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Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder of the Cornwall Alliance, joins us to discuss the ten essential assumptions that make the practice of science possible. From there, we’ll dive into how contemporary science has drifted from these foundational assumptions, and discuss the good and bad of today’s technology-forward approach to scientific research.

Whether you’re scientifically curious or trying to brush up on scientific methods before teaching your students, this episode will provide great food for thought!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello and welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today. And for the third time, we have Dr. Calvin Beiser with us as our guest. Welcome, Calvin.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Marlin, it's great to be with you again. Thank you so much.

Marlin Detweiler:
We are really really excited, when you first mentioned this to me, my ears perked up because I wanted to hear more. The topic that we're going to talk about is how classical Christian education can rescue science. That begs all kinds of questions for a guy like me. And so, but the first one maybe is a little bit pedantic here. Why does science need rescuing?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Well, that's a great question. Basically, because it's running lickety split away from its roots in classical Christian worldview. It's losing its foundation. You know, the historian Rodney Stark, citing 12 different scholarly studies on the history and philosophy of science, wrote in his book, The Victory of Reason, real science arose only once in Europe, and philosopher Nancy Piercey and biochemist Charles Thaxton, in their wonderful book The Soul of Science, wrote the type of thinking known today as scientific, with its emphasis upon experiment and mathematical formulation that arose in one culture, Western Europe and in no other.

And I add something chronological to that, not just geographic, but also chronological. It arose in medieval Europe. No other time, no other place. Why is that? It's because medieval Europe was thoroughly informed at the level of formal education by a biblical worldview that said that a rational God designed an orderly universe and brought it into being by His word and created human beings in His image to understand and then subdue and rule that orderly world for His glory.

And as His servants take away the rational God, the orderly design of the world, and man in God's image to understand and to rule that world. And you have no basis for science, period.

Marlin Detweiler:
Unpack what has been the alternative. I was benefited as I read some of the things you gave me to read for this by understanding what the alternative to that is.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Well, the two chief alternatives are one, a worldview of materialism, matter and energy and motion is all that exists. And there you have no mind. You have no purpose. You have no design whatsoever. What that means is that there is no such thing as reasoning. And if there's no such thing as reasoning, then you can't have science.

C.S. Lewis in his wonderful book Miracles, the chapter titled The Problem of Naturalism, says, in essence, and I'm paraphrasing here, the problem with naturalism is that naturalism is the argument that there is no such thing as argument, it's self-refuting. So that's the problem with materialism. The other alternative, the opposite direction is going to be either pantheism or panentheism or spiritism, animism– in all of those we lose the creator-creature distinction. In pantheism, God is the universe. In panentheism, God is to the universe as the soul is to the body. In animism or spiritism, there are lots of little gods, spirits that inhabit rocks and trees and rivers and mountains and so on. And in all of these, as I said, you lose the creator-creature distinction as you do.

By the way, also in materialism, there's no creator. There's just the matter and energy and motion. But having lost that creator-creature distinction, what the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans chapter one becomes applicable. Men then begin to worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator and professing themselves to be wise, they become fools because God gives them over to a reprobate mind.

So in panentheism, pantheism, and animism or spiritism, you have a sort of a mystical view of nature. Nature becomes your god. And therefore, instead of grasping the biblical instruction in Genesis 1:28 to subdue and rule nature, you see yourself as the servant of nature, as a slave to nature. And if that's so, then you have no incentive to figure out how to control nature.

My friend Vishal Mangalwadi, he is an Indian Christian philosopher, author of the magnificent book The Book That Made Your World, all about how the Bible shaped Western civilization. Vishal says, look, if you have a Hindu worldview and your river floods frequently, destroying your homes and flooding your town, you try to pacify the god of the river by making sacrifices.

If you are a Christian and you understand that God made this world to be subdued and ruled by mankind, and the river floods, you build dams or levees to pacify not the god of the river, but the river itself. Those are two totally different understandings of how we relate to nature. And the sad thing is that a great deal of environmentalism today wants us to recycle-ize nature and return to being its slaves instead of doing what God instructs us to do in Genesis 1:28 to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over everything in it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Now, this is a bit of a softball for me and for our audience. And you, you've made the point that you think classical Christian education is poised to rescue science. Why? What's your understanding of classical education? Such that you would say that while a traditional Christian education, as we define the terms typically today, has not rescued science.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Classical Christian education better reflects the education that was dominant under the auspices of the church. And I don't mean a specific denomination. And of course, in fact, in the Middle Ages in Europe, there was basically just one denomination, though there were some small offshoots. But the church, the universities that were founded by various churches and so on, that classical education focused greatly on unpacking what Scripture taught us about the nature of the world around us, as well as about the nature of God and the nature of man.

It provided us with a truly Christian worldview. And it drew on some of the insights of earlier classical culture, especially Greek and Roman, but it also recognized that we needed to go beyond those things, for example, because in Greek and Roman thought. So take, for instance, Aristotelian thought, all reasoning was to be deductive.

And what that meant was that you started out with certain assumptions about the world around you, and then you deduced from those assumptions, theories as to how things worked in it, but without a commitment to careful observation of what was really happening. You couldn't test those predictions very well. So we needed to add inductive reasoning to deductive reasoning.

And that required that we understand the world out there as a reasonably ordered place where things were going to be predictable because our reasoning God made it that way. Yeah. So that's a piece of the puzzle there. But there's more to it, really. We could really go into quite a number of different ways that the classical learning contributed to the development of science.

And there I would draw, for instance. Peercy and Thaxton, in their book The Soul of Science, offer ten assumptions without which science cannot develop. And all of these are owed to the biblical worldview learning of the medieval church and its influence on European culture.

Marlin Detweiler:
The roots of classical ed.

I've been involved in the three development, I guess a good term for of classical Christian education. Now for more than 30 years. And it's a tough thing to try and understand that which I wasn't taught and to then try and introduce it to a generation so that they don't have to suffer the failures in education that I did.

As it relates to science,do you have some thoughts on how people who are like me might help that process?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
It is a lot of work. You know, I would refer again to Peercy and Thaxton's book The Soul of Science. Yeah, I think that is just a tremendous help. You might also look to the book Christianity. Let's see. Christianity and the Nature of Science, I believe is the title, by the Christian philosopher.

I've forgotten it. I actually, I was the copy editor for that book for the Butcher Baker Book House back in the 1980s. But it's an excellent book. Yeah. You know, we need to grasp what are the assumptions without which science cannot develop and cannot survive. Okay. So let me, if I can, let me just try to run very, very quickly through the list.

As they come to us from Peercy and Thaxton and their book The Soul of Science, first of all, nature is real. It's not an illusion as in Hinduism. If you don't think it's real, you have no real reason to try to study it. Second, nature is good. It's of great value. It's not evil as in Gnosticism. Gnosticism taught that an evil God created the material world and matter is in and of itself evil, so you don't want to get mixed up with it.

Third, nature is merely a creature. It's not a god. Which means you're not a pantheist. You're not a panentheist. You're not even an animist. But nature as merely a creature can therefore be subject to human rule. If you think of nature as your god, you can't rule it. All you can do is to try to buy it off with sacrifices.

Fourth, in nature, events occur in a reliable, predictable fashion because God is trustworthy and dependable and therefore the creation that He made must likewise be dependable. But if you are a total materialist, everything happened by chance anyway. You can't do and think that it's going to be predictable. And if you are a pantheist or a panentheist or a spiritist, an animist.

Well, there were gods and goddesses, you know, inhabiting things and causing them to do all sorts of things that you wouldn't have expected. You have to think that there's going to be predictability and expectation in how nature works.

Fifth, you have to believe in an orderly universe, and that understanding came to be summed up in the concept of natural law. People in pagan cultures see nature as alive and moved by mysterious forces. And because of that, they're not likely to develop the conviction that all natural occurrences are lawful and intelligible. That conviction that nature is intelligible comes only from biblical principles. Even, you know, we can even say that to the materialists, you know, the natural scientists who just reject God, reject everything spiritual.

We can come back with Lewis's point from his book Miracles. The problem with naturalism is that it's the argument that there is no such thing as argument. Atoms and molecules don't sit down and have a cup of tea and talk about where they're going after they collide. They just exchange energy and move, right?

Sixth, the conviction. Not only that nature is lawful, but also that those laws can be stated in precise mathematical formulas stems from the biblical teaching that in its essential structure, the universe is precisely what God wants it to be. The historian R.G. Collingwood said, the possibility—I'm quoting here—the possibility of an applied mathematics is an expression in terms of natural science of the Christian belief that nature is the creation of an omnipotent God.

If you don't buy that, then you can't do science that depends on mathematical representation of the world around you.

Number seven, man is a rational, comprehending observer of nature because man is created in the image of God. The sinologist Joseph Needham, in his book, the grand title Titration—right. So the Chinese never developed modern science, even though, by the way, they developed some interesting technologies early on, long before Europeans did.

They never developed modern science because they had no belief either in an intelligible order in nature or in the human ability to decode an order, if it existed.

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Number eight, nature comes with surprises, not because it is inherently irrational, but because it is the work of a free and personal God who does with it as He pleases.

Marlin Detweiler:
With a level of complexity that we can't fully grasp.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Right, right. So because of that, all the deductions we make about nature—deduction being Aristotelian thinking, which is fine within its limits—must be tested by observation and experiment. Christianity regarded natural law not as capital-F “Forms” inherent within nature, but as divine commands imposed on nature from an outside source—God Himself. But God’s freedom in dealing with nature requires not only deductive inference but also specific observation for man to understand it.

That understanding of natural law comes with a price that atheists aren’t eager to pay: the possibility that God, who imposed the laws of nature from outside, can also intervene in them. In other words, miracles are possible.

So that's crucial to scientific understanding.

Then number nine from Pearcey and Thaxton: the world is intelligible because it reflects God's rationality.

And finally, number ten: the transition from science to technology required certain presuppositions about the world. It required beliefs that sanctioned active, interpretive intervention in natural processes to advance human purposes. To “fill and subdue the earth,” as God instructs us, requires a commitment to do so—and it requires technology to make that possible.

I mentioned earlier the contrast between Hindus responding to a flooding river versus Christians. That’s really crucial. This is why science, as a systematic, ongoing process of hypothesis, observation, and testing, arose only once in history and in one place: medieval Europe, which bought into the biblical worldview.

And by the way, I think there’s one Bible verse that really captures the root of science—what it’s all about: 1 Thessalonians 5:21—“Test all things; hold fast what is good.” That’s exactly what the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman described as the key to science.

You can find a short video online—just search for “Richard Feynman key to science.” He says, when we want to understand something in nature, first we guess. Then, based on that guess, we make predictions about what we should observe in the real world—whether out in nature or in the lab. That’s the real world.

If our observations contradict our predictions, then our hypothesis—our guess—is wrong. And it doesn’t matter how smart we are, how beautiful the guess is, or how many people agree with it. If the observations contradict the predictions, the guess is wrong. This movement away from that principle is, I believe, the slippery slope into irrationality we’re seeing in many sciences today—especially climate science—where people confuse the output of computer models with the real world. And once that confusion sets in, they lose the ability to test and correct their models by comparing predictions with actual observations.

Marlin Detweiler:
Unpack that a bit more. I noted this in preparation: a computer model’s output is not data. It has to be tested by empirical observation. Help us understand where climate science has gone off track.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Absolutely. There’s a fascinating, lengthy article in the December 2005 issue of Social Studies of Science, that’s a refereed journal in the sociology of science. It’s by Myanna Lawsen and titled “Seductive Simulations.” I first read it about 15 years ago, and it floored me. Myanna Lawsen was committed to post-normal science—something we might discuss if there’s time—and she was committed at that time to the notion of catastrophic manmade global warming.

She spent months studying the computer-modeled climate scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Her core question during all that time was simple, though she asked it in many ways: do these scientists consciously remember as they do their work that their computer models—and the models’ outputs—are not the real world?

So she’d ask, say, “What happens if atmospheric CO₂ increases by X percent?” And the model would respond, “Well, the ocean does this, the lower atmosphere does that, and so on.” And she’d say, “You said the ocean. Do you mean the real ocean out there? Or the one in your computer model?” And suddenly they’d get very nervous responses as the scientists would realize they had blurred the line. “I said the ocean when I meant what my computer model was doing.”

She concluded her article basically saying, these scientists can’t tell the difference. They don’t remember that the models are not the real world.

Now, I have a hypothesis about why this happens. I’ve never had time to fully study it, but prior to the 1970s, most scientists did their modeling by hand—on paper. So the models were clearly abstract, and their real work was done in nature or in the lab.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
But from the late 1970s onward, computer time got cheaper and cheaper, so it became faster and less expensive to run simulations than to conduct real-world experiments. Younger scientists who’ve grown up doing this computer stuff, it reminds me of young people so absorbed in their video games or Dungeons & Dragons, or whatever— they have a hard time telling the difference between that and the real world. And in fact, there are in-depth psychological studies on that. There are some real psychological problems that come from it.

So now, we have this incapacity of many climate scientists, where they literally cannot distinguish between their models and reality. And so, when they say, “If we add X amount of CO₂, this much warming will occur,” they treat that output as if it were actual data. It’s not. It’s hypothesis.

And the reality is that the vast majority of all the climate models that are being run for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various other organizations, they all assume as one assumption that clouds reform, respond to a little change in temperature at the surface by magnifying that change.

In other words, that clouds are a positive feedback. If you get a little warming at the surface, clouds will change so as to increase that warming. You get some cooling. They'll change so as to increase that cooling. Right? But Doctor Roy Spencer, who's a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and is also a board member and senior fellow of the Cornwall Alliance, Roy, in meditating on Genesis, telling us that everything God made was very good, inferred from that that it wasn't likely that Earth's climate system would be dominated by positive feedbacks.

And so he then thought, what if the clouds actually are negative feedbacks? But he had to make some way of testing that. So he used NASA's climate observation satellites. And he and his partner, John Christy, are largely in charge of that for NASA and have won awards from NASA for their work to use those satellites to actually test.

And what he discovered was that clouds are not a positive feedback. They're a negative feedback. They limit the warming from added CO2 in the atmosphere. That's the opposite of what the models say. And the shocking thing is that almost all the models still treat clouds as positive instead of negative feedbacks, because the modelers are more committed to their theory than they are to the real world observation.

Marlin Detweiler:
Knowing the truth. You used a term that is not a term that I know to be common knowledge as a way of defining kind of where we are. You called it post-normal science. What is that?

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Yeah, right. Well, post normal science, a very simple way to put it would be to say that post normal science is postmodernism applied to the sciences. You know, postmodernism is basically a literary theory, and it finds meaning not in the text as intended by the author, but in the readers of the text. And then it moves into personal lived experience as how you interpret a text and so on.

You can sort of think of post normal science as doing something similar to that. You know, normal science performs in the way that I described when I referred to Richard Feynman and his key to science. We have a guess as to how something in the world works. We make predictions based on that guess of what we should see.

Then we compare observations with predictions. And if the observations contradict the predictions, the guess is wrong. And that's basic scientific method. Post normal science instead works in a very different way. It takes the persons doing it and involves them and their values and their commitments and their agendas. And then it sees the scientific endeavor as basically trying to serve those agendas.

Science becomes a matter of power plays and of justifying various agendas rather than of personally non-committed investigation of what's actually out there in the real world.

Marlin Detweiler:
Very helpful. Well, I couldn't agree more. The classical Christian education is ideally poised to be part of the solution for rescuing science from some of the silliness that we see in lots of different areas. And I hope and I expect that what you're doing will help motivate the classical educators to help bring that about.

Thank you very much for your work. Thank you for all of your time in these three episodes. This has been wonderful. And it has kept my head spinning the entire time. Thanks.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Well, thank you. I might add, by the way, that we have a booklet at Cornwall Alliance in our online store called What Can Theology Say to Science About Climate Change? And it goes through much of what we've discussed and other things as well. And for listeners to your podcast, when they make a donation of any size to the Cornwall Alliance and mention that they heard of this on your program, Veritas Vox.

We would be glad to send them a free copy of that. All they have to do is go to cornwallalliance.org/give, make a donation of any size and ask for What Can Theology Say to Science About Climate Change? And we'll be happy to send them a free copy.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you. Thank you very much. And folks, thank you for joining us on another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Dr. Beisner, this has been great.

Dr. Calvin Beisner:
Thank you very much, Marlin. It has been a lot of fun for us.