Our world belongs to God. He called it into place.
Upholds, renews, controls, with sovereign love and grace.
Through all our earth's long history of God's created family,
all things were done by his decree.
Our world belongs to God. He tells us in his Word
of his great covenant love that many have ignored.
Yet his great anger did not flame;
the promised righteous Savior came, who paid our debt and cleared our name.
Our world belongs to God. We know that one bright day
each challenge to his rule will surely pass away.
We wait the ending of all wrong.
Then we will join the triumph song to God, to whom all things belong.
From the Hymn, Our World Belongs to God,
Text, Marie J. Post
Psalter Hymnal, Copyright CRC Publications 1988
Worldview Beliefs and Science at Calvin College
How do our Christian commitments influence the day to day work in the labs and in the classrooms, in scholarly work we do and in way we teach? What should science look like in a Christian college, one that takes seriously the assertion that "Our World Belongs to God?"
I can best begin to address that question by describing science at Calvin, knowing that it is different at other Christian colleges and that it will look differently at your colleges. But I think these points give us a place to start the conversation, and give you a glimpse into what we are doing in Grand Rapids, with the hope that this can give you a vision of what this might look like in your institutions.
In my own teaching of the history of psychology, I have found it useful to lead students through a basic understanding of what Robert MacLeod has called the "persistent questions" of psychology. You may recognize these questions as basic areas of western philosophy:
Ontology - What is the nature of the world?
Epistemology - How do we come to know anything about this world?
And Ethics - How, then, should we live?
These questions have always formed a useful set of pegs on which to hang the worldview assertions of various scientists and theories. So I am going to use them now as well, asking "what are the central assertions, the ontological, epistemological, and ethical assertions, and what are their implications for scientific practice at Calvin College?"
There are three things to note about what follows. First, I cannot speak for the entire science faculty at Calvin. I am not a lab scientist at Calvin, but I am involved in faculty development, and have the opportunity to read and talk with many science faculty. Second, every statement here is loaded - every statement has its questioners, every statement is the subject of expanded discussion in the philosophy of science. Third, none of these statements can be proved by science itself , these are metaphysical positions, but they do have implications for how scientists do their work.
Separating the ontological from the epistemological, and then from the ethical is a very artificial exercise. What you believe about the nature of creation has enormous, defining implications for what you think about the nature of knowledge, and then for how you live in relation to that knowledge. In fact, you will see that I constantly merge the ontological - what exists, with the epistemological - how do we know what exists. Then I will try to keep the ethical for the end.
So let's begin with these two sets of beliefs: the ontological and the epistemological.
Metaphysical/ Epistemological Beliefs
1. Our scientists believe that we are exploring God's creation, a created and real world.
There are actually two statements here - first, that the world we explore is the creative work of God, and second, that we are discovering a real world.
God is the source of all that we study, all that we can know, and of course, God is the source of us, as the knowers and explorers of this world. God is the ontological priority. Not humans, not human constructions, not our limited knowledge, and so on. And God created a real world. God is not the same as the created world but interacts with the created world.
God created the world, and behold, it was very good. God created this world for us to know, love, explore, care for, and use to bring about God's purposes. This statement is basic and key to all that follows. When God pronounces the creation "good" he declares his love for his creation. When we study this creation, we are attempting to love what God loves. So right away, the relationship between knower and what is known is not a distant relationship or an objective relationship, but a relationship of love and care.
Furthermore, the creation has a reality that is not dependent on our knowledge of it. It is a real world. Most of our scientists operate with an ontological perspective described by the philosophers as "critical realism" - that is - that scientific theories give referential knowledge of the world, but are always incomplete models, subject to change. That is, we believe, in the words of Sir John Polkinghorne:
Scientists are map makers of the physical world. No map tells us all that could be said about a particular terrain, but it can faithfully represent the structure present on a certain scale. In the sense of an increasing verisimilitude, of ever better approximations to the truth of the matter, science offers us a tightening grasp of physical reality (2000)
Here is how a chemist at Calvin, Arie Leegwater, describes it:
Our responses and formulations are more or less accurate, more or less correct, and do in fact, change in time. This approach relativizes out work in the sciences without causing us to fall prey to historical relativism; that is, it accounts for the provisional character of science without succumbing to a viewpoint which denies all structural features or holds that any discussion of structural matters can at best be heuristic or pragmatically useful.
The word critical in the phrase "critical realism" signals that the models and maps that we make are imperfect. We recognize that our knowledge of the world is imperfect, that our models of the world change from era to era, sometimes very dramatically. But there is something behind these models and maps. When we don't understand how these models might conflict with one anther, we press forward with the hope that further discovery will produce, not just a new paradigm, but a better understanding of an even deeper reality. When scientists announce the results of the Human Genome Project, we don't just call this a very interesting construction they have just developed, we assume that the genetic information tells us something true about the way our bodies work. We also acknowledge that someday, genes might not be the most useful level of analysis, and our descendents may look back and smile at our scientific naivet when we used the category of genes to talk about the biological processes of inheritance and development.
This belief in a knowable reality is very important to scientists, because it implies that there is something outside of the scientist's own work, or a culture's own story of science, which can function as a corrective to what we do. It is possible to get it wrong, and be corrected by further experience.
Social scientists at Calvin are mostly critical realists as well, believing that we study, not just the physical stuff, but social institutions that God created and intended - a real human nature, a real family structure, real government. Much of our conversation and scholarship is about trying to discover God's intent for these social realities. Because social sciences are studies of humans by humans, we know that the maps we make are even more limited, even more subject to distortion and interpretation. And yet, we believe that here too, there is a created reality that is on the other side of our models, and that anchors our models. Human nature is not a construction, although the way we think about human nature varies from culture to culture.
Human beings are a part of this created world. They are physical beings, made in the image of God but from the dust of the earth. Human beings participate in the physical economy of the earth and their lives are both limited and blessed by their participation in this physical economy. Our joys and our sorrows, our greatest thoughts, out deepest fears - all these are physical events affected by the natural processes of the created world. And our physical natures were created good. Our physical stuff, our embodied natures were created good.
There are a variety of metaphysical positions held by Christian scientists about the relationships between body and soul. But it has always seemed to me, in the context of our ontological assumptions that few of us take seriously enough how physical we are. My own discipline is psychology. So many of our students come to class with an initial naive dualism that they misread into their theology. In this dualism, the flesh is bad - that is, anything physical about them. But the spirit is good. So the quest that they think they should have, seemingly at odds with contemporary culture, is to overcome the flesh. They are troubled to hear and understand how embodied they are, or to understand how our physical nature is the source of good as well as weakness. Here it is especially difficult to help students understand the goodness of creation and the importance of taking stewardship of creation seriously.
And yet, we insist, that the whole of who we are can never be captured through physical investigation alone, because through the dust of the earth God has created human beings who share God's nature, who are somehow more than their physical stuff.
This insistence that the physical alone cannot describe us and cannot exhaust God's reality is the commitment we make against philosophical naturalism or reductionism. We cannot be reduced to the physical and cannot be known only through the methods of science. The methods of science are limited in what they can say about human persons, our place in this world and our institutions. But we are remarkably physical, and we should be awed and delighted, rather than threatened, by recent discoveries that show just how physical we are. We approach our physical selves as well with God's declaration: and behold, it was very good.
2. The coherence between the patterns in the world (design) and our cognitive abilities, are not random, but were intended by God as a revelation of the divine.
John Calvin, in his discussions of God's revelation, makes the same point:
..wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe where in you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the bountiful force of its brightness (p. 52 )
Indeed, men who have either quaffed or even tasted the liberal arts penetrate with their mind far more deeply into the secrets of the divine wisdom. (p. 53, 1536/1986.)
We believe that the world is designed by God. God intended the world to be for our delight and His glory. When we investigate the nature of the world, we are investigating patterns that are not present by chance. Rather, we are seeing something about God in these patterns, something that God gives us as a part of what we call "general revelation."
It is, of course, this idea that we can see God's design in nature - that nature proves design - that has taken such a serious hit in the century and a half since Darwin. When I lead my students through the history of psychology we look at the metaphysical language about human nature and the world before and after Darwin. It was as much the disappearance of design language as the questioned ancestry of human beings, that Christians found so disturbing to a Christian world view.
But we know that refusing to see God's design in the universe is a metaphysical or a religious commitment, not a scientific one. Seeing design, and then attributing it to God, is also a religious, not a scientific, commitment. The intricacy of the human brain, the vast numbers of galaxies, the hand, the oak tree, all are a part of the majesty and wonder of God's intent for creation.
But here is a crucial point for most scientists at Calvin - God's design is evident in the whole of nature, not just in parts of it that we haven't yet explained with other theories. Belief in design is a foundational commitment, not a result of seeing irreducible complexities. Polkinghorne, in a recent lecture at Calvin, said it this way:
The god of the gaps, appealed to as the explanation of last resort in relation to physical or biological process, was just a bad theological mistake. The Creator does not lurk in the murky and un-understood parts of the universe, for the true God is the God of the whole cosmic show, the One who holds in being all that is. The reliable laws of nature, to which science appeals as the ground of its explanation, are pale reflections of the faithfulness of the Creator. The god of the gaps, on the other hand, was a kind of Cheshire cat deity, perpetually fading away with the advance of knowledge, always over the next intellectual horizon (2001).
In other words, we don't look for design just in areas where other explanations do not work - Design is evident in the whole - in the patterns and regularities, perhaps in the lack of pattern and the chaotic, not just in the places where our current theories have difficulty.
Nature is knowable but our knowledge is not perfect. Our cognitive equipment seems to be very well suited to finding the patterns in the universe. Our senses, our memories, our ability to analyze pattern - these are given to us because God wants us to know the world. Here is Abraham Kuyper:
Hence, everything has come forth from God's thinking, from God's consciousness, from God's word. Now the question is whether we human beings are equipped with an ability to rethink this thinking of God. ..On this basis the Reformed churches confess that the original man in his nature - i.e. as the result of his place in creation, not by supernatural grace - received holiness, justice, and wisdom. This bespeaks an ability imparted to many to unwrap the thoughts of God that lie embodied in creationan ability not added to but based in human nature itself
(p.444, 1904/1999.)
Further, we believe that this coherence between the design in creation and our cognitive processes is there, not because we are imposing our categories on the world, not because we happened to evolve with the equipment best suited to survival, but because God wants us to be capable of exploring the world.
But there are limits. Our knowledge is flawed because we are finite - creature, not creator, not able to see and understand the whole.
Our knowledge is also flawed because we are fallen. We are good at deluding our selves. It may be that our own self-interest blinds us from seeing relationships that should be obvious. Many of the models of reality that we create contribute to the destruction rather than the resrtoration of the world. Because social sciences are humans studying humanity, these sciences are especially vulnerable to the distorting effects of the fall. Here we own a debt to postmodernism, I think, which shows us how having power over something distorts what we see. Why did it take us so long to see the destructive nature of slavery and other forms of economic exploitation? Why were our eyes blind to our destructive impact on the environment? We can easily be tempted to confuse our preferences with creation norms, as we have done for so long in the arena of gender relationships. Here the hermeneutics of suspicion helps us and reveals that we need to do our work on norms in community, making sure that we hear all voices so that we don't mistake our own voice with the word of God.
3. God's providence is evident in the natural process that we study.
A third basic assumption is that God's creative work is continual and underlies what we think of and talk about as natural processes. God generally uses natural processes - those we know about and those we still do not know - to accomplish his work in the world.
This belief implies that our scientists are not in the hunt for miracles - and we don't need evidence of miracle to claim that God is at work. If God is constantly upholding creation, then we are studying God's work when we study chemical processes, the movement of light through space, social interactions, and so on.
Christian scientists who use the same methods as their secular counterparts have sometimes been accused of being methodological naturalists, or of not letting their worldview assumptions permeate deeply enough into the actual doing of science. But Calvin scientists would disagree with the label. Loren Haarsma, a physicist at Calvin, writes:
When a Christian employs the scientific method to investigate nature , a biblical understanding of God and nature motivates her belief that she is using the right method. She is not acting "as if God doesn't exist." She is acting like there is a god but the God of the Bible, who made an orderly world and who still governs it in an orderly fashion.
Throughout the year, in the labs at Calvin, scientists and students study ion transfer, brain signals, gravitational lenses, chemical reactions, new plants, waterborne pathogens, and so on. Any one of these project could be happening as well at the University of Michigan. And in fact, we hope that even the most secular of researchers at the University of Michigan are interested in our projects. We think they will be, because our scientists and their scientists agree about the fundamentals of the scientific method, even though they might not agree about the foundation of the method or the ultimate meaning of the findings.
But a commitment to a bigger picture of the world also means being open to alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationships or patterns that are seen in the world. Here are two examples from our scientists:
David Van Baak is a physicist at Calvin. He has recently traveled within the United States and Europe as the Calvin lecturer, challenging his scientific audiences to consider new ways of thinking about physical causation in the world. He leads his audience through several sets of observed physical relationships, and then demonstrates that the data can be predicted equally well using both a highly mechanistic, Newtonian theory of efficient causation, or a teleological theory of causation:
By extension, we see that the availability of a wholly mechanistic description of a process, even one that is complete and correct in every single one of its predictions, does not exclude the possibility that the very same process is simultaneously, and with equal empirical accuracy, also described by an alternative theory that makes purposeful or goal-seeking behavior a central part of its description. The predictive success of Newtonian mechanics certainly provided a reason for a philosophical preference for mindless materialism as a world view, but the identical physical evidence can not be seen as equally convincing support for a view of the world partaking deeply of teleology. the playing field of worldviews is much more nearly level than is typically assumed by persons who have imbibed some sort of scientific materialism from their cultural upbringing. (2002).
Glenn Weaver, a psychologist at Calvin, challenges his psychological colleagues to think new thoughts about psychological causation:
Recently, several Christian research psychologists have proposed an overall theory for understanding psychological explanations, a metatheory, which may provide a common framework for resolving some of these disagreementsThese theorists suggest that the map for coordinating laws and rules in psychological explanation may be found in an understanding of values. Modernist approaches to psychology (e.g. evolutionary psychologies) typically explain values such as justice and mercy to be products of universal laws (selection of behavior patterns that contribute to reproductive success). Post-modernist, social constructionist psychologies interpret values as the product of social rules; they are more abstract summaries of the rules we construct to guide our human interactions in local social contexts. Hodges maintains that both of these approaches "have the relation between laws, rules and values inverted; values take priority over laws and rules rather than the reverse: Values are the intentions of the world as a self-organizing system and operate at levels even higher than societies and more fundamental than biology. Values are the boundary conditions and dynamics of existence; ontologically, they are the fundamentals of the universe.. What this position suggests must sound quite radical to modernist and post-modernist psychologists, but it should sound familiar to those who hold Christian beliefs about human identity. It proposes that human psychological functioning (including the aspect of motivation) finally is for the purpose of actualizing morally-related meanings: truth, justice, love, diligence, courage, etc. (2002).
Both physicist and psychologist make the point - frequently observed in science - that theories are underdetermined by the "facts." It is our worldviews that help us choose which theories to try. Is it a coincidence that Christian psychologists and Christian physicists are once again exploring teleological explanations?
4. Our scientists acknowledge that science is not the only way to know about the world, about human nature, and about meaning.
Most of the scientists at Calvin use the word "limited" in their descriptions of the kind of knowledge that science provides. Science, for example, does not provide the proof for any of the basic assertions that I have been describing.
We also know about God and God's work in our lives through other means: through special revelation, through intuition, through community movements and the work of the Spirit. Because our scientists are "critical realists" they know that science is an act of interpretation as well as discovery. We know that we don't always get it right, and that this interpretive act is always done with an eye on other sources of knowledge. There are no easy answers here, but I will have more to say about this later in the paper.
What are the implications of these assertions for the work of scientists?
1. These commitments give scientists powerful reasons to be scientists - they provide the grounding for the vocation of scientist within God's kingdom.
Our scientists teach and believe that the vocation of a scientist is a holy calling. To be an explorer in the world that God created is a wonderful and exciting task. Scientists are unpacking gifts that God gave us in the world. What we discover through science - along with what we discover through poetry and art and history and so ondeepens our understanding of the world and thus deepens our understanding of God. We need scientists to help us do theology. We need scientists to demonstrate our love for what God loves.
If we understand that creation was created good, but that it has participated in the effects of the fall, then scientists have the opportunity to participate in the ministry of reconciliation. David Warners, a biologist at Calvin, describes his vocation this way:
My work in the area of restoration ecology probably provides the most direct example of how my Reformed faith informs my scholarship. Understanding salvation to be a cosmic action on God's part, and working from the premise that Kingdom work is about joining God in the renewal and rejuvenation of a fallen creation, trying to understand how to best restore degraded habitats has direct religious implications. Helping the creation to more closely resemble its pre-fallen beauty and thereby allowing it to more rightly give praise to God is both borne out of and permeated with my personal commitment to loving and serving the Creator(2001).
2. We can bring both boldness and humility to our work. We in the Reformed tradition live with many intellectual and emotional tensions, but this is one of my favorite tensions: the particular mix of courage and humility that characterizes the scholarly task. We can be bold, because we believe, bottom line, that all truth is God's truth. We don't have to be afraid of discovery. We don't have to be afraid of being right - or of being wrong. Our work is in service not only to God, but to an actual reality that will be found out, with or without any individual.
Our world view is sturdy, unshakable. I remember hearing about the findings from the Hubble telescope - that there were another couple of billion galaxies in the world. We recently had Brian Greene give a public lecture in physics as a part of our winter lecture series. He talked about new theories in physics - the multiple dimensions of the physical universe - beyond the fourth or the fifth dimension, beyond what we can intuitively know. These kinds of findings can challenge our faith. How is it that we are so arrogant or foolish to think that of the billions of galaxies, God knows and cares about this one? Or that of multiple dimensions, God is revealed in the ones we know and in the ones not yet known to us?
There are areas which trouble us, long lists of discoveries which might confuse us, e.g. the limited moral agency in certain kinds of illnesses, the neurological substrates of specific religious experiences, the discovery of a very old hominid skull, the vastness of the universe, the manufacture of life forms, the strangeness of subatomic physics. But we can move forward, carefully, to see what God has in store for us to learn. We can move forward with the confidence that Gods' two sources of revelation are not ultimately in conflict, no matter what it might look like at the time.
Are there areas of discovery where Christians should not go? This is a complicated question, with even more complex answers. If we are worried only about possible threats to our worldview, the answer is "no." Everything has been given to us to understand, even when that understanding may appear to challenge our world. But of course, knowledge is never divorced from ethics, and so we will think abut this question again when I return to our ethical assumptions.
I said we approach our task with boldness - We also approach our task as scientists with humility - certain that we see "only through a glass darkly" ready to be corrected by the world, by the scientific community, by our students, by the results in the test tube or in the computer. We know enough about the history of science, and we know enough about own fallen and finite natures to know that we - or in fact the journals Nature or Science - are not the last word on anything.
3. Our scientists and our science students work twice as hard as their counterparts at secular schools.
Our students need the craft recognized by the secular world. We want them, and their science, to be taken seriously. We write and get grants from major secular funding sources, we want our students to enter excellent graduate schools and assume positions of leadership in major scientific and public policy organizations. So our faculty and our students do cutting edge research. But our faculty and students also need continuing work in philosophy, history, and religion. Our professors spend considerable class time in discussions of wide ranging issues in the philosophy of science, ethical applications, and worldview questions.
At reappointment and tenure all faculty are asked to produce written statements on the ways that their faith influences their teaching and their scholarship. Departmental seminars, all college conversations, occasional conferences, visiting lectures, all provide background material that help faculty do this integration work. Thus faculty are better prepared to lead students through an understanding of Christian perspectives on the many topics studied in science classrooms, and students are better prepared to confront the skepticism and hostility that they may encounter outside of Calvin because of their faith.
4. Sometimes our religious convictions give us lenses to see relationships that others may not see.
There is a flurry of social scientific work on the role of faith in human development and social institutions. Much of this work is done by people who do not consider themselves religious. But it is curious that there was very little done on the role of religion until approximately ten years ago. It took religious psychologists and sociologists to call attention to areas that had been simply missed by scholars with a materialist take on the world. The recent work on prayer and illness, forgiveness, faith and family development, and spiritual transformation is in this vein.
For example, at Calvin several of our psychologists are doing work on the role of faith and human thriving. Psychologist Marjorie Gunnoe is working on faith and adolescent development, and Glen Weaver is investigating the power of spiritual motivation in addiction recovery and spiritual identity in coping with Alzheimer's disease. The relationships that they discover are available to any psychologist, working out of any worldview - but it took a Christian worldview for them to even look for the data in the first place.
There is, within the area of epistemology, recent work demonstrating that an approach of care, love or respect for what you are studying gives you a different set of eyes, - leads to a different view of knowledge. Several psychologists and biologists are studying disease processes; their respect for persons affected by the diseases leads to a richer understanding of the role of the disease in the life of persons. Our plant biologists love the land; their loving attention to detail leads them to new discoveries. Our social scientists take human meaning making seriously, and recognize the need to listen closely to many voices.
5. Holding a worldview different from the secular world makes us sensitive to the times when other scientists confuse their observations and their worldviews.
There are many secular scientists who are not afraid to make worldview pronouncements. The easiest scientists to pick on here are Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, both respected scientists who made religious, or more precisely, anti-religious statements based on their work. Sagan, who famously repeated "That is all there is and ever will be" is making both an ontological and epistemological statement, and we must help our students learn that these are metaphysical commitments, not scientific findings.
Most of our students will go on to secular graduate programs, where some faculty and fellow students will challenge their religious commitments. If they have not learned to understand what science cannot say about worldview, we will not have done our work of preparing them for the world.
6. Our scientists agree to work within an interpretative community.
If science involves interpretation, and if our interpretations are limited, then we need each other to combine perspectives and call each other to accountability. This is a difficult concept to describe, and an even more difficult one to live out. We are not isolated, individual explorers, but depend on others to correct our models, challenge our procedures, and remind us of our convictions.
When you join a community of Reformed scholars, you say something like this: I want to do my work from this perspective because I think this perspective is truest to God's revelation and my experience. But this community also needs the results of my work in order to grow, so let's join together, and edge forward in this understanding together, with boldness and humility, willing to listen to eachother, to examine each other's evidence, to figure out what God is teaching us through new discoveries, and new interpretations.
We have some tough issues in front of us, addressing those issues takes bright minds and very devout hearts. We need communities of trust and respect. We agree to work within the context of certain faith commitments. But both science and theology change, and they change in response to eachother.
Working within community has implications for how we think about academic freedom, how we think about orthodoxy, and - to move into another way of knowing, how we think about the work of the Holy Spirit in out midst.
Matthew Walhout, a Calvin physicist, nicely describes some of the tension that working in community can create:
We are to conserve the ideas, texts, and traditions that have brought us to where we are, so that we can remember the truths found by those who have gone before We are to carry these truths into the world, transforming culture with new art and scholarship. An obvious tension exists between conserving and enriching. How do we remain committed to the truths we have inherited and open to the fresh truths and revelations that, on the face of things, seem inconsistent with out understanding of our inheritance? This is a tension that scientists are aware of all the time. ..I think we should embrace this kind of tension at Calvin tooWe should always be asking that next, hard question, even as we savor the last, satisfying answer. Self-evaluation through questions is how we open ourselves to the sanctifying movement of the Holy Spirit. It is the only way we can be "always reforming" (2001).
The previous president of Calvin College, Anthony Diekema, went through some tough times at Calvin that had to do with issues of science, faith, and academic freedom and concern about orthodoxy. Out of his experiences came a book and several important interviews on the subject of academic freedom. In a public forum, with an audience that was largely skeptical about how religious colleges could offer academic freedom, Diekema described the activity of a religious scientific community:
Any honest intellectual and spiritual inquiry, consistent with the mission of the college, should be taken seriously, even when it requires rethinking institutional faith statements or creeds. Indeed, it is not infrequent that the findings of faculty members through their scholarly research become the impetus for change in foundational documents. Some religious denominations expect their church-related colleges to serve the church in this way, and they cherish the relationship even though it may lead to controversy and rigorous reflection. But this kind of debate and controversy often leads to positive change and keeps both college and church alive and well over the long haul (2002)
I have explored some metaphysical and epistemological assumptions, now I want to turn to some ethical assumptions. These arise out of the metaphysical assertions that we explored earlier, but they deserve special mention because they figure so prominently in the thinking of Calvin scientists. When I ask Calvin science faculty how faith influences their work, they often turn first to the area of ethics.
Ethical Assumptions
1. Central to being a Christian scientist is integrity and excellence in the practice of science.
This is so basic, yet it is vital to how our scientists understand their ethical obligations. In the laboratory, classrooms and office, students learn to be gracious, diligent, hospitable, honest.they honor the integrity of eachother, of other researchers, and or the creation which they are in the process of exploring.
Our science departments take very seriously their responsibilities to be excellent educational settings for future scientists. Because we want Christian scientists in industry, medicine, research labs, public health, and all over the world, we must do the kind of work that allows our students to get into and thrive in graduate schools and then in their future occupations. We do have a host of Calvin graduates in important places around the world, in health care, public health policy, heading university and private research labs, in industry, and in many other places. So we must be excellent both as an ethical obligation and as a strategy of influence.
2. Stewardship of the earth, God's creation, is central to our task as humans and as Christian scientists.
We are not learning about this earth so that we can exploit it for our own profit. Our first task in the responsible doing of and application of science must be earthkeeping, caring for the world and preserving it for the next generations. We learn the intricacies of creation to praise God, but also so that we can take better care of it.
Part of having responsible dominion in this world means that we have the capacity to make things go horribly wrong. We can pollute the air, strip the land of its ability to provide food, kill off valuable species of plant and animals, create toxins that stunt human life and challenge human thriving, cause suffering, change the earth's climate, strip countries of their natural resources, and on and on. We have been given gifts to delight in, but we also have the power to make a mess of it. And when we do, we, or our descendents, we pay the price. God's reliance on natural processes means that God is not going to come along and miraculously clean the oceans or restore the farmland after we have abused them.
And we must be stewards as well of our own physical natures and the physical stuff that is my neighbor. Where we have created conditions that contribute to limited freedom, stunted moral development because of stunted brain growth, we are violating our role as stewards of the earth and eachother.
There are many ways that the concept of stewardship influences our work as Christian scientists and teachers. In teaching, we want our students to know and care about how our actions influence the health of the earth and eachother. We teach that concept through explicit lessons on stewardship, and through lab activities designed to help students care about the water and air quality, the recycling habits in their own immediate environment.
Our scholarship too is motivated by a commitment to stewardship. David Koetje, a plant biologist at Calvin, describes the motivation for his work:
As a Christian, the work that I do is an extension of Jesus' redemption of our broken relationships with God, our neighbors, and all of creation. The Bible speaks of a future time when all these will be healed, when the shalom of Eden will be restored. My role in this as a biologist is very important. I share responsibility for discovering how environmental stresses affect the molecular interactions that enable homeostasis. This knowledge is vital in our efforts to establish sustainable agricultural, environmental and economic practices (2001).
David Warners, another plant biologist, studies native plants:
The work that I do with rare native plants leads me to think about why it is important to understand how these species are perpetuated and why we should be concerned that their numbers are declining. Given our mandate to be responsible caretakers for a world that belongs to God, improving the status of endangered plants bears both scientific as well as spiritual relevance for me (2001).
Uko Zylstra writes and lectures about food - about its growth and distribution, about the politics that govern its distribution, and about the greed that results in patterns of hunger.
Our Engineering faculty make the responsible use of technology one of its central design standards. The inventions by its faculty and senior design students must be done with techonology that will care for the earth and not contribute to its destruction.
Psychology faculty work with children and adolescents, and their work is motivated by caretaking - aware that a failure to care for the biological natures of children will limit the futures of those children.
Finally, our ontological assumptions about human persons lead us to another ethical conviction that shapes our science:
3. Human Persons are uniquely created by God and their lives are valuable to God and to us. We study humans, but always as ends, never as means to another end.
Hessel Bouma, a biology professor and writer and frequent speaker on medical ethics, describes the convictions about the human person that undergird his work:
A Reformed Christian worldview on persons--in consort with the Judeo-Christian tradition but in stark contrast to an evolutionary worldview-- affirms the special uniqueness of humans 'created in the image of God.' As a consequence, all human persons are to be treated with a special sense of awe, respect and even reverence for in Christ there are to be no distinctions between ethnic groups, males and females, or persons who are enslaved or free. Being created in God's image gives us a special moral status and a special role--we are to be caretakers of God's creation. Created male and female, human persons best reflect God's image in four-fold community--with God, ourselves, each other, and creation. Sadly, God's image in us is not reflected perfectly--it is broken and distorted by the Fall which brought with it disease and illness. But Jesus Christ is our Savior, the perfect image of God in human form, and when we imitate Christ in our lives and moral decisions, people can see God's image reflected in us more clearly.
Christians recognize that God's cause is life, not death; health, not sickness; and freedom, not bondage. While secular American ethics emphasize autonomy (freedom), a Reformed Christian ethic will cherish autonomy expressed within the bounds of God's laws (e.g. freedom of sexual expression and procreation including assisted reproductive technologies within marriage). While secular American ethics emphasize avoiding harm and encouraging but not requiring good, a Reformed Christian ethic will naturally pursue beneficence even at great self-sacrifice as an expression of a life of gratitude for salvation; Christians will care particularly for the sick and the poor, even as Jesus did. And while many people will view death as the ultimate enemy to be fought at virtually all costs, Reformed Christians will view death as a conquered enemy, though the victory over death is 'not yet'--we must all die, but there awaits for us a new heaven and a new earth where death and crying and sorrow will be no more. And while many people cling to a false hope that science and technology will ultimately provide people with immortality, Reformed Christians confess that we already have a Savior, and through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, we have life eternal ( 2002).
This means that both students and faculty struggle with the ethical implications of current work in reproductive technology, end of life care, genetic engineering, stem cell research, AIDS and other diseases, sexuality, concepts of suffering. These topics are frequently the objects of classroom discussions in introductory classes and capstone classes and everything in between. This kind of assertion influences both what we study and what we do not study.
Again, how do we choose what to study? Is everything open to study, as long as we are not at the stage of application? We know that discovery and application cannot be separated from eachother, and that knowledge is never just pure discovery - that what we find out changes us even before we begin to think about application. The power and scope of recent scientific work on the human genome is breathtaking - do we embrace it because of its potential to cure disease or avoid it because of our fear of how it will change our notions of human personhood?
Different Christian traditions approach these ethical dilemmas differently - some traditions draw the ethical line around transplantation , some around abortion and end of life decisions. In the late middle ages, scientific inquiry was restricted by a refusal to dissect human beings after death.
Do we step into the next era, or are there places we just can't go? Can we ever say no to things even though they are possible to do?
That question is not unique to our time. The questions and findings of Galileo, DaVince, Harvey, and Mendel changed our understanding of human life and brought new questions of application. Every era brings its challenges and changes to our conception of humans and this world. The answer to the questions are not automatic and certainly not easy. As our techonology becomes more powerful, our human nature continues to be sinful; we become capable of greater good, and more powerful evil. We cannot afford to be nave about the power of the Fall.
So how do we unwrap God's gifts to us, and not use them to destroy ourselves? This question, of course, is at the very heart of why we need to work so hard on doing science from a Christian perspective. What the world needs is more scientists whose allegiance is to God and to care for God's world. That is why it is a community task - why you need us, and why we need you.
Background Readings and Cited References
Bouma, Hessel, (2002). Reflections on Personhood, Personal Communication.
Calvin, John. (1536/1986). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Revised Ed.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Diekema, Anthony (2002). Interview on Academic Freedom, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14, 2002.
Haarsma, Loren. (2000) The natural sciences and "methodological naturalism." Unpublished manuscript.
Koetje, David. (2001). Integration of Faith and Science: A Christian Philosophy of Higher Education. Unpublished tenure statement, Calvin College.
Kuyper, Abraham. (1904). Common Grace in Science, in James D. Bratt, Ed., (1999). The Kuyper Centennial Reader, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Leegwater, Arie. (1985). Affirming Creating: Perspectives in the Natural Sciences. Class Handout, Calvin College.
Marsden, George. (1997). The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Chapters 4 and 5. New York : Oxford University Press.
Polkinghorne, John. (2000). Faith, Science, and Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Polkinghorne, John. (2001). Christian Scholarship and the Practice of Science.. Lecture presented at Calvin College, September 28, 2001.
Van Baak, David. (2002). Cosmology and the Role of Presuppositions in Science. The Calvin Lecture, Calvin College.
Walhout, Matthew. (2000). Statement on Faith and Learning. Unpublished Tenure Statement. Calvin College.
Warners, David. (2001). Statement on Faith and Learning. Unpublished Reapointment Statement. Calvin College.
Weaver, Glenn. (2002). Motivation and Social Determinism: The Explanatory Power of Rules, Laws and Values. In Vander Stoep, Scott (ed.) Science of the Soul: Christian Perspectives on Psychological Research., forthcoming from Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Claudia DeVries Beversluis, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology, Dean for Instruction, Calvin College