Well good evening everyone and welcome to my sixty second episode. In the previous episode, I began to break down Isaiah chapter fourteen by examining the first eleven verses. Before we finish that study, I want to take an opportunity to explain more about how I understand the nature of the biblical text and the nature of reality. This is a complicated topic and so I’m going to try to parse it out as simply as I can. This is a really important conversation to be having because I think the secular community as well as many inside the church are getting this wrong. And I think the fact that they are getting this wrong is artificially giving rise to a conflict between religion and science that doesn’t actually exist. What better way to undermine humanity than to deceive them and divide them against themselves over an issue that’s not even there?
This conflict matters because it causes the secular community to dispense entirely with the biblical text and it causes the church to dispense with and encroach upon science. So, what we have to do is describe the basic claim of each side and then point out the mistakes. Then I’m going to suggest a perspective that eliminates the conflict and results in a more accurate understanding of both science and the biblical text.
First let’s deal with the secular claim. The secular claim is that the scientific method is our best tool for determining what is true about reality. Anything that does not pass muster with the scientific method is considered false or not falsifiable and therefore unworthy of integration into your worldview. The scientific method is designed to remove as much bias out of an observation as possible. This means it attempts to remove all possible value judgments. With science, all you have access to are objective facts. The secularist’s a priori faith in the scientific method has resulted in a worldview called reductionist materialism. All phenomena can be and must be reduced to their material substrate. Put simply, total reality is composed of and governed by the laws of physics interacting with quarks, atoms, and chemicals. Anything that can’t be explained on this level of analysis is not falsifiable and therefore unworthy of consideration. Consciousness is only chemical activity in the brain. Love is only chemical activity in the brain. Your interests, desires, and personality are a consequence of your genetic makeup and there is little to nothing that you can do to change them. When you die, brain activity ceases and your body decomposes into the elementary material from which it came. Nothing beyond this description is real.
Now let’s deal with the church’s claim. The Bible is the inspired Word of God and is inerrant. The Bible is to be read literally and historically, meaning that everything described in the Bible happened exactly the way we think it would have happened by the world’s definition of literal. Many inside the church vehemently reject parts of science like evolution and the age of the universe because they believe it imposes problems on the story set forward in Scripture. The limitations the church places on “literal” and “true” result in a Christian apologetic that attempts to defend the veracity of the biblical story on the level of science and philosophy. Examples of these defenses are the Kalam Cosmological Argument which says that something cannot come from nothing – and since science tells us the universe had a beginning – it must have had an agent or first cause to create it. Also the Intelligent Design Argument – which claims that the order, beauty, and extreme rarity of life is most reasonably explained by a Designer. Any scientific description of reality or the contents of reality that appears to disagree with a literal understanding of Scripture is dispensed with as unworthy of consideration.
Okay, so to summarize those two perspectives we could say that secularism claims ultimate reality is reducible to the laws of physics interacting with elementary material like quarks, atoms, and chemicals. The church claims that the biblical narrative is literally and historically true.
So where are the errors? For the secularist, the biggest issue is that you cannot derive values from facts. If I put you under a microscope to examine you at a molecular level, I could learn certain facts about your body. But I couldn’t build rapport with you as a being. In order to get to know you, I have to treat you as a conscious being who has free will. In order to trust you, I have to accept that you have free will and observe you making decisions in such a way that makes you worthy of my trust. This is not possible under the purview of materialism.
The best I could do under a reductionist materialist worldview is to say that I trust the proclivities of your genetic makeup. Basically, I observe your genes causing you act in a certain way that is consistent with what I value – therefore I trust your genes. But even if I can trust your genes, I can’t love you as a person because you were only doing what your genes determined you would do – you had no other choice. If you had no other choice, how can I say that your actions were born of you valuing me over any other option? How can I even value you over any other option if my own sense of value is determined by my genetic makeup? So to put it bluntly, even if you claim to be a secularist – chances are you do not live and act as if you are one. If you lived and acted secular, you would have no capacity for personal responsibility because your choices are just the compilation of your DNA.
Furthermore, you would have no rational grounds to value human life (including your own life) any more than you value simple bacteria. The actions that you take in life would have no rational grounds for praise or value because in point of fact, you could not have acted any other way. Chances are, you do feel good about yourself and you do accept praise when you succeed at hard work in pursuit of a worthy cause. Chances are, you do value your own life and the lives of those whom you love because you make the faith-based presupposition that there is something special about your life and their lives. Living and acting in this way immediately and irreversibly puts you into a religious landscape. So that’s the problem with secularism fueled by the implicit assumption that the scientific method is the only tool for apprehending ultimate reality.
For the church, their mistake happens when they accept the secularist’s claim that the scientific method is the only tool for apprehending ultimate reality. Their acceptance of this claim in implicit in their definition of “literal.” For the Bible to be “literally” true, the story must have played out in such a way that we humans could rationally apprehend it. And the church accepts the claim that there is nothing more to ultimate reality than what we can observe by way of our five senses, which forces the church into the limitation of – you guessed it – the scientific method. This results in a Christian apologetic that requires doing interpretive acrobatics to try to make the Bible match a reductionist materialist view of the world. And this shapes the Christian worldview into a straw man that is easily dismissed by anyone equipped with a basic understanding of science. I call this a mistake on the part of the church because the Bible is not a scientific textbook and the Bible makes no attempt whatsoever to describe the nature of reality from a scientific perspective.
So why does any of this matter? Since the Enlightenment, the emergence of science and its utility in helping us survive and thrive on a material level has caused the masses to leap to the conclusion that science addresses all of what is real. My suggestion, simply, is that it does not. This is why – as stated above – you are forced to adopt a religious perspective if you want to maintain logical consistency while moving forward effectively in your life. History demonstrates that you cannot form an effective civilization if you do not have at least two ingredients: value for truth and value for human life. Value for truth, in Biblical terms, is loving God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. Valuing human life, in Biblical terms, is loving your neighbor as yourself. These two ingredients are what Jesus Christ called the two greatest commandments. He had these two necessary preconditions for advanced Western civilization figured out 2,000 years before we did – during a time when there was no internet, no libraries, no Enlightenment, and the most intelligent people thought the earth was flat. Do you still think he was just a Jewish carpenter made famous by historical contingency?
Back to the point, if it’s true that you must take on a religious perspective in order to move forward effectively in your life – then the implication is that there is a moral dimension to the universe that is as real as the ground you are standing on. The evidence of this moral dimension is that if you act as if it does not exist, your real physical life begins to rapidly destabilize into chaos and destruction. If an entire nation acts as if this moral dimension does not exist – then the society destabilizes and collapses. This is why William James is so critically important to bridging this silly and unnecessary divide between the church and science. William James thought that since we cannot apprehend total reality – then our best bet for determining whether something is true is to act it out and see if it works across time without degeneration. This position is successfully Darwinian and Biblical at the same time. It works on both levels of analysis.
Every time the church has jettisoned reason, the result has been horribly misguided behavior akin to burning heretics alive at the stake. Every time the secularist has acted out their claimed beliefs, the result has been empty, meaningless nihilism that makes human beings who live in the safest, most prosperous civilizations anxious and depressed to the point of widespread drug abuse and suicide on the scale of epidemic proportions.
If you cannot have a value for truth and a value for human life under the scope of pure secularism, then we should expect to find societies losing these values the further they depart from a religious substrate. And that is exactly what we do find. With the emergence of postmodernism in the West and throughout Europe – deconstructionist philosophy aims to persuade its followers that there is no such thing as objective truth. If there is no such thing as objective truth, then there is no reason to have a conversation in pursuit of it. In point of fact, it is impossible to have a conversation in pursuit of truth. So any time any individual (including scientists) claim that they have found something to be true – all they are doing is acting as a mouthpiece for their collective identity as part of a play on power. This is why there are countless students being exported from major universities who require safe spaces and who refuse to sit down in conversation with any individual who comes from a majority group – like heterosexual white males. If you take the secular viewpoint seriously: you lose truth; you lose inherent value for life; and you lose a common ideal. All that’s left to you is power and everyone falls right back into the tribalism that characterized every known civilization in history that have failed in the project of developing a society predicated on reason and Judeo-Christian values.
The church has to stop trying to bend and twist Scripture to accommodate science. The scientists have to stop pretending that a reductionist materialist worldview can inform their values. The Biblical narrative and the scientific method are involved in describing two completely different facets of reality – and both facets are real and true. All of us on both sides of the divide must have the humility to admit that we are ignorant to the full scope of reality. We must have the humility to admit when we accept something we don’t know on faith. It is this humility that protects us against totalitarian ideology and allows us to continue our exploration of truth.
We have never been able to generate a successful civilization without using both of these understandings. And the way forward is to pair both of them with a good faith conversation aimed as discovering truth. And the metric for determining whether our finite understanding of Scripture and our finite understanding of science is in alignment with ultimate reality is to deploy this understanding and act it out in the William James pragmatist sense. If it destabilizes and fails across time, we know that we’ve missed the mark. My faith-based bet is that a certain Jewish carpenter had all of this correct. And that if we aspire to live and conduct ourselves in a way that brings honor to him, all of us will be better off for it.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 