Faith and Science
FAITH AND SCIENCE
Science and Religion
John 7:17; Philippians 4:8; 1 Thessalonians 5:21
If possible we must work our way through this scientific climate to God. We now see a little more clearly the relationship between science and religion. Science has reference to that which can be weighed and measured, and religion to that which can be evaluated; the one has reference to the quantitative aspects of life, and the other to the qualitative.
Science comes to a mother’s tear and defines it in terms of its physical structure: so much water, so much mucus, so much salt. But is that an adequate definition of a mother’s tear? Hardly, says religion, for there are ideas, emotions, values, meanings using the physical structure of the tear. Religion would evaluate those imponderables. Thus it would take the answer of both science and religion to give an adequate definition of a mother’s tear.
True. But the snag is this: You can verify that which can be weighed and measured; can you verify values? Why not? You can put values into life to see what life will do with them. You can test them by experiment. If the values are real, life will approve them and back them; but if they are not real, they will wither and not be able to stand up to life; the universe will not approve them. When you live by them, you will fight a losing battle; they will let you down.
Abundant Living
(Week 2, Monday)
The Five Steps of Science
Romans 2:19-20, 14:10; Galatians 6:7-9
Can we take the same steps in verifying our knowledge of God as science takes in verifying its knowledge of things that can be weighed and measured? There are five steps in the scientific method: (1) the statement of the problem; (2) pick out of the most likely hypothesis that will meet that problem; (3) experiment with that hypothesis; (4) verify the hypothesis on a wide scale; (5) simply and humbly share verified results.
Can we take this fivefold method and apply it to the realm of value? First, state the problem. The problem is how to live in a universe of this kind, and to live well. It is a moral universe, and it seems to take sides on moral questions. In this moral universe we are free to choose, but not free to choose the results of our choosing; they are in hands other than ours. This moral universe is not something that we create out of our taboos and rules; it is something we discover; it is a “given.” . . .
Just as Newton did not pass the law of gravity, but discovered it; so we do not pass the moral laws written in the constitution of things; we discover them. And we must come to terms with these moral laws, just as we must come to terms with the law of gravity. If not, we shall be broken. We do not break these moral laws; they break us. If we run afoul of them, they will throw us back, bleeding, broken, and blighted.
Abundant Living
(Week 2, Tuesday)
God Guides through Opening Providences and the Natural Order
1 Corinthians 2:9; 12:8; 2 Corinthians 2:12; Revelation 3:8
God guides through natural law and its discoveries through science. We have a primary faith in revelation and a secondary faith in science. But in a sense, science is revelation: God speaking to us through the natural order. That natural order is God’s order. It is dependable because God is dependable. God works by law and order rather than by whim and notion and fancy. There was a time when we tried to put God in the unexplained gaps in nature; we said God must be there, for these gaps are mysterious and unexplainable. But when science began to fill up these gaps, God was pushed out. To have relegated God to those gaps was a mistake, for God reveals the divine self in the very law and order and the explainable facts of nature, and not merely in the unexplainable and the mysterious. The law and order express God far more than the unexplainable and mysterious. For this very law and order is of God. God is in it, is the author of it, works through it, but is not strait-jacketed by it. For this law and order is full of surprises and of freedoms. A closed system of nature is now unscientific. God guides through science. Accept that fact.
Abundant Living
(Week 37, Friday)
God Guides through Opening Opportunities
Acts 16:9-10; 1 Corinthians 16:8-9
Perhaps you can apply the fourfold method of science in getting guidance through an opening need or providence: first, study of the problem; second, unconscious incubation; third, emergence of the solution; fourth, verification by experimentation. Study of the problem means to gather all the information possible. Unconscious incubation means that you may get guidance through the subconscious mind. “He gives his beloved sleep” (Ps 127:2) is more correctly translated, we are told, “He gives unto his beloved in sleep.” God speaks through the subconscious in sleep. You awaken in the morning and all is clear. The emergence of the solution may come through conscious or subconscious processes. When it does come, try it out, verification by experiment. If life approves of it, go on with it. You will find that life will approve only what Life approves.
The Way
(Week 41, Wednesday)
The Two Approaches to Life
Colossians 1:15-17
The discoveries of science have done nothing but corroborate Christ. For his laws are written into the nature of reality, and all the discoveries of science are but the uncovering of those laws. The Christian can stand assured and watch with breathless interest the discoveries of science, knowing that those discoveries—if they go far enough—will lead us to the feet of Christ. The God of nature and the God of grace are not two Gods; they are one God, and that one God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The laws of our universe, the laws of our minds, and the laws of our bodies are turning out to be the laws of Christ.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 30, Sunday)
According to the Nature of Things
John 20:26-29
The more science has grown, the more the Christian faith, rightly conceived, has grown. . . .
The discovery of the laws of being, underlying nature and human nature, is revealing the fact that these laws are the same laws written in the teaching of Jesus. When Jesus finished the Sermon on the Mount, the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as “one who had authority” (literally, “according to the nature of things”; Matt 7:29). He was teaching something not imposed on life, but exposed from the very heart of life. So his teaching was supernatural naturalism; it was the revealing of supernatural laws embedded in the natural. The Christian faith is therefore not an attempt to escape the natural order, or to work above that order or in spite of it; it is an attempt to work in and through the natural order and to redeem it and make it the medium of revelation.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 15, Monday)
Real Science Brings Faith
Romans 15:18-21
The facts are driving us to Christ. . . . We are on the verge of a great era of faith, and that era will be brought in by deeper and deeper explorations into the material. “Raise the stone, and thou shalt find me; cleave the wood there am I” (Henry Van Dyke, “The Toiling of Felix,” [1900], part 1, prelude). And yes, look into the constitution of your being; you will find my laws written there.
I am not afraid of science being too scientific; I’m afraid it won’t be scientific enough. Half-baked science brings doubt; real science brings faith.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 15, Thursday)
First Commandment: Love
Matthew 5:43-36
Never was love so complete in its sweep and so deep in its depths as here defined in a few swift words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Note that the total person is to love God totally: “with all your heart”—the affectional nature; “with all our soul”—the volitional, deciding nature; “with all your mind”—the intellectual nature; “with all your strength”—the physical nature. The whole person is to love God wholly—no part left out.
Note that Jesus put in “with all your mind.” It was not in the quotation from Deuteronomy 6:5. That addition was important. It annexed the whole world of science, philosophy, and psychology in a single phrase. Had that phrase been left out, Christianity would have been on the edges of the modern world looking wistfully in, but not at home. Now it is at home in the world of science and investigation. When I was told by one of the atomic scientists at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that more people go to church in Oak Ridge than any other place in America, I asked, “Why, are you frightened?” “No,” he replied, “not frightened, but reverent. We are in the presence of a great mystery. It drives us to our knees.” These people knew that love must control that energy or we perish, literally perish. The word of Jesus stood authoritative at the place of the greatest discovery of the mind of humanity: atomic energy. One of those scientists at Oak Ridge became a clergyperson, having seen the necessity of the Christian faith, with its emphasis on love, as the controlling force in an age of atomic energy. “You shall love the Lord your God . . . with all your mind” is an up-to-the-minute imperative.
Christian Maturity
(Week 15, Monday)
“This” and Not “That”
1 John 3:16; 4:10
Philosophy is something imposed on life, rather than something exposed out of life. Science, however, is something exposed out of life; it is a revelation of the facts and laws underlying nature. . . . It is true that there are limitations of science, but that lack will not be supplied by philosophy; it will be supplied by a revelation of the laws underlying the world of the spirit. In other words, it will be supplied by incarnation and only by incarnation.
Christian Maturity
(Week 18, Monday)
You Do Not Need Any Facts
Luke 18:10-14
Thomas Huxley reportedly once wrote to Charles Kingsley: “Science seems to me to teach in unmistakable terms the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Science says: Sit down before the facts as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, be willing to be led wherever nature will lead you, or you will know nothing.” Scientists have to be humble, or they will never be scientists. If they come to nature proud, ready to force their views on nature and bend it to their assumptions, then nature will close up. . . .
Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631), Italian astronomer, in order to avoid admitting his error in challenging the discovery of Jupiter’s moons, refused to look through a telescope throughout the last twenty-one years of his life. Pride closed the heavens to him and shut him off from accomplishing his life work. He would not receive the kingdom of fact as a little child, and so he could not enter it. The science of astronomy swept on without him and left him isolated by pride.
So Jesus and science both demand the same thing; they both demand self-surrender, one to the Person who is the truth, the other to the facts. Pride blocks access to both.
Christian Maturity
(Week 40, Wednesday)
A Sign? The Word Became Flesh
1 Corinthians 1:22-24
The intellectual climate of the world is no longer philosophical, it is scientific. India has been the home of philosophy, and yet the students are deserting courses on philosophy and turning to science. Philosophy is based on speculations; science is based on specifications. The Christian faith is based on the specific, on the Word become flesh. So it is at home in the world of science. It is its native air. It brings the spiritual out of the hazy into the happenings, out of mystery into mastery.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 17, Thursday)
A Prescription for Health: The Nine Beatitudes
Psalm 38:3-8
We are emphasizing the will to be well. . . .
But the will to health must not be the willing of the will only; it must be the willing of the total person. There are two extremes in regard to finding of health: one to depend on science alone, the other to depend on miracle alone. Both of these bring disappointment. There is a third way, the way that obeys the laws of health on the one hand and depends on the resources of God on the other. These are the alternate beats of the healthy Christian heart.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 42, Thursday)