“Science merely reports the facts and innocently develops theories to explain phenomena. Theology, on the other hand, is only a matter of interpretation. You can read the Bible how you want and interpret it according to your presuppositions. Science can get to the “facts” but theology only gets to someone’s opinion.” A stereotypical statement perhaps, and not one many actual scientists make, but a common enough accusation made in conversations about theology’s relationship with the natural sciences. Let me first admit that human beings are interpreters, they seek to find the meaning of what they observe. Furthermore, they should seek a meaning that is the correct meaning. Some have given…
-
-
Postmodern Integration
Christian education, despite growing in the United States, continues to struggle to find its place among the largely secular educational environment. Lanney Mayer suggests that Western education provides an inhospitable home for theology under the “hegemony of naturalistic disciplines.” Religious education has either moved to the margins or evolved to suit empirical studies. Mayer suggests that the now widely disseminated postmodern critique of modern methods of knowing–that the mind does not mirror reality, but always brings to bear presuppositions of language, culture and politics–can help faith-learning integration. According to Mayer, between the two extremes–modernist objectivism and postmodern constructivism–lies the role of faith. Faith, for Mayer, is the human way of…
-
Science and Religion: Dembski’s Proposal
Ian Barbour has died. He was 90. Barbour’s life was spent attempting to solve one important problem – how science and religion relate to one another. He wrote: If science and religion were totally independent, the possibility of conflict would be avoided, but the possibility of constructive dialogue and mutual enrichment would also be ruled out. We do not experience life as neatly divided into separate compartments; we experience it in wholeness and interconnectedness before we develop particular disciplines to study different aspects of it. There are also biblical grounds for the conviction that God is Lord of our total lives and of nature, rather than of a separate ‘religious’…
-
Faith Learning Integration: Christian Traditions
In my last post I summarized various philosophies of education. I promised to say something about Christian education. The main question for Christian education is: How do Christians integrate faith and learning? This question is about the integral relationships between the content of one’s faith and human knowledge found in particular disciplines. There are various schools of thought roughly related to distinctive doctrines held by various denominations. Richard Hughes explains how each relates faith to learning: The Reformed Model stresses the sovereignty of God. Since God is sovereign over every part of human experience God is related to every part of human experience by virtue of his authority over it.…
-
Why Philosophy Makes a Difference at School
When considering what school is best for one’s children (or even when one does not have a choice and is merely analyzing the school that one’s children are going to attend) one should not only ask what is being taught, but why it is being taught. In other words, one should have a rough idea of the philosophy of a school. A very helpful book is Philosophy and Education by George Knight from which I draw on for a summary of the various schools of thought. Traditional educational theories set the stage for what follows. There are three main theories stressing ideas, the world and human nature. Idealism stresses ideas,…
-
Van Til’s Philosophy of Education
For Van Til, two doctrines are vital for Christian education – creation and providence. God makes all the facts and arranges them according to his own will. No fact is outside the control of God or originates in anyone other than God. Experiences of human beings all originate in the plan of God. For Van Til, all facts are related to God, they are his facts. Being related to God, facts are automatically revealing of God. A fact that is determined by God reveals God to human beings who themselves are created by God. In scripture God provides the right interpretation of nature, experience and all the other facts humankind…
-
Secularism: How We Got Here.
Secularism is marked by the fragility of belief in transcendence. Its central impulse is the naturalization of all things, the leveling out of reality into a single plane. How secularism arose is a tricky question, but Charles Taylor attempts to explain how we got here. To do so he describes four parallel worlds. He admits they are ideal worlds and, in reality, relate to one another in significant ways. But to describe them well, he suggests, they must be described separately. World #1: An Epistemological World This picture is of a world in which knowledge begins with individuals who build up knowledge of the world in comprehensive theories. Facts about…
-
Christian Relativism Anyone?
After an accumulation of facts, meticulously researched in the most objective way possible, a researcher has the task of presenting the facts in a coherent way. The question is: can he do this without imposing his own political ideology, psychological leanings or scientific paradigm? Historian, Mark Noll, suggests that there are three attitudes available in response to the question. The scientistic attitude requires a scrupulous attention to method. If we get the method right the rest will follow. This attitude is held by positivist scientists and requires the adoption of a verificationist methodology modeled on an “empirical conception of the physical sciences.” The ideological attitude suggests that “historical writing exists…