Monday, June 20, 2011

On Secularism - Part 3

If secularism charges Christianity with dogmatism it's guilty of the same thing. The difference is what it's dogmatic about. What's ironic is that the rise of secularism owes many of its foundations to what Christianity helped to establish.

I'm not going to do an apologetic for the way in which Christianity helped give rise to the modern sciences. Even the most skeptical historians cannot help but notice its direct influence. But what the sciences offered turned it into an absolute rule, which helped shape the secularism of today. Ancient Greek rationality consisted only of pure speculative logic, but the rise of the sciences sought instead to probe the world. Essentially this shifted thinking towards observation and empiricism.

Gravity is gravity. 10 times out of 10, if you let go of a piece of chalk, it will fall to the ground. Basically this shows an obvious logical pattern. You can then study it and show that there's a certain rate at which it falls (Newton's law of gravity). The more you discover that the world works in an orderly fashion, like a well tuned mechanism, the more you begin to realize that what looked mysterious before can now be explained. So then this begs the question, can all things be explained entirely naturalistically?

And this becomes the crux of Secularist thinking. It believes that even if we can't explain things yet, it must have a perfectly plausible scientific explanation. There are no abnormalities as a result of some sort of spiritual, metaphysical other reality outside of the material. To be fair there's nothing irrational about this. If something strange happens it's always the logical thing to do to look for a plausible explanation other than, well, the boogeyman or something.

Part of it boils down to what makes good science. Generally speaking good science is about testable or falsify-able theories. Using gravity, as an example, you first have the law of gravity. Physical laws are derived from empirical observation which is precisely how Newton had established the law of gravity. (It's useful for practical purposes, but with the development of Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics it was rendered "moot".) But this is different from the "theory of gravity" which attempts to explain the "how" instead of the "what." If a model is put forth to theorize how gravity works it's good science if the theory can be falsified by further study.

But the miraculous, by definition, is not testable (i.e. falsifiable) and therefore does not represent good science. This isn't a problem normally, but if you insist on a "scientific worldview" which secularism already assumes, then there is no place for miracles. They are denied outright. This isn't the same as skepticism, but a dogmatic refusal to give it a chance even if the evidence clearly supports it. And this is just one place where the secularist worldview falls short.

A miracle is an event recorded in history and cannot be bound to the rigours of scientific study. It's simply impossible. It represents an entirely different discipline. You can use science to help understand historical events, but there's a certain point where the best evidence is the accounts of the witnesses. Science can help us understand the technology of World War II, but it can not explain the rise and fall of the Nazis. The same is true of the records of the Gospels. They can be cross-examined, studied, and at the end of the day, if the records show to the best explanation that Jesus did, in fact, rise from the dead, then that is what we are left with.

And this isn't to say that the sciences represent the discipline that, by nature, is antithetical to the Christian faith. Christianity uses history and science to bolster its case. You can even consider the testimonies of those Christian historians, philosophers, and scientists that have all deepened in their faith as a result of their study. In fact, some had even become Christians through their respective disciplines. Secularists will accuse Christians for being irrational for their faith, as though faith gives us blinders to logic. But this is simply not true. In fact, I would argue it's the exact opposite. Secularism's blatant refusal to see where the evidence leads and instead deny absolutely that some things cannot be explained in terms of pure materialist naturalism shows it has its own blinders. Secularism attempts to use science to discredit Christianity and explain it away, when it does precisely the opposite. Indeed, Secularism is not the real arbiter of truth that it wants to be.

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