For me, there’s a personal element and transformation in my own life. I have been far happier, kinder, and less judgmental after becoming a Christian. Of course that doesn’t necessarily “prove” that it is true but it does give evidential weight to the idea that it is true. One thing critics of Christianity often miss is that Christianity is more than a set of propositions about the world. I’d even argue it isn’t primarily a set of propositions about the world. Rather it is primarily a way of life/living (that consequently involves propositions).
Similarly, I’d argue “science” isn’t primarily a set of propositions or a collection of facts. Instead it is a methodology for producing theories and differentiating between theories. The move from learning the theories themselves and claiming they are “true” is a (albeit justified) philosophical leap. Unlike most religions, I don’t know if it necessarily implies any propositions itself, though it is often accompanied by them.
Hmmm this is a good question. I think on the surface the two look pretty different. Namely, we can verify and observe results associated with science, while assertions about God can’t be so easily verified or tested.
As I’ve thought a bit more about this, however, I’ve come to realize they’re more similar than I initially thought. The history of modern science shows that it emerged as a branch of “natural philosophy.” I make this observation because us scientists and researchers often take for granted the foundation laid by philosophers in this area. Yes, science involves empirical observations by our (fallible) senses. But perhaps even more important to science are a “trust” or “faith” in reason itself (and by extension, perhaps mathematics). In many ways, the usefulness of reason itself and mathematics is not justified only on empirical grounds. There seems to be something more going on.
Science proceeds under the assumption that even if our empirical senses can be wrong or tricked, we can eventually use these senses to discover models that are accurate. Where does this trust in the methodology of science come from? My empirical senses tell me the table in front of me is solid wood. Yet the scientific method suggests that it is actually mostly empty space. Why am I justified believing the results of science over my own empirical observation, given that they contradict?
I’d argue it’s because I have “faith” in the applicability of reason and mathematical models, perhaps over my own empirical senses. I do trust that mathematics will produce reliable pictures of the world and that if scientists perform an experiment that seems to contradict my empirical notions, these results are (likely) trustworthy.
I was very surprised to learn that YEC and biblical literalism as we think of it today are actually relatively “new” things in the course of human (and Christian) history. I picked up a copy of Mark Noll’s “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” (thanks @Kendel for the motivation to buy it" and Noll, as a historian, traces how these things came about. Very fascinating.
Thanks for this. ↑
It’s interesting that it is so often translated as assurance, but there are some interesting variations:
Hebrews 11:1-3
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition
11:1 Now faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not.
1599 Geneva Bible
11:1 Now faith is the grounds of things which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not seen.
Holman Christian Standard Bible
11:1 Now faith is the reality of what is not seen. 2 For our ancestors won God’s approval by it.
I wonder why there is such variation. It makes a difference, as you pointed out.
Besides being a “reasonable faith,” would you say that it’s possible to contrast the kinds of results one finds (or is able to find), based on the foundational presumption/s one makes? I wonder if the evidence that one foundational presumption is more reliable or reasonable than another can be demonstrated after it has been employed – by the way its use leads to results that more (or less) conform to other observations of the natural world.
Or is one so bound by one’s presumptions, that s/he is not able to see beyond them to contrast and evaluate the difference they make in studying the natural world?
Thanks for clarifying this. It’s a hard thing to live a long time with the assumption that we have hard and fast proof, and to be told (from the inside) that subjective evidence is inadequate, not to be considered. As Christians I think it’s essential that we recognize and accept the challenge that “evidence of faith” for us is something quite different than what we are told we need to have. The standard evangelical belief is that evidence of faith is objective and akin to proof. I think it’s what Jesus was getting at in John 20:29 (Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."). Thomas and the Disciples had Jesus standing there with him, even though unimaginable things were going on. It would be a lot easier to believe in the resurrection, if the crucified one you had spent the last three years of your life with was suddenly standing there, talking with you and your friends all at once. We don’t have that kind of objective evidence. Faith for us requires something different.
So, what is meant by evidence in science is quite different from evidence in faith.
Paul, Christians miss this, too. It’s so much easier to memorize statements than try living those out (and fail and try and fail and try).
At the end of this post I have put a long quote from the end of the Introduction of Myron B. Penner’s book, The End of Apologetics, that I think addresses what you’re talking about. He also talks a great deal about what a life of faith looks like, when one deals with the subjectivity of faith.
Sphinxlike, I return to questions:
Could you explain what you mean here, and particularly in light of the philosophical?
I’m not sure what you mean here.
Yes. I agree they are pretty different.
When you say:
what do you mean with the qualifier “so easily”? Can they be at all? If so, how?
Does it emerge as a branch? Or did natural philosophy simply continue to develop into what we now call “science.” To start with, the study of the natural world was done in conjunction with philosophy, the only game in town. We would hardly recognize it as “science” now, but “natural philosophy” was what was happening at the time.
I think I"m repeating myself, but am too lazy to dig for it, You do see thrust or faith in reason as something quite different from trust or reason in God? Yes?
Glad you got Noll’s book. I hope you find it satisfying.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From The End of Apologetics
Rather than framing the issue in terms of an apologetic defense of Christian belief, I prefer to consider a postmodern apologetics in terms of the concept of witness-a prophetic witness, to be clear-for it orients us to the task differently and generates a completely different set of goals. Here edification-or building" up the self-replaces “,winning the argument” as the goal of Christian witness (apologetic discourse). This type of postmodern Christian witness is sensitive to the fragility of faith in our secular condition. It is not focused on a defense of the propositional truth of Christian doctrine, but performs an ironic poet ics of truth. What we discover is that theshift away from the (modern) epistemology of belief as the paradigm for Christian witness toward a hermeneutics of belief also opens up an ethics of belief that, in turn, deepens the critique of modern epistemology. How we believe-not just what we believe-is important to our belief being justified.
But what of this notion of a "poetics of truth’'? What sense can we give that? And how in postmodernity can there be any substantial talk of truth once we have adopted a hermeneutical perspective?
In chapter 4 (“Witness and Truth”) I further clarify the approach to truth involved in my Kierkegaardian account of Christian witness and relate it to propositional truth. I begin by noting that the goal of traditional apologetics is to justify the objective truth of the proposi tions of Christian doctrine. Christianity, the “essentially Christian,” is therefore assumed, implicitly or explicitly, to be captured in these propositions. The Christian truths defended by such modern apolo getics are taken to be ahistorical, unsituated, abstract, and universal. I then use Kierkegaard’s concept of truth as subjectivity to launch a critique on apologetic propositionalism and to provide an alternative way to think about Christian truth. To possess Christian truth is always to confess it to be true, to win its truth existentially for oneself. This is not a·disavowal of the cognitive content of Christian witness; it is a shifting of our perspective about a given truth claim so we think of it in terms of what Paul Ricoeur calls “attestation.” As I develop it, this account of truth and truth-telling is agonistic – it involves a struggle to stake our truth claims and make them true of us. Christian truth, then, often involves suffering on the part of the witness, and martyrdom-the act of laying down one’s life-is the ultimate form of testimony to the truths that edify us.
I often hear atheists arguing that science proves itself because it works. But those in religion say exactly the same thing about the methods they have put their faith in. This is not to argue that there is no difference, but only that an absence of faith is not the difference between them. The difference is found in those methodological ideals of honesty and objectivity which do provide a reasonable expectation that other should agree with the results of science. And we do see a difference in the degree of agreement and consensus which is far greater in science than in religion.
As it must be a hard thing to have invested so much in the absence of real proof, and then to be repeatedly told that it can be known for certain.
John 20:29? Blessed will be those who have their eyes of faith opened by the self-evident work of the Spirit. As you may remember, this was the one thing Penner couldn’t hear Craig saying. I recall as if it was yesterday, pounding that thread, with my disbelief that Penner acknowledges it, but can’t or won’t understand it either. Plain as day was Penner’s cognitive disconnect with understanding how this affected Craig’s epistemology.
Mike, you mischaracterize what I am saying, have been saying. I have made no such investment. If you believe that’s what I’m saying, you have misunderstood me at best.
Regarding:
Of course the Holy Spirit is needed to open our eyes. But then I have to ask how something could be self-evident, if we are unable to see it without the work of the Holy Spirit. If something is only self-evident once one has been illuminated, it isn’t self-evident.
[Looking back at my first post that we’re referencing, I see I didn’t complete the thought I had begun, though. So, I’ll go back and fix that, when I finish here.]
Yeah. Sorry. No, I don’t. We obviously brought very different concerns to TEA. I wasn’t paying attention to Craig beyond an example of an apologist. My main concerns had more to do with understanding my faith better in accordance with what I had already recognized, at least for myself. I was hoping to have found a book by someone who already had similar experiences and assumptions, and who could provide thoughts on “where to go from here.”
Kierkegaard, for example, has always been seen as dangerous (in my church background), precisely because he was grappling with the understanding that Christian faith is not something demonstrable according to scientific method or purely rational arguments. And when you try to get to faith by those means, you end up with something very different; see Kant and Hegel, for example.
Lewis is always held up as a “better” defender of faith. I like Lewis. I mean, really like Lewis. But the last time i read Mere Christianity more than 30 years after the first time, and everyone else in the group was nodding and “oh, yeahing”, I was sitting there, thinking, “I remember this book being better. I find it entirely unconvincing now.” And even more frustrating, “How could I use the arguments in this book (or any other Im familiar with) as support for faith in Jesus, when speaking to any of the many many nons in my life, if I as a Christian don’t find these things convincing?”
I don’t think you agreed with a single thing I’ve said about the proofs there are, so I am misunderstanding you. Not to long ago, I explained the significance of the “therefore know for certain” in Acts 2:36, and it feels to me like you don’t care or don’t want to hear about it.
I am often wrong. So help me better understand what you are saying.
What investment have I made? In what way have I invested time, energy, any other resouce in the absense of real proof?
I haven’t sought this conclusion or desired it. And I haven’t heard any aguments I find convincing of what I understand is meant by “real proof”.
I am one of those later disciples, who without the physical resurrected person of Jesus to examine have faith in him for reasons I can only attribute to the Holy Spirit. This is not “real proof” by any human standards. Try to convince an unbeliever with it, and they’ll step away from the cult member (I am here referring to myself).
Trying to pull this back around to Paul’s OP, faith in Jesus and whatever we hold the scientific method to be comprised of, are different with different standards of proof or evidence, which are based on very different assumptions.
Thinking further about Paul’s OP and John 20:29, what need is there for faith at all, when the claims of faith are proven?
I thought this had something to do with the Apostle Paul… no not that Paul…
I want to come back to this, but my first.thought, is it is an imperfect relationship between faith and science… divine hiddenness is a subject I’ve not really explored much at all… the scripture writers seem to have found a better way, as imperfect as it still appears to those on the outside… even as plausible as historical arguments are, or big picture OT narratives. Sure, the internal testimony of the Spirit is cult like and imperfect to those on the outside who have not tasted and seen, and such is the call of Jesus for his people to evidence genuine love for one another. Beginning with the widows and orphans and even the fatherless men… I guess I said what I had to say… I’ll still come back and look at your questions again.
What I meant by this is science doesn’t produce “truths,” it produces models that try and describe observed data in some particular way. The claim that some (or all) of reality can be understood from scientific models is a philosophical assumption, not a scientific one. In other words, claiming science describes reality needs to get its authority outside of science to avoid being circular. Is this “faith” in science and the scientific method to (asymptotically) approach true propositions about the way the world works (instead of simply good approximations) similar to faith in God? I think so, at least to a certain extent.
While I do think it is often a good assumption, for models to apply to the rest of the natural world (beyond a laboratory) involves assumptions about the regularity and uniformity of nature. Many of the original assumptions about the regularity of nature have been challenged (quantum mechanics, for instance, solves inconsistencies with Newtonian mechanics, but at the expense of making things more probabilistic instead of deterministic). The extent to which observation effects phenomena, for instance, doesn’t seem to be fully understood.
I think we can be naive when we move from the pragmatism of science (at producing models that are generally “good enough” to build stuff) to claiming this is exactly how the world behaves in itself. This claim is justified, but it requires a leap of faith and cannot be justified by science.
To better illustrate this point, consider the following: what would falsify one’s belief that falsification itself (as in the scientific method) is the best method for finding truth?
If we cannot give an answer, then we cannot justify the epistemic authority of science on its own grounds. Is it fair to say we trust the epistemic authority of science on “faith”? Or is it justified on pragmatic and/or foundationalist grounds (which some contemporary epistemologists argue also justifies religious and specifically Christian beliefs?)
Honestly I don’t know much about epistemology. My friend who is a philosopher told me that positivism is literally “dead” in serious philosophical circles. Yet it still seems to be alive among many new atheist types (and science worshippers, which there seems to be a significant overlap). She made an interesting point about mainstream academic philosophy not taking Dawkins, Harris, etc seriously and even expressed gratitude for this (even though she is an atheist).
Your question of what other methodologies cousin help us discover truth about the natural world is an interesting one…
I’m back to that one again and had tried to ask @mitchellmckain about it, too, but I wasn’t clear. Let me try this way. (Sorry, more questions, but really more rhetorical and absolutely chosen to direct your thinking in a specific way.)
Can we move away for a bit from the philosophical questions about falsification and epistemology in order to consider history of enquiry into nature? You had mentioned natural philosophy earlier.
What assumptions did “The Ancients” hold regarding the best ways of learning about nature? Did those assumptions change over time? How? What kinds of variations were there simultaneously and chronologically?
How effective were the various assumptions at gaining the information that was sought (assuming that that information was findable or actually desired – Finding out what Zeus’s favorite place to vacation is, for example, may have been a legitimate ancient question, but has little to do with what we might call science today.)?
What effect did the various underlying assumptions have on the effectiveness of the enquiry? How can that be evaluated?
Does research done with these different historic underlying assumptions lead to different outcomes?
Do scientists still rely on those same assumptions?
Why or why not?
Is it fair to say we trust the currently-used methods of science on “faith” or is there another process involved that may have brought scientists over time to conclude that the scientific method is preferable to methods of enquiry that are based on different assumptions?
no not that Paul…