Michael Hanby’s opening essay in this conversation (and his much more extensive analysis in his No God, No Science) ought to give us hope that the marginalization of Christian philosophers and theologians from participation in modern science has some serious challengers today. For too long modern science (or should we say scientism) has “claimed exclusive authority over the meaning of reason and the truth of nature.” We might even describe science’s successful ascendency with religious language.
Someone has observed that the evangelists of a totalizing, reductionistic scientific culture have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Christian missionaries. With the support of secular governments, corporations, research universities, and a compliant Western media an ostensibly a-theological, anti-Christian, mechanistic, and reductionistic scientific vision has successfully infiltrated every dimension of Western culture. And the missionaries of this vision oftentimes display a messianic fervor about the future prospects of scientific knowledge.
Furthermore, some champions of modern science also often function as modern inquisitors. Christian men and women, both theologians and scientists, with alternate (but not always contradictory) conceptions of science have been treated as modern heretics. And that description can be verified as many Christian intellectuals have been sidelined in their respective fields of study by universities and scientific associations because of their theological convictions, or even because they dare to question accepted scientific dogma. There are plenty of university and college professors, for example, who wait until they are retired to speak out, recognizing that even their tenured status would not have protected them from the inquisition while serving in educational institutions.
What is more concerning to me, however, after serving as an ordinary parish pastor in Presbyterian churches for 35 years, is how many parishioners have been conditioned to believe that modern science has explanatory powers that circumscribe what we are allowed to confess about God and his creation. But it’s not just that I want to help them carve out a place for the creator God within a materialistic scientific culture. As if God started it all and then stepped back to let the world run according to immanent laws of nature. Or that he can intervene now and then with miraculous works of power that overrule those laws or to fill in where science has not (yet) explained things (i.e., the God of the Gaps). Or as if God is there for one’s soul and the afterlife, or possibly as therapy in a cruel world, but science is sufficient to guide us in the more mundane things of this earthly life. More than that, I want them to understand and confess that without acknowledging the Triune Creator, there can be no rational foundation for genuine and fruitful scientific exploration and progress.
Moreover, I want my parishioners to be able to distinguish between science and scientism, the latter being a messianic, idolatrous program that should not be linked with the genuine, astonishing gifts that scientific research has provided us in the modern world.
The story has been told by others of the foundational significance of the Christian vision of God and his creation for the origin of scientific research. The truth is that, even though it is sublimated today, if you will, nevertheless, for modern science to be productive, it must still presuppose a unified creation, open to rational inquiry by humans made in the image of God. But more than that, as Hanby and Leithart have both argued, without confessing the reality of the Creator and his creation, scientists will not, indeed cannot discover the fulness and beauty of God’s creative genius and the gracious gift of our ability to discover and participate in the astonishing wonder of his creation.
I am reminded of the parable of the Giant in C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress.[1] The pilgrim in Lewis’s allegory is John, who stands for an ordinary man seeking to navigate modern life. He fears the Landlord, whom he has been taught is a powerful, despotic tyrant. (Interestingly, this image of God as a divine despot in relation to humanity and the world is exactly the sort of theological distortion that began to take hold in 17th century, anti-trinitarian, natural theology and eventually led to the modern phenomenon of “mass atheism”). But John longs for something more, something that will bring him “joy,” which, in the story, is his visions of a beautiful and enticing island.
At one point in his journey John is captured by the Spirit of the Age, portrayed as a Giant, and he is imprisoned in a dungeon. Lewis captions chapter seven as “Facing the Facts.”
John lays in his fetters all night in the cold and stench of the dungeon. And when morning came there was a little light at the grating, and, looking around, John saw that he had many fellow prisoners, of all sexes and ages. But instead of speaking to him, they all huddled away from the light and drew as far back into the pit, away from the grating, as they could. But John thought that if he could breathe a little fresh air he would be better, and he crawled up to the grating. But as soon as he looked out and saw the giant, it crushed the heart out of him: and even as he looked, the giant began to open his eyes and John, without knowing why he did it, shrank from the grating. Now I dreamed that the giant’s eyes had this property, that whatever they looked on became transparent. Consequently, when John looked around the dungeon, he retreated from his fellow prisoners in terror, the place seemed to be thronged with demons. A woman was seated near him, but he did not know it was a woman, because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins: and lower down the lungs panting like sponges, and the liver, and the intestines like a coil of snakes. And when he averted his eyes from her they fell on an old man, and this was worse for the old man had a cancer. And when John sat down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of his own inwards. Then I dreamed of all these creatures living in the hold under the giant’s eye for many days and nights. And John looked around on it all and suddenly fell on his face and trust his hands into his eyes and cried out, “It is the black hole. There may be no Landlord, but it is true about the black hole. I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell forever.”
John is eventually released from the prison after Lady Reason slays the Giant, and he returns to the road to continue his journey. Eventually, she explains what happened to him in the prison.
“Did you think that the things you saw in the dungeon were real: that we really are like that?
“Of course I did. It is only our skin that hides them.”
“Then I must ask you the same question that I asked the giant. ‘What is the color of things in the dark?’”
“I suppose, no color at all.”
“And what of their shape? Have you any notion of it save as what could be seen or touched, or what you could collect from many seeings and touchings?”
“I don’t know that I have.”
“Then you do you not see how the giant has deceived you?”
“No quite clearly.”
“He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible. That is, he should you something that is not, but something that would be if the world were made all other than it is. But in the real world our inwards are invisible. They are not colored shapes at all, they are feelings. The warmth of your limbs at this moment, the sweetness of your breath as you draw it in, the comfort in your belly because we breakfasted well, and your hunger for the next meal—these are the reality: all the sponges and tubes that you saw in the dungeon are a lie.”
“But if I cut a man open I should see them in him.”
“A man cut open is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made you believe that life is ugly.”
“I cannot forget the man with cancer.”
“What you saw was unreality. The ugly lump was the giant’s trick: the reality was the pain, which has no color or shape.”
“Is that much better?”
“That depends on the man.”
“I think I begin to see.”
“It is surprising that things should look strange if you see them as they are not? If you take an organ out of a man’s body—or a longing out of a man’s mind—and give to the one shape and color, and to the other self-consciousness, which they never have in reality, would you expect them to be other than monstrous?”
“Is there then no truth at all in what I saw under the giant’s eyes?”
“Such pictures are useful to physicians.”
I think it’s fascinating that, although John will meet Mother Kirk later in his travels, it is Lady Reason who provides him with a preliminary metaphysics of reality, if you will, to combat the Spirit of the Age.
As I noted earlier, I join this conversation as a parish pastor who has served local congregations for more than three decades. In high school and college my interest in science led me to question my Christian convictions. I was baptized and confirmed in a faithful Lutheran church, educated in parochial schools, but began to believe that the knowledge that science offered about the world and life was more reliable because it was based on hard evidence. The knowledge presented to me by my pastors was based on biblical revelation, which ran counter to the widespread plausibility structure embedded in modern Western culture, rooted in scientific methodological naturalism. And like many young men, my epistemological crisis was correlative with my moral wandering.
When I was a geology student in the 70’s I began to question the big picture that was being presented to me in my science courses. I understood and appreciated the value of the scientific method and the results we all enjoy because of many centuries of scientific experimentation. The cultural and technological achievements of science are truly astonishing. But I began to question the totalizing vision, the “epistemic privilege” of science, as Peter Harrison has described it.
Concentrating on paleontology and geological earth history for my degree, I began to ask my professors questions. I realized, for example, that my profs were embarrassed by the absence of paleontological evidence for transitional forms and the lack of workable theories that might explain how such irreducibly complex organs like eyes and ears might have developed. When I asked questions about this, I was told that future exploration of the fossil record would eventually provide answers. But paleontologists have not discovered fossils that might fill the gaps. Furthermore, no believable mechanism has been proposed for how such developments might have happened. With such weak evidence one could be forgiven for believing that Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian theories are being propped up for reasons other than scientific data.
In conversations with my advisor, a paleontologist specializing in the micro evolutionary changes in Paleozoic trilobites in a small cross section of sedimentary rocks in Oklahoma, he confided to me that he simply accepted the theoretical framework of neo-Darwinian evolution that he learned from his professors and standard textbooks. He was busy with his own research and not interested in questioning what seemed to him to be a consensus among scientists.
I have no desire here to delve into the debates about the age of the earth or the viability of some form of evolutionary development of life. But I could not help noticing how my professors linked arms and walked in lockstep in their acceptance of some version of evolutionary theory and in opposition to any philosophical or theological challenge to the reigning materialistic philosophy of science. Of course, I freely confess that I was young and immature then, so my way of expressing my questions was not always as measured as it ought to have been. Even so, the dismissive attitude of my professors to my reasonable questions, but especially to my Christian perspective on the nature and aims of science were not well received.
My takeaway from those encounters was that there are indeed sociological reasons for the dominance of certain scientific paradigms. And that conviction has only been reinformed over time. And we could also note how professors, working scientists, all have institutional obligations. They need to make a living in workplaces that expect conformity. Futhermore, academic institutions and scientific associations receive grants from the government and corporations that often expect conformity and look for outcomes that will benefit political ideologies or turn a profit for their benefactors. This lockstep posture is important not just for the origin sciences, but because as Michael Hanby laments “the corrosive effects of Darwinianism’s universal acid” seems to poison every modern scientific endeavor.[2]
Listening to parishioners over the years, I have learned that my experience was not unique. I very much appreciate the work of Hanby and Harrison as they work in academia to remind working scientists and philosophers of science the foundational role that Christian metaphysics and epistemology have played in the origin and development of the modern scientific enterprise, as well how Christian philosophy ought to both constrain and free scientists in their work.
But we should not forget that the relationship between theology and science impacts ordinary people, not just in the upper echelons of academia. Average modern Christian people must navigate these issues in their families, at work, in the education of their children, and in how they relate to other academic and governmental institutions. Theology is not just the province of academics. Every Christian is called to understand and apply biblical revelation in their everyday lives. And in many cases, simple Christians who understand basic biblical and theological truths can identify and eschew the hubris of modern scientism. To help parishioners, modern pastors need to be better trained in how biblical revelation informs and restrains scientific knowledge. Many lay Christians are rudderless when it comes to navigating the territories of science and theology. Contemporary seminaries have not provided the instruction that pastors need to effectively serve ordinary believers, some of whom are vocational scientists.
Michael Hanby’s reference to Hans Urs van Baltasar at the end of his contribution (and in the conclusion to his book No God, No science)—“Whoever sees the most wins”[3]—reminds me of another delightful and instructive parable in C.S. Lewis’s children’s novel The Magicians Nephew. Polly and Digory have moved into a new house. And the two children plotted a way to get into that empty house in order to explore it.
“Polly informed Digory that the house next to his was empty. Her father told her that it had been empty ever since they had moved in.”
“Upon hearing this,” Digory said, “But I don’t expect it to be empty at all.”
“What do you expect?” Polly asked.
“I expect someone lives there in secret, only coming in and out at night, with a dark lantern. We shall probably discover a gang of desperate criminals and get a reward. It’s all rot to say a house would be empty all those years unless there was a mystery.”
“Daddy thought it must be the drains,” said Polly.
“Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations,” said Digory.[4]
Jeff Meyers is Senior Pastor of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church in St. Louis.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Bantam Books, 1981), pp. 48-62.
[2] Michael Hanby, No God, No Science (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 404.
[3] Hanby, p. 405.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: HarperCollins, 1955), p 5.
Michael Hanby’s opening essay in this conversation (and his much more extensive analysis in his No God, No Science) ought to give us hope that the marginalization of Christian philosophers and theologians from participation in modern science has some serious challengers today. For too long modern science (or should we say scientism) has “claimed exclusive authority over the meaning of reason and the truth of nature.” We might even describe science’s successful ascendency with religious language.
Someone has observed that the evangelists of a totalizing, reductionistic scientific culture have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Christian missionaries. With the support of secular governments, corporations, research universities, and a compliant Western media an ostensibly a-theological, anti-Christian, mechanistic, and reductionistic scientific vision has successfully infiltrated every dimension of Western culture. And the missionaries of this vision oftentimes display a messianic fervor about the future prospects of scientific knowledge.
Furthermore, some champions of modern science also often function as modern inquisitors. Christian men and women, both theologians and scientists, with alternate (but not always contradictory) conceptions of science have been treated as modern heretics. And that description can be verified as many Christian intellectuals have been sidelined in their respective fields of study by universities and scientific associations because of their theological convictions, or even because they dare to question accepted scientific dogma. There are plenty of university and college professors, for example, who wait until they are retired to speak out, recognizing that even their tenured status would not have protected them from the inquisition while serving in educational institutions.
What is more concerning to me, however, after serving as an ordinary parish pastor in Presbyterian churches for 35 years, is how many parishioners have been conditioned to believe that modern science has explanatory powers that circumscribe what we are allowed to confess about God and his creation. But it’s not just that I want to help them carve out a place for the creator God within a materialistic scientific culture. As if God started it all and then stepped back to let the world run according to immanent laws of nature. Or that he can intervene now and then with miraculous works of power that overrule those laws or to fill in where science has not (yet) explained things (i.e., the God of the Gaps). Or as if God is there for one’s soul and the afterlife, or possibly as therapy in a cruel world, but science is sufficient to guide us in the more mundane things of this earthly life. More than that, I want them to understand and confess that without acknowledging the Triune Creator, there can be no rational foundation for genuine and fruitful scientific exploration and progress.
Moreover, I want my parishioners to be able to distinguish between science and scientism, the latter being a messianic, idolatrous program that should not be linked with the genuine, astonishing gifts that scientific research has provided us in the modern world.
The story has been told by others of the foundational significance of the Christian vision of God and his creation for the origin of scientific research. The truth is that, even though it is sublimated today, if you will, nevertheless, for modern science to be productive, it must still presuppose a unified creation, open to rational inquiry by humans made in the image of God. But more than that, as Hanby and Leithart have both argued, without confessing the reality of the Creator and his creation, scientists will not, indeed cannot discover the fulness and beauty of God’s creative genius and the gracious gift of our ability to discover and participate in the astonishing wonder of his creation.
I am reminded of the parable of the Giant in C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress.[1] The pilgrim in Lewis’s allegory is John, who stands for an ordinary man seeking to navigate modern life. He fears the Landlord, whom he has been taught is a powerful, despotic tyrant. (Interestingly, this image of God as a divine despot in relation to humanity and the world is exactly the sort of theological distortion that began to take hold in 17th century, anti-trinitarian, natural theology and eventually led to the modern phenomenon of “mass atheism”). But John longs for something more, something that will bring him “joy,” which, in the story, is his visions of a beautiful and enticing island.
At one point in his journey John is captured by the Spirit of the Age, portrayed as a Giant, and he is imprisoned in a dungeon. Lewis captions chapter seven as “Facing the Facts.”
John lays in his fetters all night in the cold and stench of the dungeon. And when morning came there was a little light at the grating, and, looking around, John saw that he had many fellow prisoners, of all sexes and ages. But instead of speaking to him, they all huddled away from the light and drew as far back into the pit, away from the grating, as they could. But John thought that if he could breathe a little fresh air he would be better, and he crawled up to the grating. But as soon as he looked out and saw the giant, it crushed the heart out of him: and even as he looked, the giant began to open his eyes and John, without knowing why he did it, shrank from the grating. Now I dreamed that the giant’s eyes had this property, that whatever they looked on became transparent. Consequently, when John looked around the dungeon, he retreated from his fellow prisoners in terror, the place seemed to be thronged with demons. A woman was seated near him, but he did not know it was a woman, because, through the face, he saw the skull and through that the brains and the passages of the nose, and the larynx, and the saliva moving in the glands and the blood in the veins: and lower down the lungs panting like sponges, and the liver, and the intestines like a coil of snakes. And when he averted his eyes from her they fell on an old man, and this was worse for the old man had a cancer. And when John sat down and drooped his head, not to see the horrors, he saw only the working of his own inwards. Then I dreamed of all these creatures living in the hold under the giant’s eye for many days and nights. And John looked around on it all and suddenly fell on his face and trust his hands into his eyes and cried out, “It is the black hole. There may be no Landlord, but it is true about the black hole. I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell forever.”
John is eventually released from the prison after Lady Reason slays the Giant, and he returns to the road to continue his journey. Eventually, she explains what happened to him in the prison.
“Did you think that the things you saw in the dungeon were real: that we really are like that?
“Of course I did. It is only our skin that hides them.”
“Then I must ask you the same question that I asked the giant. ‘What is the color of things in the dark?’”
“I suppose, no color at all.”
“And what of their shape? Have you any notion of it save as what could be seen or touched, or what you could collect from many seeings and touchings?”
“I don’t know that I have.”
“Then you do you not see how the giant has deceived you?”
“No quite clearly.”
“He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible. That is, he should you something that is not, but something that would be if the world were made all other than it is. But in the real world our inwards are invisible. They are not colored shapes at all, they are feelings. The warmth of your limbs at this moment, the sweetness of your breath as you draw it in, the comfort in your belly because we breakfasted well, and your hunger for the next meal—these are the reality: all the sponges and tubes that you saw in the dungeon are a lie.”
“But if I cut a man open I should see them in him.”
“A man cut open is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made you believe that life is ugly.”
“I cannot forget the man with cancer.”
“What you saw was unreality. The ugly lump was the giant’s trick: the reality was the pain, which has no color or shape.”
“Is that much better?”
“That depends on the man.”
“I think I begin to see.”
“It is surprising that things should look strange if you see them as they are not? If you take an organ out of a man’s body—or a longing out of a man’s mind—and give to the one shape and color, and to the other self-consciousness, which they never have in reality, would you expect them to be other than monstrous?”
“Is there then no truth at all in what I saw under the giant’s eyes?”
“Such pictures are useful to physicians.”
I think it’s fascinating that, although John will meet Mother Kirk later in his travels, it is Lady Reason who provides him with a preliminary metaphysics of reality, if you will, to combat the Spirit of the Age.
As I noted earlier, I join this conversation as a parish pastor who has served local congregations for more than three decades. In high school and college my interest in science led me to question my Christian convictions. I was baptized and confirmed in a faithful Lutheran church, educated in parochial schools, but began to believe that the knowledge that science offered about the world and life was more reliable because it was based on hard evidence. The knowledge presented to me by my pastors was based on biblical revelation, which ran counter to the widespread plausibility structure embedded in modern Western culture, rooted in scientific methodological naturalism. And like many young men, my epistemological crisis was correlative with my moral wandering.
When I was a geology student in the 70’s I began to question the big picture that was being presented to me in my science courses. I understood and appreciated the value of the scientific method and the results we all enjoy because of many centuries of scientific experimentation. The cultural and technological achievements of science are truly astonishing. But I began to question the totalizing vision, the “epistemic privilege” of science, as Peter Harrison has described it.
Concentrating on paleontology and geological earth history for my degree, I began to ask my professors questions. I realized, for example, that my profs were embarrassed by the absence of paleontological evidence for transitional forms and the lack of workable theories that might explain how such irreducibly complex organs like eyes and ears might have developed. When I asked questions about this, I was told that future exploration of the fossil record would eventually provide answers. But paleontologists have not discovered fossils that might fill the gaps. Furthermore, no believable mechanism has been proposed for how such developments might have happened. With such weak evidence one could be forgiven for believing that Darwinian and Neo-Darwinian theories are being propped up for reasons other than scientific data.
In conversations with my advisor, a paleontologist specializing in the micro evolutionary changes in Paleozoic trilobites in a small cross section of sedimentary rocks in Oklahoma, he confided to me that he simply accepted the theoretical framework of neo-Darwinian evolution that he learned from his professors and standard textbooks. He was busy with his own research and not interested in questioning what seemed to him to be a consensus among scientists.
I have no desire here to delve into the debates about the age of the earth or the viability of some form of evolutionary development of life. But I could not help noticing how my professors linked arms and walked in lockstep in their acceptance of some version of evolutionary theory and in opposition to any philosophical or theological challenge to the reigning materialistic philosophy of science. Of course, I freely confess that I was young and immature then, so my way of expressing my questions was not always as measured as it ought to have been. Even so, the dismissive attitude of my professors to my reasonable questions, but especially to my Christian perspective on the nature and aims of science were not well received.
My takeaway from those encounters was that there are indeed sociological reasons for the dominance of certain scientific paradigms. And that conviction has only been reinformed over time. And we could also note how professors, working scientists, all have institutional obligations. They need to make a living in workplaces that expect conformity. Futhermore, academic institutions and scientific associations receive grants from the government and corporations that often expect conformity and look for outcomes that will benefit political ideologies or turn a profit for their benefactors. This lockstep posture is important not just for the origin sciences, but because as Michael Hanby laments “the corrosive effects of Darwinianism’s universal acid” seems to poison every modern scientific endeavor.[2]
Listening to parishioners over the years, I have learned that my experience was not unique. I very much appreciate the work of Hanby and Harrison as they work in academia to remind working scientists and philosophers of science the foundational role that Christian metaphysics and epistemology have played in the origin and development of the modern scientific enterprise, as well how Christian philosophy ought to both constrain and free scientists in their work.
But we should not forget that the relationship between theology and science impacts ordinary people, not just in the upper echelons of academia. Average modern Christian people must navigate these issues in their families, at work, in the education of their children, and in how they relate to other academic and governmental institutions. Theology is not just the province of academics. Every Christian is called to understand and apply biblical revelation in their everyday lives. And in many cases, simple Christians who understand basic biblical and theological truths can identify and eschew the hubris of modern scientism. To help parishioners, modern pastors need to be better trained in how biblical revelation informs and restrains scientific knowledge. Many lay Christians are rudderless when it comes to navigating the territories of science and theology. Contemporary seminaries have not provided the instruction that pastors need to effectively serve ordinary believers, some of whom are vocational scientists.
Michael Hanby’s reference to Hans Urs van Baltasar at the end of his contribution (and in the conclusion to his book No God, No science)—“Whoever sees the most wins”[3]—reminds me of another delightful and instructive parable in C.S. Lewis’s children’s novel The Magicians Nephew. Polly and Digory have moved into a new house. And the two children plotted a way to get into that empty house in order to explore it.
“Polly informed Digory that the house next to his was empty. Her father told her that it had been empty ever since they had moved in.”
“Upon hearing this,” Digory said, “But I don’t expect it to be empty at all.”
“What do you expect?” Polly asked.
“I expect someone lives there in secret, only coming in and out at night, with a dark lantern. We shall probably discover a gang of desperate criminals and get a reward. It’s all rot to say a house would be empty all those years unless there was a mystery.”
“Daddy thought it must be the drains,” said Polly.
“Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations,” said Digory.[4]
Jeff Meyers is Senior Pastor of Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church in St. Louis.
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (Grand Rapids, MI: Bantam Books, 1981), pp. 48-62.
[2] Michael Hanby, No God, No Science (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), p. 404.
[3] Hanby, p. 405.
[4] C. S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew (New York: HarperCollins, 1955), p 5.
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