THE THEIST AND SCIENCE

Along with others, the German physicist Volker Braun has insisted that the theist cannot be open to the facts because he is already committed to his own beliefs:

·       A scientist is a man who changes his beliefs according to reality; a theist is a man who changes reality to match his beliefs.

However, we all approach the data with our own particular perspective or lens. Even the scientist sees the data through their own paradigms or lens. In his highly regarded, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote:

·       Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

·       Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.

This was also true for me. My “traditional rules” had been torn apart by decades of depression and panic attacks. However, I had an ecstatic encounter with God while bleeding to death because of a chainsaw injury. As a result, I committed myself to seek the truth about God and pledged to examine all paths until I found it. This brought me to Jesus

A series of miraculous events had led me to Jesus’ door – the last place that this Jew had ever dreamed of going. However, skepticism forbade me from truly entering for a number of years. However, gradually I became convinced as a comprehensive and evidentially-based paradigm was taking form to become my lens and guiding paradigm.

There is nothing illegitimate about approaching the data with a paradigm or lens. Whenever I ride my bicycle, I wear my eyeglasses. Even though they are artificial and come between me and the data of pedestrians crossing the street and taxi doors swinging open in my path, my eyeglasses enable me to see and interpret the data more accurately. A sound worldview can do the same thing. I used to break up the world into “quality people” and “losers.” Although I wanted to belong to the first category, in my heart I knew I was a “loser.” Subsequently, the Bible helped me to understand that we are all losers who need a Redeemer. This shift in worldview helped me to better understand others and, consequently, to predict their actions.

The important question is not whether or not to set a pair of glasses or paradigm between ourselves and the data, but whether our lens allows us to see reality more accurately. Many Christians testify that the truth of the Bible and God working within them has given them the freedom (John 8:31-32) to truly understand their lives and those of others.

Biographer Jana Tull Steele reports of Duke Ellington:

·       He used to say that he had three educations: one from school, one at the pool hall, and one from the Bible. Without the latter, he said, you can’t understand what you learned from the other two places. (Duke Ellington)

Similarly, C.S. Lewis wrote:

·       I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun—not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

This is then the essential question: “Does the Biblical lens promote sight or blindness?” Does Christ enable us to do science or does this faith impede science? The historical testimony in favor of the Christian role in the development of science is overwhelming. British scientist Robert Clark summed it up this way:

·       However we may interpret the fact, scientific development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped. It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically wrong about science. In Greece, this conviction was enshrined in the legend of Prometheus, the fire-bearer and prototype scientist who stole fire from heaven, thus incurring the wrath of the gods. (Christian Belief and Science, quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, 14)

The Christian paradigm is a light that illuminates the landscape. Consequently, I do not stumble as I once had.