Dr Chuck Pearson

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

- Matthew 22:34-40 (NIV)

This ultimate statement of the Law from our Lord is quite familiar, and yet it has powerful implications for higher education.

Mark Noll opens his jeremiad The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by defining and defending his title: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind...Notwithstanding their other virtues, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several decades.” The thesis of the book is that those Christians in evangelical movements in America have, over the past hundred years, demonstrated love for God with their hearts and souls, but have sacrificed the love of God with their minds in the process, resulting in evangelical abdication of intellectual life and, absent the influence of evangelicals, the present academic culture that is in many ways hostile to spiritual ways of knowing. I read this book early on in my graduate school education, and I still consider the implications of a heightened need for Christians to love God with all their mind as I continue in my academic development.

There is apparent conflict between Christian belief and scientific endeavor. These conflicts appear especially among those who believe that the universe cannot be explained without relying on the vital force that a creator-God would provide. A study of the history of scientific thought since the time of Galileo will demonstrate that the most successful scientific ideas have been mechanistic in nature; in other words, considering nature to operate as a machine would, without divine intervention. Physics and chemistry, the subjects that I teach, are particularly dependent on mechanistic descriptions. It is very tempting to believe that a Godless mechanism is the only possible means of understanding the world in this context.

The means I have for overcoming the apparent conflict is to emphasize that scientific descriptions, while powerful, are but one means of understanding the world. Scientific descriptions are very useful for the deterministic prediction of the behavior of mechanical systems, for the finding of patterns of behavior in biological systems, and for the development of technology. They tell nothing about the pain of human emotion, or the value of human life, or the reason for human existence. If scientific descriptions are the only descriptions of life that we have, our lives are terribly sad indeed.

Hence the second half of our Lord's command comes into play. When it is impossible, through the veils that prevent us from seeing God face to face, to demonstrate to God himself our love for Him, we demonstrate that love through “loving our neighbors as ourselves.” Christian education, however we define it, must be terribly incomplete without demonstrating love to the students who come to learn from us. We avoid lording our academic position over our students and making unreasonable demands or unfair assessments of them. We treat our students not as soulless automatons whose worth is determined by how well they do or don't complete their work, but as people starting a path that we completed not so long ago, who are struggling with many of the same things we struggled with as students.

Our students are learning science to be doctors, health professionals, wildlife managers, scientists, and teachers in their own right. Teaching them simply the soulless philosophies of mechanistsic science does not prepare them to make the ethical decisions required to be good stewards of the world they will enter upon graduation. Christian ethics of love for one's neighbors must be demonstrated daily, and then theological ways of knowing which drives that love must be presented as complementary to scientific ways of knowing. The apparent conflict between Christianity and science should be defused through emphasis being placed on both – science to explain how the world works, Christianity to inform strategies on how to treat the world.