Taking every thought captive for obedience to Christ (2 Corinthians 10.5)

The Question
Hasn’t science disproved the Bible (7)?
It is one of the ironies of this question that those who insist on its truth do not realize that were it not for the Bible, and those who embraced its explanation of the world and life, the scientific enterprise might never have come into being. So it seems strange to insist that science has disproved the Bible, when in fact it can be shown that the teaching of the Bible gave rise to and continues to provide the framework of ideas for all aspects of the work of science.

Let’s take a brief look at each of those claims.

First, it is a matter of historical record that the early natural philosophers whose labors gave rise to the scientific revolution considered that they were serving God according to the teaching of His Word in their work. Those who have left written records for our perusal – men like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Horrox, Newton, and Ray, among many others – freely witness to their faith in God and their confidence in the teaching of Scripture. They found no disagreements between what their investigations revealed and what they understood the Bible to teach about the cosmos and our duty to know, understand, and use it responsibly and productively. They saw their investigations of the world as complementing the teaching of Scripture with respect to helping us understand the mystery, majesty, wisdom, power, and goodness of God.

So for these early pioneers, and for many Christians since – even to this day – the Bible is a rich resource for guiding the work of those who want to understand the cosmos and make the best use of it. The existence today of journals and websites sponsored by Christians working in the sciences, the existence of flourishing science departments in Christian colleges and universities, and the many scientists who maintain membership in one or another professional association of Christians working in the sciences, should help us realize that science and the Bible are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are complementary ways of understanding the world, and this has been true from the beginning of the scientific enterprise.

Second, the teaching of the Bible provides a framework for the work of science which cannot be constructed or maintained from within the parameters of science alone. Let me put that another way: For science to do its work it must assume certain things to be true, things which cannot be proven by the scientific method. For the members of the scientific community, the scientific method is the only reliable means to truth; however, that method cannot be applied to prove the basic assumptions of the scientific endeavor. Those assumptions must be in place for the method to be fruitful, and those assumptions must come from some place other than the scientific method.

What are those assumptions? I’ll mention just a few.

First, the members of the scientific community assume that the cosmos is both realand knowable. Now before we shrug this assumption off with a “Huh?”, let’s remember that worldviews exist today, with millions of adherents, which believe neither or at least one of these assumptions. Some Eastern religions and philosophies deny the reality of material existence, and regard the world as little more than a mirage. Other philosophies – for example, some forms of postmodernism – deny that we can know anything, much less the mysteries of the vast cosmos.

But science holds to both these assumptions, and relies on them in every aspect of their work. Neither of these assumptions can be proved by the scientific method. At best, the scientific method can only speak to the particular aspect of the cosmos to which it has been employed. To take the results of that method as a universal application requires reliance, not on the scientific method, but on assumptions about the nature and knowability of the cosmos. Each of these assumptions is taught in the Bible, as those early Christian scientific thinkers understood. The modern scientific endeavor simply continues to use those Biblical assumptions, without acknowledging their provenance, and without feeling any necessity of proving them by the method of their discipline.

Two other assumptions also drive the work of science, and these also derive from the Christian worldview which obtained in the Western world during the early days of the scientific endeavor. These are: that the cosmos is orderlyand that life is purposeful. An orderly cosmos is one in which “laws” can be discerned and employed to use the stuff of the cosmos for a variety of purposes. And the very fact that science goes forward with such energy and exertion indicates the purposeful nature of the enterprise, and of the humans who populate it.

Scientists assume the world is real, knowable, and orderly, and that it – and humans as part of it – has a purpose. These operative, framework assumptions are clearly taught in the Bible, as the early Christian thinkers understood. Without these assumptions, embraced as an act of faith, science could not do its work. Therefore, to reject the teaching of the Bible is to tear down the framework and shatter the foundation within which the scientific enterprise continues to operate in our day.

We’ll look at part 8 of this question next Sunday. Now here’s a recap from this week at The Ailbe website.

Weekly Review
This week we concluded our ReVision study on Time for the Kingdom. You can download the entire series on Time for the Kingdom – which is Part 2 of the larger series, The Kingdom Economy– by clicking here. Next we begin Part 3 of this series, which is entitled Work Matters, and will show us the place of all our work within our Kingdom-and-glory callng from the Lord (1 Thess. 2.12).

This week’s Crosfigell messages reminded us to work hard at keeping our priorities straight by making good use of prayer, to make sure we are living our witness consistently as well as declaring it boldly, and to take up daily reading and meditation in the Law of God in order to keep from falling through temptation into sin. Click here, and you’ll find the first three articles listed to be these.

Acts is the focus of our current Scriptorium daily studies, and this week we saw that Acts 12 provides an important interlude, reviewing many previous themes in Acts, as the next stage of the ongoing work of Christ is set to begin in Acts 13. You can watch the brief video introducing Acts 12 by clicking here (scroll down to Lesson 11), and the free PDF of all the week’s studies in Acts 12 is available for download by clicking here (scroll down to Part 11).

In our Thursday The Week column, we were encouraged by a report exhorting Western philosophers to become more open to a wider range of cultures and thinkers as they pursue truth and wisdom. Should such an exhortation be heeded, it might open a place at the table for Christian thinkers to rejoin a conversation from which they have largely – with a few notable exceptions – been excluded (click here).

Saturday’s In the Gates column warned against letting our hearts and minds be distracted from the Law and Word of God by the winds of contemporary teaching or the spirit of the age. We’ll only have the wisdom of the sons of Issachar if we ground ourselves firmly in the whole counsel of God, beginning with His Law.

Visit our website and bookstore to discover additional resources and publications to help you in your walk with and work for the Lord. Subscribe to more of our instructional newsletters. Read John Nunnikhoven’s daily Voice Together column. And while you’re at the website, watch the videos introducing our Men’s Prayer Movement and offering you an opportunity to assess the state of your Christian worldview.

T. M. Moore

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