The trend away from general acceptance of the idea of universal Truth, with a capital "T", has been centuries in the making. It was helped along by the individualism of the Enlightenment, even inadvertently by the stand against collective authority taken by Martin Luther. While Truth was losing ground in the realms of ethics, philosophy, and religion, Fact (again with the capital letter) was gaining ground in a host of scientific endeavors through the Industrial, Agricultural, and Modern Medicine revolutions. We, as humanity, knew with certainty more facts about the universe we inhabited than our ancestors could have imagined possible. Their senses were limited to their own eyes, we could examine the world through both microscopes and telescopes. Even if we were losing firm ground in the spiritual realm with the breakup of Christendom into competing Catholic and Protestant camps, and the splintering of Protestantism into still further groups, we were gaining a common understanding of objective reality that led, not without bumps along the way, away from Thomas Hobbes' description of life outside of society's embrace as 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' Life expectancy was on the rise, starvation and childhood death rates were plummeting, work was less back breaking, leisure was invented. In short, aside from the rude wake-up calls of war and genocide, optimism was a warranted conclusion.
In this world of increasing scientific fact, there was an opportunity for religion, Christianity in particular, to trumpet God's proclamation that lying is beyond his nature. In other words, Christianity should have embraced scientific discovery as a further revelation of God's nature. The relation between science and religion, which could have been harmonious, was instead rocky.
Hebrews 6:17-18 (NIV) 17 Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18 God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged.
The Church made the mistake of viewing Scripture as a scientific journal rather than simply observational reporting. The prime example is the way in which the heavens are described, the 'firmament' of Genesis 1, as it was observed by the ancients. This was not a scientific description of what lay beyond earth's atmosphere, but only how it looked from where they stood. Without telescopes, what more could they have known, and why would God have explained it to them in ways they could not have understood? Thus when Copernicus and Galileo revealed through observation that the earth revolves around the sun, the Church should have welcomed this new insight, but instead insisted that Scripture declared that the geocentric model was correct. Thus began a long and fruitless fight against scientific discovery that later encompassed numerous fields beyond astronomy, all fought misguidedly in the effort to defend things that holy scripture had not asserted.
Fast forward to 21st century American Evangelicalism (and to a lesser extent American Christianity in general). The cause of objective spiritual Truth is seemingly at a nadir, long held moral beliefs are challenged forcefully by the culture at large, and what is the response of the Church? A seemingly all-out assault on Fact. Rather than defend Truth, American Evangelicalism has largely embraced a no-holds barred war against science. It began, in earnest in 1925 with the Scopes Trial pitting an interpretation of the Creation account in Genesis against the theories of biology, but quickly expanding to hold that interpretation also against discoveries in archaeology, astronomy, geology, physics, and more as the defense of an earth that could be no more than 6,000 years old was seen as the Rubicon of scriptural inerrancy. If Science is allowed to explain the origin of the universe and of life on earth, the war would be lost and religion would be discarded, so we have been warned with increasing fervor.
With what end result? A significant portion of evangelicals now believe that the scientific community is engaged in a massive demonic conspiracy to discredit the Bible. It is now common belief among many that your average paleontologist or astronomer is an atheist that hates God. On the flip side, many of the West's most educated people have grown cynical about spiritual things in general, and Christianity in particular, in part because of this anti-science stance. What we are left with is never ending trench warfare with evangelicals touting attempts to refute science through organizations like Answers in Genesis, a process that has inevitably become more and more political, less and less theological.
In recent decades this war over the Facts of Creation has expanded to touch upon other scientific discoveries. Because millions of evangelicals look at science with disdain once reserved for Voodoo witch doctors, there is little wonder that an anti-vaccine movement has developed, that Climate Change is one of the most divisive political issues in America today, or that we now live in an era when a phrase like 'alternative facts' can be uttered with a straight face.
Is Science, if something so nebulous can be taken as a whole, blameless in all this? Certainly not, one need not be a fan of Michael Crichton (I am) to recognize that human genetic engineering requires significant safeguard and raises massive ethical questions, nor to agree that recreating carnivorous dinosaurs would be a bad idea, if it were possible. In virtually every field Science has ethical questions to answer. As Crichton's character Ian Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.” Here's the irony in all this, Science can't answer questions about what whether or not they should do something. Those questions are ethical questions, and ethics lies in the realm of philosophy and religion. Science NEEDS the spiritual realm to answers questions that go beyond the test tube, that are not answered by a peer reviewed study, but rather than act as a counselor and guide, much of American Christianity has treated Science as the enemy.
No matter what you believe about HOW God Created the World, the war on Science has already begun to boomerang.
I know that many Christians are firmly convinced that only a literal 6 Day Creation occurring approximately 6,000 years ago can possibly do justice to Genesis. {I've written about this issue previously: Faith, Science, and Creation, is there a way forward?} If this is the only option, we are at an impasse, for scientific discoveries have not invalidated previously put forth theories about the age of the universe. To continue in this stalemate is a lose-lose situation. The more Facts are eroded by religion, and especially by the politics of the religious, the less and less trust will be placed upon Truth by the culture at large. Facts and Truth are inextricably linked, you can't have one without the other. Faith and Science NEED each other, whether either side is willing to admit it or not.
If there are no objective Facts that can be agreed upon, there is no Truth either. On what basis will you build the case that the Bible is True while at the same time you preach that human beings cannot trust their own senses? Radical empirical-ism, that each of us can only trust what we sense and no objective reality lies beyond our senses, is a death knell not only for any hope of a democratic republic, but of organized religion as well. But that radical individualism is the foreseeable end result of a constant dismissal of Facts. If Facts and Truth do not exist independent of us, but are rather subject to our will to believe or disbelieve them, they cease to have any useful meaning.
2020 has shown us the acceleration of this process. Recently highly influential evangelical pastor John MacArthur has declared against a mountain of scientific evidence, "there is no pandemic", a statement that was met with thunderous applause by the 3,000 non mask wearing people in the sanctuary of his church. Here's the problem, the virus doesn't care if you believe in it or not. Science denial is now a political badge of courage, but this is not surprising, it was the next step in the ongoing assault on Fact by many Christians.
{John MacArthur jumps the shark with COVID-19 response}
It doesn't have to be this way, we don't need to sow the seeds of our own destruction. We can't have Truth without Facts. When you assault one, you attack them both. If Christians want to be people of Truth, they need to be people of Facts too.
For more on the topic of Truth and its relationship with Fact:
The apparent blasphemy of My Pillow founder Michael Lindell regarding a COVID-19 'cure'.
2020 has taken the measure of the Church, and found us wanting
Faith is not anti-fact, at least it's not supposed to be.
The ungodly growth of Holocaust Denial
Those are just the last two years, when you minor in philosophy the idea of Truth is never far from your mind. List of 37 posts on my blog about Truth
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