On the Antithesis in Science

You will have noticed, I trust, how many today treat the subject of faith as peripheral to one’s daily experience.  Christian and non-Christians may differ in their faith, but they more-or-less believe the same things.  They both think they should exercise more, that kids are great, that work demands too much, and that strong black French Roast coffee is the only way the beverage should be enjoyed.  As far as most of daily life is concerned, their differing faiths can be compared to the differing amounts of money that they may have in their wallets – some more and some less – but this doesn’t really change the way they see the world too much.

 

Going against this tide is the subject of this essay which is on the radical antithesis that, in principle, ought to exist between the Christian and the non-Christian regarding their views of reality and, science, in particular.  The essay does not claim an antithesis regarding the skill in which science is practiced between the Christian and non-Christian – I know many skilled on both sides.  The thesis of the essay is that, in so far as each side is consistent with their fundamental beliefs, there will be an undeniable and unavoidable antithesis.  And the fact that there doesn’t appear to be an antithesis is not itself proof that one doesn’t exist, but that one or both sides are not being consistent with their most fundamental beliefs – their worldviews.  This short essay will not be congruent with what most of us have been taught since grade school and will also not find acceptance in current scientific pedagogy.  Unfortunately, it is also true, that it will not find acceptance in much of modern apologetics and grates very hard against the modern evangelical sentiment of focusing on commonality and building bridges.

 

In this essay, I’d like to examine in only cursory detail a description of the Christian worldview and how it necessarily brings about an antithesis with all other worldviews.  I will then examine how science is only intelligible from the Christian perspective and how this makes the strongest and most consistent apologetic.  In the summary, I’ll attempt to point toward how to engage the unbeliever and how our ultimate commitment is not to evangelism per se, but to honoring God through our apologetics and our evangelism.  Thus, our apologetic cannot deny the message we are attempting to communicate.

 

The Christian worldview has at its heart three doctrines – doctrine of God, doctrine of man, and a doctrine of creation.  This is not the whole of the Christian worldview, but those doctrines that have the most to do with the subject of this essay.  The Christian world and life view is that network of beliefs which connects what we believe about God, with what we believe about man, with how can man have knowledge of God and his environment.  Right away this is a very significant statement that is true for all worldviews – one’s epistemology (theory of knowledge) necessarily involves one’s metaphysics (what is the nature of reality: God, man, and the world).  A certain epistemology necessarily involves a certain metaphysics and vice versa.  The answer to the one question: “How can man know?”, necessarily answers the other: “What can man know?”.  Because one’s epistemology and metaphysics are intimately connected, the Christian cannot borrow non-Christian epistemologies without compromising Christian metaphysics.  In other words, we must establish a Christian way of knowing that is self-consciously consistent with the Christian view of God and man.

 

Space simply will not allow even a terse description of the Christian doctrine of God and doctrine of man.  So, I’m simply going to highlight a few key points.  The first point is that of the Creator-creature distinction.  In Christian theology, God is the Creator and man is the creature.  As creator, God spoke all things into existence by the power of His Word.  All the wonderful unity and diversity that we observe in the natural realm (the celestial bodies and their motions, the seasons, peoples, fauna and flora) were put in place by the creative fiats of God.  God in His absolute sovereign control over nature created just as He wanted.  What a wonderful God we serve, whose beauty and majesty we get a glimpse of through the wonders of creation!  As creator, God is unique and separate from His creation – he transcends His creation.  God’s incommunicable attributes are illustrative: God is infinite, immutable, and self-existent.  God is infinite in His knowledge, power, and presence.  A word of caution here: we must not think of God’s infinity as just a linear extrapolation of man’s finitude.  Holding as we do to God’s transcendence, God’s being is not subject to the constraints of man.  In other words, there is a qualitative difference in God’s being as compared to man, a difference of kind and not of degree.  Figure one illustrates the qualitative Creator-creature distinction and a quantitative differentiation between God and man.  In addition to being transcendent over creation, God deigns to be immanent in creation.  In Exodus 3, God reveals Himself as the transcendent “I AM” and the immanent “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”.  God is not only over and above, but He is also reflected in creation.  God’s communicable attributes are illustrative: God is love, jealous, holy, righteous, wise, good, and faithful; this list is not exhaustive.  Man may truly shares in these attributes, but on a creaturely scale.  In addition to the attributes of God, of extreme import to the subject of this essay is the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ because, just like the attributes of God, these doctrines are absolute critical for a Christian epistemology.  In the doctrine of the Trinity, we have God’s self-disclosure as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  There is one God in three persons, each person possessing the fullness of God.  Here we have at the core of Christianity a unique reality that God is both unity and diversity.  In addition, the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, became incarnate being fully God and fully man.  Thus, in the one person, indwells two natures.  Jesus is the mediator between God and man as our great brother in the flesh.

 

I’ve had to be brief.  There is much, much more to be said.  However, all along the way I hope it has been noted that I cannot help but talk about man when discussing God and the opposite will be true below.  A Christian doctrine of God implies a Christian doctrine of man and vice versa, just like a Christian metaphysics will imply a Christian epistemology.

 

 

Man, too, is a part of God’s creation – in fact, the highest part, for we alone were created in God’s image.  We are creatures, however, and not the Creator.  This distinction was abundantly clear to the righteous consciousness of Adam in paradise when God gave the multiple positive commands that were exhaustive in scope (exercise dominion, be fruitful and multiply, subdue the earth, and exercise dominion) and the single negative command that was narrow in scope (do not eat of the one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil).  Thus, even in paradise, Adam was to exercise faith in God and be self consciously aware of the distinction between him and God when passing that tree that was “in the midst of the garden”; in fact, it was this very distinction that Satan attacked in order to deceive man.  So, in the garden, Adam was to use all his powers (physical, emotional, and intellectual) to learn, develop, and use the hidden potentiality in which he was surrounded.  Adam had no prior experience and there were no books or universities, thus, education was a divinely ordained need.  Notice that God didn’t tell Adam how to develop the potentiality, just to do it.  Adam, therefore, was to learn and experiment, trusting that God put him in a world that could be known.  In addition, God walked in the garden and God knew all about Adam’s environment because He was the creator.  Thus, Adam had God as an absolute authority concerning his surroundings.  So, even in the garden prior to sin, we see the absolute necessity of God’s revelation for man’s knowledge; this necessity is not pragmatic, but metaphysical.  Alas, Adam listened to the serpent!  Adam was deceived into believing a simple quantitative differentiation of metaphysical being instead of the Creator-creature distinction.  When Adam accepted an alternative explanation of reality – one in which he was to act as judge between God and Satan’s interpretations of reality – he denied God’s exclusive interpretation and, therefore, denied God’s being.  Adam may have thought he was simply being neutral – judging between God and Satan’s interpretation, but in reality it was negation.  Neutrality is negation.  Adam attempted to answer an epistemological question (how to know if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would indeed bring about the wrath of God) apart from the metaphysical Creator-creature distinction that he knew was true.  Perhaps, this is sounding a little familiar?  We, too, share in Adam’s sin.  Adam, as our representative, plunged all of his descendants into the abyss of sin, suffering, and death.  The Bible teaches that we are dead in sin and trespasses; not sick, but dead.  This deadness has affected our whole being, including our intellect.  Now, it is a matter of course to question God’s absolute interpretation of reality and to set ourselves up as judge.  We don’t even think twice about it.  This is not the end of the story, for God, in his great forbearance and mercy, has sent a redeemer of mankind, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Christ came as the second Adam, to do what Adam didn’t by His perfect obedience to the law of God.  Christ lived and died for all His people.  He suffered upon the cross taking our sin and guilt upon Himself and was crucified undergoing God’s just wrath upon our sin.  Christ is risen!  He conquered sin and death and we are healed.  Man can be redeemed and this redemption affects everywhere deadened by sin, i.e., the whole of man.  Thus, the redeemed intellect, through the work of sanctification, goes back to the garden in an attempt to see things as they truly are, as given and controlled by God, making the Creator-creature distinction basic to our thought.  In summary, the Christian doctrine of man involves three parts: creation, fall, and redemption.  In the following, we need to bring the Christian view of life to bear upon science.

 

The non-Christian also has a comprehensive view of reality and must be challenged to be consistent with this view.  All the varying strands of non-Christian belief (both theistic and antitheistic) will have in common their rejection of the Creator-creature distinction, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and the creation, fall of man in Adam, and redemption of mankind in Christ, so in this sense they may all be dealt with at one time without drawing a straw man.  All non-Christian systems of belief are not neutral toward the claims of Christianity; they are anti-Christian.  This statement shouldn’t be shocking or seen as an over-reaction; Christian belief is also against the claims of Islam, Hinduism, Atheism, etc.  This is simply dealing with varying thought systems as they are.  Not making the Creator-creature distinction the foundation, the non-Christian worldview will hold in some measure to the autonomy of man.  The god of theistic non-Christian belief may have more experience than man, but he certainly need not be appealed to as the exhaustive source of knowledge.  Man and god find themselves in a common environment to be explained.  In addition, there is no foundational metaphysical unity and diversity in all the forms of non-Christian thought.  Man, being as he is autonomous, is also, therefore, not dead in sins.  Man may be in sin, but all non-Christian beliefs regarding man, will have him in some measure being able to recover by an act of his will.  Of course, antitheistic thought will have man as autonomous and not sinful.  For, if man were dead in sins in the whole of his being (will, intellect, emotions), it would be the height of foolishness to make man’s thoughts the epistemological center.  In addition, there is no gospel where the non-Christian god enters man’s humanity to save mankind from their fall into sin and misery.  Thus, the Christian categories of creation, fall, and redemption as are rejected.  In non-Christian thought we see not only a radically differing view of God, but also of man – these two always go together.

 

So, what does all this have to do with science?  We’ve seen there is an antithesis concerning the Christian and non-Christian view of God and man, so does this antithesis affect their views of science.  The question is: Is science, in itself, intelligible on the Christian or on the non-Christian basis?  It cannot be intelligible on both, since Christianity claims an absolute God.  On the Christian basis, we have, as previously discussed, an eternal and temporal distinction – the Creator-creature distinction, but God is also immanent in creation.  We’ve seen that God, as Creator, controls all of creation and, as such, is the absolute authority for knowledge.  In addition, God’s knowledge is qualitatively different from man’s knowledge.  Man, as derivative, must experiment, draw implications, make correlations, and seek to relate one observation to others.  God knows because He controls as all things and these reflect His being – His knowledge is self-referential.  We’ve seen that in God there is an eternal unity and diversity as given in the doctrine of the Trinity.  So, when we come to the study of science, what do we find but the study of man into the mysteries of fundamental unities and diversities.  In my own field of chemistry, the whole of the field is concerned with understanding the unity and diversity present in matter.  Consider the periodic table.  Take anything about the table – one element or all elements, it doesn’t matter.  When considering all elements together, scientists find that there is a periodicity to the elements.  Certain elements have very similar properties and can be grouped according to these properties, i.e., unity of properties within a group and diversity of properties of the various groups.  In addition, within these groups we find unities and diversities: unities in properties, number of valance electrons, core charge, etc.; diversities in size, total numbers of protons and electrons, electronegativities, etc.  Take, instead, one element and we find unity in the number of protons and electrons and diversity in the number of neutrons.  In one case, the element is stable; in another case, unstable.  These are but a few examples from chemistry; the whole of creation reflects this theme.  We live in a universe – a place of both a fundamental unity and diversity.  It is the task of science to explore and explain these unities and diversities.

 

In addition to what is observed, we can also ask, what must be true of the universe for science to even be possible?  Take for example, when performing the same experiment if we continually observed only diversity (say dropping a weight – one time the weight falls, the next it levitates, the next moves horizontally, and so on).  In this case, science would not be possible.  Implicit in performing scientific experimentation, is the assumption that when performing the same experiment the outcome will be the same if the conditions are the same for all times in the future.  This assumption is called the uniformity of nature.  It is a metaphysical assumption about nature and cannot be proven by the use of scientific experimentation, because experimentation itself is predicated upon a uniform natural realm.  So, in order for science to be possible, one must assume that the future will continue to be like the past.  Just like the observations of fundamental unities and diversities, the uniformity of nature is also only intelligible within the Christian worldview because it alone makes the Creator-creature distinction basic.  God as sovereign over creation, directs nature according to His counsel and providence.  Of course, He can – and has – interrupt the normal course of nature for His acts of special providence seen in miracles.

 

I hope this essay has helped to see that Christian theology that has no point of contact with experience.  In principle, there is an antithesis between the Christian and non-Christian.  The non-Christian’s claim is that Christianity may be true, but must first stand up to the non-Christian tests of history, science, and philosophy as the non-Christian understands these subjects.  Much (most) of Christian apologetics is consumed with accomplishing these tasks.  The Christian apologist should not posit a neutral natural realm that may either prove or disprove his position.  This apologetic methodology is to unknowingly deny Christian theology at the outset and to move along the lines that the only difference between Christians and non-Christians is an abstract faith.  An apologetic that embraces a neutral natural realm in order to “prove” the Christian position is self-frustrating and will at best, prove a probable Christian view and an improbable non-Christian view.  Implicit in this apologetic methodology is that nature operates wholly outside the counsel of God.  It says that nature may (or may not!) reveal God.  God is not necessary to know nature.  The epistemological question can be answered in the absence of the metaphysical question.  Instead, Christianity must be offered as the lone light that makes knowledge possible, not as one of the sources of light.  This does not mean that Christians are the only ones that know anything about the world.  God is good to keep us humble!  It does, however, mean that if the Christian and the non-Christian were to be self-consciously consistent with their starting points, then it is the Christian world and life view that is alone able to make experience intelligible (science, ethics, philosophy, beauty, economics, etc.).

 

Thus, there is – and should be – an antithesis in science.  The antithesis is between the Christian and the non-Christian understandings of reality.  It is the rare apologists who challenges the wisdom of this world and shows it to be foolishness; that shows to the non-Christian that they cannot even begin to set out upon their task of destroying Christianity without first accepting it.  It is the strength the presuppositional apologetic^* that doesn’t ignore these foundational issues.  In today’s world, where antitheistic thought has become much more brazened, the church needs an apologetic that is self-consciously consistent with Christian theology and one that leaves the non-Christian with no where to hide, but to run to the Lord Jesus for salvation in his soul, his science, his philosophy, his art – in his life.

 

 

^*I am not the originator of this apologetic.  For an enjoyable and enlightening discussion of this method of apologetics, I would recommend a thorough reading of the originator: Dr. Cornelius Van Til.