Fighting the Wrong Fight

            Prior to the Civil War, congressional leaders argued over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories.  Southern politicians made the argument that they deserved the same rights to take their property into the new settlements as anyone in the North had.  To this argument Abraham Lincoln replied, “That is to say, inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I must not object to your taking your slave.  Now I admit this is perfectly logical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes.”[1]  Lincoln refused to let the fight be about property.  It was about people.  Now how does this relate to science and faith?

The Enemy’s Arena

            In sports we talk about “home team advantage.”  The team that can play on its familiar turf, with its own fans, has an edge over the opponent.  In the twentieth century, many Christian writers faithfully defended the faith against the attacks of skeptics and atheists, but they did so by entering into the enemy’s arena and fighting under his terms.  Unfortunately, the arena itself was built on lies to begin with.  When well meaning Creationists, for example, argued that the Bible was a book of science (and I do not doubt the Bible’s ability to give us a true picture of history), they were already giving in to the lies of the enemy.  Who made science the only legitimate approach to true knowledge?  Before they ever stopped to examine the thought processes behind science, Christian apologists (defenders of the faith) were jumping into the scientific arena, conceding that science is the most valid method of human knowing.  But it might not be.

            The enemy’s arena is built on false assumptions that have nothing to do with science but everything to do with philosophy and theology.  The first false assumption is that we can know facts as facts.  You’ve heard the phrase, “You can’t argue with the facts.”  Sounds reasonable.  But did you know the word fact doesn’t appear in the Bible?  Did you know the word fact didn’t even exist in language till about six hundred years ago?  The Bible talks a lot about truth (as did Christians before the rise of science) but not about fact (you’ll find fact in English Bibles but not in the original languages).  I’m not saying the Bible isn’t factual; I’m saying the very concept of fact is unbiblical and based on the false belief that our ability to know things is completely objective.  The scientific method is supposed to guarantee us the ability to know facts: individual pieces of information known with certainty and without any preconceived notions. 

            The problem with this belief is that there is a subjective element in almost every act of human knowing.  With few exceptions (in the logic of mathematics, for example), what we know and what is real (the facts) are connected by an act of interpretation.  A man shows me an object and says, “This is a missing link in human evolution.”  I respond, “No, it’s a skull.”  There’s a difference between the fact and the interpretation.  Even my claim that an object is a skull is an interpretation of the object.  We never leave facts alone.  We constantly interpret them by a larger framework of thought, reading things into them that may or may not be there.  Behind much scientific practice is the belief that we can know facts objectively, apart from any subjective act of interpretation.  This is not a scientific question; it’s a philosophical one, belonging to a branch of philosophy called Epistemology, which is the study of how we know.

            For a hundred and fifty years science has been dominated by two philosophies which have nothing to do with fact or scientific method, and these philosophies have so completely colored the way many scientists interpret facts that they are not even aware that they believe in these philosophies.  The first philosophy has been called Enlightenment Rationalism, and Logical Positivism.  It is the belief that man can find answers to everything through reason.  Reason, said many thinkers of the last three centuries, is completely capable of answering all our questions.  This is a belief system, not a scientific hypothesis proven by experimentation.

            The second philosophy is called Naturalism.  It is an assumption based on false reasoning: “Since all we can see is nature, nature must be all there is.”  Naturalism is not a conclusion that must be drawn from facts.  It’s a philosophical position from which many scientists make interpretations of facts.  Creation scientists do something similar all the time, only they freely admit it.  They look at the facts and interpret them based on a philosophical assumption: that the Bible’s account of creation and history is accurate.  Many Evolutionists accuse the Creationists of not doing science at all because of this, but they fail to realize that they do the exact same thing.  All facts must be interpreted if they’re going to mean anything to us, and interpretations are subjective and based on prior beliefs.

Faith vs. ????

            The second false assumption on which the enemy’s camp was built was a confusion about the nature of reason and faith.  Science uses reason: establish a hypothesis, create an experiment to test the hypothesis, observe the experiment’s results, and draw logical conclusions.  Because science reasoned from observations, observation came to be associated with reason: “We can prove the logic right because we can plainly see it.”  Science became the highest expression of reason in our cultural thinking.  So we thought science the most accurate from of reasoning available because it worked by observation.  The next natural step in thinking, then, was to say that faith was not only the opposite of science but the opposite of reason.

            By the beginning of the 1900’s, many thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, were defining faith as the opposite of reason.  Before the 1940’s the idea was entrenched.  The great war between reason and faith was at hand.  What you believe by faith had nothing to do with reason.  You took a “leap of faith” and simply believed it.  Faith didn’t require reasons.  We walk by faith, not by…reason?  Wait a minute, the Bible says we “walk by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7 KJV).  You see, sight and reason are not the same thing.  The Bible never says reason is the opposite of faith; it says sight is the opposite of faith.  Sight is not about reason; it is about appearances.

            Paul was a highly educated theologian.  He was convinced that Christianity was a heresy against truth.  His mind was changed when Christ spoke to him in terms he could understand: “Paul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4).  In addition to this experience, Paul had the corroboration of witnesses who saw a strange manifestation, of blindness which only left him after a Christian man ministered to him, and, later on, of Peter’s instruction in the truth of Christianity.  Paul had several reasons to have faith in Christ.

            Likewise, today, we have many good reasons to support our faith: strong philosophical arguments for the existence of God, historical and archaeological arguments for the accuracy and divinity of the Bible, our own personal experiences of events that couldn’t be just coincidence, and even scientific evidence in newly emerging understandings about information and intelligent design.[2]

            What attacks our faith is not reason but sight.  When I see that I have too much month at the end of my check, and I’m not sure how I’m going to pay my bills (despite the truth that God has always taken care of me in such situations before), my faith is attacked.  When I see what looks like overwhelming evidence against Christianity, perhaps in archaeology or evolutionary science, and I wonder how I can possibly argue against the facts (which turn out, in the end, only to be interpretations)—then my faith is attacked.  But each of these examples of attack is based on appearances, not reality.

            The reality is that God has never let me starve, and a reasonable assessment of evidence shows, overwhelmingly, that current archaeology favors biblical history and current evolutionary theory is in no way conclusive about the origins of the universe.  Indeed, as we have seen, science is built on certain assumptions that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with philosophical positions.  These assumptions (Enlightenment Rationalism and Naturalism) can be reasonably argued against.

How Faith and Science Relate

            It’s time to take the argument out of the enemy’s camp.  First of all, we do not have to accept that science is the best method for gathering knowledge.  The scientific evidence for the guilt of O. J. Simpson in the murder of his wife was strong; in a court of law, however, the best evidence is always considered to be eye witness testimony.  There were no witnesses; Simpson was acquitted.  Nor should we let people argue that science is infallible, dealing only in facts.  All forms of human knowing include subjective elements of interpretation which might prove wrong.  The proof of this is in science itself: whenever a “new” scientific discovery proves an “old” discovery wrong, science proves itself fallible.  It may be able to work on correcting its mistakes, but it makes mistakes nevertheless and therefore cannot claim the superior position of dealing only in indisputable facts.

            Here is the final relationship between faith and science: they are both tools for knowledge.  Human beings gain knowledge through a variety of sources: experience, reason, imagination, reading and viewing, being taught by experts, testimony, art, math, literature, music, scientific method, the logic of philosophy and theology, supernatural encounters with God, guidance by the Holy Spirit, and faith.  All of these methods of knowing are legitimate.  Each has its strengths and limitations (including faith—people will often put their faith in the wrong thing).  Science is a method of knowing that tries to limit subjectivity as much as possible.  Faith is a method of knowing that tries to limit false appearances as much as possible.  Combined with my life experiences, my Christian philosophy, the excellent teaching and studying I’ve experienced, the work of the Holy Spirit in my life, and my imaginative vision of the world, science and faith work together to lead me toward true knowledge.