Copyright 2014 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
One of the arguments used to attempt to discredit biblical Christianity by its increasingly strident secular critics in the West today revolves around the idea that the Bible is inaccurate in its description of the world and its origins. The “New Atheists” of the 21st century are aggressive in their assertions that Scripture is not compatible with the scientific discoveries of the modern age.
Much has been written about this controversy on the Christian side, many by believers far more scientifically literate than I, and this piece will not primarily be an attempt to harmonize biblical accounts of nature and its beginnings with contemporary scientific theory. The bigger question for me is how we have come to a point in human history in which science, with its intrinsically changeable understanding of reality, has come to trump religious understanding of our existence in the popular mind. Today a majority of people in the “First World” seem to have accepted, almost unconsciously, the idea of looking primarily to science as the arbiter of ultimate truth. It strikes me as ironic that this continues to be the “default position” of the average non-religious or nominally religious person when we consider how many questions once considered permanently settled by science have turned out to be anything but.
Any scientist, at least any without a Secularist axe to grind, will admit that there have been necessary changes in thinking in various scientific disciplines ranging from Cosmology to Physics in recent decades, in some cases seismic changes. This is the inevitable result of new discoveries that have sometimes unexpectedly created questions about accepted thinking. Even something as revered as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has not gone unchallenged by a new generation of Physicists. In fact in some scientific circles debate has become more than a little heated in recent years (including the area of Evolutionary Biology where assumptions accepted as “gospel” not long ago are increasingly under attack by contrarian Biologists who are anything but Intelligent Design advocates.) Yet, despite the discomforting fact that things thought settled in the canons of science can no longer be considered settled, scientific laypersons in the wider culture continue to rely on science as the only reliable arbiter of reality.
This begs the question of why at least those who do not have an agenda to reject religion wholesale aren’t re-evaluating their unthinking acceptance of the shakier dogmas of science. The answer, I think, can be found in the power that Secularists now wield in two places, academia and the media.
Educational indoctrination into the Naturalist worldview now begins in the earliest years of public education in the Western world and continues unabated through the college and post-graduate period in secular universities. The promotion of this worldview, most obviously seen in the canonization of Darwinian thought in the Biological Sciences, is now so ingrained as to be accepted almost without question by the vast majority of educated people. Meanwhile mass media continues to be suffused with messages that take the absolute reliability of “scientific laws” as a matter of course. This is particularly true in broadcast and print media which are more monolithically controlled, as far as content, than that which comes to us through the internet.
Many of us spend at least 12 years in school. Most of us spend our entire lives watching countless hours of television. It then becomes apparent why the prevailing Secularism, with its attendant near-worship of science, has control of the popular mind. Through academia and the media we are simply steeped in a pro-science, and often anti-biblical, way of thinking. The human mind is like a sponge, so why would this state of affairs come as any surprise?
When we add to this the tendency of a self-centered race to avoid the possibility that it is morally responsible to a higher power; it becomes all too clear why human beings have a vested interest in trusting in science over theology. Science generally does not call us to account for our individual moral lapses; both the Bible, and the God who inspired it, does. Science is, of course, not evil in and of itself nor is it usually inaccurate. It has much to tell us about the natural world that is useful, particularly when we apply that knowledge in useful forms of technology, but because of its malleable nature it is not a reliable guide for our existence. The fact that it continues to be used as such a guide in the modern world says less about science than it does about the wishful thinking of the fallen human heart.