Christian Culture Promotes Science

Theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued that Christian escapism and dogmatic resistance to scholarship would serve the cause of unbelief:

“This blockade, the complete starvation of all science…will raise the flag of unbelief, compelled by you, because you have so isolated yourselves. Is the knot of history to be untied in such a way that Christianity will be left with barbarism, and scholarship with unbelief?”

The Church has characteristically responded to the threats posed by the university in either of two extreme ways---flight or accommodation. Schleiermacher warned about the dangers of the first response. Centuries later, Harold O.J. Brown documented the bad fruit that came as a result of flight:

“Although it was winning the battle for individual hearts in millions of cases throughout Christendom, Christianity was no longer winning the battle for the minds of individuals. Lives were changed, churches were transformed, some major legislative changes were introduced, but the foundations of doctrine were not consolidated. The Christian world and life view was gradually lost and Christianity became, for the first time since Constantine, primarily a private religion” (Heresies, pg. 418).

Christianity has fled the halls of academia in favor of privacy. However, today accommodation and compromise seem to pose an even greater threat to the vitality of the Church. We embrace Darwinism as we reassure ourselves that the Bible is still true, somehow. Former Pentecostal preacher, Michael Dowd, and author of Thank God for Evolution now travels the church-circuit trying to sell the idea that evolution promotes true worship and deep integrity. However, compromise results in a bland, uninspiring, and moribund faith. Other Christians demand us to rethink Christianity according to Darwin’s guidance:

“Darwinism exposes Christianity’s weakness in keeping up with the growing scientific knowledge. We use the fruits of scientific technology and blissfully ignore its implications for a contemporary and comprehensive biblical worldview.” (Academy for Christian Thought, NYC)

The pressures to privatize or compromise our faith are great. Atheists commonly charge that Christians can’t truly be scholars or scientists because they are locked into a faith that suffocates true inquiry. However, this assertion contradicts the facts. Instead, science arose because of the Christian faith and not in spite of it. In this regard, Henry Schaefer quotes the British scientist, Robert Clark:

“Scientific development has only occurred in a Christian culture. The ancients had brains as good as ours. In all civilizations…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.” (Science and Christianity, pg.14)

Our retreat and compromise with academia, has allowed naturalism, a dictatorial philosophy that has forbidden any consideration of supernatural causation, to hijack science. Our Harvards, Princetons and Yales had all been Bible colleges. God has not only been thrown out, but now the Darwinist claims that He never belonged there in the first place!

Daniel Mann