God on the Brain E-Book

Brad Sickler

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 311

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The human brain is incredibly complex. Both Christian and secular scholars alike affirm this fact, yet the traditional view of humanity as spiritual beings made in the image of God has come under increased pressure from humanistic and materialistic thinkers who deny that humans are anything more than their physical bodies. Christians have long affirmed that humans are spiritual beings made by God to know and fellowship with him, while the humanist position views humans as merely evolved animals.  Bradley Sickler provides a timely theological, scientific, and philosophical assessment of the human brain, highlighting the many ways in which the gospel informs the Christian understanding of cognitive science. Here is a book that provides a much-needed summary of the Bible's teaching as it sheds light on the brain, with careful interaction with the claims of modern science, arguing that the Christian worldview offers the most compelling vision of the true nature of humanity.

Leseprobe

Thank you for downloading this Crossway book.

Sign-up for the Crossway Newsletter for updates on special offers, new resources, and exciting global ministry initiatives:

Crossway Newsletter

Or, if you prefer, we would love to connect with you online:

“A number of philosophers and scientists argue that humans are nothing more than their physical bodies, yet God on the Brain shows why this view lacks grounding. Compelling, eloquent, and accessible, this book upholds the case for a traditional view of humans as both physical and spiritual. I highly recommend Sickler’s volume to all who are interested in the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy with the Christian faith.”

Sharon Dirckx, Senior Tutor, Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics; author, Am I Just My Brain?

“In a world where our very humanity is called into question and redefined, Brad Sickler offers truth and hope in a well-reasoned manner. God on the Brain takes the Bible and religious experience seriously and views science as a partner rather than an adversary. Sickler offers a theologically reliable way forward through the dangers of materialism, naturalism, and many other ‘-isms’ that try to steer us away from living a fully Christian life. If the church takes Sickler’s work seriously, we will be extremely well prepared to love God with our entire being in a much deeper and more profound way. Highly recommended!”

J. Scott Duvall, J. C. and Mae Fuller Chair of Biblical Studies and Professor of New Testament, Ouachita Baptist University

“Brad Sickler covers a lot of ground in this short yet punchy book. He writes wonderfully and elegantly distills complex discussions. Readers coming at these questions for the first time will find his insights richly illuminating and their minds stretched in helpful ways. This book is a delight to read. You’ll end up more informed, a good deal wiser, and ever more confident in the biblical story!”

Hans Madueme, Associate Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College

“This is a really great book! Brad Sickler is able to explain complex ideas in a readable, enjoyable style. Pulling from several academic disciplines, this book is full of new, refreshing, and insightful ideas. Sickler’s treatment of the relationship between science and religion is alone worth the price of the book. I highly recommend this treasure of learning.”

J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

God on the Brain

God on the Brain

What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

Bradley L. Sickler

God on the Brain: What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine

Copyright © 2020 by Bradley L. Sickler

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Micah Lanier

First printing 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture references marked NLT are from The Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, IL, 60189. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6443-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6446-8 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6444-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6445-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sickler, Bradley L., 1972– author.

Title: God on the brain : what cognitive science does (and does not) tell us about faith, human nature, and the divine / Bradley L. Sickler.

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019059574 (print) | LCCN 2019059575 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433564437 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433564444 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433564451 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433564468 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Mind and body—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Theological anthropology—Christianity. | Cognitive science—Moral and ethical aspects.

Classification: LCC BT741.3 .S53 2020 (print) | LCC BT741.3 (ebook) | DDC 261.5/15—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059574

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019059575

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-06-22 04:09:15 PM

To Alisha,

my loving partner in all things,

and to Abby and Ben,

my joy and the strength of my right hand

Contents

Abbreviations

 1  The Nature of Humans

 2  Science and Christianity (1): The Conflict Thesis

 3  Science and Christianity (2): Strangers or Friends?

 4  Evolutionary Explanations for Belief in God

 5  Is Everything Just Brain States?

 6  Doing Away with the Soul

 7  Mind-Body Interaction and Simplicity

 8  The Question of Freedom

 9  Reason, Science, and Morality

10  Reformed Epistemology and the Naturalness of Belief

General Index

Scripture Index

Abbreviations

CSR

cognitive science of religion

CT

computed tomography (scan)

dlPFC

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

EEG

electroencephalogram

fMRI

functional MRI

HADD

hyperactive agency detection device

MCI

minimally counterintuitive idea

MRI

magnetic resonance imaging

NOMA

nonoverlapping magisteria

NREM

non-rapid eye movement (sleep)

PET

positron-emission tomography (scan)

PFC

prefrontal cortex

PGO

ponto-geniculo-occipital (waves)

PSA

progress of science (argument)

RE

religious experience

REM

rapid eye movement

SESI

self-evident, sensory, or incorrigible

SPECT

single-proton emitting computed tomography

vmPFC

ventromedial prefrontal cortex

1

The Nature of Humans

While visiting a bookstore recently, I was browsing the magazine racks, looking for something to flip through while I sipped my coffee and waited for my family to finish shopping. What I saw jumped out at me, even though it was typical of the trending topics in science today. On the rack were three science magazines in a row, each advertising its lead article. All three were about the brain. Popular Science featured “Your New Brain: When Humans and Computers Merge.” National Geographic showcased an essay “Your Brain—100 Things You Never Knew.” Scientific American offered “How the Brain Reads Faces: Cracking the Neural Code.”

My first reaction was “That’s interesting.” Then I thought: “But my brain doesn’t read faces, or anything else, for that matter. My brain is surely involved, but it doesn’t read faces—I read faces, and I am not merely my brain.” My third reaction was “There sure is a lot to say about brains!”

It has been said that the nineteenth century was dominated by the science of chemistry, the twentieth century by physics, and the twenty-first will be the century of the brain. Our understanding of that three-pound lump in our skulls is growing rapidly. Our mastery of medical and imaging techniques has progressed apace, along with a growing library of experimental knowledge.

These advances are both interesting and helpful. But, as so often happens with scientific progress, a host of philosophical and theological issues have been dragged in too, often with upsetting consequences. The message from many quarters is that you are just your brain. Programs on public television, radio shows on science topics, magazine articles like those just mentioned, books upon books—all declare a decidedly reductionist, materialistic, anti-spiritual, anti-supernatural perspective that depicts humans as nothing but complicated machines. You are not made in the image of God but are a walking, talking, conscious bag of dirt. While we can all be grateful for how advances in understanding have helped alleviate suffering from a range of maladies—everything from brain tumors to some serious psychoses—there is a lot more to the conversation than just the science. There is a wide array of philosophical and theological issues as well, though they are rarely even recognized.

In this book, we will look at recent scholarship on brains to see how it provides orthodox Christian anthropology with some serious food for thought and, hopefully, develop a framework to think through what it all means. By “anthropology” here we mean theological and philosophical anthropology. Whereas “anthropology” usually refers to the social science study of past and present human societies, what we mean in this context is the nature of humanity: what it is to be human, how we got to be that way, and how that relates to God. It is the metaphysics of the human person. We will cover a wide range of topics from cognitive science, neurophysiology, evolutionary morality, and evolutionary psychology. All of these fields have in common the tendency to treat the brain as the totality of who we are and the story they tend to tell about how we got the brains we have.

How We View Human Nature

To help frame where we will be going, consider the core, traditional, biblical set of beliefs about humanity taught as central aspects of a Christian worldview. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex field, a traditional Christian anthropology holds that we possess an immaterial soul and were made to know God. It teaches that we have the moral law written on our hearts, and that ultimately we will survive the death of our bodies to face judgment for what we do with the power of choice we have. If we are made right with God by turning from sin and embracing Jesus Christ, we will—like Jesus—be raised from the dead and given eternal life in his kingdom. All of these conclusions are drawn from an indispensable concept: humanity is made by God the Creator in his own image. Image bearing is a complex notion, and there are many expositions of what it means, but regardless of the particulars, Christians have always affirmed that it includes being brought into existence intentionally by God in a way that connects our nature to his own. Those ideas—being created intentionally in a way that connects us to God—are central to a biblical understanding of the nature of humanity.

The trend, supposedly based in science, has been to reject this entire description on the grounds that recent discoveries in science have shown it to be false. We have no soul, they say. Belief in God is a fluke of evolution. Freedom and morality are illusions. After the death of our bodies there is simply nothing. In other words, the picture painted by many advocates of the new anthropology could not differ more sharply from the biblical perspective. But do those conclusions actually follow from the evidence, or are they superimposed as a result of materialistic, naturalistic presuppositions? And, maybe even more importantly, does it even matter?

It is worth spending a little time saying why Christian anthropology developed the way it did. Some writers have argued that the Christian view of human nature developed out of an uncritical acceptance of Greek philosophy; they say the Bible itself never urges those beliefs on us. Still others argue that Christian anthropology emerged from ignorance as an attempt to explain humanity by inventing a metaphysic based on the Hebrew mythology of the Old Testament. They say Christian thinkers were trying to understand the phenomenology of human experience but were limited by their lack of scientific insight. We will not explore those lines much further here, because those conclusions seem completely wrong to me. It is my view that Scripture directly affirms the traditional positions we outlined above, and that is what accounts for their prevalence in our philosophy and theology. They are the biblical perspective shared by the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, and even Jesus Christ himself.

Let us briefly examine three of these basic elements of Christian anthropology by looking at a few relevant passages of Scripture. In the pages that follow I will explore these issues in much greater detail, so for now we will content ourselves with a very cursory survey.

We Have Souls

First, we will see why the doctrine of souls has been so important in theology and how it emerges from the Bible.

Admittedly, sometimes the teaching about souls is implicit—it is not directly asserted but seems to be implied by what the biblical authors state while directly teaching about something else. The view that we have an immaterial, spiritual aspect to our person is known as dualism, and it has been the majority view of the church based on the teachings of Scripture. For example, when Jesus says in Matthew 10:28, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell,” Jesus is warning his audience about sin, not teaching on metaphysical anthropology. Even so, this passage displays his belief that each of us has a soul, the soul is distinct from the body, and the soul survives the death of the body. A similar assumption is demonstrated during the transfiguration of Christ, when Moses and Elijah appear and speak with Jesus (Matt. 17:3)—and moments later they are no longer present (v. 8). Regular human bodies, especially those that have been dead for centuries, do not behave like that. Clearly, their consciousness extended past the death of their bodies while their souls continued on.

At other times the teaching is more direct. Consider this passage, one of the apostle Paul’s most explicit on the subject:

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Cor. 5:1–8)

As I have already acknowledged, some theologians try to argue around the evident implication of passages like this, but it seems preferable to take it as a plain indication of what Paul thought: we have a soul, it is distinct from our body, and it will survive our death. The body is the residence of something essential to the real us—our spirit. The spirit or soul is housed in the body (and, no doubt, in meaningful ways united with it), but the body is not all we are. We transcend it and will continue to endure after it dies. As James says, “The body apart from the spirit is dead” (2:26).

In theology and philosophy there are several different schools of thought about souls, but we may endorse one of the varieties of dualism without specifying which approach is best. That we are a union of body and soul has been the overwhelming conclusion of Christian thinkers through church history despite their differences over the particulars. As theologian Hans Madueme says,

Some form of soul-body dualism was overwhelmingly the consensus of the church—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant—either as substance dualism which casts soul and body as distinct substances (with the soul permeating every part of the body) or as hylomorphism which holds the soul as the form of the body (the soul organizes matter to be a living body).1

Among the things I will affirm about the soul, again in keeping with Christian tradition, are that the soul is a basic, unified, continuing, property-bearing immaterial existent with causal powers. That is, it cannot be reduced to something simpler (it is basic) but is a metaphysically fundamental entity. It continues through time (it endures). It has properties and the power to cause things to happen. In particular, its properties are mental properties—the stuff of minds like desires, affections, beliefs, sensations, memories, deliberations of reason, and so on. Souls are immaterial, not made of physical stuff, and they are ultimately the core of who we are. The soul continuing through time as the same substance is what provides us with personal identity in this life and beyond. Whether we use the term “soul,” “spirit,” or “mind,” in this book I will always be referring to the same thing: the immaterial aspect of our being.

We Are Meant to Know God

The second element to introduce and offer a very brief biblical justification for is that we are made to know God—belief in God is a natural part of our nature as creatures made in his image. A more robust development of this point will come in the following chapters, but it is important for us to get oriented to the biblical teaching that we were made to know God. We do not discover God in the same way we discovered electrons or the strength of the gravitational constant. We did not have to devise clever arguments like the cosmological, ontological, teleological, moral, and anthropological arguments to learn of God’s reality. In fact, it may be that arguments give us entirely the wrong impression—they may entice us into thinking we can discover whether God exists just by thinking carefully. The Christian doctrine, however, emphasizes the extent to which God has gone in creating both the external world and our own internal constitution so that we would know him naturally. He has shown himself through many marvelous ways: his word, his special and miraculous actions, and his internal witness to us by his Holy Spirit. We were made to be in relationship with him, and that requires having an inclination to believe in his reality.

The account we will see later in this book from secular authors will tend to paint religious belief as an unfortunate by-product of blind evolutionary forces whose only purpose has been to promote our survival and reproduction—not to tell us the truth about spiritual realities. To these authors, our propensity to believe in God is not rooted in a divine design or God’s intention to be in relationship with us, but is an error forced upon us by processes indifferent to the truth about ultimate reality. Where we come from, where we are going, who we are, the meaning of our existence, our place in the cosmos, the existence of a Creator—none of these are of any concern to their brand of naturalistic evolution. We have God-beliefs simply because God-beliefs have worked, and that is the end of the story. The Christian perspective could not be more different.

We Are Wired for Morality

A third aspect has to do with a similar question of whether we are “hardwired,” namely, our belief in objective morality. We are made to live lives of a certain kind. We flourish under some conditions and flounder under others. There are facts about what we should and should not do—moral facts that are every bit as objective and universal as the laws of nature. At least, that is what Christianity teaches. Secular thinkers, especially those who reduce humanity to a bag of conscious dirt, see things very differently. The moral sense we have, they say, arose from the pressing need to survive in harsh environments. There is no objective foundation for morality, no basis in a real moral framework undergirding the universe.

The trend in modern cognitive science, as we will see, has been to explain our moral beliefs by talking about neurophysiology and evolutionary adaptations that cemented our moral beliefs for their benefit to survival. Multiple levels of explanation are at work here. Some are at the microscopic level, tying moral beliefs to brain structures. Some are at a higher level of explanation, with individual behaviors being the locus of explanation—behaviors that are adaptive and therefore get naturally selected. At an even higher level of explanation are social practices, such as group cooperation and an affinity for kin over strangers or outsiders. These explanations have in common their denial that God—the author, source, and ground of all morality and value—has endowed us with a moral sense that makes us aware of his will for how we live.

Human Nature and the Gospel

When we consider the view of personhood presented in Scripture, the question of whether we are mere brain machines or something more becomes a gospel question. In other words, the integrity of the gospel proclamation is undermined if we reject a biblical view of humanity, because, in large part, it is our nature that frames the gospel message in the first place. There are many reasons these connections matter, but four significant ones are worth reflecting on briefly.

First of all, the gospel of Jesus Christ presents us with a call: because we have all fallen into sin, we are unable to live the righteous life that God requires. This is a universal problem endemic to humanity. The remedy provided by God in Christ is the forgiveness of sins, secured by Jesus’s sacrifice of himself on the cross—the righteous for the unrighteous. We can stand in his forgiveness and be acceptable to God by turning from sin and following Jesus in faith. This is a very cursory description of the good news proclaimed by the apostles and bequeathed to the church, but it has a key implication that traditional Christian anthropology has embraced and many secular thinkers have abandoned: there is a moral law. We cannot be in need of forgiveness unless we have transgressed the moral law; and if we are not in need of forgiveness, the gospel is emptied of its power and truth. No moral law, no sin problem; no sin problem, no gospel.

Second, the Bible makes it clear that the death of our bodies is not the end of our story. While the belief in life after death is by no means unique to Christianity, being found everywhere from Plato to Buddha to Shirley MacLaine, it is essential to the Christian message. Over and over again, Jesus and the apostles preached that after this life we would be raised to face judgment, and judgment would be followed by either eternal life or death. So central was this belief in life after death that the apostle Paul declared, “If our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world” (1 Cor. 15:19 NLT). Surviving the death of our bodies is a central biblical teaching, but one rejected by nearly all secular cognitive scientists, their advocates, and the we-are-just-brains metaphysic.

Third, the reliability of Jesus and the Scriptures is at stake. According to the Bible, there is no salvation outside of Jesus Christ, and putting our trust in him is the only way to find redemption. However, if Jesus taught and preached a demonstrably false view of human nature, then his authority to prescribe a remedy for what is wrong with that nature would be hopelessly undermined. If Jesus claims to be the divine made human and to teach the very words of God himself, then his trustworthiness would evaporate if we were to discover his entire view of human nature to be radically wrong. He would be offering a cure for an imaginary disease and would lose all credibility.

The fourth consideration is about the nature of Jesus Christ himself. The early creeds struggled to refute heresies and articulate the complex Christology implied by Scripture. They culminated in a sophisticated affirmation in AD 451 as a result of the fourth ecumenical council, convened in Chalcedon (in modern-day Turkey). In a statement known as the Chalcedonian Definition (or Creed), the council agreed to the following:

Therefore, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer; one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

Some key phrases in the definition help to show the importance of believing that humans are not just brains or even just bodies but a union of body and soul. The argument of the definition requires, first of all, that Jesus took on our nature and, second, that our nature is dualistic (yet without division).

In addition to what it says about human nature in general, the definition raises a special issue for orthodox Christology, because there must be some sense in which the incarnate Son of God—that is, Jesus of Nazareth—has continuity and identity with the Son of God as he existed in unity of substance with the Father and Holy Spirit before the incarnation. The expression “the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person” affirms that the Son took on a body: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” as Saint John put it in his Gospel (1:14). Another way to state it is this: If we are merely physical objects, then Jesus was also merely a physical object. But a merely physical object cannot have continuity and identity with a spiritual Being, as God is said to be.2 Therefore, if we are merely physical objects, then Jesus could not be God incarnate. And if we are merely physical objects, then centuries of ecumenical, orthodox Christology based directly on Scripture are wrong. We base our view of human nature—our anthropology—on our doctrine of Christ because he is the perfect representative of humanity. As one theologian says, there is

what may be described as a widespread consensus among theologians that Jesus Christ lies at the heart of theological anthropology.

. . . He alone provides the proper vantage point for understanding humanity.

. . . We can still maintain the long-standing intuition that Christology alone provides the proper ground for theological anthropology.”3

We believe that we have souls in part because orthodox Christology requires that the incarnate Son does.

In the pages ahead we will explore the contemporary alternatives to traditional Christian anthropology, mostly driven by work being done in cognitive science. I will touch on many different fields, from philosophy and theology to neurophysiology and evolutionary psychology—cognitive science itself is highly interdisciplinary and wide-ranging. Our preliminary discussion will focus on general questions about the relationship between science and Christianity and how to understand the current tensions. We will turn next to consider whether modern brain science is getting it right when it tries to describe and quantify religious experience the way it does, and we will look at some very popular but highly questionable claims from neuroscience. This is followed by a discussion of the purported evolutionary roots of religious belief and an analysis of the adequacy of the naturalist account of why we humans tend to believe in God. After that, we will look at challenges to the traditional belief in souls from those who seek to eliminate the spiritual and depict humans as merely physical beings. Then we will consider some troubling implications for human freedom, reason, morality, and even science itself if a materialist perspective is right, and see that materialism has many undesirable entailments for each of those areas. At the end of all these explorations, we will reflect again on the nature of knowledge in general and knowledge of God in particular, and see that despite all the challenges dealt with in this book, we can still confidently maintain an orthodox, biblical view of human nature and the trustworthiness of Christian belief.

My motivation for writing God on the Brain is beautifully expressed in this passage from a paper given by my favorite author, C. S. Lewis:

I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to “prove my answer”. The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonizing it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of the primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. . . . Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it, I see everything else.4

My hope and prayer is that this perspective comes through in the rest of the book, and that what follows proves both interesting and helpful for understanding human nature.

1. Hans Madueme, “From Sin to the Soul: A Dogmatic Argument for Dualism,” in The Christian Doctrine of Humanity, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Fred Sanders (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 72.

2. For example, John 4:24 says, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

3. Marc Cortez, “The Madness in Our Method: Christology as the Necessary Starting Point for Theological Anthropology,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, ed. Joshua R. Farris and Charles Taliaferro (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 15.

4. C. S. Lewis, “They Asked for a Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962), 164–65.

2

Science and Christianity (1)

The Conflict Thesis

During a summer cookout at a friend’s house, I pulled up a chair next to my old friend Mike. We have known each other for over thirty years now, and eventually our conversation wound its way to talking about God. Mike is an atheist, and he and I have talked about God many times over the years. A bright man with a background in technology and engineering, he was working as a computer systems analyst for a major corporation. He is always open to talking about God and curious to peer into the mind of someone with religious beliefs, which—despite our history—still seem so foreign to him. At some point in the conversation, he said what I have heard so many people say before: “I think we need to give up on the God question. The only way to really know anything is through science, and science has made belief in God pretty hard to swallow.” What could I say in response to this? Was he right? Has science made God unnecessary and belief in God obsolete? Is religious belief in conflict with modern science?

It is not uncommon to hear sentiments like Mike’s, from casual coffee shop conversations to sophisticated academic discussions. Even more succinctly, people have said to me, “I don’t believe in God—I believe in science.” Some portray science as a slowly advancing glacier, crushing everything in its path and grinding it to dust. On this account, as science has learned more and more, and the body of scientific knowledge has grown—slowly at first and at an astonishing rate in the last century or so—the old beliefs rooted in religion or intuition or something like “common sense” have been discredited. Religion, it is often asserted, was an effort to explain and account for the unknown and the mysterious. But the sphere of inexplicable things has been shrinking, thanks to the careful tools of investigation we now have at our disposal. As we exponentially increase the wealth of data we have at our fingertips, religion has been displaced, and its explanations of the world shown to be misguided.

Three Purported Conflicts

Before commenting on this characterization, let us turn to three of the most often cited examples of supposed conflict between science and religion. The facts about these conflicts are often skewed, so looking more carefully at the history of how things actually unfolded will correct a lot of misconceptions and better frame our subsequent discussions.

Copernicus, Galileo, and Heliocentrism

In the history of the relationship between science and religion, one event towers over all others as an example of the deep-seated tension sometimes seen to exist. The conflict between the Catholic Church and astronomers over heliocentrism is often portrayed as an argument between scientists, interested only in the truth of the matter, and the church, which was indifferent to the facts because of its dogmatism. But that does not capture all the nuances involved and, in some important ways, is even inaccurate. In reality, many different elements contributed to the eventual clash between the Catholic Church and the new cosmology. The disputes are more subtle and interesting than they are often presented to be.

At issue was the question of which body orbited which: did the earth orbit the sun, or did the sun orbit the earth? Throughout the Middle Ages, astronomy was based on a cosmological model very common in the ancient world. In this picture of the cosmos, the earth was at the center, and the sun, moon, planets, and stars all revolved around the earth. This model was articulated convincingly by Aristotle in fourth-century-BC classical Greece, and later presented in sophisticated detail by Ptolemy in Roman Egypt during the second century AD. Their work provided the framework for astronomy that lasted throughout the medieval period. Problems emerged for the church, however, because it also claimed justification for geocentrism in Christian Scripture, citing Psalm 102:25:

Of old you laid the foundation of the earth,

and the heavens are the work of your hands.

The example of Joshua ordering the sun to stand still seemed to provide another argument for geocentrism (Josh. 10). The biblical account clearly states that it was the sun that stood still while the Israelites fought; but the implication from that must be that the sun is normally moving and was prevented from moving only by a miracle.

But it was more than allegiance to a literal interpretation of the Bible that led the church and Galileo into conflict. In addition to apparent biblical teaching, many commonsense arguments favored geocentrism. Our everyday observations plausibly indicate that we are stable and unmoving. When an object is dropped, for example, it moves down in a straight line, not curving backward as if the earth is rotating underneath it. There is also variation in the strength and direction of the wind, but if we were hurtling through space, we might expect a constant headwind, always from the same direction, as we plow forward. These and similar arguments underscore the powerful feeling that we have: the earth is stationary. But those commonsense prejudices, apparently reinforced by the Bible, were soon to clash with the evidence—not in a dramatic defeat resulting from a sudden onslaught of proofs, but rather in a long, protracted war of attrition.

In 1543, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, in which he laid out his model of heliocentrism, was published just before his death. He had been working on the observations that led to the publication for thirty years, and it was only after considerable prompting that he published those findings at all (interestingly enough, in a work dedicated to the pope). In his mind, the work was still incomplete and inconclusive. Contrary to the way it is often depicted, there was no clearly compelling case made in Revolutions