Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.
--1 Corinthians 14:20
NIV
In
high school I was in the play Inherit the Wind. Unfortunately, I did not
have the part of the Matthew Harrison Brady or Henry Drummond, the two legal
heavyweights debating the legality of teaching evolution. My role was a
combination of three different roles: hot dog vendor, Eskimo Pie vendor and a
juror. The juror had no lines, and the hot dog vendor and Eskimo Pie vendor had
only one line each. As I sat through hours of play practice waiting for my few
lines, I practically memorized the arguments for and against the validity of
Darwin’s theory of evolution. The play was based on the real life so called “Scopes
Monkey Trial” which happened in 1925 in Dayton, TN. The simplistic religious
beliefs of the town minister in the play were easy to poke holes in, and I
assumed such beliefs were confined to an earlier age. I didn’t realize back in
high school that the debates between science and Christian fundamentalism in
the early 20th century would resurface later in my life.
I grew up as a Southern Baptist, but my minister
father and my schoolteacher mother valued education. I was taught by them to
try and read the Bible with an eye towards its historical context which was
different than our own. They also taught to be suspicious of Christians who refused
to accept modern science. I never felt much of a personal conflict in regards
to balancing the claims of science and the claims of faith. The conflict
between science and faith never seemed like an either/or proposition to me.
As I went to college, seminary and graduate school, I
learned there were deep streams within Christianity of valuing reason and the
best science of a particular age. You wouldn’t know it from the arguments of
the most visible purveyors of the faith in our culture. Much of the animosity
towards science in Christianity came after the Enlightenment and the rise of
modern scientific study. Fundamentalisms of every religion developed as an
antagonistic response to science and modernism. Christian fundamentalism flared
up brightly in the early 20th century, such as in the “Scopes Monkey
Trial,” but after public debacles that hurt their cause more than it helped,
fundamentalism eschewed the public eye. With the rise of the Religious Right at
the end of the 1970’s, old fights were new again, as Christian fundamentalists
sought control of political offices to reinstate prayer in schools, ban the
teaching of evolution and more activities hostile to science. These critics of
modern science and the use of reason seemed ignorant of Christian tradition
valuing both.
Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have always
been better at using the media than their more open-minded counterparts. With
the rise of the internet, it seems Christian ignorance has spread ever wider.
In many circles today, to be Christian equals rejecting science, reason and
critical inquiry—at least all kinds that do not support its own worldview. Some
of us may scoff at the Creation Museum in Kentucky with its life size Noah’s ark (complete with cargo holds to contain dinosaurs!) but for many American
Christians this is an acceptable view of history.
If Christianity is going to survive, it must reject the false dichotomy between faith and science. I appreciate the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ explanation of how the two are really pursuing different things. To put faith and science in opposition to one another is to misunderstand both. Sacks writes, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.”
Similarly, in an interview, Adam Gopnik shares that even Darwin understood this difference. Gopnik says, “You can be completely committed to a rational, if you like, material explanation of existence, of why — how we got here, without being committed to a reductive account of our own experience. You can believe that there’s a completely rational account of how we got here but that you can never fully rationalize what we feel here.” He goes on to say, "The greatest philosopher of science in the 20th century, Karl Popper, always said that the realm of science was small and distinct; that there was a huge realm of human experience that would never be susceptible to scientific explanation. Now, that didn’t mean that it could be instantly subsumed in the supernatural but that there were realms of what, for lack of a better word — you can call it spiritual experience or numinous experience or irrational experience or simply the experience of sensibility; all the things that are summed up in Christmas carols and songs and poems and novels and spirituals and all the other ways we have of organizing our experience — that those things aren’t contradictory. And again, that’s central to Darwin’s sense of human existence, and I think it’s central to any person’s."
One of the big reasons younger generations of Americans are rejecting
organized religion is because they are asked to choose between a science-less
religion and a religion-less science. If those are the only two choices, the
latter seems like a more honest course of action. Christians who are faithful
and who value science must be more visible and more vocal if Christianity is to
survive.
In navigating the contours
of my own faith and the use of reason and science, I have always appreciated
the simple elegance of John Wesley’s thoughts on the matter. He promoted
theological reflection via scripture, faith tradition, reason and experience, what
is called “Wesley’s Quadrilateral.” In his Sermon #70, which is titled “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered,” Wesley takes on those who value reason
too little and those who value reason too much. (He takes as his scripture 1
Corinthians 14:20 which is printed above.) It’s a nice argument that explains the
important things reason can do for us and the important things reason cannot do
for us. He finds a middle way between an ignorant faith on one hand and a
reductionistic non-faith on the other. When it comes to Christians who don’t
value reason, Wesley has the following words to say:
When
therefore you despise or depreciate reason, you must not imagine you are doing
God service: Least of all, are you promoting the cause of God when you are
endeavouring to exclude reason out of religion. Unless you wilfully shut your
eyes, you cannot but see of what service it is both in laying the foundation of
true religion, under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and in raising the
superstructure. You see it directs us in every point both of faith and
practice: It guides us with regard to every branch both of inward and outward
holiness.
In other words, a
healthy Christian faith is one that employs reason. Of course, there are things
in a Christian’s experience and their beliefs which are outside the bounds of
what science can ascertain, such as eternal life, divine revelation, etc., but
a responsible faith uses the mind along with the heart. I’ve often heard more
open-minded churches say, “Here at our church, you don’t have to check your
brain at the door.” That is reassuring to hear, but it’s a wonder any Christian
ever thought such a step was necessary.
Today when denial of
science literally has lethal consequences—e.g. refusal to believe in the efficacy
of COVID-19 vaccines—we need Christians who will set aside internet conspiracy
theories and science nightmares found in sensational movies and TV shows. We
need Christians who will trust the advances of science while realizing that
science cannot possess all the knowledge of what makes life worth living. If
people of faith refuse to trust the advances of science, then the consequences
will be not only fatal for Christianity but also for the lives of people like
you and me.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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