A Review of Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach by Vern Poythress.

Reviewed by Coty Pinckney, January 12, 2007

The centuries-long debate about the relationship between science and faith seemed to intensify last year. Politically, courts weighed in on whether or not local school boards can mandate a discussion of intelligent design, and government funding for embryonic stem cell research was a Democratic talking point in the congressional elections. Intellectually, books such as Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation have been best-sellers. The anti-religious fervor perhaps culminated at the conference “Beyond Belief” held in La Jolla, California last November. One physicist captured the overall tone: “The world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief.”

This milieu makes the publication of Vern Poythress’ Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach all the more timely. Having earned degrees in mathematics from Cal Tech and Harvard prior to becoming Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, Dr Poythress is unusually well-qualified to contribute to the topic.

But Poythress addresses a rather different audience than Dawkins or Harris. Redeeming Science is written very much for a Christian audience, to help Christians think biblically about science:

[I] intend to examine what the world looks like, and what science looks like, when we take the contents of the Bible seriously, and when we listen obediently with the conviction that this is God’s instruction. (65)

Nevertheless, the book opens with a salvo that weighs in on the current debate: “All scientists—including agnostics and atheists—believe in God. They have to in order to do their work.” (13). And by “God,” Poythress means not some nondescript, 12-steps “higher power,” but the God of the Bible:

The work of science depends constantly on the fact that there are regularities in the world. Without the regularities, there would ultimately be nothing to study. Scientists depend not only on regularities with which they are already familiar, such as the regular behavior of measuring apparatus, but also on the postulate that still more regularities are to be found in the areas that they will investigate. Scientists must maintain hope of finding further regularities, or they would give up their newest explorations. (15)

These regularities, these scientific laws, are inconsistent with a belief in animism. Indeed, modern science could never have come into existence without a prior, effectively religious belief that the world operates in consistent, rational ways:

Science must therefore reject animism as an ontological option, not merely as a methodological proposal, in order to get started. Not only animism, but any kind of chaotic or semichaotic ontology, threatens to overwhelm order with chaos, and accordingly has already been rejected in practice by working scientists. (269)

Furthermore, biblically we are so stained by pervasive sin that we will never come to a knowledge of the truth apart from God opening our eyes and mastering our thought through His revelation. To claim that any alternative means of coming to the truth is available is fundamentally a religious statement:

We shall never escape the circle of sin unless we have a pure word of God as the standard for criticism, rather than autonomous reason or values and insights that themselves come merely from our human environment. All other proposals represent alternative religious commitments, even alternative religions. When once we listen to the pure word of God, we find that the modern world is full of subtle idolatries in the form of these religious alternatives; among them is the alternative of trying to receive the most fundamental guidance from science in order to find out the meaning of the world. (64)

(Interestingly, some of the participants at the “Beyond Belief” conference acknowledge the essentially religious nature of their program: “Science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told.”)

Having established his project, Poythress proceeds to deal with a number of issues relating the Bible to science. The longest section of the book, covering seven chapters and 80 pages, looks at questions of origins and the flood. The author carefully examines the Genesis account, contrasting it with Near Eastern creation stories, and drawing implications for a biblical worldview. He then summarizes and assesses different ways Christians have tried to understand the age of the earth biblically. In keeping with the theme of the pervasiveness of sin, Poythress very helpfully analyzes the motives that tempt Christians to take different sides in the debate:

Some people feel strongly the temptation to compromise with the world, in order to have the world’s approval, and to avoid being looked down on and laughed at for being “fundamentalists.” . . . Other people may congratulate themselves on their purity for having rejected the compromises. . . . A good determination to remain faithful to God whatever the cost can be combined with a sinful pride and self-congratulation on how well we are doing that! . . . So let us exercise some caution about our own motives. (115)

Of the alternatives, the author zeroes in on mature creation/24-hour day theories and analogical day/literary framework theories. Several times, Poythress helps us understand the pre-modern worldview of the original readers of Genesis, thereby pointing out how modernism affects even our attempts to understand God’s Word. He is careful to point out strengths and weaknesses of different interpretations, and reaches his own conclusion with some tentativeness. No matter what your understanding of Genesis 1 and 2, you will be challenged to think more clearly about the text and the world God has made through this section of the book.

The next section examines the scientific enterprise in light of biblical truth. The atheistic scientist:

imagines the laws just to be out there, against a background inexplicability as to why. There is an ultimate irrationality at bottom, that transcends the laws themselves. (167)

The Christian, instead, conducts scientific inquiry to discover more about God’s character, confident that a personal, rational God has created the universe in such a way that we, created in His image, can learn more of Him. Yet “we always have the qualification that God is God, and we are not. He transcends our knowledge. He can surprise us.” (166) We need a Redeemer to understand God via science, and we need His revealed Word to point the way:

The corruption and idolatry in science manifests itself especially in this, that scientists seldom see their need for Christ in the sphere of science. Science needs redemption because of the turning of scientific law into an idol. . . . And only Christ can provide that redemption. . . . Science on earth becomes a process of coming to know Christ (Phil. 2:8-10) and participating more deeply in his wisdom. Or that is what it should be. (173)

This leads to a discussion of miracles. God in His sovereignty controls both the scientific laws, the general way the world works, as well as particular, individual events. God works all things together - general and particular - for the glory of His Name. Poythress quotes Herman Bavinck approvingly:

A miracle is not a violation of natural law and no intervention in the natural order. From God’s side it is an act that does not more immediately and directly have God as its cause than any ordinary event, and in the counsel of God and the plan of the world it occupies as much an equally well-ordered and harmonious place as any natural phenomenon. (180)

Biblically, then, science is the study of the regularities and generalities in God’s created order. We can learn much about God through such a study, and thereby marvel all the more at Who He is. But God in His wisdom orders the universe by His Word in such a way that the regularities do not always hold. Science simply does not speak to God’s irregular interventions in fulfilling His Word.

Here the book turns to a discussion of the nature of reality. Beginning with an analysis of realism and idealism - “Both realism and idealism turn out to be both right and wrong, because they fail to reckon with the distinct position of the Creator” (208) – Poythress goes on to examine our ordinary experience of the world around us, and how that experience relates to a scientific view of reality. He argues that, rightly seen, science offers us new perspectives on reality; we should not see science as displacing our ordinary perception of reality. Time itself, in ordinary human perception, is seen not as clock-time – second, minutes, hours – but in interactive, ordinal terms. When we assume that a scientific view is “true” and our ordinary perception is “false”, we fall into error:

Modern people . . . can become captive to various idols within their mental furniture. And in this case the idol in question is modernity itself, reinforced by a worldview that assumes that modern scientific accounts have made obsolete ordinary perception, rather than adding extra dimensions beyond the ordinary. The modern person who prides himself on his superior wisdom gets trapped by the Bible’s simplicities. The saying in Scripture proves true, “He [God] catches the wise in their craftiness” (1 Cor. 3:19). If you insist on being wise in your own eyes (Prov. 3:7), you may attain a position in which you have the delicious satisfaction of knowing with assurance that your own modern reading of Scripture, anchored in the triumphs of a modern worldview, is superior to the benighted darkness of all previous generations. But in this very triumph you will have proved yourself a fool, a dupe to modern ideology, and—more devastatingly—a dupe to your own pride. To put it another way, the Bible is full of traps that God has set for the proud. (223)

And the Richard Dawkins’s and Sam Harris’s of this world have walked right into those traps.

These considerations lead back again to further contemplation of issues surrounding origins. Here Poythress addresses intelligent design directly. Some opponents of intelligent design have argued that all scientists, regardless of their personal religious convictions, should conduct their work as methodological naturalists:

Methodological naturalism says roughly that modern science does conduct itself and should continue to conduct itself with the assumption that in the areas that it investigates, all the particular events and all the general patterns take place according to general laws that for practical purposes can be regarded as impersonal; and even if there are some exceptions, these are best ignored for the sake of getting on with the task of science. (261)

By means of this way of proceeding, many Christian scientists act as if the Word of God has no impact on their scientific investigations. But to proceed in this way ignores God’s hand in all aspects or reality – including the very scientific laws the scientist seeks to understand:

Scientific laws are themselves a prime case of design. Design shows itself not only in a particular case like a bacterial flagellum but in a general law like the conservation of energy. Once we grasp deeply that God rules the entire world, we begin to see that everything testifies to him, and we see everywhere evidence of his design. Unbelief fails to see design, not because of lack of evidence but because unbelief suppresses the truth about God (Rom. 1:18-23), which is crucial in acknowledging the evidence. To be sure, those pieces that look designed and that cannot easily be explained on a naturalistic basis may prove to be particularly useful in apologetic discussion. But one should beware of giving the impression that unbelief is innocent until it confronts such special evidence. (266)

Proponents of intelligent design have provided examples of “irreducible complexity,” cases in the biological world that seem to be unexplainable by evolutionary processes. The key question is: How should scientists react to such anomalies? Do they assume that such anomalies can’t exist? If so, what is the basis for that assumption? Do they assume that discussion of intelligent design cannot shed further light on the nature of reality? Again, what is the basis for that assumption? Poythress argues strongly that “the predominant methodological naturalism in science needs to change, however painful that may be for those who currently hold cultural power.” (283)

The final two chapters consider a Christian approach to physics, chemistry, and mathematics. I found these disappointing. Here the author attempts to show that both the history of scientific advance and the nature of the subject matter should lead us to marvel at the glory of God. But in rightly looking to glorify God, Poythress makes inferences that do not seem warranted, at least to this reviewer.

Consider a couple of examples. First: we can identify any point in three-dimensional space by coordinates on three axes. The author notes that the fundamental physical laws do not change when we rotate these axes. He then says, “We can tie this principle to biblical categories by saying that the truth, God’s word, remains the truth as we change personal perspective.” (307) How an arbitrary assignment of axes relates to the unchanging nature of God’s Word escapes me.

Second example: In discussing the equations regarding fluid motion, Poythress writes:

Each of the proportionalities is analogous to the proportionalities in the tabernacle of Moses; and these in turn are analogous to the Son, who is the image of the Father. The laws of physics reflect the beauty and harmony in God. (308)

The last sentence is unquestionably true, but the link to the tabernacle is tenuous at best. Poythress would have been well served to drop some of his examples and to focus more on the ideas in his eloquent summation:

The Word, the second person of the Trinity, expresses himself in the words or laws concerning nature. They bear the imprint of his person, so they reveal awesome wisdom, power, and beauty. The simple proportionalities in physical laws are a form of “imaging.” . . . God impressed these symmetries and proportionalities on the world as a reflection of himself and his own beauty and symmetry. (312)

The conclusion too leaves something to be desired. A 300+ page book covering a wide range of issues would profit from more than a three-paragraph concluding chapter. Readers would have been well-served had the author spent a few pages summarizing and reinforcing key ways that Christians can take his many valuable points into a public square infected by The God Delusion and its ilk. In addition, the book would be more helpful and easier to follow if the Table of Contents were broken down into sections, to give an idea of the way the overall argument advances from chapter to chapter.

Nevertheless, Redeeming Science is an exceptionally valuable book that has come to press at exactly the right time. All thoughtful Christians, particularly those involved in education or scientific endeavors, will profit from Professor Poythress’ insightful analysis of the relationship of the Bible to scientific truth.

Redeeming Science is published by Crossway (2006). It is available in its entirety online as a pdf file at www.frame-poythress.org. For more on the “Beyond Belief” conference, see “Free-for-All on Science and Religion” by George Johnson, New York Times November 21, 2006. All quotes from the conference come from that article. Coty Pinckney is Pastor of Desiring God Community Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.