Let's take back every square inch!
I watch with both fascination and frustration the ongoing saga pitting Intelligent Design against Darwinism. The Darwinists circle their wagons at any threat to their position, and the rhetoric continues. Emotions flare in this issue, because of course a much deeper issue is at stake… the conflict of worldviews – the battle for the hearts and minds of human beings.
Unfortunately, many Christians who jump into the fray have already capitulated to the definition of science that has been promulgated since the time of Darwin… the idea that ‘science’ is naturalism and by definition, anything that presupposes a Designer could not qualify as science. Or they accept the naturalistic secular view of science and try to force a fit with biblical truth. Biblical truth seems to be what is modified and in turn made meaningless. They passively (or actively) accept the division of science and religion. They allow ‘religion’ to be placed into the sphere of ideas and values, far from the sphere of ‘science,’ which deals with facts and testable data. Ideas and values, the story goes, are of lower repute than ‘facts,’ … and thus the lie continues and Christianity is relegated to Sunday School classes and private belief.
A look into the history of science would quickly correct the notion of secular scientism. I have been reading a book by Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton, The Soul of Science (1994, Crossway books). This is a great book to help one understand the current dilemma.
The main purpose of the book is to reintroduce Christians to a part of their rich intellectual heritage. It explains that the type of thinking known today as scientific, with its emphasis upon experiment and mathematical formulation, arose in one culture- Western Europe- and in no other. The ‘soil’ in which it arose was the Christian faith. Christianity provided both intellectual presuppositions and moral sanction for the development of modern science.
“Science is the study of nature,” points out the author, “and the possibility of science depends upon one’s attitude toward nature. Biblical religion gave to Western culture several of its fundamental assumptions about the natural world.” For example, the assumption that nature is real, that God made it good and worthy of study, that the created order is reliable and predictable. Christianity taught a single transcendent Creator, whose handiwork is a unified, coherent universe. Without theism, it is highly unlikely that science would have developed at all.
It wasn’t until the late nineteenth-century England when scholars set out to secularize society, replacing the Christian worldview with scientific naturalism, a worldview that recognizes the existence of nature alone.
Christians, we need to take it back! It is God’s World, isn’t it? – all of it, not merely the ‘religious’ outposts. He created every square inch. He rules over it. He commanded us to have dominion over it, not give it away to the secularists.
Just how we can begin to do this is a good subject for discussion. Any ideas out there?
The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy by Charles B. Thaxton
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