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The Real Threat to Faith Isn’t Science
If not for the revelation we have received from heaven, no one would be debating science and faith.
God says things in the Old and New Testaments that are hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with what scientists think about the world we live in. Many Christians past and present have claimed that God made the heavens and the earth only a few thousand years ago. Christians have said that because of Adam’s first sin, each of us comes into this world morally bent out of shape, that human wickedness was once so bad, God wiped out the entire human race (and many animals), except for Noah, his family, and the animals on the ark.
The Bible claims that God sent prophets, priests, and kings—men like Moses, Aaron, and Hezekiah—who encountered one miracle after another as God set the stage for the coming Messiah. We confess that the Son of God became incarnate, lived a righteous life, died unjustly, and then rose again for our salvation. But most of these beliefs contradict prevailing scientific accounts of history and the natural world.
As a result, many Christians perceive science as a threat to biblical faith. They are mistaken. Scientism is the real threat, not science.
God and Scientism
Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his role in discovering the double helix structure of DNA, said this about human beings: “Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” This insight became his “astonishing hypothesis.” Consider what this means. If Crick is right, we can only understand ourselves through biology and chemistry.
Crick’s position is called scientism. It is the view that only the hard sciences have access to true reality, that disciplines like physics, chemistry, and biology give us the only reliable knowledge of ourselves and the world.
Scientism is the view that only the hard sciences give us reliable knowledge of ourselves and the world.
Advocates of scientism say that the claims of philosophy and theology are less trustworthy because they are not empirical or testable like the natural sciences. At its most extreme, scientism teaches that, in principle, nonscientific claims cannot be true. The problem with scientism is that many things we know to be true cannot be proved scientifically. Take any historical event, like the Holocaust. It is not scientifically testable, but we believe the abundant evidence that has been preserved. We also cannot prove love scientifically, or that sunsets and symphonies are beautiful, but we credit those claims as true. The same holds for spiritual realities: The triune God. Angels. Demons. Cherubim and seraphim. Human souls. Heaven and hell. Miracles.
According to scientism, believing in such things is blind faith, not objective truth. Supernatural realities are invisible to empirical science, so for the advocate of scientism, they do not exist. Anyone who holds to scientism will see conflicts everywhere between Christianity and the natural sciences. But this is a false alarm. The conflict is between biblical faith and scientism, not science per se.
One need not be Christian, or even religious, to recognize that scientism is not the same as science. Atheists like Michael Ruse and Massimo Pigliucci, for example, have leveled some of the most incisive critiques of scientism. Scientism is reductionistic, because it ignores parts of reality that are inaccessible to scientific analysis. It is also self-referentially incoherent; scientism does not make sense on its own logic. Its central idea that only the hard sciences give us objective truth is not even provable scientifically, so scientism collapses by its own definition. Scientism as a belief system is antithetical to reality as understood by the world religions, including Christianity. A religious person accepts that we cannot properly understand reality apart from nonscientific ways of knowing.
Christians, in fact, believe that God’s words are more reliable than human modes of knowing. Scientism also ignores the limitations of scientific research, painting a fairy-tale picture of science that is far removed from reality. Here science is the unassailable truth—“Just the facts, ma’am.” My point is not to disparage natural science, nor to rally behind the anti-science movement. I recognize the limits of science, but this does not make me anti-science. I am only emphasizing the limitations of scientific disciplines.
Science and Anti-Realism
Since every generation of scientists is prone to making mistakes, the history of science exposes the failure of scientism. But if not scientism, what are we left with? Some Christians concerned about conflicts between science and the Bible take an anti-realist approach to science. Anti-realists recognize that any given set of physical data is consistent with multiple scientific theories (that is, scientific theories are often underdetermined by the data). So, in this view, rather than offering objective truth about the world, science gives us useful tools for predicting and manipulating natural phenomena. In other words, we never discover the world as it really is, but only as it appears to us.
Christians who feel threatened by evolution, or some other scientific claim, will sometimes take an anti-realist view of the offending theory: “The earth isn’t old. It only looks old.” In this way, the data no longer threatens faith; crisis averted. But most scientists are not anti-realists about their work. Most scientists are realists. They see the aim of science as discovering the truth about the world.
When Isaac Newton formulated the law of universal gravitation in the seventeenth century, he didn’t think he was merely “predicting” or “manipulating” nature. No, he believed he had discovered a truth about the universe. Same with Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910). According to their germ theory of disease, many illnesses are caused by microorganisms, like bacteria and viruses. Because Pasteur and Koch were scientific realists, they saw germ theory as the sober truth about diseases.
Nevertheless, anti-realists have done us a great service. Their philosophical and historical insights remind us that scientists are fallible. We make mistakes. Our theories fall short. In fact, what the majority of scientists believe in any given period may be false, or only partially true.
After all, scientists are finite and fallen like the rest of us. Having said that, I believe Christians should be realists about science. We should see one of the central aims of science as discovering the truth about the world. Creation is meaningful because it is the work of the Creator. As John 1:1–3 states: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Whether they know it or not, scientists are studying the work of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son.
Whether they know it or not, scientists are studying the work of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son.
So Christians have good reasons to believe we can formulate scientific theories that correspond to the real world. We accept some form of realism because the world is a created order (objective), humans have been created to work in it (empirical, rational, social capacities), and God in his good providence has ordained the two to go together. We also have good reasons to own up to our human finitude and indwelling sin, the fall’s effects on our minds and bodies; this truth encourages us not to claim too much for our theories. As Christians, then, our default mode should be to embrace the scientific consensus as an expression of the gifts and limits of creatures made in God’s image. This kind of good science is not done in isolation, like it was two centuries ago. Rather, it is collaborative, peer-reviewed, and widely tested before it is accepted.
Science and the Bible
One caveat though: Christians believe Scripture is inerrant. We hold that God’s word is free from any error, not just theologically but historically and scientifically. While we should never treat the Bible as a scientific textbook, we affirm that God has acted in space-time history and that he has said many things in the Old and New Testaments that touch on areas of science. Thus, when we have rightly interpreted what Scripture intends to teach, biblical doctrine can help our scientific investigations.
Christians should be skeptical of any elements of the scientific consensus that ignore Scripture’s witness.
Ignoring biblical teaching when it is directly relevant to scientific research not only dishonors God but also undercuts the realism of our theories. Christians should be skeptical of any elements of the scientific consensus that ignore Scripture’s witness.
However, there is an opposite danger to avoid: If we have misunderstood Scripture while claiming it is teaching a truth relevant to scientific investigation when, in fact, it teaches nothing of the sort, our faulty conviction will also undercut the realism of our theories. In short, if scientists want to glorify God in their work, they will need God’s help. But whatever the pitfalls, doing good science will always be deeply rewarding, a wonderful privilege worth more than its weight in gold.
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