LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 213

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

of the [nineteenth] century…. The deliberate attempt on the
part of some of the newly designated “scientists” to replace
the clergy at the pinnacle of the professions was accompanied
by a rhetoric that suggested the sciences were a kind of surrogate religion. “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Huxley (1825–1895),
thus wrote that he and his scientific brethren were members of
a “church scientific.”173
While only a minority of today’s scientists share such hostility toward
religion, this fact about how science achieved its high status as a modern
profession by distancing itself from the church goes some way to explain why
today’s scientists do not see a clear connection between the official standards
and those governing their faith. The deep connection between theology and
science, which had been expressed and developed by so many previous scientists, was no longer seen as appropriate to a discipline that could claim its
own authority independent of divine revelation.

7. The roots of moralistic therapeutic deism
In a recent landmark work, Christian Smith and Melinda Denton
reported the findings of a major survey of the religiosity of American teens,
“the largest, most comprehensive and detailed study of American teenage
religion and spirituality conducted to date.”174 What they found confirms
that the divorce of science from theology and an unquestioned assumption
of scientism has sadly disfigured the faith of many young people today.
Regardless of whether they belong to religious communities that are officially
Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, the survey showed that the default belief system of a majority of American youth is moralistic therapeutic deism. The wages
of naturalism have exiled God from ongoing, providential care of His world
(deism). God is “not particularly involved in one’s affairs—especially affairs in
which one would prefer not to have God involved.”175 Strict deism is revised
however, because people still want the comfort of religion (the therapeutic):
“Deism … is revised … by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God
selectively available for taking care of needs… like a combination Divine
Butler and Cosmic Therapist.”176 What lies behind the therapeutic dimension
of this emasculated faith is the assumption that God is not really knowable
(since He is unscientific), but He is there to make us feel better subjectively.
This is not a religion of repentance from sin … of building character through suffering … of basking in God’s love and grace….
It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve

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problems, and getting along amiably with other people… . [One
person surveyed said:] ‘When I became a Christian … it always
made me feel better.’177
Likewise the moralistic dimension is subordinated to the therapeutic
modifier. The idea that there is an objective moral law of God is dismissed
as unknowable, reflecting the presupposition of scientism. Instead, what
moralism means here is: “being the kind of person that other people will like,
fulfilling one’s personal potential, and not being socially disruptive .... [One
teen said:] ‘It’s just whatever makes you feel good about you’.”178
What this shows is that the wages of naturalism have not merely made it
easier for people like Richard Dawkins to be intellectually fulfilled atheists.
They have also led many religious people to radically revise their understanding of the Christian faith. The faith no longer consists of revealed truth claims
about who God is, how He wants us to live, and what He has done to save us
from our inability to live up to his expectations. Instead, faith is reinterpreted
as little more than choosing to have a relentlessly positive attitude about life
in the terms of a cosmic Bobby McFerrin’s, “Don’t worry, be happy,” or a
Pharrell Williams’s “happiness is the truth.” Such “happiness” is grounded
not in Christ’s forgiveness, but in the belief that we have no original sin and
need no Savior.
We can expect that even many Christians who are scientists will be influenced by moralistic therapeutic deism. And so, instead of seeing science as a
God-pleasing vocation—a way to serve God by using His intellectual gifts to
study His other book—science is viewed as an autonomous profession, while
religion provides a sense of comfort for those questions of meaning and value
that science cannot address. This is the two-story mind described by Nancy
Pearcey.179 The lower story of objective fact is governed by naturalistic science. In the upper story of values, religion and morality live on, but only as
subjective, private phenomena.
The great idea of vocation, that shows how scientific work has objective
meaning and worth and which connects God’s plans and providential care of
the world with human work, is absent. This is why it is so vital to help Christians who are scientists recover that understanding of providence working
in and through both the natural world and the vocation of the scientist. In
this way, Christian scientists will rightly see themselves as unified wholes as
they go about their work, and not radically divided beings consisting of two
disconnected halves.

173

Harrison, “Priests of the Most High God,” 79

177

174

Soul Searching, 7.

Ibid., 163–164.

178

175

Ibid., 164.

Ibid., 163.

179

176

Ibid., 165.

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

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8. Conclusion

Chapter III

This chapter has sketched the major historical sources of the problematic
conception of the relationship between faith and science in the contemporary
world. The revolt against final causes led to an increasingly mechanistic picture of the world, and this made it harder to visualize how God maintained
His providential care of all creatures. Reason transitioned from humble
servant of the faith to an autonomous magistrate able to judge the contents of
objective reality. The world itself came to seem like an autonomous machine,
making deism seem the best option for believers in God. Skepticism about
natural theology and the soul led some to embrace outright materialism. For
about a century brilliant defenses of natural theology kept materialism at
bay, but then Darwin undermined the argument from design and the logical
positivists positioned naturalistic science as the only way to know reality.
Science no longer seemed like a vocation but appeared to be an independent
profession with its own authority.
The fall-out of these historical developments is that contemporary people
have a hard time seeing any deep connection between faith and science, as
Christianity is no longer viewed as a source of objective truth. Faith is viewed
by definition as non-cognitive, an attitude of mind that does not embrace
any definite knowledge. This is one of the main sources of the moralistic
therapeutic deism prevalent in our youth. Today, Christian theologians and
philosophers are swimming upstream when they argue that science is an
objectively meaningful vocation, and that the Christian faith makes claims
that we can know to be true.

Philosophical Issues
1. Introduction
Philosophy can help thoughtful Christians to identify the worldview
assumptions that influence their perception of whether science can be pursued as a legitimate calling from God. In this chapter, we will begin with some
of the ideas that have proven problematic for Christian scientists, since they
either exclude or compromise important claims of faith. The goal here is to
show that these ideas derive from extra-scientific ideologies that the Christian
can and should reject. Then we will seek to show that, in fact, Christian theology provides many assumptions that are highly congenial to good science,
and argue that there is no reason to divorce faith from the work of a Christian
scientist.

2. Philosophical problems for the scientific vocation
As we saw in the last chapter, a consequence of the Enlightenment was
that human reason was increasingly seen as an autonomous judge of all
things. Behind this perception, two negative assumptions were at work. The
first assumption was a denial of the full reality of sin: either original sin was
rejected altogether or it was assumed that reason was not seriously infected.
In both views, the idea of “total depravity,” that all of our faculties have been
distorted and misdirected as a result of sin, is not taken seriously. The second
assumption was a denial of the status of Scripture as the inspired, infallible,
inerrant word of God.180
The second assumption was manifested in several critical responses to
Scripture, some more skeptical than others, but all of them united in denying that Scripture is the supreme authority over human judgments. The
most skeptical claimed that Scripture was no more than a human attempt to
understand the divine—a denial of inspiration, that reduces Scripture to an
ordinary human work like Homer’s Odyssey. Others, slightly less skeptical,
claimed that while Scripture is indeed a response to the divine, and so perhaps inspired, the resulting text thoroughly reflects the intellectual and moral
limitations of its authors. In this view, the Holy Spirit is unable to or chooses
not to overcome. In this view, divine inspiration interacts with human fallibility to produce a mixture of God’s truth and human error, and reason must be
180

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For a more detailed account of the infallibility and inerrancy of Scripture, see chapter 4.

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2016 Convention Workbook