Hard choices? Or no choice at all? Or real choices? Science and Christ are well-met, if one eliminates the solipcism of the old Enlightenment critics of the Faith. A fellow student and I use to laugh as we heard one so-called biblical scholar rattling off a rather dated piece of absurdity in skepticism, not knowing it came from Tom Paine. Today's scientific community has lost its way due to the fanatical effort to exclude what they always conclude are the fanciful falsifications of faith-advocates (and some are, indeed, fanciful falsifiers). Money pays the bills, and when one follows the money trail one finds out why and who wants such totally irreligious pabulum maintained as the hallmark of true science, forgetting the religious advocates of science as well as the religious principles which contributed to the development of our present day scientific method which, flawed as it is, still enables scientists to accomplish a great deal.

The intellectual aspect of the Gospel is a bit more prominent than most will admit. Consider how repentance, the first requirement of the Christian Faith demands a change of mind involving reflection, the conclusion of the process is not only a change of mind but of the whole life....and even a continuing change. What I found in my researches in Church History was that the truths of the Christian Faith are generally two-sided and apparently contradictory. Such two-sided truths set up a tension in the human mind, a desirable tension, which enables the believer to be balanced, flexible, creative, magnetic, and enduring. In other words, a person of maturity, the shining light of Christ engaging those who sit in darkness. The intellectual is but one aspect of a whole new theory for the scientific method, a theory which requires, the intellectual, analytical, synthetical, empirical, and mathematical as well as other likely rationales still to be discovered and developed. How hopeful!

A most interesting article. The dialectic idea is passe as neither Hegel nor Marx reflected the reality of how the dialectic fits with observable events. There are two worlds, two interstices, two interfaces, that form the continuum of synthetical ideas which go to make up one whole truth which I call crisnatological (borrowing from Paul Halmos' Theory of Creative Dissonance in his The Faith of Counsellors and uniting Christ and dissonance in a term to describe the phenomenon). I stumbled across this phenomena while doing six years of research in Church History. It amounted to an observable reality, namely, that when Believers has their apparently contradictory belief systems in balance in their minds or, rather, when their two-sided doctrines set up a tension in their minds, they were able to address reality from the appropriate pole that enabled them to deal with problems in helpful and healthy ways that could achieve some beneficial accomplishments.

No wonder atheists think we are idiots. Just read the comments of Roger and James above. It really frustrates me when Christians such as James Ward impose a non-Christian Hegelian dialetic. Please get over it, become educated and read the early church fathers such as Augustine. We need more thinkers like Noll, not less. It is the thinking of those above (commenters) which are bringing the demise of evangelical Christianity today. Their salt is losing it's saltiness! As a scientist I do and can embrace the conservative teachings of Christianity and science. Please don't confuse the philosophical and the natural world guys, but embrace the fact that God created it all and "All truth is God's truth." THANK YOU MARK NOLL!!!!!

Intellectuals like Professor Noll may believe that Christ somehow calls us to or wants us to do science, but this has only the thinnest scriptural basis, if any. I know that it's becoming politically correct these days to hold that science and religion,k specifically Christianity, are compatible in some version of the many-faceted Christian tradition on this topic. It would be refreshing if a first-rate evangelical said, purely and simply, with all the confidence of faith, that this is just not so. Christianity calls for hard choices and the hardest choice for intellectuals like Professor Noll is that they must embrace one or the other--Christ or science, no matter where this leads. If worldly science says one thing, and scripture says the opposite, whose side are we on? For several centuries liberal theology has tried to blur this harsh alternative with all sorts of clever dialectical resolutions, but, at the end of the day, it really is one or the other.