There is a very good reason why cautions “not to make our science and discoveries into idols” don’t go down well with scientifically educated Christians.
Such a caution would be a good and important point if it were a warning not to spend so much time in the lab that we end up neglecting our churches, our prayer lives, our families, or our health. Unfortunately this is rarely if ever the case. Usually, when people tell us “not to make our science and discoveries into idols,” they are doing so in the service of promoting scientific falsehood and misinformation, or wilful ignorance and anti-intellectualism. In such cases, rustled feathers, offence and a sharp rebuke are only to be expected, and do not qualify as “persecution or opposition for being a Christian.”
The issue at stake in these discussions is making sure that your facts are straight. The reason why many young Christians stumble over evolution is not because of what the theory of evolution itself says, but because they learned that their church leaders were teaching them falsehood and misinformation about it.
Those of us who, as Christians, take science as seriously as we do, have very good reasons for doing so. Some of us have to understand science correctly in order to do our jobs. Some of us have suffered damage to our careers as a result of not taking science seriously. Some of us have seen our loved ones come to harm as a result of not taking science seriously. Many of us are aware of situations where getting science wrong has resulted in companies going out of business or people getting killed.
We are aware that science has rules, and that it requires rigorous standards of disciplined thinking and quality control. When we insist that the rules be followed and professional standards be maintained, which is basically all that we are doing when we respond to young earthism and evolution denial, accusations of “making our science and discoveries into idols” are basically a demand that we lower our standards to levels that quite rightly would not be tolerated in any science-based workplace.
This comment is untrue. Science does not change arbitrarily like shifting sands, nor is it driven by “current scientific fashions.” On the contrary, it only changes in disciplined, rigorous and carefully controlled ways and only when required by new evidence or new and improved techniques for analysing the evidence. To portray scientific knowledge as “shifting sands” is to express an ignorance of how science works, what scientists actually do, and what you need to do in order to challenge it.