How Should We Then Live Part 6: The Scientific Age (II)

This brings us back to the beginning of the episode and the questions surrounding Galileo, Copernicus and others. Schaeffer is adamant that the divide is not between science and religion but between Biblical science and Aristotelianism which had been embraced by the Roman Catholic Church.

First, the science-religion debate is I think a false one. That's an oft-heard statement in Evangelical circles but they mean something very different by it. They're arguing for integration and a unified theory. I'm arguing the opposite.

Science can only pursue a limited spectrum of questions and revelation which unveils eternal mysteries is interacted with on a level quite different from the empiricist epistemology necessary to pursue scientific inquiry. Science is dealing with very different questions and the danger in our day is the absolutising of science and using it as the basis to form a unified theory. Schaeffer is right in calling it the new religion of our day and yet I don't find his so-called Biblical approach to be much better and his quest to present science as part of a unified theory or 'Biblical Worldview' presents a viable danger, not to science but to the integrity of the Scriptures. Why? Because again he falls into an epistemological advocacy that puts the Scriptures and their uniqueness, their divine-ness (as it were) into a small and ultimately self-limiting and self-destructive box. The Bible and its doctrines are turned into a data set that's dissected, picked apart and then woven together with the world's knowledge, the knowledge gleaned from a fallen and temporal world. This theological method ultimately undermines, subverts and destroys the Bible and its message.

But first, is he right about Galileo or is this merely an extension of his already flawed and questionable narrative concerning the Rome and the Renaissance?

Fusing Biblical concepts, Aristotelian thought, and tradition into dogmatic forms, Roman Catholic Scholasticism was able through the tool of coherence to offer a philosophical rationale for its system. It was unified (a worldview) and thus not easily subject to criticism or modification. That's the danger in relying on coherence, the model has the potential to stand or fall as a unity.

The real issue was not Galileo's questioning of Aristotle but rather his presumption to question Church dogma. The clash with Aristotelian concepts would be but a symptom of a more fundamental problem, one that Inquisitors and high ranking prelates were able to discern right away. Additionally they often appealed to Scripture (not Aristotle) to refute Galileo. There's an irony in their almost Fundamentalist literalism with regard to phenomenological language and so at that point there are also hermeneutical issues at work in the Galileo debate. It's actually quite complicated and those who simply cast the debate as science vs. religion miss the point as does Schaeffer who wishes to cast the debate as genuine science vs. Aristotelianism. This too fails to give an honest account of the affair but it does allow Schaeffer to perpetuate his narrative.

Pascal is noted for his scientific work but philosophically he's not on the same page as Schaeffer. Rather his views have often been described as fideistic, views which do not find harmony between the pursuits of scientific knowledge and the knowledge of the Divine, views which at times are very close to my own. Newton, Bacon and the other men of that period were complicated figures and their approaches were not as scientific as some might wish, nor were they Biblical. There was a lot of dabbling in the occult, the esoteric and in the pursuit of things like magic and alchemy. The science of the period was in part facilitated and even driven by the epistemological chaos that was a result of the Reformation and the fragmentation of Catholic Christendom. Their motivations were a little different than how they're presented by Schaeffer. The god they assumed was not always congruous with the God revealed in Scripture. Did the Reformation spur the growth of science as an outworking of Reformation principles? Perhaps, but it also incited the exploration due to the fact that the social consensus, yea the unified theory of the Middle Ages had been destroyed resulting in social chaos and war. Epistemology was suddenly a wide-open field and men were seeking answers and thus a way to re-unite and re-form the social consensus on new grounds.

I was a little surprised to see him emphasize one such as Francis Bacon. His understanding of Christianity is certainly in doubt. Clouded by occultic and heretical thought, one is left to question just how 'Biblical' his approach and methods could possibly be. Bacon did not absolutise his inductivism and yet the reductionist approach cannot but lead to the metaphysical being rendered irrelevant. Indeed such approaches are certain to wreak havoc when applied to revelation, to the Scriptures and the doctrines they teach. Bacon like both Ockham and Aquinas acknowledged there are some truths that transcend empirical investigation and categories and yet his descendants wouldn't retain that understanding. The same occurred in the theological realm as thinkers mistakenly wed their concepts of logic and epistemology to the doctrine of God and tied His hands (so to speak) in terms of revelation.

Inductivism, the proto-scientific methodology advocated by Bacon is insufficient to deal with questions of causality especially when causality is rooted in metaphysics. As Christians we have a metaphysical or spiritual understanding of how the world works. This does not mean that nature does not have laws which function in machine-like fashion and yet the questions of why are just as important as the how. Causality, meaning and (more importantly when interacting with humans), the moral implications of such actions cannot be divorced from empirical observation and mechanistic processes. Inductivism is wholly incapable of dealing with or accounting for the metaphysics which undergird reality. I don't believe there's a philosophical system or epistemology which can. These are questions of faith and the testimony of the Spirit. It's one thing to deny the possibility and yet affirm the reality. It's another to argue a system and insist there's a method that can answer these questions. Once that commitment is made, one must travel down that road, but it doesn't lead to where they think it's going.

Bacon (and Schaeffer) might be willing to assent to some of these statements. They would not lay more on scientific inquiry than it is capable of accommodating.

And yet if Schaeffer understood this he wouldn't have made the lame (but quite common) appeal to the airplane or some other technological wonder and argue that its engineers were confident in constants and did not embrace relativism. Either empiricism is universal or it's not and if it's not then the airplane analogy fails because it means there are questions that transcend the inductivist logic of scientific inquiry. Either way, Schaeffer and those who employ similar arguments are in a trap. Affirm the universality of empiricism and watch metaphysics begin to collapse or acknowledge that there are realms of knowledge that transcend its capabilities and lose the simplistic illustration and its absolutist claims, leaving them with some type of relativism. I would argue the questions need to be framed differently.

For my part I am not bothered by a breakdown in epistemology. To me it serves a purpose and drives men to the necessity of revelation to escape the inescapable alternative, that of nihilism. But my views are quite different than Schaeffer's and they don't facilitate neither the Confessionalist Scholasticism he would espouse nor the unified theory of worldview so necessary to create the holistic monism of sacralist culture. I freely admit that my epistemology which I believe to be Scriptural and rooted in Paul's teachings in 1 Corinthians does not build cultures and civilisations – apart from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Bacon I'm sure wouldn't fully agree with Schaeffer either as his inductivist approach necessitates a willingness to abandon preconceptions and precommitments. This is where Bacon would differ with someone like Aristotle who while something of an empiricist combined observation with rationalist coherence... ironically this (the Aristotelian approach) is actually much closer to what Schaeffer is advocating.

And to add to the irony, the view of Bacon actually relies on fragmentation, at least in the realm of science. His inductivist model insists on refusing commitment to a universal or form but instead is slave to the particulars. That's at the heart of inductivism but in philosophical terms it's an expression of Nominalism, the very thing Schaeffer has been criticising all along.

This is a departure from Aristotle and Aquinas, though as I've said it's a logical and even necessary departure. Yet, it breaks with their insistence on coherence as a determining and necessary factor to ascertaining truth. Schaeffer is so confused that he's championing the Nominalist even as he's spent all his time criticising the school of thought and mistakenly ascribing it to people who didn't actually hold to it.

Again, I laud Nominalism's fragmentation of old philosophical systems including its destruction of classical metaphysics. This is not because I think Hume, Kant or even Ockham were right. Rather the school demonstrates the reality that all philosophical systems collapse and implode. They're all false. The question is what do we do about it? And the question becomes more pressing as we understand that reality is spiritual or metaphysical and thus transcends what is philosophically or empirically falsifiable. Nature points to the existence of God and nature reveals something of His power, potency and incomprehensibility and yet we finite and fallen thinkers cannot formulate anything sound. All of our formulations result in idolatry. And thus we require revelation which while apprehensible in terms of language and content (and thus operable within the categories of human reason) it nevertheless unveils eternal mysteries calling us to submission and intellectual surrender... I realise that's an expression that makes people wince... and yet we have no epistemological alternative apart from epistemological autonomy which always leads to either idolatrous fictions or spirals into rank nihilism.

Again this is not to say that pure positivism or materialism have a leg to stand on. They cannot account for scientific laws, the nature and persistence of order or of human conscience or consciousness. These things point to the reality of God but apart from revelation one is always left with an idol-god— often confusing the laws themselves with God or what is common in Christian circles –the subjection of revelation to said laws. Consequently miracles rather than viewed as something abnormal but to be expected, become a crisis. A dissonance is embraced as the miracles are accepted and yet when theology itself is subjected to empirical laws and experiential (finite-concepted and conceived) categories, then it won't be too long before the miracles themselves become dubious, an embarrassment, increasingly explained in naturalistic terms and eventually dispensed with as symbolism and literary device.

Schaeffer lauds Kepler's statement about 'thinking God's thoughts after Him', a reference to observing His handiwork and studying the properties and mechanisms at work in their production and operation. And yet there's a danger here in confusing the creation with His thoughts and thus His Person and we must also ask does Heaven (which is eternal as opposed to this temporal and doomed present aeon) possess the same properties and characteristics? Is there not a danger in deifying the present evil age? Is there not a danger in projecting onto Heaven the limitations and temporal functionality of the present order? It's a sentiment that is well meant but I think potentially dangerous – and of course this also has implications for other thinkers within the Reformed camp. Understanding our thoughts as analogical shadows at best removes some of the danger and is certainly to be preferred over those who argue for strict one-for-one propositionalism (our knowledge is the 'same' as God's apart from quantity) and yet even analogy can get itself into some trouble if taken too far.

One might say that the study of the present world leaves one in awe and wonder but not just in the complexity and beauty of this fallen order doomed to die but in the hint of what is to come and the inexhaustible sublime wonder of the hinted at and yet beyond our grasp eternal realm. As glorious as fallen nature is and can be it is but a shadow of what awaits us.

Schaeffer is among those who believe there is an explicitly Christian approach to science and a Christian origin to the scientific method. And yet he is blind to the already existing nominalist presuppositions at work which will ultimately lead (and did lead) to forms of positivism and the materialism that so dominates modern secular thought.

The Christian scientific method that Schaeffer advocates and believes that figures like Newton and Bacon held to is in the end proven to be reliant upon non-scientific principles. Theism is rightly assumed and yet the very epistemological principles which guide investigation can't guarantee any universal but can only hint at it in a vague and tentative sense, nor do they have any real means to incorporate revelation. God can be assumed on a foundationalist basis but at that point the science that's being done... isn't truly inductive. And we're caught in a regress. If the method is insufficient on this question, what other questions might it prove less than adequate to answer? And we're back to an epistemological split, one I am happy to embrace and perhaps to some extent Schaeffer would be as well – and yet it's rooted in faith, not science and so to accuse the later scient-ists of defecting from an original Christian science is hardly fair. They were following through on the implications of empiricism which in the end (even though some might refer to is as mere Common Sense Realism) is really a belief system in itself. We don't need to recapture science but rather to invalidate it and reduce its authority, a daunting task as the world we live in is completely captivated by its sensory delights.

To conclude this point, if Inductivism and its broader cousin Empiricism are universal in their epistemological claims, then any serious attempt at metaphysics must be in doubt and arguments for the existence of God are reduced to mathematical probabilities. Or if the Empiricism being advocated is rooted in a priori categories or subjected to a coherence test in light of the said a priori (or axiomatic) concepts, then what you have is a system that may retain its empiricist character and yet is not properly scientific.

Again, this seems to be what Schaeffer is advocating and yet it's really much closer to Aristotle than Bacon.

The Scientific Age has certainly produced crisis and presented challenges. The era was itself born of epistemological crisis and the intellectual liberty that arose in the aftermath of the wars of religion. The West changed and the Church in many cases changed with it. Men struggled to navigate the perilous waters of the 17^th and 18^th centuries and while in some respects we can look back and see where things went wrong, we can extend a degree of charity toward those who lived through it. It was confusing just as our own day is riddled with distraction, assumption and rapid changes. The foundation stones were poorly laid in the so-called Age of Reason and thus the post-Enlightenment 19^th century wreaked havoc as it presented challenges that men struggled to wrestle with and account for. If we're not careful we will likewise fail to properly address the issues of our day and set the stage for future grief. In some respects Schaeffer was prescient and insightful but in other respects his confused and less than Biblical analysis has only been perpetuated and in fact amplified. 

Continue reading Part Seven