Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." John 14:21
In the 14th chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus makes two very interesting claims about himself. He says he is the Truth (John 14:6). And he says he will show himself to those who love him (John 14:21). Jesus, the Word who was in the beginning with God, who was God, who became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1), is the source of absolute Truth. The Creator of the universe, the only one who knows absolute Truth, promises to reveal Truth to those who really want it – to those who love the Creator of the universe. Who are those that love Him? They are those who love God’s Word and want to live the way God intended the creature created in His image to live.
In the early years of the development of modern science, those who made the greatest contributions did love the Creator. Men like Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler used their God-given intellect to study God’s creation, and as they discovered bits and pieces of truth they gave God the glory, just as King David had done 2700 years earlier when he wrote “the heavens declare the glory of God…” But as science continued its apparently unstoppable race through time, scientists began to loose their love for the Creator and his Word. The scientific method sought to strip the mind of all cultural biases and presuppositions, religious or otherwise, and focus on the “pure” data of sense experience. The method proved to be so successful that scientists began to believe that all of nature would eventually be explained by natural laws. When that happened they would have come to know absolute truth. They also believed they could get there by their own effort – no need for a purposeful Creator to show himself to them.
But our postmodern era has shown how preposterous this Enlightenment ideal of perfect human objectivity is. Stephen J. Gould’s critical analysis of the scientific community’s acceptance of the work of certain biological determinists in the 19th and early 20th century provides an example of just how difficult it is, even for scientists, to keep biases out of science. The biological determinists, living in a period of colonialism, attempted to prove the intellectual superiority of one race over another by measuring brain size and IQ’s. At first the scientific community accepted their work. The entire scientific community, after all, was part of that same racist culture. It was only when the larger culture began to change that the biases built into the data accumulated by these racist scientists began to come to light, and one more scientific theory bit the dust. However, Gould continued to have faith that astute scientists can strive to recognize the inevitable influences of political and cultural biases on their work, and can somehow overcome such biases. His theory of NOMA, meaning that science and religion are Non-Overlapping Magisteria, depends on scientists being able to keep religion and values out of their work. My next post, which will deal with the limitations of scientific truth, will show that scientists cannot keep religion and values out of their work. Scientists believe what they want to believe, and scientific theories come and go. But the Word of our Lord stands forever.
