Science Is Not Neutral

The other day I posted my review of Alister McGrath’s The Passionate Intellect.  One thing I didn’t mention in this review was this paragraph:

When properly and legitimately applied, the scientific method is religiously neutral — neither supportive nor critical of religious beliefs.  This means that scientific atheists have to spin science in certain ways in order to maintain their core dogma that science disproves religion.  And since the scientific method clearly does not entail atheism, those who wish to use science in defense of atheism are obliged to smuggle in a series of non-empirical metaphysical ideas to their accounts of science and hope that nobody notices this intellectual sleight of hand.  (111)

McGrath goes on to describe how Dawkins “represents genes as active agents, in control of their own destiny and ours” (112).  Much of what Dawkins writes about this is metaphysical speculation.

I think the key qualification in McGrath’s assertion is “properly and legitimately applied.”  What does that mean?  McGrath doesn’t say.  Nor does he go into the effects of sin on the human mind in applying and interpreting the scientific method.

I thought about this further as I was reading the November issue of The Atlantic yesterday on my flight back from BC.  There’s an article by David H. Freedman, “Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science.”  It’s about Dr. John Ioannidis and his studies regarding medical research.  Medical research, it turns out, is rather fickle.  And some of that can be traced back to human failings in the scientific process.  Freedman writes:

We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously.  “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis.  “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

This is somewhat different than what McGrath was speaking about.  The smuggling in of metaphysical assumptions is different than manipulating the scientific process, but the two are not unconnected.  In fact, metaphysical presuppositions can lead one to consciously or unconsciously manipulate data at various stages of the process — from the way a question is posed through to the way the answers are interpreted.

Ioannidis published a paper with a detailed mathematical proof demonstrating that “researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time.”  So much for scientific objectivity or neutrality.  Freedman describes this further:

Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right.  His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.  The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process — in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish — to suppress opposing views.

Now all of that is in reference to what we call “operational science,” regarding scientific observations and research in a world that can be tested and observed in the here and now.  Imagine then what happens in the realm of origins science, or historical science.  If scientists can often be wrong in what they can observe now, how much more so when they theorize about what happened eons ago?  The effects of sin on the human mind and on science should never be discounted or minimized.  Even the best science is done by sinners.  There is only one absolutely reliable source of public, objective truth.  Dr. John Byl has more to say about all this.

Varia

A few interesting items from around the blogosphere:

Tim Keller from Redeemer PCA in New York City has written some helpful books.  For instance, I really appreciated Prodigal God.  Unfortunately, Keller does hold some erroneous views.  For one thing, he seems to either hold to or at least be open to theistic evolution.  There’s a helpful response to him on this over here.  Keller is also less than consistently Reformed in his apologetical methodology.  His The Reason for God is very popular, but needs to be read with discernment.  OPC pastor Brett McNeill wrote a helpful review some time ago for New Horizons.  TRG is not a book that I would recommend if you’re trying to understand how to go about apologetics in a biblically faithful manner.

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There’s a new festschrift just out for Dr. Bob Godfrey of Westminster Seminary California, Always Reformed.  I had the privilege of reading a pre-publication copy this past summer.  I can tell you that it’s worthwhile.  I especially enjoyed Hart’s essay on Machen’s “warrior children,” Muller’s essay on seventeenth-century language about God, and Venema’s essay on the (brief) history of the United Reformed Churches.  You can order a copy here.

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I recently uploaded my review of James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom.  You can find it over to the right under “Articles” or follow this link to get it direct.

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There’s a helpful post here by Dr. John Byl on Science, Neutrality and the Antithesis.  He’s responding to Reformed Academic contributor Dr. Jitse Vandermeer’s critique of Dr. Cornelis Van Dam.

Reformed Academic Under Fire

Friends and colleagues continue to take on the latitudinarian blog Reformed Academic.  John Byl opens up on Jitse Vandermeer’s notion that human suffering and death existed for thousands of years before Adam’s fall.  Jim Witteveen dismantles Freda Oosterhoff’s insistence that young-earth creationism is dangerous for our missionary and evangelistic efforts.  If I can add something to what my colleague writes, I find Oosterhoff’s statement ridiculous, to put it mildly.  When I was a missionary, the people among whom I was working found the Darwinist mythology just as incredible, and even laughable, as I did.  The notion that people are descended from monkeys was just another crazy white-man’s idea.  A vast number of the world’s population would share that sentiment.  Many non-Christians (especially in the two-thirds world) still find a six day creation ex nihilo more credible than Darwinian evolution.   As Jim writes, it’s the cross that they really stumble over.  What’s dangerous is not young-earth creationism, but latitudinarianism.  Follow that route and before long we may not have a gospel for our missionaries to preach.

Deja Vu All Over Again

A couple of days ago, I mentioned this post by John Byl connecting some of the stuff at Reformed Academic with earlier missteps in the history of biblical interpretation.  As I’ve been reading volume 2 of Muller’s Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, I’ve seen confirmation of this.  Let me give one example.

Francis Turretin is well-known as an orthodox Reformed theologian of the seventeenth century.  His Institutes of Elenctic Theology are still in print and widely-respected.  Francis had a son named Jean-Alphonse.  Jean-Alphonse Turretin aimed to develop “an irenic theology, more attuned to the demands of reason but also more in touch with the needs of piety than that of the seventeenth century orthodox” (140).  J-A Turretin was part of a movement that eventually resulted in near-total theological capitulation to the Enlightenment ethos.  Muller goes on:

Despite the echo of his father’s strict orthodoxy, the tendency of the argument and the underlying sense of the conformity of Scripture and Christian doctrine to the light of reason both draw profoundly on the more rationalistic, apologetic, but nonetheless genuinely pious theology of Tronchin.  The more rationalistic side of the younger Turretin’s approach to the text is seen, in addition, in his hermeneutics and in his theory of accommodation — which is a rather different view of accommodation than that offered by Calvin or by the orthodox writers of the seventeenth century, and occupies what might be characterized as a position, strongly influenced by Cartesian philosophy and halfway toward the view proposed later in the eighteenth century by Semler.  The younger Turretin, for example, did not hold the first eleven chapters of Genesis to be a precise history or a scientific account: he was able to argue a valid theological and religious meaning to the stories of creation, fall, the flood and the Tower of Babel without feeling constrained to debate either matters of historical detail or of scientific cosmology. He saw no need to reconcile the narrative of Genesis with a post-Copernican view of the world.  And, very much like Spinoza, Turretin could argue that Scripture was intended to lead people toward faith and obedience rather than to rational or scientific knowledge of the world order. (141 — emphasis added)

The great philosopher Yogi Bera was right:  it’s deja vu all over again.  There’s a lot of recycling that goes on in the history of theology.

 

Copernicus and Reformed Theologians

John Byl has some helpful interaction here with some of the latitudinarian neo-Calvinist thinking at Reformed Academic.  A couple of paragraphs that caught my attention:

Then, as now, the central issue concerned the nature of biblical authority and interpretation. The Cartesians argued that the Bible was not a source of knowledge in natural philosophy but that the Bible was accommodated to fallible human opinion. The orthodox Reformed theologians, on the other hand, insisted on a fully authoritative, inerrant Bible that must be interpreted in a literal, rather than allegorical, manner.

Upon reading the detailed account by Rienck Vermij The Calvinist Copernicans: The reception of the new astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575-1750 [2002, 452pp], one is struck by the remarkable similarity between the view of Scripture of the Cartesian theologians and that of the ReformedAcademic in its current attack on the historicity of Genesis 1-11.