Do Christians Hate Science?

If you pop around on the Internet for very long, you’ll find that one of the most common screeds against Christians is that we hate science.

I don’t think it’s true, of course, but it does seem a rather general perception among our detractors. They think we see in science a direct threat to our beliefs; and since science undeniably does many good things for us, secularists of various kinds have a duty to deprive us of our illusions in this regard. We will thank them later: or if we do not, it will only be because we couldn’t be helped.

The Road to Truth

This blithe characterization of the tension between Christianity and science seems to be backed by a rather simple dichotomous perception that science is very clearly the road to truth, and faith / religion / spirituality, or whatever the dismissive choose to call it is a road to superstition, prejudice, misery and the theocratic state. Christians are thought to be plugging for some such option, and thus our perspectives do not need to be taken seriously in any way for science to progress.

I suppose it hasn’t helped that in the last century or so Christians — for the most part — have tended to withdraw from the academy, the lab, and the secular research organization since the atmosphere of hostility and contempt there has tended to be pretty strong. On one side are the proponents of the scientific method, thought to be the high road to all truth; on the other is anyone who would express even a guarded hesitancy about restricting all knowledge to that discipline. There seems very little middle ground.

Middle Ground

But this is a plea for just such a middle ground. I’m not going to say that belief contrary to science is a good thing for anyone; but I’m also not going to say that science gives us everything worth knowing, or even that every pronouncement that comes out under the banner of science is actually truthful. Some reasoned skepticism on all sides is a salutary thing, I will suggest. If all truth is God’s truth, then genuine science is no threat to Christianity, and Christianity is no threat to science.

So I am going to suggest a place for both. Against the irrational fear of science, I am going to suggest that science has real work to do in informing us about the material facts of the world God has given us. And against irrational antipathy to faith, I’m going to argue that knowledge beyond the physical realm — metaphysical knowledge — is the key to moving beyond the merely physical to our basic humanity and to our nature as spiritual beings living out a spiritual story in a dual but largely physical realm.

Of course, in our present space I can do no more than to set a direction. I cannot work out all the details of this détente. But I hope this brief treatment will provide readers with a sense of what I see as the way forward in the relationship between science and the spiritual.

The Scientific Method

Firstly, we need to know what the scientific method is. Briefly put, it is that means of inquiry that you were taught early in your science education, in which one uses the chain of hypothesis / experiment / observation / conclusion and re-hypothesizing to advance one’s knowledge of the material world. Since it focuses on the material world, and since it is such a rational method, it opens up all sorts of wonderful insights and simultaneously helps rule out distractions like superstition, received prejudices and irrelevant experiences from one’s view of material reality.

Now, let it be said that scientific method is a very good thing. But it is a very good thing with a limited scope and range. It is deliberately limited to the sorts of data that can be perceived with the physical senses … to vision, taste, touch, smell, hearing, weight, measurement, physical manipulation, and so forth. It neither promises to go farther, nor is able to yield equivalently impressive results whenever it tries to step outside of such parameters. In fact, the minute it does, it stops being the scientific method at all.

Other Methods

And there are other methods, of course. Mathematics is a non-scientific (i.e. non-empirical) method, yet one upon which the whole scientific enterprise rests. Rational knowledge comes into play: for how else is one going to know what conclusions are warranted and not? Personal knowledge is also essential, for every experimenter is also a human being; and unless that human being actually knows and processes something from the scientific method, and unless understanding is shared to other persons, no knowledge is gained thereby. Not only that, but every hypothesis is an idea generated from the mind of a particular person. (Here we are reminded to ask ourselves if we would have a theory of gravitation had Joe Lunchbucket watched the apple fall from the tree instead of Newton.)

Then there are philosophical types of knowledge that inform the scientific method; classifications and categories that are not somehow inherent in nature but rather are imposed as a kind of philosophical or disciplinary grammar generated by conceptual comparison. There is also theorizing — speculative knowledge — which is necessary from the very start of any scientific enterprise, since nothing is certain prior to experiment. Without the willingness to speculate and estimate possibilities prior to possession of full evidence, no scientist would ever perform a single experiment.

Science as Truth

But equally importantly, scientific method is informed by metaphysical kinds of knowledge; in particular, by various kinds of faith assumption. Foremost among these is the assumption that we live in a rational universe created by a Lawgiver God, one that can be trusted to run by its own regularities, so that an experiment performed at one time can have implications for another. And that is precisely what the inventor of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, thought. Bacon was not simply a dedicated scientist but a brilliant theologian and a passionate writer of tributes to God and to his Son. Bacon expected good things from a good God; and his confidence that the scientific method would work was born of his Christian faith.

Today, this history is forgotten, as are all the types of non-scientific knowledge that inevitably surround the scientific enterprise. Instead, many people view science as a lone discipline in pursuit of truth; and everything that is outside of that discipline as darkness and nonsense … or at least optional speculation. Science = Truth and Everything Else = Bunkum seems to be the axiom of many today. A sort of phony mystique is built up that says, “Science tells us testable truths, and faith is a form of creative fiction designed to avoid hard truths or to provide consolation to the weak-minded.” Forgotten in such rhetoric is the fact that science itself is only one method among many, and one dedicated to a particular range of limited purposes, not to the total revelation of universal truth.

What Is a Method?

The remarks made by David Bentley Hart, in his 2013 book, The Experience of God are particularly excellent in this regard. Concerning the scientific method, Hart cautions, “Above all, we should not let ourselves forget precisely what a method is and what it is not.” He continues:

“A method, at least in the sciences, is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance an in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak …”

A method, then, is an artificial strategy — a decision to limit oneself to looking only at certain kinds of evidence, and only on certain terms. It is not some kind of virtuous, open willingness to look at all the available evidence without preconception or prejudice, or regardless of its relevance to your particular area of interest. It’s a decision to shut down some questions in order to open up others. The tradeoff one gets for shutting out certain kinds of evidence is that one thereby may buy very sharp perceptiveness in regard to an area about which you happen to care intensely.

Scientific Myopia

A good analogy is that of a man using a microscope. When one has a microscope, one can look very intently down the barrel and see things the naked eye could never possibly see, for one’s vision is magnified and concentrated by the instrument so that perspicuity and revelations one could never otherwise have become possible.

However, at the very same moment in which the researcher puts his or her eye down to the oculus, he or she becomes completely unable to see any other object in the room where he or she is working. A whole host of people could shuffle into the room and so long as they did it quietly enough, could remain absolutely unobserved and unobservable until the researcher decided to take his or her eye away from the microscope. That same barrel that imparts such excellent vision to the object on the slide completely precludes vision of anything not on the slide.

Yet, of course, none of us is suggesting we would be wise to stop using microscopes. Instead, we need only to remember that the microscope cannot show us everything. And then we will be fine and use it wisely.

But it is easy, particularly when one is using a method that permits wide observation of many kinds of phenomena and yields excellent results in the areas it magnifies, to overestimate the power of that method and to begin to think it is telling us everything that could be worth knowing. Hart continues:

“When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one become foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one’s particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all.”

Scientific Evasions

If Hart is right, then, what we should expect to find is that people who are impressed with the scientific method should tend to be dismissive of questions about things they cannot pop into a test tube, heat with a Bunsen burner, measure with their Vernier calipers or quantify on one of their various numerical scales. And when pressed on a question about something outside of the powers of their methods to describe, we should expect that they will a) dismiss the whole question as stupid, b) claim that though they don’t have the answer yet, science will soon give it to them, or c) reduce the question from one of transcendent concern to one of merely material reorganization.

In fact, Hart’s characterization of these three kinds of evasions is precisely accurate. Those who are naively devoted to the scientific method to the exclusion of any other road to truth almost invariably resort to claiming either a) that God, morality, justice, the soul or the self are illusions, not real concerns, b) that science will one day unlock the truth about all of these, though admittedly it has not done so yet, and c) that God is an anthropologically or evolutionarily useful fiction, that morality and justice are provisional sociological arrangements, that the soul and self are products of chemicals and electricity in the brain, and so on.

Hart concludes:

“Whenever modern scientific method is corrupted in this fashion the results are especially unfortunate … what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for sure possession of ultimate conclusions.”

The result is a form of willful blindness to whatever exceeds the power of the scientific method. It is as if the thought that their method might not do everything disturbs science-lovers so much that they begin to fear it requires them to abandon science altogether. This they simply will not do: they ask themselves, has not science given us much progress and many good inventions? Has not science the hope of our future? Is not science education the only real education, and scientific advancement the only real advance? How can anyone ask us to abandon it and return to the Dark Ages of superstition and folly? And they will not move.

The Struggle to Think

The thought that nothing in the idea that there are things that exceed science requires us to abandon science, or the thought that a little modesty about their methodology might, after all, be a good thing for everyone never seems to occur to them. Anger and defiance rise up, supplanting all reason; for they feel themselves challenged at a very basic level. How can anything be outside of science, they ask, and why should we raise our eyes even for a minute from an instrument so advantageous to clear understanding? And opt for what?

The answer is simple: science is excellent, but not everything worth knowing — perhaps not even the most important things — can be seen down the barrel of a microscope. It would not be wise simply to dismiss the very widespread, almost universal intuition that science will not tell us all we need to know about reality, about happiness, about meaning, about morality, about emotions, about being a self, about having values and seeking goals, and ultimately about the whole purpose of life: for one thing that science lacks completely is a means of generating purpose.

And yet this is far more than an intuition: for if, as Christians claim, God has spoken decisively — not merely in intuitions but in actual, rational words and propositions, and if, moreover, he has spoken most eloquently through the true and physically-incarnated person of his Son, then to ignore those scientific facts and instead to treat the world as if it were merely some absurd material play enacted on a merely material stage, with only material facts to be discovered and totally outside the context of any deeper meaning or ultimate resolution would be a tragic act of eternally-dangerous blindness.

Good Science and Good Metaphysics

It may be very helpful to know that we are surrounded in this world by material entities, but even more important to know that those material entities were created by a transcendent God who imparted to us a spiritual nature and capability of responding to him, and arranged all for purposes he alone can reveal to us.

To have a science that takes no reckoning of such things is to be like a man with only one eye: he can see colors and shapes, but can no longer judge distances and depths the way he could if he had two eyes.

So as great as the scientific method may be, it always benefits from being informed by sound knowledge from the realms beyond its own limited methods. And Christians need have no fear of science, provided that it is understood to be a method for making true statements about physical reality as God has given it to us, not a method for the generation of surplus and unwarranted ideological pronouncements, or dismissals of all other ways of knowing the world.