THE THEIST AND SCIENCE
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Along with others, the German physicist Volker Braun has insisted that the theist cannot be open to the facts because he is already committed to his own beliefs:
∑ A scientist is a man who changes his beliefs according to reality; a theist is a man who changes reality to match his beliefs.
However, we all approach the data with our own particular perspective or lens. Even the scientist sees the data through their own paradigms or lens. In his highly regarded, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn wrote:
∑ Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
∑ Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change. And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.
This was also true for me. My “traditional rules” had been torn apart by decades of depression and panic attacks. However, I had an ecstatic encounter with God while bleeding to death because of a chainsaw injury. As a result, I committed myself to seek the truth about God and pledged to examine all paths until I found it. This brought me to Jesus
A series of miraculous events had led me to Jesus’ door – the last place that this Jew had ever dreamed of going. However, skepticism forbade me from truly entering for a number of years. However, gradually I became convinced as a comprehensive and evidentially-based paradigm was taking form to become my lens and guiding paradigm.
There is nothing illegitimate about approaching the data with a paradigm or lens. Whenever I ride my bicycle, I wear my eyeglasses. Even though they are artificial and come between me and the data of pedestrians crossing the street and taxi doors swinging open in my path, my eyeglasses enable me to see and interpret the data more accurately. A sound worldview can do the same thing. I used to break up the world into “quality people” and “losers.” Although I wanted to belong to the first category, in my heart I knew I was a “loser.” Subsequently, the Bible helped me to understand that we are all losers who need a Redeemer. This shift in worldview helped me to better understand others and, consequently, to predict their actions.
The important question is not whether or not to set a pair of glasses or paradigm between ourselves and the data, but whether our lens allows us to see reality more accurately. Many Christians testify that the truth of the Bible and God working within them has given them the freedom (John 8:31-32) to truly understand their lives and those of others.
Biographer Jana Tull Steele reports of Duke Ellington:
∑ He used to say that he had three educations: one from school, one at the pool hall, and one from the Bible. Without the latter, he said, you can’t understand what you learned from the other two places. (Duke Ellington)
Similarly, C.S. Lewis wrote:
∑ I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun—not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
This is then the essential question: “Does the Biblical lens promote sight or blindness?” Does Christ enable us to do science or does this faith impede science? The historical testimony in favor of the Christian role in the development of science is overwhelming. British scientist Robert Clark summed it up this way:
∑ However we may interpret the fact, scientific development has only occurred in Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations—Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, India, Rome, Persia, China and so on—science developed to a certain point and then stopped. It is easy to argue speculatively that, perhaps, science might have been able to develop in the absence of Christianity, but in fact, it never did. And no wonder. For the non-Christian world believed that there was something ethically wrong about science. In Greece, this conviction was enshrined in the legend of Prometheus, the fire-bearer and prototype scientist who stole fire from heaven, thus incurring the wrath of the gods. (Christian Belief and Science, quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, 14)
The Christian paradigm is a light that illuminates the landscape. Consequently, I do not stumble as I once had.
THE DALAI LAMA, SINCERITY, FORGIVENESS, AND COMPASSION
Are our beliefs irrelevant to the way we live our lives, or is belief and life intimately connected? The Dalai Lama had generously and popularly stated
∑ It does not matter whether you are a theist or atheist, what matters is sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion.
Certainly, “sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion” are key. However, it doesn’t seem that our beliefs can easily be detached from the way we live our lives. I have known numerous atheists, some intimately. One in particular had been so compassionate that he would do anything for anyone. When we thought of virtue, we thought of him. However, with the passage of the years, he became quite jaded and anti-social. I suspect that he still likes to give to others. However, his beliefs now take him in another direction.
Time is the final judge. Time shows us that our beliefs and experiences will eventually overcome our natural compassionate endowment. College students march with banners reading, “Make Peace not War.” They want to open the boarders and embrace refugees and the oppressed. However, time often reveals that compassion turns into bitterness, in the same way that love often screams for divorce after just a few years.
The atheist Bertrand Russell had been convinced that his atheistic worldview provided the tools he needed to live a fulfilling life. However, years later he confessed:
∑ I wrote with passion and force because I really thought I had a gospel. Now I am cynical about the gospel because it won’t stand the test of life.
Cynicism will not help us live a life of “sincerity, forgiveness, and compassion.” Instead, it will sound a retreat from all of our ideals. However, there are other beliefs that enable us continue the battle. When we know that we are loved by God, His marching orders become a welcome battle cry:
∑ Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:4-8)
This is a hope that will carry us beyond death, a hope worth any sacrifice.
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