What Are the Natural Sciences?

Before we can even discuss the Natural Sciences and how they should or shouldn’t be taught in Christian schools, we must first understand what the natural sciences are and what distinguishes them from the pseudo-sciences. 

The following list is a mix both science and pseudo-science.  Why is only one traditionally taught in the science classroom while the other is not?

• Astrophysics or… Astrology?
• Telecommunications or… Mental Telepathy?
• Meteorology or… Shamanism?
• Biology or… Palm Reading?
• Medicine or… Dianetics?
• Chemistry or… Alchemy?

It should be clear that true sciences only consider material (or natural) cause, while the pseudo-sciences appeal to a mix of both natural and supernatural causality. 

Why do the natural sciences tend to make evangelical Christians nervous?  Quite simply, naturalism is sometimes difficult to distinguish between materialism in practice – but there are very important distinctions between the two. 

Naturalism only says that supernatural causality will not be considered in practice.  Supernatural causality is not absolutely discounted, but it is rather left out of the equation simply for the sake of utility.  Believe it or not, this the way most Christians live their lives from day to day.  For example, if I can’t find my car keys, I never even consider the possibility that they could have been spirited away by an angel.  That does not mean I reject the existence of spirits and angels, but that assumption (even if absolutely true) can’t help me find my keys.  To use scientific terminology: the “spirited away” hypothesis is not a testable model.  To admit that the best way to find stuff is to look for stuff is not a philosophical declaration that nothing exists beyond the material world — but rather a practical concession to everyday cause and effect.

Materialism, on the other hand, is a worldview philosophy that claims nothing exists beyond the physical realm.  While materialism might be identical in the laboratory to naturalism, the differences couldn’t be more significant.  One can be either a theist or a materialist and still approach the study of nature without respect to supernatural influence. 

Consequently, a Biblical Worldview does not reject naturalism as a method of scientific inquiry.  In fact, naturalisim can be seen as a subset of God’s providence.  The Westminster Confession of Faith puts it like this:

Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.

God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure.  (Chapter V)

So if the will of God includes both ordinary and special providence, then scientific naturalism is the rigorous and systematic study of God’s ordinary providence only.  Acts of special providence, or those things that God chooses to accomplish by fiat, do not submit themselves to scientific inquiry since they are contrary to the created order by definition. 

In conclusion: naturalistic explanations of ordinary phenomena do not threaten God’s involvement with creation.  If Jesus turns water in wine by fiat, then God gets the glory.  If a farmer plants a vineyard, waters it, cultivates it, picks the grapes and ferments them in a barrel over many years — well, God still gets the glory for that!

In our next post, we will look at how God’s ordinary providence includes both primary (ultimate) and secondary (proximate) causes.  Also, if you have other good examples of science contrasted with pseudoscience, I’d love to hear them.

Conflict Inevitable but not Necessary

Image Source: http://www.christianmind.org/illus/conflict.htm

One thing that Christian Educators must realize is that until the consummation of all things, there WILL be conflicts between science and theology.  This is not to say that God, being the author of all knowledge, contradicts Himself.  We can assume that Special Revelation and General Revelation are always in perfect agreement and there is therefore no necessaryconflict between science and theology.  However, since mankind does not possess the ability to properly interpret and apply these two sources of truth, we must learn to tolerate a certain amount of disagreement between our systematic study of nature (science) and our systematic study of the Scriptures (theology).  We must recognize that the systems we construct for ourselves, whether they be theological or scientific, are simply fallen mans’ limited attempt to make sense of the data as we perceive it at the time. 

Sola Scriptura, the cry of the Reformation, is often abused by evangelicals.  Christians can not understand and apply the Scriptures apart from general revelation.  Quite simply, the world is our context for understanding and applying the Word, and the Word tells us how we should then relate to the world.  And since our ability to observe and perceive the world (ie: collect scientific data) increases along with the advance of technology, our context for understanding and and applying the Word is continually shifting.  A couple of examples from History:

Psalm 93:1 “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” had an entirely different meaning to Christians prior to the 17th century than it does to us today.  Not because the timeless Scriptures changed their meaning, but because our understanding of the universe changed from earth-centered to sun-centered.  If you have any doubt about this, just see any biblical commentary on Psalm 93:1 written prior to Galileo.  Over the next 200 years, our exegesis gradually shifted so as not to constradict the overwhelming evidence that earth both rotates and revolves. 

Psalm 119:11 “I have hidden your Word in my heart.” had an entirely different meaning to God’s people prior to the 4th century than it does to us today.  Not because the timeless Scriptures have changed their meaning, but because our understanding of human anatomy and physiology has changed.  The heart is not longer the organ of thought, memory, and intelligence as was once believed.  So biblical references to the “heart” have taken on a metaphorical significance even through they were written litterally according to ancient science.  Consequently, our defense of God’s Word need not hinge on whether or not “heart” really means “heart” or whether modern science is conspiring against biblical truth because physiology is clearly not the focus of the text. 

There are numerous examples of this.  In every case, the shifting of our scientific worldview – initiated by the faithful study of God’s creation (not new exegetical insights) — caused a perceived conflict between science and theology.  And once a scientific paradigm is accepted by general scientific consensus, Christians have a responsibility to rethink how the Scriptures are understood and applied, lest we place unnecessary stumbling blocks between science and the Gospel.

In our next post, we will answer the question, “What are the Natural Sciences and how do we know when we’re doing science?”

Over the next few months, I’ll be finishing up a lecture series called Science and Christian Education designed to give Christian educators a more effective paradigm for the training of children in the natural sciences.

Very few children educated in Christian Schools go on to become practicing scientists. A small number might go into technical fields, but very few ever find themselves on the cutting edge of a scientific field. Interestingly, many of the evangelical scientists that you hear about were raised with little effective religious instruction or were persuaded by the Gospel later in life—after they had already become successful in their respective fields.

I get a lot questions about school science curricula from people who recognize the extent of the problem, but the challenge we face can’t be solved simply by changing our textbooks (although that would probably be step in the right direction). What Christians need is a completely new paradigm for approaching the study of nature that treats science, not as a set of natural laws or mathematical relationships that must either be accepted or rejected as immutable truth, but rather an ongoing process of observation, synthesis, discovery and re-synthesis that best accounts for the data available to each generation.

Science does not (or can not) exist simply to confirm our worldview assumptions, nor can it be expected to support every traditional interpretation of Scripture. How could something as tentative and as dynamic as our scientific methodology possibly bear this apologetical burden without sacrificing the very qualities that make it indispensable to our technological progress? But on the other hand, how can science educators effectively respond to the uncomfortable questions that will inevitably arise when an honest treatment of nature’s data paints a portrait of creation that is theologically unsettling? Should we abandon the science used in laboratories all over the world in favor of a “science” that can only be found in Christian bookstores—just to avoid difficult questions that teachers are unprepared to answer?

As our ability to observe the world around continues to increase, the scientific consensus will continue to shift. This will happen whether Evangelicals are part of the process or not. But if we fail to teach our children how to correctly apply the only paradigms capable of integrating the observable data as it we understand it today (even those paradigms that seem contrary to our Christian worldview), we are effectively denying them access to the very community of professionals responsible for ensuring that this process called science continues to work.

And what will become of those students with natural giftings and inclinations toward the study of nature? Will we drive them to apostasy by forcing upon them false ultimatums?  Or we will reduce them to whining outsiders who mistakenly blame their victimization on institutional religious bias—throwing stones at the hard-fought accomplishments of others while offering nothing constructive of their own.  Our children deserve better!

This series will probably span many weeks as I try to keep each post short succinct. This series will also have its own category called “Christian Education” in case some readers want to read through the series without the in-between off-topic posts. After I have the opportunity to present the lecture a few times, I plan to have a DVD professionally made that can be used for teacher workshops, home school co-ops, etc…

As always, I heartily invite reader comments to help shape the final version of the lecture. Thanks!

-GJG

Two seemingly unrelated things happened to me this past weekend: (1) I had a delightful email exchange with Dr. Walton, and (2) I tried to rent my favorite movie, Contact, from Blockbuster.  No joy on Contact, but I was pleased to hear that Dr. Walton will be recommending BTF to his colleagues.  Other than both being brilliant, what else could these two individuals possibly have in common? 

Dr. Walton’s commentary on Genesis is one of the more insightful, precisely because it unpacks the text as the original Ancient Near-Eastern audience would have understood it.  Once we familiarize ourselves with the world in which the Hebrews lived, we are able to see Genesis in its native context, apart from any modern scientific bias.  If we are consistent in our handling the text, we will find God accommodating His revelation to the finite perceptions of the world in which the Hebrews found themselves.  Why?  So that mankind has a familiar context from which we can connect with Him.  How else could the infinite and eternal God be understood by such finite creatures as ourselves?

I find it interesting that in Contact, when Ellie (played by Jodi Foster) finally connects with the alien race, they do not reveal themselves as they truly are.  Without a familiar context, such an encounter would be meaningless.  Because they are so far above us in both physical and mental faculties, it would have been too much of a shock to come face-to-face with these god-like beings.  So the alien that appears to Ellie literally “puts on flesh” and takes the form of her deceased father, and the setting of their encounter resembles that of a beach in Pensacola (a strong memory from Ellie’s childhood). 

Obviously, Dr. Sagan understood the principle of accommodation: the necessity of highly advanced beings to “humble” themselves and become “one of us” in order to facilitate the possibility of connecting with us on a personal level (alien incarnation?).  Why is this important?  Well, Dr. Sagan was raised in a Jewish household and was very familiar with the portrait of creation painted by the biblical authors.  But rather than allow Yahweh the same artistic liscense as his hypothetical alien race, Sagan takes God to task for not laying down a more technically correct picture of the cosmos.  His biographer, Anne Druyan, recently wrote:

“How was it, [Sagan] wondered, that the eternal and omniscient Creator described in the Bible could confidently assert so many fundamental misconceptions about Creation?  Why would the God of the Scriptures be far less knowledgeable about nature than are we, newcomers, who have only just begun to study the universe?  He could not bring himself to overlook the Bible’s formulation of a flat, six-thousand-year-old Earth… This newly acquired vision made the God who created the World seem hopelessly local and dated, bound to transparently human misperceptions and conceits of the past.”

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, edited by Ann Druyan (New York, NY; Penguin, 2006), pg. x.

What made Dr. Sagan overlook the obvious need for an eternal, omniscient and omnipresent God to accommodate Himself to us in the same way that his own alien species used a familiar context to connect with Ellie?  Perhaps he was influenced by creationist organizations like ICR and AiG who also reject this method of biblical inspiration and insist that God only speaks to us in literal matter-of-fact terms?  On this hermeneutic, Carl Sagan and Ken Ham would find themselves in agreement.

Opponents of evolution often claim that such conclusions are “inevitable” when you approach the data of natural history from a Darwinian framework.  They are partially correct.  For instance, when I sit down to solve a puzzle, the image on the front of the box is the framework by which I make sense of the many pieces before me.  If, after days of unproductive labor, I cannot force the pieces (data) to conform to my picture (model), then someone has obviously put the wrong pieces in the wrong box.  In that case, the framework by which I initially attempted to understand the data is falsified and I must find a different way to approach the facts.  In science, such things happen quite often.  However, if given the right box, nobody is surprised when the pieces eventually come together to match the picture.  Inevitable?  How could it have turned out otherwise?