The Secularization of Christianity Part XV - Science vs. Scientism and Other Observations

As we pick up this discussion, here I want to show that there is a difference between what I will call scientism and what is actual science.  The latter is based on true natural law, which in turn has God as its author.  Actual science affirms that certain laws - thermodynamics, gravity, etc. - are valid and there is no conflict with belief in God regarding those.  Also, actual science affirms things such as the fact that if you combine two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule, you get water.   These are universal principles of physics, and no one (Christian or secular) has reason to refute them.  However, scientism is a different story.  To explain what this is, scientism is taking science and essentially deifying it as infallible truth based largely on non-Christian premise.  Scientism is best exemplified in the Darwinian theory of evolution, as well as in the whole linguistic empiricist arguments about cosmology.  Scientism is essentially either a philosophy or religion in itself, and doesn't reflect true scientific inquiry.  This lends itself to this discussion regarding a passage from Paul van Buren's book The Secular Meaning of the Gospels that Mascall quotes on page 65, and essentially there are two assertions van Buren makes with his own justification.  From page 100 of van Buren's text, this is what he says:

1.  Simple literal theism is wrong
2.  Qualified literal theism is meaningless

Why? Because to van Buren,

1.  The idea of an empirical intervention of a supernatural God in the world of men has been ruled out by the influence of science on our modern thinking.

2.  Such statements reveal our own commitments to modern science, and further modern thought tends to grant the validity of findings of the natural sciences.

Mascall notes a couple of things in regard to this which sort of reveal the weakness of van Buren's assertions:

1.  Van Buren fails to state that the "idea of an empirical intervention of a supernatural 'God'" has been shown by science to be false.  

2.  Rather, it has merely been "ruled out by the influence of modern science on our thinking."

The latter, Mascall notes, is simply a statement about the influence of modern science upon the psychological makeup of certain "not very clearly specified persons," of whom van Buren is one.  And, as Mascall correctly notes (and I agree), this presumed "commitment to modern science" which van Buren reveals as "our own" seems to be merely a capitulation to the secularist atmosphere of a world dominated by scientific technology.   And, that is what scientism essentially is in a nutshell!  However, as Mascall continues, he notes that a large number of writings had been devoted in recent history (more so today actually than in 1965, when Mascall authored this text) to the relationship between science and theology, and a lot of it has shown no tendency to abandon the traditional doctrines of Christian theology.  Some may dispute it, but many others show that true science can not only be reconciled to faith, but that God is indeed responsible for creating the natural law that governs the true principles of science.  And, as we read further, we now get into where the issue with van Buren's statements then are.

One thing I have noticed in recent years is that science is often divorced from Christian faith in order to in essence realize Spinoza's objective of confining religious practice to what he called "its proper sphere," and many secularized theologians such as van Buren have bought into that idea.  According to van Buren and others, as Mascall notes on page 66, the language of faith has a meaning, but it must essentially be confined to the practice of the faith, and is therefore not (to people like van Buren anyway) a statement of cosmological assertions.  Van Buren reveals a lot about his own outlook on this on page 101 of his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospels when he notes that theological reconstruction is essential because it needs to essentially be "clarified" in order to conform to modern thought that characterizes an industrial, scientific age - these reconstructions, therefore, are to be accepted without qualification and this is accomplished essentially by employing a purely empirical method of linguistic expression that initiates the clarification of language and thus also eliminates the "mythical" aspects of theological language, eliminating in the process problems with the supernatural aspects of faith.   We of course have seen this before, haven't we?  Others, such as Merold Westphal, essentially propose the same thing with different language:  Westphal defines it, recall, as "prejudices" which are the result of adhering to tradition, and therefore in order to clarify interpretation for Westphal, we have to work to escape those less-desirable "prejudices" by becoming conscious of them (Westphal, Whose Community, Which Interpretation, p. 72).  This is taking van Buren's assertion essentially in a whole new direction - van Buren's reconstruction would be impossible therefore without having consciousness of the prejudices which necessitate that reconstruction, according to Westphal.  What we have here is essentially a version of the same old academic elitism we have seen so much of - we are "ignorant," necessitating the "enlightenment" essential to admission of that ignorance, and then finding ways to reconstruct it to bring us in line with the "status quo."  This means then that "ignorance" for people like van Buren is essentially a belief in the supernatural, which can be remedied then by linguistic empiricism.  Van Buren even proposes that in order to do this, it is essential in essence to just hang onto the humanity of Jesus while dismissing anything about His divinity.  What is really scary though is what Mascall notes in regard to van Buren's position in the next paragraph - while van Buren describes that particular reference in his own words as an exaggeration, in reality it is an exaggeration of his own convictions, and it appeals to Nietzsche in that the Nietzschian mantra of "God is dead" is essentially the word God being terminated from empirical usage.  Let's reflect on that for a moment.

While van Buren weakly tries to redo Nietzsche's "God is dead" thing as a semantic application, the ramifications are still the same.  If one rubs out God's name as non-existent, then it only follows that God Himself will then diminish too - again, despite being a nominally Anglican "secular theologian," van Buren is in essence a practical atheist here.  Van Buren, like so many others, is using semantics in order to discredit authentic Christian faith, and on page 67 Mascall reveals the agenda behind this.   Essentially, linguistic analysis of the language of faith, as Mascall correctly notes, doesn't provide all the necessary weaponry for van Buren's ultimate agenda.  The reason for this, Mascall notes that van Buren emphasizes, is that linguistic philosophers have limited themselves to the classical statements of natural theology.  This means, therefore, that they ignore dogmatic theology.   This means then that they would consider relevant a statement such as "There is a God," but the neglect both Biblical formulae such as "No man cometh to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6) and statements regarding Christ in the historic Creeds such as "Begotten of His Father before all worlds," and the reason is that they are not considered "relevant" to modern speech, especially modern speech shaped and informed by the industrial, scientific age we live in.  And, there lies the problem!  Let us discuss that for a moment.

As has been seen from previous discussions, the supernatural means little to the secularist, and is considered a vestigial remnant of a more "ignorant" age.  While a nominal deism can deal with the fact "there is a God," it cannot abide that God came in the flesh in Christ and therefore Jesus is God the Son - this is one reason why they create a division between the humanity and divinity of Christ and therefore consider the hypostatic union affirmed by Christian orthodoxy to be "irrelevant," because it cannot be seen or proven by scientific evidence or affirmed by linguistically empirical statement.  Therefore, you have the cult of scientism, which asserts that their concept of "science" is infallible (they are as dogmatic on that, by the way, as Christians are with affirming Holy Scripture is inerrant) and nothing exists outside the natural realm.  This is nothing new either, as the position of Nominalism that was embraced by William of Ockham in the 1300's which essentially posited that a universal term for something like "sheep" or "man" is just a name and not rooted directly in reality - nominalism is the embryonic development of linguistic empiricism, in other words (Wiker and Hahn, Politicizing the Bible, p. 47).  We see it again in 13th-century Averroism, which asserted essentially that reason trumps revelation, and therefore "religion" has no supernatural origin (although it is integral) but rather is an invention of philosophers to ensure civil tranquility (ibid., p. 30) - we see that in particular in the thought of Marsilus of Padua.  This means religion is a natural necessity, as a "coping mechanism" or a "therapeutic necessity" to maintain order rather than a product of supernatural revelation. Views like that lead naturally to the implementation of linguistic empiricism, and aid in the secularization of religious faith as a "minor necessity" but nothing more.  This then means that theological truth can be radically redefined as "necessary myth" that has a utilitarian role in social structure, and that seems to be exactly what van Buren and others like him propose.  As has been said before, none of this is new - it is the original lie of Satan in the Garden in Genesis 3, when he told Adam and Eve that they can be "like gods" and that their own self-importance trumps supernatural reality.  In essence then, and I make this point again, there is no such thing as a "true atheist," because true atheism entails worshipping nothing - many atheists seem to have no problem worshipping themselves and inflating their own self-importance, so they cannot by definition be atheists.  Likewise, there is no such thing as a "secular theologian" either, in that a supposed theologian who seeks to secularize faith and Scripture is not a theologian at all, as God is not important to such a person;  his own opinion, limited by strictly tangible, empirical, and observable "evidence," is all he has.  And, as the Catechism states and we noted earlier, this makes the agnostic then a practical atheist, although in looking at it this way some clarification is needed - to be honest, it is a person substituting his own self-deification for God.  Scientism too is a cult like this, in that it diminishes or eliminates the supernatural it cannot explain as being illogical and non-rational, and thus it has no importance.  This has been the case for secularists all through history, be they Averroists like Marsilus of Padua, Enlightenment personalities such as Descartes and Spinoza, or "secular theologians" such as van Buren and his mentor Bultmann.  Fallibility is fallible, in other words, when it thinks it is infallible, and thus is the case with people such as van Buren.

Skipping over to page 69, Mascall makes some excellent and important observations as to why van Buren and others are wrong in this semantics-based approach called linguistic empiricism, especially when it entails Christian faith and doctrine.  The Creeds, Mascall notes, are not just baptismal professions of faith (which he does say they indeed are), but they are emphatic expressions of a commitment to a way of life encompassing belief in certain propositions about the nature of God and his relation to the world as embodied in the life of His Incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.  The Creeds then, as Mascall notes that van Buren misses, were transformed by the Church from simple baptismal professions to well-defined statements of orthodox doctrine, and they provide a litmus test for orthodoxy.   As mentioned as well, this is why the plural "We" replaces the singular "I" in the text of the Creeds, as they are a testament to the unbroken faith of an eternal Church.  The reason that the Creeds are originally a baptismal expression is given in Lumen Gentium, which reminds us that "...through Baptism as through a door men enter the Church." (LG 14).  One cannot enter the Church without accepting what the Church professes and believes, and by making this a collective profession, it reminds us by professing as "We" that we made a baptismal vow to accept what the Church teaches and thus have a responsibility to uphold it.   That is why the Creed is indeed a test of orthodoxy.  That now leads to a paradox in van Buren's reasoning that Mascall identifies as this section concludes.

On page 105 of van Buren's The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, he makes a true statement that if the word "God" is not a word which refers to something (or someone), then care should be exercised to not use it in a way that suggests it does.  Although this is actually a correct observation - I will get into that more shortly - Mascall also notes here that van Buren and those who share his general outlook are the worst offenders when it comes to this issue.  By seeking to "reinterpret" historic linguistic ideas about the faith in subtle, seemingly unobtrusive language, they in essence change the very belief they are supposed to profess, and that is the problem.  In essence, it is committing the sin of "taking the Lord's name in vain," in that God is often invoked and referenced by such people, but the invocation and references are devoid of meaning - it is tantamount to the cussword "g..d...." in other words.  A whole discussion could be made on this alone, as often God's name is flippantly used in ways it should not - even among Evangelicals (especially self-identified Black Christians) a lot of times, the name "Jesus" is bandied about like a sacred talisman rather than in respect to the Lord and Savior they claim to follow, and that has always been an issue of concern.  So, in van Buren and others taking God's name and using in ways that suggest a negation of its meaning, they are in essence truly "taking God's name in vain," and that is where they should exercise caution, as they know not what they are doing.

We'll pick up in the next section with the discussion, as there is a lot more ground to cover.