In the previous fourteen chapters I have examined some of the main themes in the development of science and its relationship with the Judeo-Christian tradition over the past few millennia. I also hope I have made it clear why I see the Judeo-Christian faith, along with its Greek and Roman cognates, as fundamental to the rise of modern science, and even to the rise of atheistic, secularist, and reductive thinking. For both come from the same intellectual tradition.
And central to that tradition are two things. Firstly, the idea of an all-powerful creator who made everything from nothing, as is implied in Genesis, spelled out more fully in the Psalms and other Old Testament books, and is axiomatic to St Paul and the Gospel writers of the New Testament and to most of the church fathers of the early Christian centuries. And it was this all-powerful singular creator that made science possible, for should you call him – or even it – God, Jehovah, the Logos, or the First Cause, the implication is that this being or force generated a creation or initiated a sequence of events that was at one with itself and possessed an internal coherence. And he – or it – created us humans in his own image (as in the Judeo-Christian tradition), or (as in pagan Greek thinking) this being set the whole show rolling, and we can retrace the presence of a sovereign intellect and relate to it by the exercise of our own logical capacity.
And secondly, this Judeo-Christian tradition bequeathed a sense of linearity and direction to creation. In it, everything starts with a divine act of creation: there is an orderly narrative covering six days, including the creation of Adam and Eve. Then there is the fall, and the whole history, politics, and wars of the Jewish people, narrated in the books of the Old Testament. And pivotal to the whole narrative is the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, his return to establish the New Jerusalem, the ascent of the blessed into heaven, and the end of the world of time as we know it.
No matter whether one chooses to believe or reject this historical and prophetic narrative, it nonetheless brings a radical new concept into human thought: a historical timeline. Very different, in its exact chronology of events, to the cycles, circularities, ebbings and flowings of Egyptian, Babylonian, Far Eastern, and even Greek mythological and heroic (as opposed to philosophical) cultures. And I would argue that it was this very precise relationship between monotheism and a beginning, a sequence of events, and an ending which made a scientific view of the world possible, giving as it does a potential for hard-edged objectivity.
Several millennia of well-documented history have told us time and again that we humans are transcendence-seeking, worshipping beings. Humans are instinctive seekers after cause, purpose, and order; and when for ideological reasons we deny this fact in the spiritual dimension, we simply reclothe our spiritual aspirations in a material, secular garb. That science has produced wonders, each unimaginable to the previous generation, goes without saying; yet I believe we lead ourselves astray when we presume that the cause or inner nature of these wonders can only be explained in materialist philosophical terms. For – once again – while science answers the “how” questions, it is not equipped to handle the “why” questions, any more than the technology of music-making in the symphony orchestra can tell us what the feelings of elation or despair evoked by that technology really are in absolute terms. Nor, as far as I know, is there anything on the scientific horizon at present indicating that science ever will realistically answer the persistent “why” questions. They are about fundamentally different things. And we should be aware that the New Atheists and modern-day secularists deal in very dubious coin when they try to convince us that they can answer the “big questions” about meaning and absolutes: the traditional role of religion.
We should be aware, too, of the vast amount of myth-spinning performed by modern-day “evangelical” atheists. Of how they distort incidents from the historical record to suit their own ideological agendas, while inventing whole hierarchies of myths about what education or science will achieve in the future. While critically minded Christians realize that different strands of their faith are to be understood on different levels – the Bible, for example, contains straight historical narrative, prophecy, parable, metaphor, and miracle – many secularists view their own position in what looks like stark monochrome, in which religion equals false and backward-looking, and science equals true and progressive. Which, to put it mildly, is pure myth-making.
Secular mythology, therefore, has become a dragon that, in the last fifty to a hundred years in particular, has been allowed to spew out its poisonous breath upon many aspects of Christian culture, largely unchecked. But it is now time to face the dragon on its own ground. And to slay it!