Lux Lucet

This post in a continuation of Unbelievable:
A Quick Look at Bill Nye’s Views on Evolution, Science and Creation, Part 2 published on 5/28/2017. In that post, I began to examine Chapter 2 of Nye’s book Undeniable, Evolution and the Science of Creation. That post went through page 10 of the book. This week will pick up my review starting on page 11.

The US is lagging in science, and it’s the creationist’s fault

Bill Nye seems to be very worried about the state of US science education and achievement. He writes, “[W]ithout young people entering science fields, especially engineering, the country will fall behind other nations who do educate their kids in real science rather than the pseudoscience of creationism” (10).

This is one of many manifestations of Nye’s unspoken, fundamental, and flawed assumption that one cannot be a Christian and at the same time a scientist. Nowhere does Nye offer any proof of this contention. He simply asserts is expecting his audience to swallow it without question.

But in truth, Christians accept that the very Logos, the Logic, of God spoke the universe into existence. And not only that, this same Logos, and the Gospel of John tells us, is the light which lightens every man who comes into the world. The very logical architecture of our minds is what is it as a result of the creative work of Jesus Christ.

As such, not only is there no inhibition preventing Christians from studying the sciences, but it is the Christian alone who has sound reason to expect the universe to exhibit regularity and rationality, being, as it is, the creation of a rational God.

Further, a Christian scientist doesn’t need to waste a lifetime of research attempting to explain the origin of the universe or of life. He already has these answers revealed to him and can go about his work secure in the knowledge that he has a correct understanding of the universe.

Scripture not a wax nose

As noted in my last post, Chapter 2 of Nye’s book is inspired by the author’s 2014 debate with Ken Ham on creation.

During that debate, Nye several times spoke about Ken Ham’s interpretation of Scripture in an attempt to cast Ham into the mold of a religious extremist who’s views were not widely accepted, even among others who claimed to be Christians.

That line of argumentation reappears in Nye’s book. Writes Nye, “He [Ham] claims that his interpretation of The Bible is more valid than the basic facts of geology, astronomy, biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and especially evolution” (11).

At least two points need to be made here about Nye’s argument. First, the belief that God created the world in six literal, 24 hour days is not some idiosyncratic reading of Scripture unique to Ken Ham. This is the historical Christian understanding of Genesis. One which was accepted without much argument up until the middle of the 19th century, when theologians began to believe it was necessary to find a way to fit millions and billions of years into the Bible’s historical time line.

But there is no sound reading of Scripture that allows for billions of years. Doing so requires the exegete to do remarkable violence to the text, imagining vast periods of time that cannot be derived either from the plain statements of, or necessary inferences from, Scripture.

Scripture is not a wax nose which can be bent now this way, and now that according to the whims of the interpreter. Ken Ham is entirely correct to insist on a literal reading of Genesis 1. It is sound logically, and it is consonant with centuries of Christian understanding of the passage.

Just the facts, ma’am

Second, Nye wants to contrast Ham’s supposedly fanciful reading of the Bible with “the facts.” This sounds convincing, but is it really as airtight an argument as it appears at first glance? Just what is a fact? Nye never tells us. But this isn’t such a simple question as it may seem.

Gordon Clark addressed the problem of facts in his book A Christian View of Men and Things. Clark wrote,

But, it may be asserted, although the laws of science are tentative and are modified from time to time, becoming more accurate in this process, there are, as a basis for these approximations, certain absolute facts. After all, a fact is a fact, and no one can change it. The advantage science has over theology is that it sticks to the facts. Still, one must not go too fast. The practical mind that loves facts and distrusts theory should acquire some patience and pause a while over the theory of facts. There may at first be reluctance to face the question, What is fact? Yet if facts are unyielding absolutes, it ought not to prove too difficult to show what a fact is. Let us try. Is it a fact that the Earth is round? In the Middle Ages the common people thought it was flat. Since then, evidence has accumulated (considerable evidence was known to astronomers during the Middle Ages) and has been disseminated, until today everyone takes it as a fact that the Earth is round. But strictly, is it the Earth’s roundness that is a fact, or is it the items of evidence that are facts on which the conclusion of the Earth’s roundness rests? For example, the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse has a round edge: Perhaps this is a fact, and the roundness of the Earth is a theory…This type of analysis seems to lead to the conclusion that all, or at least many, alleged facts are theories developed out of simpler items of perception. The problem naturally arises whether there is any fact that is not a theory. Is there anything seen directly as what it is (136)?

Nye seems to assume, rather naively, that it is a simple thing to determine just what the facts are. Perhaps it is this difficulty in determining the facts that explains why, “Scientific procedure does not invariable grasp the truth; on the contrary, it has a long history of accepting what is later thought to be false” (Clark, 136).

Observational vs. Historical Science

Nye criticizes Ham over his distinction between observational and historical science. Observational science, explains Ham’s organization Answers in Genesis (AiG), is where scientists are able to gather information “simply by examining things with [their] senses.” Observational science is said to be observable, testable, repeatable, and falsifiable.

Historical science (secular and religious), AiG argues, lacks these properties and is based instead on one’s worldview.

Nye and other Darwinists have taken Ham to task for this distinction, and I believe they are correct, but not for the reason they probably think.

It gets back to that most basic of all philosophic disciplines, epistemology. Epistemology answers the question, How do you know?

The most common method, really the default method for the vast majority of people, is to say that they observed something, therefore it is true. There is a name for this theory of knowledge, it is called empiricism. Empiricism states that observation furnishes us with knowledge. “Seeing is believing,” is a popular expression of this view.

By dividing science into observational and historical, it appears that Ham is arguing, at least if I understand him correctly, that there are two sources of knowledge, what we observe with our senses and what is revealed to us in Scripture.

Ham appears to agree with empiricists such as Nye that operational science can furnish us with knowledge, but for information about the past, one must rely on the Bible.

But sense perception never furnishes us with knowledge, in the sense of providing finality. Our senses can easily fooled. For example, what color is the sheet of paper resting on your table. Well, it depends on the light that is shining on it. At one time, it may appear white, but under different lighting it may appear red or orange or green. Which is the true color of the sheet of paper?

Further, as Gordon Clark notes, “No significant experiment can be completed without measuring a line,” but, “The length of a line is most difficult to ascertain” (A Christian View of Men and Things, 137).

Rather than dividing science up between operation and historical, it seems to me that a better approach for Christians is to follow Gordon Clark’s Scripturalism, in which the sole source of knowledge is revelation alone. In Clark’s system, all science, whether mixing chemicals in a laboratory or examining dinosaur bones, at best furnishes us with opinion. Opinions, unlike knowledge which is always true, may be true or may be false.

(To be continued…)