Christianity and the Nature of Science

Moreland, J. P.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9781441206664
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

A defense of the scientific view of creationism.

1

The Definition of Science

Philosophy is the only rational knowledge by which both science and nature can be judged. By reducing philosophy to pure science man has … abdicated his right to judge nature….

—Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience

The victory in the Arkansas [creation science] case was hollow, for it was achieved only at the expense of perpetuating and canonizing a false stereotype of what science is and how it works.

—Larry Laudan, “Science at the Bar—Causes for Concern”

From the beginning of the Christian church to the present, Christians have felt it necessary to integrate their theological doctrines with rational beliefs from scientific, philosophical, and other sources. According to the great theologian Saint Augustine (354–430), “We must show our Scriptures not to be in conflict with whatever [our critics] can demonstrate about the nature of things from reliable sources….”[1] Since the believer takes Christianity to be true and rational, and since Christianity makes claims about the way the world is and how it came to be, then in principle it is possible for competing claims to conflict with biblical revelation. Thus, the church has historically found that Augustine’s advice is part of her mission in the world.

Today, things have changed. For a number of reasons (e.g., Kant’s critique of religion and the reduction of theology and revelation to anthropology and religion), believers and unbelievers alike have come to understand religion in general and Christianity in particular such that they cannot, even in principle, conflict with scientific or philosophical claims about the world. Supposedly, something about the very nature of religion isolates it from other disciplines of study, especially science.

The essence of religion, we are told, is to help people’s private, practical, moral lives, to offer meaning and purpose in life. It does not matter if a religion is true, especially when it steps out of its boundaries and makes ontological or etiological claims; what matters is that it work. By contrast, it is supposedly part of the very nature of science that it gives us true and rational information about the world and how it came to be. Thus religion and science, by their very nature, mix as well as oil and water—not at all. The major factors contributing to this cultural myth have been the purported warfare between science and religion, the dazzling success and progress of science, and the alleged naturalism inherent in scientific methodology and scientific laws and theories.

Nowhere has this understanding of the definitions of science and religion been more evident than in the recent controversies about creation science. We are told repeatedly in newspapers, magazines, television talk shows, and scholarly publications that science rules out religion by definition. According to Robert C. Cowen, the natural science editor for the Christian Science Monitor, “It is this many-faceted on-going science story [the theory of evolution] that should be told in public school biology courses. Creationists want those courses to include the possibility of—and ‘scientific’ evidence for—a creator as well. There is no such ‘scientific’ evidence. The concept of a supernatural creator is inherently religious. It has no place in a science class.”[2] In other words, the very definition of science rules out any interface with religion that, as Augustine would have seen it, involves a prima facie conflict and thus requires an attempt to integrate the two into a coherent synthesis.

According to this widespread understanding of the scientific enterprise, science is a tightly circumscribed set of disciplines that, by its very nature, excludes theology, philosophy, and other “nonscientific” fields of investigation. These fields are not relevant to the methodology and practice of science. Neither are they sources of information about the world that should be consulted in assessing some particular truth claim in a given scientific law or theory.

In this chapter we will investigate the claim that science is a distinct, isolated approach to the world wherein claims from other fields, especially philosophy, are irrelevant to scientific methodology and theories. (We will leave to later chapters a discussion of theology and its integration with science.) We will investigate various definitions of science that seek to distinguish between science and nonscience. We will look at philosophy and show how it relates to science. But first, let us take a brief look at definition in general.

The Act of Definition

Why do people define things and seek definitions?[3] Usually a definition is sought in order to eliminate ambiguity and clarify meaning, since the same word can be used in a variety of contexts with different meanings. But sometimes a word is defined to influence attitudes in a (frequently) question-begging, honorific, or degrading way. C. S. Lewis once remarked that the term medieval had become a term of abuse. If something is “medieval” it is outdated and somewhat pedantic. The term scientific is often used in an honorific sense; that is, if something is “scientific” it is good, rational, modern, and if something is not “scientific” it is old fashioned and not something a fully actualized person will believe.

This honorific use of scientific often occurs in discussions about science and Christianity, but we will not examine it further. It is propagandistic. It works by creating positive associations and imagery (after all, who wants to be “unscientific” in this sense?) that cloud issues of substance and bypass rational argument.

More important for our purposes is the use of definition to clarify meaning and eliminate ambiguity. This use is often associated with a definition by “genus and difference,” that is, an attempt to state the essential attributes of the thing defined, attributes that are identical in all examples of that thing. For example, Aristotle defined man as a rational animal. Every example of a human (e.g., Socrates, Alexander, and Plato) is a rational animal. Rational animality is, in this definition, the essence of being human.

Two things should be pointed out about this sort of definition. First, one does not need to know the definition of something before he can recognize clear cases of the thing being defined. Terms like love, justice, and history are virtually impossible to define, but I can recognize cases where my wife, Hope, is showing love to me, examples where justice is aborted, and instances where someone engages in historical research. Similarly, a chemist titrating an acid with a base is doing science, while a fortuneteller consulting a crystal ball is not. Clear cases like these can be recognized without a definition of science. Definitions are most helpful, but in the greatest danger of being question begging, in borderline cases. We will return to this observation about definition, clear cases, and borderline cases later in the chapter.

Second, because it is often virtually impossible to state the essence of something one is trying to define, it is usually wiser to state necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the term in question.[4] Here terms are “defined” according to the following scheme:

P, if and only if, Q

Suppose you were trying to define what it was for something to be triangular. P would be “x is triangular.” Q could be replaced with “x is trilateral” (i.e., “x has three sides”). In other words, even though trilaterality does not really amount to the same property as triangularity, nevertheless, if some object under investigation is to count as having three angles, it is a necessary and sufficient condition for that object that it be trilateral.

In defining science, we will examine various attempts to state necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as science. If such conditions can be stated, then we will have grounds for drawing a clear line of demarcation between science and nonscience.

Finally, questions about the nature of definition in general and attempts to define science in particular are philosophical issues, not scientific issues per se.[5] For the question What is the proper definition of science? is itself a philosophical question about science that assumes a vantage point above science; it is not a question of science. One may need to reflect on specific episodes in the history of science to answer the question. But the question and the reflection required to answer it are philosophical in nature, a point not diminished merely because a scientist may try to define science. When she does so, she is doing philosophy.

Defining Science

Let us begin our search for a definition of science by listing some representative proposals:

John J. O’Dwyer in College Physics: “… [science] seeks to understand the world of reality in terms of basic general principles … involving observation, intuition, experimentation, debate, and reformulation.”[6]

William Keeton in Biological Science: “Science is concerned with the material universe, seeking to discover facts about it and to fit those facts into conceptual schemes, called theories or laws, that will clarify the relations among them. Science must therefore begin with observations of objects or events in the physical universe.”[7]

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary: “3a: Knowledge covering general truths or the operations of general laws esp. as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.”[8]

None of these definitions is adequate. The first and second are offered by scientists and illustrate that scientists today, in contrast to their counterparts in earlier generations, are often ill-equipped to define science, since such a project is philosophical in nature. Consider the first definition. Dwyer begs the question in favor of a realist understanding of science by stating that science seeks to “understand the world of reality.” We will see in chapters 4 and 5 that a number of scientists and philosophers do not think that science necessarily attempts to understand reality. Much of what we would want to count as science involved scientists who merely tried to “save the phenomena,” that is, to provide ways to harmonize, collate, and predict sensory experiences of the world without believing that they were describing the hidden structure of the world of reality.[9] Second, scientists do not always explain things by general principles. Dwyer seems to assume a covering-law model of scientific explanation whereby scientists explain particular facts (this copper wire expands when heated) by subsuming them under general laws (all metal expands when heated; this copper wire is a metal). But he is wrong. A covering-law model of explanation often is used outside of science, and within science it is not necessary. Scientists often explain things by using models or pictures (e.g., treating atoms as billiard balls). They also find it necessary on occasion to explain things by postulating a cosmic singularity, some brute particular state of affairs taken as a given. Postulation of the Big Bang is an example. The conditions in the Big Bang are postulated in an attempt to explain the unfolding of the universe, but the Big Bang is not itself a general principle. Finally, though it is not clear, Dwyer seems to equate reality with what scientists investigate. If so, he clearly begs the question since values, numbers, and so forth may be a part of reality that scientists do not investigate.

What about the second definition? It is also inadequate. For one thing, it is not clear that science investigates only the material universe. Biology, psychology, anthropology, paleontology, and sociology investigate living things, their relationships, their remains, and their artifacts. But it is not obvious that these are merely physical, nor is it clear that scientists investigate only physical aspects of them. To cite one example, psychologists investigate the structures of consciousness and subconsciousness, but a good case can be made that these features of human beings cannot be reduced to material phenomena. Second, one could substitute the word philosophy in Keeton’s definition for the word science. Among the things philosophy attempts is the discovery and conceptualization of facts about the material universe. There may be a difference in how scientists and philosophers go about their work, and there may even be a difference in their aims, but Keeton’s definition does not even begin to alert the reader to such issues. Further, some philosophers believe that philosophy starts with observation, in some sense at least. For example, Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274?) proofs for God’s existence begin with observations of the existence of finite, dependent beings. Finally, we will see in chapter 2 that science almost never begins with observation. Rather, the path to scientific discovery often, though not always, begins with the formulation of a question followed by a tentative guess about a hypothesis that guides the scientist in knowing what is relevant to observe.

The third definition is somewhat better. But as we have already seen, it is wrong to identify the object of scientific knowledge with general truths or laws (historical sciences like geology and some aspects of astronomy focus on particular events, e.g., the extinction of the dinosaurs). But the upshot of this definition is that science must be defined in terms of what is called the scientific method. We will investigate scientific methodology in the next chapter, so we need not comment on this aspect of a definition of science here.

Testing a Court’s Definition of Science

None of the definitions of science so far considered has been adequate. Another attempt to define science is the late Judge William R. Overton’s listing of allegedly essential features of science in his decision against scientific creationism in the famous creation science trial in Little Rock, Arkansas, in December 1981. He wrote: “More precisely, the essential characteristics of science are: 1) It is guided by natural law; 2) It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law; 3) It is testable against the empirical world; 4) Its conclusions are tentative, i.e., are not necessarily the final word; and 5) It is falsifiable.”[10] Let us examine each of these in turn. We begin by combining points 1 and 2 and rewording them to make them even stronger.

NATURALISM AND NATURAL LAW

Something is scientific if and only if it focuses on the natural world, is guided by natural law, and/or explains by reference to natural law. Let us break this down into three different claims and consider first the phrase guided by natural law. What does this mean? If it means “seeks to explain in terms of natural law” then this second condition reduces to the third one (“explains by reference to natural law”), and we will consider this later. Perhaps it means “motivated by a desire to find a natural explanation.” If so, then this is clearly not a necessary or sufficient condition for something to count as science. For example, some philosophers who are not theists may be motivated to find a natural (i.e., nonsupernatural) explanation of the existence and nature of morality, but they are not doing science.

In contrast, a large number of men in the history of science did science from a motivation to please God and think his thoughts after him. Further, some of them have practiced science with the belief that no natural explanation of a particular phenomenon was available. For example, the great botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) founded modern taxonomy in 1735 with his work Systema Naturae. Linnaeus, a creationist, was motivated and guided by his belief that no natural explanation was available for the existence and nature of living organisms. Nevertheless, his work was clearly an example of science.

It should be clear that people can have a variety of motivations for carrying on their work, and their private motivat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Definition of Science
• 2. Scientific Methodology
• 3. The Limits of Science
• 4. Scientific Realism
• 5. Alternatives to Scientific Realism
• 6. The Scientific Status of Creationism
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover