by Chris Alexion, Copyright August 21, 2005, all rights reserved. 266 views
Before I get too far away from Time and the issue of teaching ID, let me comment on Charles Krauthammer's piece in a recent issue (August 8). Krauthammer argues that "to teach faith as science is to undermine both." Krauthammer acknowledges that groups like the ACLU pushed too far in their removal of religion from the public sphere, and heralds the "new balance" in which religion is "back out of the closet" as "salutary."
What Krauthammer doesn't like are the "gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing?" Sure, there are gaps in science, he says. "Are we to fill them all up with divinity?" "Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it."
In a strictly literal sense, Krauthammer is right: faith is not the exact same thing as science; the primary message of Scripture is the Lordship of Christ, not the development of DNA. Okay. But Krauthammer also wants to deny that faith can or should have any impact on what we believe and teach in the classroom or the "real world."
Yet faith and knowledge are related in a much more complex way than he allows. The irony is that Krauthammer is one of those modern tourists I mentioned in an earlier post–the ones who're still splashing around in the lifeboats long after the cuise liner has gone down. The strata of his essay are punctuated with bemusing relics of modernity. Evolution is "one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science" as well as the "bedrock of all modern biology." Science "begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation." Where has Krauthammer been? Not only has postmodernism ravaged the "well-established" store of modern knowlege, but twentieth-century operationalism has seriously questioned whether "science" can describe anything but the actions of scientists.
Krauthammer also writes that the "conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion." But such a simplistically rigid separation of spheres–the religious from that of knowledge–works only within Krauthammer's worldview. The biblical worldview, on the other hand, not only recognizes the inherently religious committments undergirding all scientific activity, but asserts the authority of a divine revelation that extends to all spheres of knowledge.
Translation: First, all philosophic or scientific theories rely ultimately on unproved assumptions. That means that religious thinkers and "scientific" observers are in the same boat. Second, folks like Krauthammer underestimate the force of Christian claims. Christ didn't claim to be Lord of a nebulous faith-based sphere that needs to be properly bounded. He's Lord of all things (see, e.g., Col. 1), and His lordship extends to the intellectual realm; in Him "all treasures of wisdom and knowledge" are hid (Col. 2:3).
Current attempts to marginalize Christian claims rely on a faulty theory of knowledge. The good news is that more and more Christians are learning to think with a robust, biblical outlook that challenges modernist assumptions.
As long as that continues, the final outcome can't long be in doubt.
1 • Dale • August 22, 2005 • 8:07 AM
Very well stated, Chris.
"Science 'begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.'"
I would like to know how Krauthammer interprets what he observes and experiments, though, since he can't have any starting principles. Oh that's right, I remember; facts are neutral.
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