This is great advice! I wonder if there is scope for a BioLogos article on how to talk to a scientist about Christianity? Perhaps, titled so that it doesn’t appear as a direct response. Seems like you have the core of it already in this post.
What do you think, @HRankin/@jammycakes?
Speaking to a scientist is like speaking to anybody - we are fundamentally similar in our core, despite our education and profession. Similar kind of needs, similar kind of hopes, longing for love. A need to see that what is taught is true in the life of the person speaking.
That said, I agree about the facts. Telling things the other person knows to be false is a rapid way to loose trust. The same may be true with anybody, not just scientists, but training makes scientists respond strongly to obviously false claims. A strong response does not necessarily mean they start to argue, going away is also a common response.
Also saying ‘I don’t know’ is something that scientists can value more than an average citizen. Trained scientists know, or should know, how little they know and how much uncertainties theories and hypotheses include. Admitting how little I (/we) know is an honest starting point for discussions.
Is one selling ones Jesus to scientists or have they asked about Him? And how? Because they think you know something about Him that they don’t, or are they asking scientifically about your epistemics?
I appreciate this sensitive approach, @jammycakes . It is important, as fundamentalists often tell us that scientists and profs are out to change our faith. Just yesterday in Sunday School, a man said that trying to find signs of life on Mars and other planets was a way of trying to sidestep God’s sovereignty. I’m not sure exactly how he figured that, but he probably thought that they were searching for evidence of evolution that they could not find on earth.
This is a rather long video (25 minutes) by Randal Rauser, about how not to talk to a professor (I think that maybe the OP’s article, as it’s aimed to students, would find this relevant). Don’t feel you have to watch it, but Rauser notes that the majority of scientists are earnest seekers of truth, and it behooves us to approach things respectfully.
Growing up in a rather fundamentalist, though well intentioned, background, my initial reponse to a geology class was less than stellar. I tried, very respectfully, to challenge the prof with some questions. He very kindly and calmly broke down my arguments–which brought me to change my mind within a few weeks. I especially appreciated his attitude, as he was under pressure from other students to pass over my questions and not delay the class (not to blame them, either; I’m sure it was annoying!).
[How Christian Apologists Perpetuate a Persecution Delusion - Randal Rauser]
Thanks.
(How Christian Apologists Perpetuate a Persecution Delusion - Randal Rauser)
It sounds like a good idea, though I think I’d want to expand on what I’ve written here somewhat and possibly incorporate some of the things that other people say in response. I was thinking of expanding on this for my blog anyway, though I’d probably adopt a different tone for the BioLogos website. I’ll be on holiday next week so I will in probably have some time to give it a bit of thought if you like.
Definitely agree that it shouldn’t be worded as a direct response to the UCCF article: whatever we come up with should stand on its own. Maybe acknowledge it as inspiration, but that’s about it.
I wish I’d seen that video before I went to university. If I had a time machine, it’s the one thing I would want to go back and hammer into my eighteen-year-old self. Your science degree is NOT an ammunition gathering exercise!
Is There Hope in Science? - Christian Scholar’s Review has a good meditation on what science does and doesn’t tell us, addressing some theological errors as well, as a good example of talking about science and faith.
There’s another point that’s worth making with regard to this one. It is sadly all too common for scientists and engineers to have been bullied at school as children. Secondary school can be outright hell for anyone who is good at maths and science, not so good at sports, and more interested in subjects that they study in class than in football, soap operas and celebrity gossip. Bad attitudes to science from Christians can be particularly off-putting to such people for obvious reasons: no-one who has been through that kind of experience wants to go through it again, and if you’re giving them so much as a hint that the Church is any kind of adult version of that kind of environment, you’ve only yourself to blame if they tell you, with colourful asides, that they don’t want to know.
Paul Graham, a software engineer, venture capitalist and tech writer who founded the popular science and tech forum Hacker News, wrote an article that examines this issue in some detail. It’s well worth a read:
Cool. Thanks for that.
Great observation, and tragically true. I doubt it helps then when they turn up to church and the sermon analogies are all about sport, soap operas, and celebrities.
I guess that a thorough lack of such things in my circles is why every peer of mine I know seems quite normal and pleasant. And why everyone around me seems to at least be impressed by, if not admire, my doing independent research.
Enjoyed the article. It explains a lot. I seems that in America, Evangelical church is the high school cafeteria, and EC sits at the nerd table.
Maybe we should not assume that “assumptions” is entirely a YEC prerogative.
Well, LM77 …Good point about sermon analogies that have to do with subjects of minimal interest to science nerds – things like sports etc. But of course, if you are a single adult in church – even though not a scientist – you are bombarded by such unrelated fluff all the time at church. (Yes, fluff – there I’ve said it!) The YEC stance in some or many churches is more of a problem for a scientist, I would think. For that, they have resources like Biologos. Sometimes you have to pick and choose and look for resources in other places, while still attending church.
I doubt if that’s a problem to be honest. The real problem is things such as passive-aggressive remarks about “putting your trust in science” or “secular science” or “having more faith in science than in God.”
It isn’t. It’s just that it can come across as loaded or passive-aggressive if one isn’t careful.
Let’s keep in mind that intro level high school textbooks are addressed to teenagers, not scientists with PhDs, and they are aimed at connecting what students know with a new subject matter. English speaking high schoolers know the colloquial use of theory to describe an unscientific guess or any kind of deduction (“She has a theory about who that Taylor Swift song is talking about.”) Many many high school students are also indoctinated into “only a theory” type rhetoric surrounding evolution and this has to be countered so students can understand new concepts. The point of an intro-level textbook is not to instruct scientists in how to use the terms in their own fields, it’s to explain how terms are going to be used in the material the student is encountering right then. The things named theories in the textbook are well-established models. Should textbooks allow for the fact that there are some new theories and fringe theories and hard to empirically test theories that don’t fit this definition? Maybe, but sometimes when you are introducing an idea to novices, you stick with basics, knowing that they will get into all the nuances and uses of terms and concepts later on.
What Steve is saying about a theory and theory is how the term is used in linguistics too. If you write a paper, it has to be theoretically grounded in a particular approach or framework like minimalism, or lexical functional grammar or role and reference grammar. But then you can propose a theory about how a particular aspect of language works in a particular context, by which you mean you had hypothesses that you have confirmed and you are proposing a model for how something works based on data you have. It doesn’t mean it’s been tested by others or accepted by the linguisitic community. But then there are discipline-level theories like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity that are referential for the entire discipline. I think the textbooks are describing theories that get names and that you have to learn to proceed in a discipline because subsequent work is based on understanding how the model works.
I think it is a common misconception, probably due to the way things are sometimes framed in intro-level textbooks, that hypotheses graduate to theories once they are established and used by lots of people. And often people have the misconception that theories graduate to laws when they are “proven,” which isn’t the case at all. It would be better to describe theories to students as models. Models with names (the theory of evolution) that you learn about in intro-level textbooks are indeed based on many confirmed hypotheses and multiple lines of evidence and are accepted and used by the scientific community. But it’s not a theory’s acceptedness or proveness that makes it a theory, it’s that it’s a functional model. And it’s important to point out to students that a model is not the same thing as a guess and some models are very good, to the point of being accepted as fact.
I was speaking of college level texts.
Yes, all misconceptions. Theories don’t graduate to laws. Technically, theories are higher than laws.
But why do all the intro-level textbooks in university struggle so mightily in pointing this out then?
Hypothesis, theory, model, law…it shouldn’t be that hard to have uniformity… Jim is right. Scientists are great at doing science but suck as philosophers.
Vinnie
I think this is the most important one. Talk with people, not at them. The recent trend in apologetics is towards more sciency and logical-ish arguments, but I have yet to see any that hold any water, especially amongst those who have training and experience in the sciences. I think it is much better to talk to scientists on a person-to-person level, at a human level. Most people I know who are Christians are Christians because of personal experiences, not the latest apologetics.
I think it has more to do with scientists not caring about philosophy.
More to the point, context is way more important than wrote definitions. When scientists discuss ideas they break it down into data and explanations. This is what I saw, and this is what I think is happening. That idea is passed to other scientists, and they work on the idea to see if it stands up. How someone categorizes their idea is completely secondary to the idea itself. There’s no need to have a black and white, concrete definition for theory because that’s not how scientists treat those terms, and it works just fine.
This, all day long and twice on Sunday. I wish I could pass a law to get it written in on the inside cover of every young Christian male’s Bible.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.