4 - Is it Scientific?

Summary

SO FAR I HAVE ARGUED that faith cannot be invoked to deny facts established by scientific demonstration and that, since the historical critical method is scientific, the attitude which persists in rejecting the method on grounds of faith amounts to a rejection of scientific investigation. This means that to affirm belief in the Pentateuch as the inerrant word of God given in its totality to Moses, together with the Oral Torah, involves a rejection of the facts uncovered by the scientific approach, the scientific, historical critical method having established to the complete satisfaction of unbiased students that the Pentateuch is a composite work compiled by various hands at different periods, and that the idea of the inerrancy of the Pentateuch and hence of the creation narrative in Genesis runs counter to the scientific accounts of the age of the earth and the history of mankind. If we use fundamentalism, reluctantly, but as the most convenient term, for the attitude which affirms both the traditional belief in divine authorship of the Pentateuch and its consequent inerrancy, we have to conclude that fundamentalism is unscientific and unhistorical.

Fundamentalism and Science

A fundamentalist aware of the conflict between the two views—some fun da mentalists go their own sweet way without caring about it and good luck to them—can, of course, reject the scientific view as unfounded. He may argue that if, indeed, faith really ran counter to science, honesty would oblige us to prefer science, but, in fact, what is supposed to be the scientific picture of the universe and the Bible is not scientific at all. This was the attitude of many devout Christians in the nineteenth century in the science versus religion controversies. Another fundamentalist argument may be that every scientific hypothesis is only guesswork, to accept the results of which as established facts is sheer folly in that the facts are those stated by God Himself in Scripture. The late Lubavitcher Rebbe, for example, used to argue that to establish the vast age of the earth on the basis of the fossil records is to ignore the ‘fact’ that God may have placed the fossils there for reasons of His own.