Control the Definitions, Control the Debate

“We find ourselves mildly bemused by those benighted people who respect science but refuse to bow down to its unassailable authority.”

Okay, you won’t find that exact quote from Scientific American’s October editorial, “Let There Be Light.” But you’ll find that tone.

The editors say, “Science and faith can coexist happily as long as neither tries to take on the functions of the other.” Where is that dividing line? “Scientific research deals in what is measurable and definable,” they say, and “it cannot begin to study what might lie beyond the physical realm or to offer a comprehensive moral philosophy.”

With the theory of evolution being applied to why we have a longing for God and why we have the particular moral framework we have, I’d say that science has crossed that line time and again. Indeed, when they reach the end of their editorial, they refer to “the fault line between science and religion” as “illusory.” So, scientists like Francis Collins who have written books expressing their Christian belief “are not expressing a strictly scientific perspective,” the editors say. “Rather, they are struggling, as people always have, to reconcile their knowledge of a dispassionate universe with a heartfelt conviction in a more meaningful design.”

Read the carefully-chosen words of that last line again: it’s a “struggle” when you have to “reconcile” knowledge and heartfelt conviction. From the realm of “knowledge” we see a “dispassionate universe”—cold, meaningless, and unmindful of human existence. If one wants “a more meaningful design” to the universe, one has to stir it up with “heartfelt conviction.”

These are loaded words that express a strong bias: a meaningless view of the world equals “science” equals “knowledge.”

C.S. Lewis addressed this issue nearly sixty years ago in his important little book, The Abolition of Man, where he complained that our world is removing concepts of beauty and virtue and loyalty from the realm of what is objective and instead assigning the concepts to the wooly world of what is merely subjective. As a result, we a building “men without chests”--people without the moral backbone to sustain civil societies.

But it doesn’t take “heartfelt conviction” to fill the world with purpose. Instead, it just involves a decision to quit suppressing the evidence. Paul wrote in Romans 1:19-20 that people “suppress the truth.” Indeed, “what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. From the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse.”

In Chapter Five of my new book, The Anchor Course, I outline five realities about the natural world that will open our eyes to God once stop ignoring them. Attend Hillcrest during our current sermon series and receive a free copy (one per household), or order online.