A review of Redeeming Science, Vern S. Poythress, Crossway Books, 2006.
This is a useful, but deeply flawed book on the relationship between Biblical Christianity and modern science. Poythress, a New Testament scholar, presents a broad analysis of how science should fit into a Christian, and specifically Biblical, worldview. He introduces some useful concepts, including the correspondence between God's actions in upholding creation and the laws of nature and the concept of "imaging" which God applies throughout reality. However these concepts are communicated in an unclear, unecessarily verbose fashion -- Poythress needs a lot more clarity in his thought and language. Poythress's lack of clarity also shows in his attempts to understand Genesis 1, an issue that is important thanks to its constant influence through the book's analysis of Biblical science.
Let's look at specific issues.
In the first chapter Poythress makes a good, well researched argument for the correspondence between God's upholding word and the laws of nature. Unfortunately he errs by referring to these laws as "scientific laws", thus creating a confusion between the actual laws of nature and the scientific theories (called "laws" when they reach a particular level of certainty) that approximate them. This simple mis-choice in terminology greatly complicates his arguments and fogs his point. This sort of clumsiness is evident throughout the book, making it unecessarily hard to read. Poythress perhaps should have spent several years refining this work before publication. Nonetheless, this section is useful, especially the carefully prepared footnotes presented in the argument. This is not a light-weight piece of work, despite the easily fixed mistep in terminology.
Immediately afterwards, however, Poythree takes a seriously wrong turn. He recognises the key position of the Genesis 1 creation account in both Christian theology and science, and attempts to tackle it head on. Unfortunately his research in this area has not been as careful as in the linkage between God's word and natural law. He makes several elementary mistakes that lead him astray:
- He misunderstands the genre and purpose of Genesis. It is history intended to explain Israel's role in God's redemptive work in the world. It necessarily must be historic because analogies only help to explain something, they don't provide causes for real things, but Genesis is attempting to map the causes in the real world that led to Israel's purpose in the real world. The fact that Genesis starts at the beginning is not surprising, since it must explain why Israel offers hope to the whole world -- it's God must be the God of all creation. It also needs to explain the cause of the fallenness of the world (otherwise there is no need for a redemptive plan). Genesis 1 and 2 address both these issues.
Poythress at one point seems to be attempting to force Genesis 1 into a polemic against polytheism, but fortunately he understands that it is intended to real in some sense. However he never seems to grasp how Genesis is a history tracing historic causes. Though he treats the rest of Genesis as historic (even the flood story, though he offers a ridiculous suggestion about how it might be describing a local flood, a suggestion he seems so uncomfortable with that he never follows through on it in later discussions), he never justifies why the first chapter shouldn't be read as historic, despite the very careful language clearly designed to indicated chronological (the thus historical) narrative, and the lack of any indication that there is a genre break between Genesis 1 and the rest of the book. - He provides a reasonable analysis of various positions except for two: the 24 hour creation day position (generally known as Young Earth Creation or YEC) and the "analogical" position (which posits that the entire seven day account is an analogy). He fails in different ways on these two views.
- He hastily dismisses the YEC position for several reasons.
First, he dismisses Russell Humphreys' cosmology which addresses the issue of an old cosmos in a way that shows a complete misunderstanding of Humphrey's theory: "Third, D. Russell Humphreys employs the general theory of relativity in order to try to “rescale” the time back to the Big Bang. But he misapplies the mathematics of general relativity, and does not realize that in any case general relativity would not significantly affect the time estimates to nearby galaxies like the Andromeda galaxy." Embarassingly for Poythress, Humphreys isn't misapplying the mathematics of general relativity any more than the Big Bangers are, and Humphreys' application of the maths is indeed proving to have better predictive power than the slew of Big Bang models. Poythress clearly doesn't understand Humphreys' model and thus his critique regarding the "nearby" Andromeda galaxy has no force. He provides no references or arguments to support his assertions, but merely dismisses Humphreys' efforts offhand. This is very sloppy, and substantially undermines his argument.
Second, instead of dealing properly with the YEC position, Poythress tilts madly at a position that no serious scientists hold: the "mature creation" theory. He inexplicably spends almost an entire chapter dealing with this instead of the far more viable YEC position. It's hard to understand why Poythress wastes so much ink on this position, especially since he eventually dismisses it. Perhaps he thinks the naive non-scientist is more attracted to such a position so he'd better deal with it. If so, he does a very poor job of explaining it for the layman, using confusing and unclear terminology (such as "ideal time") in his explanations.
Third, Poythress treats Genesis 1 almost as if it stands in exegetical isolation. Never (in this section) does he look at how the rest of scripture regards the record of Genesis 1. He doesn't even attempt to understand the position and purpose of Genesis in the scriptures. Thus he is free to make up theories that are untested against the rest of scripture -- a basic mistake.
Fourth, Poythress shows an inexplicable hostility towards taking the carefully recorded days of Genesis 1 at face value. This creates enormous difficulties for him later on, as this bizarre statement demonstrates: "Days are days because of their event content. People in various preindustrial cultures, through the centuries, have read Genesis 1 and understood it in this way, because they too naturally used an interactive orientation." Tell that to Australian Aboriginals, Mr Poythress ("No, you don't understand -- those things you measure by the pattern of light and dark are not days, it's the cycle of work that forms your days, and don't tell me that your cycle of work is fitted into the pattern of light and dark, because I simply won't believe you.") This ridiculous position is forced on Poythress by his preference for the analagical day view. - He supports the analogical day view for several reasons:
First, though never clearly stated, Poythress is obviously cowed by the enourmous dates given in contemporary science. He completely fails to grasp the YEC counter to this (which is simply to point out that these dates are based on a set of assumptions that can be easily replaced).
Second, Poythress argues that the seventh day is still ongoing, and thus must be analogical. This is the only positive scriptural argument he presents for the analogical view. It revolves around his assertion that, since God rested from his creative work on the seventh day, and there has never been any more creative work to do, he must still be resting, thus making the seventh day an extended time period, thus requiring the "days" in Genesis 1 to be analogical rather than some period of time. (If the days were varying periods of time, then the analogy to the human week would break down -- at least Poythress understand this.) The problem is that Poythress's argument that God is still resting in the seventh day is that it assumes a very narrow understanding of the account. Certainly God rested from his creative work, since that's what sort of work he'd been doing. And Poythress is also correct in pointing out that God's providential upholding of the universe could not be rested from. But isn't it possible that there are more forms of work for God than merely creative or providential? Indeed, Poythress even recognises this when he dismisses the possibility that God had already forseen that he would need to start on redemptive work (and I agree with his dismissal). However, surely there are even more than these three types of work! Couldn't God have planned teaching or mentoring work with Adam, for example? One only needs to be able to suggest one possible type of work that God could have planned to engage in (dismissing the possibility of God's planning for the fall, though of course he had) in order to demolish Poythress's sole positive argument for the analogical day view. I have just done that, so I see no reason to be forced into the position Poythress takes.
Just as importantly, Poythress never deals with the important question of what the analogical day view is an analogy for! After all, the purpose of analogies is to aid in explaining something, to clarify (often by simplifying). However, an analogy cannot provide a cause for something. So the analogical day view has no explanatory power as a creation account: it cannot explain the cause of the universe, because it's an analogy, not a history (a narrative of events with causal linkages). So what is it an analogy for? Just think about the analogy between the human work week and the days of creation. How does this analogy work if the days of creation are themselves an analogy? Poythress's suggestion seems to be that it's merely the idea of days that are analogical, not the work done during them. The problem with this is that he has the same problem as all long age creationists: the order of activities in Genesis 1 doesn't sync with the Big Bang account -- plants are not around before stellar bodies in any version of the Big Bang, and Poythress never even attempts to deal with this.
Thus his attempt at arguing for an analogical day view fails dismally, failing to provide a scientifically viable explanation, failing to have any positive scriptural support, and failing to sync with scriptural views of creation.
- He hastily dismisses the YEC position for several reasons.
- Poythress fails to distinguish between the different types of science, often labelled as "historic science" (like biological evolution, uniformitarian geology, cosmology) and operational science (such as biology, physics, etc.). The differences are very simply explained: historic science deals with unrepeatable events (historic events), while operational science deals with experimentally repeatable events. If Poythress had this simple understanding he would find his job much easier. At times he hints at this understanding, but at other times he seems completely oblivious. For example, he says, " Conversely, we cannot assume that the products of science are thoroughly valid. Not only are scientists fallible, but idolatry corrupts the practice of science through distortion of the conception of scientific law. So we will find a mixture of good and bad. No simple recipe enables us to sort it out. We ourselves, the would-be sorters, remain fallible and sinful. Sometimes science may yield very good products in spite of the flawed assumptions of the practitioners. Sometimes not. We just have to look, and do the best we can." This take is appropriately humble, but it neglects the very real difference in "self-correcting" that exists in operational science, properly practiced, and historic science. Since Genesis 1 addresses areas of historic science, which is only indirectly testable (by attempting to create models that can both explain the historic record and provide measurable predictions in the near future), it resides in a different domain from, say physics or chemistry, but Poythress never explains this.
Once he moves beyond the issues of Genesis 1 (which consumes over half of the book), his ideas of God's imaging, and how this applies to science, can come to the fore. This makes quite interesting reading and can be usefully applied by setting a perspective in a scientist's mind. At times he even makes interesting attempts at explaining the relationship between operational science and God's rational and orderly universe (using the concept of imaging as the overarching idea). However, as mentioned, these sections lack clarity and are unecessarily verbose. Still, they contain useful ideas and concepts.
So, in conclusion, Poythress has a number of useful contributions for anyone interested in the relationship between Biblical Christianity and science (including practicing scientists), but his thesis is undermined by a lack of clarity and some fundamental errors.