Teaching Science from a Christian perspective
How the Bible impacts the subjects we teach - Science
In my previous post, I started to talk about the difference between secular and Christian education, and I talked a little about how that made a difference in science (quoting famous chemist, Robert Boyle). Last week, as I had a bit of time off for half term, I was thinking and praying about how to continue developing this series. I’d been thinking about what we are missing from education at the moment - the philosophy of knowledge. That is, (1) how we know what we know, and (2) why we should know it. Modern education does not have a satisfactory answer to those two questions.
To put it simply, education today teaches certain facts about the world which should be accepted ‘just because’. What I want to do is to teach more than facts - I want people not simply to know that X is true, but to know why X is true, and why it’s worth knowing X.
The problem is, of course, that I am not a specialist in the different subjects: I don’t know much about English Literature, Geography, or Art, for example. I have an appreciation for all of them, but I could never be a teacher - especially not at secondary school level!
However, it struck me that the Bible has something to say about each of those different subjects. The Bible has something to say about literature, geography, and art, and indeed every other subject it’s possible to study. This is not to say that the Bible is some kind of authority on every subject, but rather that its message has a bearing on every different area of education. And, although I am not a specialist when it comes to different subject areas, you could say that the Bible is my area of expertise. So, it seemed the natural progression for this series is to examine what the Bible says about different subjects.
I thought the best place to begin would be science, as this is a topic I have already researched and I think it demonstrates well how the Christian worldview shapes an area which is so important to Western civilisation.
The Bible vs Science?
Let’s take a moment to think about the common view of science and Christianity — the view which is implicitly taught by most schools today. Many people seem to have the view that mankind used to believe in God until science came along. This is certainly what Richard Dawkins seems to believe: I have heard him argue that mankind used to believe in God because they were unable to explain how things in the natural world happened. For example, mankind used to believe that thunderstorms were acts of God, until they learned the mechanism of how lightning was generated in clouds.
Seen this way, science is the process of ‘demythologising’ the world - of eliminating God piece by piece from the equation. If we can understand the mechanism by which something happens, then it means that we don’t need God to explain it.
As I explained last time, this is not how many early scientists viewed the world. Scientists such as Robert Boyle and Michael Faraday did not believe they was any contradiction between studying the natural world and studying the Bible. To them, it was like reading two books by the same author - the book of nature, and the book of God’s Word. It is incredible to think that many scientists now think that there is a conflict between science and the Bible, because many of the early scientists would never have agreed to such a thing.
Science is in fact dependent on the Bible / the Christian worldview. What I’d like to do is outline the ways that science rests on Biblical foundations, before looking more generally at how Christianity impacts upon science.
The Bible and foundations of science
In order for science to function, it needs presuppositions — that is, truths which cannot be proven but only taken as read. According to Christian philosopher and apologist J.P. Moreland, there are at least ten presuppositions of science - that is, things we must believe before we even get to doing science itself:
The existence of a theory-independent, external world
The orderly nature of the external world
The knowability of the external world
The existence of truth
The laws of logic
The reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth-gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment
The adequacy of language to describe the world
The existence of values used in science
The uniformity of nature and induction
The existence of numbers
None of these things can be proven logically or by scientific method. All of them need to be true in order for science to happen.
Take #2, for example (“the orderly nature of the external world”). What would be the point of science if the world was not orderly? Can you imagine if the gravitational constant or the speed of light randomly changed from day to day? What would be the point of science if nothing about the universe was actually constant? Not only would that be a horrific universe to live in, it would make the whole scientific project impossible.
Similarly, #5 "(“the laws of logic”). Nobody can prove that logic exists and works… it just seems to work pretty well for us. It’s almost as if logic (and numbers, maths etc) are simply a property of the universe which we have discovered. But why should that be the case? What kind of universe leads to the truthfulness of those presuppositions?
In general, secular scientists do not bother trying to justify their presuppositions. They seem to take a pragmatic approach: they believe that science ‘just works’, without giving any thought to why it works or its intellectual foundations. To me, this is intellectually shabby at best - and disingenous and dishonest at worst.
It seems clear to me that an entirely materialistic, secular universe does not give us a solid foundation for science. I believe that the Christian worldview is the only one which gives rise to the kind of universe where science is possible. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The universe was created by a rational Mind; when we study the universe we - in a sense - are seeing the mind of God. It is not surprising that the universe should be ordered and we can make sense of it.
This is precisely what motivated the early scientists - they expected to find an orderly and understandable world, because they knew the one who made it. Speak Life did a very good video about this a few years ago:
Science and human beings
One of the most worrying trends when it comes to science is the way that it has come to dominate what people think of human beings. We are no longer children of our heavenly Father, made in his image, but we are simply byproducts of a random process of natural selection. There’s nothing wrong with using science to describe human beings, but there is a problem when we see human beings as nothing more than that.
I like the band Keane, but I don’t agree with everything in their songs! The song Pretend that you’re alone is a good case in point:
We are just the monkeys who fell out of the trees
We are blisters on the earth
And we are not the flowers, we're the strangling weeds in the meadow
And love is just our way of looking out for ourselves
When we don't want to live alone
So step into the vacuum, tear off your clothes and be born again
If you think that there is nothing but the material world, then perhaps it is natural to think that we’re not the flowers of creation but the “strangling weeds in the meadow.” As the song goes on to make clear, this leads to a very nihilistic view of love and relationships - we might as well just obey our natural, base desires because there’s nothing else to live for. As it goes on to say, “Just primal desire, no right and no wrong.”
If human beings are simply bags of organic material, and there is no ultimate right or wrong, then there is no need for us to behave in certain ways and not others. We become machiavellian, simply trying to fake good behaviour in order to get what we want out of other people. This is no recipe for a healthy society!
Mike Ovey once wrote a piece called Projection Atheism about how a low view of humanity can lead to a low view of God, and the effect this has:
Or, paradoxically, does the zero-value view of humanity connect with a subtle self-loathing in which human disordered self-love has become so warped that it has become self-harming? Further, this puts the presentation of the gospel in a new light too. We have rightly spoken of God saving by grace alone. Part of the tragedy of projection atheism is that it is not just saying there is no God to save; it is also saying there is no ‘me’ to save in the first place. Part of our proclamation problem is not just proclaiming forgiveness of sins to a culture that does not believe there is such a thing as sin, but proclaiming it to a culture that at points has doubts about whether there is even a person there to sin at all.
If people think they are nothing but bags of organic material, they have a very low view of themselves indeed. Perhaps the problems with self-esteem we have in our society are really down to a lack of belief in God. When we stop seeing ourselves as human beings made in the image of God, we start to think we are not much at all.
This is of more than academic interest, but I believe this has a direct bearing on education and science. Science has come to be the subject which addresses every question, the subject which tells us who we are and where we came from. But the truth is, it cannot give us those answers. When we look to science for answers about who we are as human beings, it will lead to the exact consequences we are seeing today.
I want children and young people to grow up knowing they are more than simply bags of organic material - ‘fancy bald monkeys’, to use the comedian Chris Addison’s phrase. I want them to have a high view of themselves and humanity - but not by simply telling them how wonderful they are, but by helping them get to know the God who made them and loves them more than they could ever imagine. I want them to know that we are not flawless people - we are sinners - and yet in Jesus Christ we are offered redemption, we are given the chance to become the people who God made us to be.
Science cannot be the last answer when it comes to our view of humanity and the world.
One could make a similar analysis of the ‘green’ movement - I remember hearing someone argue that you couldn’t make a case for saving the panda from the perspective of natural selection. Once you ditch the Christian worldview, everything goes out of the window. But I don’t have time to go into everything here!
Science and ethics
The intellectual foundations of science are not the only thing the Bible has to do with science. There is another factor which is arguably more relevant and important for us today. This is how the Bible impacts the way we ‘do’ science (what scientists should be like), and the way we use science.
How we do science
One of the problems with science - as in any field - is the human factor: there is no such thing as science without scientists. Scientists are people, like everybody else. People can be dishonest, selfish and greedy, manipulative, and so on - putting a white lab coat on doesn’t give you a free pass. This is especially true when being a scientist confers a degree of authority and status - such as the government’s constant reference to scientists and “the science” during covid.
There are so many scandals which you could name - one recent example being the infected blood scandal. Alternatively, you could look at the Nazis experimenting on people during WWII, which led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code. This code includes the following points:
The methods used in the study should be conducted so as to avoid any unnecessary physical or mental suffering and injury to the subject or subjects taking part in the study.
No experimentation should be conducted where there is a prior reason to believe that disabling injury or death will occur, with the exception being if the experimental scientists conducting the study also serve as subjects in the study.
In short, scientists can act unethically and even unlawfully. Science is a powerful tool to find out about the world around us - but, like any tool, it can be used morally or immorally. If all scientists act immorally, then science itself cannot be trusted.
In other words, for science to work properly, it requires trust - and that requires scientists to be good and righteous people. Science will never work if you cannot trust scientists to tell the truth etc. This is where the Bible has a direct bearing on science: it speaks about having integrity, being trustworthy and truthful, and so on. All these are necessary qualities for science to flourish.
How we use science
Similarly, science is a tool which can be used for good or evil. For example, the discovery of nuclear energy: this could be used to build a nuclear reactor to produce electricity, or it could be used to build a nuclear bomb to kill thousands of people. Science itself has no say in what is right or good - in order to determine this, we need to look elsewhere.
I think a good modern example of this is social media. Although technically social media is under the realm of technology / computing rather than science, the principle is the same. Computer systems will do whatever they are programmed to do - you can build them for good or evil purposes. Social media companies are intentionally making their products addictive.
You can see a good, feature-length expose of the way social media companies operate in the movie The Social Dilemma.
Another reason that it’s important for science to include an ethical dimension can be seen in the example of scientific racism. Scientists tried to work out differences between different ethnic groups to justify treating them differently:
Some 19th-century scientists, like Harvard’s Louis Agassiz, were proponents of “polygenism,” which posited that human races were distinct species. This theory was supported by pseudoscientific methods like craniometry, the measurement of human skulls, which supposedly proved that white people were biologically superior to Blacks. Early statistical health data was weaponized against Black Americans in the late 1800s, as it was used to claim they were predisposed to disease and destined for extinction.
Although we might totally reject this line of thinking today, the reasons we reject at are not scientific in themselves. There are differences between different ethnic groups (for example, those genetically asian tend to have higher IQ). The reason we believe everyone is equal is not because we have scientifically proved it, but because this is a belief from the Bible: every human being is made in the image of God, and worthy of dignity and respect. This is the bedrock of Western civilisation, and it is not something which could ever be proved scientifically.
Scientists cannot leave their morals at home when they do science
Both of these are examples of how the Bible has a bearing on the field of science: science itself is neutral, it can be used for good or ill. You can’t derive moral values from the scientific knowledge. Knowing how to study the world with integrity, what to study, and how to use scientific discoveries wisely — this is what the Bible gives to us.
For other subjects?
I appreciate this has only been a quick tour, and there is much more that could be said. Nonetheless, I believe that I have outlined here some solid principles which shape how science should be taught.
Additionally, the principles outlined here will mostly be transferable to other subjects: (1) Every subject we study has some kind of intellectual foundation, and ultimately I believe these foundations can only be found in the Christian worldview; (2) Every subject has a moral dimension - because being human has a moral dimension.
This is what we will be exploring in subsequent posts.
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