Forgetting why we do science

Christianity keeps things in their proper relationships to each other

“It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” ~Proverbs 25:2 (ESV)

I hate for every other post here to be “men have forgotten God, that is why all this has happened”. But you know, well…

A while back I was giving an Earth Science exam, I think it was our first exam, and one of the questions was “give a couple of ways a scientist could love God, or his neighbor, using earth science”. It’s good to get students thinking, from a Christian perspective, “why should I even care about this subject?”. And, probably because they are more easily stated, most students give very practical answers, “you could study earthquakes and then help predict the next one and so save lives” or whatever. And that’s fine, that’s a true answer.

But what about “basic science”, where there isn’t any obvious practical application (and what about teaching students basic science)? Well, basic science sometimes leads to surprising applications, but not always, you can’t count on that. And here the Christian can give answers the atheist cannot. God made this universe, and it’s wondrous - not just at our human scale, but in the movement of the atoms and of the galaxies, and not just in the visible spectrum, but in the radio and x-ray too!, stuff of which most of our ancestors were completely unaware. We can worship him “deeper”, with greater intellectual depth, by understanding this universe that he has made. So all of our science matters. It is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but the glory of kings to search it out.

The firing of Claudine Gay

You probably saw that Claudine Gay, now former president of Harvard University, was fired recently after rapidly escalating and well-substantiated accusations of plagiarism, thanks especially to the efforts of Christopher Rufo. I think it was Rufo who remarked that, with all these academics rushing to defend Gay despite the fact that she was obviously guilty (in spades) of misconduct that would’ve led to consequences for any college student, and with all these journalists attacking Rufo and fellow activists for their crime of doing journalism, a situation was developing of “academics against academic standards, and journalists against journalism”. That is exactly what was happening. How did we get here?

I saw another comment - and I’m sorry, not a chance I’ll be able to find who said it now - to the effect that apparently many academics think ideology is more important than the subject they teach. And that is correct, that is exactly what has happened. You teach biology maybe, every year your students learn the same story about the structure and functions of the cell and the whole little world down there, and that’s fun enough, but that’s not going to change the world. But if your students can leave as fiery LGBT activists - well now that’s going to change the world. That actually matters.

That’s what they think. Oh, they still believe in the practical applications of science of course, they’d prefer someday to have a competent doctor to an incompetent doctor. But many of them (probably accurately) think that most of their students are not going apply the subject they are teaching them in such an immediately practical way. So why does it really matter? Well they cannot give to themselves the better answers Christianity offers. But the ideology matters, the think.

Chesterton has that comment in Orthodoxy about how the modern world is “full of the old Christian virtues gone mad” (you can search for that paragraph here). “The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” Christianity keeps things - and not just virtues - in their proper relationship to each other, helps us remember why everything matters and how and why it matters. Remove Christianity, and those things may either die out (“why should I even care about my subject?”), or go wild, lose their proper place, lose the right perspective.