Throughout this little series I have tried to stress that when we start from an impersonalist worldview we will always misunderstand the Scriptures. We must let the Bible speak on its own terms. This is particularly true as we wrestle with the conflict between modern Science and Scripture. Much of modern science has adopted a materialist worldview, and at the heart of materialism is an impersonal universe. When we come, then, to consider the claims of God’s Holy Word we see a direct conflict between modern Science and Scripture. But we should not be so quick to abandon the claims of Scripture because of this conflict. For the conflict is owing more to the materialist assumptions imposed on the Scriptures than to some defect in the Scriptures themselves.
We can easily see the failure of materialism when we consider matters of ethics, which the Bible does. How do we determine ethical rights and wrongs? What standard do we use. Christians have long-held that God’s Word is our ethical standard;God himself is the judge of right and wrong and has given us a standard to live by. But, as Vern Poythress has written:
If everything boils down to matter, this is, if materialistic, purposeless evolution gave rise to human beings, each individual is simply the product of evolution of matter and motion. We would then have to say that each person’s moral preferences are also the product of evolution. You have evolved in such a way that you prefer helping the old lady across the street. Joe has evolved to prefer mugging the old lady and taking her money. According to this view, both you and Joe are equally products of the same impersonalist evolutionary process. (Inerrancy and Worldview, 32)
In a materialist worldview you cannot say that something is right or wrong, because value judgments like that are merely a result of evolution. They have no objective, external, standard. This was one of the major criticisms that Thomas Nagel offered up in his book critiquing the Naturalist worldview. It is a real flaw in the impersonalist worldview.
As we read Scripture, then, and we wrestle with the ethical demands put on us by God in it we should be slow to toss those aside as some moral straightjacket held over from years of oppressive patriarchal societies. The truth is that without the moral foundation provided by the Bible we have no basis for even making judgments like that. Poythress adds:
The disappearance of transcendent morality undermines not only ability to act against blatant crime, but ability to evaluate anything at all. In particular, without moral standards, criticisms that people launch against the Bible from the platforms of science, historical research, or linguistics have no foundation. (33)
We need God even to critique God. Morality is dependent on a divine foundation. An impersonalist worldview will cause us to misread the Scriptures, particularly on matters of ethics, but it has no grounds for critiquing the Bible.
Next week we will consider the matter of miracles and how Science misunderstands even these events in the Scriptures. The important thing to remember, however, as you wrestle with this subject is that the approach we take when reading the Scriptures will dramatically affect our ability to understand and believe God’s Word. When we put ourselves in the place of judge over God we will struggle to accept what he has written. When we impose a foreign worldview onto the Bible, as if to make it the standard, we will fail to understand the Bible itself. We must read the Bible on its own terms, and that includes carefully considering the ethics of Scripture.
Sparrow & Heart Soul Care 