"Christians in a Scientific Age"

Psalm 104:1-35

COVENANT HIGH SCHOOL CONVOCATION

SEPTEMBER 9, 2001

These convocation services have afforded me the opportunity to speak about the various parts of a high school curriculum from the vantage point of a biblical philosophy of life and education. I have, in the past, considered the study of fine arts, of language and literature, and, last September, of history. Tonight I want to consider with you the importance, as the Bible teaches us that importance, of the education of young people in the sciences.

The Bible is not a textbook of various sciences, but it gives evidence that its world was already a scientific world. We know that, of course, also from artifactual and literary evidence of the Ancient Near Eastern world. The great construction projects of antiquity, with all of the sophisticated engineering that they required, still baffle us today by their immensity and by the astonishing precision required in their building. Think of the pyramids or of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt, a sanctuary so large that you could put the greatest cathedrals of Europe into a corner of it, with columns so large that it takes eleven adult men holding hands to get around one of them. The construction of Solomon's temple, though not nearly so large, was also very impressive from a design and engineering standpoint, as well as from an artistic standpoint. Still today it remains very difficult to do with molten metals, for example, what those artisans did to perfection in their day. Metallurgy was highly developed.

They were astronomers as well and had calculated the stars and their motions very accurately both as a means of measuring time and as a method of calculating distance and position. And, of course, as we know, nobody thought the world was flat. Not in the ancient world and not at the time of Columbus. It is one of the really interesting stories of modern history writing as to how that idea became to be so widely circulated in history and science textbooks. There may be more people in the world today who think the world is flat than there were in the days of Christopher Columbus!

I don't say that science was not in its infancy, surely it was. But it was a scientific world, the world of the Bible, and they did amazing things with the knowledge that they had. Just as today, science, engineering, and the like benefited the wealthy much more than the poor and you were more likely to see its benefits in the city than in the country.

And, in that day as this, science's great achievements were primarily those that provided some practical or aesthetic benefit: the engineering of great buildings, the diverting of rivers for irrigation, the transportation of water long distances, celestial navigation to enable shipping to cross open water for long distances, the bridging of rivers, metallurgy in the service of military weaponry, and so on. Today it is the same. When we think of living in a scientific age we think primarily of the advancements that have been provided us: air travel, refrigeration, radio, television, the VCR, the cellphone, computers and e-mail, nuclear power, drugs with which to fight disease, surgical techniques, and on and on. Sending a man to the moon or a spacecraft to Mars is just more of the same with less immediate practical benefits. These products and services are the results of engineering primarily, but lying beneath that engineering - electrical, chemical, nuclear - is some theoretical science. That has always been the case, of course. There have never been many theorists and theoretical innovators in the scientific world. Most are engineers who apply concepts to practical problems and produce products and services that people can employ to some benefit. When you read, for example, Richard Rhodes wonderful book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is really a history of modern physics, it will strike you how few men there were in the upper echelons of that scientific revolution that produced the atomic world we live in today. And in most sciences it is the same. A small group of theoreticians at the top who define the possibilities and then an army of engineers who make what is now known to be possible actual.

But, as we know, there is another side of the modern scientific revolution that has also profoundly shaped the modern world - revolution is not really the word, I am speaking rather of the greatly accelerated pace of discovery. But a consequence has been a worldview that we may describe as scientific naturalism and that, now widely found in the elites of our culture - the university, the media, and government - has fundamentally reshaped the way people think about the world.

The power of science to change the world, its impressive accomplishments, have given it an aura of authority that has been transferred to much more theoretical, even religious aspects of life. Evolution is a case of science grasping for authority outside of its proper sphere and being granted that authority in large part because people have been led to think that scientists know what they are talking about. After all, they have sent a man to the moon and have split the atom. So, when they tell us that life as we know it evolved from lower forms through a process of gradual change superintended by nothing other than natural laws and forces, when they tell us that life itself arose from non-life by chance, large numbers of people have assumed that it must be so. They assume it is so for the very same reason that if, on a TV ad, a man in a white coat says that TIDE gets clothes 33% cleaner, people are inclined to believe him. He is a scientist after all.

Only a few of these scientists and their followers, however, are as blunt as to the implications of scientific naturalism and evolution as William Provine, Professor of Biology at Cornell.

"Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, No absolute guiding principles for human society…we must conclude that when we die, we die and that is the end of us."

And the result has been, as you know, for the first time in our history as a culture, materialism or naturalism - the notion that the world and human life must be and can be explained without recourse to supernatural realities, including God - has become the reigning philosophy, the established religion, if you will. It determines what is allowed to be taught in public school, it shapes the public discourse, it determines what kind of thinking will be thought intelligent and acceptable and what kind will be scorned as unenlightened and superstitious. Scientific naturalism, so-called, leaves little place for the Christian God or the account of creation in the Bible, or its view of man as made in God's image, or, indeed, the biblical account of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. It is for this reason that there science has become a battleground in our culture and that Christians often find themselves in controversy with scientists over their claims.

Now, obviously, all of that has important implications for science teaching in a Christian school. There is a sense in which modern science is an enemy of Christian faith and that we must do battle with it. And surely that is true in one sense. Christian young people must learn the case for evolution and the naturalism that is its foundation and must be taught a sophisticated critique. Many Christian schools have not done this and sent their graduates off to colleges very poorly prepared to stand up for their convictions. I am happy to say that is not so at Covenant High School.

But I am not primarily interested in science instruction to counter the theory of evolution. That must be done and can be done. It is, indeed, perhaps the most important question of our time: where human beings come from and so what they are. And, as a culture, we are reaping the whirlwind from our denial of God's special creation of human beings in his own image. And, surely, it is a most gratifying development to see the cracks in the evolutionary establishment begin to widen before our eyes. This is an exciting time to be living if you are a student of the effects of evolutionary theory on our culture. We may be living in the generation when the idol of evolution will begin seriously to totter. Perhaps some bright Covenant High School graduate will one day provide the last push to send it on its face to the ground, like Dagon before the Ark of the Covenant.

But, I am tonight thinking more of science instruction as a constructive part of the education of a young man or young woman. I want to pay attention to the importance of that in particular. And in three respects.

I. First, education in science is an exercise in producing wonder in the heart at the sight of the glory of God.

Paul in Romans 1 says that God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, can be discerned by looking at what he has made. The creation reveals the creator and his glory. And it does. Evolution argues that it does not, of course, but the evolutionary elite are still, after a century and a half, reduced to frustration that only about 10% of the population believes that we can really explain the natural world as an accident of time and matter. You remember the old adage: "when you hear a hyena growl in the jungle, you might think it is a lion; but when you hear a lion, you know damn well it's a lion!" Well, something similar may be said of the natural world. People, by an infallible instinct, know darn well it didn't get here by accident!

And the more we know about that world, the more sure we become that it did not get here by accident! I chose Psalm 104 because it is an expression of wonder over what God has made. The structure of the psalm is modeled fairly closely on the account of creation in Genesis 1, taking the successive stages of creation as starting-points for praise. And it is not only the grandeur of it all but its perfection and its beauty. Rabbi Duncan recollects the saying of the Scottish pastor and theologian Hugh Martin, who happened to come across a flower that had bloomed before there was any other eye to look upon it but God's: "He hath taste!" God has made a world of indescribable genius, magnificence, and beauty.

And, in our day, it is the sciences that are continuing to disclose to the eye that divine genius and power and magnificence. The breath-taking discoveries that astronomers are placing before us, virtually every day it seems - distant phenomena of the universe so large, so powerful, so fascinating - cannot help but make a Christian think larger thoughts of God the maker and ruler of all this. The astonishing complexities of the life of the cell that biochemists are discovering fill us with amazement at the perfection that our Maker wove into the very fabric of every organism. Listen to this description of the cell, understood now in a way it was not just a generation ago.

"Viewed down a light microscope at a magnification of some several hundred times, such as would have been possible in Darwin's time, a living cell is a relatively disappointing spectacle appearing only as an ever-changing and apparently disordered pattern of blobs and particles which, under the influence of unseen turbulent forces, are continually tossed haphazardly in all directions. To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.

We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.

What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equaled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle." [Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, 328-329]

The world in its sinful blindness teaches us not to see the hand and mind and heart of God in all of this. True education teaches us both the marvels and the mind behind them! Biblically speaking, the truly educated human beings would want to know everything that revealed the invisible qualities of Almighty God. What is the purpose of knowing anything if it is not to apply the heart to wisdom and goodness and, to do that, we must know the meaning of things, not just their existence. The study of science gives us knowledge of very many things whose first and last meaning is the knowledge and the fear of God.

No wonder Calvin said that he wished all Christians could be astronomers. We might just as well wish that all Christians could be biochemists and physicists and geologists and zoologists. It is a great privilege, it is also a Christian's calling, to live one's life filled with wonder and science education is a means to that holy end. Its first and last goal is the revelation of God and of the fact that everywhere we turn, everywhere we look, no matter how high, no matter how deep we find the evidence of his hand.

II. Second, education in the sciences, especially in a relativist age, serves to confirm the mind in the reality of truth.

It is a delicious irony that scientism's worldview, though inimical to the Christian Faith, makes common cause with it in defense of objective truth. Nowadays, in our post-modern world, people hear a great deal about the impossibility of finding objective truth that is valid for everyone. We live in a relativistic age. Except in the sciences! Whether we are speaking of sending a probe to Mars, or finding a cure for AIDS, or learning how to predict earthquakes, the sciences - hard sciences they are often called because they claim to deal in facts, facts that are stubbornly valid for everyone - know that there is truth and the knowledge of it is essential. No relativist ever will work on a NASA space probe or do research to find a cure for cancer. There is no such thing as a post-modernist drug. No doctor or pharmacist who wishes to keep his license prescribes "whatever drug you feel is right for you." There are drugs that attack a certain disease and drugs that do not. Just as all routes do not lead to the same destination - there are no relativists working the screens at Air Traffic Control either! - so all opinions are not equally valid. Not in the sciences! And not in Christianity either! This is why, historically, the Christian faith has always been a friend of science and should continue to be so. God has made things in a certain way, has fixed certain laws, and it is man's glory both to discover the order that God has created and then to exploit that order in his mastery of the creation, which is, after all, his calling: to subdue the earth, what Reformed people have long called "the cultural mandate."

Some of you will have heard of the now famous practical joke played on postmodernist university professors by an NYU physicist named Alan Sokal. "Pomos" as postmodernists are called by those in the academy who still retain a commitment to objective truth and clarity of thought and expression, are famous for their commitment to relativism and to what one scholar calls a "pretentious murkiness in expression." [Phillip Johnson, Objections Answered, 150] They have a journal, the postmodernists do, entitled Social Text. To demonstrate that pomos are phonies and should not be given the time of day in the American university, Prof. Sokal "stitched together an incoherent article that combined quotations from pomo authors (including some of the editors of Social Text) with nonsensical scientific analogies. Then he ponderously entitled it 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,' signed his name and title, and sent the monstrosity off." The editors, proud to be taken seriously by a real scientist, published the article in a special issue of their journal, published in 1996, that was devoted to rebutting traditional science and its view of objective truth. Sokal then turned the pomo attack on science into a complete debacle for postmodernism by gleefully revealing to the press that his article was a hoax, a parody, and that the pomos, with their view of truth, couldn't tell the difference between a parody of their thinking and their thinking.

Now Alan Sokal is the farthest thing from a Christian. He worries about postmodernism because he thinks it gives the Left a bad name and he is an ardent leftist in politics and philosophy. But he is also a scientist and he knows rubbish when he sees it. His work in hard science has taught him, whether he himself thinks of it in these terms or not, that truth and error are real things and the ability to distinguish between them and then to state the difference clearly is a real virtue.

We have science in large part to thank for the fact that postmodernism is unlikely to make nearly the inroads into our cultural thought that it might otherwise make in a morally relativist culture such as ours. No relativist ever made a refrigerator and none was involved in the moon shot and, at bottom, everybody knows it.

Science education hardens the mind in good ways. It teaches it to recognize bunk and codswallop when it sees them and to think critically about the outlandish things that otherwise intelligent people say in our day. It teaches hard thinking and the rigorous application of the rules of thought. All of that is difficult. It explains why science majors are dramatically under-supported nowadays in the American college and university. The arts and the social sciences are easier, or so they often seem, and so many more college students choose those classes.

I remember years ago reading an article in Ovation magazine about Wynton Marsalis the great trumpet player. Marsalis grew up in a jazz musician's home in New Orleans. Al Hirt gave him his first trumpet. Jazz is his favorite music and the chosen medium of his career. But as a young man he crossed over into the classical world and took it by storm. He played and recorded virtually all the great works of the trumpet repertoire, made a great name for himself as a classical performer, and then went back to his first love, jazz, where he has remained almost exclusively ever since. In the article he was commenting on the difference between jazz and classical music and acknowledging how much harder it was to play classical music than jazz. In jazz, he said, you can play almost the right note at almost the right time and it will be fine. No one will know for sure whether you intended to play that note or another. In classical music, on the other hand, you must play precisely the right note at precisely the right time or its horrible. He recollected that his first classical experience was in a brass quintet when he was a highschooler. They were playing Bach and the leader admonished him, as they were about to begin, "Now don't get lost." "I won't get lost," he replied, somewhat offended that the leader had thought it necessary to say such a thing to him. "Well," he said, "I wasn't five measures in to that piece before I was lost; and when you get lost in one of those Bach things, you never find your way back!"

Well, can I say then that science education is the classical music of the curriculum and jazz is the social sciences! Only in this one respect, you understand. I am an arts man myself! But hard, logical, rigorous thinking, the respect for unyielding laws, the learning of that one way and one way only that leads to the QED at the end of the problem, all of that is an essential part of the education of a young man or young woman, even if he or she never goes on in the sciences.

I respect scientists, even unbelieving scientists, for their commitment to getting it right and finding the truth. This is why I think it very likely that unbelieving scientists will finally bring evolution down. They do care about finding the truth and sooner or later it will be impossible for them to maintain the pretense any more. They may not become Christians, they may substitute for evolution some other equally ruinous theory, but they will at last admit that in discipline after discipline the evidence has mounted against Darwinism to the point that the theory must be discarded. They are scientists and, finally, they will not be able to look themselves in the mirror and continue to hold positions they know are not true.

III. Then, in the third place, finally and briefly, education in the sciences is, for some young people, preparation for a life's work that holds promise of great good for other people.

Think of all the good that has been done for human beings and all that might still be done through the application of scientific knowledge to the problems of life. Whether it is medicine for diseases that still kill large numbers of the poor all over the world; whether it is new ways to provide electricity, or sanitation, or food to the needy; whether it is technologies that will more and more connect people who live in totalitarian states and give them the opportunity to know things that their governments do not want them to know; the sciences holding such promise of good for humanity should be thick with Christians who really care to do good to others in Christ's name.

"Do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith," and one way of doing them good is to meet their needs. No one in this age can deny the power of science to meet human need.

We have only begun to scratch the surface of the place of science in a well-ordered Christian school curriculum. But surely, anything that bears so directly on the study of what God has made must be of supreme interest and importance to a Christian. It is a case of thinking God's thoughts after him. And as a man thinks, so he is.