This morning I was thinking about a statement I read in a Daily Oklahoman article about BIll Nye the Science guy's anxiety about the influence of creationism in U.S. culture. This is the particular quote that caught my attention:"If we raise a generation of students who don't believe in the process of science, who think everything that we've come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, you're not going to continue to innovate."At first blush this seems like a perfectly logical point to make. If Bill Nye has found a generation of students out there who have been ignoring scientific research in favor of "some ancient text" I think we would all have reason for concern. But dig a little deeper into his comment and you see that he seems to be saying something very cynical about biblical theism that goes like this:
Belief in a created world via ancient text (The Bible) = ignoring everything we've come to know about science.There is a vast difference between a belief that God created the world and somehow denying the process of science. To all the Bill Nye's out there who continue to raise these "grave concerns" over creationisms influence in American culture I would simply ask, "where is your evidence that such a belief is killing science?"
In all due respect to the science guy, just because not everyone starts with the Darwinian framework of presuppositions about the origin of the earth it doesn't necessarily mean they are "anti-science". And further I would say that this line of belief completely ignores the fact that a great deal of modern science arose out of the fertile soil of theological curiosity. If we were to believe the line of reasoning that people who believe in creationism cannot simultaneously believe in scientific method we would have to ignore the history of Western Christianity.
For example, Newton, Pascal, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and the very father of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon were all dedicated Christians who were curious about the world God created and became better scientists BECAUSE of their theological world view, not in spite of it.
I'm not alone in my thinking here. Providence College Philosophy professor and historian David Bentley Hart has recently written a compelling counter argument to the kind of popular Darwinian Atheism Nye espouses called "Atheist Delusions". In this book he especially takes umbrage to the revisionist history of many modern skeptics who claim that Christianity has been the enemy of science. This book is exhaustively documented in its counter arguments on this particular subject. He summarizes his thesis this way:
Christian scientists educated in Christian universities and following a Christian tradition of scientific and mathematical speculation overturned a pagan cosmology and physics, and arrived at conclusions that would have been unimaginable within the confines of the Hellenistic scientific traditions. For, despite all of our vague talk of ancient or medieval “science”, pagan, Muslim, or Christian, what we mean today by science – its methods, its controls and guiding principles, its desire to unite theory to empirical discover, its trust in a unified set of physical laws, and so on – came into existence, for whatever reasons, and for better or worse, only within Christendom, and under the hands of believing Christians. (David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions)
I make these points because I think it's important for us as Christians to stand our ground against the tidal wave of secular humanistic accusations about our supposed "anti-sciience" worldview that can seem at times overwhelming. Especially when the person you find yourself not agreeing with identifies himself as "The Science Guy".
