The New York Times continues to advance the false claim that evangelicals are at war with "science."  Molly Worthen, a professor at Chapel Hill, argues as much in her April 13, 2017, op-ed column, “The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society.”  (Similar claims have been made in the Times before.  See, e.g., Charles Blow’s June 8, 2014, column, “Religious Constriction.”)  She claims that the current political dispute over partisan journalism and social media (occasionally parading under the name of 'fake news') has its roots in an unthinking allegiance to Biblical authority.  This allegiance takes two basic forms:

Ever since the scientific revolution, two compulsions have guided conservative Protestant intellectual life: the impulse to defend the Bible as a reliable scientific authority and the impulse to place the Bible beyond the claims of science entirely.

The first compulsion has led to the likes of “creation science,” as Christians try to fit science within the textual limitations of the Bible.  The second impulse supposedly tries to insulate the Bible from scientific critique by arguing that science — like religion — presupposes certain unprovable claims.  (The idea that everyone has unexamined presuppositions that color the interpretation of information is sometimes called "presuppositionalism" in apologetical circles.)  Worthen contrasts these misguided ways with the right way of thinking, namely

the worldview that has propelled mainstream Western intellectual life and made modern civilization possible... a kind of pragmatism.  It is an empirical outlook that continually — if imperfectly — revises its conclusions based on evidence available to everyone, regardless of their beliefs about the supernatural.

This shallow analysis (i) mischaracterizes the historical relationship between religion and science, (ii) misconstrues what contemporary evangelicals believe, and perhaps most importantly, (iii) misunderstands what the debate is really about.

First, Prof. Worthen would have us believe that the rejection of religious authority “made modern civilization possible.”  But in fact, many if not most of the great thinkers who pioneered modern science did not reject religion but were actually motivated by strong religious belief, including Copernicus, Kepler, Pascal and Newton.  And while religious belief may be less common among contemporary scientists, there are still many religious scientists.  It is certainly not the case that belief in religious authority stifles interest in the sciences generally.

Second, she is also wrong to claim that evangelicals are generally hostile to contemporary science.  Where does this idea even come from?  Are evangelicals less inclined to benefit from sophisticated medical treatments?  Or less inclined to use the latest technological tools?  Or simply less interested in the unexplored corners of the natural world?  How exactly do they manifest this hostility to "science"?  

The hostility that she refers to is evangelicals' distrust of evolutionary theory.  In other words, Prof. Worthen is conflating the general category of “science” (which evangelical Christians accept or reject in the same way as the rest of the general population) with one specific scientific sub-field, namely, evolutionary theory (which evangelicals are indeed suspicious of).  Why would evangelicals treat evolutionary theory differently from other scientific claims? 

Prof. Worthen thinks it is because, in a surfeit of piety, evangelicals read what is really ancient folklore (the Biblical account of creation) as if it were divinely-inspired science.  But evangelicals who have considered the question know the Bible is comprised of a wide variety of literary forms, including metaphor and poetry, which are not making "scientific" claims even when they are describing the world and events in it.  

For example, when the Bible states that “The flood engulfed the earth for forty days” (Gen. 7:17), is it saying that the entire planet was covered by water?  Or might it be saying that the lands of the author were covered by water?  The Hebrew translated here as “earth” is not co-extensive with the English word “planet” at all — it can mean land, or ground, or just anything under the heavens.  Some evangelicals may believe that the entire planet Earth was covered by water; others may not; but reading the Bible as the inerrant Word of God does not require one translation or the other.  Being the inerrant Word of God is not the same as being a scientific textbook.  Prof. Worthen’s assumption that conservative Christians all understand the inerrancy of the Bible the same way is a major blind spot in her analysis.

Finally, this same reductive tendency is at work in Prof. Worthen’s view of science – which is why I say she misunderstands what the debate is really about.  She says that our contemporary allegiance to science rests upon its “pragmatism.”  In other words, the scientific method (i.e., repeatedly testing hypotheses about underlying laws and causes until prediction is reliable) has allowed us to understand and exploit the natural world in ways that obviously cannot be chalked up to happenstance.  We build bridges that support us, we develop medicines that heal us, we cultivate crops that grow faster, we power cars with solar energy, etc.  All these abilities depend in part on our ever-deeper understanding of the natural world. 

But in contemporary political debate, it's not "pragmatic" science that is disputed.  Christians don’t deny the existence of nuclear power or cell phones, nor do they doubt why they work.  Rather, the contested issue is evolutionary theory, which is a very different kind of science.  Rather than being a prediction of future events, evolutionary theory is an extrapolation from the present to the past — scientists' best guess as to why and how things might have happened in a time and place where observation and experimentation is impossible.  

Moreover, quite unlike the rest of modern science, evolutionary theory does not formulate universal laws which are consistent over time and apply generally.  Rather — as atheist philosophers Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmerini argue in their controversial 2010 book, What Darwin Got Wrong — evolutionists create explanations for changes among specific populations.  (These are sometimes disparagingly called "just so stories," after Kipling's fanciful tales of natural history.)  

Science generally is the process of observing the natural world, hypothesizing as to the natural laws that determine observed phenomena, testing those hypotheses, and making testable predictions based on them.  Evolutionists do not do this when they opine on the origins of mankind — their conclusions then are retrospective and contingent.  They are engaged in natural history (albeit of a very sophisticated kind), which at its margins is not the same kind of science as physics and chemistry.

Does this distinction justify Christians' concerns about evolution?  Like science generally, evolutionary theory insists on accepting only natural explanations for natural phenomenon, rejecting any supernatural explanations.  Science is, after all, the investigation of the natural world, so this makes perfect sense — but it also explains why, when scientists reach the edges of their discipline, their speculations about things like the nature of human consciousness, moral impulses, religious belief, etc., are less worthy of deference than heartland science.  At that point, their conclusions rely as much on their own views of the human condition as they do observations of nature.  Such opinions were generated far outside the archetypal laboratory and are far from the "pragmatism" that Prof. Worthen mistakes for all science.

I don’t question that genetic mutation takes place, or that the fittest tend to survive, or other evolutionary maxims (even though these matters remain uncertain in many particulars).  But I do question the implications often drawn from those premises — because those implications are drawn insisting that all aspects of human existence must be understood and explained solely in naturalistic terms.  It is this insistence, not anything necessitated by the scientific method, which leads science to assert confidently that evolution's historical claims must be correct even though they are so improbable.  

Evolutionists take after Sherlock Holmes: 'Once you eliminate the supernatural, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'  But why eliminate the supernatural in our understanding of the creation of man?  Evolutionists' answer to that question, I'm afraid, is motivated neither by the necessity of “pragmatism” nor by the purity of their search for truth — but by a distaste for religious authority.  And that choice, far from being an objective and neutral one, is one of those presuppositions that we must heed as we evaluate the claims of “science.”

If you wish to discuss this post with me, I'd welcome receiving an email from you.  Please email me at language.on.holiday@gmail.com.