Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in A Postmodern World
Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in A Postmodern World
Maintaining Scientific and Christian Truths in A Postmodern World
D. A. Carson
Introduction
latter say to the former, ‘and so our task is to expose your blind-
spots, and teach you the proper way to think.’
Since both Christian confessionalism and science are facing a
similar onslaught, it is not too surprising that we should be drawn
together in a common defence. For both have something in
common: we both think there is such a thing as culture-transcending
truth, and that we human beings have some access to it.1 For those
who are both scientists and Christians, it is scarcely surprising that
some should wonder if it might be profitable to pool our resources
as we engage in this debate.
In this chapter my aims are modest. I propose to offer a
summary of the challenge, a survey of responses, and a pair of
suggestions.
. Although this is not the place to probe the issue, I suspect that this shared
belief in the existence of culture-transcending truth has something to do
with the fact that on many university campuses of the Western world
there is now a much higher percentage of Christians among lecturers and
students who are connected with the ‘hard’ sciences, or sometimes with
mathematics and business, than among lecturers and students who are
connected with the arts and the social sciences. More commonly, I think,
scientists are inclined to hold that their own disciplines, and perhaps some
other hard sciences, deal with truth, but that anything outside such
domains have a much looser connection to truth. In short, many scientists
are modernist with regard to their own disciplines, and postmodernist
elsewhere.
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and methods, most of them were still operating within the heritage
of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Science itself, as Roger Trigg
points out in this volume, was founded on theology – in particular,
on the idea that God is a law-giver who has guaranteed order and
predictability in the world he created. But as more and more
moderns, not least in the domain of science, abandoned the
Judaeo-Christian tradition and adopted some form of philosoph-
ical naturalism, the God whose omniscience was the reservoir of
all knowledge was lost to view. There was no final arbiter, no
anchor, no stable reference point. Thus late modernist epistemol-
ogy, by various routes, became unstable, and sired a bastard we call
postmodernism. I choose the term ‘bastard’ advisedly: my point is
that on this reading, modernist epistemology is in fact the progen-
itor of postmodern epistemology, even if the latter is so unlike his
father that he wants to deny family likeness and commit patricide.
The implication of this analogy, of course, is that thoughtful
Christians should not think of themselves as either modernists or
postmoderns in their epistemology. Both systems are far too
unstable, far too anthropocentric – idolatrously so.
In the shift from modernism to postmodernism, the relation-
ships between science and confessional Christianity have been
undergoing some changes as well. One may usefully distinguish
two opposed tendencies in late modernism: imperialism and
(early) perspectivalism. Under imperialism, either science tried to
control religion or religion tried to control science. One finds the
former, for instance, in the hard-edged philosophical naturalism of
Richard Dawkins at Oxford, or in Peter Singer at Princeton.
Sometimes the stance adopted by science is an ill-defined mysti-
cism that is nonetheless a materialistic scientism, in which nature
becomes god, the corpus of empirical knowledge its sacred
deposit, the scientists priests and priestesses, and the scientific
method almost sacramental religious rites.6 The same imperialism
shows up when we are told that science deals with fact, while reli-
gion is about ‘faith’ – where ‘faith’ has been implicitly defined to
. Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be
(New York: Carroll & Graf, ).
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. The Golem: What you Should Know about Science (nd ed.; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ).
. As an aside: since my wife has been battling cancer. I could not
estimate the number of well-meaning people who have contacted us to
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the facts of the central revelation; science holds itself above the
same waters of relativism by insisting that its methods and results
transcend the relativism of social construction. Both are there-
fore making authority claims inimical to a generation brought up
to be suspicious of ‘totalization’.
One does not want to exaggerate the influence of postmodern-
ism in our culture. There are plenty of modernists around who
engage in intellectual combat with postmoderns. Some of the roots
of postmodernism are withering: in France, for instance, decon-
struction is increasingly viewed as passé. But that is a bit different
from saying that postmodernism is passé. Critical realism may have
a respected place in some intellectual circles, but postmodernism is
still preceived to be the innovator, the leading edge, of cultural
advancement, especially in the Anglo world. And even if it dissi-
pates faster than I think it will, it is leaving in its wake a very large
swathe of Western populations who are suspicious of all truth
claims, including those of science and of confessional Christianity.
Its impact on science, science funding, the vision of desirable
careers, superstition in the culture – doubtless these are things
many of you who attend this conference know more about than
I. The impact on confessional Christianity is something I have
made an academic and professional interest for about a decade.18
I shall restrict myself to two observations. () In the domain of
evangelism, not least university evangelism, the hardest thing to
get across these days is the notion of sin. To talk about sin is to
say that certain behaviours and attitudes and beliefs are wrong,
and that is the one thing postmodernism does not permit us to
do. The one heresy postmodernism condemns is the belief that
there is heresy; the one immoral act is the articulation of the view
that there are immoral acts. But unless people adopt biblical views
on sin, transgression, rebellion, trespass, guilt and shame, it is vir-
tually impossible to articulate faithfully the good news of Jesus
Christ. If we cannot agree on what the problem is, we most cer-
tainly cannot agree on what the solution is. () Within the church,
not least in home Bible studies and discussion groups and the
A survey of responses
. See especially discussions in Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence:
Years of Western Cultural Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, ).
. Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological
Era (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, ).
. See my review chapter in Millard J. Erickson, Paul Kjoss Helseth and
Justin Taylor (eds.), Modern Reformation. Reclaiming the Center: Confonting
Evangelical Accommodation in Postmodern Times (Wheaton: Crossway, ),
pp. –.
. Ch. , ‘Theology and Science after the Demise of Realism’.
. I might mention one point. In his discussion of scientific method, Grenz
marshalls quotations from scientists who disagree as to the exact nature
of the so-called scientific method, to draw the conclusion that there is no
such thing, in order to justify the conclusion that there is no proper
grounding of ‘truth’ in scientific method since there is no such thing as a
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stable scientific method. The most reflective of scientists have always rec-
ognized the limitations of ‘scientific method’ and the adaptations that are
made to particular ‘methods’ to accommodate each discipline, not to
mention the interplay between controlled experiment, scientific theory
and tests of theory (see, e.g., David Lindley, The End of Physics: The Myth of
a Unified Theory (New York: Basic Books, ). But Grenz, like all post-
modernists, takes any admission of weakness or incompleteness to be a
confession that there really is no such thing as objective truth in scientific
discipline.
. Grenz, Renewing the Center, p. .
. London: George Allen & Unwin, .
. Grenz, Renewing the Center, p. .
. Ibid.
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way; he has simply refused to answer the first question and has
asked an alternative question, namely, ‘How can a postfounda-
tionalist theological method lead to statements about a world
beyond our formulations?’ And his answer to that question,
influenced by Pannenberg, says, in effect, that the only kind of
realism of which we can speak is ‘eschatological realism’, with
reference to the universe as it will be. There are several muddled
confusions here, too, but for the moment I shall have to pass
them by.30
So confessional Christianity and science, in Grenz’s view, are
both in the same hopper, precisely because postmodern epistem-
ology governs both. Yet so far as the academic world is concerned,
in some ways they have been forced into this hopper from
different sides. Before widespread appeal to postmodern epistem-
ology, science was widely thought to be dealing with facts and
truth (and most scientists still think that today), while religion was
widely thought to be dealing with subjective experiences of the
numinous, with minimal truth content. That’s not how confes-
sional Christians saw things, of course, but it was how science and
Christianity were widely perceived in the university world. But now
. In fairness, Grenz then goes on to say that Christian theologians have
some similarities to the so-called critical realists, in that we maintain ‘a
certain undeniable givenness to the universe’ (p. ). But what the right
hand gives, the left hand takes away, for Grenz argues that this givenness is
‘not that of a static actuality existing outside of, and co-temporally with,
our socially and linguistically constructed reality. It is not the objectivity of
what some might call “the world as it is.” Rather, seen through the lenses
of the gospel, the objectivity set forth in the biblical narrative is the objec-
tivity of the world as God wills it, as is suggested in the petition of the
Lord’s Prayer, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. :)’
(p. ). And thus Grenz segues into eschatology. But the confusion of
categories is palpable. How does Grenz now know what the eschatological
reality will be? If he replies, ‘By revelation,’ then what stops us from
knowing, in measure, what the world now is, by revelation? In any case, the
Bible does not encourage us to think that the eschatological world is more
real than the present one, but that it is sinless.
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We are critical realists, which means that we believe that there is a real
world out there where it is possible to know and know truly (hence,
. Os Guinness, Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don’t Think and What
To Do About It (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, ), pp. , .
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‘realism’), but we also believe that our theories and hypotheses about
that world, and our religious presuppositions and beliefs about reality,
color and shape our capacity to know the world (hence, ‘critical
realism’).32
A pair of suggestions
. I have discussed some of them in The Gagging of God – including the one
described in the following lines.
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speaks of God’s wrath; and so on. Still, his appeal to John :
does answer the question; he has in some measure answered the
question correctly. He does not think that John : describes the
virgin birth, or reflects on the sex life of sea turtles. His choice of
John : shows that he understands it well enough as an appro-
priate answer to the question that was put to him. We might say,
then, that the lad’s answer is positioned fairly high up in the top
right-hand quadrant of the graph, and only five units removed
from the y-axis. Doubtless his knowledge of John : still leaves a
great deal to be desired.
By the time he has graduated with a degree in the classics and
another in theology, however, his position on the graph is
perhaps twenty-five units from the y-axis (he is years of age),
and much closer to the x-axis. After completing a doctoral dis-
sertation on the Fourth Gospel’s understanding of the love of
God against the Jewish background, the graph of his increase in
knowledge is still heading in the same general direction. In fact,
the graph is tracing out an asymptotic approach to the x-axis.
Even fifty billion years into eternity (if we may speak of eternity
in the categories of time), the graph that represents the proxim-
ity of his knowledge to the actual reality never touches the
x-axis, because omniscience is an incommunicable attribute of
God. It is simply not available to finite beings. But to argue that
finite beings therefore cannot truly know anything is decidedly
unhelpful. That conclusion is true only if one initially assumes that
the only meaningful way of speaking of ‘knowledge’ and ‘objective truth’
occurs when the knowledge belongs to Omniscience, when the truth is what
God alone knows it to be. Certainly in some discussions that is a
useful point to make. But to run from that truism to the com-
monly assumed antithesis adopted by postmodernists is a leap
too far: either we can know something absolutely and omnisciently, or we
must give up claims to knowledge of objective truth. For finite human
beings (the ‘we’ in the antithesis) can know some things truly,
even if partially. To appeal to the standards of omniscience to
eliminate the possibility of true but partial knowledge among
finite and fallen beings made in his image is to erect a false stan-
dard. To argue that either we can know something absolutely and
omnisciently, or we must accept the status of all human know-
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Concluding reflections
© D. A. Carson,
. One wonders if the events of / will do more to overturn the preten-
sions of postmodern arrogance than all the books that have been written
since the s. For suddenly people are willing to talk about ‘evil’ again
(even if some of the talk is not very probing or realistic).
. This chapter was first published in Science and Christian Belief (),
pp. –.