CULTURE ATTITUDE TOWARD CHRISTIANS

WHAT ABOUT SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE

Part One

Do we need to know sciences to understand the Bible? Is it Reality or Science:

• This cultural attitude toward Christians and what we believe is nowhere more evident than in that part of our culture interested in things "scientific". Not that science is the only cultural activity where this attitude exists. Nor can it be said that everyone in science shares such an attitude. They don't. It's just that in public institutions that are passing on our culture, science holds a special place. A place that has made it the most powerful and authoritative cultural tool in our society's rejection of God. It hasn't caused that rejection. But it is being used to legitimize that rejection just the same.

• For decades now, we have been taught that reality lies beyond our everyday, human faculties. And that the sciences offer our only objective interface with reality——the only way for us to really get in touch with the way things are. In school, to drive this lesson home, we were told that the desks upon which our elbows rested were not really what they seemed to be. They were really made up of mostly "space" (referring to the 'spaces' in the atomic and subatomic structure of the material that makes up the desk). It was supposed to follow that our confidence in the solidness of desks was, therefore, something of an illusion——a sort of crude approximation of reality. What we were so sure we knew about our desks was really just an impression derived from our rather dull senses and their inability to precisely engage reality. Thinking of the desks as "solid" is as close to reality as we can expect to come, left to ourselves. Through the sciences though we know better. (Oh, we may still talk about "solid" desks if we want to. But only as a naive convention of language. Because the desks aren't really solid, after all).

• This lesson was supposed to impress upon our young minds that we need science in order to correctly articulate reality. And that it is through the sciences, rather than religion, that we actually come to understand reality. And further, that it is upon the sciences, rather than religion, that we must build engaged and relevant and responsible lives for ourselves, especially if we intend to be practical about things.

Drafted by Charles E. Whisnant