The Unintended Reformation (Part 3): Church Tradition, the Reformation, Philosophical Naturalism, and the Quirky Thing About Science

In my last post, I discussed how Brad Gregory, in his book The Unintended Reformation, began to make the argument that our current secular society, complete with its assumption that “science and reason” deal with the real world and “religion and faith” deal with private feelings, is actually an outgrowth of the Reformation’s battle cry, “Sola Scriptura.”

What had happened was that when the Reformers cried, “Sola Scriptura,” they ended up throwing out over 1,000 years of Church Tradition and insight regarding, not just how to read Scripture, but how to understand the world. Therefore, what the Reformers ended up doing was relying on their own autonomous reason in order to understand Scripture. Not surprisingly, the Reformers came to different conclusions about what the Scriptures said.

Eventually (and granted, this is quite over-generalized), by the time of the Enlightenment, the prevailing view came to be that the problem wasn’t autonomous reason, but rather religious faith. After all, Catholics and Protestants (and Protestants and Protestants) were going to war with each other over disagreements about religion—so let’s just admit religion in public is the problem. Regulate it to private belief and subjective opinion, but let science and reason rule the public sphere…at least, that’s what Enlightenment thinkers said.

Yes, those Enlightenment Thinkers, and Their Rejection of the Reformation Mess
So, as Gregory points out, by the time Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Spinoza, and Hume came to their conclusions regarding religion, how miracles don’t happen, and how the Bible isn’t historically reliable, they were rejecting a mess that the Reformers in the previous century had made.

Here’s what I mean. In medieval Europe, far from being “the dark ages,” the Catholic Church was the driver of innovation, education, philosophy, and science (which was called at the time, “natural philosophy”). Monasteries revolutionized technology in order to run their farms and orchards better; the Church began the university system throughout Europe, and it was in those universities that students got a truly liberal arts education: literature, philosophy, the sciences, and of course Scripture.

This is not to imply that it was some sort of “golden age,” for there never is any such thing. But it is to say the Catholic Church, building on the centuries of Church Tradition and the examples of the early Church Fathers, held to a sacramental view of the world. They saw everything in the world as being able to be redeemed and used for the glory of God. That’s why early Christian thinkers like Origen, Augustine, and Justin Martyr interacted with Greek philosophy; that’s why Thomas Aquinas essentially “Christianized” the philosophy of Aristotle. They embraced learning and discovery, and sought to take whatever they discovered and use it to further understand God and His creation.

This mentality extended to the realm of the natural sciences. Modern science would have never come about, had it not been for the sacramental worldview medieval Christianity impressed upon the numerous monks, priests, nuns, and scholars of the time. They believed God was a creative, good, loving, and rational being, and therefore it was possible to study nature—nature, like God, was expected to make sense and be orderly. Therefore, the use of reason and empirical observation was encouraged within the medieval Catholic Church, but it was always used within the larger framework of their sacramental worldview. Or simply put, the assumption wasn’t that reason and faith were antithetical; it was they were inseparable.

The Reformers blew that worldview apart by. They rejected Church Tradition and the sacramental worldview it developed, and instead of using reason in conjunction with the faith and worldview developed in the history of the Church, they attempted to use their autonomous reason to define what that faith was, without any reference to the history of the Church, dependent solely on each and every Reformer’s personal opinion and bias. And that led to a whole lot of fighting over religious points of doctrine.

Philosophical Naturalism in Today’s World
Therefore, given the hostility and strife that the Reformation brought about, Enlightenment thinkers concluded it was best to regulate “faith” to the private sphere, and let science and reason determine truth in the public sphere. After all, science was discovering some pretty amazing stuff—let’s go with that!

The problem, though, is that for as amazing as the natural sciences are, for as much as they can figure out about the natural world, they are simply unable to provide a sufficient and well thought out worldview. Philosophical naturalism is the belief that the natural world is all there is to reality, and that therefore there is no spiritual world or God. That belief, though, is not in itself rooted in empirical observation or any of the natural sciences. Simply put, philosophical naturalism isn’t rooted in science—it is rooted in a metaphysical assumption, namely that if it can’t be empirically observed using the scientific method, then it isn’t real. It begins with the assumption, a belief that cannot be scientifically demonstrated, that the natural world is all that exists.

And once that assumption takes root, then “faith” is also assumed to be not really real, and is thus regulated to the emotions and feeling—purely subjective, with no objective reality or value. Sadly, even many Evangelical Christians have accepted this regulation of faith to pure emotion—just listen to virtually every modern Christian pop song or modern Christian worship “experience”—all geared toward evoking emotion and feeling with vapid and hollow lyrics that would make the boys of One Direction proud…but I digress.

The Quirky Thing About Science, Though
At the end of his discussion in the first chapter, Gregory comments on a few interesting points regarding science in general, and evolutionary theory in particular. In regards to evolutionary theory and the creation accounts in the Bible, Gregory says the following:

“…evolutionary biology certainly undermines any literalist reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. Patristic writers from the third through sixth century already knew not to interpret them so naively” (66). And later, “Without question, the findings of science falsify some religious truth claims, such as those of young-earth creationists. Anyone who cares about truth should reject such views as false” (70).

Gregory’s insights (as well as many others in his book) helped me see just what the problem with the young earth creationist movement is: their insistence to read the creation accounts “literally” flies in the face of the way the early Church Fathers read and interpreted them. That should not be surprising though, for the young earth creationist movement is one of the unintended consequences of the Reformation: it reads and interprets the Bible solely on what they think it should be, without any consideration of how the historical Church has taught about it. Despite their claims to be upholding “Sola Scriptura,” young earth creationists are really upholding, “Sola-Henry Morris” and “Sola-Ken Ham.”

On the other end of the spectrum, another thing Gregory points out is that a major problem with scientists who are philosophical naturalists is their inability to grasp what science cannot discover, and their foolish assumption that science can, indeed, explain everything. This mentality is what leads men like Dawkins to actually claim that since they can explain genetic mutations that allow for evolution to take place, that that somehow “proves” there is no God. Like I said before, such a jump from point A (i.e. genetic mutations) to point B (i.e. there is no God) is mystifying at best.

Such an assumption, Gregory states, also makes it impossible for people “to see how a traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim conception of God is compatible with all the findings of evolutionary biology” (67). Simply put, since all three religions conceive of God as being transcendent over creation, and not a part of it, it is completely logical to view evolution as simply the mechanism and process by which God creates and sustains His creation. It is only (a) the literalistic reading of Genesis 1-2, and (b) the assumption that God is part of the natural order that is in conflict with the findings of evolutionary theory—and both are not supported or held in the historical Christian faith and Church Tradition.

Finally, Gregory points out that, ironically, the more we discover about the natural world through science, the more mysterious and incomprehensible the natural world becomes. He points out, for example, that despite the validity of both quantum theory and the general theory of relativity, scientists have no idea how to combine the two. Gregory quotes theoretical physicist Brian Greene: “as they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,’ even though they are the ‘two foundational pillars upon which modern physics rests.” (68).

Translation? We know quantum theory is true; we know general relativity is true—but they can’t both be right…nature is more complex and mysterious than ever! Gregory then adds, “The more we learn about reality at every scale from the subatomic to the cosmological, the more unexpectedly complex and strangely bizarre does it become, with no end to this trajectory in sight” (69).

As a Christian, that excites me, not in some simplistic way that says, “Ha! God exists in the places science can’t figure out!” No—it says to me that science and scientific discovery, not only has the ability to discover amazing things about the universe, but at the very same time, it bears witness to the transcendence and mystery of God Himself.

Or to put it in Orthodox theology language: science is helping us understand God’s energies at a much more profound and deeper level, while at the same time bearing witness to the fact that God’s essence is beyond what our finite and rational minds can grasp. It is precisely this Christian teaching of the difference between God’s energies and God’s essence that makes it possible for Christians to embrace science, in full knowledge of its limitations, and to give glory to God for it.

Young earth creationists, having rejected Church Tradition, can’t do this, and therefore see modern science and evolutionary theory as of the devil, lies spoken by the serpent.

And, at the same time, many modern scientists who hold to philosophical naturalism are, as Gregory points out, woefully ignorant of Christian theology as well, and are thus “unaware of how disputable…their own philosophical assumptions [are]” (70).

Conclusion Thus Far
Yes, that’s quite a lot to chew on. Savor the flavor and think about it. Then come back next time for my analysis of Gregory’s second chapter, “Revitalizing Doctrines,” which takes a close look at the Reformation itself.