Science and Christianity

First of Two Parts

A few generations ago, when conversation lagged there were always topics like theology and philosophy to quicken the hour, for educated men felt an obligation to be interested, if not well informed, in these areas. Today it is science we like to be “up on.” First Cause, no; Space Age, yes. Moses is out, Freud is in. The mere fact that a subject can be at one time in and at another time out is mute testimony to change. Sometimes it reflects man’s fickleness, but often it mirrors his growing interest both in an ever-changing world and in the new structures required to understand it.

Behind this growth in our comprehension of the universe stand several competing concepts that are usually in some degree of tension. I say tension rather than duality or plurality, for these concepts do not all apply to the same level. Not all of them purport to give the same kind of description or view of the world. All of us feel this tension.

In Christianity and the Modern World View, H. A. Hodges writes:

I should like to ask three questions and make some suggestions in the three areas they lead us to. The questions are: What is science? Where are the frontiers of science and Christianity? What is the conflict?

What Is Science?

Science in its myriad parts is both conceptual and functional—conceptual in its effort to map the physical and natural world and more recently the psychological world; functional in its perennial enlistment to fight disease, lengthen life, and serve the public good, to say nothing of its capacity to intensify the war effort.

Science is a much misunderstood enterprise. Some say it has a methodology: it gathers data, sends up trial-ballon concepts called hypotheses, tests their validity, makes corrections, modifies the map of reality, makes further tests, and so on. But is this not the basic method of nearly every field of knowledge-seeking, including theology?

Even the gathering of facts is not so simple as it sounds. If you looked east on a clear morning, what would you see? A moving ball of fire rising above a fixed horizon? Look again. Wasn’t it rather a moving horizon dipping below the ball of fire? Which was it? Or were both in motion? Whatever your answer, a structure is implied, a perspective and its related understanding assumed. That is why Goethe said that we see what we know.

Generating hypotheses to fit data is both work and play; either way it is demanding. In physics, which holds a strategic place as a natural science and serves as model for most would-be sciences, the attempt to discover or invent hypotheses to explain data has been the most mind-wrenching experience of all. As Herbert Butterfield observes:

To speak of “the” scientific method in relation to all sciences is quite misleading, for such a method simply does not exist. Science has many methods, each characteristic of the particular science served. A distinguished physiologist once remarked, “It is astonishing how few people realize that the methods of science are in the main ad hoc in nature.”

But what, then, of the logical step-by-step development we learn from textbooks? Honest scientists will tell you that it is an ideal, an afterthought, a way of explaining your work to someone who hasn’t the time to hear about all your mistakes and false starts and zany hypotheses that ultimately (and usually painfully and slowly) became the “shavings from the carpenter’s bench.” The niceties of formal deductive logic are not nearly so important for natural science qua quest as are the freedom and power and fecundity of human imagination.

For this reason Alfred North Whitehead was very frank to characterize science as the outworking of a man’s hunch, of his hope, of his guess:

The colorful comment of the late Professor P. W. Bridgman of Harvard is often quoted:

All this suggests, then, that scientific research is quite honestly not itself a science; rather, it is still an art. Indeed, science is much richer than most laymen dream and can be viewed from different angles: as a collected precipitate from the stirrings of past minds it is a body of organized knowledge; regarded as a mathematical skeleton (as in physics, notably), it is simply an array of equations; when seen as a formal a posteriori account, the stricter science (with mathematics as the prototype) exhibits a structure of axioms and theorems; seen as a growing edge of understanding, science is a disciplined insight; under the rubric of a bold intellectual adventure, it is experimental theorizing; under the figure of fidelity, it is a “second wife”; and seen as a particular way of life, it is indeed an exhilarating one.

Most scientists, it seems, consider their aim to be constructing at one level or another a world symbolic of the actual world, that is, a model of reality. The success of the model, as Mach observed, is its own justification. What better recommendation is there than the fact that “it works”? But the use of models also has inherent dangers. Nineteenth-century physicists fell into the trap of nearly completely identifying the current theory with their model for it. This led them to think that gases were “really” made up of minute billiard balls, that space was “really” filled with a perfectly elastic solid, rigid but penetrable. These dangers underscore the fact that to have a map of reality is not enough; we need also to know how to use the map. We have relief maps, road maps, contour maps of the same terrain, but each is used in a different way. And those little black circular blobs marking towns do not mean that towns are circular, or that they are black; nor is the State of Rhode Island all purple, as some maps show.

Where Are the Frontiers?

If these considerations point in any specific direction, it is, I believe, toward the fact that the frontier of science as a human effort is simply in the mind of man. This mind is still the most important element in all scientifically conducted research. It is there that facts are observed, hypotheses formed, critical judgments built up, revisions made, and so on.

Now, to the scientist who is also a Christian, it is of incalculable importance that what he seeks to map is God’s universe, for this means he is contributing to an understanding of the work of God’s hands. This difference will not necessarily make him a better or more thorough scientist, but it will qualify his attitude toward his work. In the nature of things and persons, the pristine joy of creating is beyond our power; but the exhilaration of being on the growing edge of deeper and deeper awareness of how it all is put together and how it actually functions is surely a joy, whether the poets celebrate it or not. In the words of George Macdonald, “human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science, works with its back to Him, and is always leaving Him—His intent, that is, His perfected work—behind it, always going farther and farther away from the point where His work culminates in revelation.” Note the connection between science and revelation via creation.

The scientist can hardly avoid placing himself somewhere in the scheme of things; to do this is a human thing and has nothing whatever to do with science. And where we place ourselves in our reading of life is crucial. We are all cut from the same bolt of cloth in our basic concerns; these are the classical, personal, perennial matters of security, freedom, order, and meaning. The answers we give to these questions involve our faith or lack of it, our concepts of history, of self, and of the future.

God is always a “problem” to a man, including an educated man, until He becomes the center of that man’s own little universe. Our egocentricity is our damnation; God’s egocentricity is our salvation. It was the same with Mitya in Dostoevsky’s story of the four Brothers Karamazov:

Because science qualifies how we construe the world, and construction is both of mind and of heart, the mind of modern man—and particularly that of the educated, because it is more susceptible to science—is justifiably identified as the frontier of both science and Christianity.

What Is the Conflict?

Although the more acrimonious debate between science and traditional views of the Christian Church is past, the fires of controversy have left embers that are still warm. The tension of incompatible attitudes is still with us and will probably exist for a long time. No doubt new aspects of the conflict are yet to emerge. This surely testifies to the vitality of both sides in a world of men who are supposed to see things for themselves. Each with a growing edge of understanding tends to eye the other with conspicuous aloofness. But much of the time they ignore each other.

THE PROPHET’S CHILD

He dreamed his dreams—

Some were roaring nightmares;

He saw his visions

And tiptoed skyscraped heights;

His prophetic mouth has sprung

And closed with clacking teeth

And with thin, smacking lips.

A pop-eyed, naked nuisance!

Spirit dripping on this stone,

They charged, would not wear

Away its final, immutable presence.

But as they left, at their feet

Children sang and carved

Their dream-born castles

From the white, sea-washed sand.

WILLIAM J. SCHMIDT

The story of the conflict has been one of faults on both sides. On the whole, it has been an account of shrinking faith in the relevance of Christian faith. The Church bitterly opposed the Copernican idea of heliocentricity; yet how much grander is our concept of the universe as a result of it! It is a sad fact that scientists, even unbelieving scientists, are swifter to confess error in science once it is discovered than are the leaders of the Church. Would not confession by the Church of its ancient errors, even at this late date, be a wholesome act? Has the Church forgotten how to confess?

But there is yet another angle for viewing the scene, one that can be very revealing. Sometimes the distinction between science and religion is compared to that between a diagram and a picture—two different but complementary methods by which man grasps reality. Up to a point this is true.

The error, from the Christian point of view, that has colored many well-meaning scholarly attempts to treat the problem of theology and natural science is conceiving them to be on the same level. Novel though the thought might appear to some, truth is not all on one level. There is truth that is higher because it is more important and because it includes other truth and depends upon it for its validity. The difference lies in the matter of man’s involvement of himself in the viewing process. For this reason, the one-level treatment of theology and science is academically impossible. James Denney called attention to this involvement when he criticized Ritschl in 1895:

But what is the picture today? Half the human race is dominated by a philosophy that dogmatically asserts that science has superseded Christian theology and then sets out to prove to the world that Christian faith is obsolete.

It has been popular to think of the science-religion conflict as a running series of battles between particular dogmas of religion and particular discoveries of science. But this is a superficial approach, as W. T. Stace observes. The real trouble is deeper; it extends to the private laboratory of the heart and mind, where presuppositions are formulated. The antagonism, Stace says, “is rather that certain very general assumptions which are implicit in the scientific view of the world conflict with basic assumptions of the religious view—any religious view, not merely the Christian view—of the world” (Religion and the Modern Mind, Lippincott, 1952, p. 53).

It is in the heart that man first and most importantly either affirms or denies the existence of God. Here is the watershed of character. In his assumptions a man determines what he really is before God. For me, this is a basic biblical insight. My experience as a mathematician has only served to rub it in, as it were, because it is also a basic mathematical insight that the axioms of a system determine completely the structure reared upon them. The Apostle Paul makes this order clear when he first argues a correct doctrine of God and self and then sets down exhortations on conduct. The picture in the Book of James is that of a spring from which sweet or bitter waters flow.

If man does not recognize God as Creator and Lord of all life, and of his own in particular, then God forces him to take an idol as his “god.” If he will not believe the truth, there is nothing left but to accept a lie. There are many ways to tell a lie, but there is only one way to tell the truth. God implicitly gives the possible meanings of life when he puts man in the context of the rest of his earthly creation. We do not manufacture meanings for life: we choose from those available before we arrived on the scene. Thus when man realizes his alienation from God, he finds himself continually driven to seek provisional meanings from the broken cistern of his own existence in order to nullify the sense of guilt and to satisfy his deep yearning for meaning. His guilt and hostility will inevitably rise to the surface and work themselves out in his every pursuit. The testimony of conscience in time emerges to the surface like the periscope of a submarine, to be seen by all. Either we are living epistles for God and exhibit faith that others see, or else we reflect to the world an emptiness of soul and an absence of faith.

Both in college years and later, educated persons are influenced by the mainstreams of thought. Many continually make progress in a lively intellectual pilgrimage. We need to see how the educated often parry the thrust of the Gospel. Let us examine the structure of reasoning. If strong emphasis is given to the status of hypotheses and presuppositions, it is because they appear as both necessary and sufficient to carry out a line of reasoning.

The basic move in discursive thought is the syllogism, the logical move whose very simple form is: All A’s are B’s; all B’s are C’s; so all A’s are C’s. The conclusion follows from the two premises. Any logical argument is ideally a chain of reasoning involving such syllogistic links. Argument is logical to the degree that it shares this pattern. We are constantly making assumptions in all areas of life and under all sorts of conditions, because we cannot apprehend reality in any other way. In the sciences it is important to recognize our assumptions and often to call specific attention to them. Sometimes whole nations are in such basic agreement on a presupposition—for example, that war is terribly wrong—that it becomes an unconscious axiom, as prevalent as the air we breathe. Often in the history of ideas a whole culture has bought stock in some popular idea or concept that all or nearly all people accepted without question. A mind set, an automatic frame of reference, develops, to which other questions are referred for consideration.

Historians tell us that the modern mind, including the educated mind, is the product of seventeenth-century science. Herbert Butterfield sees the “scientific revolution” of that period as truly volcanic in its mental upheaval:

One of my philosophy professors was fond of saying that it is the essence of thought to make distinctions. Doubtless this was a “pearl” he was handing down from his own schooling. But I’m not sure that philosophy always makes significant distinctions. If we play detective in trying to locate hidden as well as plain presuppositions, then we find that science makes three basic assumptions: (1) that the world is really there (seldom mentioned but a constant backdrop); (2) that logic applies to science’s description of the world (this cannot be proved a priori but is constantly and in different ways being verified); and (3) that some kind of causal laws apply to nature, though their precise nature is, at least for physics, the subject of hot debate.

In Miracles C. S. Lewis observed that “all possible knowledge … depends on the validity of reasoning.… Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true.… A theory which explained everything else in the universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid … would have destroyed its own credentials.”

While some such basis is common to all scientists, it should be clear that a Christian view of things cannot stop with these three axioms. Indeed, there is nothing religious at all in this characterization of science. But the scientist who is also a Christian goes two steps further by saying that God exists and that Jesus Christ is an adequate revelation of him to man. On both points he is on firm biblical ground. The Bible assumes, without formal proof in any mathematical sense, that God exists. The evidence it offers is, for the believing, quite sufficient. Scripture is full of the evidence that God exists independently and underivedly and eternally. All time is “now” to him; all space is “here” to him; all men are “present” to him; all beings are “creature” to him.

Christian faith puts that described world into its own God-arranged setting. Science has absolutely nothing to do with the way faith regards the cosmos in relation to God. This is for the believer a matter of God’s revelation. The Christian cannot afford to let the scientist tell him the ultimate significance and meaning of the universe, any more than the scientist can let the Church dictate the experiments he will conduct and the investigations he will carry out. Our conviction as Christians is that the Bible’s view of the world, its view of men and things and of all the created order, is the most satisfying and the most consistent with all the facts.

Milton D. Hunnex is professor and head of the department of philosophy at Willamette University, Salem, Oregon. He received the B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Redlands and the Ph.D. in the Inter-collegiate Program in Graduate Studies, Claremont, California. He is author of “Philosophies and Philosophers.”

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