Science and Faith: Part II: Scientific Determinism and Divine Intervention
MY THESIS is deceptively simple in a way, yet it could be badly misunderstood and misrepresented. And it may of course be quite wrong. I am trying to deal with the fact that scientists (especially biologists) are constantly pushing their researches with success into areas which hitherto have been held to be in some sense "sacred" in the Christian view, especially in the manipulation and potential re-engineering of living things, including man.
Little by little, all life is being "reduced" to inanimate components, as though there is essentially no difference between the living and the non-living. Animals are being reduced to the status of mere machines for the conversion of one kind of energy into another; and in the final analysis man is being viewed in the same light. Every advance made in the laboratory seems to underscore this as the inevitable "ultimate finding."
What are we to do with the facts regarding the nature of life which are thus emerging, other than to argue that they are being misinterpreted? Unfortunately for this plea, much of the new knowledge hardly needs interpretation: it speaks for itself in no uncertain terms. Life is indeed mechanism to a surprising degree. This is the fact I have tried to deal with in the light of Scripture. How do we relate mechanism to divine intervention?
Where I fear I shall leave myself open to misunderstanding is that I may seem to be inviting the concept of evolution to take over my thinking by the back door, as it were. In my own mind, I have no intention of doing this. I am persuaded that the evidence presented, especially in chapter 2, is established fact. For the most part it is not open to alternative interpretations. It is potentially verifiable experimentally in any laboratory at any time, though some very elegant techniques are required which not all laboratories are equipped to perform. In living things mechanism is a fact.
In the question of evolution, I believe the situation is entirely different. Here we have virtually no clinching proof whatever. We have all kinds of circumstantial evidence which can be interpreted to support evolution, but its meaning is equivocal. For if God created it all in the first place, and then created man in His own image with a mind capable of thinking His thoughts after Him, we can just as easily interpret the facts as evidence of economy of design. We recognize the rationale of a machine designed by an engineer because we have a mind which operates like the engineer's. If our minds work in some sense as God's mind does because He made them to do so, it is only to be expected we should be able to discern the nature of His design, too. On the other hand, in view of the tremendous number of missing links between Phyla, Classes, Orders, Families, and Genera, which are universally admitted, the vast array of living forms looks much more like a bunch of disconnected twigs than a tree. The evolutionists find it necessary to arbitrarily tie these twigs together: but those who believe in Creation can accept the facts as they are. Perhaps the twigs never were a tree.
I suggest, in the light of the facts presented in this paper, that God must have designed a mechanism with tremendous potential which could be used again and again in the subsequent creation of living forms. (1) All these created forms operate on the same basic formula, but with different coded messages written in their DNA that are analogous to different languages which nevertheless use the same alphabet. Just as English, French, German, and Italian all use a common alphabet so that a single print shop can set the type for each from a common font, and yet produce copy unintelligible except to those for whom the particular language is native, so the DNA code appears to be a universal font of type, but the messages "printed out" by it may be specifically separate and nonconvertible. Each original DNA "language" was therefore designed to separate out different lines, i.e., different kinds of living forms, which no more make sense when crossed than it would make sense to scramble pages of English, French, and German books and bind the unrelated pages between a single cover. Anyone who could identify the letters of the alphabet but not read the different languages might be misled into supposing it was all one book simply because the letters throughout were the same.
All analogies are faulty. This one is, no doubt. But I mean suggest by it that the DNA code for each species or kind---whatever name seems most acceptable for unmateable lines animals---was specifically created by God so that a confused message results when such lines are crossed, leading to a non-sense which defeats the attempt. Confusion of relationships in the animal world is thereby guarded against without the need to design thousands of different mechanisms.
Plenty of room was allowed for varieties to arise within a species by changing the spelling of the words while maintaining the identity of the language. And I suggest that it was part of God's plan that man should make use of this potential---which of course he did long before he discovered the secret of how the mechanism operates. I suggest that the mechanism is God's design and that, except where sin has disturbed it, it is still as perfect as when He first created it as base for all living things, including man. This accounts for the evidence of mechanism.
Yet I believe that the message in man was once different in some way, a message which made man potentially an immortal creature physiologically not subject to death. Man "poisoned" himself as were in Eden; (2) and the poison disturbed the original code and reduced man's body to something less than it was, something which in our present state of knowledge is not distinguishable in many respects from the bodies of other animals. It reduced man to the status of a mortal creature where previously he possessed the potential to live on indefinitely. Even after the Fall, his viability was still extraordinary in terms of life-span until the time of the Flood. But the Fall did not convert man as a person into a mere animal with superior intelligence. He has still a distinguishing component in his total make-up which animals do not share, a component which is, dealt with in this paper and which makes not only his origin but also his destiny different from that of all other creatures.
I propose that mechanism does characterize God's created order, not only in its inanimate elements but even in its living ones. I propose, moreover, that this mechanism is so perfect that God need not as a rule intervene in it and will not therefore actually be discernible by any scientific research into its workings. But when man sinned, he introduced a disruptive element which has so upset the mechanism in certain areas that God must now intervene redemptively to maintain it against a total breakdown. In these areas natural science will find itself up against imponderables with which it is not equipped to deal, for here God is at work in a supernatural way.
In a manner of speaking, I am not yet committing myself---to a firm position: I'm just thinking out loud. This expression of my thoughts regarding the mechanism of living things is tentative. It may have implications that more acute minds will detect, which will condemn it as a premature and nonviable approach to a difficult problem. It is a problem to be wrestled with.
Scientific Determinism and Divine
Intervention:
Chapter 1
The Significance of Imperfection
THE DETERMINATION of science to reduce every phenomenon to physics and chemistry, to "sticks and strings," has been called appropriately its "implacable offensive." (3) The goal is to demonstrate that all is mechanism and that God is an unnecessary hypothesis. And many Christian people are disturbed.
It does not trouble us merely because it is a form of opposition our faith. It troubles us, as much as anything, because it has prove so successful ever since the offensive began, and because it seems likely to succeed even more dramatically in the near future. When will it end? It did not seem worrisome to see the forces of inanimate nature being conquered one by one, for it was possible to interpret this as a fulfillment of the command to have dominion over the earth. It was when the same method began to prove equally successful in the realm of living things that we were worried, for surely here if no where else, God has certain unique and direct prerogatives. Could it be that we have been wrong in this?
Now that science is proving itself equally effective as a tool "reduction" here also, the time has come for some serious reflection as to what it all signifies. How far will the offensive go, and how successful will it prove to be in creating life itself, even human life? Shall we also see human beings created out of non-living substance by man himself?
When the offensive began, there were many gaps in understanding, many areas of ignorance, many apparently impassable hurdles that seemed beyond the competence of the scientific method. And Christians were well able to relax and say, "These are the limitations of science: here is where God must be called in." But as these gaps were closed one by one, the room for divine intervention was steadily reduced until it seemed that the only place left for the Creator was as the supplier of the raw materials at the very beginning. Even this was soon challenged by the demonstration that matter is really only a manifestation of energy-energy "congealed," as Sir James Jeans put it, and not solid substance at all. Heisenberg said: (4) "All the elementary particles are made of the same substance, which we may call energy or universal matter; they are just different forms in which matter can appear." So the Creator was once more pushed back another step until He became merely the power supply, the source of energy if not the energy itself, virtually depersonalized, "the ground of all being" of Tillich, and little else.
Yet, the child of God knows that God really exists and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him (Heb. 11:6); that He is a merciful Father to all who find Him through the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ; that He is personal and compassionate and a very present help in time of trouble. By experience the Christian finds that his life can be as luminously filled with divine interferences as the life of any of the Old Testament saints. And such interferences often involve the reordering of events firmly rooted in the physical world, so that we know God does and can intervene and we know that the nature of His intervention has all the earmarks of personal concern and specific purpose, and sometimes of miracle. God is clearly still at work within the created order, it seems to us.
How, then, do we orient ourselves toward a mechanistic view of reality which must have some truth in it to succeed so well, and yet which seems to leave no room for God anywhere at all? How do we square it with what is equally undeniable in Christian life, namely, the fact of supernatural intervention in the very same arena?
Is reconciliation possible on a rational basis? Or must we separate the two lines of evidence and say that one belongs in the realm of demonstrable fact and the other in the less certain realm of faith only? Does the one kind of truth apply in the world of Christian experience and a conflicting kind of truth in the realm of scientific endeavor, so that reconciliation is logically impossible because a different kind of logic applies in each? The one says, Reality can be explained without any concept of divine interference, and the other says, Divine interference is a fact of Christian experience. This fact is certainly not an illusion.
I believe that in a few simple statements of Scripture there is a answer to this dilemma---one that can bring a tremendous sense intellectual satisfaction and spiritual encouragement. The answer hinges upon the implications of two statements in Scripture, one the Old Testament and the other in the New, which appear to be obvious enough in their meaning but which may have a more profound significance than is immediately apparent.
The first one is in Genesis 2:1-3, which we shall deal with now, the second is in John 5:17, which we shall deal with later. They appear to be contradictory, but in fact they are not. Genesis 2:1-reads as follows:
And the Heavens and the Earth were finished and all their host, and by the seventh day God had ended His work which He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all His work which He had done, and God blessed the seventh day and set it apart, because that on it He had rested from all His work which God had created and made.
The meaning seems clear enough. But is it? Why would God "rest" Because He was weary? Surely not! The words must have some other meaning than merely to reflect our own weariness at the end of week of intense activity. Indeed, the Hebrew word rendered "rest" is not bound at all to any idea of fatigue. It means rather "to disengage," "to terminate active involvement in," or simply as the New English Bible has it here, "to cease from." God did not stop work because He was tired, but because He had finished what He was preparing.
Could this mean, perhaps, that the "machinery" of nature had been so perfectly designed, so effectively ordered, and so wisely appointed that it could now be left to run by itself, being endowed with all the means of self-regulation, with all the feedback systems and servo-mechanisms with which even human creations can be supplied in order to make further maintenance and supervision them virtually unnecessary? Even man can do this in a limited way, as was done in designing and building the Alouette satellite, developed by the Canadian government, which has had such an extraordinarily successful unattended life. Could not God have done the same, only on a far grander scale?
An electric power generating station, for example, can be designed to run virtually unattended, needing for the most part only routine inspection with perhaps some occasional adjustment. The superintendent could conceivably be there on the job for only a few minutes each day, and the rest of the time a casual visitor to the plant would find nothing but mechanism. These few exceptional occasions when the superintendent must be personally present would be the only times in which there were any evidence of anything other than a self-regulating system; and such occasions of intervention would be due solely to the fact that the mechanism itself is an imperfect one, one that needs adjustment or oiling or replacement of worn-out parts or used-up components.
If we assume that what God does is perfect (Ps. 18:30) and requires no such subsequent readjustment of its mechanism, then there need be no evidence whatever of any Person behind it---except as its Architect in the first place. In such an electric power plant---assuming that the power input (water or fissionable material, for example) is unlimited, and that the machine is never subject to failure---there never need be any superintendent present at all. The machine will serve the purpose for which it was designed, unattended. This is, in fact, Newton's watchmaker, the Mechanic who wound up His device and left it to run by itself, unattended.
The problem is that a useful analogy can become a dangerous invitation. The Creator who is no longer attending His machine comes to be viewed not merely as absent but as nonexistent. Leibnitz discussed the tendency which had become common in Newtonian circles, to conceive of the relation between God and the universe as analogous to that of a watchmaker to a watch which he has constructed and which, having been set going, continues to function for some time at any rate without any necessity for the actual presence or attention of its originator. As Whittaker observed, (5) "Such a conception led inevitably to the idea of an absentee God, Who having created the world had left it to run its own course without further divine intervention and Who was therefore for practical purposes non-existent."
There is no question of the reality of this danger. it should be recognized that the more perfect the work of the designer and builder, the less evidence of his actual presence would there be in the end product. Moreover, if the individual who examines this end-product has such tools of research and such methodology as to allow him to deal effectively only with this kind of mechanism, then he can of necessity perceive nothing else. And insofar as he perfects his tools and his methods to deal most precisely with these aspects of the subject, with the pure mechanics of it, to that extent he will be the more certainly limited in what he can perceive. This is equally true whether the mechanism is living or non-living.
There might therefore be two reasons why science is unable detect the presence of the Creator in and behind His creation. first, because his instruments are not designed to give this kind of information and the second, because the mechanism is so perfectly designed that it could safely left to run itself The strictly scientific method of research therefore, leads necessarily away from rather than toward the discovery of God.
In physiology, for example, we dissect the body, or we experiment with it only as an electrochemical machine, and our findings confirm the effectiveness of our tools of research and our methodology by giving us the only kind of information we looking for. But as Paul Weiss, recognizing this aspect of the inherent limitation of the scientific method, observed: (6)
Maybe our concept of our nervous system is equally inadequate and insufficient, because so long as you use only electrical instruments, you get electrical answers; if you use chemical detectors, you get chemical answers and if you determine numerical and geometrical values, you get numerical and geometrical answers. So perhaps we have not yet found the particular kind of instrument that tells us the next unknown.
The important thing to recognize is that the very perfection of God's handiwork is what deceives us. When we examine the work of man's hands---what might best be termed his handicrafts---we can read, distinguish between them and machine-made products. We recognize them by their very imperfections. If a craftsman happened produce an absolutely flawless piece of work, we might very well suspect it to be a forgery, a machine-made object posing as a handicraft. This is because an essential element of the character of man's craftsmanship is its freedom from the bondage of machine-like perfection. This imperfection we call "character." But we do this on because we know that all man's handiwork is imperfect. By contrast God's handiwork is perfect, so that it is easily confused with what we recognize as machine-like.
I suggest that it is inherent in any such perfected system that the more perfect it is, the less evidence there will be for the presence of a Superintendent. The very lack of evidence of any such Presence when it is examined by tools appropriate to pure mechanism, is proof in itself that God's work is perfect and not that it is not God's work. Were we to discover faults in the mechanism, we should either have to say that God's work is not perfect or that something has damaged the mechanism since it was created. Moreover, the more precise our understanding of the mechanism, the more likely is God's absence to be confirmed.
Purely scientific understanding will exclude the Designer to the extent that (I) the design of the mechanism is perfect, and (2) our understanding is precise and correct. Contrary therefore to what one might expect, complete understanding of the mechanism is just as likely to create atheists as believers.
If the Superintendent happens to be discovered "on the job," it is only a demonstration that the mechanism is in need of occasional adjustment or repair---in short, that it is imperfect. The absence of any evidence of a superintendent on the job is therefore a compliment rather than a challenge to the Creator!
If we do begin to find things that are faulty in the mechanism, then we have problems: How could a perfect God have made a faulty device? And the fact is that there is some evidence of fault in the mechanism. The question is, Does this mean that it was badly designed in the first place? Or that it was never designed at all but happened by accident? Or that something happened to it subsequently to disrupt it? The answer to this is of profound importance to the Christian. In point of fact, he can really make only one choice. He cannot believe God's handiwork is faulty, nor can he believe that this whole complex cosmos is purely accidental and to no purpose. So he concludes that something must have gone wrong only after the mechanism had been designed and put into operation.
Scripture tells us what went wrong: the disruption was introduced when man fell. Sin is the disturbing element, beginning its destructive effects in man, and through him thereafter in one way or another acting upon and upsetting much of what would otherwise have continued as a faultless self-regulating mechanism. It did not apparently disrupt the whole mechanism in all its workings. It is enough, by analogy, that a watch get some dirt into it to disturb its time-telling ability; it is not necessary that the whole watch be destroyed in all its parts, much less that the mainspring be broken. And it can be corrected by cleaning. This, as I see it, is somewhat like the situation in the Natural Order. The "dirt" is the effect of man's fall.
The question then arises as to whether we can separate out the disruptive element in each situation and categorize the kinds of areas in which it may be expected to have an effect and the areas where it will have no effect. It is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone who has followed scientific research over the past twenty-five years or so that at least in the realm of natural law we are still witnessing the operation of an essentially perfect mechanism capable of carrying on unattended and with no evidence of the disruptive effect of sin. Here at least, God still has no need to intervene. Indeed, "natural law" simply becomes a descriptive term for that part of the created order which still operates undisturbed by the consequences of man's fallen nature.
And clearly God doesn't need to intervene here at all, though can do so under very special circumstances where miracle is then manifestly involved. Intervention is always redemptive in character; what is undisturbed and unaffected by sin requires no redemptive intervention, simply because it is still operating perfectly as God meant it to.
The extent to which natural law, or more simply "mechanism" has continued to operate with unfailing precision is almost beyond belief However tragic the consequences of the fall of man have been in terms of human history (and man's handling of his own environment), there is no question that the original mechanism has remained remarkably intact; it is even proving unexpectedly resilient in its powers of recovery from the disturbing influences of human misbehavior. (7) In the next chapter we shall try to give some concrete examples, now clearly established, in which mechanism entirely governs events even where until quite recently it was believed many informed people that some other kinds of forces were at work, forces more directly under the superintendence of God. But for I present it is only necessary to say that we can now rather precisely map out the kinds of areas in which disruption of the originally perfect mechanism has made itself felt, and the kinds of areas which it has apparently had no effect whatever.
Though sin has spread like a disease far beyond its carrier, man, yet its influences are still confined. Wherever these influences have been felt, God must now constantly intervene to reorder, reorganize renew, restore, repair, regenerate---in short, redeem. The effect of the fall of man has been so to upset the original order that from Eden forward God has had to go to work again redemptively, to prevent the whole fabric from becoming a chaos. I believe this is the significance of the Lord's words in John 5:17: "Hitherto My Father works, and so do I..."
Life: An Elusive Definition
Now, it is when we come to deal with living things that the sorting out of the evidence for the disruptive effects of man's fall upon the natural order becomes a problem. While the building blocks, the molecules of living substance, obey the strict laws of cause and effect characteristic of the rest of the unattended mechanism, the aggregates of them begin to take on a new character in which the whole becomes more than merely the sum of its parts. There should surely be some sharply defined border between non-living and living substance. Yet it still escapes us, and the only thing that we can say at the moment is that it appears to have more to do with relationships (i.e., organization) than with substances per se.
Plants have all the earmarks of mechanism when studied carefully. All their movements appear to be initiated by and responsive to physicochemical forces; yet they are alive. And some very lowly forms of animal life seem equally to be mere machines for converting energy, though here, too, we find evidence of some kind of a "ghost in the machine," to use Koestler's phrase---though the phrase is older than Koestler. (8) Life can seem to be pure mechanism. As W. H. Thorpe pointed out, "There is no firm evidence whatever against, and an immense amount of evidence for, the view that the 'ordinary' laws of physics and chemistry are holding within the organism just as they do within a man-made machine." (9)
A molecule of something ingested by an animal could be traced through the process of digestion until it lodged somewhere in living tissue and became one with it. But at what point does that molecule become alive? Obviously it has more to do with the organization of the tissue than the tissue itself: so the nature of life still eludes us. It is true that we have now progressed far enough to manufacture synthetic DNA---though, thus far, only with the help of the natural product derived from something that is already alive. The question remains whether the synthetic DNA is really alive in itself or more like the reflection in a mirror which has all the appearance of being alive but none of the reality. As Commoner said, "DNA may not be the secret of life: life may be the secret of DNA." (10) Yet as we shall see, even in these basic elements of living stuff, natural law seems still to play the governing role and pure mechanism looms large.
Perhaps before man sinned and after the work of the six days had been perfected and life had been injected into the whole system with the creation of living things, this stream of life could be conducted thereafter from biosystem to biosystem, riding upon a long line of carriers which were themselves designed to obey the strict regimen of natural law---a circumstance which allows us to push our researches more and more deeply into these carrier systems only to find that at no point does there seem to be anything to them beyond mechanism, except that some spark derived from the main fire lights them with life if they are correctly put together. As Sir Arthur Eddington said in seeking to define life, we may say that one and one make two, or "this and that" constitute life, yet it is the meaning the and that is critical. (11) Life is more than the sum of its parts.
Was such the original design of the Architect who created it all? Was it so perfect in every way that it would all have continued to seem to be pure machine with no evidence of the presence of Superintendent if sin had not intruded? Reverting to our analogy of the hydroelectric plant, we may say that sin acting as some disruptive agent in the mechanism has forced the Superintendent to stay the job. But now, the fault is not with the machinery but with the dirt that has intruded into it. It is a form of sabotage.
We know now that in non-living as well as in living things are certain elements of freedom. Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy rests upon the fact that atoms behave individually as they were not completely bound always to do the same thing: though in concert these freedoms cancel out and leave us with a strict deterministic mechanism. With living things, even at the molecular level, there also exist certain freedoms which allow for variation in the developing organism, though in time we may discover that kind of freedom is less indeterminate than it now appears to be:" very fact that mutations are reversible seems to me to suggest this. (12)
But perhaps in living things at the very beginning there some "freedoms" from pure mechanical determinism built into functioning so that the appointed "keeper," unfallen man in person of Adam, could explore and exploit their potential for variation and development. Even in ecological terms, the randomness of nature's planting of its own seeds would allow him to reorganize things into a garden with an imposed order laid upon them to enhance the beauty of the natural order. Similarly, in terms of genetics, the freedom of the sharing process in the fertilization of the ovum by the sperm would allow man to vary the end-result-for example, to breed dogs to afford different kinds of pleasure---without upsetting the machinery in any way. Because of the way it has been designed, this perfect mechanism need not mean absolute determinism. An unfallen keeper (Adam before he sinned) was put in charge (Gen. 2:15) of an undisturbed natural order, but this does not require us to believe that all subsequent history was necessarily predetermined, though the elements of the natural order could still be mechanistic at certain levels. God built these freedoms into His creation for man's pleasure; and to make it possible for him to exploit them, He allowed man certain freedoms himself.
But man abused his own freedom, and he has ever since abused the freedoms which exist in the created order and is likely to continue to do so. Every advance in his ability to exploit these freedoms only tends to increase the consequences of the Fall and to endanger the whole fabric. It is only where these freedoms exist that he can effect disruption. He cannot abuse things like gravity, for example. Gravity can be ignored to man's hurt, but it is unchanging. As Simpson put it, "Gravity has no history." (13) Natural law remains, whatever we do: mechanism continues to operate in a perfectly deterministic and authoritarian way. We can do nothing to change it except to exploit its very predictableness for our own benefit and then to abuse that benefit. We do. And we shall continue to disrupt God's intent by manipulating the freedoms that were built into the system-especially where living things are concerned, for here the freedoms are most evident, having been most liberally introduced by the Creator.
Thus we read of plans now to re-engineer human beings even as we have already engineered some rather unnatural forms of animal life (as for example, dachshunds). The potential is there, undoubtedly. This fact has to be admitted in the light of present knowledge. It is foolish to deny the possibility of test-tube babies and cloned communities of people in the light of what we know, although I think there may be one barrier here which we shall consider in chapter 3. Perhaps God will step in before this happens and either put an end to human ambition, or perhaps actually allow man to proceed until he learns the appalling possibilities that there are when a fallen creature with high intelligence learns to manipulate a perfect mechanism with a potential as immense as its original Architect built into it.
Let me recapitulate very simply the essential point I have been trying to make in all this preamble. Then in the next chapter 1 will show just how all-pervasive this concept of mechanism has proved to be in every area in which we have any certain knowledge.
What I am proposing---and I am doing so tentatively because there may be implications in all this which, when they become clear will show that this is not the way to go---is this: what the Bible mean when it says that after so many days of work God rested (i.e., stopped work, having finished what He was doing) is that He had in fact created and finished (Gen. 2:1-3) a perfect mechanism---the Natural Order. It was self-sustaining, self-regulating, self-correcting, deterministic in appearance, uniform in principle of action, servo-mechanized with countless interlocking feedback channels, and autonomous to such a degree that if a scientist had examined it with the finest research tools and the most sophisticated methodology, he would have found no evidence of God as superintendent over it at all God had so perfected it that He could "cease from it." It was finished work. It could be counted upon to run itself indefinitely.
Even after the introduction of man, still unfallen, there would be no evidence of God in the machine itself. There would be evidence of intelligent intervention, for man himself (with God's permission) would act upon it to introduce order in his own way. A row of poplars, instead of the chance plantings of nature; flat stones set out in orderly lines to mark out pathways; some exuberant growths converted into hedges; certain wildflowers tamed and cultivated to bring out their special character; fields of vegetation instead of nondescript patches of verdure; and so on. In short, one would have seen a special kind of formal order imposed on what is otherwise precisely ordered only in the individual and not in the aggregate (for example, the shape of the leaf as opposed to the shape of the tree). One would, in fact, have suspected a gardener was at work, dressing his garden and achieving dominion or control over the natural order, bending it to serve his own particular delights but not with selfish motives, nor disruptively.
Yet one would still find no evidence of direct divine interference only an extraordinarily beautifully adapted mechanism designed in the non-living, not only to remain orderly and thus to allow for precise control, but designed also to form the vehicle for life itself.
Then man sinned---and there was introduced into the whole scheme a new element, an element of disorder, disruption, decay, and unnatural death. At that moment God had to step in once more and go to work, not only to preserve it against total disruption, but to redeem it. And because of the noetic effects of sin which limit man's powers of perception and prevent him from seeing with any certainty what lies behind the natural order, He has also to reveal certain to things which man needs to know about himself and his origin and his destiny, which he is not able to discover for himself merely by observation and reflection.
Because the fallen nature of man has introduced elements into the working of the machine for which it was not designed to compensate automatically, God's interventions in a redemptive capacity have always appeared to be of a different order and not susceptible to natural law. They do not belong within the order of natural phenomena but are super-natural. For those who by experience of second birth have been enabled to recognize this aspect of redemptive intervention is not after the pattern of the original "ceased-from" order of nature and therefore not discoverable by tools and methods which have been designed solely for the latter. So they are unrecognized and unconsidered, and usually denied altogether---on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence for them.
The very perfection of the whole original order in its "ceased-from" aspect ensures that instruments and methods designed specifically to explore it will give valid and effective understanding with genuinely predictive insights and possibilities of control. Science can, and does, successfully manipulate these natural laws and duplicates their effects; without a shadow of doubt, time will broaden and deepen these areas of successful manipulation, thus demonstrating the validity of science's understandings. But in the very nature of the case it dare not or cannot admit the existence of any other kind of force or agency than natural law. The credo of science is, and must remain, that where mystery persists in nature, more knowledge or more time or better tools are required---and nothing else. As Howard Becker put it, "The faith of science is that the answer to any persisting problem is simply more science." (14) There can be no admission of supernatural agency or activity in any research program that is to be fruitful in the laboratory. As Joseph Needham said many years ago: (15)
Biologists find that their work is possible only if they define life a dynamic equilibrium in a polyphasic system consisting of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, lipoids, cycloses, and water.
Thus it has come about that a purely mechanistic philosophy, which to the Christian seems so totally "unbelieving," has nevertheless allowed tremendous advances to be made by scientific research the understanding of the perfection of God's handiwork. However is only the mechanism itself that is thus elucidated, not the meaning of it. The evidence that the machine has been disturbed by sin is either not recognized or ignored---or simply denied.
References:
1. A beautiful example of a single basic mechanism adapted to a million different end-uses is contractile muscle tissue. The point is remarked upon by J. D. Bernalin his paper, "Molecular Matrices for Living Systems," in The Origin of Pre-biological Systems, ed. Sidney W. Fox (Academic Press, New York, 1965, p. 79). He says, "All striated muscle is built on an almost identical pattern in the existing and presumably in the earlier phyla." Mechanically it is a structure whereby contraction expands the muscle! Bernalin describes it as "a marvelous Contrivance of vernier-operated crossbars. An interesting point is that this ingenious device seems to have been invented, so to speak, only once and has been taken over by all the different phyla." What a faith in evolution this is!
2. For a full treatment on these thoughts, see Volume V of the Doorway Papers, The Virgin Birth and the Incarnation: Part II, "The Nature of the Forbidden Fruit"; Part III, "If Adam Had Not Died"; and Part IV, "The Virgin Birth and the Incarnation."
3. An apt phrase coined by E. M. Forster and quoted by Leslie Paul, The Annihilation of Man, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1945, p.160.
4. Heisenberg, Werner, in The Listener, 63, London (l960):139.
5. Whittaker, E. T., "Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein," in Science 98 (1943):270.
6. Weiss, Paul, in a discussion of "Aspects of Consciousness" by J. R. Smythies, in Beyond Reductionism, ed. A. Koestler and J. R. Smythies, Hutchinson, London, 1969, p. 252.
7. Reports from England show that many species of birds and fish which have not been observed in the Thames for thirty or forty years are now returning as a result of pollution control upstream.
8. Koestler, Arthur, The Ghost in the Machine, Hutchinson, London, 1968.
9. Thorpe, W. H., Animal Nature and Human Nature, Methuen, London, 1974, p. 18.
10. Commoner, Barry, "DNA and the Chemistry of Inheritance" in American Scientist 52 (1964):387.
11. Eddington, Sir Arthur, The Nature of Physics, Univ. of Michigan Press, 1958, p. 104
12. Reversal of mutations, a fact known for many years: see, for example, R. Goldschmidt "Das Mutationoproblem" in Zeitschrift f. Ind. Abstamm. XXX, 1923; also G. R. deBeer, Embryos and Ancestors, Oxford Univ. Press, 1951, pp. 96-97, for examples; also D. Lewis and L. K Crowe, "The Theory of Revertible Mutations" in Nature, 12 Sept. 1953, p. 501. cf. G. Simpson wrote: "The elementary processes of evolution at the genetic level are all reversible. This, notably true of mutations (This View of Life, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1964 pp. 244-45). In discussing the subject, Waddington suggested that some law governs this reversibility (Beyond Reductionism, ref. 6, p. 370). R. L. Wysong reports the discovery that when DNA is injured by a mutagenic agent and its "letter" sequence is upset, the normal sequence may be restored by a kind of "biochemical first aid kit" present in the cell; the aberrant sequence is enzymatically cut out of the chain and replaced by the original sequence (The Creation-Evolution Controversy, Inquiry Press, East Lansing, Mich., 1976, p. 109).
13. Simpson, G. G. Biology and Man, Harcourt. Brace and World. New York. 1969, p. 9.
14. Becker, Howard, in a special lecture given to the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, "Science, Culture and Society," 1954.
15. Needham, Joseph: quoted by Theodore H. Savory, Mechanistic, Biology and Animal Behaviour, Watts, London, 1936, title page.
Corrections, June 20, 1997