Escape from Reason – part 11
Modern modern science – bankruptcy of naturalism
In this section Schaeffer gives us his analysis of what he calls modern modern science. That is, a science that has lost its way by forsaking the Christian base that gave rise to its development. Is faith consistent with reason and scientific investigation? Emphatically, we answer, yes. Faith founded in the revelation of the Scriptures is essential. Otherwise you end up with only naturalism and autonomous man, both without meaning or purpose.
The early scientists believed in the uniformity of natural causes in an open system. God and man were outside the cause and effect machine of the cosmos, and therefore they both could influence the machine. To them all that exists was not one big cosmic machine that includes everything.
The shift from modern science to modern modern science was a shift from the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in an open system to the concept of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. That little phrase makes all the difference between natural science and a science that is rooted in naturalistic philosophy. In the latter view nothing is outside a total cosmic machine.
Scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continued to use the word God, but pushed God more and more to the edges of their systems. Finally, they moved to the idea of a completely closed system. That left no place for God, but equally it left no place for man. Man disappears, to be viewed as some form of determined or behavioristic machine. Everything is part of the cosmic machine, including people. Before the shift the laws of cause and effect were applied to physics, astronomy, and chemistry. Today the mechanical cause and effect perspective is applied equally to psychology and sociology.
Notice that the scientists who gave birth to the earlier great breakthroughs of science would not have accepted this concept. It arose not because of what could be demonstrated by science, but because the scientists who took this new view had accepted a different philosophic base. The findings of science, as such, did not bring them to accept this view; rather, their world-view brought them to this place. They became naturalistic or materialistic in their presuppositions.
Earlier thinkers would have rejected this totally. Leonardo da Vinci understood that if you begin rationalistically with mathematics, all you have is particulars and therefore you are left with mechanics. The modern modern scientists insist on a total unity of the downstairs and the upstairs, and the upstairs disappears. Neither God nor freedom are there any more; everything is in the machine. Thus we are left with a deterministic sea without a shore.
The result of seeking for a unity on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system is that freedom does not exist. In fact, love no longer exists; significance in the old sense of man longing for significance no longer exists. This is what we mean when we say that darwinism is vain philosophy that leads men to despair and destruction.
Darwinism makes an illegitimate claim to the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes. If chance alone operates, why should that which exists move toward a consistent increase in complexity? Most importantly, no one has yet shown how man could have been brought forth from non-man solely by time plus chance. Without the Scriptures to give man a reference to the absolute his rationalism ends in nonsense.
Darwinism is a bankrupt ideology. Men have let go of the rational in order to hold on to his naturalism. Man cannot long believe that which is nonsense. We see the ID movement as a stream coming over the dam. Soon there will be a flood. This does not mean a return to the Christian answer, but it is a step back toward recovering the rational from today’s irrationality. When the flood begins perhaps the Lord will call many to Himself in a revival of truth, and we will again see autonomous man turn away from his rebellion and submit to the truth.