LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 197

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

In Christ All Things Hold Together
The Intersection of Science and Christian Theology
******
Introduction: The Challenge of Scientism
Contemporary Western culture is increasingly influenced by the doctrine of scientism. Scientism does not merely assert that empirical science is
a generally reliable source of information about the natural world, a claim
that is uncontroversial. Rather, scientism claims that a particular approach
to science—the materialistic science which has become dominant since the
Enlightenment—is the only way to gain knowledge. 1 While a modest
empirical approach sees science as a useful, but limited instrument to be complemented by the findings of other disciplines (such as literature, philosophy
and theology), scientism claims that a materialistic paradigm of investigation
has a monopoly on human knowledge. The consequence is that metaphysics,
religion, and even traditional ethics lose their cognitive status and appear
vulnerable to replacement by more enlightened thinking.
At an institutional level, we see this in the radical disconnect between
the sciences and the humanities noted by C. P. Snow in his classic work, The
Two Cultures.2 Scientists and non-scientists receive very different educations,
with very little by way of overlap that would facilitate dialogue between
the sciences and other disciplines. Increasingly, scientists are given a highly
specialized, technical training, and have little time to ponder the broader
questions of human nature and the human condition. At the same time, many
students in the humanities are scientifically illiterate and easily confuse ideological claims made on behalf of science with what the science itself is saying.
As a result, cultural conversations about the value and purpose of science are
often unproductive, as neither sort of education produces individuals who
have a good understanding of both the science and the broader moral, legal,
and theological considerations necessary to guide its best use.

1
The second definition of scientism in the current Random House Dictionary emphasizes this
claim: “the belief that the assumptions, methods of research, etc. of the physical and biological
sciences are equally appropriate and essential to all other disciplines, including the humanities
and social sciences.” scientism. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scientism (accessed: January 29, 2015).
2

Scientism exacerbates this problem as it leads people to regard literature, philosophy and religion as unverifiable relics of our pre-scientific past,
sources which can no longer contribute to a serious conversation about what
is really true. At a personal level, scientism is one of many factors that explain
the radical privatization of faith observed by so many of the most astute
Christian cultural critics.3 For Harry Blamires, the problem is that Christians
have acquiesced to a one-sided treaty with secularism, according to which
religious believers can retain the therapeutic benefits of belief in the supernatural within the privacy of their own minds, provided secular ideologies
define public fact.
Modern secular thought ignores the reality beyond this world ...
Secularism is, by its very nature, rooted in this world, accounting it the only sure basis of knowledge, the only reliable source
of meaning and value... Hence the collision between the Christian faith and contemporary secular culture. For all teaching of
Christian revelation deals with the breaking-in of the greater
supernatural order upon our more limited finite world ... Secularism is so rooted in this world that it does not allow for
the existence of any other. Therefore whenever secularism
encounters the Christian mind, either the Christian mind will
momentarily shake that rootedness, or secularism will seduce
the Christian mind to a temporary mode of converse which
overlooks the supernatural.4
Blamires’s point is that even Christians may start to think that the
supernatural is irrelevant to their daily life, so that they no longer see God’s
providential hand in nature or in their work as a sacred calling to serve others
made in the image of God. In this way, complains Blamires, “the Christian
mind has allowed itself to be subtly secularized by giving a purely chronological status to the eternal. That is to say, the Christian has relegated the
significance of the eternal to the life that succeeds this one.”5 Thus God is no
longer seen at work in ordinary events and in each person’s vocation.
Similarly, Francis Schaeffer6 and Nancy Pearcey7 describe the splitting of
the Christian mind into a structure of two levels or stories. The lower story
of objective fact is controlled by materialistic science. Since religion and

3
Stephen L. Carter also points to the way the law and our political dialogue has contributed
to the privatization of faith in his The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize
Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
4
Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think? (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications, 1978), 67–68.
5

Ibid., 69.

6

Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1968).

C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). This book was
developed in two parts, written in 1959 (the Rede Lectures) and 1964 (“The Two Cultures: A
Second Look.”). While Snow’s work on the “disconnect” noted here has typically framed this
discussion, his views on the intersection of science and non-science have not gone unchallenged. The arguments in this document are not contingent on his framework.

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton, IL:
Crossway Books, 2004).

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transcendent moral claims cannot be investigated in this fashion, they are
relegated to the upper story of private values. This upper story can only be
accessed by faith, and its contents are regarded as subjective and not the sort
of thing which can be known as fact. As Schaeffer said, the assumption of
many in our time is that “Rationality and Faith are totally out of contact with
each other.”8

NOMA betrays those Christians in the sciences who are strongly motivated
to integrate the content of their Christian faith with their work as scientists.
They are not content to live their lives in two tracks—a faith track of devotion and worship, and a work track in which they look at science in exactly
the same way as an atheist. To be sure, the basic procedures and standards
of competence in science are generally derived from reason, observation,
and trial and error, not from Scripture. And there is nothing to be gained by
decorating incompetent science with pious platitudes. But sincere Christian
scientists11 do need a way of understanding their work as an authentic calling
to understand God’s world. This holistic vision of science, in which Christian
scientists seek to discover what God has done in the world—in order to
glorify Him and use that knowledge to serve others— reconnects the realms
of fact and value, of knowledge and meaning, and helps to heal what Martin
Marty has called the “modern schism”12 in the Christian mind.

The sad consequence for Christians in the sciences (including students,
teachers and workers in the public and private sectors) is that they lose the
ability to connect their faith with their work at the cognitive level—at the level
of how they think—so that they can reasonably claim to know that the world
really is as they believe it in faith to be. Thus, while they may continue to see
themselves as motivated by a desire to serve their neighbor in God-pleasing
ways, it is inconceivable that a biblical worldview could contribute to the
framework of assumptions on which scientific knowledge is built. Even Christians who are not scientists are greatly affected. The contemporary, pluralized,
post-Christian societies typical in the West have no clear center of cultural
authority, but amid the babel of voices competing for dominance, scientism
has become stronger. A proper respect for scientific rigor may be supplanted
by an uncritical acceptance of claims made on behalf of science by secularists
in the media and by popular science writers and philosophers with nonChristian agendas (including atheism and a more “inclusive” spirituality).
For example, it is increasingly claimed that science has discovered a genetic
or neurological “explanation” for religious and moral beliefs.9 This corrosive
environment also tends to push faith inside, making it seem irrational, irrelevant to objective reality and unfit to enter public life, from which government
may be only too happy to expunge its influence.
Some Christians do not have a problem with this state of affairs, as
they accept the proposal of Stephen Jay Gould, according to which science
and religion define non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA).10 On this view,
religion concerns issues of ultimate value (telling us how to go to heaven),
while science tells us how the temporal world operates (how the heavens go).
However, this apparently neat division of labor denies that either natural or
revealed theology tells us anything factual about the origin of the world, the
nature of human beings, or the actions of God in history to save mankind.
NOMA is incompatible with a comprehensive biblical worldview, according
to which Christianity is a framework of “total truth” about reality. Moreover,
8

Schaeffer, The God Who Is There, 61.

9
For a survey of many such views, and a thoughtful scientifically informed Christian response, see Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’Leary, The Spiritual Brain (New York: HarperOne,
2007).
10
See Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages: Science and Religion and the Fullness of Life (New York:
Ballantine, 1999), and his “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997), 16–
22, 60–62. For further discussion of NOMA and other models of relating science and religion,
see chapter 3 of this report.

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The hope that such holism can be recovered should not be dismissed
as unachievable. Today, national science organizations exert a powerful
influence in favor of secularist conformity. However, the history of science
provides numerous examples of great scientists who integrated their Christian faith with their scientific work in profoundly illuminating ways. As
Alfred North Whitehead argued in Science and the Modern World, it was the
habitual thought forms of Christendom that made the very idea of modern
science appear feasible and worthwhile.
[T]he greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of
the scientific movement [is] the inexpugnable belief that every
detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents
in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists
would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly
poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of
research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled.
How has this conviction been so vividly implanted on the European mind?
When we compare this tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilisations when left to themselves, there seems
but one source for its origin. It must come from the medieval
insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek
philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the

11
The term “Christian scientist” refers herein to a scientist who is a Christian, not to a member
of the Christian Science religious group.
12
Martin E. Marty, The Modern Schism: Three Paths to the Secular (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock,
2012).

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2016 Convention Workbook