Science is the only way to gain knowledge of reality

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Some people who leave the message (or another Christian cult) move on to reject any concept of God. They are opposed to the very concept of Christianity as a result of their prior bad experiences and become atheists or agnostics. This is quite understandable given the deception, lies and spiritual abuse they experienced while in the message.

The purpose of this series of articles is to present a reasoned response to some of the questions relating to Christianity and God that former ex-message followers have presented to us. We certainly understand their pain and how this has led them to doubt the existence of God and the good news that Jesus Christ brought to the world.

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Questions raised:

• Science is the only way to gain knowledge of reality
• Is Christianity based on myth?
• Christianity represents a God who is unfair
• Did the resurrection take place?
• Is Christianity based on blind faith?

Ex-message followers who are atheists may state the following:

“I reject religions of all kinds as superstitious. Science is the only way of gaining knowledge about reality. It tells us the physical world is all there is.”

Scientism

The claim that science is the only way of gaining knowledge of reality is referred to as scientism - the view that science is the paradigm of truth and rationality. The father of modern scientism was Auguste Comte (1798–1857), an atheist who also began a religion of secular humanism. Comte’s view is also known as positivism.

There are two forms of scientism: strong and weak.

Strong Scientism

Strong scientism implies that something is true if and only if it is a scientific claim that has been successfully tested and used according to appropriate scientific methodology. Within this view, there are no truths apart from scientific truths, and even if there were, there would be no reason to believe them.

Weak Scientism

Weak scientism allows for truths to exist apart from science and grants them some minimal rational status without scientific support. Still, weak scientism implies that science is the most authoritative sector of human learning.

Implications for Christian belief

If either form is true, drastic implications result for theology. If strong scientism is true, then theology is not a cognitive enterprise at all and there is no such thing as theological knowledge. If weak scientism is true, then the conversation between theology and science will be a monologue, with theology listening to science and waiting for its support.

What, then, should we say about scientism, and what should Christians say to those who hold this belief?

Note first that strong scientism is self-refuting. Strong scientism is not itself a proposition of science but a proposition of philosophy about science to the effect that only scientific propositions are true and/or rational. And strong scientism is itself offered as a true, rationally justified position. Propositions that are self-refuting do not just happen to be false; they are necessarily false—it is not possible for them to be true. No future progress will have the slightest effect on making strong scientism more acceptable.

Two more problems count equally against strong and weak scientism. First, scientism does not adequately allow for the task of stating and defending the necessary presuppositions for science itself to be practiced. Thus scientism shows itself to be a foe and not a friend of science. Science cannot be practiced in thin air. Scientism has many assumptions, each has been challenged, and the task of stating and defending these assumptions is a philosophical one. The conclusions of science cannot be more certain than the presuppositions it rests upon and uses to reach those conclusions.

Strong scientism rules out these presuppositions altogether because neither the presuppositions themselves nor their defense are scientific matters. Weak scientism misconstrues its strength because it believes that scientific propositions have greater intellectual authority than those of other fields, such as philosophy. This would mean that the conclusions of science are more certain than the philosophical presuppositions used to justify and reach those conclusions, and that is absurd.

Here are some of the philosophical presuppositions of science:

• the existence of a theory of an independent, external world
• the orderly nature of the external world
• the knowability of the external world
• the existence of truth
• the existence of the laws of logic
• the reliability of our cognitive and sensory faculties to serve as truth gatherers and as a source of justified beliefs in our intellectual environment
• the adequacy of language to describe the world
• the existence of values used in science (e.g., “Test theories fairly and report test results honestly”)

Second, there are true, rational beliefs in fields outside science. Strong scientism does not allow for this fact, and it is therefore to be rejected as an account of our intellectual enterprise.

Moreover, some claims outside science (for instance, “Torturing babies is wrong” or “I am now thinking about science”) are better justified than some believed within science (for example, “Evolution takes place through a series of very small steps”). It is not hard to believe that many of our currently held scientific beliefs will and should be revised or abandoned in a hundred years, but it would be hard to see how the same could be said of the non-scientific propositions just cited. Weak scientism does not account for this fact.

In sum, scientism in both forms is inadequate, and it is important for Christians to integrate science and theology with genuine respect for both.

Questions science can't answer

Here are some questions that science can't answer:

1. Can science explain everything?
2. What are we all here for?
3. What is the point of living?
4. Is there life after death?
5. How did life begin?
6. Where Does Consciousness Come From? What is it?
7. Is reality real?
8. What happened before the Big Bang? What was its cause?

Is physical science – as some people say – omnicompetent? Can it (that is) answer all possible questions? If, for instance, we ask why human beings sometimes behave so appallingly – or how we know that they shouldn't behave so appallingly; or what is the best way to deal with inner conflicts; or whether depression is a physical or a mental trouble – can we look to the physical sciences for an answer? How would we even start to hunt for it there?

This idea that science is an all-purpose oracle dealing with every kind of question is surely very odd. Yet that promise was confidently launched in the 1930s and has proved a very powerful myth. Faith in it seems (perhaps understandably) to be getting even stronger now as more traditional faiths are sidelined. Thus, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey writes confidently in his book, Soul Searching, that the inventors of modern science meant it to provide "a sufficient explanation for everything that is or might be", and it has indeed now managed to do this:

"Two hundred years later this programme for a self-sufficient science has succeeded beyond the dreams of its inventors... The major puzzles of existence have been pulled to pieces [by] all-conquering and consuming scientific rationality. Indeed, the basic laws that govern everything have turned out to be fewer in number and, to those who understand them, simpler and more beautiful than anyone originally guessed. So successful has it been that many scientists would now say, and even fear, that there will soon be little left for them to do."

What can this mean? Talk of basic laws surely means physics; yet this seems wild. Lord Kelvin is well known to have been mistaken when he made that claim, and today's physics – besides being incredibly complicated – is notoriously uncertain how to reconcile its views on two crucial topics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. Physicists, in fact, are not offering any all-purpose key to the universe, nor (of course) ought they to. Serious scientists know that their enquiries are endless; any answers always raise a swarm of new questions.

Neither, of course, do physicists claim to deal with the "major puzzles of existence". In fact, the success of 17th-century physics was due wholly to its founders seeing the need to limit its scope – to separate out physical questions from others that were entangled with them. When Isaac Newton said that he felt he was only a child picking up shells on the shore of an infinite ocean, he did not mean merely that it might be a couple of hundred years before physicists managed to discover and explain everything. He meant that life as a whole is radically mysterious. The sciences deal only with a tiny fragment of it; other kinds of questions need quite different forms of answer.

Humphrey, however, is convinced that something called science has indeed in some way solved the mind-body problem, apparently by proving that "there is no need for a life-force... no need for a human soul to explain the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness". But of course that was never the point.

Our problem here is to understand the relation between these two things – between our inner and outer life, between consciousness and its objects, between the vulnerable self and the world it has to deal with. This is not a physical problem. It is a problem about how to understand and face life as a whole. And it is not about to go away.

The impact of Christianity on science

One reason modern science was so late getting started was that the philosophical views (the conceptual framework) of earlier cultures were inadequate to justify and sustain the necessary preconditions for research. Science was birthed, nurtured, and flourished within the European culture because the predominantly Christian vision of reality invoked all the necessary presuppositions to undergird the scientific enterprise. The following points reflect twelve ways in which the Christian worldview anticipated, shaped, encouraged, justified, and sustained the general character and presuppositions of modern science:

1. The cosmos is a distinct, objective reality. The God of the Bible created the universe. It, therefore, has a distinct existence of its own (apart from the mind and will of the human observer) though it remains contingent on the creative and sustaining power of God. If, as suggested by other cultures and philosophical-religious traditions, the cosmos were somehow less than an objective reality, science would be superfluous. The transcendent God revealed in Scripture is the necessary causal agent of the contingent universe.
2. The laws of nature exhibit order, patterns, and regularity. God's teleological qualities are essential to the nature of science because they make self-consistent scientific theories possible. Since it mirrors the mind of its Creator, the cosmos reflects clarity and coherence.
3. The laws of nature are uniform throughout the physical universe. God’s ordering of the universe, the orderliness and regularities of nature hold throughout the entire universe. This is critical to the scientific enterprise, for the universal nature of these laws guarantees predictability and the possibility of duplicating scientific outcomes. The inductive method and inferential reasoning are dependent on the uniformity of nature’s laws, and that universality corresponds to what one would expect when looking through the lens of the Christian, theistic worldview.
4. The physical cosmos is intelligible. Since God designed the world, the stated: "We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that, most of the time, we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos, rather than an orderly cosmos."
5. The world is good, valuable, and worthy of careful study. The created order testifies to God’s existence, power, wisdom, majesty, righteousness, and glory. Therefore, studying nature reveals truth about God. The world is also the place where human beings are to play out their destiny. The study of nature holds great benefit (medical, technological, economical) for humanity, and as the crown of creation, humankind has a divine imperative to manage or “rule over” nature (Gen. 1:28).
6. Because the world is not divine and therefore not a proper object of worship, it can serve as an object of rational study. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures condemn as idolatrous all belief systems that deify the natural realm (e.g., animism, pantheism, paganism). Christianity’s curbing of pagan superstition regarding nature allowed science to be viewed as an appropriate discipline.
7. Human beings possess the basic ability to discover the universe’s intelligibility. God created human beings with cognitive and sensory faculties capable of discovering the intelligibility of the created order. People can know and discern truth. Humans also enjoy intellectual interaction and are able to check each others’ inferences (making the scientific practice of peer review possible). God, as the designer of both the world and the human mind, has made possible the congruence between the two, thus guaranteeing the validity of truths in mathematics, logic, and language. This correspondence between the physical universe and the human mind is a powerful witness to the truth of divine design as set forth in historic Christianity. Scientist and theologian Alister McGrath explains the significance of this connection: "There is a deep-seated congruence between the rationality present in our minds, and the rationality—the orderedness—which we observe as present in the world. Thus the abstract structures of pure mathematics—a free creation of the human mind—provide important clues to understanding the world."
8. God created human beings with the ability to hunt and gather data and to recognize the importance of testing truth-claims. Human beings are made in God’s image with the necessary intellectual capacities to distinguish truth from falsehood. Scripture implores believers to make such distinction by subjecting assertions to rigorous examination and testing (Acts 17:11; 1 Cor. 14:29; 1 Thess. 5:21). The scientific principle of verification-falsification inherent in the broader scientific method was first used by theological naturalists (early scientists) who were familiar with such biblical principles.
9. The free agency of the Creator makes the empirical method necessary. God’s creative patterns could have taken a variety of pathways. Since human beings have no prior knowledge of those set patterns, the empirical method with its experimental process is necessary. The creation illustrates that God is both a reliable engineer and also a playful artist.
10. God encourages science through his imperative that humans take dominion over nature. God created human beings not only with the ability to study the natural world but also with a command to do just that. Adam’s caring for the garden and naming the animals involved a necessary mastery and classification of nature. God’s imperative to “subdue” nature (Gen. 1:28) justifies and encourages the scientific enterprise.
11. The intellectual virtues necessary to carry out the scientific enterprise are part of God’s moral law in Scripture. In order for science to flourish, it must be practiced in a particular way. Good science involves such intellectual virtues as honesty, integrity, discernment, humility, and courage. These moral qualities are part of God’s intended moral law for humankind. And moral principles need to be grounded in something objective in nature.
12. The devotional basis of pursuing the life of the mind to the glory of God led to the educational advancements that helped usher in the study of science. The Christian worldview values logic and rationality, which find their source in God. Accordingly, Christian civilization spread literacy and founded the great universities of Western Europe, which offered the first formal courses in the natural sciences. Integrating the truth of God found in the book of nature and the book of Scripture was a mandate of the Christian world- and life-view.

Rodney Stark explains the Christian motivation for the scientific enterprise: “In contrast with the dominant religious and philosophical doctrines in the non-Christian world, Christians developed science because they believed it could be done, and should be done.” If the world had been left with only pagan influences, there would have been major impediments to establishing science:

• a cyclical view of time
• astrology and superstition
• deification of nature
• denial of nature
• arbitrary and whimsical nature of the gods

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