The Christian and the Scientific Method

By W. Stanford Reid

McGill University, Montreal

I. The present Christian attitude to the scientific method

Since the beginning of the seventeenth century man’s confidence and admiration for scientific activity has steadily grown until today he has become dependent in almost every aspect of life upon the results of scientific research. Whether he has liked it or not science has by virtue of its advances come increasingly to dominate his thought-patterns as indicated by the more common use of scientific terms in ordinary conversation. Western man has reached the position where he believes that practically every aspect of experience, including one’s religious beliefs, may be analyzed properly only if one employs the methods of natural science.[1] For this reason the Christian has during the past century or more felt himself torn between two attitudes to science, and this ambivalence has caused him much uncertainty in his attitude towards the scientific method itself.

The Christian cannot, and indeed should not, deny the accomplishments of scientists, nor the effectiveness of the scientific method. After all, whether he recognizes the fact or not, both his necessities and his luxuries have come to him largely as a result of scientific endeavour. The car he drives, the aeroplane in which he travels, the food that he eats and the clothes that he wears to a large extent owe their existence to the scientific research of the past century. Moreover many of the contemporary social phenomena and patterns trace their origins back to the same source. Consequently he may never fail to acknowledge that the use of the scientific method has aided greatly in the opening up of human culture in this world.[2]

On the other hand, the Christian often feels that he has abundant cause to fear the development which has taken place through the use of the scientific method. For one thing, one cannot always be sure that the so-called advances in science which seem at first to introduce an amelioration of man’s condition, have always truly helped man. This is particularly striking when one realizes that only too frequently unbelievers have attempted to employ the scientific method as a weapon against the Christian gospel itself. Adopting a fundamentally materialistic point of view, many scientists have rejected any idea of man as more than a fortuitous extension of the animal kingdom, a denial of the Christian doctrines of creation, fall and redemption in Jesus Christ. To this Christians have usually reacted with disfavour and fear. The scientific method they feel is godless and atheistic, and as far as possible no Christian should have anything to do with it.

In the light of our present dependence on science, such an adverse attitude can hardly come to expression in practice. Therefore, a good many Christians accept the results of scientific research, as applied to everyday living, but desire to stay as far from it as possible whenever it deals with the theoretical even though it is limited strictly to its own particular sphere. This often leads the Christian to impose upon his thinking a division. He regards the scientific investigation of the material world as something apart from his Christian faith. The study of physics, chemistry, history, sociology and other spheres of experience, he looks upon as really autonomous so that scientific research has nothing to do with, or to say, about his Christian faith, and the Christian faith reciprocates by having nothmg to say, except in most general terms, about science and scientific research. Thus the Christian, particularly if he is a scientist, often develops a two-compartment mind devoted respectively to scientific investigation and to the Christian faith.

Such a point of view has little to recommend it, for it implies, if it does not actually maintain, that God’s sovereignty and Christ’s redemptive work apply only to man’s religious experience, leaving all other aspects of man’s experience and activity to the domination of a virtual materialism. One can hardly call this a Christian solution to the problem. To deal with it, therefore, Christians in this third quarter of the twentieth century must take a very close look at modern scicnce and in particular at the scientific method. They must endeavour to see it as it really is, and they must also endeavour to understand what it involves, not merely in its practical application, but in its theoretical implications for them as Christians.

When they have made up their minds about this, they should then set forth the Christian view concerning the scientific method, its presuppositions, its validity and its scope. Only then will they make some impact upon scientific thought in a critical but positive manner. Their interpretation, to be sure, should not take the form of a merely edifying confession of faith which may help one to appreciate the gospel more fully, but which leaves the problem of scientific investigation untouched. Rather they should endeavour to permeate scientific studies with the Christian concept of truth, in order that they may make manifest that only when built on a Christian foundation can scientific research be more than the technical study of phenomena.[3] The writer hopes that in some small measure the present article may help towards a clarification of these matters.

II. The development of the scientific method

To study anything, one should first of all have some idea of what one plans to investigate. For this reason we must begin by asking ourselves what we mean by the “scientific method”. To answer this question a considerable number of books have recently appeared on the market, but they all seem to come to one particular point. The scientific method is a method of asking questions of the temporal, phenomenal world whereby the scientist hopes to obtain answers which will provide him with the means of describing the “regularities underlying diverse events”.[4] Many techniques of investigation have their places in this general method both in terms of the instruments employed and the use of the instruments. Martin Deutsch has subsumed the various methods under observation, testing and measurement.[5] When one has obtained certain results from investigation one then goes on to construct models and formulate laws which actually surpass immediate observations. These laws in turn, in the hands of a great scientist, may become general concepts, hypotheses on a grand scale, opening up new spheres of study.[6]

But what determines the method which one uses? What guides the investigator in the techniques which he employs? Usually the question he desires to have answered. The scientist directs his query to nature in a particular way in order that the answer will contain a minimum amount of variables and irrelevancies.[7] As Dooyeweerd has pointed out: “Experiments are always pointed to the solution of theoretical questions which the scientist himself has raised and formulated”.[8] And these questions usually receive their form from the laws of the sphere of temporal reality which the scientist is investigating, modified by the state of knowledge of that sphere at the particular time, and limited by the competence of the investigator himself. Thus even the questions posed involve more than a mechanical type of inquiry.

Behind both the scientist’s question and his understanding and interpretation of the answer he receives, lie certain basic assumptions about himself and about the temporal reality which he seeks to open up. When working in a limited field of research this does not easily become apparent, for many scientists with no philosophical interest take most of their basic principles as axiomatic and relate them merely to technical problems. But when one attempts to carry one’s thinking out into wider spheres, applying one’s results to reality on a grand scale, one immediately becomes conscious of many philosophical and even religious assumptions. Thus the questions which one poses in the search for truth involve one’s whole basic outlook on God and man.

Before turning to an examination of the metaphysical and religious presuppositions behind the modern scientific method, however, in order to understand what one means by the term “scientific method” one should endeavour to see how it has developed over the past five or six centuries. It did not spring full armed, like Athena, from the head of a Galileo, a Bacon or even a Newton. It has developed gradually and slowly, piling up precept upon precept, here a little, there a little, and even today, despite the views of many, it has not reached final completion and probably never will. Consequently if one desires to understand the scientific method one must look back over its history in order to gain a proper perspective on it as it is today.

Going back to the Middle Ages one finds that an attitude existed then very different from the modern outlook. The medieval thinker, his mind dominated by Platonic and Aristotelian concepts, thought of reality as made up of two realms: nature and grace. While the realm of grace was that of the church, of revelation, of heaven, the realm of nature was that of the world in which he lived here and now, in which man’s mind possessed relative autonomy. In fact if he used his reason carefully he could reason independently to the borders of grace, proving the existence of God, of right and wrong and many other truths.[9] He would do this by seeking to discover, by the use of reason, the true essences of things, e.g., the dogginess in which all dogs participate. In this way the philosopher could gain an understanding of the nature of these essences. Then building them up into their proper hierarchy of being until he reached the limit of nature, he would come to know the world as it truly is. Although his passions might lead him astray in this endeavour these he might overcome by the infusion of God’s grace.

Behind this “scientific” attitude, lies an interpretation both of the universe and of man’s place in it. The physical temporal universe lies open to human rational analysis, so that man by reasoning correctly, accurately and effectively can gain a proper understanding of it without taking God into account.

Thus man needs only the restraint of his passions in order that he may gain true knowledge of the world in which he lives. Both he and the temporal cosmos possess autonomy in their own right and only when he attempts to step beyond the temporal cosmos, must he really look to God for knowledge and understanding. Thus grace builds upon an already independent and autonomous nature.”[10]

In the fourteenth century the medieval concept of the relation of nature and grace began to change. It now became a matter of nature against grace. Religious truth might well contradict the natural truth discovered and accepted by man’s reason. Moreover, men began to lose interest in seeking for essences, concentrating upon the individual phenomenon experienced. After all, one sees in nature only individual items. The nominalists said very bluntly that the so-called universals or essences had no reality, but simply represented names which men had devised. To seek for universals led nowhere. Men should investigate the individual. Although some natural philosophers such as Roger Bacon, influenced by Augustine of Hippo, continued to insist that individual phenomena depended for their being and nature upon the divinely ordained, uniform laws of the universe, others such as William of Occam held to the more atomistic interpretations.[11]

The ultimate objectives of the new way of thinking became clear in the Renaissance when men increasingly regarded the realm of grace as irrelevant and laid all their stress upon man in this world. Regarding man as a microcosm, a universe in miniature, they thought of him as a being who by his own will-power and efforts could elevate himself almost to the divine, and yet at the same time remain part of the cosmos in which he lived, subject to the rule of nature.[12] The realm of grace, if it existed, man did not need. Fortune ruled all so that man had to try by his reason to overcome her vagaries whether good or ill. Renaissance thinkers stressed man and his abilities, but conveniently ignored the laws of nature which guided and directed both him and his cosmic environment.

By 1500, therefore, scientific method appeared in many guises. The true-blue Aristotelian, dependent on “the philosopher’s” authority, usually followed a fully deductive method. The convinced and consistent nominalist, on the other hand, stressed the study and classification of the individual phenomenon. A third element consisted of the practical scientists who, to make sense of the physical universe, found themselves obliged to assume a certain amount of uniformitarianism in nature, in order that they might make some generalizations concerning individual phenomena. And yet even this last concept of nature had within it many traits of the older thinking, for only too often the natural laws themselves seemed to be subject to the influences of occult forces such as those exercised by the planets or demons. Uncertainty characterized much of the thinking of the time.

Into this somewhat chaotic state of scientific thought the Protestant Reformation, and, in particular, Calvin, introduced a note of stability. With his emphasis upon the doctrines of creation, providence and redemption, he turned mens minds in the direction of a solid law-basis for the universe which man by virtue of his creation in God’s image and his redemption by God’s grace could truly, although in a limited way, understand.[13] In Calvin’s thought all the particulars which man experiences in this world are bound together and subject to God’s created laws, which alone make it possible to talk of a cosmos rather than a chaos. Moreover, through this cosmos God offers a natural revelation of himself that man should see the divine origin of all things.[14] Thus in Protestant circles natural physical law became a fundamental presupposition of all scientific thought. In a certain sense this brought about a restoration of the medieval “law-idea”, only it had now lost its autonomy by virtue of the Calvinistic doctrines of creation and providence.

Although the Reformation helped to counteract the atomism of Renaissance humanism, the Calvinistic concept of law soon suffered secularization. The humanist, stressing the necessity of man’s domination of nature, reduced the Christian concept of “replenishing and ruling over” the physical world to a natural law, which lost its grounding in the sovereignty of God to become something independent and self-existent. Both the individual phenomenon and the law became abstractions, for the phenomenon existed in complete isolation while the law had no concrete content. The only difficulty was that one could not analyze pure abstractions or come to know them except perhaps by mathematics or geometry. Thus the essence of scientific investigation became the observation and measurement of the functions of particulars, leading eventually to the discovery and elaboration of laws.[15]

Although the concept of law in nature had by no means completely disappeared from natural philosophy during the Renaissance, the philosophers themselves never seem to have incorporated it fully into their methodology until the end of the sixteenth century. Copernicus, the Polish ecclesiastic had in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium touched upon law and its relation to scientific method, but not until the appearance of Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon and RenÉ Descartes did the scientist attempt a systematic exposition of the new ways to study nature.[16] Galileo worked out practical problems at first by rule of thumb and from his results deduced certain laws of motion. Bacon and Descartes carried the matter further. Believing that God had created and sustains all things, Bacon held that man must seek the “form” of the phenomena by which he meant the necessary and sufficient condition of its existence, i.e., the laws by which it exists.[17] To achieve this, Bacon held, one should frame hypotheses which one might then test by experience, and if corroborated, the hypotheses would become general principles. RenÉ Descartes added an additional element by insisting that self-consciousness and geometrical order formed the foundation of all knowledge of the universe. He wished to break down all experience in order that he might rebuild it geometrically.[18] These early formulators of scientific methods had as their successors men such as Kepler, Harvey, Huygens, Boyle and above all others, Sir Isaac Newton, whose great work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) showed quite clearly the nature of this concept of scientific knowledge.[19]

To Newton and his contemporaries natural philosophy had nothing to do with ultimates. Although Newton himself made his name primarily as a scientist, and much of his interest lay in the realm of theology, he never brought the two together. He adopted the position that the phenomenal world to all intents and purposes is an autonomous world. To understand it one does not merely concentrate upon individual phenomena, but must attempt to subsume all under general categories of natural law. To do so the scientist must equate the function of the phenomenon with its nature, and physical reality becomes nothing more ultimate than this law. Moreover, since this is the character of the universe, the method employed by Newton to study the movements of the heavenly bodies men, by analogy, accepted as the only method by which one could know anything.[20]

The eighteenth century one might well call the century of Newton. His disciples carried his views and techniques into every possible sphere of study, and as they did so one notices that the idea of even an absentee-god begins to fade away. Newton might say that he did not deal with absolutes; many of his followers did not possess such modesty. They, rather, began to pride themselves on the fact that no absolute existed beyond their scientific measurements, so that by the end of the century God had become to Laplace an unneeded hypothesis. Yet this declaration of independence did not answer all their questions. With a world governed by absolute natural law what happened to human freedom? Could one believe that man possessed any real freedom? What value did his thought have, if it did no more than simply register the impressions of sense experiences under the control of natural law? If, on the other hand, man was truly free, what then happened to natural law, at least as far as it affected man? One could not have it both ways.

Unfortunately for western thought, the eighteenth century Evangelical Revival had little to say to the contemporary scientific world. With the exception of George Whitefield and of a few men in Scotland and Holland, the main stream of the movement flowed in the Arminian channel. These evangelicals laid their great stress upon man, his abilities and his independence over against God, so that the Arminian Wesley could declare to the Calvinist Whitefield, “Your God is my devil”. Consequently any attempt by the evangelicals at a Christian interpretation of the place of the individual human ego within a world of law never gained much currency. Calling upon men to place their faith in Christ, they never really sought to apply their Christianity more widely.

Immanuel Kant, who came out of a pietistic background, sought on purely rational grounds to solve the problem of scientific knowledge, of natural law and human personality, by separating the mechanical, mathematical universe from that of human freedom. Man’s decisions he placed in the moral sphere, while he held that mathematical and mechanical scientific knowledge came by man’s subsuming the chaos of experience under the logical categories of his own understanding. The scientist knew the world scientifically when he subjected it to the rational laws of his own mind. The only difficulty was that man himself forms part of the chaotic, mechanical universe, which would seem to indicate that scientific knowledge has thus become something which really does not represent the world of experience at all. For this reason any truly logical or empirical analysis of the facts would seem to be impossible.

From the days of Kant, partially as a result of his thought and partially as an outgrowth of Hegel’s stress upon history as the process of the Weltgeist coming to self-consciousness, men sought to solve the problem of scientific knowledge by two means. The first, derived from the writings of Auguste Comte, was known as positivism. The scientist simply took the facts as they presented themselves in his experience (i.e., experimentally), and from these measured facts, by means of hypotheses, formulated laws. Philosophy had nothing to do with the case, for metaphysics belonged to an earlier and less enlightened phase of human development.[21] Alongside the positivist stood the historicist who held that in the biological and social aspects of experience one needed to know historical development. Since the world of animal and man had evolved over aeons of time, to know and understand the present situation, one must know the past. Function and measurement thus received the addition of the idea of development which the historicist hoped would help explain, and perhaps correlate, the idea of law with that of personal freedom. By this means man could finally reach the truth.

ln the sciences of physics and chemistry the result of seventeenth and eighteenth century research was uniformitarianism. Newton had held that laws which ruled here on earth explained certain phenomena, so if one observed similar reactions in the heavens, they obviously ruled also in the celestial area. After a certain struggle, uniformitarianism in biology, geology and paleontology gave way to an evolutionary interpretation, although even here a type of uniformitarianism in the historical process continued to dominate. Processes observable today in nature must have ruled nature from the beginning.[22] The development in these fields inevitably helped to produce “the social sciences” which attempted to provide a measured, functional and developmental explanation of economics, political science, religion and even of history itself. Thus by the end of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, most scientists had become quite confident that they would eventually obtain an explanation of all the facts of experience.

The ground for this confidence lay in their faith in the so-called “scientific method”. All the scientists of the latter part of the nineteenth century insisted that to obtain adequate scientific results one had to approach one’s researches with no preconceptions and without reference to any authority. After preliminary observation of the phenomena under study the scientist should frame an hypothesis, which usually involved the construction, perhaps only in the mind, of a mechanical model. Then followed a series of experiments to test the hypothesis, which, depending on the empirical results, might need appropriate alteration or modification. Once the investigator had verified his hypothesis, he next proceeded to interpret it in terms of unifying theories which he usually called laws and to extend it to unobserved cases.[23] The crux of this whole technique lay in the formulation of hypotheses and the construction of mechanical models, but the scientist offered no explanation to account for the possibility of hypotheses possessing validity in a purely mechanical universe. Such was the situation about 1890.

By the opening of World War I, because of the work of Morley and Michelson on light, of the Curies on radium, and of various scientists in other fields, supported by the mathematical studies of men such as Einstein, except in limited and practical areas the nineteenth century concepts faced rejection. As men delved deeper into the nature of the atom or of the celestial universe, they found that many of the old accepted laws simply did not stand up to empirical investigation. As Planck studied the characteristics of light he found himself forced to formulate the quantum theory which he had to combine with a wave theory, two hypotheses which seemed mutually contradictory, but both of which met certain empirical tests. Heisenherg then propounded the view that one could never determine the true position or velocity of an electron, for in attempting to locate such a small entity one affected both position and velocity. Thus to man the universe is in the final analysis a mystery, the image frequently formed by the scientist being “the symbolic anthropomorphic representation of the basically inconceivable atomic process”.[24]

What does this mean for the scientific outlook and for the scientific method? The scientist now tends to reject the old ideas of attaining scientific understanding by “cook-book methods”.[25] He tries new models which no longer follow the old mechanical pattern but tend to become mathematical equations or statistical studies, and necessarily so, because no sense organs can make direct observations of the subatomic phenomena. In so creating his model, however, the scientist finds it necessary to disregard certain aspects or effects of the actions of the phenomena as irrelevant because they do not fit in with the preconceived structure. He does this simply on the basis of his intuition.[26] As P. W. Bridgman has pointed out the scientist is now reaching the boundaries of scientific knowledge, but boundaries established not so much by the construction of the world, as by the limitations of his own perceptions and comprehension.[27] This is a far cry from the self-assurance of the nineteenth century.

As one might well expect, such views have forced a major re-orientation in the concepts of scientific method. While the old techniques still produce results in the applied science of a company laboratory, scientists no longer regard them as providing the answers to the ultimate riddles of the universe. They now tend to think in terms of great general concepts, hypotheses on a grand scale. As one reads various writers on the subject one comes repeatedly across the words “imagination”, “rational”, “intuition”, “stimulation to further investigation”.[28] Conant has declared flatly that no longer may the scientist think of himself as mapping out the universe like a geographer. Scientific theories, he must regard merely as “guides to human action”, and perhaps as “an extension of common sense”.[29] Others, however, such as Sir James Jeans, go further and believe that while empirical investigation is still necessary, ultimately the universe in which we live is a universe of chance. If one accepts such views, however, it would seem that one casts doubt on any scientific investigation, and even on the scientific method itself.[30]

III. The philosophical presuppositions of the scientific method

Ever since the sixteenth century, scientists have more often than not maintained that they do not bother with matters of philosophy or religion. Their aim is to find out the truth about the cosmos, and to this end their only true interest lies in accurate measurement of, and exact comprehension of, the functions of temporal phenomena. Since they seek primarily to develop techniques for the observation and measurement of phenomena, they require no presuppositions.[31] As one can see from what has been said above, this position has begun to lose some of its acceptance in the twentieth century world. When speaking of “general concepts”, or of “hypotheses on a grand scale”, modern scientists, or at least some of them, have found it necessary to recognize that they actually do set forth cosmologies, interpretations of the temporal cosmos, which involve the whole of reality itself. They may no longer confine their investigations to matters of technique, but despite themselves have become philosophers, with presuppositions concerning both themselves and nature. Consequently it should not present as much difficulty today as it used to in the past to prove that scientists, for all their professed objectivity, have behind their views of the universe, and so behind their method of investigation, a philosophy which they should recognize.

If one commences by examining the scientist’s presuppositions concerning his field of study, frequently one discovers that he adopts the attitude that he may analyse his sphere of interest without reference to any others. Chemists and physicists have found themselves forced to forsake such an attitude on many occasions, particularly in atomic research. On the other hand, a good many scientists working in their laboratories forget about the other sciences, and even deny the relevance of social and philosophical studies. The tendency is to forget their work’s relationship to reality as a whole. One may hardly experience surprise, therefore, when they deny the existence of any vertical relationship as exemplified by religious faith.[32]

Another assumption of the scientist which one frequently encounters is that, the scientific method deals with natural-reality-in-itself. While the scientist may not find it possible to analyze atomic phenomena in an exact manner so that he can identify and plot the course of an individual atom, nevertheless when he measures and analyzes the functions of a natural object he comes to know it. He usually does not consider it necessary to relate his results to other fields, nor to a basic and fundamental philosophical view of reality as a whole. He feels that he operates above and beyond such necessity or limitation. By his scientific means he has come to know the object—at least as far as it is knowable to man—in itself.[33]

This involves a further presupposition, that all phenomena exist under the laws of the field or sphere in which they operate. F. F. Caldin has pointed out, for instance, that since physics deals with inanimate matter, the physicist seeks for laws of general behaviour of the phenomena under investigation, laws which one may know by means of measurement and express in mathematical equations. The results so obtained he then applies even to unobserved phenomena. This means, of course, that the scientist by analogy declares that the universe possesses a basic order and law-structure which extends outside his own field of investigation. Even Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy does not mean that no law exists or that causality is a figment of the imagination. It merely says that man cannot discover them in sub-atomic matter by empirical means. To make such a statement, however, involves belief in the orderliness of nature. Thus in spite of the scepticism of a Hume or a Bertrand Russell, a scientist in order to carry out his investigations must make certain basic assumptions concerning law and order in the universe. Even Sir James Jeans’ mysterious universe seems to require a mathematical framework in which to operate.[34]

Does the modern scientist believe that by the scientific method he has reached ultimate reality? To this the answer would seem to be, No. He holds very much the position of Newton who said that he did not deal with ultimate matters. He may state his hypotheses on a grand scale, develop his general concepts as “generally” as he will, but in the end, as most leading scientific thinkers today admit, he has not really advanced beyond the physical world. Scientifically, mystery or chance lie just across the border line of all that he may know, and not infrequently the scientist desires to leave it there, claiming that he neither knows, nor wishes to know anything beyond the physical law-structure of the universe.[35]

Yet all along, in his believing that the physical cosmos operates according to law, that it is knowable through empirical investigation, and that it consists of certain basic elements such as energy, he has in reality made much wider assumptions concerning the temporal universe than he admits. He may end by talking about mystery or chance, but his fundamental Kantianism cannot stand up to the basic questions of whence the laws, whence the energy, or what is the assurance of the truth of analogies? Can these arise by chance from chaos?

Before carrying the matter any farther along this line, however, one should perhaps examine some of the assumptions of the scientist concerning the investigator himself.

Generally speaking, one seems to find that the average scientist believes himself to be a free and independent individual who may objectively investigate the temporal cosmos by means of scientifically developed techniques. He assumes that his intellect is “normal”, i.e., without any functional maladjustment, which means that his own moral or religious views, and perhaps even his social relations, have no influence upon his interpretation of empirically gained data. Some of the social scientists, particularly historians, have at times disputed this outlook, but generally even they have adopted the attitude that if a man has a bias it comes from his social environment, not from any moral or religious maladjustment within his personality. Any bias should be overcome at least partially by adequate self-examination leading to self-consciousness.[36]

Man, therefore, when he investigates the temporal cosmos feels that his experiences and measurements at least partially reveal reality to him. He classifies and arranges his experiences of phenomena according to type or property, attempting to seek a more general understanding of the laws governing them. Then he proceeds to formulate hypotheses and construct explanatory models, which he in turn checks by repeated references to the results of empirical research. Following this he frames statements of general laws and eventually wide concepts.[37] In the views of some scientists, they have by this means come to a true understanding of temporal reality, while others hold that, even here, it again eludes them. But at the same time they all agree that as far as experience and measurement are concerned they have come to a knowledge of at least a segment of the universe which they can interpret truly and accurately.[38]

Thus the free individual can reach out to and acquire a knowledge of a certain amount of truth. But he does so in a law-governed world or in a chance-constructed world—however one looks at it—of which he himself forms a part. For this reason one might well raise the question of the value of such knowledge. Is it truly knowledge or understanding, and how can such knowledge and understanding be what they claim to be? Is it not really but the haphazard working of the human imagination and its environment? It would seem that the claims so frequently advanced for the validity of the scientific method must find their grounds in a philosophy other than the positivism which the scientist usually advances, for positivism can truly accept nothing but individual experiences of chaos.

Added to this problem one finds that, only too frequently, the scientist states that he will consider as true only that which may come under the rules and investigations of the scientific method.[39] This would seem to exalt the scientific technique to an absolute standard for the discernment and acceptance of all truth. The logical aspect of man’s experience then becomes the final arbiter in all discussions of the nature of truth: but if the temporal cosmos ultimately consists in chance, one finds it a little difficult to accept such a judge.[40] The scientist has attempted to deify a part of his own space-time conditioned personality in order to enable him to sit as ultimate interpreter of the universe.

Someone may at this point object that the author has not taken enough account of the new trends in science which, in delving into the subatomic structure of matter, have shown that the old positivistic empirical concepts no longer hold. Yet do they not? If one reads P. W. Bridgman’s The Nature of Physical Theory and Sir James Jeans’ Physics and Philosophy both written in the 1930’s and then turns to Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy published in 1959 one discovers that while indeterminacy, the quantum theory, relativity and the like have become nuclei of the most recent thought, much the same point of view and attitude remains. True, the feeling of uncertainty about the possibility of really uncovering the nuclear components of atoms, and in particular of actually pin-pointing an electron in its movement, exercises a strong influence in the direction of caution. But still the fundamental humanistic assumptions tend to lie at the basis of contemporary physical science. Plus Ça change, plus c’est la mÊme chose.

The outcome of this position would seem to be a basic self-contradiction in scientific thought, which in turn destroys all possibility of scientific knowledge. Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship”, would seem to demonstrate this conclusion admirably.[41] After asserting at the beginning that everything is chance and man the most peculiar of all accidents, he goes on to discuss man’s intellectual activity and his accomplishments, apparently ignoring his own presuppositions. On a positivistic or humanistic scientific basis, the common approach of our own day, it would seem that one has no right to make any general statements, nor even to think of formulating general concepts, for they can mean nothing. And yet to carry out scientific research the most positivistic practitioner of the scientific method adopts philosophic presuppositions concerning both the nature of the temporal cosmos and himself, a procedure which flatly contradicts all his professed scientific positivism. Thus some other approach seems absolutely necessary.

IV. The Christian interpretation of the scientific method

As pointed out above, Calvin in the sixteenth century set forth the concept of a universe ruled by law, law divinely established and maintained in creation, providence and redemption. He held that the medieval concept of nature and grace had no value, since nature, God’s handiwork, cannot be opposed to God’s grace. Corruption, an alien force, has entered nature only by man’s sin. Yet even sin could not possibly remove man from the law-structure of God’s creation, so the law remains as the foundation for both the unity and diversity within the cosmos. This, man can see and understand only when he lays hold upon Jesus Christ as saviour, who leads him into all truth, and enables him to grasp the fact that nature continues to remain God’s creation, the revelation of divine sovereign wisdom and power.[42] Calvin thus laid the groundwork for a Christian concept of science and scientific method.[43] This pattern of thought we now wish to examine, in order to see what it tells concerning the Christian view of the scientific method.

In approaching this matter of the Christian interpretation of the scientific method, one must always keep in mind the fact that a Christian does not merely believe in certain abstract metaphysical or scientific theories. A Christian believes that He is a creature and a sinner saved from the wrath of God by the grace of God in Jesus Christ. By faith he has committed himself to Christ for eternal life. This gives him a completely new outlook on life, himself, and the world about him. He thus has a view of reality different from that of anyone who does not hold the same faith. His religion forms the foundation for his life, determining his whole perspective of outlook.

This is much more than a matter of church membership. It involves a total interpretation of the universe in which he lives, since it implies an ultimate interpretation of the origins, meaning and purpose of cosmic reality. For this reason. whether he recognizes it or not, he has a Christian approach to, and interpretation of, the scientific method. A Christian may, of course, not have a clear epistemological self-consciousness, that enables him to think as consistently as a Christian should concerning such matters. Nevertheless, if he has experienced the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, his basic outlook provides him with a position from which he may examine and analyze every approach to the study of the universe in which he lives.

To state the matter a little more carefully and exactly, the Christian knows God as the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the One who is absolutely self-sufficient in power, wisdom, goodness and truth. He sees God, therefore, as the sovereign over the universe. This means that the ultimate environment of the temporal universe has a personal character. A materialistic or irrationalistic concept of the ultimate character of reality can have no place in Christian thinking.

At once, of course, the problem arises as to how the Christian knows this. Is it by scientific investigation? To this the Christian must always answer that he knows God only by his own sovereign self-disclosure. God speaks to men by his works and by his Word, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. He shows himself for what he is, and reveals himself by what he does. And yet man can never know God fully or completely, for the infinite and eternal One cannot be reduced to the finite temporal categories of the human mind. Moreover, man as a sinner, in rebellion against God and blinded by his own waywardness, does not wish to keep God as the sovereign in his mind. Thus only by divine revelation will man ever come to know God and so attain a true interpretation of temporal reality.[44]

As mentioned above, God reveals himself also by his works, which are in the first place creation and providence. He has originated and established all things according to his infinite power and wisdom. He has determined the structure of the temporal cosmos according to the pattern which he purposed within himself. This has resulted in the establishment and continuation of a creation which has unity within its diversities, a basic coherence as well as a basic multiplicity. Everything that exists in the universe exists by virtue of the laws of its structure and type which determine its inner nature, known to man only in temporal and perishable forms. Chance or even necessity has not produced the universe, but the wisdom of God who has already bestowed on all things the true interpretation.[45]

Of this creation man forms a part and he can never free himself from it. Since physically he has come from the dust of the ground, he is related to the whole of the rest of creation. At the same time, however, man stands above creation in that he is a personality. He possesses the power to analyze and synthesize his experiences, drawing from them general laws and principles. He has the capacity to mould and use the physical particulars of the cosmos for his own purposes and to organize himself and his fellows into social units, thus developing a culture. In all of this he proves himself different from, and superior to, the rest of creation.[46]

Why does man hold this position? To the Christian the answer lies in the fact that God created man in his own image, as a personality possessing true reason and knowledge, righteousness and holiness, although, since man always remains limited by the horizon of his own temporal experience of the cosmos, on a finite scale.[47] As God’s vicegerent man received the commission to fill the earth and subdue it, a cultural obligation which no other creature can fulfill. Man could do so, however, by virtue of the structure of his divinely patterned personality or ego which possessed the intuitive capacity to understand his sensory impressions or experiences. As God created the temporal universe a law-structure consisting of numerous law-spheres with their own specific structures, so he created man with the intuitive capacity to relate those aspects of reality to himself. Thus man could obtain a true knowledge of the structure of temporal reality, and a true understanding of how it should be used.[48] But he did so on the basis of the fact that his intuition had a vertical as well as an horizontal orientation. He saw all things in the light of the sovereign God. Thinking analogically, he thought God’s thoughts after him.

The process of man’s thinking analogically to God’s true interpretation and understanding begins with pre-theoretical experience and intuition. God has created man so that his organs of sensory perception present him with experiences which correspond to objective reality in all its individuality.[49] But these experiences, or the things which he knows by them, do not appear in his consciousness as equations, or even as scientific structures. Rather they impinge upon his consciousness as concrete things and events in their full totality. For instance, because one thirsts one takes a drink of water, but one does not have a sense perception of H20 with various other chemical, physical, biological and economic attributes. One experiences the water as a totality which takes away the dryness of the throat and satisfies the body’s craving for more fluid. One knows water in this way, but such knowledge does not bring with it scientific or theoretical understanding. It represents what Dooveweerd calls “naive experience”, which, although not scientific knowledge, must lie at the basis of all subsequent theoretical analysis.[50]

Naive, pre-theoretical intuition of the temporal cosmos makes distinctions, as, for instance, when one differentiates between water and gasoline by certain sensory criteria, but these distinctions one cannot term “scientific”. Scientific knowledge consists in abstraction, by which one employing certain scientific hypotheses and techniques abstracts chosen aspects from the experience of specific phenomena of reality. The chemist, for instance, analyzes water by means of electrolysis into two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, and the physicist studies the problem of the freezing or vaporization of water. Other scientists interested in its biological, physiological, economic or social uses or its practical importance on the basis of the work of chemists and physicists, deal with other aspects. In all of these cases the scientist tends to abstract, so that no one abstraction really represents the whole truth, for abstraction means onesidedness and artificial isolations.[51] This takes place not by some mechanical means but by the human person, the supratemporal “I”, who has the ability to stand back from his experiences of reality and so to examine and analyze them that he obtains something of an understanding of an abstract aspect of the structure of temporal reality.

Because of the fact that the scientist’s logical, abstract knowledge of the temporal horizon always remains bound to sense experience, he may never separate his theoretical from his pre-theoretical intuition of the temporal cosmos. He may never become a rationalist attempting merely, by deduction from general principles, to attain a true theoretical understanding of an aspect of reality. He must continually go back to his concrete experiences in order to check all his scientific theorizing. Thus induction cannot but be the basic scientific method. All theories, all interpretations, he must test repeatedly by the phenomena of temporal reality.[52] For this very reason, therefore, one may never say that a scientific understanding of one aspect of reality or of the “scientific method” enables one to reach out to absolute truth, nor even to understand nature-in-itself. Scientific endeavour is limited to the temporal horizon of experience and deals with abstracted aspects of man’s experience of the phenomena within that horizon.[53]

At the same time, however, an aspect of phenomena abstracted from the coherence of temporal reality does not constitute wholly true knowledge even of that one aspect. It cannot possibly exist in isolation from its total environment, and this limitation applies not only to the phenomenon known but also to the knower. The possibility of man’s developing a special science depends upon the existence of a certain type of temporal reality, one over which law rules. Moreover, the knowledge of this world implies, indeed necessitates, specific relationships between the scientist and the phenomena which he investigates. But even attempts to understand a special science by linking it to the rest of temporal reality do not suffice, for temporal reality is not self-explanatory. True scientific knowledge comes only when men see themselves and the phenomena of the cosmos in the light of eternity, from the perspective of Jesus Christ the creator, the sustainer and redeemer of men. To the Christian, here alone lies the source of the true understanding of science, for only in this faith can one justify the use of the scientific method.[54]

At this point, however, one faces the inescapable fact that although men do not interpret reality in this way, they still do achieve much in the scientific field by means of the scientific method. How does the Christian explain this, especially as he himself insists that any explanation must stick to the empirical facts?

To the Christian the answer lies in the fall of man into sin and God’s redemption. Although man’s finitude would keep him from having absolutely comprehensive knowledge of the temporal cosmos, his knowledge as far as it might go would be true, for he would not only have a proper insight into the law-structure of the cosmos and in particular of his particular area of investigation, but he would see all things in their true relationships to God as creator and sustainer. Man, however, has refused to accept God as God, insisting that no prior interpretation of the universe exists and that he can attain to absolute knowledge by stressing one aspect of experience, usually the logical-scientific, so that it becomes the guide to all truth. Whatever lies beyond its range remains mysterious for man and for God also, if there be a God. This outlook stems from the fact that sin consists in personal alienation from God, so that when man comes to study the temporal cosmos his eyes refuse to see that he must always take God into account if he would obtain true knowledge.[55] Hence man’s error.

How does this error manifest itself? Man seeks independence from God, endeavouring to attain to creativity in his own right. He falls victim to Satan’s temptation: “Ye shall be as gods, discerning good from evil” (Gen 3:5). He, therefore, follows Descartes’ formula by beginning with himself as an independent thinking being whose reason is the standard of truth. In this way, even though he may not deny some god’s existence, he does reject the idea of the necessity of his absolute subjection to the deity. Rather he interprets the world as though he and it stand alongside his god as independent entities. Commencing his thinking from a humanistic presupposition he cannot but end by asserting his autonomy in his interpreting and using this temporal reality.[56]

At this point the non-Christian runs into serious difficulties. While proclaiming his freedom from philosophical presuppositions in his employment of the scientific method, he nevertheless usually assumes hidden positivistic presuppositions coupled with a belief in natural order which in turn hardly agree with his positivistic, purely experiential approach to reality. To think scientifically he must accept a concept of law-coherence within the temporal universe, which, in turn implies ultimate rationality as the universe’s foundation. If he cannot know aspects of the universe truly without any reference to ultimates, or by positing ultimate chance or mystery, the assumption of a basic rationale to all things would seem required. Whether he likes it or not the unbelieving scientist finds himself forced to bow to the reality of the law-structure of the universe in order to be a scientist, which seems to constitute a denial of his prior assumption of his own and his world’s autonomy.[57] This would seem to destroy any possibility of accepting the validity of his non-Christian presuppositions

For man to employ logically and consistently the scientific method he must come to see it in its basic coherence with the rest of temporal reality, and this he does only when he looks at all things in the light of eternity. But such light comes by no other means than the grace of God which speaks to us by his Word and Spirit concerning Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. When by the effectual calling of God one comes to faith in Christ, one has become a new person, not merely ethically but in one’s fundamental “religious center” which determines the individual’s outlook on the whole of his life and experience. This produces a change in one’s interpretation of the temporal cosmos, so that one no longer attempts to elevate a single aspect, particularly the logical-scientific, to the place of absolute truth but realizes that one knows the truth only when one sees it in the perspective of Christ who thus becomes “the new root of our cosmos”.[58] Although sin would have shattered our cosmos, God has maintained it and redeemed it in Christ the source of all true knowledge.

At this point, an important question arises, one which many Christians seem to ignore. If indeed one uses the scientific method properly only if one is a Christian, what about all the myriads of non-Christian, even atheistic, scholars, who also use it and to apparently good effect? Does their work have no value? Are all their achievements purely illusory? From listening to some Christians talk, one might well think that this is the case. Such an attitude, however, by no means represents a truly Christian point of view.

The Christian purview takes into account both human apostasy and divine purpose in creation. To accomplish his purpose and to make his special redemptive grace effective in this world, God, by his common grace bestowed upon all men, has restrained the effects of sin. “The sense of deity”, of which Calvin speaks, still remains even within the most agnostic mind, giving the unbelieving scientist the assurance that he may know the temporal universe rationally. Thus although unbelievers may remain blind to the vertical significance of temporal reality, if they do but “capitulate to the temporal Divine order”, they can gain a relatively true understanding of the states of affairs here and now. Thus in all interpretations and philosophies one finds relative truths; but these become ultimate falsehoods when interpreted immanently and subjectively. Forced by the structure of reality to acknowledge its law-governed pattern they achieve much, but frequently they then go on to extrapolate their findings to provide an explanation for the whole of reality, ending up in a slough of chance or ultimate ineluctable mystery.[59]

As the Christian, therefore, studies this matter of the scientific method in relation to his own faith, he need not fear it nor feel that as a Christian he must disregard the discoveries and achievements of those unbelievers who have gone before. Successive generations of scholars have built up a structure of knowledge in the past which itself has become part of man’s temporal horizon of experience. God has given to many great gifts and capacities which they have employed to investigate the relationships and structures of temporal reality, thereby making marvellous and astonishing discoveries concerning its character. These discoveries the Christian must not despise or disdain, but use them as God intends to obtain a greater understanding of his power and glory. True, scientists may commence from a wrong idea of the nature of the universe, ignoring or denying that they may explain it truly in the light of God’s self-revelation alone. Nevertheless, the Christian must recognize that the scientific method holds good because God is sovereign. When the unbeliever uses it he is basically inconsistent, and when he makes discoveries of truth he does so, not by virtue of his intellectual autonomy but, by the grace of God which preserves both the law-structure of the universe and some vestiges of the image of God in man.[60]

In the past most Christians, when interpreting both Scripture and the world of nature, have followed a method ultimately derived from the thought of Aristotle. They have, for instance, sought to interpret the Bible, particularly in its references to natural phenomena along scholastic and Aristotelian lines. This Dooyeweerd with good reason terms “oppressive to the Christian faith and to honest scientific investigation”.[61] Even many Reformed scholars have fallen into the same trap, not infrequently attempting by scholastic reasoning to refute new theoretical or scientific ideas which have conflicted with traditional scholastic interpretations of the Bible. The Christian scholar, however, cannot subniit himself uncritically to any philosophy, even though put forward by Christians, but must on true Christian grounds prove all things and hold fast that which is good.

What implications arise then out of this? In a world largely dominated by science and the scientific method, what attitude must the Christian take? A mere confession of faith or telling of “what Christ means to me”, important as Christian witness of this type may be, hardly meets the situation. The Christian, in obedience to God’s cultural mandate to man, has the abiding responsibility of understanding and knowing temporal reality scientifically. This of course has always been the case, but in our own day and age it has become even more imperative. Christians must not only involve themselves in their world, but they should in particular turn their attention to the scientific spheres in order that they may demonstrate clearly and dramatically that only if man knows the sovereign God through Jesus Christ, can he truly depend upon and use the scientific method as a means of understanding the world in which he lives.

Notes

1. E. F. Caldin, The Power and Limits of Science, London, 1949, p. 3.
2. One might add that a good many Christians fear science because it upsets their basically Aristotelian interpretation of the Bible’s statements. Cf. H. Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Philadelphia, 1953, I, 510.
3. Ibid., II, 572.
4. Ed. D. Lerner, Evidence and Inference, Glencoe, Ill, 1959, p. 13.
5. Ibid., pp. 102f.
6. Caldin, op. cit., pp. 53f; J. B. Conant, Modern Science and Modern Man, New York, 1953, pp. 47f.
7. Caldin, op. cit., p. 18.
8. Op. cit., I, 561; W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, London, 1959, p. 38.
9. H. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought, Philadelphia, 1960, p. 44.
10. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. I, chaps. IIIff.
11. Dooyeweerd, Twilight, p. 44; A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, London, 1957, pp. 212ff.
12. Good examples of this point of view are Machiavelli, Pico della Mirandola and Castiglione.
13. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, I, 510f.
14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, xiv, 20f; I, xvi, 4.
15. Dooyeweerd, Twilight, p. 49.
16. Crombie, op. cit., pp. 308ff.
17. W. C, Kneale, “Scientific Method” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 1957, XX.
18. Dooyeweerd, Twilight, p. 49; H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, London, 1950, pp. 83ff.
19. Ibid., pp. 65ff; Dooyeweerd, New Critique, I, pp. 553ff.
20. Dooyeweerd, Twilight, p. 50; Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation, New York, 1909, p. 67.
21. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, I, 546ff.
22. R. Hooykaas, Natural Law and Divine Miracle, Leiden, 1960, describes the manner in which the concepts regarding science developed during the nineteenth century
23. Caldin, op. cit., pp. 21, 52ff; Conant, op. cit., pp. 55ff; Kneale, op. cit.
24. Deutsch in Lerner, op. cit., p. 96; Conant, op. cit., pp. 48ff, 66ff.
25. Ibid., pp. 41ff.
26. Ibid., pp. 75f; Lerner, op. cit., pp. 96ff.
27. Conant, op. cit., p. 87.
28. Ibid., p. 47; Caldin, op. cit., pp. 22f; A. D. Ritchie, Studies in the History and Methods of the Sciences, Edinburgh, 1958, pp. 80f.
29. Conant, op. cit., p. 101.
30. Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, New York, Cambridge, 1944, chap. I.
31. Dooyeweerd, Critique, I, 550f.
32. Dooyeweerd, op. cit., II, 577; Twilight, pp. 8f.
33. Caldin, op. cit., pp. 26, 38ff; Lerner, op. cit., p. 12.
34. Ibid., pp. 9, 15ff, 25, 46f, 52ff; W. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, London, 1959, p. 49.
35. Ibid., p. 52.
36. Lerner, op. cit., p. 10; P. W. Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory, Princeton, 1936, pp. 12f.
37. Kneale, op. cit.
38. Lerner, op. cit.; Caldin, op. cit., pp. 19ff; Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy, Cambridge, 1946, p. 189.
39. Lerner, op. cit., p. 13.
40. Dooyeweerd, Twilight, pp. 8ff; Critique, II, 577.
41. Published in Mysticism and Logic, London, 1953.
42. Calvin, Institutes, bk. I, chaps. III-V; Dooyeweerd Critique, I, p. 516.
43. One of the best examples of his statement concerning this is to be found in his tract: Adversus Astrologiam quam ludiciariam Vocant (1549).
44. Cf. Rom 1:18ff.
45. Dooyeweerd, Critique, II, 547ff; Bavinck, op. cit., pp. 90ff.
46. Ibid., pp. 79ff; Dooyeweerd, op. cit., II, 469, 553ff Cf. Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses called Genesis, 1:26; 9:2.
47. Dooyeweerd, op. cit., II, 554f; Bavinck, op. cit., pp. 53f.
48. Dooyeweerd, op. cit., II, 475ff, 547ff.
49. Ibid., I, 561f; II, 557ff; Twilight, pp. 6ff.
50. Ibid., II, 468f; 557f; Twilight, pp. 13ff; Bavinck, op. cit., pp. 56ff.
51. Dooyeweerd, Critique, II, 469ff, 575; Twilight, pp. 12ff.
52. Ibid., pp. 18f; Critique, II, 4ff.
53. Ibid., II, 561; Twilight, p. 6.
54. Dooyeweerd, Critique, I, 561f; II, 504ff; Bavinck, op. cit., p. 106f.
55. Dooyeweerd, Critique, II, 547ff, 573f.
56. Ibid., II, 552, 581f; Twilight p. 59; Bavinck, op. cit., pp. 98ff. Caldin, op. cit., pp. 9ff, in discussing the scientific method, makes this very clear.
57. Ibid., pp. 15ff; Dooyeweerd, Critique I, 550f; II, 571ff.
58. Ibid., I, 522f; II, 561ff; Twilight, pp. 42f, 54.
59. Ibid., pp. 54f; Critique, I, 522f; II, 571ff.
60. Ibid., II, 576ff.
61. Ibid., I, 510.