This is the essay that I offered to post
here. I wrote it for the introduction to a booklet I’m working on, which is intended to serve as a counter-argument to the claims made by Answers in Genesis’s “Creation Museum”. A large portion of its displays are intended to convince Christians that they should never trust “human reason”, so one of the points of this essay is why “human reason” is something nobody can do without. It isn’t a matter of interpretation that this museum argues that reason is incompatible with Christianity; they’re quite specific about it:
Since the essay is written with the intention of being an introduction, it makes several references to the booklet it’s going to eventually be part of, but that shouldn’t affect the points it makes.
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God’s word or human reason? This was a question I first asked myself in fall of 2001, following the worst terrorist attack ever to occur on American soil.
As a Christian, I had been raised to believe that reason was something akin to a child’s desire to eat candy: something which was appealing but ultimately useless, since all of the world’s most important lessons could be found in the Bible. And in the distant realms of the world where no missionary or Bible had ever reached, the Holy Spirit could still be counted on to lead people to the truth. All that was required was simple faith and obedience, without need of any person to figure out for themselves what was or was not true.
The puzzle of this matter first hit me when I read what the motivation had been of the terrorists who carried out these attacks. The hijackers had claimed to be led by the Holy Spirit, and were acting out of faith for what they believed would be their reward in heaven. Clearly, the Holy Spirit could not have led anyone to crash an airplane into a skyscraper filled with innocent people—that was not what puzzled me. What I found confusing was that somehow, these men had mistaken the depraved urges of their own minds for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, without ever realizing their error.
I wondered how anyone could make such a mistake. It seemed that it should be easy for a person to discern God’s guidance from their own sinful nature, since the Holy Spirit would never offer anyone guidance contrary to the instructions provided by the Bible. However, the reason for this was not difficult to discover: the hijackers believed that God’s word was not the Bible, but the Koran. And according to the Koran, their actions were not only permissible, but honorable.
Here were two books, each claiming to be God’s word, yet offering two vastly differing views on the nature of God and of morality. I had been told that the Holy Spirit could be trusted to show anyone that this was true of the Bible and no other book, yet somehow these men had been unable to distinguish its guidance from their own sinful desires. Was the Holy Spirit truly the only guidance God had provided for people who spent their lives in parts of the world where Christianity was mostly unknown, and where a book other than the Bible was widely regarded as God’s word? Based on what I had just seen, the Holy Spirit alone did not seem to be enough to lead people in such places to the truth, and I could not understand why God would have equipped people so poorly to identify the truth among the world’s countless false teachings.
Almost as soon as I reached this apparent quandary, however, I realized what its solution was: God had not left us nearly as helpless in this respect as it at first seemed. He had granted us the gift of reason, an ability which no other animal can match, and which was the only certain way for a person to determine which teachings are true and which are false. I had begun down a path scorned by many Christians, but I soon discovered that I was not alone, for many other Christians had traveled it before me.
As was written by Galileo Galilei:
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
It is my hope that the preceding explanation will enable you, the reader, to understand my dissatisfaction with the Creaton Museum’s teaching that “human reason” cannot and should not be trusted. If you share their opinion on this matter, and I have thus far been unable to sway it, you may as well put this booklet back where you found it—if reason is worthless to you, then everything else I have to say surely will be also. If, however, you are willing to consider reason a gift from God as I do, then the rest of this booklet will serve as an introduction to reason and what can be learned from it.
I will begin with the most basic lesson that reason taught me: that I should observe the world around me, and learn from what I see.
I doubt that most Christians would disagree with the most basic applications of this principle. For example, if while driving a car a person sees a traffic light in front of them turn red, I would hope and expect that they press the brake in order to stop. It is only when what we observe appears to run contrary to the Bible that anyone would have a problem with this idea: if the Bible is the greatest authority that exists on all matters, then according to some Christians it should be trusted more than any other source of information, even more than our own eyes and ears.
This was another idea which I believed for most of my life, but in time reason presented a problem with it. How could place more trust in the Bible than in my eyes, when my eyes were my only way of reading the Bible? It seemed that I would have to fully trust my eyes regardless of how great an authority I considered the Bible to be. Alternatively I could read a Braille Bible, or have someone read the Bible aloud to me, but in those cases I would only be placing this trust in my sense of touch or hearing rather than sight. The inescapable conclusion was that regardless of what I believed about the Bible or anything else, my senses were the only way for me to learn about the world.
And with this conclusion followed another. If I must trust my eyes an equal amount while reading the Bible as I do while observing the physical world, then what my eyes told me about the physical world could be trusted just as much as what they told me about God’s word. It was not really a surprise: if God had created the physical world, surely I could learn just as much about how He worked by observing his creation itself as I could by reading a written account of His actions.
Science suddenly became a realm of study just as honorable as theology to me. It was through science that we could more fully understand the workings of God’s creation, and better appreciate His glory as its designer. For science is more than just a set of teachings, and this is among the most essential things for anyone to understand if they wish to learn more about the world: science is, above anything else, a quest for understanding. After observing the world with one’s senses, the scientific method is to formulate a hypothesis to explain these observations. The hypothesis must then be tested, and if these tests show the hypothesis to be incorrect, a new hypothesis is created that is consistent with whatever information has been gathered.
This raises an important question: if the conclusions of science have the potential to be disproved by future tests, as indeed they do, then why should we have faith in the conclusions science has drawn? The answer is that no true scientist ever does. If any scientific theory which I currently accept were unequivocally shown to be false, I would abandon it without hesitation, and I’m certain that the same holds true for all of the other people who have contributed to this booklet. However, there are certain theories that explain all of the observable evidence in a way that no other theory can, such as the theory of gravity or the theory that all objects are made out of atoms. Although it is remotely possible that at some point the existence of atoms will be disproved, until then accepting their existence is the only course of action for anyone whose goal is to understand as much as possible of the truth about the world.
What, then, are we to make of those situations in which the conclusions of science appear to run contrary to the Bible? There are two possible answers, and the first is offered by the statement of faith of Answers in Genesis, the organization responsible for the Creation Museum:
No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record.
The second was offered the theology journal
Christian Observer in 1832, approximately two decades before Charles Darwin introduced his theory of evolution:
If sound science appears to contradict the Bible, we may be sure that it is our interpretation of the Bible that is at fault.
These are two diametrically opposed viewpoints, but God’s gift of reason can allow us to determine which of these method we should favor.
The operative phrase here is “sound science”, as not all scientific theories can be considered sound. Those that qualify as
sound must fit the description given above, explaining all of the observations which pertain to them in a way that no other theory can. In other words, when
sound science appears to contradict the Bible, it is because things can be seen in the physical world that directly contradict our interpretation of the Bible, and the only way to reject these observations would be by placing more trust in the Bible more than we place in our eyes. But of course that is impossible, since we cannot read the Bible without using our eyes.
The most famous example of sound science appearing to contradict the Bible is not evolution, but the studies of Copernicus and Galileo showing that the earth revolves around the sun. This view was opposed by the church because it appeared to contradict verses such as Ecclesiastes 1:5, which suggests that it is the sun which revolves around the Earth, as well as Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30, all of which suggest that the earth is immobile. However, in 1758 the Pope acknowledged that this opposition had been a mistake, and reversed the church’s opposition to the heliocentric model of the solar system.
The church’s opposition to Galileo is an example of an important principle. There are parts of the Bible which cannot be interpreted correctly without the use of physical observation and reason, as can be seen from the fact that the aforementioned verses were interpreted to mean that the sun revolves around the earth until Copernicus and Galileo showed otherwise. Clearly, we must be prepared to do follow the instructions provided by
Christian Observer: if sound science is found to contradict our interpretation of the Bible, meaning the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from our observations shows our interpretation of the Bible to be false, then we must allow what we can see of God’s actions to alter our understanding of God’s word.
The question that will surely be asked at this point is, can the theory of evolution be considered sound science? Although it would be easy to answer this question with a simple “yes” or “no”, such an answer would be of little value: a scientific theory is never valid because a person declares it to be so, but because of its ability to explain evidence that cannot be explained by any competing theory. It is for this reason that the next six chapters of this booklet exist: in order to show what this evidence is in the case of evolution.
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The introduction to the booklet will also include an explanation of what the theory of evolution actually states, since I think it’s important to include that before I start describing the evidence for it. But this part is what I think the people here would find most interesting, since it’s why I don’t think anything in the Bible can be considered a greater authority than what we’re able to observe in the rest of the world. What do the people here think of it?
I’m most interested in hearing what the creationists here have to say about this essay, since when this booklet is finished they’ll be the target audience for it.
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