1.3 Approaches to Scripture

Tuesday Science and Scripture continues. We are in the second half of the first draft of chapter 1: "Four Relationships" 

Previous posts:

1.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
1.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

The Nature of Scripture 
Since we are asking about the relationship between science and Scripture, we should take at least a moment to clarify exactly what Scripture and science exactly are. It is perhaps ironic that, of the two, we might be less refective on the nature of Scripture than we are the nature of science. There are three main approaches to Scripture in this discussion, all of which likely intermingle in actual practice.

The first is exactly what we implied in the previous paragraph. Many readers approach Scripture in an unreflective, "what you see is what you get" manner, assuming the text means what it seems to say to them in modern English. One reads the words and defines them according to whatever meanings are in your head. If you are reading the Bible in English, then you assume that the normal meanings of English words in your world are the meanings the words have. 

For example, if you were reading the King James Version (KJV) of 1 Peter 1:15, you would encounter the words, "be ye holy in all manner of conversation." If you come to these words from the standpoint of modern English, you will likely think the verse is about how you talk to others. Yet the meaning of the English word conversation has changed over the last few hundred years. Accordingly, the English Standard Version (ESV) has "you also be holy in all your conduct."

Of course, the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (and some Aramaic), while the New Testament was written in Greek. Understanding the original meanings of the Bible's words two thousand years ago and more is not simply a matter of finding an English word that is equivalent to those Greek and Hebrew words. This is because the meanings of words are never exactly equivalent from one language to another. There is always some loss of meaning.

This is because the meaning of words is in how they are used. A dictionary does not tell us some unchanging meaning to words. A dictionary is a popularity contest. The meanings of words are numbered from most common use of a word to the least common. Meanings come and go. New meanings are always being added as they arise in culture, and older meanings (like that of conversation in the KJV as "conduct") first become archaic and then are dropped entirely.

For this reason, the meaning that first comes to our mind when we read the Bible may approximate the meaning the verse had when it was written, but it might not. Our first impression may actually turn out to be quite far from what the verse really meant. An English dictionary is only helpful if we do not know what the English words in our Bible mean, which we probably do.

Further, these meanings are embedded in a cultural world. When I read the word husband or wife in the Bible, I am not reading about a modern husband or wife. I am not reading about families as they likely exist in my world. I am reading about husbands, wives, and families as they existed in the biblical worlds.

Additionally, many Christians tend to read the Bible in an atomistic way. That is to say, we may tend to focus on individual verses rather than reading the Bible the way we would normally read a book, following paragraph to paragraph. If we remove verses from their paragraphs and chapters, we are even less likely to be reading the words "in context." To read in context is to read the words in the flow of an overall book of the Bible as well as in the light of its historical background.

All that is to say, we may assume that science is what needs to be adjusted in relation to Scripture when our understanding of Scripture itself may be incorrect. For example, Martin Luther once mocked the new idea that the earth might go around the sun, quoting Joshua 10 where the sun stands still. [21] Taking Joshua 10:13 literally, Luther assumed that the verse was saying it was the sun that was going around the earth and that it stopped in its course. In the 1500s and 1600s, there were many Christians who saw any language in the Bible about the sun rising or setting as evidence that it was in fact the sun that goes around the earth (e.g., Eccl. 1:5).

Today, we would take this language phenomenologically. That is to say, we take this as informal language that speaks of the world in terms of how it appears, not as scientific statements that should be taken literally. For example, Paul may be alluding to the dead when he says that every knee "under the earth" will bow to Christ (Phil. 2:10), but few Christians today think of the center of the earth as the true abode of the dead, even if we might bury their bodies under the earth. Similarly, when Paul talks about being taken up into "the third sky" (2 Cor. 12:2), few of us think that he is revealing that God's throne is in the upper atmosphere.

What is interesting is that we are usually willing to adjust our hermeneutic -- our way of interpreting Scripture -- in these instances even though Paul and the authors of Joshua and Ecclesiastes themselves may have taken this imagery literally. We are willing to say, "The point of the revelation was not the literal structure of the universe but the event being described or the actual point being made." Determinations of whether we should read such imagery literally or figuratively are often made unreflectively, depending on what our Christian traditions find important or generally ignore.

However, in other cases, we may actually be mistaken about what the text really meant. Our interpretation may be wrong. We may be reading the words as they strike us in our world rather than in the way the words were intended to be understood in their worlds.

In addition to an unreflective reading of Scripture, there are two other approaches that are significantly more reflective. We might call one a presuppositional approach and the other an inductive approach. The first says, "We cannot rightly understand Scripture unless we have a number of key faith assumptions in place." The other says that "We should let the text tell us what it meant by reading the words in their most likely original literary and historical contexts."

What is an inductive approach? An inductive approach simply tries to read the words for what they would have most likely meant when they were first written. This is a potentially complicated task. Indeed, we often lack sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on the original meaning beyond a reasonable doubt. In many cases, the meaning of the Bible is "under-determined." [22]

Nevertheless, an inductive approach draws on evidence from context to identify the most likely original meanings of a passage. This includes the literary context of a passage -- the words that come before and after the text in question. What does the train of thought lead us to think the words most likely meant. It also draws on the historical context of a passage -- its likely historical and situational background. This latter context is much more difficult to identify with certainty.

As relates to science, one of the most important questions is that of genre. The genre of a document is the type of literature it is. For example, we know not to laugh (generally) at an obituary or to cry after reading a comic strip meant to be funny. We absorb these expectations from our culture without even realizing it. 

Yet the expectations of biblical genres were part of the biblical worlds. I will not naturally come to the biblical texts with those assumptions because they were shaped in a world that is ancient and likely quite foreign to mine. What, for example, were the expectations of history writing when the biblical texts were written? What were the expectations of story telling or poetry or prophecy? 

For some, this may seem to be an attempt to dodge the "plain meaning" of the text. Yet, again, the plain meaning of the text to me is a meaning based on my world, not the text's world. Is my world really more important than theirs in determining the meaning? Do not the biblical texts themselves say that they were written to ancient Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, and so forth?

There is, however, another approach to the meaning of the biblical text that we might call presuppositional. To be clear, there are presuppositions -- pre-assumptions -- involved in the first two approaches mentioned above. The unreflective interpreter has largely unexamined assumptions. The inductive interpreter assumes that we have enough evidence to make reasonable decisions about the meaning of the text that at least approach or aim at objectivity.

What distinguishes a presuppositionalist approach is the nature and extent of the assumptions made. First, such assumptions are largely theological in nature -- they have to do with the nature of Scripture, the nature of human knowledge, and how God reveals himself. For example, we mentioned above that the meaning of Scripture is often under-determined. Many "post-liberal" theologians thus argue that it is not only permissible but inevitable that we bring our theological assumptions into our interpretations. [23]

Another group of interpreters that have long emphasized the role of presuppositions in interpretation are those who come from the standpoint of a "Reformed epistemology." The Reformed tradition stands in the stream of John Calvin's thought (1509-64), who famously emphasized that God chooses or "elects" certain individuals to be saved while not choosing others. The basis of God's choice is his decision alone and has nothing to do with any choices on the part of the elect.

It is thus natural that some in this tradition would see a proper understanding of Scripture as something that is given by God rather than investigated. You might say that the most important truths are more revealed than discovered. Karl Barth (1886-1968), perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the twentieth century, wrote a masterpiece of theology known as the Church Dogmatics. [24] In them, he takes the posture that the most important truths about God are not to be argued for on the basis of evidence but to be believed as a matter of dogma.

Two more recent, leading Reformed figures in this regard are Alvin Plantinga and Vern Poythress. [25] Both would strongly emphasize that science is neither objective nor presuppositionless. We have already seen that this is the case from the work of Thomas Kuhn. 

A second key point that both Plantinga and Poythress make is that science often proceeds from a naturalist or anti-supernaturalist presupposition. What this means is that the possibility of God designing or being involved with the creation or processes of nature is either precluded or bracketed out. Naturalism presupposes that divine intervention cannot be used as an explanation for any scientific data. [26]

On the one hand, it is understandable that science would normally bracket the question of divine or "supernatural" intervention. When you are looking for an explanation for why mold grows on cheese, demons are not a particularly helpful explanation, as we will discuss in the next chapter. Nevertheless, what if God actually does exist and intervene in nature? What if the true explanation for the fossil evidence is that God actively participated in the development of simpler to more complex forms of life, as old earth creationists believe? In that case, the assumptions of normal science would actively preclude arriving at the correct explanation.

Christians are theists. That is to say, historic Christianity both believes that God is objectively real and that God is involved in the creation. A number of prominent scientists from the 1600s and 1700s were deists. They believed that God had created the world as a self-operating machine but that he was no longer involved in the operations of the world. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) would be a good example of someone whose views approached those of a deist. []

However, deism is not an option for a historic Christian, not least because the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the central features of Christian faith. It would be hard to underestimate the degree to which the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are an "intrusion" into the natural cause-effect flow of nature! For this reason, historic Christians by definition believe that God remains involved in the world.

The degree to which presuppositions about Scripture should be involved in scientific thinking can vary from one presuppositionalist to another. For example, Ken Ham is perhaps the best known spokesman at this time for what is called "young earth creationism." [27] He would interpret Genesis 1 to present creation in six literal 24 hour days.

For him, presuppositionalism not only assumes this interpretation of Genesis 1 but it demands that all scientific evidence must be analyzed with this assumption in view. If you attend a creation-evolution debate in which Ham represents the creationist side, you will hear much about presuppositions in his presentation. In his case, the evidence is not allowed to come to any conclusion but one that coheres with his interpretations of the relevant biblical passages.

On the other end of the spectrum, Francis Collins might represent a theist who looks for minimal involvement of God in the course of nature. Collins is well-known both for his leadership of the Human Genome Project and his strong Christian faith. In the late 1900s, the Human Genome Project mapped human DNA for the first time. Yet Collins is also known for his conversion to Christian faith, a pilgrimage captured well in his classic, The Language of God. [28]

Yet in his acceptance of evolution he largely rejects the option that God might have directed such a process. [29] Although he is a theist, he suggests that resort to the miraculous should be a course of last resort. Any "God of the gaps" approach -- which uses divine intervention to explain current gaps in our scientific knowledge -- should be strongly avoided. [] We will see in the next chapter why this approach is understandable. Nevertheless, it is possible that Collins' assumptions could lead him to miss God's divine hand when it was actually there in a pronounced way. 

[insert discussion of inerrancy]

We will keep these three basic approaches to Scripture in mind in the discussions of this book. Ideally, we would move from unreflectivity about our approach either to a primarily inductive or presuppositionalist approach. However, we likely will adopt some mixed approach, with at least some presuppositions and some evidentiary elements. We should keep these options in mind as we move forward.

[21] In Martin Luther's Table Talk as recorded by Mathesius (1539)

[22] See below for Stephen Fowl as an example of someone who would say that the meaning of the Bible is so underdetermined that it is fully acceptable to read it with theological presuppositions in place, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Blackwell, 1998).

[23] I would describe the post-liberal tradition as thinkers who have come from mainstream (liberal) Christian traditions who have rejected what we might call a modernist, evidentiary oriented approach to the most important truths. Rather, these thinkers emphasize the legitimacy of giving primacy to certain faith assumptions apart from evidentiary reasoning. 

The work of Hans Georg Gadamer often stands in the background of such thinkers. See Truth and Method (Mohr Siebeck, 1960). Gadamer argued that our readings of texts are an inevitable fusion of our "horizon" with the horizon of the text. We thus cannot see the historical meaning of the text-in-itself but only the fusion of our world with the world of the text.

[24] The series was published in English by T & T Clark in 13 parts and 4 volumes from 1936-77.

[25] E.g., Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University, 2011); Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2006). See also Ransom Poythress, Has Science Made God Unnecessary? (Christian Focus, 2022).  

[26] The roots of such bracketing go back to the Enlightenment, not least David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

[27] See especially answersingenesis.com. 

[28] Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2006).

[29] Collins, Language, 45-52

Gen Eds Series P5: Philosophy of Science

This is my fourth philosophy post in a series called, "General Education in a Nutshell." Philosophy is the first of ten subjects I plan to overview in this series. These are the subjects a person normally takes in college (or high school) to be a generally educated person (most of them also make up what is sometimes called the "liberal arts").

The first four philosophy posts were:

• Philosophy Overview
• Philosophy of Religion
• Epistemology
• Critical Thinking

1. The previous post was on critical thinking, one of the three primary components in the pursuit of truth (assumptions, evidence, and reasoning). Critical thinking relates to reason as a tool and path of truth. Another path to truth is that of evidence and experience. So if we covered logic in the previous post, in this post we talk about the philosophy of science.

The rise of the modern era of science is often traced back to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Bacon developed what we now call the scientific method. The scientific method seems so obvious that it's hard to believe that it was somewhat of an innovation at the time of Bacon.

Yet theology was "queen of the sciences" in the Middle Ages. and beliefs about the world even in the days the Greeks were largely speculative. That is to say, "knowing" in the Middle Ages did not so much involve testing or experimentation or gathering evidence. Rather, individuals came up with ideas that expressed the mysteries of the world in some form pleasing to them or their time.

The scientific method, as we all learned in high school, basically looks at evidence and forms a hypothesis. That hypothesis is then tested, modified, and tested over and over again against reality. Then once the hypothesis has proved to be very successful at explaining and predicting what will happen under certain circumstances, we begin to call this hypothesis a theory.

It is important to note that when scientists speak of something as a theory, they don't mean it is just a blind guess. The scientific community only begins to call something a theory if a hypothesis has proved to predict a particular outcome successfully over and over and over and over again. A theory in science is thus quite different from mere speculation.

It is unheard of these days for the scientific community to call things, "laws." Back in the 1600s when Newton was exploring nature, he spoke of the "law of universal gravitation." But since the 20th century, scientists are generally not so bold as to call things, "laws." So there is the theory of relativity and the theory of evolution.

Again, we should not think that scientists are tentative about these theories just because they are called, "theories." They are called theories because of their predictive capacity. Yet we do not call them the law of relativity or the law of evolution. So many paradigms have shifted in recent times that scientists wisely refrain from speaking about new laws of nature. Rather, they develop and modify successful theories.

2. Probably the most important philosopher of science in the late twentieth century was Thomas Kuhn. His work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, drastically changed the way we think about science.

Thomas Kuhn studied the way in which key scientific perspectives or paradigms have changed throughout history, especially in the last few hundred years. He called these changes, paradigm shifts. What he found was that there was a strong social dynamic to these changes and that they were not driven entirely by evidence at all. [1]

For example, Copernicus (1473-1543) is known for suggesting that the earth circled the sun (heliocentric paradigm) rather than the traditional view that the sun went round the earth (geocentric view). But the math of Copernicus' explanation for the motion of the planets was not actually as accurate a predictor of planetary motion as that of the Ptolemaic view. However, the geocentric view was extremely complex, while Copernicus got close with a fairly simple circular model.

Kuhn's point is that the change came from a change in perspective far more than it did from new evidence. Of course when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) suggested elliptical orbits, then the math of a heliocentric universe was not only simpler but more accurate as well. Kuhn pointed out that the shift became established because the older generation eventually died off and weren't around any more to fight it.

We see these sorts of paradigm shifts throughout the modern era. Einstein (1879-1955) of course brought one of the most remarkable paradigm shifts since Newton. But Einstein himself never agreed with quantum mechanics in its prevailing form. Eventually, Einstein died and is no longer around to try to poke holes in the prevailing quantum understanding.

Kuhn may have taken his sense of these paradigm shifts a little too far. Initially, he seemed to suggest that there really wasn't any truth at all to scientific paradigms. They only wandered from one perspective to the next. In the second edition of his book, he modified his position a little.

His point however is well-made. There are paradigms in all fields of knowledge, including the way a certain generation reads the Bible. Once a prevailing point of view is established, it becomes very hard to dislodge it. Kuhn called established paradigms, "normal science."

3. We might synthesize these insights in the following way. There are individual bits of evidence we experience with our senses (we might call them "facts"). Tree, crash, sun, rise, wire, shock. From "empiricists" (sense-oriented thinkers) of the past like John Locke and David Hume, we can speak of our human tendency to glue these individual bits of experience together.

We take simple impressions and glue them together in our minds in certain ways to form complex ideas (we might call them "interpretations"). Kant revealed that a lot of this gluing has to do with basic ways our minds process things. We glue causes to effects, for example, in various ways.

Kuhn showed that there's more to this gluing than some reliable mind-software we can count on. We come to the game of interpretation with a tendency to see some data and not to see others. We inevitably "select" some data and "deselect" others. There is almost always data that doesn't fit in our paradigm (I call this, "naughty data"). We tend to ignore it when we are with others who are also willing to ignore it.

This incongruent data though can sow the seeds for future paradigm shifts.

4. In our current situation, almost everything we believe about the atomic and subatomic world is not directly observable. That is to say, it involves extremely highly developed interpretations of "facts" at significant remove. We talk about electrons, quarks, spins, and probability waves, but these are not "facts" per se. They are highly effective systems of interpretation or paradigms.

There is another word we might use, namely, myths. While it is popular to speak of myths as stories that are false, there is a more sophisticated and arguably more useful definition. A myth is a story that expresses a mystery. The quantum world below the atomic level is mysterious indeed. We cannot see it. We can only tell stories that express in as detailed a fashion as possible the "mysteries" that we observe.

In that sense, human paradigms are a certain kind of myth. Scientific equations are the form they often take. They express, often in an extremely detailed form, the mysteries that we observe on our macro-level. The names we give the characters in our stories--gravitons, gluons, positrons--are much more specific and useful than a Thor or a Zeus. But they are not, as Kant said, what these things are in themselves. They are expressions of the world as it appears experimentally to us.

5. A good deal of energy was spent in the twentieth century debating the truth status of claims. Positivism insisted that we could not speak of anything as true if it could not be observed. Hopefully you can see that paradigms cannot be observed at all. They are rather "stories" we tell ourselves to express the things that we can observe. Positivism dies when you realize that you cannot observe positivism as a paradigm.

Karl Popper (1902-1994), by contrast, suggested that the key to truth in science had to do with falsifiability. Something had to be falsifiable to be considered scientific. Everything else was unscientific, something different from the kinds of things that science treated.

But we can see that both of these approaches do not fully realize the "mythical," paradigmatic nature of all thinking. The question is how precisely and accurately a paradigm accounts for the details of observation. A paradigm might work for part of the data and not for some other part. In quantum mechanics, some approaches work to address one set of questions but not another.

So most of our scientific "knowledge," as it were, ultimately falls under the category of the pragmatic test for truth. We should not think of scientific theories as factual, but as workable. We use scientific paradigms to account for the data we observe and to predict what will happen under certain circumstances. But these are really finely tuned myths, expressions of the mysteries of the world, not the world as it actually is.

6. So it is with all our paradigms and interpretations, including those that have to do with the Bible. Individual statements in the Bible are like bits of data. We interpret them by placing them within some context (and there are countless options). Then we "select" some verses as the central ones and "deselect" others as peripheral. There are always "naughty verses" that do not fit as well into our theology.

Our theology of some subject is our paradigm. For those who say they focus on the Bible in relation to their theology, theology involves various paradigms for reading the Bible in relation to specific subjects. Different Christian groups have different paradigms. Every once and a while, a group will undergo a paradigm shift, sometimes without even knowing it. Different verses become centralized. Other verses are now paid less attention to or even ignored.

Why are there 30,000 Christian groups? Because most of what we believe about the Bible is interpretation, using the paradigms we have inherited and invented.

Next Week: Philosophy 6: What is real?

Classic Reading

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

[1] In fact, the first edition of his study suggested that paradigm shifts in science weren't about truth at all.

Philosophies of God and Science

In celebration of my philosophy textbook, which took about 10 years to get published (now down to $64), I started doing my philosophy in bullet points, as I had done my theology. Unlike the textbook, which tries to present all basic positions fairly, my last post gave my sense of most appropriate positions on epistemology and metaphysics.

So here is a second installment, treating the philosophy of God and the philosophy of science. I consider the first to be a subset of metaphysics and the second a subset of epistemology. Since I had largely done my philosophy of religion in the previous post, I have mostly just repeated it here.

Philosophy of Religion
Faith and Reason

• The best working epistemology for a Christian is, "faith seeking understanding" (fides quaerens intellectum, credo ut intelligam). Begin with faith and pursue further understanding from there. Given the epistemological predicament in which we find ourselves, however, such faith should be potentially revisable.
• Belief in God is reasonable, although from our current capacity of understanding, it does not seem provable. Abelard was not completely wrong (intellego ut credam) but not entirely correct either.
• Items of faith in general are, in principle, reasonable to believe. They may not be obvious and certainly may not be provable (that is to say, the evidence will rarely "demand" the verdict of faith). Christian thinkers like Aquinas were overconfident in how much about Christian faith is more or less provable. 
• At the same time, items of faith are not, in general, irrational. God is not a trickster with evidence. Christian thinkers like Tertullian and Kierkegaard go too far in their sense of "blind faith" (credo quia absurdam). Similarly, presuppositionalists like van Til and even Barth give us the impression that Christianity can't survive in an evidentiary world, which seems problematic for the long term survival of Christianity. Christian epistemologies that cannot survive the Enlightenment have the whiff of failure.

Arguments for the Existence of God

• The idea that a Being as powerful as the universe created it is as reasonable as to suggest as that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe as generated the universe as we know it. (cosmological argument). If so, he would thereby be all powerful in relation to this creation (omnipotence).
• The idea that the universe was designed and initiated by an Intelligence is as reasonable as the notion that some other unobserved material reality beyond this universe has generated the universe as we know it. (argument from design or teleological argument) If so, he would thereby at least know all the possibilities of this creation (full middle knowledge)
• The idea that, amid the contingency of existence as we know it, there is an entity with necessary existence seems reasonable. This line of thinking may actually prove God's existence as a Necessary Being, but we are not intelligent/informed enough to know it at this time. (argument from necessity, Aquinas, a form of ontological argument).
• Anselm's formulation of the ontological argument is nonsense (I can conceive of a greatest Being, but he wouldn't be greatest if he didn't actually exist. Therefore he exists.).
• Other arguments for the existence of God are less convincing (moral argument). Arguments from miracles and personal experience of God tend to be more individually convincing.

Problem of Evil and Suffering

• The biggest challenge for faith in a benevolent God is the question of evil and suffering. Why does a good God allow the righteous to suffer?
• The best suggestions are the free will theodicy and the soul making theodicy. The soul making theodicy (Irenaeus) suggests that suffering provides a context in which we can grow morally and become mature people. 
• The free will theodicy (Augustine) suggests that a world in which we can choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we all choose good by nature. But if God allows us to choose, some will choose badly and, thus, we will have evil in the world.
• Others, such as Pascal or Kierkegaard would suggest that we cannot hope to fully understand such things. Lack of clarity creates a context in which faith can thrive.
• It seems likely that many things that we think of as contradictory to goodness (e.g., death, suffering) are actually not and should not be thought of as incompatible with a good God.

Philosophy of Science
Cause and Effect

• As a heuristic tool, we might say that God has created the world to run like a machine according to certain "natural laws." 
• The "natural" refers to the universe as it runs apart from God's intervention. "Miracles," then, properly so called, are when God or some other spiritual agent with the ability to circumvent natural law, interrupts the natural cause and effect flow of events. We might call such an event a "supernatural" event.
• At present, there would seem to be a certain fundamental indeterminacy on the atomic level, where the normal understanding of cause and effect may not fully apply. Nature, on its most fundamental level, may therefore be more indeterminate rather than determined.
• Nevertheless, the law of cause and effect seems thoroughly dependable on the macro-level of reality.

Scientific Method

• Scientific theories are ultimately not about explaining the world as it is (das Ding an sich, Kant) but are very precise "myths" that express how nature appears to work under certain circumstances.
• The scientific method remains without question the most appropriate evidentiary approach to truth. Gather evidence. Formulate a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Establish a theory. Continue to modify the theory as appropriate.
• The simplest explanation, without being too simple, is the most reasonable explanation (Occam's Razor, Einstein form). A good hypothesis accounts for most of the data in the simplest way conceivable.
• A good scientific theory often has an "elegance" to it and often results in unexpected convergences with other scientific problems.
• Inductive thinking, such as scientific reasoning, tends to be open-ended when one cannot (as is usually the case) account for all the data. In that sense, inductive reasoning in particular is almost always revisable in the light of new data that does not fit the existing hypothesis ("naughty data").

Scientific Paradigms

• In all areas of life, we function by way of certain paradigms or ways of organizing data in particular domains.
• No one can be completely objective. There is always prioritization and selection of data, as an expression of the operating paradigms.
• All paradigms involve assumptions. There is no such thing as a purely evidentiary framework of thinking. Fundamental presuppositions are always involved in the organization of the data of reality. However, some presuppositions are more basic than others. The most appropriate evidentiary assumptions should be "atomic" in size, rather than whole systems.
• Worldviews are our collective paradigms. Usually there are harmonies between our individual paradigms such that you might say that we broadly have a certain "worldview." However, most worldview rhetoric smacks of extreme oversimplification and tends to be particularly "violent" in relation to particulars.
• Most of our paradigms are inherited from our environment, although one might argue, I suppose, that some are genetically inherent to the human brain. We do not see the world as it is (das Ding an sich, Kant) but the world as our paradigms organize it.
• Most of our paradigms are thus a product of our cultures and subcultures, with a strong element of our individual personality at work in the mix as well.
• Given the nature of inductive hypothesis, almost all paradigms, if not all, are potentially revisable in the light of new data or better hypotheses on how to organize the data.
• The history of science is thus a story of ongoing paradigm shifts (Thomas Kuhn). Normal science is what Kuhn called the inherited scientific paradigm, which he argued tended to be persistent.
• A paradigm shift occurs when someone suggests a significantly different way of accounting for what I call "naughty data" that existing paradigms do not as easily account for ("The Devil is in the details.").
• Such shifts are often resisted by more entrenched scholars of the standing paradigm. They eventually die off. Scientific "progress" thus has a significant element of sociology and is not just about objective truth.

Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi

Those in the know are now very disappointed for clicking on this link. No, I'm not going to discuss the question of whether Kuhn "plagiarized" Polanyi's ideas. By the way, I haven't looked into it, but I bet the reason Kuhn had massive influence and Polanyi is little known is because Kuhn's analysis comes in a more narrative form...

I've had writer's block on philosophy for about two months now. Chapter 8 of my philosophy text has just sat there waiting for two textboxes to get done. Argh!

So since I don't know if I will post anything else today, here is, finally, my textbox on Thomas Kuhn. I'll never go back to do a PhD in philosophy--I pity those who do. But if I had lots of extra time on my hand, I would love to explore the thought of Hilary Putnam. He sure makes me feel stupid...

And now, the textbox:

"Thomas Kuhn lived from 1922-1996 and is best known in philosophy for his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Philosophically, Kuhn stands in between the logical positivists, who believed that only things that could be observed could be considered true in any real sense, and postmodern philosophers of science like Paul Feyerabend (1924-94), who did not believe science was truly about reality at all but about sociology and groups of people interacting with each other.

The most central challenge of Kuhn’s work to the prevalent understanding of science is his sense that scientific discovery is not strictly an ever improving movement toward greater and greater understanding of reality. Rather, significant human elements are involved in the process of what we think of as scientific development. Differing scientific “paradigms” operate from categories that are “incommensurable,” meaning that they cannot really be compared with each other. Critics of this claim have suggested in contrast that some of the fundamental observations that paradigms interpret remain the same and thus that differing paradigms do allow for comparison.

Kuhn himself was quite keen to distance himself from the label of “relativist” in the aftermath of his first edition. In his second edition, for example, he suggests that a paradigm that covers more content in its scope—explains a larger pool of data—can be considered a better paradigm. He thus did not reject the basic idea of scientific progress.

Some overlap exists between the thought of Thomas Kuhn and the slightly earlier Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) such that some of Polanyi’s followers initially saw Kuhn as borrowing from Polanyi’s thought. Thus Kuhn brought Polanyi into explicit conversation with his ideas in the second edition of Structure. Polanyi argued that “tacit knowledge,” elements of our thought that are not completely conscious or easily articulated, is involved in all knowing. We thus cannot be completely objective because there are always hidden elements steering our thinking (Polanyi is associated with critical realism). Scientific development is thus not strictly an objective development, but human factors are also involved.

Christians and Evolution (philosophy)

Let the failure begin... I wasn't able to finish my planned section of the philosophy book for today. I used all my writing time finishing, polishing, and editing the previous chapter. So I'll share some of what I worked on yesterday in this regard, and move on.
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It is beyond the scope of this book to engage in Christian debates over the science of macroevolution. [1] Over the last few decades, a significant literature has emerged against it by scientific creationists and more recently, by those who hold to Intelligent Design theory (ID). The former group marshaled biologists, geologists, and other scientists in the 1970s to argue for a young earth whose complexion is best explained on the basis of catastrophes like
the biblical Flood.[i] Their model of the earth’s geology is thus called catastrophism, as opposed to the uniformitarianism of Darwinism. Uniformitarianism assumes that the earth’s geology has resulted from the same slow processes we observe today, just over billions of years.
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textbox material
Darwinism: the idea that evolution has taken place gradually over millions of years simply by nature “selecting” organisms better equipped to survive in particular environments

mutation: a change in the fundamental molecular structure of an organism

neo-Darwinism: a revision of Darwin’s theory that understands mutation as the method by which organisms arise that are better equipped to survive in particular environments

scientific creationism: a Christian approach to scientific evidence that arose in the 1970s to counter belief in macroevolution. It assumes a literal seven day creation and explains the earth’s geology by recourse to a world-wide flood

Intelligent Design theory (ID): a more recent Christian approach to scientific evidence that suggests it cannot be explained adequately without recourse to an Intelligent Designer, namely, God

uniformitarianism: the idea that the earth’s geology can be explained on the assumption that conditions have largely remained the same over the course of its history

catastrophism: the idea that the earth’s geology is largely explained by a major catastrophe, namely, a world-wide flood
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Intelligent design theory takes a slightly different tactic.[ii] It suggests that certain aspects of life reflect an “irreducible complexity” that could not have evolved by chance. They attempt to demonstrate that the evolution of certain things like proteins is a mathematical impossibility by chance, because they are so complex. Unless they were designed, we cannot account for their existence.

At the same time, the evolutionary community has not stood still either. Many evolutionists no longer hold to the strict uniformitarianism of Darwinism and now suggest that the most radical phases of evolution may take place “quickly” in various spurts (quickly meaning over thousands rather than millions of years). This process is sometimes called punctuated (not spontaneous) equilibrium.

Again, our purpose is not to examine the science involved. We can refer to a body of Christian scientific literature that makes scientific arguments against macroevolution.[iii] Other Christian scientists argue for theistic evolution, the idea that God directed the evolutionary process.[iv] When the theory of evolution first began to gain prominence, some Christians strategized to fit it with their Christian understanding. For example, some suggested what became known as the “gap theory,” the idea that dinosaurs and other extinct animals might have lived in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. They suggested that Satan’s fall from heaven might have caused the world of 1:1 to become “formless and empty” in 1:2.

Over time, however, evolution was used as an excuse for social Darwinism, the idea that the rich and powerful should naturally run over the poor and powerless in society. After all, they were the fittest! It is quite possible that William Jennings Bryan, who famously argued against evolution in the famed Scope’s Trial of 1925, was so vehemently opposed to evolution primarily because of what he saw as its unchristian social implications, more than because it violated a literal understanding of the Bible.[v] That emphasis of scientific creationism came more to the front in the 1970s.

We might briefly mention the biblical texts that most come into play in such debates. The first is obviously Genesis 1, which presents creation in terms of seven “days.” Theistic evolutionists take such language as figurative and poetic rather than a straightforward, literal description. Perhaps the days represent ages of history, they might say. At the same time, fundamentalist interpreters put a high premium on taking the days as literal 24 hour days. Similarly, when Genesis says God made everything “after its kind,” this description is taken to preclude evolution between species.
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more textbox material

social Darwinism: the application of the idea of “survival of the fittest” to its “have’s” and “have not’s,” justifying the domination of the powerful over society’s weak

theistic evolution: the idea that God in some way directed the evolutionary process or at least that macroevolution is compatible with belief in God
___________

Perhaps a greater challenge to the theistic evolutionist view comes from the book of Romans in the New Testament. In Romans 5, Paul tells the Romans that death entered the world through sin, through the sin of Adam in particular (e.g., 5:12). From the similar passage in 1 Corinthians 15:22, it is clear that Paul includes physical death in what he is talking about. [6] Yet evolution requires lots and lots of death to take place before Adam. The theistic evolutionist must thus take Paul’s argument somewhat less than literally.

For some, like Kenneth Miller, the Adam and Eve story might shift into the category we explored at the beginning of the chapter: a story expressing a mystery that does not refer to historical figures.[vi] This solution of course then removes for us Augustine’s “free will” explanation for world-wide evil and natural calamity—we would have no human parent on which to pin the “Fall.” Other theistic evolutionists see God much more involved in the process of evolution. They might accept the existence of an Adam and see him as the first homo sapiens into which God put a soul. They would then see Paul’s language of death really having more to do with spiritual death than physical death. Indeed, they might argue that Adam and Eve themselves were designed to die unless they ate of the tree of life (Gen. 3:22).

What is non-negotiable for the historic Christian is that God created the universe and has all power and knowledge of it as He sees fit. Further, God is involved in the world and through Christ will eventually set right everything that is wrong in it. Within these boundaries, we find some variety of perspective among faithful Christians. Each one will have to decide what they think is acceptable to believe.

[1] For the spectrum of positions Christians have taken on this issue, see Greg Boyd, ed., Across the Spectrum (***).

[i] E.g., Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (Green Forest, AR: Master, 1974).
[ii] E.g., Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer, Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000).
[iii] In addition to nn.ii-iii, we might also mention Michael J. Behe’s, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Free, 2006).
[iv] E.g., Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street, 1999).
[v] See Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 189.

[6] For an arugment that Paul does not have physical death in view, see David Snoke, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth (***).

[vi] See n.iv. Another excellent resource for Christianity in relation to science is Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (***).

8.3 Philosophy of Science

Whether individuals could describe it or not, the scientific method is deeply ingrained in the consciousness of Western culture. Our teachers in middle school and high school at least tried to teach it to us. But we probably learn it more effectively from watching police and crime shows where they gather evidence and form hypotheses about "who done it." They test these hypotheses against the evidence, gather further evidence, test the hypothesis some more.

[textbox: scientific method, hypothesis, theory]

At some point they move beyond considering someone a "person of interest" and they will declare them a "suspect" in the case. Eventually they may arrest the person and put them on trial. Finally, a jury will, at least in theory, weigh the evidence again to decide whether guilt is the most logical conclusion given the evidence, at least "beyond a reasonable doubt." As we have argued previously, it would seem impossible to prove anything of this sort absolutely--the world of inductive thinking is a world of probabilities, not absolute certainties.

The process is so common sensical that it hardly seems something anyone would question. After all, isn't this the way we operate in our day to day activities? I hear a thumping on the roof. I go and investigate. Is it a burglar? Santa Claus? Too big for a squirrel. Not sure if it was heavy enough for a person. I go upstairs and look out the window. Oh, it's a raccoon.

On the other hand, most of us are scarcely consistent. Sometimes--perhaps more often than we might admit to ourselves--we form conclusions on the basis of almost no evidence at all. We "pre-judge" someone or something on some irrelevant basis. This is the stuff of prejudice. We see a person's color, race, or gender and presume that they must be a certain way. In chapter 2, we called this the informal fallacy of hasty generalization, with other fallacies often involved as well.

[textbox: prejudice]

Nevertheless, even if we are not good inductive thinkers, most Westerners would likely claim in theory that they consider this method of investigation legitimate and valuable. You'll remember from chapter 2 that inductive thinking is when you look at a collection of data and induce a general truth from it. We are so used to this way of thinking in science that it is hard for most of us to imagine a time when the best known thinkers were primarily talking about truth from a deductive standpoint, where you start with certain assumptions and then play them out in particular details.

To be sure, we are seeing a resurgence of this older deductive approach to truth today, especially since postmodernism raises questions about whether we can really induce truth from our observations of the world. We live in a climate where it is acceptable simply to start with large, unproved assumptions and talk about reality from there. Some Christians, such as the radical orthodoxy movement we mentioned in chapter 2, see this situation as a great climate for Christian faith.

Many of postmodernism's criticisms seem to be valid, as we will see later in this section. However, our hunch is that the usefulness of inductive thinking will continue to predominate in the days to come. Its usefulness in expressing accurately what happens in the world, as well as in enabling us to do things in the world is too great for it not to continue. If every group simply starts with their own untouchable assumptions and proceeds from there, then such groups can hardly even talk to each other.

Historians often trace the re-emergence of inductive reasoning and scientific method to Sir Francis Bacon in the 1500s (1561-1626). But others might suggest that Bacon himself was riding a wave that goes further back to the theologian Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s (ca. 1225-74), and then beyond him to Islamic philosophers like Ibn Sina (sometimes called Avicenna, ca.980-1037) and Ibn Rushd (sometimes called Averroes, 1126-98). These individuals did use deductive reasoning to a significant extent. But their reasoning often began with some observation of the world, such as the fact that for something to move, it has to be pushed. In that sense, Bacon more represents the culmination of a trajectory rather than a completely new beginning.

Francis Bacon secured his name as the "father of scientific method" primarily because of a book he wrote called the New Organon. In it, he suggested that when trying to arrive at a conclusion on some matter relating to the world, a person should create tables of data. You would put data relating to something you were studying, like heat, in one column. Then you would put data relating to the opposite, like coldness, in another. Then you would test hypotheses against the columns, to see if your understanding matched the way the data played out. This grounded the study of the world in observation rather than in making deductions from "axioms" you assume as a starting point.

[Organon quote]

A few features of Bacon's approach are significant. First, he assumes that a person can be more or less objective or unbiased as he or she looks at the data. Secondly, he assumes that you can come to a definite and final answer to the question you are posing to the data. Both of these assumptions came under serious question in the twentieth century.

[quote: "knowledge is power"]

One of the main figures to question these two assumptions was Karl Popper (1902-94). Popper rightly pointed out that the very questions with which we come to some set of data colors the answers we will draw from that data. No one comes to a set of data without certain presuppositions or expectations. No one can look at a set of data with a God's eye view. No one is perfectly objective.

Secondly, Popper seriously questioned whether we could ever come to a final answer and verify that a scientific theory was true. A claim like "all snow is white" cannot be finally verified. The very nature of inductive thinking is open-ended. So it was that after Europeans had thought for years that all swans were white, they came across black swans in Australia. So Popper suggested that science was based on the quest not to verify theories, but to falsify them. Good theories were theories that, thus far, had resisted falsification.

In this approach, he rejected another approach that enjoyed a brief moment of popularity in the early twentieth century, logical positivism. [1] Logical positivists held that only things a person could observe and verify had any real claim to being called "true." The fundamental problem with this theory, of course, is that it cannot be observed or verified. It is thus incoherent on a most basic level. Popper's suggested that the best theories are those that have not yet been falsified is at least an improvement on logical positivism, although it still assumes that with scientific theory we are basically dealing with theories that are either "true" or "false."

However, by far the most significant philosopher of science in the twentieth century was Thomas Kuhn (1922-96). In the first edition of Kuhn's, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he argued that no scientific paradigm is ultimately better than another. You will remember that a paradigm is a way of looking at a particular subject, like the diversity of animal species. To Kuhn, what we think of as scientific development is a kind of organized wandering from one paradigm to another, following a predictable process. In the second edition, he tempered his thinking a little, particularly over protests at the thought that creation science might be equally valid in comparison to evolutionary science. [2]

[text box: paradigm, normal science]

Kuhn's basic idea was that science operates most of the time according to a dominant paradigm, the normal science. So in the early 1500s, the dominant astronomical paradigm was that the sun went around the earth. In the 1800s, the paradigm of physics was Newtonian. In the twentieth century, the dominant biological paradigm was evolutionary. These are the lenses through which a particular set of data are viewed and organized.

So you are at the Grand Canyon and you see a set of layers of earth and rock. In the typical creation science paradigm, you might assume that these layers were laid down over a relatively short period of time, perhaps in the aftermath of a world wide flood. [3] Alternatively, such a person might suggest that God created the earth to have "apparent age." In other words, the earth may look like it is billions of years old, but it only appears this way because God made the earth and universe to look old. The dominant geological paradigm in these matters, of course, is that these layers represent millions of years of slow, largely uniform conditions in which layer was gradually laid down over time. [4]

According to Kuhn, the reason paradigms change is not so much because we get smarter or that science gets better. Rather, all paradigms leave explained or seemingly contradictory data. I like to call it "naughty data." After a paradigm has shifted, most "normal scientists" expend their energy trying to fit anomalous data into the new, dominant paradigm. Such operations may go for a long time without changing the current paradigm too much.

For example, evolution has been the dominant scientific paradigm perhaps for over a century now. But it has not gone unchanged. For example, while Charles Darwin (1809-82) suggested that the more complex organisms we know today evolved from less complex ones, he could not really explain how such changes took place. His version of evolution simply saw organisms gradually changing bit by bit, with nature over time selecting the bits that best helped organisms adapt and survive.

But Darwin's version of evolution could not really explain how the new changes came about in the first place. This element of evolutionary theory did not enter the equation until after Darwin, when the idea of mutation entered the scene. So we have here an example of "normal science" persisting, in this case, the paradigm of evolution. But when encountering a problem with the theory, normal scientists did not abandon the overall idea of evolution. Rather, they modified the theory to account for some "naughty data" that did not fit.

Kuhn suggested that there will always be anomalous data in relation to a dominant paradigm. This data is the seed of a paradigm shift, which Kuhn predicted would always take place eventually. At some point, Kuhn argued, someone would suggest a completely different way of looking at the data--one that focused on the data that did not fit the current paradigm.

[text box: Thomas Kuhn]

Of course normal science resists such radical rethinking. Copernicus' (1473-1543) suggestion that the earth went round the sun was not met with open arms by either the Roman Catholic Church or the scientists of the day. [5] Indeed, one of Kuhn's points was that it was not scientifically obvious at the time that Copernicus was correct. For example, his mathematical explanations of the planets' movements did not work as well as the "Ptolemaic" scientists who defended the normal science of the day--that the heavenly bodies moved around the earth. [6]

[insert figure of Ptolemaic universe]

But the math of the Ptolemaic scientists was much more complex than Copernicus'. So while they might account for the motions of the heavenly bodies more accurately, Occam's Razor was against them--the idea that the simplest explanation is usually a better explanation. As Christians, we should take warning. We Christians have paradigms about Christianity as well. We have paradigms of interpretations, for example.

A Baptist will emphasize certain verses that fit with their way of thinking and tend to de-emphasize other verses, "naughty verses," that do not fit as well. The same is true of a Methodist or a Presbyterian or a Reformed thinker. At the same time, we often find that Christians in a particular tradition expend a good deal of intellectual energy trying to account for the passages that do not fit their paradigm as well. Often new churches and denominations are born off such naughty verses. [7]

A great example of applying great intellect to account for problem data is that of mid-twentieth century fundamentalism and its understanding of inerrancy. In a famous book called The Battle for the Bible, Harold Lindsell took a very rigid view of how minutely the gospels of the New Testament need to fit together historically in order to be truthful. [8] In a famous example, he tries to explain how all four gospel accounts of Peter denying Jesus can be historically accurate down to the smallest detail and still fit together. Ingeniously, he suggests that Peter might have denied Jesus six times--three before a first rooster crow and three more before a second crowing! [9]

Lindsell's reconstruction is a great illustration of a paradigm ripe for a shift. Yes, he managed to account for some naughty data. He applied his significant intellect to problem data and found a way to make it fit into his paradigm. But his thesis was so complex that it begged for a paradigm overhaul. His scenario created a "fifth" gospel that is more different from any of the individual gospels than they are from each other! It is no wonder that evangelicals of the late twentieth century generally came to take a looser view of how minutely accurate the gospels need to be historically in order to be considered truthful or even inerrant.

In the case of the planets, Copernicus' heliocentric solar system (sun at center) did not fit all the details as precisely as the geocentric one (earth as center) defended by the math of the Ptolemaic scientists, but it was simpler and not far off. Less than a century later, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) made the heliocentric math both simpler and more accurate by arguing that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses rather than circles. As Kuhn argued, however, what now seem to us as obvious steps forward in a progression of knowledge were not clear at all at the time.

According to Kuhn, paradigms shift in a political struggle between those who support the old paradigm and those who focus on data that does not fit. Since normal science operates by trying to fit anomalous data into the old paradigm, it usually resists strongly the advent of new paradigms that form around the problem data. The old paradigm establishment may keep new paradigm supporters from publishing or speaking at conferences or getting jobs. But if the new paradigm gets its foot in the door, if its supporters increase--usually among younger scientists--the older scientists will eventually die off.

So it was that Albert Einstein (1879-1955) never supported the radical version of quantum mechanics that developed in the 1920s and is now the normal paradigm of physics. "God does not throw dice," he once wrote in a letter to a fellow scientist. But Einstein has been dead for over fifty years now, and it would be hard to find a reputable nuclear physicist today who agrees with him on the issue in question.

Although Kuhn's theory applies to paradigm shifts in science, the basic principles clearly apply to paradigm shifts in any field of knowledge that involves the organization of data. For example, one important shift in the study of Paul's writings in the New Testament has flowed naturally from greater attention to passages in Jewish literature that view God's relationship with Israel as one of grace rather than as something Israel primarily earned or worked to achieve. When certain interpreters focused on the importance of God's grace in Judaism, the seeds of a paradigm shift came into play. And it is predictable that they have encountered angry resistance by the "normal scientists" of the old paradigm. [10]

In the years since the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran and Calvinist interpreters had interpreted certain passages in Paul to oppose human "works" as having any role at all in God's acceptance of us, in our "justification." Accordingly, not only did these interpreters accentuate any passages in which human action seemed to play a role in God's acceptance, they also read Paul and the New Testament in such a way as to deny any role of works in God's acceptance there. But of course, there are any number of New Testament passages that connect God's final acceptance of us to our actions in this life, both in Paul and elsewhere (e.g., Matt. 25:31-46; Rom. 2:5-6; 2 Cor. 5:10; Jas. 2:24-25). And so the "new perspective on Paul" in its various forms has both emphasized that Judaism was also a religion of grace and that Paul had a significant place for works in his understanding of God's acceptance of us.

There is therefore much in Kuhn's approach to science that is helpful in understanding the way in which scientific paradigms change. We can wonder, however, if he were not too pessimistic in his sense that such paradigms were not really headed anywhere. For example, quantum mechanics--even though it may very well be superceded at some point--certainly accounts for the workings of the world on a vastly different scale than Newtonian physics did. As we mentioned in the first section of this chapter, it may still only be an "expression" of what we observe in the world, a kind of scientific myth. But it is a myth that has served and continues to serve us very well. Quantum mechanics is a vastly more useful scientific approach to the world than Newtonian physics was. And in that respect, surely it deserves to be called a better, even a "truer" theory than Newton's.

[1] The best known logical positivist was A. J. Ayer (1910-89).

[2] "Creation science" here refers to those Christian scientists who argue for a relatively young earth with only a minimal amount of evolution around the level of individual species or orders.

[3] This paradigm is called catastrophism, the idea that the earth's geology is best explained on the basis of world wide catastrophies, particularly a world wide flood.

[4] A paradigm we might call uniformitarianism. Certainly mainstream geology also would allow for major earth catastrophies as well. A common theory for why the dinosaurs went extinct involves a rather large asteroid hitting the earth and changing its climate.

[5] We should point out that the Roman Catholic Church today actually has scientists on retainer and could not in any way be described accurately as being against science. For example, Roman Catholic thinkers would more likely engage themselves in how evolution might connect to Christian faith than with trying to disprove it.

[6] "Ptolemaic" here refers to the Greek astronomer Ptolemy (**), who argued that the planets, sun, and moon moved in perfect circles around the earth.

[7] The Seventh Day Adventist Church is a great example of a church formed around naughty verses. This church worships on Saturday because they emphasize the fact that the Sabbath in the Bible always refers to Saturday. They have noticed verses in 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4 where Paul speaks of death as sleep and so do not believe we are conscious in between death and resurrection.

[8] **

[9]**

[10] In my opinion, we are currently witnessing continued resistance by the old Pauline paradigm in such "Ptolemaic" works such as John Piper's The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (Crossway, 2007), and the two volume work edited by D. A. Carson, Peter T. O'Brien, and Mark Siefrid, Justification and Variegated Nomism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001, 2004).