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CONTEMPORARY EVANGELICAL THOUGHT

SCIENCE AND RELIGION - CARL F. H. HENRY

Carl F. H. Henry holds a Ph.D. degree from Boston University, and a Th.D. degree from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has served as professor of philosophy of religion at Northern Baptist Seminary (1942-47) and since then as professor of systematic theology and Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is currently on leave as editor of the Protestant fortnightly magazine, Christianity Today. The latest of more than a dozen books which he has authored was recently published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company under the title Christian Personal Ethics.

THE CLEAVAGE between science and religion is one of the defacing characteristics of our culture. Even casual observers must detect its ugly scar upon our world of thought.

Certainly there is no need to argue the fact of this cleavage. For it is the conflict between science and religion which supplies modern life with one of its most evident tensions. Secular publications allude to the situation with monotonous regularity. Fortune magazine reports that forty-five per cent of the younger American scientists of distinction now lean toward agnosticism. The impressive articles published periodically by Life since December 8, 1952, on the origin of the universe, of man, of religion and of civilization, contribute no rapprochement with historic Christianity. Despite the widespread acknowledgment that a renewed interest prevails in religious realities, that the need for a theological answer to totalitarianism is more firmly sensed, and also that democracy founders without a spiritual basis, the cleavage of science and religion remain nonetheless a patent fact of our era.

Anyone who faces this condition with a sense of cultural concern must move inevitably to thoughts of pathos, of peril, of prospect and of program. The pathos of perpetuating the cleft, the peril of compromising the cleft, the prospect of transcending the cleft, the program for repairing the cleft - such considerations obtrude irresistibly into view.

Like human beings generally, the prime contenders in this conflict are indisposed to ready an inventory of their own liabilities. The scientist is prone to think only of the cost to religion if the warfare is prolonged. And the theologian meditates on the cost to a scientific age if the tensions remain unsurmounted. The price of continuing this controversy, equally to science and to religion, and beyond that, to modern life and culture, and, in truth to the whole human enterprise, is more staggering than the multitudes discern.

1. THE PATHOS OF PERPETUATING THE CLEAVAGE

Beyond doubt, religion has suffered most from this modern conflict. Everywhere the dissolving effect of science upon religion may be detected.

Religious life no longer supplies the strategic center of our cultural pattern. In fact, today the life of religion is not regarded as an indispensable element of cultural completeness and integration.

The achievements of religious faith, consequently, are dismissed as irrelevant by scientifically enlightened men. The prevailing tendency is to classify faith along with the irrational and emotive aspects of life. Religious experience is viewed, therefore, as a special problem requiring justification to the modern outlook. Full-orbed religious commitment is not only ignored, but in many circles is regarded as an oddity. The refusal to assign a determinate role to religion is no longer confined to extremists like Marx and Nietzsche. Many Anglo-Saxon leaders, while repudiating a barbarian way of life, today devaluate religion as catering only to human weakness.

From such considerations the enormous cost of this cleavage to the religious side of life is painfully clear; science rules the center of our culture while religion survives as a displaced refugee. The form in which the religious question is put today already salutes this state of things: "What is the relevance of religion in a scientific age?" Even an evangelical work like Bernard Ramm’s implies a certain priority by its title: "The Christian View of Science and" The benefits science bequeaths the modern world; its embarrassment to religion; the futility of prolonging this cleavage: these emphases supply the primary orientation of the current debate.

The modern era tends to ignore, therefore, the loss accruing to science if the cleavage with religion is not repaired. Only recent glimpses of a world wavering in all its spiritual loyalties have brought into anxious purview this settled indifference to religion.

The very foundations of the scientific enterprise are imperiled by the cleavage with Hebrew-Christian monotheism. The Christian religion, referring reality as a whole to one ultimate, rational, sovereign principle of explanation, was historically the source of the scientific confidence in the unity of the universe. Christianity provided the climate of conviction which stimulated the rise of science and then guided its growth. Science originated in the West, not in the Orient; in the West, moreover, it sprang from the Christian view of nature, not from Greek philosophy. Science without Christianity is metaphysically vagabond.

The readiness to invoke a plurality of explanatory principles in accounting for phenomena amounts to a sophisticated return to polytheistic divinities, and ultimately will deprive science of confidence in a single ultimate rationale.

Furthermore, Western European civilization, the highest yet achieved by the human race, gained its main inspiration from the Hebrew-Christian religion. The weakening of ties to biblical religion started and sped the decline of Western culture. Dismissal of the traditional world-life view as scientifically untenable is a main ground in the cultural breakdown, since all attempts to perpetuate Christian morality in the absence of Christian metaphysics have crumbled.

The integrity of human experience is also threatened. The modern man is torn psychologically by irresolvable tensions and inner frustrations. He finds himself irremediably religious by nature, yet he is unable to correlate the scientific claim and the spiritual-moral claim. The resulting scientificreligious conflict, productive of a divided self, has impaired the intellectual and practical vigor of multitudes. An unintegrated personality is forerunner to a disintegrated personality. Since no satisfactory integration of the scientific and the sacred is achieved within the same mind and heart, the unresolved division in the self easily leads either to the scientific demonspirit or to the anti-scientific religious zealot.

Science itself can provide neither ethical sanctions nor ethical norms, and therefore lacks the power to strengthen our civilization morally. For experimental science deals only with the is, with the descriptive; it cannot determine the ought, the normative. The modern segregation of science from religion leaves the scientific temper devoid of final standards. This neglect of theological and moral realities has shorn our generation of moral restraints and has escorted society to the verge of a shameful collapse.

The totalitarian state, moreover, stands before us today as the incarnation of scientific power detached from a superior religio-moral claim. Loosed from ethical imperatives, the whole atomic age has been placed at the disposal of the demonic in and through the moral prodigality of its scientific parenthood.

These far-reaching effects mirror the pathos of prolonging this cleavage. Whether measured by its price to the religious enterprise, or by its price to the scientific, it can no longer be doubted that the opposition of religion and science has already escorted modern culture to the hazardous brink of bankruptcy.

From this sad situation, in what direction may modern man go? Without question, from the predicament sketched in this preamble, men today turn in hundreds of diverse directions. Tens of thousands of individuals, no doubt, seek subjective mystical solutions. Like most home-made remedies, these offer no promise of social antidote, and are not really intended for retail to others. We are concerned especially over the evangelical turn, which dare not, if it aims to be culturally significant, lead down some private lane, inaccessible to the multitudes.

Whoever would orphan either theology or science at this stage of world affairs contributes to the delinquency of the whole human family. The scientist bears, therefore, a proper obligation to guard any projected treaty from dismantling his empire of assured results; the theologian is rightly concerned that the essential requirements of religion be not disregarded nor minimized.

Is there a solution which mixes fully both with science and with theology? Is there a program which preserves the requirements of general and of special revelation alike, harmonizing God’s activity both in nature and in redemption? Can significance any longer be saved for the cherished Hebrew-Christian conviction that God’s speech is translated both into the word of power in nature, and into the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible?