A World of Scientists, Part 2

A comment by a reader has me writing this continuation of "A World of Scientists", the germ of my reply to Seed Magazine's essay contest question from a while back: "What is the most significant force acting against science in society today?"

My simple answer is that science as a conscious and disciplined way of thinking conflicts with science as a general worldview - as experience of the world.

One way to illustrate this is to briefly describe the shadow side of this conflict: the crisis of contemporary theology to be relevant and to understand itself. This is not the same thing as the clash between Christian creation science and 'real' science. The issues are related, but not identical, and can be distinguished thusly: how do we judge between creationism (whether Christian or any other religious source) and science, on the one hand, and on the other, does theology have any legitimacy or relevance at all?

What follows, then, should be read with these caveats:

- I am not a Christian any longer
- Christian theology is not the only theology in a crisis. One could substitute "spiritual" for "Christian" in every occurrence of the word in what follows
- Christian theology as such is not necessarily the antidote to the crisis

Let us proceed...

Theology changed in the last 500 years or so, and the nature of the change from classical to contemporary theology, that accounts for the crisis of legitimacy of theology, is a change that is significantly marked by the role of science in modern and contemporary thought, and which change is not one to be dealt with only by theology, nor only on a rational or argumentative level. Further, creation doctrine is in a crisis of its own, and that crisis is a specific and thereby potentially more explicable case of the general crisis of theology. If we review the role of science in regard to creation doctrine, we might see the significance of the role of science in the general crisis.

A friend of mine, a philosophy professor, advised me when I considered studying graduate level philosophy: be careful that philosophy doesn't displace your Christian faith as a way of life. Because I lacked my friend's brilliance (and perhaps faith as well, since I no longer count myself a Christian), my success in taking and keeping his advice meant my failure in philosophy. But this same advice applies regarding Christian faith and science: be careful that science doesn't become a way of life, rather than a job. That is the Christian view.

But for all of us, in many (mostly unconscious) respects, science is not merely a method but a world view. It is more than a method practical within the horizon of a specified world view; it is the world. For most Christians, their faith is also a world view, a developing language and thought life in which and by which they live and take up with the objects and subjects of their lives. Science as a world view, and Christian faith, are then bound to clash, whereas science as a method within a prescribed horizon and Christian faith are not bound to clash.

Though all the details are arguable, many scholars and intellectuals agree that the modern world displaced the medieval/classical world. This was a gradual process, yet the passage was marked profoundly in the 16th through the 19th centuries. Scholasticism waned, experimental science waxed, and religion faltered. In a short span of two hundred years or so, the ideas, methods, opinions, and even artifacts (illuminated texts, cathedrals) of the classical/medieval world were found to be not just impractical or insufficient, but downright unintelligible to those that came after. This is the change that one Christian theologian, James McClendon, refers to as "The Christian doctrine [of creation] in eclipse":

we must consider the difference made to Christian thought as a whole by the enormous success, since the Middle Ages, of science and technology....in post medieval times science became in the English language the name of the study of nature (including social and psychological nature, but) excluding theology. [McClendon, "Doctrine", p. 150]

McClendon points out that this word for science, scientia, was "the ordinary medieval word for knowledge," [p. 150] of whatever sort. The change to a modern worldview is marked in the change of meaning - really, the constriction of meaning - of this word for knowledge. Now, knowledge is what we observe in, and infer about, the material world, not the spiritual or divine. This new science is not special knowledge, at least, not now. Though perhaps it began as a disciplined way of seeing, for most of us now it happens that we now see this way. This is the world as it appears to us. It is our worldview.

McClendon suggests that aspects of this view that are profound obstacles to a Christian doctrine of creation:

the dominance of science in the world of thought, the effective absence of God from nature, and the man-centered shape of the surviving residue of the doctrine of creation....[p. 151]

To counter these tendencies, McClendon addresses each one separately, and offers an end-around for each. For the dominance of science in modern thought, he invites a critical attitude toward received notions; and suggests we distinguish between "what is factual and contemporary in current science, and what is a mere holdover from the scientific mistakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." [p. 153] For the absence of God, he points to Christian practice of prayer, which "presumes the divine presence." [p. 155] For the anthropocentrism, he prescribes an ecological view of creation. [p. 157]

Several observations and responses are appropriate here. First, let's step back and notice what we have here. In the thick of a theological exposition on the kingdom of God, the nature of God's rule, McClendon brings up Christian creation doctrine, and discusses at some length the nature and hegemony of science in modern thought. He repeats what has become common in our day: there really was a thing called the scientific revolution, and things changed drastically as a result, and Christian doctrine is fighting for its life. Now, either this is true, and only becoming more obvious with each passing day, or for some reason we are more and more inclined to adopt the story about our human western history of the last three or four hundred years. If science isn't a real problem, then the fact that we are so paranoid about science is itself as serious a problem, and perhaps of the same nature as would be our problem if this momentous change really had occurred.

The antidotes he suggests to this encroachment of science on the Christian mind and heart is an ecological reading of Scripture and the world. Yet ecology itself comes under harsh scrutiny by some as just another science that denies God, denies nature a voice, and perpetuates the dominance of man over nature.

I think the problem is as bad as McClendon says, and worse. That dominance of science, absence of God, and centrality of Humanity are all of a piece. They are the main features of a worldview, one which is a complete alternative to the Christian worldview. Let us go back to what McClendon said in the beginning pages of the first part of his systematic theology:

Those who construe [the world] in relation to God - the God of Moses, of Isaiah, of Jesus of Nazareth - must do so by thinking as Moses and Isaiah and Jesus think, and that is in...images or pictures. [p. 66]

That McClendon sets his hopes on "picture thinking" is especially challenging, in this regard: he characterizes this thinking as significantly teleological or eschatological. But surely teleology is explicitly and historically denied by science. This is part of the magic that drained out of the human experience and separates modernity from the classical world. We do not habitually look to the "end" of things, as not just the product of a mechanical process, but the end to which a process is directed and by which it is informed along the way. Here in a seeming philosophical/cultural tangent to his theology McClendon suggests a practice essential to theology, but shown up clearly in the tangent as anathema to the contemporary milieu, and probably doomed to failure. So theology probably is too.

It is a matter then not merely of reconciling the Christian faith with some facts of science, just as it is not merely a matter of reconciling modern theology with some various claims of contemporary intellectual schools. It is a matter of what world we see. It is a matter of whether we have eyes and can see, ears that hear, tongues that taste and know that the Lord is good. If we cannot serve both God and mammon, neither can we hope to preserve the house that mammon built, if in fact we do serve God.

But I preach. What is instructive here to me is that the needed tenacity of a believer insofar as his and her thinking goes, in its breadth and depth, is not to be understated; the corollary is that the tenacity of scientism cannot be understated either. The pictures that comprise scientism constrict and blind because they are exclusively material pictures. The pictures of God's Rule picture what we cannot otherwise see.

Because this eclipse of Christian creation doctrine is really an eclipse of spirtualized sight, not just a questioning of various theological propositions, then the contemporary intellectual account of the change from Scholasticism to modernism and post-modernism will gloss over all the important details. Why? Because a change in worldviews means a change, not most importantly in theories or explanations of facts, but in the facts themselves. Classical theology is anachronistic because the medieval world is gone. The Apostle's Creed may not be able to be preserved in its mere words because the meanings that filled those words were the phenomena of a world passed long ago. Hans Urs von Balthasar is the closest to what lies behind the contemporary experience of theology as stark and dry: "the removal of the magical from man's view of the world." [p. 26] Theology was born, and gave birth to ideas, in that magical world. Science is not, in this regard, most significantly a collection of facts. It is an obsessive/compulsive, nigh on demonic preoccupation with the material elements of all phenomena. That is all science sees. Science didn't debunk theology; science ignored and became blind to the divine.

This is all true; and maybe more, and more robust, acknowledgment of the fact of alternative worldviews, as opposed to mere conflicting facts, will be necessary before we can honestly deal with whatever good lies in the results of science. There may be a time, for an individual and a culture and a civilization, to cultivate the eyes of God in and through what God gives them to see. If that is a collection of material objects in which the face of the divine finds no reflection whatsoever, so be it.