LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 219

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

and supplanting the claims of religion, while religion is barred from defending itself or from making any critique of scientific overreach.
The sleight of hand that allows this double standard occurs because
although it seems that religion is generously being offered autonomy in
matters of ultimate or eternal significance, in fact it is not. Religion can talk
about these matters so long as it does not make cognitive claims about objective reality, since that is the domain of science. But the fact is, religion does
make claims about objective reality which are contrary to those of scientific
materialism (it says we were specially created for a purpose, etc.). If religion
is prevented from making these claims, it is reduced to a collection of subjective opinions and feelings about reality. One cannot claim that religion is a
complementary domain of truth and then prevent it from saying anything
that could be true.

e. Science and parascience
Gould’s approach is only an example of a much broader tendency to
promote the cultural dominance of science. Marilynne Robinson shows that
in the attempt to supplant religion with science as the most authoritative
source of knowledge, some have conflated science proper with what she calls
“parascience.” Robinson notes that parascientific literature “makes its case by
proceeding, using the science of its moment, from a genesis of human nature
in primordial life to a set of general conclusions about what our nature is and
must be”226 In the process, Robinson argues, parascience commits two main
fallacies. For one thing, it fallaciously treats current science as ultimate truth
when, at best, it reflects only the latest, fallible theory. The shortcomings of
such a theory could be shown tomorrow by new data or a more comprehensive competitor theory. It also moves from mere descriptions of natural fact
to normative conclusions about the way things should be. In this way, for
example, evolutionary ethicists claim to have discovered the historical origins of moral norms, confusing a scientific account of the origin of our moral
judgments and feelings with an ultimate account of the origin and authority
of moral norms.
This imperialist strategy leads its proponents to “deny the reality of phenomena it cannot accommodate, or to scold them for their irksome, atavistic
persistence.”227 For example, consciousness, authentic altruism, and religious
experience are all either denied or explained away as illusions or delusions.
There is a lack of open-minded investigation into these phenomena on their
own terms: they have been judged problematic before that investigation
begins. An important implication for Christian scientists is to distinguish
carefully between the scientific data and scientific models themselves and

226

Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of
the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 32–33.

227

agenda-driven philosophical interpretations of those data and models which
aim to compel concessions to a non-Christian worldview.

3. Philosophical contributions
of Christianity to science
Christians should not only be on their guard against philosophies which
attempt to appropriate the name and authority of science to advance their
cause. They should also be ready to point out that Christianity is philosophically friendly to science because it provides some key principles that support
the scientific enterprise. These principles fall into three broad categories:
metaphysical, epistemological, and moral.

a. Metaphysical support for science
If science is conceived as the attempt to comprehend the natural world
and critically depends on the discovery of universal laws of nature, then science assumes that nature is fundamentally rational. This assumption is not
justified if nature is governed by many gods or local spirits as in polytheistic
mythologies or animism. Neither is it justified by the assumption that the
universe is simply a brute fact, an inexplicable accident. Furthermore, the vast
success of science has shown that the assumption of a rational universe is a
highly plausible one. The question which remains is: which worldview best
justifies this assumption? Albert Einstein, who was neither a Christian nor an
orthodox Jew, hints at the religious implications of these facts in a letter which
reflects on the amazing fact that we can discover universal laws of nature. As
noted earlier, he writes that
But a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot
be grasped by the mind in any way ... [T]he kind of order created by Newton’s theory of gravitation ... is wholly different.
Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of
the objective world .... That is the “miracle” which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.228
Together with other monotheists, Christians can point out that a good
explanation of such a coherent, law-governed world is the existence of a
single, rational, divine creator. Indeed, the whole idea of a universal law of
nature is derived from the prior idea of a single, rational legislator, and if
these laws apply throughout nature, then that legislator must be a supernatural being.
Theism thus provides metaphysical support for science by affirming
that there is a natural order to discover. Without this assumption, as Einstein
realized, science as we understand it today simply is not a feasible project.
228

Ibid., 72.

Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine, 131; also quoted earlier on pages 38–39.

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However, an orderly world is not enough for science to be feasible. For it
could certainly happen that the world is rational but human beings are not.
Here, biblical theism has a decisive advantage because it asserts not only the
creation of a law-governed world but also the creation of humans specially
made in the image of God with the gifts required to be stewards of that world.
This surely predicts that we are sufficiently rational to discern what is going
on in nature.

After studying his environment man has begun to study himself.
Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through
it seen all other things. Now, his reason has become the object:
it is as if we took out our eyes to look at them. Thus studied,
his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenon which
accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is
itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own
logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must
obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth.230

b. Epistemological support for science
This metaphysical claim is the foundation for biblical theism’s epistemological support for science. It is not merely that the world is rational and so
are we, for that still might not be enough for science to be feasible. It might be
that we are simply too limited in our rationality, or that our type of rationality is not attuned to the rationality governing nature. This could happen, for
example, if God only provided us with the ability to discover local rules of
thumb, but not the universal rules governing the cosmos as a whole. Lying
behind the feasibility of science is the fact that one and the same logos (principle of rationality) is supremely exemplified in the mind of God. Thus it is
imaged both in the natural world and the human mind, so that human reason
is attuned to the rationality of nature and sufficient to discover its principles.
This confidence in our ability to discover the truth about the natural
world encourages scientific work. Realistically, however, it is also balanced
by a recognition of our creaturely limits and sin. We can conceive the idea of
a universal law of nature, and yet our actual theories appear to capture only
fallible approximations. We know that God’s will and His ways are above our
will and our ways, so we must take care to see what He has done rather than
anticipate what we think He would do or assume that our ideas are better
than His. Even then we can expect that our best efforts to interpret His work
will still fall short. As Nathan Jastram has argued,229 being made like God,
and yet not being God, gives just the right balance of confidence and humility
so that we are sure science can progress without expecting final answers.
By contrast, it is fascinating to see that contemporary naturalists lurch
between the extremes of excessive confidence and excessive humility. When
they want to use science as a weapon to attack religion, they are often tempted
into the parascience critiqued by Marilynne Robinson, fallaciously converting
the temporal and contingent results of science into pronouncements on the
ultimate meaning of life. But when they reflect soberly on the consequences
of a naturalistic theory of man, they often conclude that we are not truthoriented creatures, failing to see that this undercuts our confidence in the
science alleged to have that consequence. Long ago, Lewis called attention
to the self-defeating nature of “scientific” arguments that undermine our
confidence in human rationality:
229
Nathan Jastram, “Scientists Called to Be Like God,” in Menuge, ed., Reading God’s World,
243–269.

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The severity of this problem does not seem to be recognized by leading
evolutionary psychologists. For example, Steven Pinker admits that in his
view, “our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth.”231 Lewis Wolpert
claims that “our brains contain a belief generating machine, an engine that
can produce beliefs with little relation to what is actually true.”232 With no
sense of irony, Wolpert later claims that “Science provides by far the most reliable method for determining whether one’s beliefs are valid.”233 The problem,
of course, is that if our belief-forming mechanism favors useful but largely
false beliefs, this will also include our scientific beliefs. And even if natural
selection could somehow hone beliefs relevant to our everyday survival so
that they were mostly true, this still would not be good grounds to trust recent
scientific theories, because they played no role in the survival of our ancestors. In fact, Steven Pinker emphasizes that recent scientific advances solve
problems that our ancestors never encountered.
Our ancestors encountered certain problems for hundreds of
thousands or millions of years—recognizing objects, making
tools, learning the local language, finding a mate, predicting
an animal’s movement, finding their way—and encountered
certain other problems never—putting a man on the moon …
proving Fermat’s last theorem.234
The problem-solving abilities of our ancestors give no reason for confidence in our ability to solve scientific problems that go far beyond the
requirements of survival. It seems that the prediction of naturalistic evolution
is that human beings would have too limited and parochial a grasp of rationality to account for the discovery of universal laws of nature. And of course,
we did put a man on the moon.
230
C. S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Walter Hooper, ed., Christian Reflections (London: Fount, 1991), 98.
231

Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997), 305.

232
Lewis Wolpert, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007), 140.
233

Ibid., 216.

234

Pinker, How the Mind Works, 304.

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2016 Convention Workbook