Category: Science

A Five-Part Series

Introduction

The myth that there is some inherent conflict between faith and reason, or between religion and science, dies hard; but for at least twenty years, philosophers of science have attacked the myth so many times and so effectively that we now happily see it gasping for breath.  So it may seem like piling on, but it is important that the truth of the matter be discoverable in these pages.

Perhaps the most important reason for the myth’s tenacity is that while there is no inherent conflict between science and religion – indeed, they are, on the contrary, close allies in the search for truth – there is conflict between science and religion as practiced, in two very important ways.  First, many scientists impose a metaphysical naturalism upon their research.  The essence of naturalism is the presupposition that reality consists of matter and energy and nothing else – the immediate corollary being that any imagined spiritual or supernatural entity (such as God) is just that: imaginary, unreal.  Thus naturalism is the equivalent of atheism.  In such a view, the causes of all natural phenomena must themselves be physical, which is to say, impersonal.  What other sorts of causation might there be?  Personal causation: design.

Accordingly, it must be emphasized that this scientific naturalism, as it is often called, constitutes a religious idea.  Any assertion as to the ultimate nature of reality is, by definition, religious.  The mere fact that naturalism answers the question, Is there a creator? in the negative does not make it any less religious.¹

Please note also that naturalism does not arrive at this doctrine by any scientific or empirical means; rather, it does so a priori – that is, rather than make an effort to establish the truth or falsity of its atheism by observation, naturalists simply declare the matter in the negative, and pronounce it closed.  This places it in direct conflict with science, which, properly conceived, seeks evidence of the causes for natural phenomena, and follows that evidence to its conclusion, whether it leads to the personal or to the impersonal.

This is well-illustrated by the methods employed in the sciences of archaeology, forensic science, and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.  In each of these, researchers seek to determine whether an ancient artifact, or a fatal injury, or a signal from space, may be the result of the activity of a conscious agent acting purposefully.  If the data indicate that the artifact, or the death, or the signal, bear the hallmarks of design, then the activity of a conscious agent is inferred.  So is design a meaningful category in astronomy but not in biology?  Why or why not?

There is, of course, a difference between the inference to personal causation in archeology, on the one hand, and the inference to personal causation in biology, on the other hand.  In practice, such an inference in archeology generally invokes a human agent, whereas such an inference in biology obviously invokes a non-human agent; and there are very few candidates for the non-human agent– most people can think of only one, that being a divine creator.  But for the naturalist, the only permissible inference is to the impersonal, because to the naturalist only the impersonal exists; and this is how naturalism comes into conflict with science.  Is it even possible that a personal creator exists?  Big Bang cosmology powerfully says that it is possible.  Does science, then, not wish to know about this creator?  Wouldn’t that be anti-scientific?  The term science comes from the Latin for “to know.”  Thus, there is indeed conflict between science and religion, but it is not between science and biblical religion: it is between science and naturalistic religion.

The scientist who imposes his naturalism onto the data may be correct some of the time, just as the theist who imposes his theism onto the data may be right part of the time.  But the naturalist who rushes to an atheistic conclusion is just as unscientific as the theist who rushes to a theistic conclusion.  The solution, obviously, is to make oneself conscious of one’s biases, guard against them by remaining open to either type of causation, and to follow the data wherever they lead.

The other source of conflict arises out of the insistence on the part of many Christians on a wooden exegesis of the Book of Genesis.  Their commitment to a literal understanding of the six days of creation places them in direct conflict with many recent and seemingly solid scientific findings.  How can we see light from stars millions of light years away if the universe is only 6,000 years old?  Why do radiometric dating and Antarctic ice cores reflect an ancient Earth?  Ken Ham, a leading Young Earth proponent, himself acknowledges that Young Earth Creationism has no answers to such questions.²  Young Earth Creationism then becomes the straw man ripe for attack by the advocates of naturalism who find it convenient to ignore the existence of the other major exegetical school, namely, Old Earth Creationism, which makes a much more robust (and successful) effort to reconcile the science and the biblical text in ways that are faithful to both.³

Leaving those matters to one side, I propose, in a five-part series, to comment on a more pertinent question, namely, whether science and religion are necessarily at odds when practiced rightly.  In this connection I wish to emphasize four simple truths.

First, it was theists who invented modern science.  That is, it was Christian and Jewish scientists who did so, and they did so not merely as an expression of their religious faith but as affirmations of particular biblical doctrines as to the nature of God, the nature of the Creation, and the nature of man.  It was their belief in those doctrines which incited their inquiries.

Second, there is a reason why modern science gained no foothold in areas of the globe where non-biblical religions were observed: namely, their religious doctrines were not conducive to the systematic investigation of the cosmos.  Indeed, some of their beliefs actively discouraged scientific inquiry.  

Third, the precepts of atheism/materialism⁴ likewise provide no warrant for expecting the study of nature to be fruitful.  Indeed, if the scientific community were to apply its metaphysical assumptions consistently to the scientific enterprise, the latter would come to a screeching halt.  It is only by borrowing from the earlier, theistic consensus that the project continues at all.

Fourth, while it is true that the church badly mishandled the Galileo affair, that dispute had almost nothing to do with cosmology and everything to do with the politics of the time.  Only decades later was it re-interpreted as evidencing enmity between science and religion.  That reinterpretation, together with a long series of ideological blunders on the part of leading intellectuals, resulted in the widespread embrace of scientific materialism which now causes so much confusion.

Fifth, monumental discoveries in 20^th-Century physics – the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and DNA – have resoundingly restored the scientific plausibility of theistic science.

Part One: The Biblical Basis for the Scientific Revolution

It is no surprise, of course, that the founders of modern science were predominantly Christian, since in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries almost everyone in the West was a Christian or a Jew.  If one searches the web for lists of Christians who were important in the development of the sciences, one finds the names of hundreds who lived from the 16^th century forward.  For example, if one goes to the web page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology

and searches the page for the word “father,” it appears 17 times, and we learn that Christians were considered the “fathers” of the following fields of science:

Empiricism and the scientific method

Botony

Parasitology

Chemistry

Microbiology

Physiology

Taxonomy

Paleontology

Genetics

Surgery

Special mention is merited in the following instances, with whose names and accomplishments many readers will also be familiar:

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), showed that the Earth orbits the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the sun orbiting the Earth as previously believed.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), “Considered among the fathers of empiricism and is credited with establishing the inductive method of experimental science via what is called the scientific method today.”⁵

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Johannes Kepler (1564–1642)

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

Robert Boyle (1627–1691), father of modern chemistry

Isaac Newton (1642-1726), discoverer of gravity, classical mechanics, and the calculus

Michael Faraday (1791–1867)

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)

Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)

Arthur Eddington (1882–1944)

Georges Lemaitre (1894–1966)

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977)

Alan Sandage (1926–2010)

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)

John Polkinghorne (1930–2021)

Owen Gingerich (1930–2023)

Francis Collins (b. 1950)

Paul R. McHugh (b. 1931)

Kenneth R. Miller (b. 1948)

Hugh Ross (b. 1945)

Pat Gelsinger (b. 1962)

James Tour (b. 1959)

Christians, all.

The same web page informs us that:

According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, a review of Nobel prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prizes Laureates have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference.  Overall, 72.5% of all the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry,65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics were either Christians or had a Christian background.

What’s more, among the early founders, it was their theology which inspired their science.  They considered their scientific endeavors to be expressions of their faith.  According to Stephen C. Meyer, Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, regarded devotion to the study of nature, like devotion to the study of scripture, as “an act of Piety,” especially since he thought God desired “to have his Works regarded and taken Notice of.”⁶

Their belief in a rational God and in an orderly, purposeful universe was conducive to scientific inquiry.  The divine logos creates an orderly universe – intelligible and sacred, but disenchanted (not magical).  Humans, likewise, having been created in the image of a rational God, are also rational creatures who therefore have the mental capacity to apprehend the order which God has implanted in nature.  Thus the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), for example, could say that “God wanted us to recognize natural laws, and God made this possible by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”⁷

Isaac Newton wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”⁸  According to Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke, “For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [divine] Legislator.”⁹

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) argued that “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things.  And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”¹⁰  Whitehead particularly attributed this conviction among the founders of modern science to the “medieval insistence upon the rationality of God.”¹¹  Meyer comments:

Other scholars have amplified this observation.  They insist that modern science was specifically inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed the universe to be understood and who also designed the human mind to understand it.  As historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller notes, Western science is grounded in the belief that “the natural order is the product of a single intelligence from which our own intelligence descends.”  Philosopher Holmes Rolston III puts the point this way: “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists.  The great pioneers in physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.”  The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”¹²

The “Two Books” metaphor reinforced this view.  The idea is that scripture is one book and nature another book.  Both books having the same author, there can be no contradiction between them.  If they seem incompatible, it is because we have not yet understood one or the other or both.  Galileo specifically affirmed that in some cases it might be our interpretation of scripture which must give way.  (The Pope was prepared to do exactly that in Galileo’s case, until Galileo offended the Pope.)  “The metaphor of the book of nature . . . implied the legitimacy of scientific endeavor, since it affirmed that nature supplied a secondary source of authoritative revelation about the character and wisdom of the creator.”¹³  

These ideas were not made up out of whole cloth, but were based on clear scriptural warrant.  Thus, in his letter to the Roman Christians, the Apostle Paul wrote:

. . . [W]hat may be known about God is plain . . because God  has made it plain. . . .  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

And in Psalm 19, David writes:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

the skies proclaim the work of his hands,

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

And in Psalm 104, the Psalmist writes:

O Lord my God, you are very great;

you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

He wraps himself in light as with a garment;

he stretches out the heavens like a tent

and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their 

waters.

The idea of divine sovereignty and freedom further justified interest in nature.  The understanding of God’s freedom to create or not, or, creating, to create whatever He will, spurs inquiry into what He may actually have done.  This is another way in which biblical teaching encouraged an empirical epistemology, which relies on observation and experiment, in contrast to the Aristotelian tradition of relatively abstract speculation.

Finally, the belief in human fallibility and depravity “engendered caution about trusting human conjectures and hypotheses unless they were carefully tested by experiment and observation.”¹⁴

NEXT WEEK: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

ENDNOTES

¹For a fuller discussion of the religious character of non-theistic belief systems, see Joshualetter, “The Definition of Religion, June 13, 2015 blog post, https://joshualetter.com/2015/06/13/the-definition-of-religion/.

²Ken Ham, “Young Earth Creationism,” in Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (J. B. Stump ed., Zondervan 2017), 17-48, 41-42.

³The reader is encouraged to visit the website, reasons.org.

⁴I use the terms naturalism and materialism interchangeably.  Naturalism, again, is the view that nature is all there is; materialism is the view that matter and energy are all there is.  Naturalism is the term which one encounters more often.

⁵https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology.  (Last visited 12.2.24.)

⁶Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 48.

⁷Meyer, 36.

⁸”General Scholium,” in Mathematical Priciples of Natural Philosophy (1687) in Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.), 369.

⁹Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” 9.

¹⁰Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 3-4, emphasis in original.

¹¹Id, 12.

¹²Meyer, 36.

¹³Meyer, 48.

¹⁴Meyer, 38.