Why Conservative Christian Piety Should Animate Evangelical Engagement with Science’s Sticky Subjects

“Well, it’s kinda hard for me to believe in Jesus because—well, you know, the dinosaurs and everything.” Stuart was in the first year of a graduate degree, with wavy brown hair and cheeks to match the hue of his posh pink polo. Sawing at a tough bit of curry chicken over dinner during an Alpha course, this agnostic student was responding distractedly to my question, “What strikes you as the most troubling feature of Christianity’s claims about Jesus?” For all that it lacked in rhetorical verve, Stuart’s off-hand comment voiced one of the fundamental difficulties educated non-Christians must overcome in order to embrace Christianity: the popular face of our religion seems squarely and thoroughly incompatible with scientific knowledge. 

Prima facie, the existence of dinosaurs possesses little relevance to the teachings, putative deity, and redemptive death of a Galilean Jew 2,000 years ago. But to Stuart, serious countenance of the Bible’s Christological claims would require assent to a whole litany of scientifically incredible assertions. And Stuart came by this assumption honestly. He had been exposed to the sort of Christianity that regularly fulminates against evolution, the sort of Christianity from which I also hail. (I as a homeschooler, my Christian biology curriculum required me to rehearse seven reasons why radiocarbon dating was unreliable; while my grasp of the water-cycle may have been flawless, my knowledge of plate tectonics was mediated through detailed exposition of Noah’s Flood.) 

In this conversation with Stuart, it felt as if my fundamentalist chickens were coming home to roost. To share the gospel, I now had to divert from the story of Jesus in order to deconstruct historicizing readings of Genesis 1-11. Ironically, my evangelical tradition had actually hamstrung the evangelism effort by contributing to the erroneous supposition that Christianity and mainstream science are ideological alternatives. In fundamentalist circles, this anti-scientism is sometimes taken as a mark of Christian piety.[1] But I would like to suggest the opposite: Christian piety should motivate a far more robust engagement with mainstream science than has hitherto characterized the evangelical tradition.

 Evangelism and Apologetics

 I’ve already indicated how a concern for evangelism should stimulate more rigorous interaction between religion and science. In a similar vein, I would underscore Kyle Roberts’ observation that better Christian engagement with science is imperative for in-house apologetic purposes, insofar as a great many young Christians are abandoning their faith because of its putative incompatibility with science. Kyle points out, “Traditionally, apologetics has been directed primarily to non-Christians (atheists, agnostics, or adherents of other major religions). But another apologetic need is arising today within the church itself. This apologetic argues that the perceived forced choice between science and faith is a false dichotomy.” Serious reflection on the subjects of cosmology and human origins is a matter of urgent pastoral and apologetic concern.

 Belief in the Transcendence of God

Still, when I talk about the role of piety in the faith-science dialogue, I’m not just thinking about gathering converts and maintaining the numbers on our church membership rosters. Christian piety should make us receptive to the insights and truths of science insofar as proper Christian piety has a fundamental commitment to the transcendence of God. Yet, however much we extol the greatness of a God whose being splinters our rough-hewn images of him (cf. the commonplace warnings about ‘putting God in a box’), our reticence towards the insights of science may indicate that we begrudge God the right to gainsay our traditional assumptions about the way he works in the world.

I wonder if the apophatic theological tradition might provide us with a much-needed corrective. Apophatic theology is not simply an exercise in saying what God is not; it is no primer to theological nihilism. Rather, apophaticism is a spiritual and intellectual commitment to recall that our predications about God, even when true and revelatory, are also inadequate caricatures; whatever true things we may say about God fall magnificently short of exhausting or circumscribing him. Recourse to apophatic theology might counterbalance the hubris by which we presume unduly on our understanding about, e.g., the way divine agency operates in creating and sustaining the universe. Apophatic theology is not to be confused with sloppy relativism; it manifests deference to divine transcendence.

For this reason, I found my head bobbing enthusiastically at Peter Enn’s post, when he wrote: “It may be that evolution, and the challenges it presents, will remind us that we are called to trust God, which means we may need to restructure and even abandon the ‘god’ that we have created in our own image. Working through the implications of evolution may remind Christians that trusting God’s goodness is a daily decision, a spiritually fulfilling act of recommitment to surrender to God no matter what.”

Trust in the Work of the Holy Spirit

 Peter’s comments about trusting God’s goodness and surrendering to God bring us back to the heart of all properly Christian theological inquiry: belief in the self-revelatory work of God through the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, all our attempts to pursue truth through Scripture and theology rely upon the assumption that the Holy Spirit inspired the composition and compilation of the Scriptures and continues to bear with and sustain our efforts to hear the Word revealed in those holy texts. But we also believe that the Spirit of the Creator God bears with and sustains our efforts to hear the Word as revealed in the creation that declares the glory of God (Psalm 19).

 As an undergrad at Wheaton College, I recall Prof. Sam Storms introducing the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, that wonderful epistemological heuristic that articulates how God’s truth is revealed through Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience (with special deference to Scripture as the “base” of the Quadrilateral, so to speak). Dr. Storms, being a good charismatic, underscored that the whole reason we trust any of the “sides” of the Quadrilateral is because we believe in the operation and self-revelatory activity of the Holy Spirit, A) in the inspiration of Scripture, B) in our daily experiences with him, C) in the history of the Church as enshrined in Christian tradition, D) and in the operation of our reason in reflection of the All-True God whose image we are and bear.

In this respect, I’m in energetic agreement with Amos Yong’s encouragement that “Those who are led by the Spirit can therefore pursue the life of the mind, even the scientific vocation, and in this way also bring their own questions, perspectives, and curiosities to their scientific endeavors.… [P]ursuit of the Spirit-filled life can be part and parcel of the modern scientific task.”

Conclusion

As I said above, popular evangelicalism can sometimes wear its opposition to science as a badge of Christian piety, and some evangelicals have been wont to characterize engagement with science as a faithless attempt to ingratiate oneself to the fashions of the academy. But I’d like to think that grappling with the Big Bang and abiogenesis can express precisely the sorts of piety that should animate Christian evangelicals. For the sake of the lost and for the sake of our own struggling parishioners we have an obligation to sort out a faithful understanding of modern science. And this intellectual engagement is not stirred by an anxious disbelief in the Scriptures; it is vivified by a deep-seated conviction in the transcendence of the God who is revealed, if only in part, in those Scriptures. Still, however partial may be the glimpse of the God’s face we see in the Bible, it is a true glimpse, true because it is given to us by the Holy Spirit. And it is faith in the continued operation of that Spirit, in and for God’s people and through the world God created, that gives me hope that evangelical engagement with science will not only prove possible, but revelatory.

[1] More than once have I heard someone reject evolutionary biology or mainstream geology by appeal to Colossians 2:8 (“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ”.) Of course, the fact that Pauline literature is shot through with appropriations of Stoicism should keep us from presuming that Paul thought that all philosophy was demonic and deceitful. The existence of bad philosophy does not mean that all philosophy is bad; the existence of bad science (or scientists bent on turning their research into a pike on which to impale Christian belief) does not mean all science is bad.