Dear Friends
You knew that we couldn’t undertake a series on Genesis 1-11 without dealing with science – and so here it is. Mind you, it may be different to what you are expecting as we explore the background to the warfare between science and religion (aka Christianity). We do not want to hold the Bible to ransom from the captivity of science, but science from the captivity of history. Where has science come from and how has it been derailed or helped by an understanding of the sinfulness of humanity? Neither Peter or I claim any expertise in the practice of science, but both of us have serious questions about the history of science, the understanding of Genesis in the light of science and the understanding of science in the light of Genesis. I hope you find it informative.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Today we are going to look at the controversial topic of Genesis and Science. Most people want to see Genesis 1 as the failure of Christianity and the Bible to answer scientific questions, leading to unbelief. But that's not the story at all.
Peter Jensen: Many people are scientists with a genuine Christian faith. For example, Professor Barry was committed to the biological sciences and a very keen Christian. Evolution was the flashpoint in the 19th century with Charles Darwin. Now, Darwin wasn't just Darwin. There were people around him who wanted to take what he said and punch Genesis 1 on the head with it, and they did. In the 19th century, a book titled The Warfare Between Science and Religion1 influenced the way people came to think about the topic. There is a war between science and religion, or specifically science and Genesis 1, and therefore the Bible, and therefore the Christian religion. In this view, science has to win. Phillip, “warfare,” is that the best way of thinking about it?
Phillip: Broadly speaking, there are three ways in which people relate science and religion, but by religion, frankly, that's code for Christianity. One is warfare, another is complete independence, and a third is partnership.
I posed a question the other day with a group of people about Christopher Columbus. He met with a group of church leaders who were involved in funding his journey. I asked the question, “What was their objection to Christopher Columbus going? Was it that he would sail off the edge of the flat earth? Would it be that he couldn't get to the East Indies and back in time, given the amount of money and the provisions he had on the ship?” A large number of people will say it was because he'd sail off the edge of the flat earth, which is complete nonsense. Ever since the ancient Greeks, we’ve known the world is round. And all the leading Catholic, medieval and Protestant scholars believed in the round world. That was not a controversial matter at the time. Although some obscure and unusual people did believe in the flat earth. The problem was that Columbus had cooked the books. He was arguing that he had enough resources to get to the East Indies and back. They were saying he didn't. That was their objection. But why? Why would a lot of people answer falling off the flat earth? There is an interesting book written 10 or 20 years ago on the creation of the flat earth. It's an interesting survey of 19th century history texts for secondary schools. It found that very few mentioned the flat earth myth before 1870, but almost all texts after 1880 featured the legend. What happened in the 1870s? This book says we can pinpoint the invasion of general culture by the flat earth myth. It all came about because John William Draper produced a book in 1874 called A History of Conflict Between Religion and Science2. Draper wrote
‘The history of science is not a mere record of isolated discoveries; it's a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other…. Faith is, in its nature, unchangeable, stationary. Science is in its nature progressive, and eventually, a divergence between them, impossible to conceal, must take place.’
There's the thesis of his book, and it's extraordinarily successful; it conquered the world in a decade.
Peter: People wanted to believe that was true.
Phillip: Clearly, they wanted to believe it was true, but it wasn't.
Peter: When Darwin first prepared his theories, they were discussed amongst thinkers, including Christian thinkers. They did not automatically disqualify it or say it couldn't be true or anything like that. Some quite conservative theologians said, Yes, that's quite consistent with Genesis.
Phillip: The group in America who founded the Fundamentalists with their essays called ‘the Fundamentals’ by and large agreed with Darwin. It’s valuable for the hard-line creationists and evolutionists to know that the story of religion rejecting science is not true, as the most hard-line Christians (Fundamentalists) did not reject evolution when it came out, though modern Fundamentalists often lead the charge against it.
A warfare has been set up between religion and science, and it has certain stories. Galileo is a kind of story that is told repeatedly about how this man did science, investigated the world empirically through his telescope, and came out confirming Copernicus’ heliocentric view of the universe more than that of the moon and the stars moving in ellipses rather than in circles. His publication got him in terrible trouble with the church at the time, and he was indeed removed from office and called a heretic. The story is told in terms of the warfare between science and religion, which is unfair. Firstly, it's the Roman Catholic Church rather than Christianity. Galileo was himself a churchman and a believer in God. There was an enormous amount of political infighting in Rome. At one stage, his patron was the Pope, who then was embarrassed by having patronized him. But Galileo's experimentalism undermined Aristotle, and Aristotle was the philosophical basis of the Catholic Church from the time of Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle was not an experimentalist. Aristotle came to his views from rationalism. The circle is perfect, and so the world operates in circles. The world is the centre, and everything circles the world. But Galileo, looking in the telescope, saw that Copernicus was right. The world is going around the sun in the elliptical patterns of the stars. He was undermining Aristotle. It was the very philosophical basis by which the Catholic Church had defended itself against Protestantism. The Pope was under terrific political pressure about Protestantism, not least over the mass. Transubstantiation only makes sense in an Aristotelian world. If Aristotle is wrong, Protestants may well be right. This was not a moment to be undermining Aristotelianism within the Roman Church. It wasn't just a scientific debate. It was a political debate.
Peter: It was a philosophical matter rather than a theological matter. But we've got to remember that Aristotle had a much bigger part to play in Roman Catholic theology at that time and that one of the products of the Reformation was a break with Aristotelianism. That is one of the reasons why early modern science arose out of Protestantism. I'm not saying that science comes from Protestantism; that would be too simplistic. Certainly, the unleashing of the Bible and the replacement of that philosophy had a big impact on the development of modern science. The ones I'm thinking of did take it very seriously, but they recognized, too, the limitations, scientific limitations, of Genesis 1 and explained it for us. Augustine, in the 4th century, was one of the greatest Christian thinkers. There's a quote from Augustine in Bavinck’s great Dogmatic Theology3. Augustine says, in discussing these things with a Manichaean who he was fighting with, he says, ‘ “The Lord said, I will send you the paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon.” For he wanted to make Christians, not mathematicians.’ In other words, Augustine sees, in his approach to the Bible and Genesis in particular, that you've got to ask this: What's this material for? What's its impact? What is it doing? What is God doing here? He's not trying to teach us science. He's trying to teach us something far more profound. I like the idea of a partnership between science and religion.
Phillip: In a sense, that sounds like independence. Science teaches us certain things; religion teaches us other things.
Peter: Aquinas says that Moses in Genesis is accommodating himself to uneducated people. Aquinas was fully aware that the Bible was what you call phenomenological. It is a book for all people of all ages. If it were a book of science, it would be beyond most people. It wouldn't communicate what it needs to communicate. But the Lord, in speaking to us in his wonderful and gracious way, speaks to us with language that we understand, which the ordinary person understands. To this day we say, “the sun rises,” when in fact the sun doesn't rise.
John Calvin, in his great commentary on Genesis, says this:
But astronomers prove by conclusive reason that the star of Saturn, which on account of its great distance appears to be the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference. Moses wrote in a popular style, things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand. But the astronomer investigates with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nonetheless, the astronomer's study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them, for astronomy is not only pleasant, it is also very useful. It cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.
Phillip: The great ones already knew that phenomenological language was used in Genesis to communicate the great truths, which, in the end, are more important than the great truths revealed by astronomy. Indeed, since there's a partnership, I would say there's a connection between the growth of science and Genesis.
The great scholar Stephen Jay Gould, a leading Harvard scholar for many years, argued for independence. His book is all about two kinds of schools. There is science, which tells us certain things, and there is religion, which tells us other things. He doesn't believe in religion. He would like to be an atheist, but he says he can't be. So, he's a hard-line agnostic. He wants to say the two things are completely separate. But some of that is an indication of the anti-religious bias. There was another great Harvard scholar called Richard Lewontin4. He said
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfil many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
That is a powerful profession of the problem. Phenomenologically, it doesn't look right, but we are right. There's a previous philosophical commitment. He goes on
It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter to finding an atheistic explanation of the world.
He's writing this as a book review against Carl Sagan, who was doing exactly that, as Dawkins did that. They extend from their scientific discoveries into the metaphysical. He's saying we've started with a metaphysical, and that's why we've created this. He goes on, ‘Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door’.
The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured so miracles may happen. Out of our materialistic commitment, we've created a science that is only looking at materialism and will not allow any divine foot in the door.
Then we come up with a materialistic answer. Lewontin is honest enough to say, 'Well, of course we did.' He is not looking for partnership; he's looking for separation, for independence. I think it is a very common way of people seeing things. But you want to push further for partnership between them. So where do you get that partnership idea from?
Peter: It goes back in a way to some research I did into witchcraft in the 16th century, what I'd call animistic beliefs, belief in spirits, belief in a world dominated by spirits. All around the world, people believe in such things. If something happens, if a tree falls over, you ask not why, but who has done this? If I fall sick, who is doing this to me? And why? They are the who-why questions. When the Bible began to be read in the 16th century, we discovered that the who and why questions were answered. The who is God, God who controls all things, who is the supreme maker of all things. What occurs in this world, the why, is the will of God. God sustains all things—one God, one will. That frees you to look at the next lot of questions, namely, what is this thing in itself, this tree that fell over, and why has it fallen over? Let's see if it has termites. Let's see if it is too old. Let's investigate the tree. The metaphysics of early modern science were not materialism; they were theism.
Phillip: Polytheism never produces science. Animism never produces science. It is the biblical doctrine of creation. It is Genesis 1. God has created a world that is other than himself, which is created rationally by his word, by his will. That makes the world something that can be studied empirically because it is stable, singular, rational, and regular. But you can't leave God out of the laboratory. We want to. And in one sense, we do, don't we? That is, you can't keep saying, “I don't understand that it must be God.” I should say, “I don't understand that because I don't understand that. I must look further.” But you can't be an atheist in the laboratory, which is what Lewontin and many others want, because the study that we do must be ethical. We can't experiment on a human. The Nazis did. When I visited a concentration camp where they did this, they kept referring to the scientists who were doing it as ‘pseudo-science.’ They were perfectly well-equipped scientists, the finest of the German minds doing science. But they're doing science without God in the laboratory.
Peter: Theism is the rock on which science is built, the consistency of the world, the unity of the one will, which liberates you to look at the what and the how. But the other segment is the knowledge that human beings are inherently sinful. That impacts the methodology of science and requires ethical science.
Phillip: The people who first started lecturing on ethical science ran university courses for the medical faculties with the Nazis, which is astonishing. It is Christians who created ethical science. Peter Harrison5 is a professor who was at Oxford and then rose up to the higher position at the University of Queensland. He writes very helpfully on Christianity and science. He sees Calvinism as actually the root of it. He said
Of all the new systems of knowledge of the 17th century, it's experimental philosophy that is most indebted to Calvinist ideas of human nature, because it was the Calvinists who believed in sinfulness.
Hence, therefore, I cannot trust your science. You must make it replicable for me. We must have peer review. We must do it publicly. We must do it in fellowship and relationship with other people because we are sinful. You have a wonderful combination of Genesis 1 and Genesis 3. The world God has created is something that we, as humans made in his image, can study, but also that we, as humans fallen from our creation by our sinfulness, cannot be trusted to study it without every check that is possible and available to us.
Peter: Boyle's law puts this emphasis on the results of research being spread around.
Phillip: Out of the Protestant Reformation, modern science has blossomed. To then see a war between science and religion is a perversity of mind.
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1896-97)
John William Draper, A History of Conflict Between Religion and Science (New York, D. Appleton & Company, 1874)
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics (Baker Academic, 1895-99)
Richard Lewontin, Billions and Billions of Demons (The New York Review, 1997)
Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For another article on this topic, check out https://phillipjensen.com/resources/in-defence-of-science/
