Science in Christian Perspective

 

 

 

The Need For An Evangelical 
Philosophy of Science*

THOMAS H. LEITH

From: JASA 11 (December 1959): 3-13.

By analyzing past attempts at synthesizing theism and science, the need for an adequate contemporary philosophy in the area, capable of meeting past failures, is presented. Important issues may then be outlined between the attitudes of presently fashionable philosophies of science toward such synthesis and varied types of Christian study therein. The necessity of a careful choice of a unique theistic starting point is offered as the only path to a useful and abiding resolution.

Huxley, the great English biologist, once remarked that "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every infant science like the strangled snakes about that of the infant Hercules." It is with regard to Santayana's reminder that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and in the hope of preventing the above cruelty to my theological brethren that this paper is given. While none of us is infallible, even the youngest, I shall assay an escape from Santayana's chains of history by the simple device of reminding the theologian that he cannot impede the growth of an infant he needs must succor and of reminding the scientist that he may not debach the theology he needs must sanction. If this is a worthy purpose, my task then is not to bury either but to praise the first-fruits of both.

A well-known schoolboy malapropism reveals that "the difference between Science and Religion is that Science is material and Religion is immaterial". Much as our day decries in many quarters and with divers voices the perspicacity of our student, surely the acts of his seniors reveal his discernment. There are those who are akin to Faraday who, in his letter to Lady Lovelace, informs us that he went into his lab and forgot his religion and came out again and remembered it. Others like Haldane, failing totally in memory, cry "scientific education and religious education are incompatible. . . Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science."l The army of both is legion and the Christian must face it with purpose.

But the tragedy of tragedies is that platoon of Christians who march in step with it, or provide food for its appetite albeit blindly, calling to all who will bear, "Worship and thought are distinct. My ways, of fellow scientists, are your ways and my thoughts are your thoughts!" But must not science and religious


*Paper presented at the 14th Annual Convention of the American Scientific Affiliation. Chicago, Illinois, June, 1959.


belief be mutually intelligible and mutually interdependent? In our day, can either live, as implied above, coherently if apart? Or we hear again, "In my God you must believe! How else explain life's origin? The hiatuses of my paleontology? The indeterminancies of my quanta? 'The mind of my psychology? May one not exclaim here as did Henry Drummond, "As if God lived in gaps!" Must we not remind these Christians that if they do not have valid arguments for their beliefs they surely do love their prejudices? But need they be anyone else's?

It is often remarked that the sciences haven't failed man: rather man has failed them. Have not such Christians often failed both? Reinbold Niebuhr writes, "Nature can be known through scientific enquiry, but scientific knowledge does not disclose its own meaning." To be sure, hasty and premature explanations of this meaning have proven to be job's false comforters in the history of the church, and as the above indicates, even today, but if the Christian view is the only way to redraw the map of knowledge, should it not best be done by those who have done some intellectual traveling particularly in theology and in the sciences? As John Baillie so wisely observed, "Surely the depth of the problem emerges only when the man of science and the man of faith are the same man, so that the two who have to walk together are but two elements in the total outlook of a single mind."2

My plea then is for a revitalized witness to science by those aware of its difficulties. We must point out that the scientist has a range of awareness transcending the purely scientific discussion of experiences and that to find understanding in nature, he must pass beyond a purely scientific universe.3 As Pasteur said, "(There is) something in the depths of our souls which tells us that the world may be more that a mere combination of phenomena." We must make clear too that God doesn't exist because a famous scientist says so, nor

,cease because an infamous theologian agrees, popular though these beliefs are in rather different quarters. His existence is axiomatic. Only then may we challenge that indifference so clearly portrayed in Wood's observation, "Probably the revolution that has had the profoundest effect upon religion in modem times is not that caused by science itself, but by the absorption of the scientist in his science. I-Te feels no need to go outside its range for intellectual and emotional satisfaction . . . They set up for themselves and other people a climate of opinion in which religion need play no part."4

But lest it escapes in unwonted satisfaction, let me point out too that theology needs to, and has often failed to, provide this vitality of witness. An anti-scientific Christian, just as an anti-Christian scientist, is not Baillie's 'man of faith and science'. In both cases prejudice or lack of communication sunder what must be united. R. G. Collingwood states this so well. "Religion always mistakes what it says for what it means. And rationalism, so to speak, runs about after it pointing out that what it says is untrue."5 If anything is to be gained by contemporary stress on semantics it is this: speak wisely and clearly if you would be understood, and in particular if you would adjust that strife of the religious and scientific temper of mind, that debate between the critical intellect and the inner spirit which would fain believe.

With these introductory comments let me move to my appointed task. If what we have said is rather negative in tone, what positive remarks may be made? Of course time and ability must stay my zeal here. I do not intend like Priestley, in the late 18th Cent., to be "induced to undertake the history of all branches of experimental philosophy" in their relation to our problem but rather to survey the general need for a fruitful synthesis of Christianity and science. Unfortunately, it is impossible in this effort to avoid the use of the big brush though I will try to avoid the slovenly use of that utensil. Let me begin by placing, as I see them, the sciences in their appropriate position in this dialectic.

Huxley, writing to Kingsley advised, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." Despite the desirable plea for open-mindedness it is unfortunate that this Baconian ideal, as even a cursory reading of Bacon himself will reveal, turns out to be unattainable. The same applies to Whitehouse's observation that "the scientific attitude may be a gift of God which can liberate us from the idolatry of divinised tradition in the same way that it has freed us from the idolatry of divinised nature."6 No scientist (indeed no man) is so humble, so lacking in preconception, so apart from the past of his teachers and societal mores that he can become a divinised scientist. Indeed were science only as Prof. Young stated in his Reith Lectures, "in the end practical ... serving to ensure that so many of us can live on earth"7 it Still must be replete with the prior value judgments of the scientific community.8 And again, were science but calculated unfolding of nature it still must run the Socratic risk of the Phaedo where the sage tells us that science alone leads to blindness of soul. Who cannot feel the pangs of Darwin as he tells us "his higher tastes . . . were atrophied" as his mind became "a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts"? The scientific man cannot escape his humanity in the interest of becoming an animated Univac. If faith dies so must science. Mere inquisitiveness won't sustain the proper attitude of mind. A speculative interest in nature's manner of proceeding depends on the assumption of a meaningful nature with a controlling purpose. "The scientific intellect often slays the object that it loves in order to understand it ... Perhaps this is the reason why poets and scientists do not understand each other."9

Indeed, I feel Waddington said more that he thought when he remarked, "Science is concerned to discover how things work and its test for truth is that it makes them work as it wants to." Scientific laws are not only descriptive hypotheses which bear much fruit, they are really prescriptive models into which we fit the data of observation as long as no great violence seems to occur in the whole weltanschauung. of our science nor in the value of the model for suggesting future experiments. However, this temporary form of interpretation must not be confused with the eternal substance of God's immutable law. Thus science is to a greater degree than is often asknowledged a product of our scene, our interests, and our spiritual condition.

What then must the Christian realize and proclaim? He must realize that while nature is never understood without experiment nor described without geometry as the 13th Cent. Oxonian Grosseteste proclaimed, it is incapable of ultimate resolution in these alone. Demanding religious commitment, science needs the challenge of the orientation of Biblical theism. In addition to failing to provide this, the placing of science by the Christian in some abhored naturalistic limbo forgets that science itself doesn't lead to naturalism. The naturalistic commitment was felt long before science, which indeed is the abode of many a non-naturalist and the product of the Christian church. Every scientist must say 'yea' or 'nay' to God but no Christian may say 'nay' to God's voice in nature. In fact, as Archbishop Temple affirmed "unless all existence is a medium of Revelation, no particular revelation is possible" thereby linking Kant's starry heavens with the moral responsibility of man.10

And what must the Christian proclaim? Is it not the following which Burtt outlines? He notes that the thinker who decries metaphysics will actually hold metaphysical notions of three main types. He will share the ideas of his age on ultimate questions (where he agrees) ; his method will tend to be turned into a metaphysics, ie. he will assume the universe of such a sort that his method will be appropriate and successful - and if a great mind he cannot avoid ultimate questions else he cannot have full intellectual satisf action. 11 Must we not add to these Bavinck's great truth, "What nature is to us is determined by what we think of God to our day but our principal grammar must be approand who He is for us"? If we remove God from His priate to a revelational theism and firmly ensconsed creation we end up investing it with the character of God.12 Is it not finally then the Christian argument that the disputing guides of men may leave the guided to complain justly that he has been abandoned in the metaphysical jungle without even a way of identifying the animals and that only God's self-revelation may truly guide?13

Hence, we find science and theology in need of one another. We may not compartmentalize without a wholesale oversimplification of the aims of both. The spiritual and natural realms cannot be in conflict. Science, theology, and the ethics within both "are intertwined and cannot be separated without the entire structure's collapse." 14 The scientist must be reminded, as Thos. Pratt observed in 1667, "It is a dangerous mistake into which many good men fall that we neglect the dominion of God over the world if we do not discover in every turn of human actions many supernatural providences and miraculous events. Whereas it is enough for the honor of His government that he guides the whole creation in its wonted course of causes and effects."15 And the Christian must continually observe that "when we come to the scientifically unknown, our correct policy is not to rejoice because we have found God: it is to become better scientist, and to think a bit more deeply and imaginatively until we can devise some model, or some concept, that will bring the previous unknown into the pattern of the known."16 Thus both must see that God is the God of all; not just the miraculous or the mysterious. Science should understand nature as demanding God (and that a God who illuminates His acts in His creation by the enlightenment of Scripture) while theology must see its system and its Biblical sources isolated and starved without deep thought about the general revelation of God that it is meant to clarify and portray.

As generality this is all quite appropriate, but what is the detail of this union of science with theology? Is history not replete with syntheses weighed and found wanting? What audacity is it that assumes we can escape the inexorable decay of some potential monument of our thought under the erosive scrutiny of our progeny? My reply is, I believe, both simple and correct. We must, as I mentioned earlier, learn from the past and its heart-rending list of failures. Let us cull out error and save the timeless which is truth. Let us assay to construct on lasting foundations. To be sure, any apologetic system in the area of our interest is a product of the problems of its day and fades as the problems are revised or forgotten. Any human system must expect this, but what has this to do with the validity of its methods? It is tragic only when the foundation, the principles, the basic ideas are found incorrect and unwarranted. We are expected only to speak within it so as to challenge the future as well as our own time. May we then turn for a few moments, with these thoughts in mind, to the broad sweep of the last five centuries of church history before more carefully scrutinizing the recent past and our present scene?

I am sure that most of my audience will recall that the intellectual scene, insofar as it interests us here, was prepared for the Renaissance by, among other things, the partial decay of the great 13th Cent. synthesis of human knowledge in the Summa. of Thomas Aquinas. The problem of our paper which had appeared to have been given resolution were now, by many, found wanting. Where Aquinas had closely delineated the distinction between faith and reason and defined their limits, these limits were now altered radically. The great eclectic had placed certain dogmas of the church beyond reason but not contrary to it. With Sotus the list is enlarged and with Occam all that has not its source in the data of the senses becomes faith. Where Aquinas had found God clearly, though partially, revealed to all men in His creation, for Scotus more is hidden, and for Occam the need for making suitable assumptions makes the proof of God the consequence of arbitrary prior decision. Thus by the middle of the 14th Cent. the spheres of faith and reason are so dichotomized as to leave man's views of this world separated into spheres of distinctive types of truth. The moot question is whether to resolve the problem by shrinking one of the poles to insignificance. The temptation to walk one side of a fence of paradox is always strong and many tramped paths on the side either of revelation or of human reason, even though for a time most of this was done within the realm of church authority.

But the failure had yet to become more overt. Occamism, with its stress on a sphere of coherent but secular knowledge, led to an interest in this to the detriment of revelation. His razor led to attempts to simplify the ideas of nature's mode of operation by the exclusion of the supernatural and the teleological. With the revival of learning and a growing interest in pre-Christian literature came a certain disdain for the rote of much scholastic thought and the attempts at ecclesiastical interference in the growing political, economic, and legal freedom. In the heart of this comes the Reformation with its doctrine of the priesthood of' the believer, frequently (but with notable exceptions) interpreted so as to allow considerable freedom in man's application of revelation to the affairs of this world and frequently fostering an interest in the question of the mode and extent of God's revelation to each man in His creation. From this time on, the Renaissance interest in non-Biblical thought and the Reformation return to Biblical bases was to be in conflict between and within individual thinkers.

Then in the late 15th Century appears Francis Bacon to crystallize the methods of the Leonardo's and the Gilbert's of the century just passed. We find him derisive of scholasticism and of the idols of the past, asking that all knowledge begin and end in sense experience, proclaiming that all knowledge is to be his province, and forgetting facts need prior value judgments and present rational correlation. In him the inductive method is crudely crystallized, but unfortunately confused and attenuated by a lack of interest in mathematical relations and a search for substances instead. At almost the same time we find the pious Lutheran Kepler overstressing just that which Bacon lacked (mathematical relationships, in his case in the motions of the planets) : overstressing because of a mystical conviction that God created and moves the universe in simple mathematical harmonies. And finally, in the same period Galileo, utilizing the work of Kepler, crystallized the rising problem of the past .several centuries.

And what is this? The question of the relation of truth in description and truth in Scripture. The Inquisition and Cardinal Bellarmine would have been happy had Galileo described his work as speculative, as theory and not as fact. Did not the Bible and tradition obviate its factuality? Galileo would have been happier17 had they paid more attention to experiential facts and less to the past and fallible exegesis. The problem then is whether appearances can give an answer, both simple and precise in logic, which differs from the grounds of those appearances. If Scripture tells us about the world as it really is ontologically can we place confidence, for more than utilitarian motives, in descriptions of nature? Does the Bible use postulational language or does it use either man-oriented modes of description or language so as to illustrate or strengthen a revelational truth? Can science ever go beyond description or organization according to our schemes as researchers? Is there meaning, in science, to any other kind of natural law?

Subsequent thought usually stresses one of these three. The Christian generally does believe that God does sustain a universe of laws but has the problem of correlating changing laws of science, or presumed laws discovered from thought alone, to this. The empiricist stresses the availability only of appearances and claims our thoughts cannot reason beyond this. All else is faith. The rationalist, finally, claims an ability to discover the secrets of nature by innate truths and reason, claims a consistency of these with scientific discovery, and if a Christian, claims thereby to find what God means by His revelations about nature.

Let us briefly discuss the thesis of the rationalist first, specifically by illustration from the three major figures of the school embracing almost perfectly 17th Century continental Europe.

Descartes, the earliest, strongly influenced by the mathematical (as were the others in distinction from the experimental bias of the English empiricists) claimed that all that was clear and distinct was true. First we cannot doubt our existence, then we cannot doubt the existence of God as the conserver of our existence, and finally we must assume the truth of logic and the existence of the external world because God would not cause intuition, demonstration, and appearance to lie. Having now grounded all in God, he proceeds by steps we may ignore to remove God from His creation leaving all that exists, including min, part of an inexorable mechanism with which God does not interfere. He does allow for a free mind but never integrates it satisfactorily with the determinism of man's body.

With Spinoza, infinite substance or God becomes the eternal ground of all that is. All that exists is in and inconceivable apart from, this substance. Our world is an aspect of this and not a creation. In it we may know two of the infinite attributes of God-thought and extension-but all are independent even if everywhere as aspects of God. Thus Spinoza ends with a pantheistic world in which freedom means only that the action is determined by God and a world equally well described by either the mental or the physical.

Leibniz finally reasons to a world of monads or independent and continuous centers of perception. Each mirrors the universe from its point of view and there is a harmony between the perception of any monad and the motions of the rest of the universe. Since there is no interaction this must be pre-established and thus deterministic. Everything has thus a sufficient reason and man's role is to try to discover it by more clearly perceiving the universe around him.

Thus we reach an impasse. All three leave us with the antinomies of freedom and mechanism; Spinoza and Leibniz continue with an eternal universe which, for quite unclear reasons, manifests itself differently with time; and all three face the unenviable task of explaining how infallible reason leads to three different Gods with the attendant problem of how reason alone can, from the nature of any of these Gods alone, decipher the course of history and the details of nature.

Stretching between the mid-17th and the mid-18th century we have in England a quite opposite attempt to relate God to nature in the great empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. All disagreed fundamentally with the ability of unaided reason to understand reality. Locke first challenged innate ideas, claiming all knowledge to rise from simple ideas such as sensation and reflection received passively by the mind. These the 'mind combines, relates and abstracts into complex ideas such as number and beauty, the conceptions of external objects, and cause and effect. Knowledge then is the perception of agreement and disagreement of these ideas and is of three degrees: intuited as in mathematics and our own existence, demonstrative as in the existence of God, and sensitive as in the assurance of an external world of items made up of a substance with cohering primary qualities such as shape.

Bishop Berkeley spotted a difficulty in Locke. He rejected the existence of a world of primary qualities and a substrate as unproven. All that exists is either perceived (an idea) or a perceiving mind. Mind and its content alone are real. We have only a combination of sense qualities and the consciousness we exist as an independent thinker. There is no evidence in sensation or reason for the belief in external objects. God is the cause of ideas attributed to the outer world. Of this mind and our own mind we have only notions, and not ideas, as our ideas are passive. But if God is the source of ideas perceived by the senses we can trust them. On any other basis we might doubt that the world was like our ideas of it. God also sustains reality even when unobserved by us.

Finally Hume takes this to its apparent conclusion. We perceive only sensations or emotions first appearing to the mind and ideas which are faint copies of this in memory or imagination. Both are the source of association of ideas into resemblance, identity, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect. Matter is thereby just a constant combination of simple ideas given a convenient name but has no logical necessity. Berkeley's self is rejected as we have no direct perception of it and confuse it as an object with a flow of impressions constantly coming and going. Thus Hume denies both material and spiritual substance and rests solely on perceptions. Observing the contiguity and succession of impressions we assume a necessary connection in causality. Scepticism he tries to evade by a leap of faith in instinct and habit inducing us to believe in the reality of the world and the validity of causal analysis. So confident was he in his assumed uniformity of nature and in causality that he rejected free will and miracle. God he also reduces to an assumed ground for nature, but nothing can be discovered precisely about His nature.

Thus empiricism rests! Berkeley, defending God's necessary relation to nature, left man to doubt the existence of other minds like ourselves. Hume, the critic of Christianity, left us without even sure belief in ourselves. He lost the whole world and lost his soul too. And all leave us with the question of how empiricism on such grounds could attain knowledge at all. No mind, and if a mind, no logical demonstration of an ability to construct a philosophy of nature at all!

  Thus we see the tendency of the thought of the philosophical mind of the time. It is a trend, either by way of reason or by way of experience, leading to the rejection of revelation as necessary or basic to the understanding of nature. Its weakness is the chaos of the rationalist views of God and His relation to our world and the ultimate scepticism implicit in empiricism. Man's reasoning and experience alone have been tried and found wanting. Though not many contemporaries went as far as Hume, for example, a spirit of irreligion on the continent and the limitation of revelation to the laws of nature and by the tests of reason in the English deists are willing bedfellows. Did the more scientific mind of the time do any better? Let us see.

Many forces were at work in 17th and 18th century science but no force was so great as an inexorable adjustment of Christian beliefs to conform to the conclusions, of science. Natural religion rises with the stress on reason and the growing concern with other religions and the spiritual state of the heathen. Mechanism and the anti-miraculous sentiment grow both in the reaction to scholasticism among Protestants and from a misunderstood Calvinism where John Wallis's God laying down eternal and unchangeable laws was easy to merge with Robert Boyle's Divine Mechanic constructing his machine. Let us survey rapidly the fruits of the Puritan devotion and utilitarianism in England which made, in the work of the virtuosi18 that country the scientific leader of the period of the 17th century. For these are the days of the origins of the Royal Society, of Boyle and Hooke and Lower the pioneer physiologist, of Barrow in mathematics', of Halley and Hobbes, and of the equal genius of Wren and Newton.

We may characterize the century by a strain to preserve traditional faith in the face of a burgeoning science. Some would preserve by restricting the scientific attitude and others by fostering it. Alexander Ross' cries in 1646, "Whereas you say that astronomy se rves to confirm the truth of Holy Scripture you are very preposterous; for you will have the truth of Scripture confirmed by astronomy, but you will not have the truth of astronomy confirmed by Scripture; sure one would think that astronomic truths had more need of Scriptural confirmation than the Scripture of them."19 Twenty-four years later Henry Stubbe decries the superciliousness that implies the praises of the savant are more acceptable to God than the blind wonder of the ignorant. Hence on one side there is a fear that science leads to arrogance wherein scientific ideas outweigh God's Word and to a gross materialism.

The defense stresses design and harmony in the world, replies that the study of God's natural revelation is a truly pious task, that science will remove ignorance and superstition and clearly distinguish the un usual from the miraculous, that the praise of the student is. better than blind praise, and, as Boyle remarked, that the rejection of nature to promote disbelief is as absurd as promoting atheism by the study of the Bible.

However, the difficulties between science and Protestantism were not primarily ones of religion versus ,science but of religion versus science as science defended a view of nature mundane as to appearances and supernatural as to inferences.20 "The sources of rationalistic atheism were not the same as the sources of scientific agnosticism".21

For example, where John Ray found divine omnipotence in the multiplicity of creatures in nature,22 Newton found it in nature's mathematical simplicity. The antithetical nature of such arguments is not of as great import as the realization that they can apply to either side as multiplicity and simplicity are relative. One sun warming seven planets and seven suns warming one plant might equally argue to design through simplicity or complexity or it might argue to caprice.

Let us say a few words about Newton for it is he, with the Enlightenment philosophers, who raise up deism in the next century. Newton sought God in the precision and harmony of planets and optical spectra but his views led where he guessed not. As Pope wrote (but with more than he intended), "God said, 'Let Newton be', and there was light.'- for he removed much of the mystery in nature which to many led to faith. Newton also thought his system raised questions of origin.23 Later, others found here deism or atheism. God for Newton is nearly identified with the eternity and infinity of the world. "He constitutes duration and space." (Though elsewhere this is qualified as space and time become merely the sensoria of God.) As Westfall points out, God is taking on the character Newton assumed his creation had, and "a God deduced from nature can be no more than a projection of nature."24

Newton also said that God occasionally restored order to the accumulating small inequalities of the planetary motions. Leibniz replied that this made God incompetent.25 Clarke tried to defend Newton by saying that God continually controlled nature but this is more typically providential than Newton's spirit.26 In the 2nd edition of the Principia. Newton himself assayed a reply but in it God's dominion is still not made direct and immediate but "his arbitrary freedom in shaping matter and promulgating laws at the original creation."27 Miracles are reduced to rare events the causes of which we do not know. Natural religion here becomes the whole of Christianity where the virtuosi made it only the foundation.28 By it man is to discover the power of God and His benefits and our moral duties to God and man. Thus the work of the virtuosi led to the Enlightenment deism with its replacing of spiritual worship by moral law and its claim to discover true religion without special revelation. The reverence of the 17th century virtuosi became the doubt of the 18th-a change, not in argument, but in attitude.

But there were also those who attempted to lift religion out of controversy onto a firm philosophical base. These centered around the Cambridge Platonists, modern analogues of the Alexandrians Clement and Origin, who, as Basil Wiley points out, both made an effort to maintain philosophy and religion as allies, not as strangers or enemies.29 The group of Lord Herbert, John Smith, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill and Ralph Cudworth tried to formulate a belief commanding the universal assent of men. God's revelation thereby was considered to go on continually as He enlightens man's reason with Scripture intended only to confirm the truths so discoverable from nature. Surely this reversal of the true position of Scripture was the type of argument that led Butler, Ray, and Paley to what I consider their misplaced defense of the faith on arguments from nature.30 When both Scripture and the Platonists' arguments were ignored their opponents, the deists, also arrived at their misplaced exclusion of God from the nature He created.31

It should be remembered, however, that philosophy was far advanced of science in its agnosticism as the 18th century begins and so continued for some time. As Lecky put it, "The direct antagonism between science and theology which appeared in Catholicism at the time of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo was not seriously felt in Protestantism until geologists began to impugn the Mosaic account of creation."32 Let us turn therefore briefly to 18th century geology to see how it handled the relation of its data to the Christian faith and how later an increasing breakdown in this relation was thought by many to have been made final by the advent of Darwinism. The measure of a synthesis is not its duration but its donation. How much do we retain today?

As the 19th century begins Neptunism is the dominant geological theory. While technically it was the thesis that all rocks came from cold solutions its apologetic strength lay in its basis as a fine argument for design in nature, it did not need excessively long ages, and successive flooding seemed to allow varied forms of life as distinct creations. Its competitor, Vulcanism, which believed at least some rocks were of igneous origin, had apparently none of these advantages. However, one has but to read Gen. I and 2 exegeted in the light of Neptunism as in Kirwan's Geological Essays in 1800 to see how forced even this apparent harmony was. The spirit of God moving on the waters becomes evaporation soon after creation which led to the crystallization of early rocks, and so on. Surely this is isegesis of text into pretext! Indeed at this time the inspiration of Scripture was defended on just the grounds of this supposed agreement with geology since certainly ordinary Jewish literature could not anticipate this. Some even went so far as to assume God and Scripture could be perfectly deduced from geological argument. But in 1802 we find Playfair defending Vulcanism to similar ends but with a more reasonable restriction that science could only illustrate those portions of design and purpose appropriate to its realm. His thesis did, however, lead to agnosticism about the time and nature of creation as we cannot know more than the laws operating since then which are those of the present.

About this time Catastrophism arose as Sir James Hall, explaining Alpine valleys by a tidal wave, disagreed with Playfair that laws of nature have been the same since creation. (Here are the direct origins of present-day flood geology). The subsequent disagreements led by about 1820 to a truce whereby Scripture was no longer connected in detail to geology but where it sufficed that there be no contradictions with Moses' more detailed (sic) account. Much present Christian thought here is the offspring of this.

Win. Buckland and Cuvier the paleontologist in the early 1820's developed Catastrophism into a sequence of universal deluges following the rising of continental areas and mountain belts. After each, new life was created. All this was used for a great argument for design, for the interdependence of life and the environment, and for the manifest destiny of Britain with its bounty of economic minerals. It was Buckland also who raised the 'ages-day' interpretation of the creative week to popularity. It was he too who argued that deviations from general natural laws was God's way of showing us Him immanence. But does it not argue rather for a more Newtonian occasional interf erence ?

But the facts were slowly causing an attrition in the Catastrophist camp and Lyell rose to generalize the views of Hutton and Playfair into his principle of uniformity which taught the constancy of the tempo and energy of present laws as we move into the past. "If Buckland feared that without cataclysms there was no God, Lyell was as fundamentally apprehensive lest, without uniformity, there be no science", Gillispie remarks.33 To be sure such a view of uniformitarianism is much too simple for today34 and this may be illustrated by his inability to reconcile this with any thesis of evolution in past life.35

Lyell did not go unchallenged. Sedgwick, one-time president of the Geological Society, claimed uniformitarianism to be Ptolemaic, arguing that it rejected belief in all not seen or done by us. It circumscribed God's actions to our ignorance of them. Conybeare also argued that the degree and intensity of past causes has changed-a quite modern view!

In 1844 Chambers wrote his Vestiges of Creation in which he held that primitive and simple life developed by very tiny steps into the more complex. The "tiny steps" were from one specie to another. The writer anticipated, and got, violent reaction so that he kept his name secret for 40 years. Sedgwick claimed it annulled all distinction between physical and moral, thereby degrading man. He wrote in like vein to Darwin in 1859. Hugh Miller argued that the strata showed no such simple pattern and suggested a degradation theory instead. Others claimed it did away with design but Miller argues that it does away with much more-man's responsibility and immortality.

But interest in evolution was growing.35 Whewell and Brewster carried on a debate even before the publication of Darwin's work on the possibility of life on other planets. When Darwin published his Origin in 1859 it was to be only 25 years or so before most of the intellectual community had accepted it. With the plethora of books and articles on the issue appearing in this centenary year I need not recall the detailed events. But let us very quickly complete our "survey with the big brush" by noting the impact evolutionism had on various areas of thought. just as there are philosophies of science which change with our ideas of nature and our relation to it, there are philosophies front science which stop with the scientific view from which they grew even when it is long past. Such as the latter are most of the subsequent trends in evolutionism as a creed.36

For one thing, evolution was used to argue for everything from the most extreme forms of capitalism to Marxism. It had an impact on historical scholarship as in Andrew White and Win. Draper and the massive field of philosophies of history.37 Certainly it had tremendous impact on philosophy where pragmatism, Smut's holism, Spencer, Bergson, Alexander, Morgan, de Nouy, and modern organicism were saturated with it, but in vastly different ways.38 But its greatest impact was on theology.39 This ranged from the extremes of the Scopes trial to modernism of the early decades of our century. Some used it to defend imperialism and racial superiority. Others construed it as a basis for optimism and humanitarianism. Some rejected it entirely as in Chas. Hodge's, "It is atheism." Still others tried thereby to reconcile theology and science or develop a new theology based on evolutionary science, so that by 1890 evolution was fully recognize([ 1)y the leaders of the liberal movement. History became the evolution of divinity out of humanity, the evolution of the kingdom of God on earth. God became immanent in nature; what Jesus was man is becoming, and sin is mere lapse into man's past animal nature.40

Our survey of the past is now complete. The certainties of one age have become the problems of the next and temporal prejudices have apparently often been mistaken for timeless convictions. Well might one cry with Kierkegaard, "Lord, give us weak eyes for things that are of no account, and clear eyes for all your truths." Yet surely my peregrinations will have been most odious if we do not learn. We cannot operate on the strange assumption that by not taking thought we can add one cubit to our stature. Let us ponder a while.

We have learned first the dangers of the Thomistic conclusion that man, unaided, can find God. Apart from the problem it immediately raised as to how much we might find and the logical question of whether one can indeed accept the traditional arguments at all (now almost universally settled in the negative by philosophers outside of Thomism)41 there is the additional broader stricture that sinful man of himself cannot know God. As a man sows his axioms so shall he reap his deductions. No one can validly deduce more than that with which he begins. If he does not start with God as sovereign he will not end up with Him. Nor can a man induce the Biblical God from observations in nature. A God who might act in nature doesn't prove that He did. Also, God is not exhausted in His natural revelation and it is thus insufficient to give all truth about Him as Hume pointed out long ago.

But there is a greater difficulty here yet. If we look at nature we must evaluate the evidence for God on our prior criteria of judgment. But this has led, in some philosophers, to the problem of evil implying a finite God and in others to the scepticism of Russell's Free Man's Worship. Our criteria can only come from God Himself.42 If we accept them knowingly we then have already accepted God as speaking in Scripture. If unknowingly, any agreement we find with what a Christian finds in nature is a product of a violence we do to our own prideful and self-centered assumptions in accreting to these items from a Christian heritage or melieu.43

I believe we must say the same about the history of Rationalism. Its many different Gods, all supposedly self-evident, and its great difficulty in deriving particular events from its generalities only reveal what we have said above.44 Sinful man wards off the revelation of God. He is blind and cannot see, but he is responsible for this as his life and world-view are the antithesis of the acceptance of God as sovereign. He cannot isolate his reason from his life and faith consistently, so how may reason find the God his worldview denies? (The same applies to the Christian. How can he presume to find the God who speaks through Scripture and in Whom he believes by isolating his reason and arguing independently to God thereby? He will conclude either with a God in his own image or surreptitiously he will introduce elements of Christian theology and end with the God of Scripture only to that degree. Neither is satisfactory.) Descartes said that it was inconceivable that God would implant reason in man so as deliberately to lead him in error. He was right. Man is the source of the error.

Empiricism likewise failed. Pretending to work out from experiences it failed to find the ordered world of God with which it needs must start. Consistency demanded that it fragmentize nature. Indeed it ended up by distintegrating the self! Our point then is crucial. Only by starting with God as person, as creator and sustainer; with man as made in His image but now fallen; and with the fact of moral and physical evil can one ever correctly see the world. Wm. Temple, in his great study of natural religion and theology, remarked that the primary assurances of religion are the ultimate questions of philosophy.45 May I interpret this to mean that one must move from a theistic starting point to philosophy and science? Then, and then alone, will we find the confirmation of the original belief.

Let us now turn to the implications of this. There are never any facts without interpretations thereof or organizations of these without prior working judgments. A truly Baconian science is thus a figment of the imagination. Nor can man-centered interpretations ever assume the necessity of universal assent. Certainly they have never got it! The system of the Cambridge Platonists has come and gone. The arguments from design of Ray and Newton, of Butler and Paley, of the Bridgewater Treatises, of Kirwan and Playfair, or yet again of an Eddington or a Morrison, apart from their often contradictory nature have never achieved more than transitory acceptance.46 They special plead,47 their God is finite and changes with their judgments about Him, and when consistently argued becomes merely a personification of nature. Like the camel he partakes of that awkward look as if assembled by committee.48

We must also reject the claim that knowledge in the Christian is arrogance. Where the unregenerate should see God but refuses the Christian can see God and give meaning and purpose to the scientific work that he does. Indeed, in the mind conscious of God in the world, there is an obligation to study God's hand in every realm of nature and life. Where sin caused the distinction of special from general revelation, the Christian must use the former to restore perspecuity to the latter.

But we must therein correctly construe this relationship of Bible and nature. Science is not the judge of Scripture. The exegetical crudities of Neptunism or Catastrophism or the forced constructions of many modern writers are to be abhored. While the Bible does not settle the operational usefulness of theories in any science it does require that the construction of these assume as axiomatic the propositions of God's special revelation. The unregenerate, in violence to the incoherence of their theological assumptions, derive brilliant systems in spite of themselves but the believer's choice of these, or of others of his own construction, must be couched in the framework of theistic presuppositions. Thus a thorough mechanistic theory of nature may be quite useful to Christian or nonChristian but whether it is interpreted providentially, deistically, pantheistically, or atheistically depends on what one believes to begin with.49 The apparent nature of the world neither proves God nor the inspiration of passages of Scripture supposedly teaching this assumed nature, nor the antithesis of these, but rather it confirms our view of God and His Word and reveals the incoherence of any other view.

We may now suggest the basic structure of an evangelical philosophy of science. Built upon the foundations mentioned and delimited by these, it will none-the-less be temporal and on-going. It must not only speak to the problems of its time but it must see God's revelation in nature as unfolding under its scrutiny. How prone we are to stagnation! Much current Conservative literature in the field could have been written centuries ago. If this were because of lasting truth no one could gainsay the import, but much of it is the error of the past couched in new material. What is the placing of God in some fourth dimension but a ridiculous modern deism? What is a God in the indeterminancy of atomic physics, the "deft touches" of Milne's cosmology , or the gaps of the fossil record but Newton and Cuvier all over again?50

Surely our scientific philosophy must retort strongly to the current stress upon the general revelation of God in much contemporary philosophy due to its deemphasis of Scripture. Scripture must be seen as the unique revelation of the Archimedean point of truth which is God. Of course it must be interpreted with great care. Interpretation must try to be ahead of, not a generation behind, what is lasting in science. Unfortunately hermenutical principles do not arise entirely in Scripture and sometimes the development of human thought has had to lead us to re-examine and revise specific exegesis. We must walk carefully between the appearance of continually fudging Scripture to fit scientific advance and a too-broad interpretation of the text. But if we must err let us err toward the latter, giving every possible latitude in interpretation apparently consonant with inspiration and the internal unity of Scripture. And then let us clearly recognize that, of scientific theories thereby given latitude, we pick the theory on the grounds of its suggestiveness of future experiment, its ability to organize data, and its coherence with our entire world view.51

Of all the tasks for hermeneutical theory and Christian philosophy of science, this tension and its exploration and partial resolution are the greatest. The Jew reading the creation account saw it elaborated in whatever knowledge of nature he had; early 19th century geology and biology saw Genesis illuminated therein; and we see it amplified by our data. God's revelation in Scripture must be sufficient to present all that God desires in any age. And what is it that changes from age to age but insight into the meaning of Biblical statements and our knowledge of nature? The great truths of God's nature, plan, and purpose always speak with sufficiency in Scripture but further insight comes by patient linguistic research and scientific study.

But the coin has another side. Science, by its very nature, assumes a regularity in nature.52 It develops descriptive theories and constructs prescriptive models or laws into which it organizes nature.53 With time both change, but always they will exclude certain things. For example, miracle cannot nose into the tent via probability considerations or indeterminism54 and even the Christian rejects miracles in his working model of science and places them only in a non-predictive model embracing God and nature. Creation cannot steal in through entropy or arguments about design and first cause. Neither logic nor scientific working models can settle the argument of whether the universe has or has not a finite age. Only a broader scheme inclusive of God and His revelation can do this. The origin of life may be discussed and even achieved but this can never prove that life did originate in any given way in the past. A Christian may construct physico-chemical descriptions of the origin and development of life but at best they are only highly possible. His thesis that God is its source and sustainer is a model in another level of discourse including the scientific models as possible manners in which we can describe God's actions. Indeed here is the major point regarding a Christian philosophy of science.

The Philosophy of Science can never be ultimate to the Christian. Indeed it can never consistently be ultimate to the non-Christian. It is a discipline organizing the varied sciences and suggesting techniques of exploring its field of study. It does this with whatever foundational principles it desires, but only one group can consistently integrate with all we know and are. For the Christian these are the understanding that God, as creator of the universe, is to be seen in it and that it is a universe sustained in law by Him and also the understanding that these principles we arrive at through theology. But theology itself is not ultimate as it is, in turn, a special science dealing with the propositions of Scripture. What then is ultimate for us? It is a philosophy embracing theology, philosophy of science, and system organizing the other disciplines of human experience; a philosophy grounded in the revelations of Scripture. In other words, a truly Christian philosophy must begin with the self-disclosure of God.

Thus we see that at the root of all we know and are lies God. God is thus revealed in all that is His handiwork, but because of sin His special revelation in Scripture becomes the only light by which this may be seen. Hence the propositions of Scripture become axioms in a truly Christian Philosophy. It is the role of theology to attempt organization of these but no doctrine or creed can be accepted as final. Finality lies only in the discreet statements of Scripture. The organization of these is ours and hence liable to error. Theological statements, therefore, are to be continually appraised both from the side of improving our knowledge of what the Bible really says and from the side of semantical. clarification and improved ability to encompass the statements of science. Our faith is never a faith in theology. Nor is it a faith in science. It is faith in God as creator and sustainer of all that is. Indeed, it is a mistake, I think, to view theology or science as an aid to faith. If we have no faith in God to start with we will never get it by any human study and if we do have faith, we will only find in the varied areas of experience that which we expect anyway.

But there is one last point. While theological models (or if you like systematic organizations) by their very nature try to organize the revelations of Scripture which cover every area of God's creation. This does not imply that they thereby settle disputed questions in these areas. The operational principles making for fruitful scientific endeavor have their own realm of discourse and this does not treat of origins, of purpose of meaning. Both make a mistake when they overstate their appropriate bounds.55

And thus we finish. But this is but the beginning. I have done very little with respect to exploring in detail the relations of theology to science, of the semantics of theological statements and of scientific statements,56 with the precise place of teleology and miracle, with the social sciences and their relationship to those physical, with the relations of the humanities and the sciences, with the nature of mathematics, with the sociology of value judgmens in science, or with the technical data of and staggering quantities of precise philosophical studies of science. The work for Christians here is immense and most that I have seen is a.diarrhea of promise and a constipation of fulfillment. Let us, however, not become enthusiasts but rather enthusiastic. For the former, as you have heard, is a person who, having completely lost sight of his objectives, redoubles his efforts. Our objective must never be forgotten and our Christian philosophy must guide our every step?

References

1. J. B. S. Haldane, Facts and Faith, p. 107.
2.
John Baillie, Natural Science and the Spiritual Life, p. 6.
3. See C. A. Coulson,
Science and the Idea of God.
4. Quoted in his Belief and Unbelief Since 1850. James Orr also pointed out that perhaps the conflict of science with religion lies more in the general outlook of science than in its specific results.

5. Speculum Mentis, p. 148.
6. W. A. Whitehouse, Christian Faith and Scientific Attitude, p. 143.
7. Doubt and Certainty in Science, p. 149.
8. "To seek an integrative philosophy and neglect the Christendom out of which science and its consequences have sprung . . . goes far to explain and to perpetuate our present distress" as Chas. Raven remarks somewhere.

9. H. E. Kirk, Stars, Atoms, and God, p. 76.
10. Quoted from Nature, Man and God in C. A. Coulson, Science and Christian Belief.
11. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, p. 226.
12. Herman Bavinckp The Philosophy

13. If I may misquote Morton White Higher Learning, p. 33.

14. John Clark, His, June, 1959.

15. Quoted in R. Westfal, Science and tury England, p. 39.

16. Quoted in C. A. Coulson, Science and the Idea of God, p. 16.

17. See his letter to Christina in S. Drake (ed), Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo.

18. See R. K. Merton, Osiris, 1938, pp. 360-632.

19. Quoted in R. Westfal, op cit. Richard Baxter also wrote against the arrogance of testing God and the Epicurean atomism of the time. "They cut off and deny the noblest parts of nature and then sweep together the dust of agitated atoms and tell us that they have resolved all the phenomena of nature." p. 23.

20. C . C. Gillespie, Genesis and Geology, p. ix.

21. Ibid. p. x.

22. Compare here Prolusion 7 of Milton's Paradise L st. "When I behold the goodly Frame, the World of Heaven and Earth consisting, and compute their magnitudes, this Earth a spot, a grain, an Atom with the firmament compared, and all her numbered Stars, that seem to rowle Spaces incomprehensible merely to officiate light around this opacous Earth, this punctual Spot, one day or night; in all their vast survey useless besides, reasoning I oft admire, How nature wise and frugal would commit such disproportions."

23. In the Optiks we read: "The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical."" And aag in we read, "Whence is it that nature does nothing in vain?" Compare this with Sir Thomas Browne's creed in Religio Medici. "Every essence created or uncreated, hath its final cause and some positive end both of its Essence and Operation. This is the cause I grope after in the works of nature; on this hangs the Providence of God." (1, 19).

24. Op cit., p. 24.

25. And cannot we see Hume gleefully agreeing later as for him, at best, God can be considered to be only as great as the universe is construed to reveal.

26. See H. G. Alexander (ed), The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, 1956.

27. Westfal, op cit, p. 202. We may note here Paley's later comment that astronomy might, by the perfection of its processes, lead to a neglect of God as things too trivial led us to self-sufficient principles and not to a skillful Will behind them. However, he claims that after studying anatomy we may then turn to find the comparative sublimity of God in this area of nature. Natural Theology, pp. 260-279.

28. "In his drive for a rationally demonstrable religion he excluded the spiritual element in Christianity." Westfal, loc cit.

29. The 17th Century Background, p. 126.

30. Ray, Wisdom of God in the Works of Creation; Paley, Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology (so well known to Darwin as a youth) ; and Butler, Analogy (for critiques from quite different perspectives see A. DuncanJones, Butler's Moral Philosophy and C. Van Til, Christian Theistic Evidences).

31. See John Toland, Christianity Not Mysterious

Pantheisticon; Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation; Woolston, Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Savior, and Morgan, The Moral Philosopher.

32. A History of England in the 18th Century, 11, p. 571.
33. Op cit, p. 121.
34.
See R. liooykaas, "The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology, and Theology," Trans. of the Victoria institute, 1956.

35. Though he believes all forms of life to have been around since creation many forms he considers to have not fossilized in the early history of the earth, thus we think they appeared late. klowever, he is inconsistent here, as he argues from the absence of fossils to the recent origin of man.

35. See articles in the Scientiftc American, May and February 1959; in P-ndeavor of April 1958; in the American Scicnlist, December 1958; also Jan Lever, Creation and Evolution; L. Eiseley, Varwin's Century; the Journal of the History of Ideas, June 1956; Ayer (ed), Ideas and Beliefs of Victorians; Fothergill, Historical Aspects of Organic Evolution; Darwin, Autootography; and Clark, Darwin, Before and After.

36. See particularly S. Persons, Evolutionary Thought in America; The Antioch Review, Spring 1959; R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought; and E. A. White, Science and Religion in American Thought.

37. See any of the multitude of works and articles available in historiographical survey. Stern, Dray, Munk, Renier, and Geyl have all excellent studies. See also articles in the Christian Scholar, March 1957, and in the Personalist, Autumn 1956.

38. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism; M. White, The Origins of Dewey's Instrumentalism.- and E. A. White, op cit all discuss pragmatism and evolution. Main Currents in Modern Thought, a bi-monthly journal and G. Cannon, The Evolution of Living Things are defenders of a somewhat teleological organicism.

39. See Ginger, Six Days or Forever, 1958 and the article in the January issue of the Scientific American for discussions of the Scopes trial. See also David Lack, Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, 1958; Jan Lever, op cit; E. A. White, op cit; and Ira Brown, Lyman Abbott.

40. As in C. W. Sajous, Strength of Religion as Shown by Science, 1926, where we find the fall becoming "a solemn plea to mankind to beware ofthe animal instincts which the animal inheritance of the body includes." A recent writer states also, "Original sin is the mark of the beast from which we have come, still lingering and still to be overcome. It becomes sin only when man has reached a stage where he was conscious of choice and chose the lower part". See Wallace, Religion, Science and the Modern World, 1952.

41. Though some still do. See S. Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism; J. C. Monsma, The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe; and Cressy Morrison, Man Does Not Stand Alone. Of course, for Catholics, the Vatican Council of 1870 said God could be known through nature and the anti-modernistic agreement of 1910 interpreted this to mean that God could be proven. However, some Catholic writers assume science incapable of this. "I cannot agree . . . that physical science within its own universe of discourse as understood by itself can grasp final causes. The force of the data presented would seem to be that physical science is dealing with data which are not entirely explainable within the framework and method of science itself, and that for sheer explanation a discipline superior to physical science is needed." Proc. Amer. Catholic Philosophical Assoc., 1952, p. 195. For Catholic discussion of science see H. J. Koren, Readings in the Philosophy of Nature, 1958; H. Van Laer, The Philosophy of Science and Philosophico-Scientific Problems; A. van Melsen, The Philosophy of Nature, 1954: and Kane et al, Science Synthesis. See also P. J. McLaughlin, The Church and Modern Science, 1957 and Hauret, Beginnings.

42. Gordon Clark in Carl F. H. Henry, Revelation and the Bible, points out that even a sinless Adam had to have God speak. Note also Berdyaev's remark that "philosophy is anthropocentric but the philosopher ought to be theocentric," in The Beginning and the End.

43. T. H. L. Parker, Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 1959.

44. E. J. Carnell states, "Whereas philosophy seeks to explain the heart by a God gained through the examination of nature, Christianity seeks to explain nature by a God gained through an examination of the heart." A Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 274.

45. Nature, Man and God. The Gifford Lectures of 1956. For further elaboration of my point see Herman Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation. For,much more detailed criticisms of Thomism, rationalism, and empiricism see G. Clark, From Thales to Dewey; C. Van Til, op cit and his Apologetics; and the magnificent A New Critique of Theoretical Thought by H. Dooyeweerd.

46. See the fascinating study, Revelation and Religion, by H. H. Farmer.

47. As R. E. D. Clark put it in his Scientific Rationalism and Christian Faith, "The world is very largely colored by our own spectacles. The 'rationists' are careful to put on dark spectacles when they are arguing with theologians, but very rosy ones when they are dreaming of evolution or world utopias." p. 86. But he then turns around and does it himself. See his Creation, 1953.

48. Bernal, in his Science and Ethics rightly claims of such arguments that God survives only to explain the origin of the universe or of life. He is thus just a vague form: a name for our ignorance.

49. "The reason why the Victorian world contained nothing corresponding to religious experience is then obviously because religious experience had not been taken into account in building it up." Herbert Dingle, The Sources of Eddington's Philosophy. (I do not agree, however, with what Dingle thinks this implies.) See also S. Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists for a critical analysis of the views of Eddington and Jeans.

50. Ernst Cassirer, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, states, "Ethical freedom . . . (where ethics takes shelter in gaps in scientific knowledge) . . . would somehow be tolerated in the world but it could not exert any effect, any true power; it could not move anything outward. Yet . . . everything depends on this outward influence." p. 198. Is this not similar to our point?

51. As d'Abro points out in his Evolution of Scientific Thought, introducing ad hoc hypotheses continually demands we keep doing this with each deviant case. This removes the predictability from science. We must instead choose new axioms giving simple and apparently consistent results. See p. xv. See also G. Clark, op cit, p. 209.

52. And the Christian must not reject it with impunity at every desire to argue progressive creation or a reluctance to accept age determinations. It is very easy to end up in solipsism 1

53. On the theoretical structure of even mathematics see Max Black, The Nature of Mathematics and G. Berry, "Paradox and Logical Uncertainty", Philosophical Forum, 1957. On problems with induction see S. F. Barker, Induction and Hypothesis. For theory construction see P. Frank, A Philosophy of Modern Science; H. Mehlberg, The Reach of Science; and J. G. Kemeny, A Philosopher Looks at Science.

54. See Ernst Cassirer, op cit, pp. 203-205 and David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, 1957. On philosophical issues in quantum mechanics see S. Korner (ed), Observation and Interpretation.

55. For a similar discussion see, in increasing order of complexity, J. M. Spier, What is Calvanistic Philosophy? R. J. Rushdoony, By What Standard J. M. Spier, An Introduction to Christian Philosophy; C. Van Til, op cit; and H. Dooyeweerd.

56. A great deal of work is going on here though it leaves much to be desired in most cases. See T. R. Miles Religion and the Scientific Outlook; Flew and M'acIntyre (eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology; M. Foster, Mystery and Philosophy; B. Mitchell (ed), Faith and Logic; E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy; S. Toulmin et al, Metaphysical Beliefs; and I. T. Ramsey's Religious Language and Miracles.