Thinking Christian

Via Stand To Reason:

ConversantLife is giving away free digital copies of J.P.’s recent book, The God Question.

I just found out about it and haven’t read it, but if it’s Moreland, you can count on it being well worth reading.

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Not long ago I heard J.P. Moreland in a lecture discussing the importance of knowing that Christianity is true. Moreland is an apologist and the author of what I consider to be one of the most important books written by a Christian in recent years, Kingdom Triangle. I don’t have his exact words, but it went something like this:

“There seems to be among average churchgoers a nagging suspicion, a fear, that the scholars—those who are really in the know—have proved the faith is all wrong. In the universities, the laboratories, and even the  seminaries they’ve found out the Bible is mostly false and the message of Christ is a big hoax; but the rest of the world just hasn’t quite caught on yet.”

Moreland was actually drawing from Dallas Willard, in another on that short list of most important books, The Divine Conspiracy. Willard is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, and stands in a good position to comment on this topic. On page 92 he wrote,

The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are “in the know.”

This presumption, though “vague and unsubstantiated,” is nevertheless “powerful,” he says. What kind of effect might it have? Does it really make a difference? It must. A believer, after all, is someone who believes; and if that belief is colored by concerned that the really smart people, the ones who understand, have found out it’s all foolish, that belief may be little more than a confused mind game: “I guess it’s all wrong, or at least I think it is, but I’m going to believe it anyway.” This is irrational. It makes us double minded, even unstable, to use James’s words (James 1:6-8).

I wrote in a pending post that quite often, it really is good to do what others say is good for us; but too many churchgoers “believe” not because they think it’s true, but because they think it’s good for them to believe. That kind of belief isn’t good for you, though; it’s just confused.

This presumption that it’s foolish to believe is wrong, at any rate. Willard goes on:

But when it comes to say exactly what it is that has been found out, nothing of substance is forthcoming.

Thus Rudolf Bultmann, long regarded as one of the great leaders of twentieth-century thought, had this to say: “It is impossible to use electric light and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”

To anyone who has worked through the relevant arguments, this statement is simply laughable. It only shows that great people are capable of great silliness. Yet this kind of “thinking” dominates much of our intellectual and professional life at present, and in particular has governed by far the greater part of the field of biblical studies for more than a century.

But the baseless presumption in question must be seen for the empty prejudice it is if we are to enroll with serious intent in Jesus’ school of life. Though this is not the place to discuss it, you can be very sure that nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus.

Here on this blog entry is not the place to discuss it either, for it would go far too long. I will leave you with questions and some advice instead, directed especially toward followers of Christ. Do you really believe what you “believe?” Does believe, for you, mean to consider the Gospel to be true and reliable information, or does it mean something less than that? Do you sense that nagging suspicion that it might be all wrong after all? Are you believing because you’re confident it’s true, or because you think it’s probably good for you?

If you identify any of those haunting doubts in you, here’s what not to do: Don’t try to squash or squelch it, don’t feel condemned about it, and don’t feel shame over it. It’s a signal, a good and helpful one for you to pay attention to. It may be a sign that what you “believe,” you don’t really believe, and that you’re trying to manage some kind of impossible schizophrenic doublethink. Bring that vague unsettledness out into the open. Turn it into genuine questions. Then you can look for genuine answers, in Scripture, at your church, and among good books and blogs (of which I hope this is one).

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There have been a bewildering 170 comments so far in response to a post published here a week ago. The bewilderment, for me, has been that much of the discussion has been a debate on the Law of Noncontradiction. It’s hard for me to see how that could be controversial–or how controversy is even possible if the LNC is not an agreed principle–but it has been.

It started with the question whether there is such a thing as nonempirical knowledge. One commenter proposed this test:

“If you can’t check it (ie. test it), then even if it is true, you can never know that.”

This alone doesn’t assert that the test must be empirical (based on observation), but that’s the direction the discussion went. One example:

“I showed you a specific example of how logic is verified by observation. I’ll repeat: if the observations I laid out didn’t verify the logic, we wouldn’t believe in the logic, so the logic is directly dependent on those observations.”

All this time I’ve had a relevant resource in my list of waiting web pages–pages I saw when I did not have time study them, and bookmarked to return to later. A few weeks ago J.P. Moreland published a short article on Christianity and Non-Empirical Knowledge. Here’s a taste of it (he is using “see” as shorthand for “testing something with the five senses”):

First, truth (the relation of matching or correspondence between a thought/proposition and reality) is not something we can see, so if we are limited to our five senses, we can have no grasp of it. If I believe that a book I ordered is at the bookstore, and then go to the bookstore and see the book, I know that my belief about the book is true. I can see the book there, but I cannot see my belief that the book was there, nor can I see the correspondence relationship between the book’s being there and my belief that it was there.

(Emphasis added)

What does this have specifically to do with Christianity? I don’t know where Moreland is planning to go with it in his next article in this series. There is, though, a common belief that the only reliable form of knowledge is scientific knowledge, which is further believed to be all empirical. If this is true, then faith is excluded. Moreland shows that this is a false assumption.

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A few days ago I confidently announced I was going to blog my way through J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. What I failed to recognize was that the first chapter is considerably more “bloggable” than the rest. I’m scaling back my plans now.

Moreland’s book began with the difficulty of strictly defining what science is or is not. Within his set of reasons there was one easily extracted subset, from Judge Overton’s decision in a creation science trial. The conclusions Moreland drew were both significant and relatively uncontroversial, as witnessed by neo-Darwinist Michael Ruse’s general agreement. All this made it rather easy to blog.

I let myself think the rest of the book would be similarly easy to condense, but it isn’t. (I should have known better from the start.) Though it’s not my first time reading the book, it’s the first time I’ve done it with blogging in mind, and now I’ve recognized it won’t all summarize into this format.

There are some things I will come back to, like the misconceptions surrounding the “scientific method” we all learned in school: science doesn’t always use it, science doesn’t only use it (other disciplines employ many of the same methods). There’s some very fascinating stuff there to discuss.

But I’m backing off on my plans to cover it all. It won’t condense that way. That opens the door again, though, for me to make a strong recommendation: get yourself a copy and read it! Agree or disagree with what he has to say–either way, you’ll find a lot to learn in it.

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Science and Christianity–are they at odds with each other? Is science the kingly road to knowledge, and is religion a matter of mere belief? Do they speak to each other, or do they occupy (as Gould said) non-overlapping magisteria? To the heart of the point: can a Christian really take her faith seriously in this scientific age? Can a scientifically-minded person take religion seriously?

I’m convinced the answers to these questions all point in positive directions for both Christianity and science, properly understood. My convictions come in large part from J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. First published in 1989, it is the best non-specialist’s overview of these issues I have yet seen. There is a 1999 edition available, but my dog-eared earlier version–which though it predates the term “Intelligent Design” remains relevant to all today’s issues–has been my standby.

I run the risk of contradicting myself by my own actions here, for I want to persuade you to buy the book, study it, and absorb it; for a full, extended treatment is well worth your time. Yet I am also going to blog from the book, in a series beginning with this post. If I cannot convey the range and depth that the book can, I can at least raise some issues for discussion and whet your appetite for more.

Moreland begins by asking what is the definition of science. That’s certainly still relevant: Is Intelligent Design science? How would we know? What characteristics must it have to qualify as such? What is it about ID that causes so many to declare it is not science, and do these characteristics really disqualify it? Ideally, there would be some descriptors of science that, taken together, would clearly mark out what it is and does, and exclude other fields of study.

An early “creation science” trial, the McLean case in 1989, shows that the answer is more elusive than many think. Judge William R. Overton wrote in his opinion,

“More precisely, the essential characteristics of science are: 1) It is guided by natural law; 2) It has to be explanatory by natural law; 3) It is testable against the empirical world; 4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and 5) It is falsifiable.”

Presumably what meets these criteria is science, and what does not meet them is not. But the first one is ambiguous: does it mean that science seeks to explain by natural law? If so, it is redundant with (2). Does it mean “motivated by a desire to find a natural explanation”? Moreland reminds non-scientists may have the same goal, for example philosophers seeking to find a natural explanation in evolution or the brain for morality. On the other hand Carl Linnaeus’s (1707-1778) pioneering work in taxonomy, while clearly science, was “motivated and guided by his belief that no natural explanation was available for the existence and nature of living organisms.”

Mathematicians often refer to non-supernatural laws of mathematics and logic, yet their work is not science. And scientists often appeal to brute fact, not law, as explanations: the Big Bang and various physical constants being examples. (The discovery, after Moreland wrote this edition of the fine-tuning of these constants adds extra interest to that point.)

Do Overton’s points (1) and (2) mean that science only deals with “the world of physical things having only physical properties that are part of one spatio-temporal system?” If so, it’s not at all clear that psychology is a science. Whether it deals with just physical properties and events is a matter of considerable controversy. If it were someday settled that thoughts, feelings, morality, the unconscious, etc. are not just physical, would that mean that every psychologist in history had been a non-scientist? Hardly.

Overton says that science involves empirical testability, apparently meaning that theories may be subjected to observational confirmation or disconfirmation. But theories may be empirically equivalent, for example, certain competing views of quantum phenomena, or (some forms of) theistic evolution compared to naturalistic evolution. More crucially, there is no such thing as observation independent of theory, so testability just by observation alone is impossible. Further, other disciplines appeal to observation: history, literary scholarship, and philosophy.

Is science defined by being tentative? Since Moreland wrote this, we have been treated to the Michael Ruse’s terribly tentative shout that “Evolution is fact, FACT, FACT!” Apparently evolution is not science. Moreland asks, “Was Newton tentative about his belief in the existence of forces? Would any contemporary scientist seriously question the theory that blood circulates?” And is science the only discipline that uses a principle of tentativeness? “Christian theologians are often tentative, that is, open to new evidence about a number of issues ranging from interpretations of specific passages to the inerrancy of the Bible and the existence of God.”

Finally, is science necessarily falsifiable? Many of us are skeptical of evolution’s falsifiability. Evolutionists say that one good fossil anachronism would be sufficient to falsify it. But they remain impervious to failed predictions, like Darwin’s prediction that the fossil record’s gaps would be largely filled in, or that there would be at least one observable instance of a new structure or function evolving under laboratory or field conditions. Moreland if extremely helpful on this.

The nature of falsifiability in science is often difficult to clarify. For example, seldom if ever are individual scientific propositions tested in isolation from other propositions or theories…. let H stand for [a given hypothesis], and let Ci – Cn be the various auxiliary assumptions involved. Then these are related to the experimental observations O in the following way:

(H & Ci & Cj & . . . Cn) –> O
___________Not – O__________
Therefore, Not – (H & Ci & Cj & . . . Cn)

The experiment shows that H or Ci or Cj or … Cn is mistaken. Which is it? Falsifiability is not always as simple as it seems. I learned in high school that the famed Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 proved that light does not propagate through an ether. In fact, the ether theory lasted a long time after Michelson-Morley as scientists adjusted their auxiliary hypotheses to fit. It took Einstein to finally settle the question; and it took several years before Einstein’s theories were observationally vindicated. They’re still working on the cosmological constant, in fact.

Other disciplines can point to falsifiability as part of their criteria. Historians’ theories can be falsified by new documents. Christianity could be falsified by the discovery of Jesus’ bones, though identifying them would be hugely problematic. Moreland clarifies,

Now, world views can be falsified in principle, at least some of them can . . . but doing so is very difficult, because their epistemic support is so multifaceted. Broad research programs in science are like this as well, and they are not unscientific for that reason.

All of Judge Overton’s criteria fall short. And so do several other definitions of science Moreland offers as examples. Now, lest you think this conclusion is just the anti-faith position of some Christian apologist, in fact Darwinist Michael Ruse came to the same conclusion in the 1996 edition of But Is It Science, the volume he edited in the wake of the McLean case. There is an updated edition of this book available, too, but it’s very new and I have not read it yet. It’s unlikely to say anything different, for philosophers have agreed that the demarcation problem–finding what clearly demarcates science from other disciplines–has no one simple solution.

In the end, Moreland, one of whose degrees is in chemistry, is not saying we can never tell science when we see it. He’s saying that the charge, “It’s not scientific” may not be as clear-cut as we have thought. More than that, though, he’s laying a careful groundwork to begin his investigation into Christianity and the nature of science. We’ll continue to follow him through that investigation in future blog posts. On the way, we’ll also take a short detour into a more recent court’s definition of science.

Related, February 26, 2008: On Blogging a Philosophy Book

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