In his mid-20th century book "Radical Monotheism and Western Culture", Yale professor and Christian ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr examined the prospect in a chapter called "Radical Faith and Western Science."
“Our twentieth century is an age of confidence in science. In our culture we tend to believe scientists as, we are told, in another age of faith men believed churchmen,"
Niebuhr says,
"To be sure, we call the content of what we now believe knowledge or science, but for the most part it is direct knowledge only for the scientific specialist while for the rest of us it is belief – something taken on trust.”
Since none of us can know everything about a given subject we must trust the direct knowledge of others. Atheists - and everyone else to some degree - trust Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan when they say that if you go through the same steps they have you will come to the same conclusions they have just as I trust religious men like Thomas Merton and C.S. Lewis.
We both believe this based on faith in these men and their area of expertise. Atheists believe, on the authority of Dawkins and Sagan that, as Niebuhr says, if you put yourself through the discipline of scientific inquiry you will be able to convince yourself directly of the content of your beliefs and so convert them into knowledge.
Niebuhr proposes three reasons for our near complete trust in science:
1. Scientists have commended themselves by the signs they have wrought
“We believe what physicists and engineers tell us about electricity, sound-waves, and light-waves because we have heard radio and seen television…Modern, so-called scientific, man is not too different from his forebears in this respect; unless he sees signs and wonders he is reluctant to believe.”
2. Scientists make predictions that come true
“Once true and false prophets were distinguished from each other on the basis of the accuracy of their predictions; now science and pseudo-science are discriminated on similar grounds. We believe the astronomers because we have seen eclipses at the predicted hour…”
3. Scientists have been faithful to us
“They have been loyal to the human community and its members in the administration of the particular domain for which they have responsibility. That domain, we believe, is the understanding of the natural world in which we live and of which we are a part… it has not deceived us, who can easily be deceived about many things that lie beyond our knowledge.”
“We have come to have our great confidence in science,” he continues, “Because we encounter it not as an impersonal activity but as a community of men with a tradition and a discipline of faithfulness.” I believe this trust is waning as religion and science are so often pitted against each other rather than enjoying a mutually enlightening relationship.
As a Christian, I find it unfortunate that it is necessary to say that I am not anti-science. I get the distinct impression that some Christians think an anti-science position is not only truthful but also required. In this essay Niebuhr makes a positive assessment of science and the scientific community that I can support.
You can find Part 2 of this series
here.
