She Blinded Me With Science: Are Christians Science Haters?
I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. This childhood saying saved me during my husky days on the playground and my long days as an adult. Little Debbie was big Nick’s friend and scientific truth is Christian Nick’s ally.
But you wouldn’t think that if you pay attention to the cultural narrative. Some assert that Christians are anti-intellectual, science-deniers. They drag their knuckles and close their minds as they try to legislate morality, so they say.
Consider Billy Nye the Science Guy. He calls The Creation Museum a “temple of ignorance,” a “temple of lies,” and “irresponsible.” Bill Nye, when situated on a hill overlooking a replica of Noah’s ark, said, “This is anti-science.” But thankfully, according to Bill Nye, the “anti-science days are winding down.”
Or consider Neil deGrasse Tyson. The famed astrophysicist considers religion and objective truth mutually exclusive. “The line I’m drawing is that there are religions and belief systems, and objective truths. And if we’re going to govern a country, we need to base that governance on objective truths — not your personal belief system.”
And then there is Scientific American magazine. When the abortion debate ramped up earlier this year and heartbeat bills began to pass across the US, the editorial board took a stand: “The public officials behind these latest abortion bans exhibit breathtaking ignorance of the science of their own proposals… Not only is this law bad science, it is actively dangerous.” Writing in the NY Times, Mary Ziegeler claimed: “Jeanne Mancini of March for Life recently wrote that ‘the abortion debate isn’t settled, but the underlying science certainly is.’ Whatever either side may wish, that could not be farther from the truth.”
I’m not writing to argue against the merits of these claims – this has repeatedly been done before. Rather, I want to answer the question as to why some continue to associate Christians with anti-science. Unfortunately, this repetitive association has proven famed Nazi Joseph Goebbels correct. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” But like most lies, there is a hint of truth.
In his seminal work The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll postulated that the scandal of the mind is that there’s not one. He writes: “In their defense of the supernatural, fundamentalists and their evangelical heirs resemble some cancer patients. In facing a drastic disease, they are willing to undertake a drastic remedy. The treatment of fundamentalism may be said to have succeeded; the patient survived. But at least for the life of the mind, what survived was a patient horribly disfigured by the cure itself.”
However, Noll did more than analyze the past; he was able to identify positive signs in the present. A recent example of this is David Gelernter. This famed Yale University professor has publicly renounced his belief in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, calling it a “beautiful idea” that has been disproven. He goes on: “My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me — it’s widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job — it’s an absolutely serious scientific argument. In fact, it’s the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind. It’s got to be dealt with intellectually.”
Professor Gelernter points to a problem—the immediate dismissal of contrary ideas—and exemplifies the solution—consideration of the other side.
Humans have greater cognitive capacities than animals but don’t always exercise those capacities. Daniel K. and Amos T. (pioneers of behavioral economics) noted: “Logic can melt into emotion in the blink of an eye.” In a non-shocking twist, we don’t always act rationally. In his book Nudge, Nobel Prize winner Richard Thaler wrote: “People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!” He goes on: “We all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders.”
Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind, noted: “We think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.”
Research continues to demonstrate that people on both sides and of all ages prefer information that confirms their preexisting attitudes (selective exposure) and view contrary claims skeptically (confirmation bias).
There may have been a day that Christians were anti-science, but that day is not today. In the Scriptures, we read about an enemy that functions as a deceiver – the father of all lies (John 8:44, Rev. 12:9). The truth-distorting enemy stands in stark contrast to our God, who is truth and wisdom (John 14:6, 1 Cor. 1:30).
As people following the truth, we champion truth, speak truth, and live in accordance with revealed truth (Eph. 4:15, 1 Pet. 3:15). We do so because, as Augustine noted, “All truth is God’s truth.” This is true whether you hear it in a church or see it in a science book.