H. H. Price has stated that "a Deity who intervened miraculously and suspended natural law could never be accepted by Science."1 In his reply to Professor Price, C. S. Lewis observed that you cannot discover a railway accident by studying railway timetables:
To discover a regularity is by definition not to discover its interruptions, even if they occur. You cannot discover a railway accident from studying Bradshaw [Bradshaw's Railway Guide]: only by being there when it happens or hearing about it afterwards from someone who was. . . . But surely this does not mean that a student of Bradshaw is logically forced to deny the possibility of railway accidents.2
Many people believe that it is unscientific to believe the Bible. If this is true, however, then the following people were unscientific: Isaac Newton, Johann Kepler, Robert Boyle, Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Matthew Maury, Michael Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, John Ray, and Carolus Linnaeus. All of these great scientists believed the Bible, including the miracles recorded within it. In fact, they were creationists, as were almost all scientists before the time of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was not published until 1859.
Has the Darwinians revolution changed all of that? No, there is nothing intrinsically unscientific about Sir Isaac Newton's world view, according to which all of the miracles of the Bible took place, including the creation of the universe by God ex nihilo. However, with the acceptance of the Darwinian theories, there was an acceptance of a new world view. Ernst Mayr, Agassiz Professor Zoology at Harvard University, wrote as follows in the prestigious British journal, Nature:
The Darwinian revolution was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another, as had been the scientific revolutions in the physical sciences, but rather the replacement of a world view, in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explanatory principle, but a new world view in which there was no room for supernatural forces.3
According to Mayr, the implication of Darwin's thesis was that "it is unscientific to believe in supernatural causation."4 If Mayr is correct, then the "scientific" world view, according to which there is no supernatural causation, is relatively new to science.
Science itself was built upon the foundation of a Biblical world view. The great historian of science, Stanley L. Jaki, asks in his book, Science and Creation,5 why it is that the development of science took place in Europe between 1250 and 1650 and not in any of the great civilizations of antiquity, even though many of them had long periods of relative stability, and were able to develop technology to a considerable degree. Jaki surveys the civilizations of ancient Babylon, Egypt, China, the Hindus, the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas, in an attempt to determine what kept them from developing a true science.
Scientific research requires certain basic beliefs about order and rationality. Jaki concludes that the elements needed for the birth of science came into existence through the Judaeo- Christian belief in an omnipotent God, creator and sustainer of all things. Within such a world view it becomes meaningful to attempt to understand nature, and this is the fundamental reason why science developed as it did in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, culminating in the brilliant achievements of the seventeenth century.6 Christianity's objective view of truth made possible the rise of modern science. Jaki writes:
The scientific quest found fertile soil only when this faith in a personal, rational Creator had truly permeated a whole culture, beginning with the centuries of the High Middle Ages. It was that faith which provided, in sufficient measure, confidence in the rationality of the universe, trust in progress, and appreciation of the quantitative method, all indispensable ingredients of the scientific quest. . . .The future of man rests with that judgment which holds the universe to be the handiwork of a Creator and Lawgiver. To this belief, science owes its very birth and life.7
Science will not flourish in a world view which excludes a creator and orderer of the universe. If there is no order in the universe, there can be no science, because the very purpose of science is to study that order. It the presupposition of materialism persists, we can be certain that science as a field will progressively become an unfruitful area of endeavor.
1 H. H. Price, "The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism," Phoenix Quarterly, vol. I, no. 1 (Autumn 1946), p. 25.
2 C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?" in C. S. Lewis, God In the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), p. 134.
3 Ernst Mayr, "Evolution and God," Nature, Vol. 248 (22 March 1974), p. 285.
4 Ibid.
5 Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1974).
6 Marvin L. Lubenow, "Progressive Creationism: Is It A Biblical Option?", a paper presented to the Midwestern Section of the Evangelical Theological Society, twentieth general meeting, March 21-22, 1975, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, p. 8.
7 Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), p. viii.
