Bernard Ramm: Epilogue
Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University
of Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issue
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What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutability
is one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,
I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determine
whether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.
Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all you
have to do is commit to a criterion for testing.
It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-minded
enough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
Excerpting from Bernard Ramm's The Christian View of Science and Scripture
is like eating salted peanuts: impossible to stop. It's a scandal that this work
is out of print, ignored by people who put out reams of trash. Significant
statements in Ramm's text are
highlighted in yellow. My own comments are in blue
Epilogue
The Christian View of Science and Scripture (347-351)
It has been the intention of the preceding pages to establish two
different sets of convictions which we may conveniently describe as (i) denial
and (ii) affirmation. We have tried to show in denial that certain beliefs
attributed to evangelicals are not believed by all evangelicals and are not to
be considered part of evangelical faith. Therefore, no man of science may
withhold faith by reason of any of the following allegations:
- It is not true
that all evangelicals believe that the world was created 4004 B.C., but to the
contrary, evangelicals in large numbers believe that the universe and the earth
are as old as the reliable evidences of science say they are. Evangelicals may
(and many do) believe that the universe is four billion years old.
- It is not
true that all evangelicals believe that man appeared 4004 B.C. Many evangelicals
will push the date of man's origin back to the time of the earliest civilization
(say, 10,000 B.C.), whereas others are willing to admit that man is hundreds of
thousands of years old. A scientist may accept such an antiquity for man in good
Christian conscience.
- It is not true that evangelicals believe that the earth
is flat or that the earth is the center of the solar system. Neither of these is
the Biblical position, so evangelicals may believe in a spherical earth and in
the Copernican version of the solar system.
- It is not true that all
evangelicals believe that evolution is contrary to the Faith. Most
Fundamentalists and evangelicals are opposed to evolution to be sure, but we
have given evidence to show that men whose orthodoxy is unimpeachable have
accepted some form of theistic evolution or at least were tolerant toward
evolution theistically conceived. We indicated that within the strict orthodoxy
of the Roman Catholic Church with its huge dogmatic edifice evolution is not
condemned.
- It is not true that evangelicals believe that the last word on
specific details of physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, biology, and
psychology is to be found in the Bible. Evangelicals believe that the great
metaphysical backdrop and historical setting is given in the Bible for the
sciences. But by so asserting this evangelicalism does not seek to stifle all
reason, all research, nor does it seek to dogmatize beyond the facts nor to have
theologians dictating to scientists.
Besides these denials we have tried to make
the following important affirmations:
- It is impossible to separate
Christianity from history and Nature. The hope of some to relegate religion to
the world of pure religious experience, and science to the world of physical
phenomena may suit some religious systems but not Christianity. The historical
element alone in the Bible is too dominant to permit this treatment, as is the
repeated reference to creation. Christianity appears in a universe created by
God, and in historical situations under the providence of God. Creation and
history are indispensable to a loyal evangelical theology. Although to some this
appears as a weakness in Christianity in reality it is part of the strength of
Christianity, for it shows that Christianity is deeply woven in the UNIVERSAL
SCHEME OF THINGS.
- The Bible does not teach final scientific theory, but
teaches final theological truth from the culture-perspective of the time and
place in which the writers of the Bible wrote. We do not expect modern science
in its empirical details in the Bible. In that the Bible had to be meaningful to
the people who received its various parts in the course of its writing, the
Bible had to be in the culture-terms of the time. The theological and eternal
truths of the Bible are in and through the human and the cultural. Evangelical
Christianity reprimands the religious liberal, who seeing the cultural
accommodation so large, failed to see the divine revelation in and through the
cultural.
- The Biblical statements about Nature are non-postulational or
phenomenal; and its statements are free from the grotesque and the mythological.
There is no deism, no animism, no pantheism, and no dualism in the Bible. It is
free from the absurd views about Nature prevalent among the Greeks and Romans.
Scripture is committed to no theory of the solar system nor the structure of
matter, etc., and it is at the same time free from the polytheistic,
mythological, and grotesque. Therefore, although the revelation in Scripture is
in terms of the culture of the people who wrote and received it, divine
inspiration spared the writers from adopting the grotesque and mythological, and
in turn presented the divine inspired concepts and categories for the
understanding of God, man, and God's relationship to Nature and man.
- We have
tried to show that no man of science has a proper reason for not becoming a
Christian on the grounds of his science. We have tried to show the inoffensive
character of the Biblical statements about Nature; the tangency of so much of
Biblical truth to fact; and the credibility of the miraculous. We have not tried
to force a man to Christ by these chapters, but if a man is a Christian, a
scientist cannot question on scientific grounds the respectability of that man's
faith.
- Christianity is a religion and not a science. In science the principle
of inter-subjectivity or objectivity prevails. What is true for one scientist
must be true for all. But this is not true in religion, for if the pure in heart
see God, then the impure do not, and what is true for the pure is not true for
the impure. God draws near to those who draw near to him, and He is a rewarder
of them who diligently seek him. He is not known to those who do not draw close
to him nor to those who refuse to seek him. What is true for some is
emphatically not true for all.
Therefore, if a scientist comes to God he must
come the same way as any person comes to God. He must make the appropriate
spiritual motions. He must repent; he must confess his sin to God; he must
believe in Jesus Christ with all his heart. In the Gospels a very wealthy young
man refused to make the motions of faith. He was intrigued by Jesus Christ but
when the issue became sharply one of Christ or his possessions, the tug of his
possessions was the stronger, and sorrowfully he left Jesus Christ. He wanted
religion without the motions of faith. It is not a rash presumption to believe
that many scientists and educated men wish for peace of mind, relief from a
guilty conscience, hope for the life to come, and the blessedness of faith in
God. But they find themselves caught between their science and their religious
hopes, unable to move. Being possessed of great intellectual riches which manage
to come first in their sentiments, they leave Jesus Christ.
Just as Jesus
refused to pursue the rich young man and make other terms, so today we cannot
lessen nor cheapen nor alter the terms of the gospel for our men of science.
There is no other Saviour than Jesus Christ, and there is no other means of
having him than by the motions of repentance and faith. Our word to the men of
science of this generation is the word of one of the great men of science of a
former generation, the biologist St. George Mivart:
Assuming, for argument's sake, the truth of Christianity, it evidently
has not been the intention of its author to make the evidence for it so
plain that its rejection would be the mark of intellectual incapacity.
Conviction is not forced upon men in the way that the knowledge that the
government of England is constitutional, or that Paris is the capital of
France, is forced upon all who choose to inquire into those subjects. The
Christian system is one which puts the strain, as it were, on every
faculty of man's nature and the intellect is not exempted from taking part
in the probationary trial. A moral element enters into the acceptance of
that system. [On the Genesis of Species (1871), pp.
286-87. Italics are his.]
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