Scripture, Theology and Science: Personal Reflections and Conclusions

Deep in the hearts of many Christians, especially Evangelicals, there is a fear if not outright terror of science.

The faith is under attack on many fronts. The most vocal and vitriolic of these attacks come from “The New Atheists,” who include Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, the late Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, all of whom use science as a weapon against Christianity. Sam Harris has proclaimed, “The difference between science and religion is the difference between a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle.” But this attack is not new, nor are the arguments of the current generation of the enemies of the faith. Over a century ago, the 1st president of Cornell University published his famous A History of the Warfare of Science With Theology in Christendom in 1896. The work was an unvarnished attack on Christianity. According to Ronald Numbers ″No work—not even John William Draper’s best-selling History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874)—has done more than White’s to instill in the public mind a sense of the adversarial relationship between science and religion. His Warfare remains in print to the present day, having appeared also in German, French, Italian, Swedish, and Japanese translations. His military rhetoric has captured the imagination of generations of readers, and his copious references, still impressive, have given his work the appearance of sound scholarship, bedazzling even twentieth-century historians who should know better.”

According to White biblical literalists “had stunted the growth of science and prostituted religion-only to lose in the end.” I must note here that most of the charges were utter falsehoods and many of the references were total fabrications or twisting of the intent of the sources. One example is the idea of the flat earth. The early church fathers attest to the spherical shape of the earth. The idea of a flat earth had never been endorsed by the Church. But the assertion that this was the case has made its way into the popular consciousness based on these unfounded assertions.

My first introduction to the battle came when I was a freshman in high school. Henry Morris spoke in our church one Sunday, both morning and evening. My parents bought his book The Twilight of Evolution, which as a precocious 14 year old I read. I read about the hoax Piltdown man which had been foisted on the public as proof of the evolution of man and heralded as a disapproval of the Genesis account of creation. We were biblical literalists and were convinced that whatever the Bible said was literally true and because that was the case, the creation of the cosmos occurred about six thousand years ago. Armed with this certainty I stood my ground in Sophomore Biology as our teacher taught evolutionary theory as fact. After High School I attended Biola College the Los Angeles area. While there the college regularly hosted the yearly meetings of the Creation Research Society, and I attended the lectures. My senior year I had Henry Morris as a professor in a course on Historical Geology. Attending Dallas Theological Seminary in the 1970s we were taught recent creation. In one class we were shown a film produced by a creationist group that they claimed showed footprints of humans and dinosaurs in the same rock formations at the Paluxy River in Glen Rose, Tx. I was a convinced young-earth creationist. My first doubts came when I took a PhD seminar on the relationship between science and theology at Dallas Seminary. For the first time I began to examine the implications of some of the arguments used by creationists to defend their position. Several of the rigid assertions simply did not work, particularly regarding death before the fall—the author I was reading insisted that there was No Death Of Any Kind, not just no human death before the sin of Adam & Eve in the garden. A red flag popped into my mind. What about the process of digestion? That process involves death. I filed that in my mental filing cabinet under in the “to be studied more later” category.

During my first teaching job at Simpson College, which at the time was located in San Francisco, by best friend on faculty was our science professor, who was finishing his Ph.D. in entomology (the study of bugs) across the Bay at UC Berkeley. He had for several years been teaching a “Christianity and Science” class. During the five years we taught together we had hundreds of hours of conversation over coffee. Most of these conversations revolved around the nature of science and the scientific method. I read numerous books about science and the scientific method and learned that much of what I had been taught about how science works was incomplete and in some cases false. One important piece of the scientific method I had not known was that the scientific method is self-correcting. Because the conclusions of earlier studies could be checked by re-examining the data errors in earlier conclusions could be discovered. By the way, the hoax of the Piltdown Man was discovered by scientists, not by creationists who were seeking to debunk it.

Additionally during this time I discovered numerous problems in the rigid literal hermeneutic (method of biblical interpretation) in which I had been schooled. Particularly disconcerting was the fact that the chief architect of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy the great B.B. Warfield, to which the “creation scientists” appealed as the justification for their extreme literal interpretation of scripture, had no problem with the Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Creation Science
The roots of modern creation science in America are to be found in the teachings of George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist who in 1923 published The New Geology, arguing that a simple “literal” reading of the book of Genesis revealed that God created the cosmos in six literal twenty-four-hour days between six and eight thousand years ago. The present state of the earth was to be explained by a worldwide flood in the time of Noah. This book at first had little influence outside Adventist circles. But in the early 1940s, some “flood geologists” began to promote their agenda, without measurable success.

Then, in the late 1950s, John C. Whitcomb, Old Testament professor at Grace Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana, and Henry M. Morris, a hydraulic engineer, both reacted negatively to Bernard Ramm’s landmark book The Christian View of Science and Scripture (Eerdmans, 1954). In this work, Ramm confronted the fundamentalists’ naive Baconian hermeneutics and their failure to read the Scriptures in light of their historical and cultural background. Whitcomb and Morris joined forces to pen The Genesis Flood (1961), in which they adopted Price’s logic and argumentation wholesale but gave it a much more sophisticated theological and scientific expression. The book was an immediate success and then spawned over the years the Creation Research Society, the Institute for Creation Research, and other organizations committed to the position in the United States and Great Britain.

The Literal Hermeneutic

Foundational to the program of conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the commitment to the literal truth of the Bible. The particular cast of this assumption, while arising out of a rejection of the Enlightenment program, is paradoxically also itself a product of the Enlightenment, particularly the philosophical and epistemological work of Thomas Reid and Common Sense philosophy. While most analyses of the Enlightenment trace its development from Descartes down through Hume to Kant, few recognize that there was an intellectual bifurcation in the reaction to Hume’s skepticism. The major stream followed Kant and his phenomenology, but another, smaller but still significant stream followed Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, who responded to Hume with a view of reality based on a naively realistic epistemology that came to be known as Common Sense or Scottish Common Sense. It was this Common Sense understanding of reality that formed the warp and woof of the fabric of the American psyche from the late 1700s until it was overwhelmed by the changes in the world a century later. It was Common Sense that gave Americans their no-nonsense practical view of reality.

It was also Common Sense that gave nineteenth-century evangelicalism its mind-set that the Bible could be approached and known apart from historical and literary context. It was not a book for scholars but a book for the people. R. A. Torrey summed up this approach to the Scriptures: “In ninety-nine out of one hundred cases, the meaning that the plain man gets out of the Bible is the correct one.” Another aphorism concerning literal interpretation commonly heard stated, “If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense.”

The presupposition of the literal truth of the Bible led to corollaries. Among the most important was the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. This doctrine had arisen during the Reformation, and its sense had always been that the salvific message of the Bible is clear enough even for a child to grasp. However, coupled with this clarity was the recognition of depth of meaning within the text, a depth that could not be plumbed even by the most learned scholar. However, when applied under the influence of Common Sense, the Bible was democratized and opened for all men and women to interpret it as they saw fit, independent of any tradition, history, scholarship, or literary context.

When it came to the issue of science, from the seventeenth century onward, Protestant Christians sought to demonstrate that science and the Bible were in harmony and that Christianity was truly scientific. As we read the nineteenth-century apologists, we find them operating under Baconian principles of induction from the “facts.” Let the facts speak for themselves, apart from any speculative theory.

The explosion of scientific knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, placed a strain on the relationship between the Bible (interpreted through Baconian lenses) and science. The harmony seen in earlier centuries was seemingly shattered. Nevertheless, many believers still held to the assumption that, contrary to prevailing opinion, science, properly done, supported (their interpretation of) the Scriptures. But this support was a one-way street. Science was only valid if it supported the received interpretation of the Scriptures. It was not an aid to comprehending and nuancing scriptural understanding. Scripture stood supreme over and against science and reason. When the two came into conflict, trust had to be placed in the Bible. Henry Morris made this clear in his 1946 work, That You May Believe. He asserted that he would accept the Bible “even against reason if need be.”

The nature of the Bible was understood to be truth, absolute divine truth that was not dependent on genre, context, or original audience. The Bible was to be interpreted in a Common Sense fashion, because it “in no way does violence to common sense and intelligence.” Morris, with his engineer’s mind, particularly applied this Common Sense hermeneutic to the Scripture and found scientific truths that had lain hidden in the text for millennia. Such truths as “the stars cannot be numbered” and the hydrological cycle were deduced from allusions in the Psalms and put forth as evidence of the Scripture’s scientific accuracy.

The Common Sense worldview that dominated fundamentalism provided fertile soil for creation science to take root and flourish. The fundamentalist heritage of American evangelicalism made the straightforward interpretation of the biblical text vis-à-vis origins an attractive option, and major evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges were increasingly found to support the particular version of origins espoused by creation science.

Although this discussion has not focused on evolution, that concept represents the fear at the heart of creation science. Creation science adherents believe that the only options are (1) a six-day literal creation by the transcendent and almighty God as presented in Genesis, or (2) materialistic evolution. To admit any degree of evolution even under the direct control of God is to give away the store; no variation in understanding can be tolerated.

Again we see among the conservative mainstream an opposition to new discoveries, learning, and knowledge. These cases have been set forth as anecdotal examples of a tendency that is present in each person who studies theology. That tendency is to identify our own understanding of the truth with the truth itself and cling to the fear that reality itself will come unraveled if we change our position or open our minds to new perspectives.

During the past several years several high profile Scientists who are also conservative Christians have come into the limelight in so doing break the stereotype of the anti-intellectual, anti-science stance of Christianity. Most prominent may be Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D. who was the director of the 13 year long Human Genome Project. That was the project that mapped the human genome from both a physical and functional perspective. Collins in his youth was an atheist who as a young adult became a Christian largely through the writings of C.S. Lewis. Several years ago Collins was lecturing at UC Berkeley. My wife and I went to the campus to hear him. The auditorium was full as was a second auditorium. Ultimately there were three auditoriums filled with expectant listeners. Due to the wonders of modern technology the University was able to project the lecture onto large screens in the remote auditoriums. The topic was the Human Genome Project, and its discoveries. Collins had already published a national bestselling book: The Language of God, which was the basis of his lecture. After the lecture he did Q. & A, and at the end told of his Christian faith. As the thousands of attendees walked out the doors each was given a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.

The point here? We are called to pursue God and to pursue truth. God and truth/reality are much larger than the mental frameworks we inhabit. What we discover may shock and amaze us, but if God is the creator of all reality, what we discover from physical reality cannot disprove the reality of God. It may however call us to see that portions of the understanding we have inherited are inadequate or at times wrong. And require adjustments in our understanding.

(Apart from my personal experience related in this paper much of the content is from my book The Survivor’s Guide to Theology where the sources are documented.)