You gotta have faith!
Christians are often accused of using ‘faith’ as opposed to ‘reason’ — which (it is said) thinking people use. But in fact, it’s quite the opposite. We will see in this article that ‘all truth is God’s truth’.
Last month, we saw that Christians and non-Christians alike use faith, reason and evidence in forming their view of the world. Christians exercise ‘true’ faith, whereas others exercise ‘false faith’ — faith in something other than God’s true revelation. We began to explore the idea that Christians alone have true knowledge (cf. Proverbs 1.7). How then do we explain the apparent success of non-Christians in making great advances in many fields of knowledge — most obviously, the natural sciences?
The answer is that for centuries Christian and non-Christian thinkers in the West have been building on the foundation of Christian faith. In his important book The Victory of Reason (Random House, 2005), Rodney Stark argues that it is no coincidence that commerce, modern science, capitalism, just rule of law and political freedom arose systemically in the Christian West. They occurred because, in the early centuries after Christ, Christian thinkers were unique in combining faith in reason with faith in progress (that is, that history is moving forward, rather than in cycles).[1]
Scientific Knowledge
But there were other Christian beliefs which were also essential to the formation of the modern Western world. Let’s take natural science as an example. We tend to think of the body of scientific knowledge as one, objectively-verified mass of information.
In a sense this is right. For example, as Christians we should be very happy to talk about the existence of gravity. We should be willing to say that all scientists have true knowledge (as far as it goes) when they talk about gravity and its effects. And we should admit that the scientific advances of the past few centuries have been of great value, and we should thank God for them.
But there is a problem with this view of knowledge. It fails to recognise the influence of Christian belief on scientific endeavour.
Natural science is built on Christian foundations, or faith commitments — this is the reason natural science works. In fact, we could go further — anything that is true is built on Christian faith commitments. Or as someone said: ‘All truth is God’s truth’. This is a big claim; but it follows on from what we saw last time. God is Creator — so he alone knows the universe fully. He knows how everything works. So any true knowledge of the universe must come from God — from his revelation in the Bible, or from things which can be worked out from it.
Consider an example. It is generally accepted that on earth, at sea level, a feather travels to the ground more slowly than a stone. I might say that this is a scientific ‘fact’. But in doing so I am using a number of Christian assumptions (beliefs).
For example:
- The universe is governed by laws which will continue to operate.
- The universe can be understood — the ‘rational intelligibility of the universe’.
- The universe exists.
- My senses do not deceive me.
Science and True Faith
Let’s focus on the first assumption above — that the universe is governed by laws which will continue to operate. There is nothing in the scientific method itself which gives us any right to assume this. The key principle underlying modern science is empiricism — the observation of patterns in the world. But this means that scientific ‘laws’ are not laws at all: they are disprovable theories, based on past observations.
But just because something’s happened lots of times before doesn’t necessarily mean it will happen again. I might take a dice and throw it five times and get a six every time; but I’d be a fool to say that dice always fall on six. The reason scientific ‘laws’ work is precisely because there is a Creator who’s made an ordered world. We might describe such laws as ‘God’s habits’. Take away the Creator, and science is nothing more than observation of past events, making hopeful predictions of the future. More honest atheist scientists will admit this — that they simply have to make a groundless assumption as the basis for their work.
In fact, this is the reason that modern science arose, principally in England, in the 17th century: Christians and God-fearers — convinced that God had created an ordered world — decided to study the ordered world to better understand and harness it. Similar arguments could be made for the other assumptions set out above.
Science and False Faith
But what of those who claim that the rise of science means there’s no longer any place for Christianity? It should be clear by now that in itself science is not opposed to Christianity. But in recent years some of the changing assumptions of mainstream science have been used to trespass on the ground formerly reserved for God.
Empiricism
It is generally accepted that (among other things) a scientific theory must be testable (repeatable in a laboratory) and falsifiable (disprovable). This is fine as far as it goes. But when it is then concluded that miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus Christ, couldn’t possibly have happened — this is a crazy use of those assumptions.
Furthermore, in practice science holds to a theory until a better theory can be found. But in the meantime, the theory that prevails influences the way that additional evidence is gathered. When the evidence disagrees with the prevailing theory it can be discarded or ignored — until the contrary evidence is so overwhelming that a new theory must take its place.
Naturalism
Naturalism is the faith commitment that only ‘natural’ forces are at work in the world. It manifests itself in another element to the formation of scientific theories. This is that a scientific theory has to be explainable by natural law — in other words, only natural causes of natural events count as science. So God’s intervention is discounted from the very beginning, be it in the Creation or the ongoing working of the universe! Again, it is fine to define science in that way, as long as it is recognised that science therefore covers a relatively small area — God’s habits. But many scientists today are trying to answer the big questions of life in narrow scientific terms.
What are we to conclude? That there is no such thing as a ‘fact’ in isolation. As someone has said: “Scientists should always state the opinions on which their facts are based.” Scientists have faith like everyone else. Some have true faith — they look at the world, they see the Creator at work, and they praise him. Some have false faith — they pretend there’s no need for a God, while using the very evidence which points to his existence. You could say that atheist scientists are borrowing Christian truth without acknowledging it!
Suppression of the Truth
The apostle Paul explains this ‘false faith’ very well in Romans 1.18-32. He tells us that God’s invisible qualities are clearly seen in the created world (Romans 1.20) — and therefore everybody knows God. But people don’t want to know and worship God, and so they suppress that truth (1.18): literally, they force it down as a child forces a lilo under the water in a swimming pool. Instead, they worship created things — like money and intellectual ‘freedom’ and pleasure (1.23). In turn, God ‘gives them over’ to further ignorance and ungodliness. A negative spiral develops (1.24-26, 28). And this ‘being given over’ begins in our minds (1.21, 28).
God has given human beings the ability to reason and weigh up evidence. But those faculties have been damaged — rendered faulty. We’re no longer able to reason flawlessly. We make wrong assumptions. We look at evidence and draw wrong conclusions in an attempt to marginalise God and elevate ourselves.
All this changes, of course, when a person is born again. We are then governed by a new power, the Spirit of truth. The process of being renewed in knowledge in the image of God (Colossians 3.10) begins. Of course, our faculties will always be marred to some extent by sin in our minds; but the renewal process has at least started.
Conclusions: True Knowledge and the Future of Civilisation
All truth is God’s truth. All knowledge is God’s knowledge. Science is true to the extent that it is built on the foundation of God’s Word. This is also the case for every other area of human knowledge.
We must learn to explain these truths to a society which is increasingly in the grip of atheist faith. We must help people to see that far from being responsible for the Crusades and not much else, Christianity is largely responsible for many of the good things they take for granted in modern life. We must help them to see that, as Christian beliefs are eroded and false faith takes their place, the nascent ‘brave new world’ of futility and hatred and lawlessness will expand and swallow British society and souls into ever increasing depravity and deprivation. Such a horrifying possibility is portrayed in John Gray’s Straw Dogs (Granta, 2002).[2] We must take the intellectual high ground once more, for the sake of the gospel and the glory of Jesus Christ. How do we begin? Perhaps by graciously asking the atheist science teacher at the local school why he believes science works.
Go to 3. The Public Sphere, Ideas and Faith
Footnotes
[1] Stark suggests that the Greeks had a form of reason without a sense of progress; the Jews and Muslims saw the law as purely to be obeyed rather than understood; the Eastern religions had neither a sense of reason nor progress.
[2] Or, indeed, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which has frightening parallels with parts of British society today.
© 2010 Steve Wilcox
This article was originally published in the December 2010 edition of Evangelicals Now. It is published here by the kind permission of the author and editors. For a free sample issue or to subscribe to Evangelicals Now, click here.
