That nasty little thing called science

First off I must apologize for this because it will be wholly inadequate simply because of the hugeness of the topic, but I will try to set the case.

When ever one decides to look at and evaluate Christianity it must always be done with the dominate philosophies of the time in view. For example one can’t understand the fights and tribulations the early Church went through about the Trinity without understanding the Greek idea of substance and being. Further one must understand the categorical thinking of Aquinas to get anything from the theology of the Middle Ages. When we read these earlier Theologies it is painfully obvious that this is true, the language they use, the arguments they choose, and the choice of final arbiter of disputes on interpreting the Word all seem strange to us.

But the real problem for us isn’t looking back, but looking at our own world and seeing what is there. The language of the Theologies of today seems comfy and logical. The reasoning makes sense to us. The reason is that it is a product of our own situation: they talk like me.

Our language is full of the modernist philosophies that were birthed by Descartes. This language is all about the testing of things according to the abilities of the human mind. picked up in a different way the English thinkers of this time brought about a language concerned with testing the human experiences against each other. The fight went on till Hume killed the idea that our perceptions mean anything other than what we want them to and Kant made the human mind nothing more than a plausibility structure factory.

What a large portion of Western Civilization has done with the final two thinkers is to put them on hold till they can be dealt with by another customer service rep. And once every generation or so some one picks them up and tries to answer them before slinking away leaving them listening to Kenny G for another twenty years.

Due to the inability to answer the last thinkers in the line, their main focus, epistemology, has stalled. Indeed it’s startling to me how little cogent work one can find on the subject within the last two centuries. Instead the focus now has changed to ethics and its several subjects including aesthetics. But the language of truth has stalled.

Where it stalled is in the fight between the rationalists and the empiricists. Both of these worked from the same foundationalist system and understanding of humanity. Where they differed is in the idea of what must change to fit the other. The rationalist placed mind over matter and stated that the physical world must be changed to function as we think it should and the empiricist said that our mind must change to fit how the world functions. These two combatants reach an uneasy truce in the Scientific Method.

Thus science became the new big thing based on a combination of logic from the continent and observation from the island. Christianity was eventually caught up in this storm of scientifiying and eventually it became the system for every one.

Our name for this was Modernism and it started out with a good name. But over time thanks to the Germans (it’s always them isn’t it?) it slowly became the object of hissing and pulling faces that it is today. The change was gradual but in the end the scientific method became the lens by which the Bible was interpreted. As a result things began to fall inside of revelation. First it was the History of the Bible, then the Science and finally the Religion. What has remain relatively unscathed until the last 20 years or so was the morality of the Bible.

The foundation of these attacks has been that of science. What follows is just an example and then what follows that is what I see as the more biblical and faithful way of dealing with it.

Let’s just look at the errors in the biblical text that are thrown at Christians. Most of them come from six books and their interactions: I and II Samuel, I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles. Now most of the errors are according to this form: “I Kings so and so says that twenty five people died, I Samuel says the same number were killed and II Chronicles says the number was thirty. Answer that and remain consistent if you can, Ha, Ha, Ha, Heh Heh.” The foundation for this entire claim is the scientific assumption that all truth is Factual Truth. If one is to speak anything true it must be absolutely consistent with each and every fact. We don’t talk or think like this but it is the standard that is placed for us to meet.

Faced with this what does the modern Christian do? They go back and examine every bit of evidence that can be gathered and posit all sorts of theories on how 25 = 30 and fights the Modernist on the Modernistic turf. What effectually happens is that we give up the idea that the standard for truth they posit is false. In effect the Christian assumes that the Enlightenment compromise of the Scientific Method and its standard for truth is correct.

The irony of the situation is that the solution that I would posit would be called caving in to the modernist and giving up the truthfulness of the Bible. Here is my answer: Your wrong you silly idiot. What you are doing is placing a standard of truth that the Biblical writer had no conception of and would scoff at. Ancient history was written for the same reason that good literature is written today; to prove a point, not necessarily a factual one as if they were writing a field report, but also spiritual and moral ones. Your standard of truth is a poor one that you cannot even meet in any one of your attempts so stop foisting the burden you can’t bear on to others as well you Pharisees. (Now they might not get the last reference but its therapeutic to say.)

Alas what would I be accused of by the common Christian? Simply that I had taken the Bible out of the realm of factual testing and as a result given up the fight on its inerrancy, the same thing that all those liberals did in Germany that led to this problem. I deny that and say rather that they assumed the truth of their secular histories and denied the biblical one based on the Enlightenment epistemology. I actually deny that their secular histories can be true according to a Biblical epistemology and that the Biblical history is true despite their factual fetishes.

Now on to my claim that the Church of today uses the Enlightenment as a crutch.

For conformation just go up to a random Christian and use this example and wait for your response. Better yet try this one. (I recommend a cigar or pipe and some small amount of alcoholic beverage be present for this will be long and they keeps the nerves from fraying.)

Tell them that all that gravity is Newton’s Zeus and that what the Greeks did to explain the world with their Pantheon, scientists do with their “natural forces” and physical theories. Even to the point of personalizing them. Gravity cannot “cause” a book to fall because that is and active verb that requires a personal agent to perform. Rather the cause of the book falling is God telling it to. He doesn’t work through middle managers, He does everything by Himself, what we call gravity is just His normal way of acting.

See how that goes over and then think about it.

Peace Out

Johanns de Selincio