CHESTERTON HOUSE:
A CENTER FOR CHRISTIAN STUDIES
"daring to discuss the important and the amusing"
NEWSLETTER #33
SUMMER 2009
I recently met with a student who decided to stop going to church because he had read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and found it compelling. "Science can get along just fine without religion," he said. Although Dawkins' views already have been ably critiqued many times over (see, most recently, David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies), working with a new batch of students each year requires revisiting familiar themes.
The idea that science is somehow inherently atheistic is very popular--and very wrong. Such a view entails a deep irony, for it was religion--Judaism and Christianity in particular--that taught us the universe is orderly and can be approached mechanistically.
Science requires "pre-scientific" assumptions--that the world is good and worth knowing, orderly and consistent. We should not take this for granted. Against a backdrop of beliefs that the world was evil, unknowable, or animated by capricious spirits, the Hebrew Scriptures asserted that the world was created and ordered by a rational God, and repeatedly asserted that "it was good." Simply put, the presuppositions of science and the presuppositions of (western) religion are one and the same. Although now justified by empirical results, these presuppositions originally were justified by faith.
Note too that in contrast to the the world according to Aristotle, where knowledge was gained by reasoning deductively from final causes, early modern scientists believed in observation and experimentation precisely because they believed in "contingent order"--i.e, that the behavior of the created world depended on the will of a sovereign Creator. They posited no tension between purpose and mechanism because they understood the scope of science to be limited to the latter. Like the proverbial teapot that boils both because energy in the form of heat has been added and because someone has a taste for tea, mechanism and purpose are everywhere complementary.
That modern science emerged out of the Christian milieu of the West is thus no coincidence. As Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Boyle all understood, the medieval metaphysics of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were a bridge, not a barrier, between classical learning and modern science. Moreover, the Protestant Reformation's emphasis on literal rather than allegorical hermeneutics further facilitated scientific ways of thinking (see, e.g., "Squaring God's Books").
Science, it turns out, contrary to popularizers such as Dawkins and the students who believe him, is very indebted to religion. Or, to put finer point on it, we can thank God for science.
Karl E. Johnson
Director
KARL JOHNSON TO SPEAK IN SEATTLE AREA
Chesterton House Director Karl Johnson will be in Seattle in early August to give a couple of talks, including a public lecture on the Christian Study Center movement. The lecture, entitled "Faith in the Halls of Learning: Finding, Sustaining, and Communicating Faith in a Secular University Community" will take place Sunday, August 9th, 7:00pm at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Issaquah, just east of Seattle. For more information and directions, click here. Cornell alumni and Chesterton House supporters are getting together for dinner prior to the lecture; rsvp to karl@chestertonhouse.org. Please spread the word to alumni and friends in the Seattle area!
RESOURCE ROOM RELOCATION
For almost ten years, the Chesterton House resource room has been located at the Crossroads Life Center in Collegetown. The location has served us well in many respects, but it now appears that the facility is likely to be sold. We anticipate needing to relocate the resource room in the very near future, and we invite you to pray that we would be able to find a suitable location that would allow us to continue to make these books and other resources easily accessible to students.
UPCOMING SPEAKERS
Summer is a time of planning and preparing, and we are pleased to announce that several speakers are now confirmed for the coming academic year. During the fall semester, we will host Dr. Lou Markos, a CS Lewis scholar from Houston Baptist University; Denis and Margie Haack, Directors of Ransom Fellowship in Minnesota; Dick Keyes, Director of L'Abri Fellowship in Massachusetts; Lisa Sharon Harper, Director of New York Faith and Justice; and Dr. Shirley Mullen, President of Houghton College. See website for dates and details. During the spring semester we will host Dr. Skip Ryan, Chancellor of Redeemer Seminary, Dr. Eleonore Stump, a philosopher at St. Louis University; and Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist of religion at Rice University. The dates and details of these spring semester events will be posted soon.
FINANCIAL UPDATE
By the grace of God, we have continued to be able to pay our bills during these difficult and uncertain times, though we did run a considerable deficit for the fiscal year ending March 31st. We need to generate approximately $30,000 more revenue this year than last year in order to break even. Please join with us in prayer and—if you are able—with any level of financial support, so that the work of the Chesterton House ministry may go forward for the glory of God. As always, please see our three easy ways to give.
"Scripture is like the sun, while reason is like the moon."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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