My walk in the scientific/evangelical world – Who am I?

First, a little history. While I was working towards my doctorate in Bioengineering at the University of Washington, my husband and I attended a Presbyterian church in Seattle. Young and newly married, we chose to help in Sunday School, and found our niche teaching second graders there for almost 10 years. During that time I was very involved in the scientific world and surrounded by a university community that had a real appreciation for science. Wrapped up as I was in the lab, focusing on my dissertation, and living in a climate of serious inquiry and study, I was unaware of any significant disconnections between science and faith. Science was actively integrated with faith from the pulpit of our church, and in turn, we always loved to bring little bits of science into our lessons—even to the point of using sediment deposits in the Black Sea as evidence of a regionally-based ‘flood’ event thousands of years ago during our lessons about Noah’s ark. No one complained.

As I loved research, I continued to work in a lab at UW once I finished my PhD. But I also had two babies while completing my dissertation, and eventually found it challenging to balance work and family. When my husband was relocated to San Diego, I took that difficult uprooting as an opportunity to step back from labwork and spend more time with preschoolers. Leaving life at a fast-paced urban research university for the relaxed and resort-like coastal suburbs of San Diego County was another kind of culture shock, compounded by the fact that we found looking for a new church to be particularly hard. After some consultation with friends of friends, we stepped out of our Mainstream Protestant comfort zone and visited a Calvary Chapel.

There was certainly an adjustment period (eventually we stopped doing a double-take every time we saw the board shorts and flip-flops on Sunday morning – even on the stage!), but over time we were able to plug into a dynamic evangelical community. We found the vibrant, Christ-centered church to be a great place to make deep and lasting connections with the people, both through small groups and by serving in Children’s Ministry. Making a personally quite revolutionary decision to fully step away from the busy life of a researcher, I found a new calling when I took on a part time job leading the church’s 2nd and 3rd Grade program.

A surprising disconnect in the faith community

I now find myself spending my weekends with over a hundred kids and volunteers, and it has been a great adventure. However, it has also been through this ministry that I discovered first hand the uncomfortable disconnect between science and the evangelical church. At first it was just a few throw-away comments from fellow believers in church: dismissal of museum exhibits, eye-rolling at the ancient geology of the Grand Canyon, etc. Of course, I had heard rumors of such thinking, but I was a little surprised to find it to be so common in the Evangelical community. Many people I knew were rejecting large swathes of science outright. Sometimes I give out prizes to the kids in my class—trinkets and other insignificant plastic things that kids love—and some of the items I had in our “prize box” were “dino eggs with dino facts.” To my amazement, these items brought on complaints from parents because of their reference to the age of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Meanwhile, my husband—an environmental engineer with a background in Geology—was serving at the church with older kids. In his class he often heard that favorite question from Christian kids, “How do the dinosaurs fit into the creation story?” But the only answer he’d ever heard in response was the explanation that dinosaurs were obviously on the ark, and somehow became extinct after the flood. He is the most easy-going person ever, but he was taken aback by this wholesale dismissal of geologic history and by the lack of a more nuanced discussion of Scripture. At that point we began to ask around, and learned that, yes, this is a common way of thinking in evangelical circles.

These attitudes about science and the Bible seemed especially prevalent among the many home schooling families in our community. More than half of my church coworkers homeschool or send their kids to Christian schools. Several of these wonderful folks were homeschooled themselves, and very few attended secular universities. Many of the children and families that I minister to each week are also homeschooling families, and for the first time I became troubled by what they were learning about science and the natural world. I attended public school and secular universities both for undergraduate and graduate studies, and (after much thought and discussion) we chose to send our own kids to public schools, not least because we want them to have great training in science and math. While we are fortunate enough to live in a community with challenging public schools well equipped to prepare kids in those areas, I want the same for homeschooled kids, as well. All Christian young people should be able to both excel in science and grow in their understanding of the God of Scripture, whether they’re taught in institutional settings or at home. I only wish I could better trust available homeschooling science curriculum materials to achieve that end.

Is there cause for concern? Does it really matter?

One can correctly argue that Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection are the central beliefs and values of the Christian faith. In the end, does it matter what we teach our kids about origins or the age of the Universe? What harm is there in these black and white beliefs held by good people doing good things?

I believe that it does matter, for several reasons:

1. We have generation of Christian young people who are not trained in scientific principles that will allow them to meaningfully contribute to fields such as cosmology, geology, biology, etc. Our universities especially need an evangelical presence!
2. Thoughtful, scientifically-minded people—both young and old—will be pushed AWAY from the evangelical community. I know that I could not attend a church that dismisses scientific evidence in order to fit nature’s narrative into preconceived ideas, or one where scientists are actively mocked.
3. The faith of homeschooled and other Christian kids can be challenged when they have their first college classes on geology, evolutionary biology, etc. Many will reach a point where they think they have to choose between their faith and what the scientific world tells them about the created order.
4. Simply, evangelicals are in danger of looking a bit ridiculous to reasonable and educated people when they appear so fearful of science, making it easier for non-Christians to dismiss the gospel message.

Exploratory Efforts –Communicating God’s Revelation in Nature

Despite these experiences and concerns, my overall impression of the evangelical community’s perspective on science is that in most areas, everything is fine. But it seems that sensitivity around a few points—particularly origins, the age of the earth and climate change—limits open discussion even of more general scientific issues, and as wonderful as they are, our pastoral staff rarely invokes natural wonders to illustrate doctrine, whether speaking to adults or kids.

As a Christian, a scientist and an educator, I particularly want the kids I work with to know that it is good to wonder about the world around us and say “God Did It – But How?” More than that, I want them to know that they do not have to be afraid of the answers to those questions. So I ask myself, “Is there anything I can do?” As it turns out, I’ve concluded that there are ways that I (like any of us) can help, even if the efforts are incrementally small at first. Our church hosts a tremendous summer camp that teaches kids Bible stories and worship, but also gives children a chance to choose an “elective” and learn more about subjects like art, music, cooking, a sport, or science. Each summer more than 1,000 kids attend this outreach at our church campus, and I was privileged this past summer to be able to “coach” science and write up a fun science curriculum that dovetailed with the various Bible stories the kids were hearing.

The practice of science became a wonderful avenue for sharing God’s love and the Salvation Story whether I pulled ideas for experiments directly from the Bible (such as creating, testing and optimizing sling shots like David) or used the stories more allegorically; extracting DNA from strawberries (always a hit with kids) illustrated our uniqueness in God’s eyes, while creating a solar music box demonstrated the beauty of living in God’s light vs. hiding in the darkness. I found that this was an excellent place in which to bring young Christians (and non-Christians) into an understanding and appreciation of basic scientific principles in conjunction with communicating spiritual truth. My hope is that those lessons will open their eyes to further inquiry as they grow up and move on through junior high, high school, and—for some—beyond.

In the end, I was inspired to write out a preliminary curriculum, combining scriptural lessons with science experiments. This effort led me to co-author Wonders In Our World: Insights From God's Two Books, a book that further explains the complementarities of God’s Two Books – the book of nature and Scripture. While materials like these can be used in church settings such as the summer camp at our Calvary Chapel, my hope is that they will become a resource for Christian families all year long—especially for those homeschoolers I love so much. A full curriculum may still be a ways off (perhaps I’ll have more to share about that in a future post), but in the meantime, I’m honored to be able to draw on both Scripture and science to share my joy in Christ and his creation.

Keeping History Safe

In the cold morning air with the sun not yet over the ridge, the place to begin preparation for summiting Mount Darwin is to ponder the reasonableness of miracles. Many Totalizers would like to ban miracles from university consideration and inquiry. Trouble is: human history is awash with credible people reporting miracles.

Modern academic tradition tends to try and maintain order. For historians it behooves us professionally to avoid accounts of alleged spiritual events. We find comfort in a little logical gymnastics that keeps history safe for us to wander in, a deceptively formulaic avoidance method that helps us avoid what people are telling us about extraordinary events in the past.

David Hume popularly articulated this logical gymnastics in an essay titled “Of Miracles” that was eventually printed in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “I flatter myself,” Hume triumphantly proclaimed, “that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”

His everlasting check on superstition begins with a circular argument that because miracles can’t happen, a reasonable person should not even listen to reports of them. Hume taught that though the normal job of a historian was to listen to the testimony that comes down to us from the past, there is a point at which you can close your ears. Hume knew that historical testimony can get wild, so he came up with a way to domesticate the wildness, a way to make history a zoo rather than allow it to be a jungle. His “Of Miracles” has been tremendously influential in the discipline of human history over the last two hundred and fifty years, not because his ideas are strong, but because his ideas are useful. Get rid of “superstitious delusions,” and the discipline of history can be turned from a safari into a form of home economics. Hume’s domestication of history is seductively simple. Instead of following the Aristotelian tradition of linking the credibility of hard-to-believe testimony to the credibility of the testifier, Hume recommended disregarding the testifier and focusing only on the testimony. This effectively removed the persuasive power from hard-to-believe testimony. Miracles need the credibility of an eyewitness in order to have persuasive power. Hume cut the power source from the unwanted testimony.

Essentially, Hume adopted the modeling technique that Darwin later used and is best seen in Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Hume recommended gathering testimony from the past and every region to create a general model of what humans generally experience. Using this mass of information, one should generalize standards of common experience. Now if anyone reports a miracle, the alleged event can’t be true because it does not conform to the generalized standards of common experience. (Of course, Hume had already refused to allow that any reports of miracles could be used even to generalize common experience.) It’s tricky. Its logic is circular. But it works to weed out awkward, quirky information. It is as if a domineering GPS unit created a sphere to serve as an abstraction for the earth, then insisted that the earth can’t have wobbling poles and flattening in the upper latitudes because the sphere in the GPS shows it can’t be true. Given a useful and trustworthy GPS, don’t listen to a scientist who might tell you something different than what the GPS tells you.

The circularity of this argument has been noted ever since Hume first proposed it, but Hume was a good writer and said what a lot of people wanted to hear. Miracles are impossible so miracle reports can’t be true. Don’t even listen to reports of them.

Balancing Likelihoods

Also embedded in Hume’s essay is the awkward “rule of logic,” most often called “Balancing Likelihoods.” By combining math and logic in an odd way, Hume’s “Of Miracles “ offered another way for historians to avoid thinking about miracles. Balancing Likelihoods has many names but is probably best stated by David Hackett Fischer, in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, as “the rule of probability:”

“[A]ll inferences from empirical evidence are probabilistic. It is not, therefore, sufficient to demonstrate merely that A was possibly the case. A historian must determine, as best he can, the probability of A in relation to the probability of alternatives. In the same fashion he cannot disprove A by demonstrating that not-A was possible, but only by demonstrating that not-A was more probable than A. This is the rule of probability.”

This seems to be practical but is impossible. Balancing Likelihoods, in the way described by Fischer, cannot be used by historians in any normal practice. It is a talisman to keep history mentally safe from the wildness that is reported to exist. Logicians, especially mathematicians, have long criticized intellectual constructions like this. The “probability” that Fischer writes about is seemingly mathematical, but the math is simply implied to give a sense of strength to human feelings.

Before Hume wrote “Of Miracles” probabilistic logic had been advancing rapidly and there was a great hope that mathematical analogies would strengthen human thinking—even Christian apologetics. “Pascal’s Wager,” the most famous mathematical apologetic from the seventeenth century, equated eternal salvation with mathematical infinity and then applied it to a gambling formula. Antoine Arnauld, in The Port-Royal Logic (1662), and John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Discourse on Miracles (1706), carried probabilistic math and logic into the handling of reported miracles. A half-century later, however, Hume reacted against Arnauld and Locke’s teachings that mathematical analogies could help in the discussion of the credibility of miracles. Hume insisted that to handle a reported miracle, a historian had to create two separate ratios, pro and con, for believability. The ratios were then to be weighed against each other. This is Fischer’s “rule of probability” quoted above. In the language of Hume’s era, this was proclaimed as the “calculus of good sense.”

Lorraine Daston, in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), offers an excellent study of Hume and the many eighteenth-century mathematicians who wanted to help bring rigorous quantitative thinking to what today would be called the humanities. Daston writes that by the 1840s, mathematicians realized that “the ‘calculus of good sense’ had become antithetical to good sense,” and that today most of what these early probabilists were trying to do is considered “patently absurd.”

In 1901, one of America’s preeminent philosopher-mathematician-logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote three essays attacking the way historians had adopted Hume’s bad logic: “A Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.” Peirce showed that historians are in error when they talk of judging testimony by balancing probabilities because “in a scientific sense, there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”

Probability, Peirce wrote, “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific event to a generic event.” A testimony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual event.” Peirce further pointed out that what people were justifying by claiming Balancing Likelihoods was really simply relating “what they prefer to do” to what they don’t prefer. “Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”

Historians like me who teach in universities about the reasonable credibility of Jesus’ resurrection need to be students of Peirce not Hume on the subject of assessing the credibility of reports that come down to us from ancient history. Dealing wisely with reports of events verging on the incredible is just part of the normal job of being grounded in the social study of our complex human past.

“Come to history as a doubter,” Richard Marius advises in a historical methods manual. “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians don’t trust their sources. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s reputation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility.”

But Marius is wrong. In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt. In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting. Historians have to be close listeners, discerning listeners, wise listeners, who sometimes have to make harmonies and stretch for belief.

Monopolizing Knowledge

Science and Scientism

One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims (or at least assumes) that it must therefore be inferior. However, there are many other important beliefs, secular as well as religious, which are justified and rational, but not scientific, and therefore marginalized by scientism. And if that is so, then scientism is a ghastly intellectual mistake.

But how could it have come about that this mistake is so widespread, if it is a mistake? The underlying reason is that scientism is confused with science. It is natural for readers without inside knowledge of science to assume that science and scientism are one and the same when many leading scientists and science popularizers often speak and act as if they and thus directly promote this confusion. What is more, several major strands within religion also promote this confusion. On the conservative theological wing, science is often rejected because it is confused with scientism, and on the theologically liberal wing scientism is often adopted for the same reason. Whether rejecting or assimilating, religious believers often confuse science and scientism.

Scientism is, first of all, a philosophy of knowledge. It is an opinion about the way that knowledge can be obtained and justified. However, scientism rapidly becomes much more. It becomes an all-encompassing world-view; a perspective from which all of the questions of life are examined: a grounding presupposition or set of presuppositions which provides the framework by which the world is to be understood. In other words, it is essentially a religious position.

The Origins of Scientism

The word science is used with two completely different meanings; confusing the two has a natural tendency to lead to scientism. The historical meaning comes from the word's Latin root, scientia, which means simply knowledge, and indeed the word science was once used to describe any systematic orderly study of a field of knowledge. In today’s common usage, however, "science" refers to the study of the natural world. The "Encyclopédie" (1751-) of Diderot and D'Alembert¹, a classic embodiment of Enlightenment thought, defines the word science to mean knowledge in general, but then focuses on natural science and technology. This is scientism in its youth. Enlightenment writings helped to insinuate scientism as an unacknowledged presupposition into much of the intellectual climate of the succeeding two centuries. From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), through historians such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848), and in vestiges even into the mid twentieth century, "science" was held to refer generally to formal, intellectual learning, yet when specific examples of science are cited these are almost all natural science.

Edward Cheney used his preface to the 1898 edition of Macaulay's history² to criticize him as failing to "treat history as a science". Cheney's attitude is rife with scientism - trying to distinguish between `true' scientific historical knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, literature that fails to qualify as science and hence as true knowledge. As president of the American Historical Society, twenty seven years later, Cheney would champion an explicitly scientistic view of the historian's task as to discover law in history, “... natural laws, which we must accept whether we want to or not, ... laws to be accepted and reckoned with as much as the laws of gravitation, or of chemical affinity” ³ The view is not convincing. The supposed distinction between scientific and unscientific history bears no discernible relationship to the methods of the natural sciences. It is mostly a substitution of “scientific” for "correct" for rhetorical effect.

The continued robustness of scientism is surely partly attributable to this terminological confusion. If science means simply knowledge, then scientism is merely tautologically true. End of story. But if science means a particular type of knowledge, as it does today, then it is essential to recognize that meaning and stick to it. In short what we mean by science today is the inheritance of the Scientific Revolution. In later parts of this series, I shall identify two key defining characteristics of science that encapsulate the two emphases crucial to its development: experimental or natural evidence, and mechanical or mathematical explanation. Before I move on to this task, though, let me pause to address some objections to the whole of my explanatory enterprise.

A Few Possible Objections

One objection that might be raised at this stage is to ask why one should restrict the designation science to the inheritors of the Scientific Revolution. After all, the argument goes, surely we should use whatever strategy is available to discover knowledge. My first answer is immediately to point out that this objection is an example of scientism. It confuses knowledge with science and implies that they are one and the same. I am not at all interested in limiting the ways of obtaining knowledge to those avenues that we call “scientific”. I simply want to be clear that, as a matter of historical fact, science as we commonly conceive it had, and has, a distinctive characteristic approach to methods of discovering and knowing. But why insist on this terminology? Here, my second answer is that science has a well-earned prestige and authority precisely because of its success. This prestige is, of course, one driving force behind the desire of many disciplines to be considered sciences. To use the metaphor of the market today, it is a question of "branding".

A second kind of objection is this: suppose we grant that we will use the word science to mean natural science. Doesn't that just mean the study of nature? So shouldn’t"the study of nature" be our working definition of science then? And if it is, why should one limit the scope of science by an identification of its methods? Surely one should use whatever methods are available to study nature.

My answer is this: the main problem with "the study of nature" as a definition of science is that it simply begs the question: what is nature? We tend to think that "nature" is self-evident; but it isn't. Prior to the Scientific Revolution, nature was populated with gods and teleological imperatives, with intention and purpose. Even in 1686, Robert Boyle (of Boyles' Law) identified eight different senses of the word nature⁴. Boyle's purpose was to deplore the use of, the semi-deity that underwrote Aristotle's physics, which the Scientific Revolution was in the process of superceding, and to replace it with the established order or settled course of things. Moreover, even after the Enlightenment, the romantics such as the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that what they were about was the study of nature. Yet no one today would for a moment think to call the poetic understanding of the natural world science. It simply is not adequate to assume that what is meant by nature is obvious.

Instead, I believe, we must use a functional definition of science. Once we have a clear view of what science is, we will have a definition of what we here mean by nature. Nature is what we are studying in natural science. The result of this definition, as we'll see, is entirely consistent with what Boyle was arguing for: the established order or settled course of things.

We will continue this exploration of what we mean by “nature” in the next installment.

Notes

1. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, editors. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. André Le Breton, Michel-Antoine David, Laurent Durand, and Antoine-Claude Briasson, Paris, 1751-77.
2. Thomas Babbington (Lord) Macaulay. The History of England from the accession of James the second. G. P. Putnam, New York, 1898.
3. Edward P. Cheyney. Presidential address delivered before the american historical association. American Historical Review, 29 (2): 231-48, 1924.
4. Thomas Birch, editor. Robert Boyle,, The Works. Georg Olms Verlangsuchhandlung, Hildsheim, 1966. Volume 5, p167-9.

Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion

In the film Nacho Libre, Jack Black plays a preposterous worker in a Mexican orphanage with a secret life as an incompetent professional wrestler. There is a scene where Black and his scrawny wrestling partner assess their competition – two vicious-looking men in the opposite corner. It appears to Black that his life as a wrestler will end immediately in serious injury. He says to his partner, in a horrible Spanish accent, “Pray to the Lord for strength.”

His partner immediately replies, in only a slightly better accent, “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science.”

While that bit of dialogue appears in a comedy film, it echoes statements made in serious conversations throughout the world. Conventional wisdom seems to say that one either believes in God, or one believes in science. There is no third option.

We don’t believe that at all, and neither does the deep thinker we profile in this book. We hope you won’t either, when you are finished reading. Much has been written about faith and science – the history of supposedly major conflicts and minor harmonies between the two; the rational and irrational accounts from people who read just one of the two books set before us – the Bible and the Book of Nature; the condemnation and condescension of one group toward the other. There is a lot of diatribe, but not much dialogue.

We illuminate this issue by writing about John Polkinghorne. We chose this strategy because it involves a story. What we offer is not a conventional biography of John Polkinghorne. We didn’t read his correspondence, interview his family members, students and colleagues, search data bases for public and private records. Instead, we wrote the story of John Polkinghorne, probably the most significant voice in this generation’s conversation about science and religion. But we also unfold some bigger issues. How do we know Truth? How does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith -- prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection? How should people of faith approach science, especially when new scientific discoveries appear to contradict their religious beliefs? To get at those questions, we tell the story of John Polkinghorne.

We conducted many interviews with Polkinghorne. Wherever the book shows a quote from him without an endnote, it came from a personal interview. The interviews occurred from 2007-2010 in the following locations: Quincy, Massachusetts; a monastery in Venice, Italy; the President’s Lodge at Queens’ College (while the president was away) in Cambridge, England; the chapels at Trinity College, Queens’ College, Trinity Hall and Westcott Seminary – all in Cambridge; the parlor of Queens’ College; the Senior Combination Room at Queens’ College, under both his own portrait and that of the Queen; the study in his home in Cambridge; the sitting room in his home; walking from the vicarage to his old parish church in Blean, England; in his car to and from Blean; at the Good Shepherd Church in Cambridge; and in pubs throughout Cambridge.

As if to cosmically underscore the need for this book, when we approached Passport Control at London’s Heathrow Airport for a final series of interviews with Polkinghorne, the officer asked why we were coming to England.

“For a conference at Oxford,” we said.

“What’s the conference about?” he said.

“God and Physics,” we said.

“God and Physics, eh?” He paused and looked at us. “Which side are you on?”

Exactly.

Those interested in reading more from John Polkinghorne should view the BioLogos sponsored video, "An Afternoon with John Polkinghorne," which can be found here.