SCIENCE EXISTS BECAUSE OF ORIGINAL SIN.
You know Christianity and science are incompatible. Everybody knows this. It’s one of three things we all come out of the womb knowing, like how coffee should only be drunk black, and your bed is cosier when it rains.
Most likely, the reason that you know this (although it’s even more likely that you don’t know this is the reason you know this) is because of a movement called New Atheism. It began around 2006, its popular proponents are scary men like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. These men published scary books: The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, and The End of Faith.
There’s really nothing new about New Atheism. Its various underlying beliefs — such as naturalism, and the ridiculous nature of Christianity — had been gaining force over the prior century. (This explains why it all has become so entrenched in the social imagination of the West.) Even if you’ve never heard of these men or their books, one of their principle theses is familiar: that science and Christianity are in a war more hopeless than the marriage of a sunbeam and a snowman.
You can be a serious Christian, or you can believe science — but you better not try to do both.
What is a young Christian — already pressured from many angles to abandon his or her faith — to do?
I recently finished a few books that were purely theological, and so craved a different type of literature. Examining my Unreads, Stephen Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis stuck out. A science book — that would be refreshing. Not even a chapter into this marvellous work, Meyer teased out an observation I’ve never considered. Note: if a writer strikes you with something you’ve never considered, that is a gift. His observation concerned the origins of modern science.
Of all the great civilizations which came before us — the Egyptians with their pyramids, the Chinese with their gunpowder, the Romans with their aqueducts — it was only in western Europe between about 1500 and 1750 that a method for investigating nature was developed that catapulted Western civilization into a degree of ingenuity and prosperity that to this day shows no sign of slowing. Why? It is due to what scholar Herbert Butterfield calls “a transposition in the mind of the scientist himself.” This transposition came from Christianity.
Here we go, I thought. The New Atheists are wrong — not only are Christianity and science compatible, the way of Christ gave birth to what we know as science.
Being interested in apologetics, I was familiar with this idea. But of the aspects of this “transposition” Meyer outlines, I only knew one out of three. I want to highlight one of these aspects because it’s particularly ironic in relation to how New Atheists speak of Christianity.
New Atheists not only enjoy showing the apparent incompatibility of Christianity and science, but they love ripping apart Christian doctrines as ludicrous or immoral. A favourite target is original sin.
You might think of original sin as being the sin of Adam and Even when they ate the fruit in Eden. This isn’t quite right. Original sin is that corruption in human nature which flows out of Adam’s first sin. As Psalm 51:5 says, “In sin did my mother conceive me.” It’s called “original” sin because all of our sins find their origin in this fundamental twistedness. But what does this have to do with science?
Prior to Christianity, the Greeks pioneered the study of the natural world — but they held such a high view of the human mind that they often neglected actually studying the world, and simply relied on their logical inferences. (This led to several wrong conclusions, including the idea that planets necessarily have a circular orbit — we now know none of them do.) In the late Middle Ages, but especially after the Protestant Reformation recaptured the Bible’s emphasis on the fallen state of mankind, this shifted. If original sin has infected even the mind of man, then you must study nature intently — and you must study it again and again, checking every conclusion against every possible falsification. The new principle basically became this: you are more likely to be wrong than right.
(You might think this leads into a pessimism which says we can know nothing at all for certain — but the great theological authority in the area of original sin, Augustine, also taught much about the image of God, which Christians believe makes us still capable of gaining true insight. We simply can’t trust our first intuition.)
The scientific method is marked primarily by the techniques that emerged from this theological insight: systematic investigation, relentlessly verifying and falsifying every bit of information gathered.
What I enjoyed so much about reading this part of Meyer’s book is that the very doctrine New Atheists love to ridicule is the same principle which gave rise to modern science. If it weren’t for original sin, Richard Dawkins wouldn’t have the scientific insights he loves to twist into evidence against the existence of God.
I need to be less susceptible to critics — to take their ideas seriously, but not to believe them just because they’re popular or ignore them because they sound convincing. Investigate them ruthlessly, and come out on the other side with greater knowledge than either blind faith or scared ignorance can provide.
Who knows — you might discover that an “abhorrent” idea like original sin is the reason we’re able to investigate a cure for cancer.
The quotes and data used in this post are from Meyer, Stephen. Return of the God Hypothesis. HarperOne, 2021, pp. 3-29.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHASE HALL is a student at OBC, doing his Bachelor's in Biblical Studies, and a Ministry Intern at Central Community Church. He is the host of Revolution Podcast.
