On May 29, 1919, Arthur Stanley Eddington pointed a telescope toward an eclipse and proved that gravity did, as Einstein had theorized, bend light. Unfortunately, nothing has been pointed in the heavens, in the earth, or in any direction that has proved, with such verifiable and empirical objectivity, that Christ is the Son of God who shed His blood at the cross as an atonement for sin. People need what is called faith to believe that "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump .. . the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible"(l Cor. 15:52), or that "God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). People do not need faith to understand that "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" or that the force of gravity between two objects "diminishes by the square of the distance between their centers."
This general context, no doubt, is what inspired philosopher Bertrand Russell to pro claim, "What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know."
Really, now? Though Russell's scientific, materialist worldview has formed the back ground for some of humankind's greatest intellectual, pragmatic, and scientific achievements, just how valid are its presuppositions? How much credence does such a worldview deserve, especially from the point of view of mature Christian faith, and more particularly still from the perspective of those who minister to Christians who live in the midst of a world largely dominated by this perspective? What, if anything, may be given to the materialistic axioms that dominate the Western intellectual elite? Is the secularist, scientific worldview as worthy of its firm entrenchment in our cultures as many, like Bertrand Russell, would have us believe? Are many Christians, even ministers, surrendering, perhaps even unwittingly, to a worldview that besides being antithetical to the Christian faith is built on faulty, even crumbling foundations?
The chemistry of a major shift
From the time of Protagoras, who said, "Concerning the gods, whether they exist or not I do not know because of the difficulty of the topic and the shortness of human life," on up through the materialistic presuppositions of modern science a spiritless, naturalistic worldview has had a long but thin (in that few adhered to it) history. After thou sands of years of consideration, it is only during the past 100 or so that cultures have actually embraced the flimsy but thickly insular perspective of secularism, which now may be said to have tilted the whole edifice of thought and worldview particularly in the West.
Conceived in the debris of the seventeenth-century Cromwellian Revolution, birthed in the arable soil of Enlightenment ideals, breast-fed by the goddess of reason, schooled in Parisian salons, parented by science and technology and unwittingly encouraged and embraced by those ostensibly adorned in the numinous garb of Christ secularism has come to maturity only in the twentieth century, where it has been so infused into Western culture that we'd have to climb out of our eyes in order to see what it has done to our minds.
For hundreds of years men slit each other's throats because they couldn't agree on what God did to them after their throats were slit. Today, by contrast, people argue in a systematic, calculated, and scientific manner that there is no god at all who does anything to us (either before or after we slit each other's throats). Thus the chassis of an entire civilization has shifted away from the premise that there is some kind of god behind the human scene. Never before has there been such a widespread, institutionalized, and intellectually fertile movement to explain creation, and all its predicates (life, death, morals, law, purpose, love, whatever) without a Creator.
Wrapped in airtight numbers, expressed with precision by scientists and explained by universally testable theories the secular worldview has claimed and commanded an aura of objectivity, of validation and of demonstration that is beyond the reach of religious faith. Special Relativity has enjoyed proofs that the death and resurrection of Christ haven't and can't, at least short of the parousia itself.
Flimsy foundations
Fledgling, relatively short-lived, and parochial, the materialistic, scientific worldview has, nevertheless, harnessed the moment. This is true even if its tethers are proving to be inadequate as they slowly unravel under the strain of their own intricate and feckless knots and loops.
Despite accolades that continue to be sung to the triumphs of scientific rationalism, with all it has genuinely accomplished, its victories have never been tethered to anything far beyond its own rather dogmatic presuppositions. And the fit of presupposition with conclusion is not as tight as has been claimed. The longer such an ill-fitting shroud covers the world the more threadbare it tends to become. More and more, reality is laying threadbare its seams and the frayed gape becomes more and more visible as it is placed under the light of the truest needs and longings of the humanity it is said to serve.
Sure, the world flashes across our senses as material; sure, rational thinking solves puzzles and helps jets fly; sure science has been hugely helpful in creating cures for all sorts of human woes; sure it has dissected the atom and constructed the Space Shuttle. Yet these facts don't prove that materialism, rationalism, and science contain the potential, or even the tools, to explain all reality any more than classical physics alone explains France's 1998 World Cup victory, or fluid dynamics a ballerina's dance, or endocrinology love.
There's something about Tenny son's Enoch Arden or Alexander Pushkin's A Little Bird that accesses a dimension where science is too bulky, too crude, too broad, too clumsy to enter, a dimension where reason is too staid, too hard, too inflexible to pass through. Equations, cold, dead, and static serve a purpose in human existence, but at the same time they are incapable of actually defining a reality riotous with passion, effusive with thought, and spry with creativity. They may help and they may hinder, but either way they simply can't actually do the job that needs doing. Asking them to do so is asking to.
Theories, formulas, principles, and laws don't make stars shine, robins fly, or mothers feed their young any more than carving the symbols E=MC2 on a piece of refined uranium will make an atomic explosion.
Chemical scum
However great the scientific achievements of the past few hundred years, something primal, something essential and intrinsically human has been squandered along the way. Between Isaac Newton's words, "O God! I think thy thoughts after thee!" and Stephen Hawking's, "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among hundreds of billion of galaxies" a whole dimension that cannot be fitted into test tubes or con formed down to formulas, has been drummed out of nature, demoted from reality to myth. It has been largely dismissed because it could not be reduced to a size and shape amenable to full physical explanation by the human intellect.
In this new calculus, heaven instead of being the throne of the cosmos has been shattered, the pieces parceled out and fragmented, made to appear as nothing but fickle myths scattered around the superstitious halls of an over-religious over anxious, imagination. And the God who once reigned in that heaven, if He is seen to exist at all, now instead cowers, in the minds of many, twice removed from that throne, created by the creatures He once created.
Yet not only has the divine been contorted and demoted to fit the frame that for the past hundred years has outlined the boundaries of all reality. Whole aspects of human existence have been painfully crammed by scientific rationalism and materialism into containers that can no more hold them than a fishnet can whirlpools. Ethics and love, hate and hope transcend not just the Periodic Table of Elements but all 112 other facets of the reality the Table represents. No matter how microscopically fine tuned and balanced the proportions, they cannot fully explain heroism, art, fear, generosity, altruism, hate, hope, and passion, and to pretend that they can or that they ever might, is to be most truly preposterous.
A worldview that limits its view and thus its world, only to rational ism, to materialism, and to scientific atheism, misses all that's beyond them which is so much of who we are, what we hope for, what we aspire to, what we imagine, what we dream and laugh and cry about and love and worship and live and die for.
Chemical scum doesn't mull over loftier worlds, doesn't envision eternity, doesn't write Les Miserables, doesn't weep for the pain of others, doesn't evoke the sublime, doesn't desire immortality, doesn't seek the Good, and doesn't love (either conditionally or unconditionally). That formulas and chemicals are part of it, an important part, of course. That they are all of it, never.
Moral culpability?
There is more to consider. In a purely materialistic, chemical, and mechanical world, how can humans ever be responsible for their actions? If physical laws alone control us and explain us, we're like the wind, or combustion, or any single automatic response dependent on chains of reaction and interaction. Any society based on purely materialistic premises would have to let all its offenders murderers, child-molesters, thieves, rapists go free because we're machines, and who can ascribe moral culpability to a gizmo?
No society, even those engorged on secularism, allows for such moral inculpability, except perhaps among the criminally insane. Every culture, every society, rejects hard-core materialism, believing instead that we're morally responsible beings influenced, not manipulated, by deterministic physical forces beyond our control.
We're animated, obviously, by something more than what we immediately perceive even if we don't know what it is or how it works. Kant argued that the mere act of reason surpasses nature, transcends emotions, trumps urges, and upstages instincts. How, too, could we even think transcendent thoughts if there were not something about us beyond nature, something greater than the sum of our chemicals, something more to our minds than pulsating meat?
Isn't there some principle out there stating that effects can't be greater than their causes? Are Flaubert's Madame Bovary and St. Augustine's Confessions nothing but chemical reactions? Isn't there more to imagination than quanta of neurotransmitters lunging across synaptic clefts? Otherwise, what does the brain do, secrete ideas like the liver does bile?
"An uneasy sense nonetheless prevails," wrote mathematician David Berlinski," it has long prevailed that the vision of a purely physical or material universe is somehow incomplete; it cannot encompass the familiar but inescapable facts of ordinary life."
Stepping outside the system
Scientism and materialism cannot in fact even justify themselves, or their own existence, much less explain everything else's. Austrian mathematician Kurt Godel showed that no system of thought, even scientific, can be legitimized by any thing within the system itself. One has to step outside the system, to view it from a different, grander and broader perspective in order to properly appraise or validate it. In other words, how does one judge X, when X itself is the very criterion used to do the judging? How can humans objectively study that act of thought, the act of thinking, when they have only the act of thought, the act of thinking, to do it?
For years reason has reigned as epistemological king of the Occident, the sole criterion for judging truth, the monarch whose word was law, creed, and dogma. Yet what has been the criterion for judging reason? Reason itself, of course. After all, what else can one use to judge reason but reason? Yet to judge reason by reason is like defining a word by using the word itself in the definition.
The problem for scientism and materialism is, How can one step out side a system, into a wider frame of reference, when the system itself purports to encompass all reality? What happens when we reach the edge of the universe? What's beyond it? If there were a wider frame of reference to judge it from (God perhaps?), then the system itself would not be allencompassing, as scientific materialism often claims to be, or takes for granted that it is.
"In short," wrote scientist Timothy Ferris, "there is not and will never be a complete and comprehensive scientific account of the universe that can be proved valid." In other words, even science will always have to be taken on or by ... faith.
Could it then be that the inherent limits of science itself require faith? But isn't faith, the notion of belief in something unprovable, outside the purview of science, whose whole purpose is to prove things empirically? Isn't the concept of faith a leftover from a distant, mythic, pre-scientific, pre-rationalistic age?
Because science is based on the understanding of matter, science implies (at least hypothetically) that everything should be accessible to experiment and empirical validation. Ideally, there shouldn't be room for faith in a scientific, secular, materialistic universe, yet the very nature of that universe demands it.
What a paradox! The same system that verbally refutes faith inherently implies it. Within the materialistic and scientific worldview, then, there reigns the potential for something beyond it, something outside of it, something that could explain why love is more than endocrine function, why ethics is more than chemical syn thesis and why beauty is more than mathematical proportions . . . some thing, perhaps, divine?
The natural man
Ultimately of course, Christians can't "prove" their faith. Not, at least as Arthur Eddington, with his tele scope, could prove Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Faith is a different kind of knowledge, requiring a different kind of epistemology. So it is that using the tools of science alone for theology is like using socket wrenches on computer software.
Thus, Lord Russell's words, "What science cannot tell us, mankind can not know," present an exceedingly narrow view of reality, a view that the apostle Paul almost 1,900 years earli er answered with words still valid for those who trust that reality stretches beyond where science can go: "But the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned" (I Cor. 2:14).
