Reforming Science

The Bible and modern science each have their own creation story. On the face of it, the stories are obviously not the same. Many Christians attempt to reconcile the two, under the assumption that the contradiction between them is only an apparent one, but I hold to the view that the contradiction between them is real. There are generally two approaches to making Genesis and Big Bang cosmology tell the same story: 1) maintain an essentially literal (perhaps there’s a better word) exegesis to line up the Genesis account with current scientific theory (e.g., Hugh Ross) or 2) interpret the Genesis account figuratively, so that the burden of scientific accuracy is removed (e.g., Meredith Kline). I won’t interact with these approaches in depth here, other than to say that I find the exegetical creativity employed by them difficult to believe.

The alternative to trying to get the Bible and the Big Bang to just get along is to reject one or the other. Rejecting the former is not an option for the Christian, so the only choice left is to reject the latter. It is important to reject it for the right reason, however. The Big Bang is wrong because it contradicts the Bible - period. It is not wrong because it contradicts the scientific evidence. Science is driven - not just influenced, but driven - by metaphysical assumptions. Interpreting evidence is impossible without assumptions, and different assumptions give rise to different interpretations of the data. The question of whether or not God was involved in creation will have a profound influence on our interpretation of the creation event - how could it not?

In my view this issue is the most glaring manifestation of the antithesis in modern science. If there is anywhere we should expect a Godless approach to natural philosophy to get it wrong, it is here. I would argue that the consistently Christian approach to cosmological questions is to take the creation story our God has revealed to us as the starting point, as a constraint upon our science. To put it a bit more bluntly, we should believe what He has told us about how He created the world. There is nothing unscientific about this, unless you define science as interpreting data without any assumptions (in which case I say to you, good luck). A good analogy in modern cosmology would be the Copernican Principle, which states that there is nothing special about Earth or mankind. This assumption has had and continues to have a profound influence on the development of modern cosmology, and scientists maintain it firmly because they believe it, not because they’ve been persuaded by evidence for it. This is not stubbornness or bad science - you simply can’t do science without faith in something.

None of this is to say that all interpretations of the data are equal, or that data cannot be used to evaluate  underlying assumptions. What I am really arguing for is that a consistently Christian approach to natural philosophy will do a better job of explaining the world around us. Scientific theories based upon biblical assumptions will fit the data better because they are true assumptions. Even more than that, science is ultimately incoherent without biblical assumptions, and only a return to them will keep science from becoming more of a dead end than it already is.

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