Nervous Christians
These are the kinds of questions that have always made Christians nervous. Rather than rejoicing in the possibility of the discovery of God’s handiwork beyond our previous knowledge or imagination, Christians historically have worried, literally, about losing our alleged pride of place in the sun. Science has consistently managed to unmask one fundamental Christian heresy: Rather than placing God at the center of our universe, we have placed ourselves at the center of God’s universe and determined that we are the objects of his existence rather than the subjects. Every effort to expand the orbit of creation at the expense of our central and unique place in it has been resisted tooth and nail by Christians. Modernity can be described as a series of guerrilla wars between an egocentric Christianity and an arrogant secular science, neither of which is prepared to concede to the other, neither of which can achieve an absolute and unambiguous victory, and neither of which is prepared to take any prisoners.
Even the beginning student of the history of science knows that it all started when Copernicus determined, contrary to received dogma, that the earth rotated around the sun, and not the sun around the earth. This new astronomical discovery demanded a new physics to go with it, and that was readily supplied by Galileo. The result was at first consternation: “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” wrote the poet-preacher John Donne. Consternation was succeeded by condemnation, and Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to recant his theories. As an undergraduate in college, I recall the mounting anxiety as we were taken through “The Scientific Revolutions” in our required course in Western civilization. Each discovery and theory of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and Newton seemed a mortal blow to the faith once delivered to the saints; and this was only the beginning, for Darwin, Freud, and Einstein were just over the horizon. Our professor shared in the observation of Herbert Butterfield, which ran in italics at the top of the chapter on “The Scientific Revolution” in one of our texts:
The so-called scientific revolution…outshines everything since the rise of Christianity, and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere displacements within the system of medieval Christendom…. It looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.1
This was in the days when we still studied Western civilization and European history and engaged in the intellectual conceit of periodization, but the substance of the point is well taken, and has been a continuing source of anxiety to Christians who are determined not to be excluded from the modern world and wish at the same time to maintain their place of privilege within it. Biblical scholarship and much theological energy since the eighteenth century have been devoted to a reconciliation of these tender issues, and the struggle is by no means concluded, as any contemporary school board with creationism on its agenda for curricular review will testify.
What Does the Bible Say About Science?
Nothing. That is the simple answer. If science is, as Harvard’s chemist-president James Bryant Conant once wrote, “an interconnected series of concepts and conceptual schemes that have developed as a result of experimentation and observation and are fruitful of further experimentation and observations,”2 the Bible has nothing at all to say about such a thing. The very concept is alien to it. Despite the pretensions made for it and the claims made in behalf of it by its devoted partisans, the Bible itself has no such pretensions and makes no such claims. Nowhere in scripture are the faithful enjoined to take as scientific and observable fact the Bible’s description of phenomena: the accounts of creation, the sun standing still at the battle of Jericho, the fish swallowing Jonah; these are not presented as articles of fact or of faith, essential to belief and salvation. It is not that the Bible has “good” science or “bad” science. It has no science, for that is neither the language in which it was written nor the mind with which until fairly modern times it was read. To impose the constraints of science upon the Bible is to force it into a role for which it was never intended, and to which without violence to author, text, and reader, it cannot be adapted.
This has not prevented the devout from trying, however, and in the name of preserving the authority of scripture and orthodox truth, scripture was made to fit the facts of science, and the facts of science were required to conform to the facts of scripture. When the evolving science of geology challenged the belief that the earth was created in six days of twenty-four hours each, the concept of “day” had to be reconsidered, and the length of the creation process extended. The simple-minded argument was this: If science is right, then God and the account of creation in Genesis must be rendered irrelevant, if not dead wrong; and if this portion of the scripture is unreliable, what is there to reassure the faithful of the reliability of other parts of scripture—those parts, like the moral law, for example, which are normative? The church was really not interested in defending its views on the age of rocks and fossils with geologists and paleontologists, but if it conceded to science the unreliability of scripture in these areas, it also risked conceding areas of doctrine and morals in which it most definitely had an interest. To defend the scientific credibility of scripture was to defend the substance of the faith. Thus a biblical scholar at Cambridge in the seventeenth century, Dr. John Lightfoot, could argue on the basis of scriptural exegesis that it was possible to date the creation as having occurred on October 23, 4004 B.C., at 9:00 A.M. Such an effort, while herculean, was also laughable, and did nothing for the scientific credibility of the Bible. The great irony is that despite all of these efforts, the Bible requires no such credibility.
Does Science Threaten the Bible or the Believer?
If the believer’s faith in the Bible depends upon the Bible’s conformity to the norms of modern science, then that faith is very likely to be threatened, for the Bible is not a book of science and cannot, in light of modern science, be made to perform like one. Biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, and geology are only at odds with the Bible when the Bible is expected to speak with authority in the language of these topics, and its writings to confirm the discoveries and postulates of these sciences. If this test of science is applied to scripture, scripture will always fail.
But having said that, we have said really nothing at all, for scripture does not pretend to be science any more than science pretends to be scripture. The canons of one simply do not apply to the other, and neither is challenged or diminished by being simply what it is. To say this is to take nothing away from scripture except those cultural assumptions that have been added to it from beyond scripture itself. To ask scripture to do what it can do and not to do what it cannot do does not make scripture any less true than science. Is music any less “true” because it does not do the work of fiction, or correspond to the rules of science? Of course not. But some will be quick to say that an aesthetic example does not work, because there is nothing normative about aesthetics and there is everything normative about scripture. This is why believers of a certain stripe delight in finding a compatibility between scripture and science; in both they seek normative and absolute descriptions, upon which they can rely, of things that are fixed and immutable and, unlike fickle humors and mores and fashions, do not change but in fact define reality for all time. Scientific religion, not to be confused with Christian Science, is an effort to provide a science of belief and morality, a system so divinely rational that it operates according to a moral architecture, like the stars in their courses, and is readily accessible to human intelligence. The appeal of science, even in matters of faith and morals, is that it provides the illusion of order out of chaos, and permits thereby the creation of orderly structures with clear rules, fines, punishments, and rewards, easily and fairly administered. This kind of scientific religion reminds one of T. S. Eliot’s lines, in which people dream of systems so perfect “that no one need ever be good.”
Science, or s
cience as we have come to understand it, has taught us to think this way, and it is thus with these lenses that we read the Bible. To be scientific, we believe, is to worship the sovereignty of fact, and facts alone make truth. Do not confuse us with theories, and surely not with metaphors, similes, symbols, allegories, tropes, and signs. We want a thing to mean what it says and to say what it means in unambiguous and easily accessible English. It is this poor parody of science that we are tempted to impose on the Bible, and this caricature of science is a threat to the Bible greater than anything that Descartes or Darwin or Freud could possibly have imagined or concocted.
“Science” Is Not What We Think It Is
I have always had a healthy aversion to science. I think it began when I discovered that I was no good at glassblowing in high school chemistry. I had already suffered for years from what is now called math phobia: I was terrified by numbers and simply was no good at them. Even today, a computer innumerate, I do my necessary calculations with not much more skill than I had after a miserable year of plane geometry. I chose my college in part because it did not require mathematics and one could substitute geology for a “real” lab science. Science intimidates me.
In my Cambridge years, however, I have spent a great deal of time around scientists, and in a community such as this one, many of these are among the greatest scientists in the world. What has amazed me over these years, in addition to their sheer erudition and the laurels that sit lightly on their shoulders, is the fact that most of them have an intellectual humility that is at the heart of both great competence and great curiosity. By no means are all of these scientists religious believers. In fact, few profess any faith. None, however, possesses the kind of arrogant anti-faith that one so easily associates with the image of rampant science. Rather than raging village atheists, most of my colleagues are mildly agnostic, yet strangely sympathetic to the larger dimension and implications of their work. When I listen to Dudley Herschbach or Stephen Jay Gould or Owen Gingerich, each speaking with differing degrees of reverence and awe toward their work and the world within and beyond it, I am reminded that the demonization of science and the scientist is largely the work of humanists. I am further reminded that my colleagues in the humanities and the social sciences are much more the victims of professional hubris than the scientists I know. It is often the humanists and the social scientists who wrap up their scholarly insecurities in what they believe to be the impregnable armor of science, and impose the sovereignty of facts upon their all too elusive disciplines. In professional life these are equaled in immodesty only by doctors.
The disparity between the behavior of my colleagues in the sciences and the reputations of their disciplines caused me to ask if I and others were laboring under a misperception of what science really was, and of how people who took science seriously really behaved. I remember, in my early days of teaching at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, reading of an interview with the school’s most famous teacher and researcher, George Washington Carver. Dr. Carver, late in life, was asked by some writer what he thought was the most indispensable thing for science in the modern age, and Carver replied, “The capacity for awe.” What a strange thing for a citizen of the kingdom of facts to say. In my limited readings in the history of science I was to learn that such a view was not unusual: Newton and Darwin stood in mute adoration before the wonders revealed to them by their discoveries in science. That sense of reverence and awe produced a piety all of its own in the Newtonian universe of the eighteenth century, and Christians still sing Joseph Addison’s eighteenth-century paraphrase of Psalm 19, “The Spacious Firmament on High,” a hymn not untypical of the age of reason.3
In our own expanding age of science, with newly discovered planets on the nightly news, and more to come, science just may be the means to rekindle the embers of piety and devotion, and indeed to rehabilitate the doctrine of God, which has suffered heretofore at the hands of a seemingly constricted universe. If indeed the heavens are expanding, so too must now our doctrine, our vision of God, for more implies not less but more of God. This is not quite the conclusion to which Paul Davies comes in his “The Harmony of the Spheres,” but the implications of what he does write in his final paragraph suggest an opening rather than a closing in the dialogue between science and the Bible:
But what if, in spite of the second law of thermodynamics, there can be systematic progress alongside decay? For those who hope for a deeper meaning or purpose beneath the physical existence, the presence of extraterrestrial life-forms would provide a spectacular boost, implying that we live in a universe that is in some sense getting better and better rather than worse and worse.4
Efficiency and Appreciation
Can a thoughtful believer take both science and the Bible seriously? Is there a way out of the rivalry between two supposedly opposed systems of truth and, as well, a way out of the unhelpful argument that says if one is right, then the other must be false? In the nineteenth century those Christians who tried to accommodate their faith to science were regarded with suspicion by the more orthodox; they gave way too much to science and were left, so it was supposed, with a denatured faith. Those opposed to them either resisted science altogether in the name of defending orthodoxy, or forced science to conform to the ideologies of religion. Religious modernism and fundamentalism are the continuing heirs of that struggle, and science as such goes on its way without them.
Henry Nelson Wieman, in the heat of the science versus religion debates in the 1920s, proposed a division of function and thereby the establishing of a new and healthy relationship between science and religion. He argued that it was the function or task of science to be “efficient,” to pursue and organize knowledge, and to come to the appropriate conclusions on the basis of what one learned. Appreciation, on the other hand, was the province of religion and had to do with values, virtues, and judgments. Both efficiency and appreciation were necessary to live responsibly in the world. To many, mere efficiency sounds too mechanistic, too functional, and deprives science of the sense of awe that George Washington Carver and other scientists have found so fundamental to the work of good science. To assign appreciation as the province of religion appears to make religion too passive, a thing to be admired rather than a living faith to be practiced. Concerning the Bible, for it simply to be appreciated and admired rather than believed and obeyed is an unacceptable circumscribing of its role. As one critic of contemporary American theology has put it, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, the baby has been thrown out, and the bathwater kept.
Thoughtful scientists of the later twentieth century, such as Arthur Eddington and J. Arthur Thompson, have argued that the conflict between science and the Bible is a pseudo-conflict and ought to stop. It is an unproductive debate. For the religious mind, science is as much a gift of God as the creation itself and the creation of the mind. While it is bad religion and worse science to suggest that whatever science cannot or has not yet explained is religious, the theory known as the “God of the Gaps,” it can be maintained that what science pursues and what science reveals, and indeed the very methods by which it does so, are a godly, religious enterprise. In paraphrase of a wonderful aphorism of Krister Stendahl, science is not religion minus, and religion is poetry plus. In other words, religion requires both science and poetry, both truth and meaning. That the Bible is not a book of science does not make it any less religious, nor does it make it hostile or indifferent to science. The thoughtful believer still requires both poetry and science to enlarge the thought of God.
Chaos, Light, and the Image of God
There is a point of view that science is the new theology, and that like the old theology that many think it has supplanted, it stands fixed and immutable, its laws beautiful and unchanging. The security that men once found in religion and in the Bible they now find in science. Perhaps it started with Pope’s lines on Newton two centuries ago:
Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night;
God sai
d, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
Modern science, however, endures its own scientific revolutions and the stable, knowable, mechanical view of reality is being turned upside down. Frederick Burnham calls this chaos a new theology.5 “Chaos theory” understands that “randomness is not just a subatomic feature of the world but pervades dynamic systems everywhere in nature.” Chaos theory reveals not only that there is unpredictability and that nature is open in its process, but that there is also in this randomness a certain ordered freedom, and that the order and the freedom are bound in a relationship. As Burnham puts it, “Everything in creation is free and yet simultaneously and paradoxically bound by its relationship to everything else that is.” A Christian, Burnham is used to seeing the paradox between freedom and relationship, and calling it love. Could such an insight not only help in the ever-unfolding study of the cosmos, but help as well in the understanding of those metaphors that the biblical writers exercised in an attempt to create meaning and value out of the mystery that was and is God?
My colleague Owen Gingerich, professor of the history of science and of astronomy, preached a lay sermon in Washington National Cathedral on the First Sunday of Advent, 1995. In “Journey into Darkness”6 Gingerich addressed the phenomenon of the winter solstice and the mystical movement into darkness and beyond it, the liturgical journey that the church begins on its long way to Easter. Gingerich does not see himself as a bifurcated soul, one part of which is sound scientist, and the other sound Christian. He uses all of his gifts of soul, mind, and imagination, the skills of science and the insight of faith, to discover in the most efficient way possible what can be learned about the marvelous creation in which God has set us, and of which we occupy such a tiny part. Taking as one of his texts what he calls “the most quintessential verse in the Genesis creation account,” the creation of humanity, male and female, in the image of God, he argues that it is this creation in God’s image, the imago dei, that gives us our self-consciousness and our qualities of creativity, conscience, and consciousness. “One consequence of this self-consciousness,” he says, “is that we ponder our place in the universe, and we seek to find meaning and to find God. The search for God is subtle, but perhaps it is this long journey, this search more than anything else, that makes us human. We are the thinking part of this vast and sometimes very intimidating universe, and our quest could well be the purpose of it all.”
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