I have been reading John Hick’s book Evil and the God of Love. It is one of the better books I have read on the subject of human free will vs. God’s sovereignty and how a loving God can permit evil to exist. However, I do have one problem with his book. He states the fall of man as described in Genesis is “untenable in the light of modern science”. [1] Why does modern science take precedence over the Bible?
Now I’ll be the first to admit that when it attempts to explain our natural world, Christianity has not always proved to be a reliable guide. I agree with Christians that the Bible is accurate in the science it describes but the problem is in how we interpret what the Bible says when it discusses scientific issues. The prime example of this is the argument that erupted between Galileo and the Christian faith when he proposed the theory that the earth revolves around the sun instead of the sun revolving around the earth. At that time, Martin Luther stated: “The fool will turn the whole science of Astronomy upside down. But as Holy Writ [Joshua 10:12-13] declares, it was the Sun and not the Earth which Joshua commanded to stand still” [2] Luther was right in what the Bible said, but by interpreting what the Bible said to fit in with his limited scientific knowledge, he provided generations of critics of Christianity an opportunity to condemn it for its backward thinking. Luther was not alone in his thinking; the Catholic Church also used its heavy hand to stifle this new scientific revolution.
Science does have has impressive credentials in explaining our natural world. However, science is a human institution and like all human institutions, it is fallible. One of the limitations of science is that it is a process of discovering how our physical world functions; it is not a set of facts. Anyone who has studied science in college is taught this basic tenant of science. This assertion is valid because the definition of inductive logic, upon which most of science is based, includes “certainty is attainable only if all possible instances have been examined”. Scientists have not examined all possible instances in the past or future so they cannot be certain of our current scientific “facts”. Also, if scientists believe science is an accumulation of facts, they close their mind to information that might challenge those facts. The history of science teaches us the wisdom of this tenant of science because scientists once believed in all manner of ideas that we consider foolish today and undoubtedly future generations will look at some of our current scientific “facts” as humorous. Scientists once believed that space was filled with ether. Now we believe space to be a vacuum. Scientists once believed that catastrophes had no part in shaping our earth (uniformitarianism). Now scientists believe that meteorite impacts have caused the extinction of various species of animals at various points in time. In the 1700s, scientist scoffed at the rural folks who told them that rocks fell from the sky and denied what we now know as meteorites existed. Now scientists go to great lengths to find meteorites and study them. If you read any science periodical, you will constantly find research that challenges what we know and understand. Science, for the foreseeable future, will be constantly revising its beliefs as it discovers new evidence. This is the way science works. It is a fact that the further science goes from our current space and time, the less certain science is.
History teaches us both Christianity and science have not been a totally reliable guide to what is true in terms of our knowledge of events that occurred in the past. The problem is we humans are finite and we make mistakes in interpreting the Bible and in interpreting the scientific evidence we have accumulated. So I have learned to be more reserved in asserting one side or the other has the correct interpretation of a particular set of observations and data.
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[1] John Hick. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010, p. 222.
[2] Colin A. Ronan. Galileo. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974, p. 29.
