Christianity has two conflicting schools of thought. One says that evidence is the Christian’s friend and that an open-minded skeptic who follows the evidence will soon become a Christian. The other school cautions that such an empirical belief is grounded in science rather than God, and if science changes (as it sometimes does), that belief would then rest on nothing.

So which is it? Are science and evidence reliable paths to faith or just temptation from Satan?

I do enjoy watching Christian-on-Christian action, so let’s get the popcorn, explore these two options, and enjoy the show.

Science supports Christianity

Lord Kelvin said, “If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.” Modern apologists make a similar argument, though they often give themselves license to select the science they like and reject what they don’t. For example:

Throughout the ages true science has repeatedly confirmed Christ’s words. True science is the Christian’s friend, and the enemy of the evolutionist.

(Unsurprisingly, this claim, with its anti-evolution bias, was made by a not-biologist.)

There are many organizations like the Discovery Institute, Stand to Reason (Greg Koukl), Reasons to Believe (Hugh Ross), Cold Case Christianity (Jim Wallace), and Reasonable Faith (William Lane Craig) that enthusiastically point to science to support their Christian position.

One extreme approach is to simply declare your faith position correct with respect to science. For example, here’s a tenet from the faith statement of Answers in Genesis:

By definition, no apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the scriptural record. Of primary importance is the fact that evidence is always subject to interpretation by fallible people who do not possess all information.

You see, if there’s a conflict, it’s because fallible people got it wrong. Cuz Jesus.

Science makes a poor foundation for faith

Other Christian sources see science as the bad guy.

The faith which the Christian has cannot be destroyed by the results of scientific study either, since that faith doesn’t depend on science. To base our faith on the proposition that a particular scientific theory is true or false is to build it on the wrong foundation. (Source)

Here’s input from Ken Ham of ICR:

We should be very wary of any idea about life that has a consensus among non-Christians. Sadly, many Christians listen to the ideas of secular scientists and try to add these to the Bible. This shows that they have the same problem as the non-Christian—they don’t want to submit to God’s Word.

This is sometimes put more forcefully: don’t use a scientific conclusion as part of the foundation of your faith, since science is always tentative. That foundation might crumble as science changes, which would put your faith at risk.

A weakness of this position is that such an apologist is never committed to the argument. They might say, “Well, how do you explain abiogenesis?” or “You can’t tell me what caused the Big Bang!” but those are just ploys. When science reaches a conclusion about any of these questions, the apologist will drop it and pick up the next challenge du jour. Nothing’s at stake. They demand that you question your worldview but refuse to reciprocate.

If you come across such an argument, you can dispel the smoke screen by asking if they would drop any part of their faith after science answered their question. If the answer is no, responding to their question is a waste of time.

Let’s consider this science-averse position. “Faith” is popularly defined by many apologists as synonymous with “trust”—that is, belief firmly grounded in evidence. If that’s what faith means to you, you should lose your faith when popular apologetics arguments are answered by science. Or, if your belief depends on nothing tangible, admit it, say that you “just believe,” and drop any pretense of grounding your worldview in evidence or having an argument that would convince someone else. (More on faith here.)

The Christian rebuttal

Apologist Jim Wallace makes an excellent argument against this position. He considers evangelical Christians who justify their belief in some experience or feeling and asks,

Could my Mormon friends and family make the same [experiential] claim? If they could, then your claim probably is insufficient. (Cold Case Christianity podcast for 5/12/16 @15:00)

That is, if you would reject Mormons grounding their faith in nothing more than a powerful feeling, why think that grounding is justified for you?

Conclusion

So which is it? One option is to keep faith and science separate and look for God to show you with some feeling or experience that you’ve chosen the right path. But then your position is no more compelling than that of anyone claiming a similar experience from their deity.

Or do you ground your faith in science? But then you risk a change in science undercutting that foundation.

Sometimes Christians do my work for me.

See also: Science and Christianity: A Dangerous Mixture

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/15/16.)

Image from Amit Patel (license CC BY 2.0)
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In the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile (pronounced “ee-oh’-la-pile”), the device shown in the drawing above. A fire below heats water in a boiler. Steam from the boiler enters the hollow ball through the two horizontal pipes that form the ball’s axle. The steam exits the ball as two jets and makes it spin.

We have no evidence that this was more than a curiosity, which, when you think about it, is remarkable. The Roman Empire (of which Alexandria was one of its biggest cities) built roads, bridges, coliseums, temples, and aqueducts that weren’t surpassed in scale for centuries. If they had redirected their engineering genius, could the Romans have launched the Industrial Revolution 1700 years before it actually happened?

The Industrial Revolution

That would seem possible since the Industrial Revolution began in England in 1733 with a far more mundane invention, the flying shuttle. This increased weaving speeds fourfold. The spinners who made the thread now became the bottleneck, but the invention of the spinning jenny a few decades later made them more productive. To spin a pound of cotton had taken five hundred hours by hand. Machines reduced this to twenty hours by 1780 and just three hours a few decades later.

The weavers in this arms race shot back with the water-powered loom in 1785 and later, steam-powered looms. Cotton suppliers became a bottleneck, and the cotton gin (1793) boosted their productivity. By 1830, England had roughly ten million spindles for spinning thread and over 100,000 looms, most powered by steam. One worker had become as productive as several hundred with manual equipment. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts at this time were producing a hundred miles of cloth per day.

Like the trickle over an earthen dam that becomes a torrent, the change spread and grew. The equipment that worked so well with cotton was applied to silk, flax, and wool. The Jacquard loom wove elaborate designs with punch cards.

The innovation spread to other industries. The manufacture of glass and pottery were automated. More demand for steam power meant more demand for coal, so coal mining ramped up in response. Tin, copper, and lead mining also expanded. Thousands of miles of canals, followed by tens of thousands of miles of railway as well as steamship routes, connected mines to factories to markets.

England had gone in a few generations from a country like every other to a country like no other.

(Much of this is taken from my book, Future Hype: The Myths of Technology Change.)

Enter Christianity

The Roman Empire missed the boat of an early introduction of the Industrial Revolution, but there was another monumental change coming: the sweep of Christianity across Europe.

Emperor Constantine decriminalized Christianity in 313, and it became the state religion in 380. Labor-saving machinery would reduce or eliminate the need for slaves. Many Christian apologists today insist that not only does their religion hate slavery but that we have Christianity to thank for abolishing it in Europe and the United States in the early 1800s. They also tell us that not only does Christianity embrace science but that the Old Testament contains clues to scientific truths that preceded modern science by millennia.

With the Christianization of the Empire in the fourth century, Christians seem to be saying that society was fertile ground for the labor-magnifying ideas of the Industrial Revolution. We know that Christianity can drive innovation given the remarkable period of cathedral building beginning in the twelfth century and the commissioned artwork from the Renaissance. With Christianity newly empowered as it quickly overran the continent, was the first-century aeolipile too distant an invention to inspire the Industrial Revolution? Did the flying shuttle (or any other invention that might drive innovation) simply not occur to anyone?

Debunking the claims

Those are possibilities, but the bigger problem is that Christianity’s claims about slavery and science are false. While the Catholic Church did eventually disavow slavery, that wasn’t until 1965. Not only didn’t the Old Testament reject slavery, it regulated slavery with rules. Old Testament slavery was basically identical to slavery in America. The New Testament is no better, and it tells slaves to obey their masters.

Claims that the Bible anticipated modern scientific discoveries are also wrong. In fact, such claims are inept post-hoc attempts to imagine farsighted scientific observations in verses that said nothing of the kind, and the Bible makes plenty of false claims about science.

Christian Europe didn’t stand out for its nurturing of innovation. Yes, there was innovation during the medieval period (eyeglasses, the water wheel, the stirrup, metal armor, gunpowder weapons, castles, improved plows, crop rotation, and others), but that was in spite of Christianity, not because of it. In fact, much of this wasn’t native innovation but was simply the adoption of foreign inventions.

Christianity has had the opportunity to improve the lot of its flock. It was largely in charge from the medieval period through the Renaissance, but there is little to show for it. Modern apologists struggle to point to fruits of Europe’s Christian period, like universities and hospitals, though these examples wither on inspection. Christian Europe was ruled by superstition, not reason.

The technological and scientific advances that did happen—paintings, statues, cathedrals—were just the Church glorifying itself, rather like the whore in Ezekiel 16. Anything to help the people was inadvertent, and sponsoring or encouraging that wasn’t the church’s interest.

What explains Christianity’s missing its opportunity? We could find excuses. A society is a complex thing after all. For example, it’s possible that a successful society discourages innovation—why mess with it if it ain’t broke? But trying to find excuses for Christianity assumes that it’s just another manmade institution. And, yes, it is. That’s the problem—Christianity looks merely like another human institution. It’s not magical, and it doesn’t harness the power of the Creator of the universe.

Because it should: the Bible promised that God’s people will be vastly more prosperous than others. Jesus said, “No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age” (Mark 10:29–30). God said, “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it” (Malachi 3:10).

Science, not religion, has ushered in the health and prosperity that we have today. A peasant living in Europe in the year 1100 would’ve noticed very little different a century later. Contrast that with the enormous jump between 1900 to 2000. That might be worth keeping in mind during the upcoming U.S. presidential campaign.

(h/t: The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire by Richard Carrier pointed out that slavery didn’t hinder industrial innovation.)

See also:

• When Christianity Was in Charge, This Is What We Got
• Yeah, But Christianity Built Universities!
• Yeah, But Christianity Built Hospitals!
• The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/11/16.)

Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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Alister McGrath, an Anglican priest and professor of theology at Oxford, contrasted atheism and Christianity in an interview on the conservative Christian site The Stream: “An Atheist’s Reasonable Journey to Faith: An Interview With Alister McGrath.” You may know McGrath from The Dawkins Delusion, his response to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which I read shortly after it came out in 2007.

A reasonable journey to faith? Let’s see how reasonable it was and how well supported by evidence his adopted Christian position is. He has plenty to say about science, too, and we’ll critique the comparison.

1. Science has limitations, and other avenues may be more attractive

McGrath says that “science did not demand atheism” and that the other worldview options “seemed to be more interesting.” Another limitation of science was that it didn’t answer life’s big questions such as the meaning of life. “I began to realize that human beings need existential answers about meaning, purpose and value, not just an understanding about how the universe works.”

He says, “human beings need existential answers,” and I agree that people might well want such answers, but Reality is under no obligation to provide them. McGrath plows forward, looking for answers without satisfying that annoying little prerequisite that the source for the answers must be reliable.

And yes, science is limited. Scientists themselves are quick to make these limitations clear. It’s too bad we don’t see the same thing within Christianity. I wish Christianity was also self-critical and admitted to its limitations. As an example of Christianity’s hydra-headed blundering, consider John Hagee’s “four blood moons” humiliation. Five years afterwards, I’m still feeling the schadenfreude.

McGrath next wonders about worldview options that are more interesting than science while doing nothing to convince us (or himself) that they’re correct. Without this fundamental first step, who really cares whether they’re interesting?

I’ll grant that Christianity can tell you what the meaning of life is. So can Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. So can David Koresh, Jim Jones, or Sathya Sai Baba. So can Pastafarianism, Jediism, or Zuism. So can the drunk stranger at a party. But are any of these sources worth listening to?

2. We have Christianity to thank for nurturing science

“There has always been a strong religious motivation for the scientific study of nature. Religious writers like Thomas Aquinas have always insisted that the regularity and beauty of nature point to the wisdom and beauty of God.”

There have been Christian scientists for centuries, though that’s not saying much since pretty much everyone in Europe was Christian until recently. To give Christianity credit for the last 500 years of European science is to call attention to how little Europe progressed while Christianity was in charge (see also here).

McGrath admits that Christianity hasn’t always been science-positive: “Of course, there have been episodes when religious ideas or politics have got in the way of scientific advance.”

Let me add to that. I’ve written about how apologists falsely claim the Bible anticipated modern science and how the Bible got science wrong. Also, about how apologists’ boasts about Christianity building universities and hospitals are overblown.

3. Christianity makes sense of the world

Many think that religion is irrational, but don’t let that stop you. Consider how seemingly irrational are areas of science such as quantum physics.

C. S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” McGrath added, “A theory is judged by how much sense it makes of our world.”

If Christianity untangles reality where no other worldview does, McGrath does nothing to argue for this claim. The most charitable interpretation of this is that McGrath has support for these claims but the interview simply didn’t allow him to express them.

A less-charitable interpretation is that McGrath’s arguments are aimed only at his own community, and he doesn’t have much that would convince an atheist, despite his frequent contrasting of the two worldviews.

4. Science is “provisional and limited”

Science is provisional because it changes its mind. It’s limited because it can’t address the important areas of meaning, value, and beauty.

Yes, science is limited. Do you have an alternative? Surely you’re not thinking of Christianity! With 45,000 denominations and counting, it can’t even sort out its own beliefs.

Every year there are “Top 10” lists of scientific discoveries. Show me a similar list of things Christianity has given the world—not Christians (I grant that people do good things) but Christianity. If Christianity doesn’t dirty its hands with evidence and doesn’t care to make such advancements, then what good is it? That Christianity tells you happy, groundless nonsense isn’t much of a selling point.

Are Christianity’s contributions to the world all in the past? If so, I need evidence of that, too.

McGrath has good things to say about science and points out limitations that anyone would grant. But his vague praise about the Christian worldview make me want to set some ground rules. Can we at least agree that groundless certainty is bad? And that evidence is mandatory to support a belief? And that faith (that is, belief despite insufficient evidence) has no place in this conversation? If so, I wonder where Christianity is in all of this.

5. Science can’t prove whether God exists or not

“Science has been hijacked by ideological atheists, who have weaponized science in their battle against religion. . . . The epistemic dilemma of humanity is that we cannot prove the things that matter most to us. We can only prove shallow truths. It’s not a comfortable situation, but we have to get used to it, and not seek refuge in the illusory utopian world of the New Atheism, which holds that we can prove all our valid core beliefs.”

(I’ll remember Weaponized Science if I need a name for another blog. Or a band.)

McGrath frets about science’s “shallow truths,” but I wonder what truths these are. Perhaps truths like, “The earth orbits an ordinary star in an unimportant corner of a vast galaxy, just one of roughly 200 billion galaxies”? Or, “This technique will increase crop yields so that billions of people can be fed”? Or, “This vaccine will immunize your child against smallpox”? Those sound like pretty important truths to me. Here’s another one: you don’t need to have someone give you the answers to life’s Big Questions®. You decide what the purpose of your life is. I appreciate that this is can be an intimidating challenge, but it’s also a thrilling opportunity.

As for science being unable to prove or disprove God, that’s true. All we can do is follow the evidence (and it’s not looking good for Christianity). I have no idea what he means by an “illusory utopian world of the New Atheism” in which we can prove all core beliefs. That certainly doesn’t describe my views. If “illusory utopian world” describes anything, it’s religion, not atheism.

6. Christianity helps science in two ways

First, it provides “a reassurance of the coherence of reality.” Our view of the world is imperfect, but we see a bigger picture that gives meaning to a world that would otherwise be “incoherent and pointless.”

Second, Christianity provides answers where science can’t to the big questions such as “the meaning of life, and our place in a greater scheme of things.” Science alone can’t be “the foundation of meaning and value.”

These are bold claims, but I need evidence to back them up. Show me where Christianity has helped science. All the clues from science tell us that the universe is ultimately pointless, and Christianity’s flailing explanations are just fantasy, built on nothing. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t find meaning in life and assign a purpose for your existence. It doesn’t bother me that the universe has no ultimate purpose, but if it troubles you, remember that your wishing reality were different counts for nothing.

McGrath says that there is more to a full life than science. If he’s thinking of enjoying family and friends, finding satisfaction in a job well done, or helping the less fortunate, that falls outside of both science and Christianity.

McGrath’s approach can be adapted to justify lots of supernatural worldviews, most incompatible with Christianity. He has done nothing to make clear why Christianity is the only correct worldview or even why we should believe the supernatural of any sort exists.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/9/16.)

Image from Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington (license CC BY 2.0)

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