Brooke Week 4 : Natural Theology and The Science of History

So we complete our time in Brooke who takes us from Pre-history to Modernity. We are now able to agree with Solomon that "there is no new thing under the Sun" but as applied to Science and Faith. We started this section by discussing how a theistic person would view a lightening rod as a challenge to God's sovereignty and complete it with the largely duelist view of a modern, complementary worldview where the developments of Science do not impact issues of faith.

In this week, we start with how the modern worldview provides a completely different historical narrative from the Universe to the mundane. To show how this works we start with a couple of simple questions:

1) If a strict Baconian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

1) If a Cartesian looks at the following photo as the only evidence for humanity what would that scientist be able to say?

We discovered of course that Baconians have a very limited ability to see the obvious. If we then extend this principle to the Universe and the message written for us in the stars then what do we see? Well, this is the Universe as we see it.

If we allow a Cartesian analysis of what we see then we can categorize the stars according to size and history.

Leading us to conclude that if our Sun behaves in any way like the stars in the Universe that are the same size then this is not only the history of our Sun but its future as well. What is amazing in this is that if this model is correct then to form a golf atom in a wedding band the atom would have to have been fused in the heart of one star. That star would have to explode and turn to dust then return to the heart of a second star which then uses it as fuel to form the gold atom and then that star explodes to dust that eventually got collected up into the ball of space debris that formed our Earth. At least two stars. Makes you wonder.

Another thing that makes you wonder is that our view of the Universe is based on what we can see. The fact is that stars closer to us block the view of stars that are farther away. So one year the Hubble Space Telescope was trained on a tiny spot of night sky that was apparently dark. What they discovered was that the tiny black spot was a window past the local stars to the farther stars and this famous photo was collected. It is important to note that the image did not see stars but galaxies of millions, billions, trillions of stars ... all in a window the size of a grain of sand in the night sky.



A cartoonist saw this discovery in this way ...

From My Pictures

And so we see how modern science tells us a history of the universe and the Earth and our job as scientists and theists is to not only understand this information but to develop a worldview that integrates it.

And so we consider how people just like us tried to do this as the world changed under their feet 100 years ago at the beginning of the Modern Era ...

Chapter 6: The Fortunes and Functions of Natural Theology
“The object of the chapter is to uncover some of the reasons why this integration of science and religion proved so viable, despite the existence of trenchant critiques. We shall also consider the extent to which a commitment to natural theology affected the scientific enterprise and the extent to which advances in science affected the plausibility of arguments from design. ” (p. 15)

“The idea that divine wisdom could be discerned in nature was attractive in different ways, both to Christian apologists and to deists. Christians found the argument useful in their dialogues with unbelief. It seemed to offer independent proof of a God who they believed had also revealed Himself in the person of Christ. On the other hand, Deists also had reasons for promoting the design argument. The more that could be known of God through rational inference the less perhaps it was necessary to refer to revelation at all” (p. 193)

“For Calvin, any knowledge of God inferred from nature would be distorted, the defective product of a dimmed and fallen intellect. The image could only be rectified by reading nature through the spectacles of Scripture” (p. 195)

“Natural theology flourished in England not because of a peculiar English mentality but because there were social and political circumstances that gave the English Enlightenment a distinctive character” (p. 200)

“… according to Kant, was that no matter how much wise artistry might be displayed in the world, it could never demonstrate the moral wisdom that had to be predicated of God” (p. 205)

“On one level, natural theology was not so much destroyed by science as eased out of scientific culture by a growing irrelevance.” (p. 219)

“Whewell continued to argue that the best explanation for the mind’s capacity to discover scientific truth was that it had been designed for the purpose. As priest and preacher, however he stressed that the way back to God was not through rational considerations. For one thing, that would leave God out of the conversion process; for another it would take insufficient account of the fact that design arguments were really only compelling to those that already believed.” (p. 224)

Chapter 7: Visions of the Past: Religious Belief and the Historical Sciences
“The assumptions made in reconstructing the past were often highly controversial even among naturalists themselves. We shall therefore stress the competition between rival scenarios, in which the political and religious preferences sometimes constituted a hidden agenda. Although there were countless attempts to harmonize these disturbing vistas with biblical texts, they were eventually abandoned – at least among academic theologians – as the methods of historical research were brought to bear on questions of biblical authorship” (p. 14)

“With the emergence of more sophisticated historical scholarship, particularly in Germany, it had already become clear to many Christian intellectuals that adherence to the literal inerrancy of Scripture was no way to present the credentials of Christianity to the modern world.” (p. 231)

“The science of history had created a watershed. One set of presuppositions took one toward a more human, but historically elusive Christ. The other – more traditional – allowed the retention of the Christ of faith, but at the cost of severing ones ties with what Strauss called “our modern world”” (p. 270)