Scripture and Science

Recently, I've had a few conversations with some friends about the relationship between science and scripture. They left me disheartened. On the one extreme I found friends who, believing they were being faithful to scripture, systemically rejected nearly our entire body of well-established scientific discovery. On the other extreme, I found friends who thought that scripture has been proven outdated, unreliable, and little more than fairy tales in light of modern scientific findings. I'm not sure if it is balancing or disorientating to have friends with such diverse perspectives!

To be fair, most of my friends fall somewhere between these extrema: my Christian friends tend to hold a high regard for scientific discovery and a number of them are actively involved in it, and my non-Christian friends tend to at least recognize some value in the teachings of scripture.

Nevertheless, these conversations reminded me of a number of errors, both historically and presently, that have muddled peoples thinking on the relationship between scripture and science. Here I'd like to offer a brief sketch of what seem to be some of the most common ones.

Scripture, not Aristotle
Perhaps the most famous example cited to show that scripture is opposed to scientific discovery is the case of the Catholic Church's persecution of scientists such as Kepler and Galileo. After all, their arguments that the earth rotated the sun contradicted the Biblical account, right?

Not quite.

It turns out the history surrounding these men is rather more complex, and political, than a simple the-scientists-said-this-but-the-Bible-said-that. The politics of the matter aside, to understand some of the dynamics involved, one has to consider another actor on the stage of intellectual thought: Aristotle.

By the medieval ages, the Catholic Church had altogether embraced Aristotle and his works as authoritative. For instance, one can trace the enormous influence Aristotle's works had on theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. One place this came through was in the Church's understanding of Justification, that is, how one is made right with God. They had embraced Aristotle's view that "men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts" (Nicomachean Ethics, II.1).

This became a central point of controversy in the Reformation when Luther and others argued that Scripture taught justification by faith in contrast to the position of the Church which they believed amounted to justification by works.

Aristotle didn't just write about ethics; he also offered a cosmology in which the earth was fixed and the sun rotated about it. True, the Church appealed to biblical accounts such as Joshua commanding the sun to stand still to argue against Kepler and Galileo's work, but they did this because they were reading Scripture with an Aristotelian lens. Significantly, Kepler and Galileo were both dedicated Christians and offered readings of Scripture entirely consistent with their discoveries, but these were rejected because they challenged the authority of Aristotle, and hence the Church. This also explains why Galileo's discoveries of spots on the sun or craters on the moon were so offensive. Nowhere did scripture claim that the moon or sun were without blemish, but Aristotle had.

In fact, at the time Kepler recognized this, even labeling himself "the Luther of astrology". The Protestant Reformation, replacing the authority of the Church and its reliance on the opinions of the Church Fathers with the study of the book of scripture itself, opened the way for the scientific revolution that replaced the authority of ancient figures such as Aristotle with the study of "the book of nature" itself. For more on this, check out The Bible, Protestantism, and Rise of the Natural Sciences.

I find in this history a warning to modern Christians: we need to be sure that the ideas that we're defending in the name of faithfulness to scripture are actually the most faithful reading of scripture and not just ideas that we've latched onto and glossed over with Biblical language from some other source.

Science, not Scientism
Just as some ideas are labeled as teachings of scripture that really shouldn't be, we can label some ideas as scientific that shouldn't be. My favorite example to highlight this is the statement by logician Bertrand Russell: "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."

Now, Russell was a fine logician who really upset attempts to ground mathematics upon set theory in the early 20th century by considering a set with the paradoxical property that it contained as an element every set that was not a element of itself. That might sound odd and rather confusing, but Russell was demonstrating that the current rules of set theory could lead to contradictions (which we really seek to avoid in mathematics). In particular, one could ask if this set of his was an element of itself and reason that if it was, then it must not be, but if it wasn't, then it must be, either way giving a contradiction. The point being, this led to the need for mathematicians to be a bit more careful in how to think about and discuss sets to avoid this kind of contradiction.

Why is this relevant? Because analyzing Russell's statement--"What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."--leads to a very similar paradox of contradiction. All one needs to do is ask if we can know that Russell's statement is true. Suppose we can. Observe, Russell's statement is not a scientific one. It is outside the scope of what one will ever discover with the scientific method. Hence, by its own criteria we cannot know that it is true!

At best, this leaves the possibility that it is true, but that we can never know of its truth. It turns out to be a statement of faith--and a hopeless faith at that. There is not even the possibility that one day we could know if such a statement is true.

Russell's statement embodies what has been called scientism. We see it alive in the academy when disciplines such as the humanities are disregarded as unscientific and hence considered without value. Indeed, not every discipline conforms to the scientific method, but perhaps other fields of investigation--be it that of the historian, economist, or even a theologian--require different methodologies. In fact, even to consider such questions of truth and how we can know it moves us beyond the realm of physics into metaphysics. A scientist cannot claim the unique superiority of his own method as a scientist--rather he must do so as a philosopher!

For some thoughtful discussions that explore this further, check out the Vertias forum.

We Were Made for Both
Now that we've sketched some of the boundaries of scripture and science to prevent us from the ditches on either side, there is one final danger that we ought to avoid and that is the danger of thinking the study of scripture and science are altogether unrelated: that one can walk the road of scientific discovery and not have it affect her life or faith, or that one can study scripture and not have it affect the way she makes sense of the universe.

Now I understand the attraction to such a view: as highlighted above scripture has been inappropriately used to stifle scientific discovery and people have wrongly called on science to stifle faith. It is no wonder then that many have been drawn to the idea that science and religion are two different lines of inquiry that have authority to speak to different kinds of questions; they are non-over lapping magesteria.

Broadly, there are some features of this thinking are quite helpful. We shouldn't expect scripture to answer every scientific question that we may have nor should we expect to conduct a scientific experiment to verify, say, the doctrine of the trinity. Some truth can only be known through special divine revelation (the book of scripture) and some truth has been left to general revelation (the book of nature). In fact, scripture encourages us to seek out those truths that have been hidden in the creation (Proverbs 25:2).

But these are not to remain isolated, independent ventures. Reflecting on the natural world led David to sing of the Creator (Psalm 19), and yet, in the same Psalm, he moves naturally to a praise of the Torah. In another Psalm, David recorded how it was his study the Torah that led him to be wiser than the established authorities (119:99-100)--an experience that both Luther and Kepler can identify with.

The greatest problem with the idea of non-overlapping magestria is that it forgets that we ourselves stand at the intersection: dirt created in the image of God. We are physical beings, but also theological beings. To divide our study of the world from our study of God is against our very nature. And standing in this intersection, we are not alone. Throughout history God has acted concretely in the physical world. Parting waters, healing the sick, and bringing down strongholds. Above all, in the incarnation, God Himself in the person of Jesus is found inhabiting our physical world as a real man. Notably, after His resurrection, the tomb was empty--He was raised and enthroned in heaven with a Man's body. The Christian cannot just consider God as an abstraction or philosophical exercise detached from our world, and hence, our study of the world. The scars on His hands won't allow for that. The Creator is forever connected with His creation.

What the Bible Teaches about Islam, Allah, and Judgement

Recently, an evangelical college placed a professor on leave for expressing that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Numerous other news reports have surfaced highlighting an increased concern in some Christian communities regarding Islam. While my own faith community seems to continue on rather positive terms with our Muslim friends, we are not immune from the influence of fear. For the benefit of my own community and that of friends looking on, I took a moment to share some thoughts on what Scripture has to say about some of the current questions I hear being asked about Islam, Allah, and Judgment.

Over the last couple weeks, as I've been reading through the Qur'an, one thing has become clear: Allah is a name for the God of Abraham. This makes sense--Islam traces its lineage to Ishmael, son of Abraham, just as Judaism traces its history to Isaac, son of Abraham. While Genesis gives Isaac a special position among the sons of Abraham--he is the promised child whose lineage Messiah would come from--Ishmael is also favored by God and it is promised that he too will become a great nation (Genesis 21:18). Interestingly, Ishmael had 12 sons, just as Isaac did (Genesis 25:12-17). While Ishmael and his sons move to the east, the Hebrew Scriptures tend to have a positive view of them, for instance, associating wisdom with those in the East (1 Kings 4:30). Moreover, a number of righteous characters such as Job (Job 1:3) and Moses' father-in-law Jethro, a priest of Midian (modern Saudi Arabia), are from the East and are presented as offering true worship to the true God. This background helps explain the presence of wise men from the East at the opening of Matthew's gospel (an excellent sermon on this).

Recently, some Christian's have argued that Allah is not the same as the Christian God because Islam's Shahada which affirms the oneness of God in declaring that there is no God but Allah is inconsistent with the Christian understanding of God as trinity. However, the Hebrew Shema which plays a central role in Judaism, and was cited by Jesus as the climax of Torah, makes a very similar declaration ("the LORD our God, the LORD is one"; see Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Significantly, Christians have never held to the position that Jews who reject the the doctrine of the trinity worship a different God. Rather, the Christian community has readily acknowledged that the Hebrew Scriptures say very little to suggest the God of Abraham, YHWH, has a triune nature (although, through the lens of the New Testament, one can see suggestions of it present). Therefore, rather than claim that those who worship YHWH worship a different God, Christians have always held that they worship the same God as the Jews, but that something new (and incredibly important) has now been revealed about this God since the incarnation of Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Indeed, the Qur'an outright rejects the divinity of Jesus. It presents God as One Person, rather than the Christian conception of God as three-Persons-yet-One. Here there is an authentic disagreement between Christians and Muslims, just as there is authentic disagreement between Christians and most Jews over the identity of the Person of Jesus. But all three groups worship the God of Abraham, the Creator of heaven and earth. Christians believe their Muslim and Jewish friends have missed a most important Revelation of this God, but that doesn't change the fact that all three groups worship the same God. Moreover, in Christian history there have been many great individuals such as Isaac Newton, or in the early Advent movement, James White and Uriah Smith, who, at least for a time, rejected the doctrine of trinity. Of course, looking back we might lament that they did and even say they took a heretical position, but we still regard them as worshipers of the true God.

In addition to trinity, there seems to be another factor at play in many of these conversations: eschatology, that is, the theology of last day events. You see, Revelation describes a series of battles between various political/religious groups resulting in the persecution of the righteous and leading up to the return of Christ. Many of these battle scenes are described with references to Israel and middle eastern geography and therefore, especially in recent decades, some Christians have seen various wars in the middle east as fulfilling these prophecies with Islam fulfilling the role of the antichrist figure in Revelation. There are, however, a number of problems to this view. Chiefly, this is a selective (and rather modern) reading of apocalyptic prophecy that disregards the theological development of the New Testament. For you see, the New Testament presents Christ as the New Israel (just as He is the New Adam). What this accomplishes is it spiritualizes the blessings of the covenant to those who are "in Christ" (eg. 2 Corinthians 1:20). In particular, this means the references to Israel and Mediterranean wars should not be read in the sense of literal wars in the middle east, but through the lens of a spiritual conflict not limited to a particular geography. You can read about this in The Deep Things of God and The Israel of God in Prophecy.

Of course, there is a spiritual system of confusion and persecution described by terms such as "Babylon", "the harlot", and "the beast" described in the Revelation. But the Revelation consistently describes this system using Roman and, more incredibly, Christian language. Rome would have made sense since the original audience of the Revelation was facing persecution from Rome for their refusal to participate in the cult worship of the Roman emperor. The fact that Christian language is also used to describe this system is more surprising (here are some study guides that walk through this), but it is consistent with the teachings of Paul and Jesus that the greatest danger the Church faced is that one day it would transform from a persecuted people to a persecuting people. In short, Revelation isn't warning against some other faith such as Islam when it describes a system of massive religious confusion and persecution. Rather, it is warning against what Christianity can become, especially when it lays hold of political force. Much of Christian history is a sad testimony to the accuracy of Revelation's prediction.

Fascinatingly, the Qur'an seems to have recognized this transformation of Christianity away from a pure faith:

"If only the People of the Book [Christians] had faith, it would be best for them. Among them are some who have faith, but most of them are perverted transgressors." [3:110] 

"Not all of them are alike: of the People of the Book are a portion that stand for the right. They rehearse the Signs of Allah all night long, and they prostrate themselves in adoration. They believe in Allah and the Last Day. They enjoin what is right, and forbid what is wrong, and they hasten in emulation in all good works. They are in the ranks of the righteous." [3:113-114]

Notice, the Qur'an maintains a high regard for those who maintained an authentic faith, anticipated the last day, and lived righteous lives. As I look back at history, I can identify with those who rejected the Romanization of the Church into an empire, desiring a more authentic life of faith and obedience. Does this mean I agree with all of the teachings of the Qur'an? Not at all. The identity of the Person of Christ is central and I believe here the Qur'an gets it wrong. But I also see how Islam maintained other great teachings of the New Testament that the Christian Church largely disregarded for much of history, such as those highlighted in the passages above. Moreover, Protestants have long taken a favorable view of Islam if only because it seems the Protestant Reformation would have been quickly stopped if Turkish armies hadn't at a critical moment stole the attention of emperor Charles V long enough for the reformation to spread (see Great Controversy, Chapter 11).

Jesus taught his followers, "I have other sheep which are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear My voice; and they will become one flock with one shepherd." Notice, Jesus affirms that there are others that just as truly belong to Himself; moreover, He leaves the responsibility to Himself to guide them to Himself. What is the Christian's role in all this? At the end of the day, rather than seek to demonize or draw into question the worship of our Muslim friends, Christians should examine the purity of their own worship. Not only then will our good works lead others to glorify God (Matthew 5:16), but it will guard as against false security. After all, as Jesus reminded His disciples, simply knowing to call Him Lord does not constitute true worship:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Matthew 7:21-23)

Jesus' teaching of the Day of Judgement highlights not only that many who thought they were living in service of Him were in fact not, but also that many were serving Him without ever realizing it (see Matthew 25:31-46). I'll close with a reflection on this judgement scene from The Desire of Ages:

How surprised and gladdened will be the lowly among the nations, and among the heathen, to hear from the lips of the Saviour, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me"! How glad will be the heart of Infinite Love as His followers look up with surprise and joy at His words of approval! 

But not to any class is Christ's love restricted. He identifies Himself with every child of humanity. That we might become members of the heavenly family, He became a member of the earthly family. He is the Son of man, and thus a brother to every son and daughter of Adam. His followers are not to feel themselves detached from the perishing world around them. They are a part of the great web of humanity; and Heaven looks upon them as brothers to sinners as well as to saints. The fallen, the erring, and the sinful, Christ's love embraces; and every deed of kindness done to uplift a fallen soul, every act of mercy, is accepted as done to Him.