Reforming Science

From chapter 1 of The Reformed Pastor:

Your study of physics and other sciences is not worth a rush, if it be not God that you seek after in them. To see and admire, to reverence and adore, to love and delight in God, as exhibited in His works - this is the true and only philosophy; the contrary is mere foolery, and is so called again and again by God Himself. This is the sanctification of your studies, when they are devoted to God, and when He is the end, the object, and the life of them all.

He goes on to rebuke Christian academies for putting physics, metaphysics and mathematics ahead of theology, and to expound for several pages on the importance of knowing God as the foundation of all our knowledge. A particularly good excerpt:

If God must be searched after, in our search of the creature, (and we must affect no separated knowledge of them) then tutors must read God to their pupils in all; and divinity must be the beginning, the middle, the end, the life, the all, of their studies. Our physics and metaphysics must be reduced to theology; and nature must be read as one of God’s books, which is purposely written for the revelation of Himself. The Holy Scripture is the easier book: when you have first learned from it God, and His will, as to the most necessary things, address yourself to the study of His works, and read every creature as a Christian and a divine. If you see not yourselves, and all things, as living, and moving, and having being in God, you see nothing, whatever you think you see. If you perceive not, in your study of the creatures, that God is all, and in all, and that ‘of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things,’ you may think perhaps, that you ‘know something; but you know nothing as you ought to know.’

The concept of nature as one of God’s books is commonly used today to subordinate the Bible to a secular framework for understanding nature. The fact that God reveals Himself in multiple ways does not diminish the necessity of subordinating all knowledge to His Word. We are fallen creatures, and we must know God through His revelation before we can know anything at all. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

No Comments »

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.

One of the reasons God created stars was to mark time. The Bible mentions days and years, but now that we are able to measure very short intervals of time, it turns out that God had something out there for that as well. Astronomers have recently (since 1967) discovered many stars that emit pulses of light at regular intervals. They are referred to as pulsars, and the frequency at which they vary in intensity is on the order of 1000 times per second. Not only that, but the stability of pulsar timing rivals that of the most accurate atomic-based clocks used on Earth.

No Comments »

Another thing I was struck by in Baxter’s quote was his reference to Aristotle. Baxter was a contemporary of Isaac Newton (he was 28 when Newton was born), but Aristotle was still being taught at Cambridge when Newton studied there. I’m sure I’ve read that before, but it’s not always easy to rid oneself of common misconceptions about the relationship between the Church and science, especially when one studies history as little as I do. Hadn’t the Church come to her senses by now and tried to move beyond the embarassment of the Galileo affair? Hadn’t the Reformation delivered us from the superstitious cosmology of the Middle Ages? And yet here is a 17th-century Puritan invoking Aristotle as the scientific authority, not Galileo or Copernicus or Kepler. This highlights the fact that the Galileo affair was primarily a controversy over scientific authority, and the Church was firmly on the side of the scientific establisment - Copernicus conflicted with Aristotle. Surely an advocate of the common view wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the Church was continuing to stuff Aristotle down the throat of free thinkers like Newton?

No Comments »

Check out this quote from Richard Baxter’s The Reformed Pastor:

It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics so as to understand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use than many apprehend; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle can teach us.

Notice Baxter’s affirmation of the antithesis - you must believe in order to understand.

2 Comments »