Reforming Science

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?

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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.

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One of the implications of the antithesis is that believers and unbelievers will often draw antithetical conclusions from the same data. While many Christians share the modern assumption of neutrality in science, at least in the hard sciences, it is amazing to see how many reformed people that affirm the antithesis scurry to avoid its implications for science. If we must believe in order to understand, if the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, then it follows that those who do not believe will not understand, those who do not fear the Lord are on the path of folly. Again, this has nothing to do with the intelligence of scientists. Christians who think that science is more or less a neutral source of truth are left with two options when its truth claims appear to be at enmity with the truth claims of God’s Word. The first option, the approach taken by most young earth creationists, is to affirm the truth of God’s Word and ridicule the intelligence of scientists. If their science doesn’t line up with the Bible then they must be doing bad science. The second option, embraced by those who consider the fundamentalist label something to be avoided at all costs, is to conclude that the scientists must be on to something and their contradiction with God’s Word must be only an apparent contradiction. The work then is to be creative with the text and figure out a way to interpret it in a way that is faithful both to the revealed truth and the truth of modern science. God is the source of all truth, so obviously scientists can’t be wrong; or something like that.

But there is a third option, which is that modern scientists are doing good science, in the sense that they are being careful and drawing logical conclusions from their assumptions, and yet they are still getting things wrong. They are at enmity with their Creator so He’s not telling them His secrets. The work for a Christian in science (or any other discipline) is to be aware of this, to submit to the ultimate authority of God’s Word, and to look at the results of science with a measured skepticism. I say measured because I am not advocating a revolutionary approach that rejects everything unbelieving scientists have ever done. Most of them are a lot smarter than most of us, and they are studying God’s creation after all so they can’t make the data say anything they want. As we study our discipline, it is important to distinguish between assumptions and conclusions, and we must always reject those assumptions (such as the Cosmological Principle, about which I’ll say more later) that are unbiblical. This requires time and careful thought. Science needs reforming, and the work of reformation requires perseverance and faith.

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Modern science is in a state of confusion. Since this is not a sentiment shared by everyone, I will attempt to give some evidence for that statement. The real reason I see things that way, however, is related to the implications of the antithesis for science. A good case can be made for the fact that science flourished in Western culture primarily because of the Christian worldview of that culture. I won’t try to argue that case here, other than to say that it only makes sense to look for order in a world governed by a covenant-keeping Creator. The deeper issue, however, is that any scientific advancement can only be regarded as a gift from God. Not only does He sustain the world He created, not only do we live and move and have our being in Him, it is also His glory to conceal a matter, and if He so desired to He could make every scientist go mad and eat grass like a cow. His common grace is certainly evident in the scientific advancements of pagan cultures, including ours, but we should expect to see a significant difference in a culture that has been impacted by the gospel. All the promises of God are yes in Christ, and everything else in comparison is eating scraps under the table. To put it another way, If science is done in the context of a God-honoring culture, we should not be surprised to see the blessing of God upon it in an unusual way. And when that culture turns its back on Him, we should expect to see His blessing gradually removed. From this perspective, there are very clear signs that the blessing of God is no longer upon the scientific enterprise of Western culture. Modern science (by which I mean science since the early 20th century) is in a state of confusion that Newtonian science never was.

By the 19th century, Newtonian science had been developed into a very coherent system, and one of the prominent scientists of that time (I can’t recall who, perhaps Laplace) expressed the view that pretty much all that was left to do in science was to extend measurements out to more decimal places. Talk about setting yourself up to be humbled. The most notable theories of modern science, which upset the billiard ball worldview of Newton, are quantum mechanics and relativity. One cannot read even an introductory discussion of the theory of quantum mechanics, the theory for describing phenomena on a microscopic level, without mention being made of its weirdness. And the weirdness does not go away as one delves deeper into the theory; if anything, it gets worse. The weirdness is usually couched in terms of the probabilistic interpretation of the theory (which is not the only possible interpretation, but the generally accepted one), but this isn’t even the strangest aspect of the theory. The current mainstream scientific belief is that the electron is a structureless point particle that has the properties of mass, charge and spin. If you’re wondering exactly how a structureless point can have measurable properties, your confusion at this juncture is not due to any lack of understanding you may have about the theory. It’s not that the theory doesn’t work - there is excellent agreement between theory and experiment - it’s that it doesn’t really make sense. Of course one can interpret this in various ways, and emphasize how well the theory works, but it doesn’t take much of an imagination to come to the conclusion that God is making fools out of us.

Other signs that God is making fools out of modern scientists:

– The theory of quantum electrodynamics (a merger between relativity and quantum mechanics) has these pesky infinities in it that can be managed with but make most scientists uncomfortable. An introductory text will usually indicate that the theory is incomplete or lacking in self-consistency (while at the same time emphasizing the excellent agreement with experiment).

– There is no theory that unifies quantum mechanics with the theory of gravity, and all attempts to do so are bizarre in the extreme.

– The standard model for elementary particles (which is based on quantum theory) has around 20 quantities that aren’t predicted by the theory but have to be taken from experiment. What this means is that, as far as the theory is concerned, these are free parameters; and the more free parameters you have, the easier it is to get a match between theory and experiment.

– Experiments based upon the standard Big-Bang cosmology indicate that the universe is made up of about 74% dark energy, 22% dark matter, and 4% regular matter. Dark matter is stuff that is thought to be out there because we can see gravitational effects that can’t be accounted for by the gas and stars that we can see. We don’t really know what it is in terms of things we’re familiar with (although there are plenty of ideas about what it might be). Dark energy was invoked to account for observations that indicate that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. Again, scientists don’t really know what dark energy is, i.e., what is causing the acceleration (but again, plenty of ideas). So when it comes to 96% of the universe, we’re pretty much in the dark.

– Quantum electrodynamics predicts that there should be energy in the vacuum of outer space, and the theoretical estimate of the amount of that energy is 120 orders of magnitude larger than what is observed. That’s 10 raised to the 120th power, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000.

Let me emphasize here that what I am arguing for has nothing to with the intelligence of scientists. It is a spiritual problem, not an intellectual one. In addition, it is not even primarily the spiritual problem of scientists. The way out of this scientific confusion is by the return of Western culture to the faith of its fathers, not the conversion of a few prominent scientists to Christianity. I want to encourage the involvement of Christians in science, but it is important for us (especially as individualistic Americans) to see the big picture. What we need is a reformation in the Church; God is not going to remove the confusion just because I had my devotions this week. And if God is not pleased to send us one, perhaps the next great scientific advance will come out of Africa.

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I would like to offer a definition of what is commonly referred to as a law of nature, or at least a perspective on its meaning and significance. One of my primary motivations for doing science is a fascination with the fact that we can describe things that happen in God’s creation with mathematical equations. Many secular scientists have acknowledged the same fascination, often with the accompanying observation that they really have no explanation for why this should be the case. A common view of these regularities among Christians seems to be that God built the laws of nature into creation at the beginning of time, and that creation is more or less constrained to follow them under normal circumstances. From this perspective, supernatural intervention by the Creator is in a very real sense unnatural, even alien; He chooses at times to break the laws of nature by performing a miracle (which He is of course free to do since He is the one who created them in the first place). I see at least two difficulties with this view. The first is that it presents a view of a God that is essentially diestic for a large portion of our daily experience. When He isn’t supernaturally intervening, the creation is simply running along in the manner in which He wound it up, following the formulas He built into it at the beginning. The second is that it makes the laws of nature an abstraction, as if they had an existence of their own apart from God’s relationship with His creation. But law is necessarily personal - it is a command that is given to be obeyed or disobeyed. Law is meaningless outside of the context of the relationship between law-giver and law-receiver. So a definition that seems to capture some of these ideas would be that “a law of nature is a manifestation of the obedience of creation to God’s sustaining Word”. Using the language of obedience not only highlights the personal nature of the “laws” of nature, it also lines up with the language Scripture uses to describe the relationship between God and His creation. It should be emphasized that creation is always operating in obedience to God’s sustaining Word; the regularities we observe are just a particular example of that fact. As Doug Wilson has pointed out, the wind and the waves were obeying Christ before He commanded them to be still. From this perspective, God isn’t breaking the laws of physics when He performs a miracle; He’s simply speaking a unique command to His creation. The sun goes around the earth because that’s what God is constantly telling it to do; once He told it to stop for awhile, and so it did. This isn’t an attempt to lessen the wonder of miraculous events, but rather to increase our wonder at the events that are occurring around us all the time. And the wonder at being able to find patterns in nature should be directed towards the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.

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This is meant to be a blog about how to do science as a Christian. I have been studying physics (and to a lesser extent astronomy) for about seven years now, and throughout have thought a great deal about the implications of the Christian faith for science. In addition to the essentials of the Christian faith, there are two particular beliefs that have driven a lot of my thinking, which I may as well be clear about at the outset. The first is that the Christian faith applies to everything, or to paraphrase Kuyper, there is not a square centimeter (astronomers use cgs units) of our human existence over which Christ does not cry “Mine!”. While I haven’t thought through all of the exegetical issues, I tend towards an optimistic view of eschatology, and one of the primary driving forces for my study of science has been my belief that doing science as a faithful Christian matters for the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. Discipling the nations includes teaching them how to do science. The second has to do with what the reformed affectionately refer to as the antithesis: when God cursed the serpent in the garden, He put enmity between his seed and the seed of the woman, Christ. This enmity runs throughout the Biblical story, and while Christ crushed Satan’s head when He rose from the dead, the antithesis will remain until all His enemies have their necks under His feet. One of the implications of this for science, or any other human endeavor, is that we shouldn’t expect the nations (or ourselves, for that matter) to naturally do it in a way that honors Christ. Nor should we expect Christ to honor the efforts of those who are at enmity with Him. Christ as the Saviour of the world includes Christ as the Saviour of science. I hope to say more about this stuff in later posts, but I see these as essential starting points for a Christian view of science.

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