“Come and See”:  A Christological Invitation for Science, Part 2

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Today's entry was written by Mark Noll. Mark Noll is a historian, essayist and professor specializing in the history of American Christianity. Since 2006 he has been the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. His books include America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln; God and Race in American Politics: A Short History and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, which has been widely recognized for making a strong appeal for a better approach to intellectual life among American evangelicals.

In part one of this series (taken from Mark Noll's new book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind), Noll introduced the complex nature of the relationship between science and faith and discussed pre-modern conceptions about it, which were largely harmonious. Augustine,way back in the fifth century recognized the need for caution and emphasized the need Christians to take great care in their discussions of nature, lest they distract from the central message of Scripture which is new life in Christ. This christological concern manifest itself in earnest beginning in the 16th century when a growing body of scientific knowledge called into question an array of “literal” interpretations of Scripture. In this, part II of the series, Noll “explores historical reasons for the difficulties besetting efforts at bringing scientific knowledge and biblical wisdom together.”

The Bible and Science Historically Considered

Of the many books that have treated the record of religious-science engagement since the sixteenth century, the best have demonstrated that there has never been a simple conflict between biblical theology and natural science.¹ Rather, that history has been marked by a sustained series of negotiations, breakthroughs, well-publicized flashpoints, much conceptual rethinking, lots of ignorant grandstanding, some intellectual overreaching by starry-eyed avatars of a supremely all-competent “Science,” some intellectual overreaching by determined “defenders” of Scripture, much noncontroversial science carried out by Christians, a huge quantity of scientific advance accepted routinely by believers, and much more.

At the dawn of modern science in the early seventeenth century, the iconic experimenter and polemicist Galileo Galilei recorded exceedingly wise words about how to combine investigations of nature with complete trust in Scripture. Implicit in his comments was an anchorage in christological realities that I hope to make explicit at the end of this chapter. If Galileo’s guidelines had been followed, the history of science and religion in the modern West would have been much calmer than what actually unfolded. Galileo’s comments are worth quoting in full before exploring why it has been so difficult to follow his proposals for peace between belief in Scripture and reliance on the results of scientific investigation. His standpoint combined a number of basic dispositions:

• trust that sense experience, rigorously controlled and creatively contemplated, could reveal truths about nature;

• trust that biblical interpretation and scientific interpretation cannot in principle conflict because God is the author of both Scripture and nature;

• realization that much in the Bible is not intended as a scientific description of the world;

• realization that interpretation of Scripture and interpretation of nature often require legitimately different procedures; and

• confidence that what God allows humans to learn about nature could help discern what God has revealed in Scripture.

Here is what Galileo wrote:

It is most pious to say and most prudent to take for granted that Holy Scripture can never lie, as long as its true meaning has been grasped; but I do not think one can deny that this is frequently recondite and very different from what appears to be the literal meaning of the words. . . . I think that in disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of scriptural passages but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. For the Holy Scripture and nature derive equally from the godhead, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s orders; moreover, to accommodate the understanding of the common people it is appropriate for Scripture to say many things that are different (in appearance and in regard to the literal meaning of the words) from the absolute truth; on the other hand, nature is inexorable and immutable, never violates the terms of the laws imposed upon her, and does not care whether or not her recondite reasons and ways of operating are disclosed to human understanding; but not every scriptural assertion is bound to obligations as severe as every natural phenomenon; finally, God reveals Himself to us no less excellently in the effects of nature than in the sacred words of Scripture . . . ; and so it seems that a natural phenomenon which is placed before our eyes by sensory experience or proved by necessary demonstrations should not be called into question, let alone condemned, on account of scriptural passages whose words appear to have a different meaning. However, by this I do not wish to imply that one should not have the highest regard for passages of Holy Scripture; indeed, after becoming certain of some physical conclusions, we should use these as very appropriate aids to the correct interpretation of Scripture and to the investigation of the truths they must contain, for they are most true and agree with demonstrated truths. . . . I do not think one has to believe that the same God who has given us senses, language, and intellect would want to set aside the use of these and give us by other means the information we can acquire with them, so that we would deny our senses and reason even in the case of those physical conclusions which are placed before our eyes and intellect by our sensory experiences or by necessary demonstrations.²

As helpful as what Galileo said in the early seventeenth century may still be 400 years later, it is obvious that his hopes for smooth sailing on the sea of science-religion interaction have not been realized. The tumults that have arisen, however, are not random or uncaused. Many, in fact, have been propelled by habits of mind established in Western thinking well before the age of scientific revolution or that came to prominence during the era of the Enlightenment. In other words, thinking about science and religion has always been strongly influenced, sometimes absolutely determined, by important assumptions about how that thinking should take place.³

Because some of these assumptions arose in the Middle Ages, the recondite debates of thirteenth-century Catholic philosophers actually go far in explaining difficulties that continue to this day.⁴ One particular dispute that has exerted a great influence on later Western history concerned the relationship of God’s being to all other beings. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican friar who lived from 1225 to 1274, argued that this relationship was analogical, that is, while humans and the created world were certainly like God in many ways, the essence of God remained ultimately a mystery known only to himself. Aquinas may well have been thinking of the passage in Isaiah 55:9 where the Lord tells the prophet,

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

The fact that God created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) was a crucial part of Aquinas’s argument, because it meant that, while human minds could understand communication from God (i.e., revelation in nature, in Scripture, in Jesus Christ), they could in principle never grasp the essence of God. An interesting by-product of this position, which has taken on surprising relevance in contemporary debates, was Aquinas’s understanding of randomness or contingency. Everything in the world, he insisted, happened because of God’s direction. But some things happen contingently, or with the appearance of randomness. The logic of their contingency was perfectly clear to God, but because God in his essence is hidden to humans, humans may not be able to grasp how what they perceive as random could be part of God’s direction of the universe.

The opposing view was maintained by the Franciscan priest and philosopher Duns Scotus, a younger contemporary of Aquinas who lived from 1266 to 1308. His position argued for the univocity of being. The only way to know the essence of anything is through its existence. Although God is much greater and much wiser than humans, his being and the being of all other things share a common essence. God is the creator and redeemer of humans, but his actions toward humans can (at least potentially) be understood reasonably well because the same laws of being apply to God as to everything else; the same way that we explain causation in every other sphere explains how God causes things to act and to be.

Scotus’s approach to metaphysics (= the science of being) became, with a few exceptions, the dominant view in later Western history. It was particularly significant when joined to one more principle, this one from the English Franciscan, William of Ockham (1288-1348). Ockham’s famous “razor” held that the simplest explanation was always the best explanation (“do not multiply entities unnecessarily”). Applied to science, this principle came to mean that if a natural event is explained adequately by a natural cause, there is no need to think about supernatural causes or even about the transcendent being of God. The combination of these philosophical positions is responsible for an assumption that prevails widely to this day: once something is explained clearly and completely as a natural occurrence, there is no other realm of being that can allow it to be described in any other way.

For a very long time, this assumption was not regarded as anti-Christian, since God was considered the creator of nature and the laws of nature as well as the active providential force that kept nature running as he had created it to run. During the Reformation era, Protestants maintained that conviction, but also began to place a new stress on the importance of Scripture for understanding God, themselves, the church, and everything else.⁵ That emphasis was one of the important factors accelerating the rise of modern science. In particular, as Protestants set aside symbolic interpretations of Scripture, which had been prominent in the Middle Ages, they stressed straightforward examination of texts in what was often called a literal approach. This approach, in turn, stimulated a similar effort at examining the natural world in such a way that the medieval idea of God communicating to humans through “two books” (nature and Scripture) took on greater force. The assumption that became very important in this process was that those who believed God created the physical world and revealed himself verbally in Scripture should harmonize in one complete picture what they learned about nature from studying nature and what they learned about nature from studying Scripture. In both cases, literal knowledge was crucial, along with a belief that sources of literal knowledge could be fitted together harmoniously.

By the late seventeenth century, when science in its early modern form began to expand rapidly, yet a third conviction became important, which was worked out especially in the many efforts that went into constructing natural theology.⁶ Natural theology was the project of explaining, often in considerable detail, what God’s purposes were in creating the various parts of nature. Natural theology became a major enterprise when the earlier assumptions — metaphysical univocity and harmonization of the “two books”—encountered rapidly expanding knowledge about the physical world. Learned believers recognized the potential threat of this expanding knowledge—if scientific investigation could explain how nature worked as a system unto itself, maybe reliance on God and reference to the Scriptures were expendable. In response to this challenge, savants like Cotton Mather in the American colonies (The Christian Philosopher, 1721) and William Denham in England (Physico-Theology, 1713) offered elaborate explanations for how the structures of the physical and animal worlds revealed God’s purposes in creating things as he had made them.

The tradition of natural theology received its most famous exposition in a book by William Paley, an Anglican archdeacon, published in 1802. Its title explained what it was about: Natural Theology: or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the appearances of nature. Paley’s method was to describe features of animal, human, or material life and then to show how these features manifested God’s design in and for nature. For example, the fact that animal and human bodies were symmetrical in outward appearance even as their internal organs and functions were asymmetrical provided Paley with “indubitable evidences, not only of design, but of a great deal of attention and accuracy in prosecuting the design.”⁷ The very important assumption behind the natural theology promoted by Paley was that not only did God create and providentially order the natural world, but humans could figure out exactly how and why God ordered creation as he did. This assumption became critically important when later investigators of nature concluded that it was not necessary to think about God’s intentions when figuring out how nature worked, and so belief in God was wrongheaded. In turn, those conclusions naturally antagonized the ones who continued to believe in God and therefore insisted either that new discoveries did in fact reveal a providential design or that the new discoveries had to be false.

Perhaps not many today who are engaged with contemporary debates in science and religion pause to think about historical turning points deep in the past. But the assumptions of univocal metaphysics, harmonization, and natural theology created powerful channels in which much subsequent discussion has flowed. During recent decades, much of the conflict involving religion and science has resulted from polemicists on all sides carrying deeply entrenched convictions, attitudes, and assumptions into the present. Sorting out ancient mental habits from recent novelties is difficult, however, in part because there are so many different factors feeding into the current situation, and in part because evaluating these factors requires delicately balanced judgments. As examples of broader concerns, the awareness that nonbelievers of several types regularly use the supposedly assured result of modern science to attack traditional Christianity is hardly a baseless fantasy. In addition, Christian believers of all sorts can only applaud the devotion to Scripture that has been so prominent in conservative Protestant history, but many believers today — including a growing number of evangelicals —question some of the assumptions about how best to interpret Scripture that evangelicals sometimes treat as interchangeable with trust in Scripture itself.

When considered historically, however, it seems obvious that the modern strength of young-earth Creation Science is almost entirely explainable as the continuation of former predispositions.⁸ To be sure, skillful publications like John Whitcomb and Henry Morris’s The Genesis Flood, which appeared in 1961, have added new elements to the mix. And of course, they have been matched blow for blow by skillful antitheistic works like Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion that was published in 2006.

Yet the terms of debate in this modern polemical literature depend almost entirely on assumptions about metaphysical univocity, harmonization, and natural theology — as applied to modern questions and disseminated by democratic appeals to a broader public. In its turn, the Intelligent Design movement, with much more sophistication, still demonstrates a strong commitment to metaphysical univocity, harmonization, and natural theology, along with the use of modern probability theory and a tendency to treat the court of public opinion as a capable judge of controversial issues. Again, critics of Creation Science and Intelligent Design, both believers and unbelievers, also often share some of these attitudes, especially those derived from metaphysical univocity, harmonization, and natural theology.

If what I have sketched here portrays the past with any accuracy, it should be clear that when conservative Bible-believers object to different aspects of modern science, they do so on the basis of assumptions as well as arguments. Often missing in those considerations, however, are direct appeals to the heart of the Christian faith as defined by the person and work of Christ. Coming back to that center offers a better way of discriminating more accurately between assumptions well grounded in solid theology and those that are not.

In Part III, Noll goes on to study a positive case study where the central christological concerns were well maintained—the work of B.B. Warfield.

Notes

1. See especially John Hedly Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). An excellent reference work is Gary B. Ferngren, ed., The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland, 2000).
2. “Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess” (1615), in The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, ed. Maurice A. Finocchiaro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 92-94.
3. The following paragraphs are taken, with revisions, from Mark A. Noll, “Evangelicals, Creation, and Scripture: An Overview,” BioLogos Forum (November 2009), available from biologos.org/uploads/projects/Noll_scholarly_essay.pdf (accessed May 17, 2010).
4. This section relies on Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially 25-31.
5. See in particular Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
6. For particularly astute treatment, see Brooke, Science and Religion, 192-225.
7. William Paley, Natural Theology, ed. Matthew D. Eddy and David Knight (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006; original 1802), 101.
8. For the best history, see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists, expanded ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), and for a solid general survey, Michael Ruse, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).