In the July/August 2007 issue of Analog appears a wonderful essay by Michael F. Flynn called “De Revolutione Scientiarum in ‘Media Tempestus.’” I don’t think I’m able to supply sufficient superlatives to describe how valuable I think his essay is, so I won’t try. Therein Flynn covers a great deal of ground concerning the state of science in the fourteenth century, and explains why it is that science was born in the hey day of Christendom even though it was stillborn everywhere (and when) else. He also goes a long way toward dispelling the all too common notion that faith and reason (or in this case, science) can’t go hand in hand.
This column is not going to be an “alternate” view—rather, it is a supplemental one. In Flynn’s essay, his Reply to Objection 1 under the heading of Question IV, says: “That faith is opposed to reason is a modern dogma accepted on faith.” I couldn’t agree more, and to supplement Flynn’s point, I’ll treat you to a bit of my own history with respect to faith and science.
When I was a kid, my family attended Grandville Avenue Christian Reformed Church, which was right next to my elementary school, Southwest Christian. So almost everyone I knew was Christian Reformed. Indeed, Grand Rapids, Michigan is something of a Mecca for the Christian Reformed Church. The bulk of the congregation of my church came, at one time or another, from the Netherlands. My mother’s side of the family had been in the US since at least the 1800s, because her father was born here on Christmas day, 1893. My father was born in the Netherlands, coming over on “the Boat” when he was four.
The Christian Reformed Church (hence, CRC) is Calvinist, so much so that both my high school and college alma maters are named after Calvin. But outside of Grand Rapids, it suffices to just tell people I’m Presbyterian if they happen to ask. The CRC is considered a conservative evangelical denomination by most who’ve heard of it. (It is thought to be too conservative by those “progressive” members who have been, in my opinion, systematically destroying it through misplaced good intentions since the 1970s.) Certainly, many of my childhood friends grew up in homes where on Sundays they were not allowed to ride their bikes, or watch TV, or even go swimming. Fortunately at my house, we watched Lassie every Sunday night, rode our bikes regardless of day, and dropped the no-swimming nonsense once our neighbors, who were Catholics, got a swimming pool. I didn’t realize until I was older that the peculiar strain of legalism that ran in my church had nothing to do with Calvin, or even with my denomination’s formal teachings. It was mostly a Dutch thing.
Even before I reached kindergarten, I was into science. I loved robots and stars and rocket ships, but, as for many kids still today, dinosaurs were the coolest! But wasn’t this a problem, growing up a Christian kid in a conservative religious family? Isn’t Christianity, or religion in general, or simply faith, antithetical to science? What did I do when I discovered dinosaurs? How did I reconcile the young Earth of the Bible with all those dinosaur books that not only said dinosaurs lived millions of years ago, but that no people, not even Adam and Eve, were around then?
All I can tell you is that none of those issues were ever much of a concern. Though I am still a conservative evangelical, I am not a Fundamentalist. And the CRC, though conservative, is not a Fundamentalist denomination. Oh, it certainly has its share of capital “C” Creationists in it, the same way it has its share of capital “S” Socialists, or any other capital letter “–ists” you can think of. But these beliefs are no more indicative of the actual teachings of the church than was the no-Sunday-TV rule.
I can recall exactly one time in grade school when a “Creationist” episode occurred. I was in either first or second grade, and students were asked to bring in a favorite book for the teacher to read to the class. I brought in A Book to Begin on Dinosaurs. At the point in the book where it mentions dinosaurs living millions and millions of years ago, the teacher skipped over that part. I don’t think she personally had a problem with the idea, but she didn’t want to open a can of words if even one parent did. Even at that young age, I understood why she did it, and I also remember thinking it was silly, but it didn’t bother me. After all, some kids were raised to believe in a literal six days of creation like others were raised to believe in Santa Claus. (And besides, what really bugged me was that my teacher mispronounced Brontosaurus as Bron-tos-er-us!)
I was as attracted to books as a child as I am now, so after the service while the adults were enjoying coffee and windmill cookies, I routinely visited the church library, even though it was mostly filled with old books even I found boring. However, I did take out a few volumes that dealt with science and religion and how there wasn’t any conflict between them. Granted, some of the books argued points from both scientifically and theologically bogus angles (like treating the creation days in Genesis as referring to umpty-million-year-long sequential epochs), but they still embraced scientific findings with the same reverence scientists do.
Calvin Christian High School had biology as the science requirement for the sophomore class. As in any public school across the land, we were taught about the evolution of living organisms. Creation science existed then (the current Intelligent Design manifestation was still embryonic) but it wasn’t part of our curriculum. Indeed, the only thing my biology teacher said that you wouldn’t have heard in a public school were a few words meant to placate those few parents who were excessively influenced by Fundamentalism.
By the time I got to Calvin College, I was exceptionally well educated in science, both from my schooling and from what I had learned on my own, largely from books I found in my school libraries (and from reading Analog). At Calvin, I studied both psychology and physics, under professors who published in all the same journals that professors from non-church-affiliated colleges and universities do. None of my teachers had to run their class notes past the seminary faculty. And in the laboratory where I spent two summers measuring the thermopower of liquid rare earth elements, the only CRC handbook we consulted was the one published by the Chemical Rubber Company.
One of the last classes I took at Calvin was a Philosophy of Science post-graduate course taught by visiting professor David N. Livingstone. Among the books he’s written is Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Eerdmans, 1987. ISBN 0-8028-0260-5). Though currently out of print, it is a book well worth tracking down and reading. Livingstone presents the history of how evangelical theologians responded to evolutionary theory at the time Darwin first presented it. Far from rejecting it out of hand, “(The) greatest Victorian advocates had promoted a Christian evolutionism that was uncompromisingly scholarly, theologically sensitive, and scientifically informed.” (Pg. 168) Essentially, they had no more difficulty with evolution than they did with heliocentrism.
One of the reasons why my church embraced science the way it did goes all the way back to John Calvin himself. Consider this bit of history.
Back before Galileo and the controversy about whether or not the Earth went around the Sun, some readers of the Bible had a different problem with certain passages in Genesis and what the science of the day was telling them about the sizes of the heavenly bodies. Specifically, Genesis chapter 1, vs. 16 refers to the Sun and the Moon as the “greater lights” as compared to the stars (and it was understood that this included the planets). Yet in the middle of the sixteenth century, astronomers already knew that Jupiter and Saturn were much larger than the Moon.
It was during the sixteenth century that Calvin wrote his commentaries on the Bible. Calvin was perhaps the most brilliant theologian of the Protestant Reformation, extremely influential on those responsible for Western civil society. I was delighted when I discovered what the founder of my branch of Christianity had to say on this early religion-versus-science controversy.
In his commentaries on Genesis, with respect to Genesis 1:16, Calvin says: “I have said, that Moses does not here subtilely descant, as a philosopher, on the secrets of nature, as may be seen in these words . . . Moses makes two great luminaries; but astronomers prove, by conclusive reasons, that the star of Saturn, which, on account of its great distance, appears the least of all, is greater than the moon. Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in the popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labor whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend. Nevertheless, this study is not to be reprobated, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known: it cannot be denied that this art unfolds the admirable wisdom of God.”
As we learned from Flynn’s essay, in Calvin’s day theologians were expected to know natural philosophy. (As one who has heard a few too many ministers confuse “galaxy” with “solar system,” I wish seminarians were still required to take additional science classes.) What I find most telling in the above quote is the modern view Calvin took toward Biblical interpretation on scientific matters, best summed up in the phrase: “The Bible isn’t a science textbook, and shouldn’t be read as one.” I find Calvin’s expressed attitude toward astronomy gratifying, and I especially appreciate his disdain for those “frantic persons” who “reject whatever is unknown to them.”
I’ve used instances from my own life as a kind of case history for how a man can grow up able to easily reconcile modern science with his religion. But I’m certainly not unique in this respect. Several of Analog’s current crop of most frequently appearing authors of both fiction and fact are just like me in this respect.
Having grown up in a milieu that so openly embraced both science and religion, I was taken aback the first time I met someone who honestly thought you couldn’t be a good Christian and a good scientist at the same time. I can see how he’d get that idea if his only exposure to “Christians doing science” was on the local religious channel where he’d been treated to a lecture on how there were no rainbows until after Noah’s flood, or something like that.
But to echo with an addition Stan Schmidt’s words from his May, 2007 editorial: “The vast majority of portrayals of scientists and engineers who are also religious in movies, television, and other popular media are grossly unrealistic stereotypes and caricatures.” (However, Creationist scientists appearing on local religious stations are exactly as depicted.)
