Relocating To Elfland

“The concept that the community of scientists regulates the kind of questions scientists ask as well as the answers they will accept does not fit with the image many scientists have of their field as an open search for truth, but the idea of sociological influence in science has gained considerable acceptance.” (Ariel A. Roth, Origins: Linking Science and Scripture, p. 41)

For an interesting example, see “An Open Letter to the Scientific Community” at www.cosmologystatement.org.

1. In scripture, raw “nature” does not exist; there is only divine creation.

2. In scripture, raw “space” does not exist; there is only divine placement.

3. In scripture, raw “time” does not exist; there is only divine purpose.

Discuss.

“A missionary encounter with our culture must bring us face to face with the central citadel of our culture, which is the belief that is based on the immense achievements of the scientific method and, to a limited but increasing extent, embodied in our political, economic,and social practice – the belief that the real world, the reality with which we have to do, is a world that is to be understood in terms of efficient causes and not of final causes, a world that is not governed by an intelligible purpose, and thus a world in which the answer to the question of what is good has to be left to the private opinion of each individual and cannot be included in the body of accepted facts that control public life.” (Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks, p. 79)

From Brian Brock’s recent weighty work, Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (pp. 378–79):

“Technology assessment has only one inviolable prohibition: Thou shalt not undermine the survival of the institution, or stated positively: Thou shalt protect your own institution by tirelessly expanding those resources under your control. The Christian community has one inviolable claim upon it that can only be stated in positive terms: Thou shalt love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself. The promise of Christ is that collaboration with his love frees humans from the compulsions to expansion driven by fear of a world bound to securing its own well-being.”

“Happiness is . . . a word with multiple meanings. The question ‘What is true happiness?’ can only be finally answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world, and so ‘happiness’ had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give it. Each individual has the right not only to pursue happiness but to define it as he wishes. Moreover, there is a further element of pathos in this idea of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Medieval people believed with great seriousness that final happiness lay on the other side of death. They did not expect it in its fullness on this earth. But the methods of modern science provide no grounds for belief that there is anything beyond death. Hence, the whole freight of human happiness has to be carried in the few short and uncertain years that are allowed to us before death ends it all. The quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, more fraught with anxiety than it was to the people of the Middle Ages.” (Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, pp. 26–27)

A Weltanschauung that rejects the metaphysical and confines itself entirely to the physical or material (i.e., one that trusts wholly in the presuppositions, methods, and findings of naturalistic science) has thereby forfeited the grounds from which to make any meaningful statements concerning the existence or nature of the metaphysical. Metaphysical claims simply do not fall within the ambit of science. The converse cannot be said of a Weltanschauung that embraces the metaphysical along with the physical or material. Religion may speak concerning science, while science must necessarily be mute concerning all things religious.

Discuss.

One of the conversations going on in the church that is very old but currently as lively as ever is the one about the relationship between science and theology. Of particular interest to me here is the question from that conversation: To what extent should Christians let the theology they have learned from “special revelation” (scripture) influence their interpretation of “general revelation” (nature) in the course of doing science? I’ve written about this elsewhere before, but it continues to fascinate me, not least because of how many Christians give what is basically the secularist’s answer – “not at all!” It should be beyond dispute (we hear) that any compromise of objectivity is a compromise of science itself; a scientist must come to the data with an open mind and simply see where his investigations lead him.

I’ve thought a lot about this because, as a former attorney, I’m deeply sensitive to the problem of prejudging evidence. Make up your mind about a case before it is presented, and you will be deaf to anything that doesn’t fit your view. Such an approach inevitably yields miscarriages of justice. So it is with science, we understand: let people start believing in demon possession because they read about it in the Bible, and they may start burning people with “demonic” symptoms without ever bothering to consider what medical causes might be in play.

All right, but here’s a difficulty. Suppose we say theology is one domain of study with its own rules (faith working from scripture), and science is another domain of study with its own rules (reason working from nature), and the former mustn’t disturb the latter. Doesn’t this mean we have already placed the “supernatural” firmly outside the bounds of science? Doesn’t this define science in such a way that the evidence can lead nowhere but to purely “natural” conclusions? Isn’t this, then, a prejudging of the evidence? And doesn’t it completely secularize science?

Consider, for example, the Gadarene demoniac. If we met this man today, we would want to have him examined by a physician, and we would not want the interference of crazy religious ideas about demon possession. But suppose some physician, committed to what we now know as the “scientific method,” had run up to Jesus as He encountered the Gadarene, and told Him He was about to corrupt a brilliant opportunity for science with His wild ideas about exorcism. And suppose Jesus had said to this physician, “Your objectivity has blinded you to what’s actually going on here.” Would that have been a corrupting imposition of theology on science? Would that have been a theological prejudging of the scientific evidence on Jesus’ part? Or would it have been an exposure of the prejudging of the evidence on the physician’s part? Hmmm . . . .

I ask this because I recently read something in Jim Jordan’s Through New Eyes that is kind of obvious, but it’s also kind of radical. He says this (p. 29):

“According to the Greeks – and actually all pagans – the world was not made by God. Rather, the world, or the raw material of the world, has always existed. This always-existing stuff just is, and so it is called ‘Being.’ This ‘Being’ stuff is like a blank slate. It is silent and meaningless ‘raw material.’ It does not bear the impress of any Creator, and it does not joyfully shout His name (Psalm 98:4–9).”

If you let this sink in, it means that to look at anything in the world without seeing how it shows off the glory of God is to look at it wrongly; it is, in short, to misunderstand the thing before you. There isn’t anything that is “just there,” naked under the microscope, open to all interpretations. Whatever is already has meaning, because it is created; and this must govern our interpretation of whatever is. How do we know this? Because the Bible tells us so. We can’t very readily throw out our Bible, or we cease to be Christians; and we can’t very readily shelve our Bible when we walk into the laboratory, because it tells us how we must look at everything we find there. This isn’t to say the Bible is a scientific handbook, which scientists must consult for answers to all sorts of scientific questions. It is to say the scientist never deals with anything for which the Bible hasn’t already provided a supernaturalistic interpretive grid – and this surely rules out the possibility of “Christianized” naturalistic science.

Now here’s a kicker: If the biblical understanding that nothing is “just there” precludes scientific interpreting of the world in just any way we please (notably without reference to the Creator), does it also preclude artistic representing of the world in just any way we please? In other words, if the Bible forbids a certain kind of objectivity in science, does it simultaneously impose a certain kind of objectivity in art?

Post-Darwin Christianity exhibits an extraordinary variety of views on how to read the scientific “evidence” for evolution. Some simply accept the “findings” of science, without any concern for how this acceptance might be squared with a faithful reading of scripture. Others believe some “reconciliation” of science and scripture must be attempted where they appear to conflict (the Author of nature is, after all, the Author of scripture); but opinions differ as to whether biblical interpretation should move in the direction of scientific findings, or vice versa. Should biblical interpretation be accommodated to the scientific evidence, or should our reading of the scientific evidence be accommodated to faithful biblical interpretation?

One question that lies near the center of these disputes is whether we are permitted to believe God has tampered with the scientific evidence. Some Christians want to say that since His first act of creating something ex nihilo (be it the world as we know it, or the “stuff” from which all things have evolved) God has confined His relations with the world within the “laws of nature” or “ordinary” providence. On this view, if we study nature and its “laws” (which are universally reliable) and are led to conclude that the earth is billions of years old, any hint to the contrary in scripture must arise from a misreading of scripture. What is off the table is any notion that God might have done something in nature that we couldn’t predict by the laws of nature.

Ken Miller, for example, says we haven’t understood the mythological character of Genesis 1–2. A “literal” reading of Genesis 1–2 must be wrong, because if it were correct, Genesis 1–2 would conflict with the assured findings of science. What Miller firmly refuses to believe is that God might have played fast and loose with the evidence in nature (e.g., creating a world that has the appearance of age). He emphatically rejects any idea of a “deceptive God” doing anything that might mislead or confuse the scientists.

Meredith Kline took a different tack. He insisted we haven’t understood the Bible’s own clues (notably Genesis 2:5) about God’s use of “ordinary” providence throughout most of the creation week. What we may perceive as “extraordinary” acts of God in Genesis 1–2 (e.g., giving light to the earth prior to the creation of the sun) become quite obviously “ordinary” once we grasp the details of his “framework hypothesis” concerning those chapters – which hypothesis importantly allows for a non-chronological reading of the creation days and for a very old earth.

Without debating the merits of Miller’s mythologizing or Kline’s framework hypothesis, it does seem to me they share a profoundly questionable assumption: that when we come to the facts of science, we needn’t be concerned that the facts are muddled by supernatural intrusions (beyond the bounds of the ordinary workings of nature). There is no need to posit a “God in the gaps”; we needn’t explain things with reference to surprises on the part of the Creator-King.

Disciples of Miller and Kline may argue that I have grossly oversimplified, even misrepresented, their views. I hope that is not the case; and I also want to remove any misunderstanding in what I am about to say: it does seem to me that, given the assumption described above, it is difficult to maintain the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ (or any other “miracle,” for that matter). Let no one mistake: I am not saying either Miller or Kline denies the reality of miracles. I want to parse out the logical conclusion of accepting their assumption (as I understand it); I am not saying that either man actually takes their assumption to its logical conclusion. What I am asking is this: if we are prepared to say that God has raised the dead, multiplied bread and fish and oil and flour, turned water into wine, walked on water, and healed the sick, then precisely how can we argue that God would never suspend the “laws of nature” to create the world in the order described in Genesis 1, or to destroy the world with a flood? How, in short, can we insist that things in nature may always be explained without recourse to the notion of supernatural intervention?

There may be an answer that I am missing, but . . . well, I am missing it.

In view of Bruce Waltke’s recent video on Biologos (which, due to ensuing furor, has been removed), I am brushing up on my sympathetic imagination when I listen to evolutionists. So here is Sean Carroll (the physicist, not the biologist), who “happened” to stop by the offices of the New York Times last month:

“It’s likely that we can’t do time travel. But we don’t know for sure. The arrow of time comes from the increase of entropy, meaning that the universe started out organized and gets messier as time goes on. Every way in which the past is different from the future can ultimately be traced to entropy. The fact that I remember the past and not the future can be traced to the fact that the past has lower entropy. I think I can make choices that affect the future, but that I can’t make choices that affect the past is also because of entropy. I can choose to have Italian food tonight, but I cannot choose to have not had it last night. But if I travel into the past, all that gets mixed up. My own personal future becomes part of the universe’s past. We’re not going to make logical sense of that. So the smart money would bet that it’s just not possible.”

I’m no physicist, but here’s what I’m getting from Mr. Carroll. The universe is falling apart. It’s unraveling. It’s getting more chaotic and disordered all the time. That’s why the “past” (which I can fondly remember, notwithstanding the increasing disorder of my brain functions) is different from the “future” (which I can’t “remember,” because it has too much entropy for my brain to engage at its current level of entropy? . . .). I may be able to make choices that will impose some kind of order on the increasing chaos of the “future” (which is a bit hard to understand if I am to be part of that increasing chaos), but there’s no hope of making choices that impose order on the greater order of the “past” (not because the “past” has already happened, mind you, but simply because of the laws of physics). Then a final dismissive wave of the hand toward time-travel: we can’t, after all, “make logical sense of that.” Sink me, Mr. Carroll, I can’t make logical sense of any of this. Do you think I have abnormally high levels of entropy?

Mercifully, he doesn’t leave me in my insecurities:

“You’re allowed to feel small. As the 1970s rockers sang, ‘All we are is dust in the wind.’ But there’s another way to think about that. Instead of being humbled by how tiny we are, we should be impressed that we can understand it. The rules of nature are ultimately our rules and when we try to understand them, we learn something about ourselves.”

As I write, Eyjafjallajokull is still belching ash into the skies of Iceland. A portend of the “future” according to Mr. Carroll. Indeed, a metaphor for our very existence. But we, unlike the other dust particles of the cosmos, have created “our rules” to explain this to ourselves; and so, in the brilliance of stuff like entropy theory, we enjoy self-discovery. We are not humbled by our tinyness; we are not intimidated by the sheer randomness of our drifting in the wind. We stand tall with “our rules”; sometimes we even understand them.

But I’m kind of scared, Mr. Carroll. While we sit around doing our thought experiments, Eyjafjallajokull keeps vomiting. Nothing including “our rules” can stop her or predict what she will do next. You told me our choices can affect the future, but there seems to be something deep and inexorable at work here. Please tell me there will at least come a point where entropy will destroy self-awareness, where chaos will obliterate the need for explanations and even consciousness itself. I would really like this to happen before I am buried under a pile of ash.

Thus far sympathetic imagination. I’m going to stop now.

Some months ago I read this remarkable passage in John Webster’s Confessing God:

“The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is to be the ‘head and pattern’ of theological thinking about space, above all because that doctrine articulates the utter gratuity and contingency of created being . . . . Space is therefore not absolute or unoriginate, some sort of pre-existent medium; nor is it simply a register of acts and attitudes on the part of creatures who make space for themselves by disposing of themselves in the world. In both cases . . . space has become detached from God’s acts of creating and maintaining the creaturely realm and reconciling it to himself. In effect, space is secularized . . . .” (pp. 104–105)

Subsequent dabbling in Oscar Cullman’s Christ and Time and in the work of Rosenstock-Huessy has convinced me something similar must be said of the time-dimension of creaturely existence. Space and time are not “simply there” any more than anything else in creation is “simply there.” The concept of “space” articulates God-ordained dimensions and relations; the concept of “time” articulates God-ordained dynamics and developments. To think or speak of time and space apart from God is secularism: it surrenders to pagan unbelief things over which He claims absolute ownership and authority.

So what? Well, to begin with, this means the sacredness of space is the result of creation, not the Mosaic Covenant; and so what I do with space God has entrusted to me matters. I may not have been given a specific plot of land in Canaan which I am not free to sell in perpetuity (as was the case for my Israelite fathers), but it is still the case that where God has placed any space under my jurisdiction, the call to holiness comes with it. No less in the New Covenant than in the Old, if “anyone comes . . . and does not bring [the teaching of Christ], do not receive him into your house” (3 Jn 10), because your house is holy space. Territory under the jurisdiction of a disciple of King Jesus is territory claimed by the King in His dominion-taking work in the earth, and the disciple stewarding it (we may call him a king-priest) will have an eye open for serpents. One must ask also if there is not something in the old epigram, “cleanliness is next to godliness.” The homemaker who keeps picking up toys and putting up curtains is obeying the gospel, because the Spirit doesn’t just order God’s space, He also beautifies it.

In the time-dimension, leaving aside the obvious significance of the centrality of Christ in history (powerfully expressed, among others, by Lesslie Newbigin in his Finality of Christ), we must look square in the face the sheer sinfulness of modern piety that is so unaware of the past and so unconcerned about the future. Not to know history is to ignore the glory of God and to deafen ourselves to what He has been teaching His church for generations. Not to prepare for the future (perhaps because we are hunkered down hoping He will return tomorrow, and can see little point in anything so this-worldly) is to come dangerously close to hiding His deposit in a napkin. Such chronological obliviousness extracts our lives from His lordship over all time, and in doing so secularizes (however unwittingly) the present. My present life is part of God’s working out His purposes in the earth; what possible hope do I have of doing His will now if I have no idea what He has been doing or plans to do? “Knowing the time,” says the apostle (Rom 13:11), we take up the mantle of our fathers, and give ourselves for things we will never live to see. If our sons and daughters are wise, they too will take up the deposit in time, and serve the Lord their God in their generation. And so on until He comes.

A lot more needs to be said about all of this . . . .