SCIENCE AND CHRISTIANITY: TEN LESSONS FROM SCIENCE

I am a Christian who is also a scientist, which is not the same as saying that I am a Christian Scientist. Therefore I can see both sides of what is sometimes considered an on-going conflict between two entirely different worldviews. Christians often invoke the findings of science to confirm statements found in the Bible, and rightly so. One example of a group that takes what I believe is a responsible approach to that sort of apologetics is Reason to Believe. (See their website for some informative talks on the subject).

Another useful resource is the recent Dictionary of Christianity and Science (DOCAS) [Unless mentioned otherwise, all page numbers given below refer to this resource], which I will be quoting from extensively, beginning with this explanation by Robert C. Bishop (pp. 595-596): “Concordism is an interpretive framework presupposing biblical and scientific statements have scientific import, so we should expect implications for the actual content of the sciences.” “Nonconcordism is an interpretive framework where correlations or parallels between biblical and scientific statements are not required – no scientific implications of biblical statements are presupposed.” RTB, for example, holds a moderate concordist view.

Ian Barbour's classical fourfold approach to the subject of science and Christianity is summarized on p. 510:

1. Conflict (Irreconciliation)

It hasn't always been this way. Science arose in large part along with the rise in Protestantism.

2. Independence (Compartmentalist or Complementarian)

p. 611: Those who feel there is no commonality between the two are compartmentalists or complementarians.

p. 608: Stephen Jay Gould (1999) said that “science and religion do not even share the same domain or subject matter, but constitute non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA). While science is concerned with how the world works, religion is concerned with questions of ultimate meaning and value.”

3. Dialogue (Conversation)

p. 608: “...some argue for a more cautious, open-ended dialogue between science and religion. On this view, science and religion explore common ground, but neither of them commits to a final synthesis.”

p. 614-617: a traditional reconciliation in which both may need to change some of their understandings. This last view is close to Barbour's conversation or dialogue view.

4. Integration (Reconciliation)

p. 608: “Another approach distinguished by Barbour, is to start from a religious tradition and to develop a theology of nature in which religious doctrines are reinterpreted so that they apply to the world disclosed by modern science.”

a. conservative view (science must change to bring it in line with traditional understanding of the Bible) pp. 614-617

b. liberal view (traditional Christian theology must change and adapt to fit in with the understanding of contemporary science) p. 614-17

5. Replacement

p. 614-17 Replacement is the radical view that ultimately science will replace religion entirely.

Considering the various alternatives above and having a fairly good understanding of how science works, I will try to outline some commonalities with a Christian approach to life and specifically to the Bible.

“I have been impressed by the example of research in the physical sciences, and believe that there is much to be gained by an inductive approach to biblical materials also.” David Noel Freedman, Divine Commitment and Human Obligation, Volume 1, p. 152. The late Dr. Freedman was one of the most admired Bible scholars in the world at the time of his death in 2008. He made this statement in 1963 at just about the time I was beginning to wonder the same thing.

Similarity #1. Both are defined as a process (way, method) used to approach the truth.

This is the first of several parallels between how science operates and how faith can or should operate.

Jesus said, “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas said...”how can we know the way?” Jesus said to hm, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” John 14:4-6

“Saul...went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Acts 9:1-2

Christianity was called the Way before it was called Christianity. And, of course, science is actually defined by the way or method it uses to reach the truth.

 p. 508: Arthur R. Peacocke was a biochemist-theologian who said “...both science and theology use inference to the best explanation and employ imperfect and revisable concepts and models to describe objective realities.”

p. 593: “Christianity cultivates both humility and confidence in human knowledge. Confidence derives from the orderliness of God's world designed for discover by his human image bearers. However, the Christian doctrine of the fall of Adam and Eve provides an explanation for the difficulty of human reason in achieving certainty about the cosmos, with a consequent emphasis on the testing of hypotheses.” This is the hardest thing for scientists or Christians to grasp: purposely testing your own theories.

Let's review what the scientific method is.

Basic Assumptions

Observation

Hypothesis

Test Hypothesis

Revise Hypothesis

Test Revised Hypothesis

Christians often dismiss the Theory of Relativity or Evolution by saying, “Well, it's only a theory.” But the sense in which people popularly use the term is really equivalent to what scientist would call a working hypothesis as a starting point for testing. A scientific theory has been tested and tried experimentally for years and passed every test before it is even called a theory.

And in practice you can begin almost anywhere in the process and keep repeating it to refine your results. This is quite similar to what Grant Osborne has called The Hermeneutical Spiral in describing the proper approach to interpreting Scripture.

It has been said that recognition of man's fallibility and fallen nature is what originally gave rise to the idea of testing and revising, rather than just going with what an authority such as Aristotle had said.

Similarity # 2: Both begin with a set of basic assumptions which are taken on faith

Basic Assumptions of Christianity

A. God existing outside of time and space created the universe and the natural laws that govern it.

B. The consistency in these natural laws, along with any other principles under which God operates, reflects God's orderly nature.

C. We can learn more about God and his plan for creation through study of His revelation (both natural and special) and by guidance of the Holy Spirit

Basic Assumptions of Science

A. There are natural causes for the things that happen in the universe.

B. There is consistency in these causes.

C. We can learn about those causes by application of reason to observable physical evidence

 p. 689.  Presuppositions of Science: objective reality of the cosmos; order, regularity and uniformity of nature; validity of mathematics and logic, intelligibility of the cosmos, basic reliability of human cognitive faculties and sensory organs, congruence between the human mind and physical reality.

p. 589. Basic presuppositions of science: “the physical world is real and orderly, humans find it substantially comprehensible.”

p. 590-591.Presuppositions include the inescapability of logical laws, the basic reliability of reason and sense experience, the uniformity of nature (over place and time), nature is intelligible.

Note that none of these assumptions in the realm of science or religion is capable of being proved, either through logic or by experimentation; they are all ultimately matters of faith.

Similarity # 3: The final goal of both processes is the formulation of the truth expressed as universal laws.

Scientific Laws of Nature

Isaac Newton: Laws of Motion

Johannes Kepler: Laws of Planetary Motion

Antoine Lavoisier: Law of Mass Conservation

Willard, Clausius, Rumford, and Thomson: Laws of Thermodynamics

Gregor Mendel: Laws of Heredity

All of these scientists believed in God, and some were obviously more than just nominal Christians. Newton wrote Bible commentaries, Lavoisier was executed during the French Revolution, in part because he was loyal to the Church, and Mendel was an Augustinian friar.

Even though these basic laws are considered to have met the test of time and experimentation, they are still subject to revision if more data become available. For example, the Law of Conservation of Mass has to take Einstein's work into account and is now sometimes called the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy.

Christian “Laws”

Historic Creeds:

Apostles' Creed (200-900) Western Church

Creed of Nicaea (325) Ecumenical Church

Nicene Creed (381) Ecumenical Church expansion and

    revision of the 325 Creed including new section on Holy Spirit

Athanasian Creed (500) Western Christian denominations

Denominational Doctrinal Statements

The Nature of God: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent

The Four Spiritual Laws

Our own basic formulations of spiritual truth are attempts to summarize briefly a mass of biblical data. And they too are subject to revision, as you can see by the various early Church creeds which were reworded when they were found to be too loosely stated or could be misunderstood.

Similarity #4: Successful predictions resulting from a theory strengthen the plausibility of that theory.

Here is an example from one of my preliminary orals proposals. The cyclic benzene molecule can be pictured as having alternating double and single carbon-carbon bonds. In actuality, the electrons are equally shared around the ring, rendering the molecule much more stable against chemical attack. These type of molecules are called aromatic. If one of the carbons is replaced by a nitrogen, it is still aromatic in character.

Molecular orbital theory had predicted that replacement of a carbon with a phosphorus atom instead would also yield a stable, aromatic compound, but no one had yet synthesized the molecule to test out the theory. So one of my orals proposals involved several synthetic schemes to make this compound, and six years later someone actually did it, and the compound proved to be aromatic as theory had predicted, as well as another non-classical aromatic compound I had proposed to make.

Here is an example of the Bible being used in a predictive manner. During the beginning phases of the excavation of the city of Hazor by Yigael Yadin in 1955-1960, he identified what looked like the corner of the city gates. That night he took out his Bible and read the following passage:

“And this is the account of the forced labor which King Solomon levied to build the house of the LORD and his own house and the Millo and the wall of Jerusalem and Hazor and Megiddo and Gezer.” ( I Kings 9:15)

He reasoned that if those last three cities had been rebuilt by Solomon at the same time, perhaps the same architect was used in all three constructions. The gates of Megiddo had been excavated earlier, and Yadin had the detailed report with him. So the next morning he outlined on the ground, exactly where he wanted the workers to dig to clear away the rubble. He reported, “When they were finished, they looked at us with astonishment, as it we were magicians or fortune-tellers.” The gate is an almost exact replica of the gates at Megiddo and Gezer in every dimension.

So his theory was strengthened by the results. But like any theory, it must be purposely tested, and that is the process going on currently since some scholars have now proposed that the dating of the ruins comes from a time period other than Solomon's. Only time will tell how it all works out.

Similarity # 5. When predictions from a theory prove false, that casts doubt on the theory or the experimental method—not on the basic assumptions.  

This is a very important point to keep in mind.  D. A. Carson, Collected Writings on Scripture, p. 206: “All such evidence considered, the traditional view claims that its interpretation is the best 'fit.' If in a few cases it is prepared to suspend judgment because of difficult pieces of evidence, it does not see this as admission of defeat any more than a theory in science admits defeat at that point. The theory must be rejected or modified only if there is unambiguous counter-evidence, or a clear counter-example, or if there arises another theory with a better 'fit.'”

My first assignment when I left school and began work was to find a method of producing surface-active agents (call them detergents) from a specific class of alcohols. One way of accomplishing this was by addition of ethylene oxide in the presence of Lewis acid catalysts. I kept getting erratic results. One day I would be able to add enough ethylene oxide to make a good detergent, but the next day the reaction would suddenly stop half way through and not go any further. At this point, I could have said, “I have disproved one of the basic assumptions of science; in fact there is no regularity and order in the universe. I think I'll switch over to English literature instead.” Of course, I didn't do that because I had an underlying faith in the regularity of the universe even when the facts didn't seem to support it. I assumed instead that the problem had to lie with me and my experimental method. I eventually found that the lack of reproducibility in my experiments was due to a hidden variable: trace quantities of water in the various batches of alcohol I was using were poisoning the catalysts, even when present in part per million quantities. By scrupulously drying my starting materials, I could control the reaction as I wanted.

Why I am I wasting time discussing this example? Because many people make the same mistake in the religious realm. Consider a few of the Christian "theories" shown below that were all developed based on passages in the Bible:

Once saved, always saved.

Prosperity gospel

Calculations on the timing of the Second Coming

Various schools of eschatology

The divine right of kings

Views on the age of the earth

Supremacy of the white race

A good and powerful God would not allow the innocent to suffer.

Some of these theories have been thoroughly discredited by now. What happens if one of your pet theories doesn't pass the test of reality? Take the last example especially. This belief regarding the nature of God has probably been responsible for more people abandoning their faith than any other. Voltaire was shaken in his faith after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 where 15,000 people died. One of the main reasons Charles Darwin stopped believing in God was the death of his 9-year old daughter. Mark Twain turned from God when his daughter died at an early age. Their mistake, and one we often make, is to question the truth of our basic Christian tenets, belief in God and his Word, rather than questioning our own limited understanding.

Similarity # 6:. Results in both fields are enhanced greatly when subjected to intense peer review.

a. This is the only way fraud and unfounded statements based on inadequate data or misinterpretation can be detected. It illustrates the self-correcting nature of science.

b. It guards against group-think. The Bible Knowledge Commentary is a two-volume work in which the authors are all associated with Dallas Theological Seminary. There are some very worthwhile articles in it, but the uniformity of theology between the various authors on even minor subjects sometimes leads to a rather lock-step approach that allows for little deviation. For example, I looked at 33 different commentaries regarding the return of Elijah. Only three stated that John the Baptist was merely a partial fulfillment and that Elijah will literally come again in the last days. All three were articles in BKC.

c. Ultimately leads to a closer formulation of the truth.

Let me bore you with three examples in the area of chemistry. One was the so-called discovery of polywater, a polymeric form of water occurring when it is drawn up into a very thin glass capillary tube. It possesses a higher boiling point and lower freezing point than water itself. As a joke, ten of us chemists at work submitted a joint patent suggestion on the use of polywater as the perfect antifreeze. Of course, there is no such thing as polywater. Under the experimental conditions, what happens is that water dissolves silica out of the glass capillary tubes. So the experimenters were measuring the properties of silica gel instead.

Cold Fusion was a very hot topic at one time after University of Utah researchers discovered a way to conduct a nuclear fusion reaction in a beaker. In essence, it was a perpetual motion machine that could eliminate the energy crisis worldwide. After the results were published, teams of scientists in major universities tried to duplicate the results to no avail.

Russian chemical publications, at least back in the 60's, had virtually no peer review system and so it was not uncommon for errors to be exposed in them. I personally overturned two of so-called findings in Russian technical journals.

Whether there was a basic flaw in these original studies or purposeful fraud, it was rapidly exposed by peer review. Any true scientist recognizes the absolute necessity of allowing his work to be independently reviewed by other experts in the field. Scientific journals hand over any submitted papers to a team of reviewers first to critique them and make suggestions for any possible changes or the need for further work before publication. I have served as a reviewer myself in the past and have recommended rejection where the data sim;ly didn't warrant the conclusions of the paper.

Does anything like this process exist in the religious realm? Yes, there are a number of reputable journals that publish papers on biblical research. And the papers are carefully screened by a board of editors for content and the technical background and expertise of the authors. The same care is taken before reputable publishers like Baker Books, Zondervan, Eerdmans or Intervarsity Press will publish a new Bible commentary. A lot of nonsense is weeded out in the process so that it never sees the light of day.

Where does the nonsense end up? On the internet which you are now consulting yourself. Unfortunately, on the internet there is no peer review whatsoever. I realize that it is much easier and cheaper to just go there for your answers regarding the Bible rather than building up your own library of reliable resources and digging through them on your own. But if that is going to be your main source for understanding the Bible, you need to at least look into the scholarly training and background of your sources and take all of their teachings with a large spoonful of salt. And that includes my own opinions.

Similarity #7. With more theories and laws developed to successfully explain existing phenomena (both physical and spiritual) comes greater confidence in the basic assumptions.

Even though the basic assumptions in science and Christianity can never be ultimately proved, we can be strengthened in these beliefs the further we go in investigating their implications. For example, Keith Miller and Bruce Larson wrote a very popular book in 1974 entitled Edge of Adventure: An Experiment in Faith in which they proposed that the scientific method could actually be used as a model by which to live and grow spiritually. Here is a quote from the introduction to their book: “Each of us has discovered that the best way he's found to learn and teach about the Christian life is to accept the hypothesis that God really was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and that it is possible to communicate with him through prayer. For instance if you should decide, as an experiment, to give as much of yourself as you can to as much of God as you can grasp in this hypothesis, then the adventure is to try to live your whole life for a certain period as if you believed totally.”

Similarity # 8: Both are, or should be, suspicious of taking as authoritative comments outside their respective areas of expertise.

On the scientific side, this can include the astronomer Carl Sagan famously saying: “The Cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.” This is a rather bold statement of a universal negative that both theologians and philosophers rightly condemn as going far beyond the evidence. Or witness Isaac Azimov's pathetic attempt to write a two-volume Bible commentary.

But we Christians should not be so smug. Just look at the reliance of many Christian home schools on science material written by a Dr. Hovit, a so-called expert with minimal scientific credentials. And once my former church brought in a creationist speaker for a week of lectures. He said that he had a PhD in Science, a non-existent degree. He got very embarrassed when I asked him where he got such a degree, and he refused to answer me. Even the otherwise respectable Truth Project came out with a video which mocked scientists for putting in fudge factors to get their theories to fit the data. I could go on with a number of equally embarrassing examples of how Christians who don't really know what they are talking about make incorrect statements regarding science.

DOSAC, p. 55: This is not a new problem. “[Augustine] warned in his work the Literal Meaning of Genesis of the danger of non-Christians hearing Christians who affirm the book of Scripture nevertheless talking nonsense about matters relating to the book of nature.”

p. 142: “...educated non-Christians who come across young-earth advocates will equate inaccuracies about the natural world with the teaching of the Bible and thus be less inclined to give credence to the gospel, and...young Christians immersed in YEC doctrine who later discover its untenability may face a crisis that robs them of their faith...”

Similarity #9: A certain amount of uncertainty is to be expected in both fields.

When you plot the effect on one physical parameter obtained by varying a related parameter, you almost always get some deviation from an expected straight line or curve because of random errors. When I was a laboratory teaching assistant in graduate school, I would always suspect a student who got exactly the expected result from his or her experiment. We used to call that “dry-labbing.” As one scientific example, look at the estimated age of the universe as determined by different methodologies:

Red shift of light from other galaxies gives 14B years

Radioactive decay on stars yields a value of 11-16B years

Cosmic microwave background radiation indicates 13.8B years

                            Michael G. Strauss, Dict. Of Christianity and Science

Since we have three different types of measurement all based on different assumptions, we have three independent witnesses to the same fact, even if we now have to live with a certain amount of uncertainty.

The very same thing occurs in the biblical accounts where an event happens to be told in more than one place.  Critics of the Bible latch on to any little discrepancies in the details in attempts to invalidate the whole event as fabricated. I have given a number of these in my posts on Bible Contradictions. 

Actually, by comparing the minor differences between parallel accounts, we can actually increase our understanding of the events as well as seeing the particular concerns that each author has.

Similarity # 10. In both fields, an emphasis on arriving at the truth is (or should be) more important than pushing individual agendas.

p. 219: Stephen A. Contakes states, “On the whole, science's ethic of integrity is consonant with the Christian ethic of integrity...”

James Watson wrote a fascinating inside account of all the in-fighting and competing egos behind the race to determine the structure of DNA. Without going into all the details, Watson and Crick were hampered throughout their search by a number of people:

    Crick's graduate research advisor, Sir Lawrence Bragg, told Crick point-blank to stop all research on DNA, but Crick went ahead behind his back anyway. I must admit that I did something similar during my doctorate studies.

    The brilliant x-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin had vital data on the subject, but she refused to share it with Watson when he suggested a possible research collaboration between them. She made fun of his approach to the problem and forcibly ejected him from her office.

    Linus Pauling, a CalTech professor of chemistry and world expert on the subject of chemical bonding, was totally humiliated in scientific circles when he proposed in print an obviously erroneous structure for DNA and Watson and Crick published their model shortly afterward.

The amazing conclusion to this story is that Bragg became a complete supporter of Crick once his approach began to look promising. And even more amazingly, Pauling and Franklin were among the first to congratulate Watson and Crick since their main concern was to further the course of scientific knowledge. It is an example that we could take to heart when we get embroiled in theological debates with those with whom we don't agree.

I will give a final personal example related to my preliminary oral exam in graduate school. I found out a little too late that a very prominent chemist on my committee had actually been co-author on a technical paper that disproved the thesis of one of my proposals. My only alternative was to prove that the research in his paper had been poorly carried out. Surprisingly, he did not argue with my reasoning at all since he knew it was true.

Unfortunately, we do not always meet with such magnanimous behavior when dealing with fell ow believers. In my own research on the literary structure of the Bible, I shared my results with several professionals in the field. One was by accident. A friend of mine happened to share share one of the chapters in my unpublished book with his brother, who had actually written the textbook on Biblical criticism. My friend shared his brother's very caustic and sarcastic response with me, which didn't really deal with any of the issues but dismissed the whole approach to structural criticism which scores of recognized scholars have used. Analyzing his response, I realized that if the approach I utilize continues to be considered valid by more and more scholars. a whole set of liberal approaches to biblical criticism that the brother had become an expert on will be considered passe'. He was protecting his own turf out of fear.

All is not negative in this respect, and so I will close with a more positive example of Christian behavior. Dr. David Dorsey wrote a very well-thought-out book entitled The Literary Structure of the Old Testament. I shared the draft of one of my chapters on the subject with him, and he wrote back with some very kind words as well as suggesting that I publish it so that more interest would develop in this general approach to Scripture. That was in spite of the fact that he knew I disagreed with him on some of his analyses. This is exactly the type of open spirit that is sometimes sadly missing in the Christian world. It is perhaps telling that a recent Gallup Poll on the most honest and trustworthy professions lists engineers as fourth while clergy come in at eighth.

The one attitude we should all steer clear of is epitomized in a speech I once heard at an industry dinner. The speaker was a noted political speechwriter who began his comments by glaring at the audience and saying, "I have been told that a number of you are scientists and engineers, and I must say that I have a problem with people like you. You all seem to feel that there is such a thing as the truth. I believe that the truth is whatever the people want it to be." Unfortunately, that attitude seems to be growing.