A Christian Philosophy of
Science Education
The inaugural lecture of Dr. Gordon Wilson, Fellow of Natural Philosophy, at New Saint Andrews College's Tenth Convocation
August 19, 2003, Moscow, Idaho
To students, parents, faculty, and staff, greetings in the name of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
I am the new guy here, and I have been given a nice classical sounding title of Fellow of Natural Philosophy. Lest you get the idea that I was classically trained in a Christian atmosphere, be it known, I wasn’t. I was trained in government funded, non-classical, predominantly non-Christian, humanistic, and secular institutions from kindergarten to Ph.D. Nevertheless I am here to rebuild the ruins of my own education and prevent these fine students from having the need to. This may unsettle you a bit, much the same way it would if I told you that I was an ex-convict about to teach ethics. But to calm your nerves, I can also tell you that through the light of the scriptures and the mind renewing work of the Holy Spirit, I and my colleagues have learned by God’s grace to separate the silver from the dross by throwing our education into the refining furnace of God’s Word.
Thankfully most of you students here had a better start than we did, having avoided government schools altogether, being educated in Christian homes and Christian schools. Nevertheless, many of you received pre-refined silver to protect you from the dross, and that is good. But the down side of this is that the world’s deceptive philosophies were usually presented to you as silly straw-men that any seventh grader could easily hew to the ground. We as faculty are planning to have you read some of these nasty deceptive philosophies straight from the horse’s mouth (i.e. from the clever, albeit wrong authors who conceived them) and not the straw-man version from a Christian curriculum company. In other words, you will often be given silver ore, not just silver. However, we will also teach you how refine it in the furnace of scripture and skim off the dross. This requires a distinctively Christian worldview.
For many, your Christian worldview is a set of smudged and ill-fitting pair of spectacles that were placed on you by your well-meaning teachers and you avoided wearing them when you needed them most. I believe a true Christian worldview should be much more internal than that. It’s a renewed heart, mind, and soul endowed with spiritual wisdom from above that perceives the world as Christ does. This is not an academic enterprise. An excellent student that is not walking in love and obedience to Christ will only be puffed up like a helium balloon; a tempting target for the faculty and students who carry around pins. Therefore, we hope to avoid training you to simply parrot or regurgitate the knowledge you’ve received, rather we hope that by encouraging both spiritual faithfulness and academic discipline you will not only be taught the sword of Truth but by God’s grace you will learn how to wield it skillfully and effectively against any hollow and deceptive philosophy. To tie it in with the ore analogy, we hope to instill the ability and desire to refine the silver of truth from the dross of falsehood. We hope and pray that through this classical and Christ-honoring education you will fully grasp that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and that you will learn and desire to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and to take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
On a lighter note, although I am extremely happy to be here, the one pebble in my shoe, which I have now grown to be comfortable with, was my title of Fellow of Natural Philosophy and the course title of Natural Philosophy. I always thought myself a broadly-trained biologist especially in a world of scientific specialists and it made me feel that the broad field of biology which I was preparing to teach was a fraction of the immense realm of natural philosophy which today is called the natural sciences, i.e. chemistry, physics, biology, geology, astronomy, etc. For the first time in my life, I felt narrow. How could I presume to whip through all the sub-disciplines of the natural sciences in just one year. Even if it was in a cursory fashion, it would be so shallow that you would hardly learn or enjoy any of it. It would be like drinking out of a fire hose. No, I felt the need to limit the body of knowledge that I taught to my area of expertise, biology, and have the course title reflect that content. They agreed that I could teach with in my biological bailiwick but they seemed a trifle reluctant to have the course title changed. Was it rhetorical? Was it because the name ‘biology’ smacked of modernity and had too many negative connotations? If that was the issue, no problem, I was willing to make it sound more antiquated, say Principia Biologiae. After a talk with Mr. Schlect, I discovered that most of the faculty members were in the same boat, they were also teaching courses with relatively limited content with wicked-big course titles. This discrepancy was striking me in a way that it wasn’t striking my liberal artsy colleagues. What was my problem? Although reluctant they also seemed to humor me a little by considering my suggestions. This banter continued until I had a chat with my brother. Although, his defense of the current title didn’t really differ substantively from my earlier discussion with Mr. Schlect, it was from my brother and consequently hit home; it clicked in like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I saw the light. Let me try to explain.
The two modern approaches are: 1) teach deep and narrow i.e. Psychological Problems of Abused Pets 495, or teach shallow and broad, say History of Life. This is where so many topics are crammed in the syllabus that the teacher can’t really teach. He can only violently hose the students down with factoids for them to madly scribble down, memorize, and then regurgitate them when prompted to do so. I thought these two were the only options, but they aren’t. The other option is a broad course title with a narrow content. So why the broad title when we have no intention to teach it all? The answer is simple: we want you to think you were taught it all. Just kidding. Well, if I am kidding, are these big course titles false advertising? No, they are not. The purpose is to remind the teachers to shed light on a narrower and deeper body of knowledge (such as herpetology or ancient Greek History) so that our students can be better equipped to study and grasp other truths under the same broad discipline but different sub-disciplines (such as ornithology or American history) by the process of induction. We want you students to savor the truth, behold the beauty, and taste the goodness, of a small piece of the pie, so that you are better equipped to help yourself to other pieces of the pie and also to see the broader context in which that particular piece of the pie lies. Trying to learn it all is like getting a pie in the face. This is not a good experience. But just serving up one sliver of pie as if it is completely divorced and independent of the whole pie is also not encouraging you to see and discover interrelationships between sub-disciplines within the larger discipline. Keeping the broad course title is a reminder to both the teachers and students of the big pie from which our particular sliver was taken. This is how we are attempting to put the ‘uni’ back on to ‘versity.’
Lastly, what am I, a science guy doing here at this liberal arts institution? In order to answer that question it would be in order to present my philosophy of education with regard to the study of life. There is a great need for reformation in the area of science education. One fundamental problem is that most science teachers operate under the assumption that nature should be taught and studied in a sterile, objective manner. This approach generally results in a course devoid of any aesthetic appeal. Unfortunately many students who are forced to partake of their recommended undergraduate allowance of science receive a pile of disconnected facts about the natural world, with most of the wonder and beauty drained out of it by the leech of atheistic naturalism. If any attempt is made to highlight the magnificence of nature, all glory, honor, praise, and thanksgiving must fall upon the naturalistic gods called Time, Matter, Energy, Laws of Chemistry, Mutation, and of course Natural Selection. This is an abomination because it is a flagrant insult to the Lord of all Creation.
The Creation has a beauty, complexity, and diversity that demands an infinitely wise Creator, but its existence is regularly and dogmatically attributed to mindless matter that was begotten from nothing. This is not ultimate foolishness, but also blasphemy. This can be likened to teaching a survey of art class and refusing to acknowledge the genius of the masters or even mentioning there names. And then, adding insult to injury, proclaim that any apparent design of Michelangelo’s David, was really the result of wind and water erosion on marble. Even among Christian science teachers, because they have been trained mostly by godless scientists, teach this glorious subject the way they were taught, with materialistic descriptions and insipid definitions (monkey see, monkey do). However, they do try to Christianize their teaching by attributing ‘all these boring facts’ to God. What a tragedy! The general revelation of creation is so much more magnificent than any of the works of the masters, and yet it is often taught as a dry pile of facts. Many students probably marvel at how science teachers manage to retain any interest in their subject when they dole out the information with about as much enthusiasm as a server in a prison cafeteria dishing up lukewarm porridge. As in everything natural philosophy should be taught to bring glory to God but it also should be taught as a subset of theology simply because it is the study of God’s general revelation.
By studying nature we are studying the direct handiwork of God and by so doing it gives us great insights into His creative character. For example, His artistry and engineering are so wonderfully evident when pondering the wonderful living machines and systems spanning all levels, from biological molecules, cells, organs, organisms, and ecosystems. One who is privileged to teach our God’s creation – its beauty, complexity, and diversity – should strive to teach in a manner that students respond with reverence, wonder, praise, and thanksgiving toward the Lord of all Creation.
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