A Christian Basis for Scientific Reasoning

Roger Trigg (University of Warwick)

Abstract of a presentation to the 2001 Christians in Science Annual Meeting.

1) We have become inured to the idea of conflict between science and Christianity. At best the two keep their distance, and are judged to be 'complementary' or as dealing with different kinds of questions.

2) Yet modern science was founded on theology - and, in particular, the idea of God as law-giver, guaranteeing an ordered and regular world. This gives a focus for human reason, and as God is the source of that reason, this suggests that we may be able to find reality intelligible. This makes science possible - it has to assume the existence of an objective world, that it has an inherently rational structure, and that such a structure is, at least in part, accessible to human rationality. A favourite seventeenth century slogan in Cambridge just before the time of Newton was that reason is the 'candle of the Lord'. This gives a theological underpinning to the idea of reason, while warning us that it may only give us a flickering and partial knowledge, not the bright certainty of a world illuminated by a searchlight.

3) Two of the main competitors nowadays for a Christian view of the world are materialism and relativism. (For an attack on both, see my new book Philosophy Matters, Blackwell 2001).

4) Materialism -or 'physicalism' or 'naturalism'- takes it for granted that science can explain everything. It assumes that the world is merely what is accessible to humans, and our sense-experience (cf. logical positivism). It cannot explain the functioning of reason (appeals to evolution, itself a scientific theory, are circular.) It cannot legitimate science, but takes it at face value. According to materialism, science cannot be rationally grounded in anything.

5) Relativism also can provide no basis for science. It changes the subject from reality to varying beliefs about it. It celebrates plurality and difference. Yet relativism takes social reality -the fact of different beliefs- for granted. At one level at least it has to assume objective reality, and thus is internally inconsistent.

6) Science cannot avoid metaphysics if it is to defend itself from attack - and metaphysics leads inevitably to theology.