and it is concrete in that it can enter into causal relations.
Kant himself did his own injury to the philosophy of science when he tried to rescue morality from the skepticism of his day:
. . . [T]he doctrine of morality and the doctrine of science may each be true in its own sphere. I have, therefore, found it necessary to deny knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality, in order to find a place for faith.
In other words, there is, according to Kant, a divided field of knowledge. He claims to have justified our beliefs in God and morality, but he thinks they are unverifiable: he declares faith and fact to be mutually exclusive!
It is this divided field of knowledge which is, at least in part, responsible for the modern proclivity for thinking of science as an exclusively secular pursuit of mechanistic, naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, and not as an integral part of man’s unitary quest for knowledge. And thus has it been ever since.
In addition to those injuries, the very success of the new empiricism itself contributed to the rejection of theism as an explanatory framework for science. Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), for instance, attempted to explain the origin of the solar system not as the product of design, as Newton had done, but as the result of purely natural gravitational forces. The identification of a mechanical account of the origin of the solar system does not, of course, exclude the possibility that it was both gravity and God which caused it. If gravity shaped the primordial proto-planetary disc, where did the gravity come from? In fact, recent discoveries about the fine-tuning of the solar system powerfully demonstrate design.3
Finally, the exclusion of the design hypothesis was reinforced by an emerging tradition that increasingly sought to exclude intelligent causation by means of a spurious definition of science.
What is the orthodox definition of science?
Science is the collective human effort to gain knowledge of the physical causes of natural phenomena.4
How should “science” be defined?
Science is the collective human effort to gain knowledge of the causes of natural phenomena.
Note the difference: either we search for physical causes, or we search for causes. But why should science limit itself to physical (impersonal) causes? If non-physical causation ever occurs, does our science not wish to know about it? Wouldn’t that be anti-scientific? Science is Latin for “to know.” Can a true scientist wish not to know anything that is real? If you ask a naturalist why scientists would subscribe to such a crabbed notion, they will not answer you except sometimes in private: it is for money, prestige, authority, and power.
Naturalists will sometimes explain that design theory is not science because it entails phenomena which cannot be scientifically detected or measured. Spirit is undetectable. “You can’t test for God,” they will say. This is an instance of the straw man fallacy. We’re not talking about magic, or clairvoyance, or bending spoons here. We are talking about the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, and the origin of life, all of which shout “design.” The relevant distinction is not between natural and supernatural causation; it is between personal and impersonal causation. The criteria for design are not mysterious. Design – which, again, is a mental event, entailing a conscious mind – is detectable according to three very simple criteria:
1. If an object or event is relatively complex;
2. If the object or event corresponds to some meaningful extrinsic standard – that is, if it corresponds to something else, the purpose of which is already known; and
3. If there is no known, plausible, physical explanation for the object or event, such as erosion, or seismic activity, chemical reaction, or gamma rays, etc. . .
then we infer design.
Now, the more complex the object, and the more exactly it matches an extrinsic standard, and the more unlikely physical causation seems, the greater our confidence that the object was designed. So it is always a matter of probability. It could be a very high probability.
For example: If we find a styrofoam cup in the wilderness, we will never mistake it for an accident of nature. We will pronounce it as having been designed, with a great deal of confidence.
Please note carefully that unlike scientific naturalism, design theory is metaphysically neutral. It does not presuppose that anything was designed, and it does not presuppose who a designer might be. It certainly does not presuppose that there is a God or that anything was designed by God. It is merely a metaphysically neutral test for deciding whether a particular item or event was or was not designed. If we were to conclude that a given natural entity – say, a protein, for instance – was designed, the conclusion that the designer had powers more than human might seem unavoidable. We could call such a designer God, or a Creator, or merely a super-human agency. We could call it whatever we might want to call it. What we must not do is refuse to recognize design when it is staring us in the face.
Darwinism
It hardly needs to be detailed the secularizing effects which neo-Darwinism has caused in biology and paleontology. If one is curious as to how the biblical scientific consensus was lost, one could say without much exaggeration, look no further. In that respect, Darwinism has been a great success.
It has not succeeded, however, in resolving the question of the origin of species. The discipline has been waiting for a breakthrough ever since Stephen Jay Gould pronounced gradualism dead in 1980, 44 years ago and 121 years after Origin of Species. And recently published in a peer-reviewed journal is an announcement that macroevolution itself is also on life support.
The August 2022 edition of Progress in Biophysics and Microbiology published an article by Olen R. Brown, Professor Emeritus of Biomedical Sciences, University of Missouri, and David A. Hullander, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Texas Arlington, entitled, “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive,” in which the authors state,
Microevolution was biologically and empirically verified by discovery of mutations.
There has been limited progress to the modern synthesis. The central focus of this perspective is to provide evidence to document that selection based on survival of the fittest is insufficient for other than microevolution.
However, macroevolution (required for all speciation events and the complexifications appearing in the Cambrian explosion) are shown to be probabilistically highly implausible (on the order of 10-50) when based on selection by survival of the fittest. We conclude that macroevolution via survival of the fittest is not salvageable by arguments for random genetic drift and other proposed mechanisms.5
10-50 is an extremely small number. It’s one part in one hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion. In practical terms, it’s zero.
For that reason and many others, I remain a skeptic with regard to the theory of evolution. If pressed, I would say I do have an opinion, which is that the theory is highly improbable. At the same time, I do not consider it to be a closed question, because whether biological diversity arose by natural selection working on genetic mutations, or not, what is most important is whether God was involved, and we know that He was. This is not a god-of-the-gaps argument: we know that a conscious mind was involved because of the colossal complexity of the very simplest of living systems. God could have done it by natural selection if He had wanted to. I just doubt that He did.
But more to the point, our inquiries here are not the truth or falsity of Darwinism but merely to understand whether science and faith are compatible.
Scopes
We must consider one more spurious secularizing influence upon the popular conception of the relationship between science and religion, and that is the 1925 “Monkey Trial” in the case of the State of Tennessee v. John Scopes. Scopes, a public school teacher, was prosecuted for violating a Tennessee statute which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The case was of no great immediate consequence: Scopes was convicted and fined $100. But the trial and its legend became symbols for the danger which religion presents to liberty because of the religious certitude which impels believers to impose their views on others.
That lesson is worth remembering. The Tennessee statute requiring the public schools to teach the Genesis account of origins was a clear violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and William Jennings Bryan’s unthoughtful defense of the Bible (to say nothing of his reckless trial practice) was not well-calculated to win a skeptical audience.
At the same time, it is, of course, a gross oversimplification. Bryan was primarily motivated by his concern about the ill effects of social Darwinism, and he was supremely justified in that concern. Moreover, Bryan’s willingness to participate in putting the Bible on trial in a one-sided contest (he volunteered to be examined as a witness, while prosecutor Clarence Darrow did not) says little about the truth of it.
The trial was a catastrophe from the standpoint of the Gospel. Inerrancy became identified with ignorance; science and religion came to be seen as adversaries necessarily. The influence of fundamentalism – and by association, evangelicalism – was stunted for decades.
And Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, and the 1960 film of the same title, probably did more damage than the trial itself. It would have added to the harm even if it had retold the story truthfully. Sadly, it flagrantly misrepresented the facts, and consequently what most Americans now living think they know about the trial, is not true.
For instance, few Americans are aware that the play was written as a parable of the dangers of McCarthyism, using fundamentalism as a straw man. The Dayton, Tennessee townspeople, who were only interested in drawing tourists, were depicted as a vicious mob dragging John Scopes out of jail. (He was never in jail.) Almost no one is aware that the prosecution was arranged, and the defense provided, by the American Civil Liberties Union. The film depicts Darrow as being recruited by H. L. Mencken’s newspaper, when actually he volunteered. Bryan is shown as opposing evolution as a matter of biblical hermeneutics – no mention is made of his concern about the social implications of Darwinism. Bryan is portrayed as accepting Bishop Ussher’s young earth hypothesis, when he actually held to the “day-age” interpretation of Genesis.
In short, the authors and producers had no interest in conveying the truth about the trial. Even their assassination of Bryan’s character was incidental to their purposes. Not only was their ostensible purpose – promoting tolerance – lost on their audiences, but the effect of their work was quite the opposite.
To anyone who imagines that there is anything historical about Inherit the Wind, it should be observed that the movie bears almost no resemblance to what actually happened in Dayton; that the Tennessee statute was an unconstitutional establishment of religion; that William Jennings Bryan was rightly concerned about the social effects of Darwinism; and that Darwinism is probably not true, as modern molecular biochemistry shows. Also, it must be understood that originally fundamentalism was only a defense of the Bible, not an attack on “modernity.” Most early fundamentalists either entertained some form of evolution or rejected it on scientific grounds. When the movement became politicized – which, not incidentally, was itself a reaction to the political extremism of the most radical exponents of Darwinism – these moderate fundamentalists left the movement.
Finally, although the failure of anti-modernist fundamentalism is ultimately the failure of the Church at large, in the last 50 years the Church has gathered herself, and God willing, soon will resume her rightful place at the forefront of science.
Taking stock
We have identified several factors in the loss of seeming plausibility of the creationist ideas underpinning the pursuit of science. Not one of them, nor all of them together, justifies the loss. Believers in the sciences, and the church at large, have a tremendous educational task ahead.
Here are those factors:
Misinterpretation of the Galileo affair
Enlightenment rationalists’ errors
Darwinism
The Scopes PR fiasco
Baseless commitment to naturalism
Unjustified rejection of design theory
Resistance from an entrenched science establishment
Discussion
The Galileo affair tells us little about the relationship between science and religion, and more about the hazards of establishments of religion. Given human fallibility and corruption, it is not a good idea to give civil government the authority to define acceptable opinion, much less to enforce it. If you do, violations of human rights follow almost automatically. The West was slow to recognize this – even if the rest of the world was even slower.
And the church was slow to embrace heliocentrism; but that it did embrace it eventually shows there is no inherent conflict between the Bible and observational science. Galileo would have fared much better had he lived and worked just a few years later, after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia ending the Thirty Years War, or had he been more politically astute.
The Enlightenment
We also have learned that the efforts of the philosophers of the Enlightenment to show science and religion to be incompatible relied on false ideas:
Hume: Miracles cannot happen
Comte: Theistic accounts of natural phenomena merely reflect ignorance of their actual physical causes
Newton: The universe is infinite; hence there was no beginning; hence there is no need for a creator
Kant: Religious truth is not amenable to scientific inquiry
Laplace: All natural phenomena reflect only physical causation
Do you recognize this as the world we live in?
Darwin
There is of course no mistaking the influence which Charles Darwin has had on the religion-science debate. Much of that influence stems from the supposition that neo-Darwinism is true, which has not been established, despite the protestations of those who claim that “the vast majority” of scientists have accepted it. More than 1,000 scientists are on record as doubting Darwin.6
YEC, Scopes, and the Rest
Toss in the dubious science of Young Earth Creationists, the Scopes trial debacle, and a widespread naturalistic bias, and it becomes possible to understand the collective amnesia toward the theistic origins of the Scientific Revolution.
Neo-Darwinism still has a man in the field of play. That is, it hasn’t collapsed yet. Maybe it won’t. The jury is still out. But what we have seen is that the erosion in the plausibility of theistic science has not been due to any increase in scientific knowledge, but rather to a long series of theoretical missteps and misinterpretations of historical events.
But there is good news! The major scientific discoveries of the 20th and 21st Centuries dramatically restore the plausibility of theistic science.
NEXT WEEK: Part Five: Twenty-First Century Physics and the Recovery of Theistic Science
ENDNOTES
1Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 77.
2I have treated this topic at length elsewhere. See the following Joshualetter.com blog posts, all in reverse chronological order at https://joshualetter.com/category/philosophy/the-existence-of-god/the-cosmological-argument-for-god/:
June 28, 2018, “The Existence of God”
September 14, 2018, “The Existence of God: A Concise Summary”
January 8 2022, “The Cosmological Argument for God is Virtually Conclusive”
April 2, 2023, “A Little Deeper into the Cosmos”
April 6, 2023, “Postscript to the Cosmological Argument”
3https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/
rtb-design-compendium-2009, last visited 12.2.24.
4“The most basic characteristic of science [is] reliance upon naturalistic explanations.” Brief of amicus curiae National Academy of Sciences, Aguillard v. Edwards, 482 US 578 (1987).
5Progress in Biophysics and Microbiology, v. 172, August 2022, 24-38. (My emphasis.)
6See dissentfromdarwin.org (last visited November 23, 2024).
Joshualetter 