Modern-day
science is built on the shoulders of Christian scientists who believed in the
regularity and predictability of the created order because there was a Creator
behind it all and a future to create into.
On June
5-7, 2019, I spoke at the Biblical Worldview Student Conference held at
Milligan College in Johnson City, TN. Two of my messages were on eschatology. I emphasized the
importance of biblical optimism during attack and persecution. Young people
need to believe there is a future waiting for them, that not everything is
gloom and doom and escapism.
This is
not a popular opinion. Prophecy writers and worldview dualists often dismiss
the importance and sacredness of the here and now. Everything God created is
good (Ge. 1:31; 1 Tim. 4:4) when approached in a spirit of
prayer and conformity to God’s Word.
We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for
Christians who had an optimistic eschatology even if they could not articulate
how they obtained it.
Many
Christians err by asserting that this life and the world in which we live count
for very little. But this world does count. “The earth is the LORD’s and all
that it contains” (Ps. 24:1). As “fellow‑heirs
with Christ” (Rom. 8:17), we possess, as a stewardship, this
world. God’s gift of a good creation (Gen. 1:31; 1 Tim. 4:1-5) requires righteous stewardship.
The world and this time are not to be despised. This world and this time are
the domains of God’s redemptive work. Until God decides to do something with us
personally, this world and time are the only places where we can work out our
salvation with fear and trembling.
“The
introduction of mechanical movable type printing to Europe” by Johannes
Gutenberg (c. 1398-1468) “started the Printing Revolution and is
widely regarded as the most important invention of the second millennium, the
seminal event which ushered in the modern period of human history. It played a
key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of
Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution and laid the material basis for
the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.”
If you
wanted a pamphlet or book copies, you had to hire someone to make a
hand-written copy. For approximately 4,500 years before Gutenberg invented the
printing press, books were produced by hand. They were written on surfaces of
clay, papyrus, wax, and parchment. Law books, cookbooks, works of philosophy
and science, great comedies and tragedies were all painstakingly copied, and
all too often were lost through war and neglect.
There
were very few Bibles, and the Bibles that were available were often under lock
and key by the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The moveable type
printing press changed everything. There were no longer any information
gatekeepers.
It has
been estimated that there were perhaps 30,000 books in all of Europe before
Gutenberg printed his Bible; less than 50 years later, there were as many as 10
to 12 million books. Printing technology has changed in dramatic ways in just
the last 30 years. Now anyone can be an author and publisher.
Natural
philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor Robert Boyle (1627–1691) spent a
portion of his fortune “to have the Bible translated into various languages”
and worked with the created order for the good of humankind.
In his
will and testament, Boyle “addressed his fellow members of the Royal Society of
London, wishing them all success in ‘their laudable attempts, to discover the
true Nature of the Works of God’ and ‘praying that they and all other Searchers
into Physical Truths’ may thereby add ‘to the glory of the Great Author of
Nature, and to the Comforter of mankind.’”1 This is postmillennial
thinking and action.
The
title of one of Boyle’s many books was The Christian Virtuoso, that
is, “The Christian Scientist.” Boyle was not a single Christian voice crying in
the wilderness of secular science. The membership of the Royal Society was made
up of many Christians who shared Boyle’s view that “the world was God’s
handiwork” and “it was their duty to study and understand this handiwork as a
means of glorifying God.”2
On the
archway above the wooden door of the Cavendish Laboratory, at Cambridge
University, there is a Latin inscription that reads, Magna opera
Domini. Exquista in omnes voluntates ejus.
The inscription had been placed
there at the insistence of the physicist James Clark Maxwell, the first
Cavendish professor in 1871. The inscription quotes a Psalm that reads, “Great
are the words of the Lord, sought out by all who take pleasure therein.” The
inscription summarized Maxwell’s inspiration for scientific study: the thought
that works of nature reflect the work of a designing mind. In this belief he
had been joined by many of the leading scientists of Western civilization for
over four hundred years — Copernicus, Kepler, Ray, Linnaeus, Curvier, Aggassiz,
Boyle, Newton, Kelvin, Farady, Rutherford — on and on the list could go.”3
Samuel
F.B. Morse (1791-1872), “after having established his reputation as a portrait
painter, in his middle age … contributed to the invention of a single-wire
telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of the
Morse code, and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.”
While
Morse was painting a portrait of Lafayette, a horse messenger delivered a
letter from his father that read, ‘Your dear wife is convalescent.’ The next
day he received a letter from his father detailing his wife’s sudden death.
Morse immediately left Washington for his home at New Haven, leaving the
portrait of Lafayette unfinished. By the time he arrived, his wife had already
been buried. Heartbroken that for days he was unaware of his wife’s failing
health and her death, he decided to explore a means of rapid long-distance
communication.” This happened in 1825.
n 1832,
the first message sent over Morse’s telegraph from Washington, DC, to
Baltimore, Maryland, was, “What hath God wrought?” (Num. 23:23). What has GOD brought to pass?
Overnight, the speed of information went from a few miles per hour – train,
horseback, walking – to 186,000 miles per second and hasn’t gotten any faster
since. The devices used to transmit voice and data were the stuff of science
fiction in Morse’s day and beyond.
In 1858
Cyrus West Field (1819-1892) and the Atlantic Telegraph Company laid the first
transatlantic telegraph cable along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. On August
16, 1858, the first message sent via the cable was, “Europe and America are
united by telegraphy. Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and good
will toward men.”
Modern-day science is built on the
shoulders of Christian scientists who believed in the regularity and
predictability of the created order because there was a Creator behind it all
and a future to create into.
Compare
what these men did in terms of their faith with the following:
John Nelson Darby, the founder
of dispensational premillennialism and the pre-tribulational “rapture” of the
church doctrine, the basis of the Left Behind series, taught that “the imminent
return of Christ ‘totally forbids all working for earthly objects distant in
time.’”4 This would have
included the study of mathematics, medicine, art, music, and the sciences
unless there were “immediate spiritual results.”5
Optimism
about the future no matter world conditions were swirling around, what the
newspaper headlines read, technical obstacles, or the seemingly impossible
moral climate, Christians have always forged ahead.
We should follow their example.
Instead, secularists have done a better job because they did not view time or
creaturely limitations to be roadblocks to cultural advancements. They co-opted
the fundamental principles of a classic Christian worldview and secularized it
and turned it against us.
1.
Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led
to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the end of Slavery (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 158.(↩)
2.
Stark, For the Glory of God, 158.(↩)
3.
Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the
Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York Harper/Collins, 2009), 145.(↩)
4.
Francis William Newman, Phases of Faith; or, Passages
From the History of My Creed (London: George Woodfall and Son, 1850),
35.(↩)
5.
Newman, Phases of Faith, 37.(↩)