Why Am I Writing on these Subjects?
Science as it has been understood for the last 400+ years has been portrayed as being in continual tension with a Biblical worldview. It is easy for man to think that he can have dominion/mastery over nature by means of theories which utilize mathematical formulas. It is true that many of the early modern theologian-philosopher-scientists held a high view God and the Bible, and saw no contradiction between their faith and the experiments they were doing and the theories they were creating. In fact, many of these early philosopher-scientists were investigating nature (esp. the motion of the planets and local motion) because of their religious faith; they were pursuing clarity on how God created the world. Many believed they were rediscovering knowledge that Adam had lost as a result of the Fall.
To us, in hindsight, it certainly appears that God has created the world with regularities (due to God’s faithfulness) that can be described by mathematics, but how are we to understand, and teach, this from a Biblical perspective?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to understand that everyone has a worldview, and that a person’s worldview is always determined by certain initial and unprovable presuppositions/assumptions. I hold that the presuppositions of a Christian’s worldview must begin with God as He has revealed Himself in His Word (the Bible & Christ). These blogs will always have this as the underlying premise, even if it is not explicitly stated in a given blog.
It is important also to have clear definitions of terms, so I will spend some time in these blogs defining terms.
It is also important to understand the key scientists and their discoveries, and to try to understand what they were doing, and especially why they were trying to do it. This will necessarily mean covering a lot more of the history (and philosophy, and theology) of science than is typically covered in standard secular and Christian science textbooks.
Finally, this approach has direct implications on how to teach science (& math) from a Biblical perspective. I plan on covering these implications in the blogs.
A word on my motivations: After I came faith in Christ (in my late 20’s), I began to rethink what I was taught in high school and college, and wondered what a Biblical perspective was on science. I began to do some research and reading and thinking on these topics. For instance, what are we to think of the miracles of the Bible? Are we to understand miracles as violations of natural law (the answer is no :))?
As we had children over the next several years (culminating in 6 children), I wondered how I would go about teaching “science” from a distinctly Christian perspective. We ended up sending our children to a Christian school, but my desire to understand and teach, and perhaps even provide materials for Christian homeschooling parents never went away. It’s been over 30 years since I began this journey, and I’m still frequently coming across new and relevant materials that modify and adjust my perspective on Biblical worldview of this topic. My goal is to provide an overview of the history of science from a Christian perspective, and show how Christian presuppositions were the driving force in the creation of modern science, and point homeschooling parents to additional resources that they may use to teach their children (and themselves) how to think Biblically about science. I do think that much of how science is taught today goes too deep too fast. It is important for our children to wrestle with the physical phenomena first before going into the associated current scientific concepts. Much of the my critique will be at a presuppositional level - for instance, when discussing Gen 1 (creation in 6 days) vs theistic evolution vs. naturalistic evolution.
