Re: Are American Public School Science Programs Anti-Christian

There are so many things in this statement that I could write pages about,
by way of commentary. I'll pick only one for the moment:

In science class, students learn that there are physical causes acting on
physical objects, and these form a closed system of cause and effect (see
Rock and Window? and Evidence?). This "naturally" implies atheism or, at
best, deism. If plant stem elongation is caused by gibberellic acid, if
tides
are caused by the moon, if chemical reactions are caused by electromagnetic

forces, then what place for God? If atoms and the forces that hold them
together and act between them form a closed system of cause and effect,
then
what need for God? If the universe is a grand agglomeration of tiny
billiard
balls, or a great machine, chugging along with not need or even room for
direct interaction with anything outside, then we don't need evolution to
do
away with God. All we need is physics! We are left with, at most, the
clockmaker god of the deists. At best, His activity is pushed to back to
the
big bang or to the fringes in miracles....

****

Ted comments:

Many years ago, my late dissertation supervisor (Richard S Westfall) wrote,
"The relation of science to religion in the seventeenth century [is] the
central question in the history of modern Western thought."

I agreed with him when I was his student a quarter century ago, and I still
do after many years of further thinking about the same subject. And the
paragraph above is really about this historical issue in science, since it
was in the 17th century that the mechanical philosophy (billiard ball models
for all of nature) was really worked out and took over the scientific
enterprise as the dominant approach by the end of that century.

Theologically, the fundamental questions will involve our conceptions of
divine activity. What is it that we think God "does" in the world, all the
time and everywhere? Is it "everything" or only "some things" or "nothing"?
 And is God's activity whenever/wherever it occurs always on the same level
as human activity, or might it be mostly or always on another level? Is
causing to be the same type of activity as producing motion? If God acts
everywhere and always as Newton believed (the same Newton who believed that
God's constant activity could be described faithfully in mathematical
terms), then is God's activity always or usually capable of being
described/understood by our minds? If so, then we have science; if not,
then we don't. Well, obviously (I would say) a science of nature is
possible, so you can see where I believe good theology ought to reside.

Ted
Received on Tue Jan 3 14:19:12 2006