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By Steve Weatherbe
THE SOMETIMES stridently secular professors at the University of Victoria (UVic)
are all too comfortable with characterizations of religious believers as
fundamentalists.
Maybe they turned out in droves to fill the hall for teacher/ pastor/scholar
Paul Teel’s lecture because he proposed to look at fundamentalism among scientists as well
as among religious believers.
Teel is a mathematics, philosophy and Bible studies teacher at Pacific Christian
Secondary (PCS) School, and a graduate fellow at UVic’s Centre for Studies in Religion and Society.
He provoked aggressive questioning after his talk, particularly for calling
British geneticist and best-selling atheist Richard Dawkins an anti-religious
fundamentalist.
“I admitted it was a caricature,” Teel says. “But my lecture wasn’t about extremists on either the anti-science or anti-religion side of the
debate. It was about how the real and complex relationship between religion and science
gets lost when caricatures dominate the discussion.”
Teel’s topic, ‘Beyond Fundamentalism: the Complex Relationship of Science and Religion,’ is one he deals with at several levels.
As a teacher at PCS, interim teaching pastor at Saanich Community Church, and
occasional lecturer on theology and science at Vancouver’s Regent College, Teel works hard to dispel the belief of many Christians that “science and religion are incompatible.”
The December lecture at UVic was aimed more at fundamentalists in the scientific
camp who believe the same.
Teel defines fundamentalist, for the purposes of his argument, as a “dogmatist motivated by fear.” Each side – dogmatic atheists in the scientific community, and dogmatic Christians – believe that anyone who disagrees with them is an opponent, and therefore
dangerous.
Christians at PCS aren’t taught that science in general or evolution in particular are dangerous, he is
sure; but they might be getting it in church or at home – and they probably will get the reverse version from some of their university
science teachers, as well as from popular culture.
Then, students might be forced to give up their faith because the scientific
evidence for something like evolution seems so compelling; or they might give
up a career in science, suppressing their own God-given talents and interests,
and never putting them to the service of humanity and God.
“If they have to do that,” says Teel, “they aren’t whole people.” Teel says God authored both “the book of holy scripture and the book of nature. If the two books seem to disagree, it isn’t God’s problem – it’s our problem. We should assume we’ve misread one book or the other.”
In his talk, Teel focused on the thinking of British philosopher Michael Foster,
who in 1934 advanced the highly unpopular thesis that Christian beliefs about
nature helped lead to the rise of modern empirical science.
Teel says the classical Greek and Roman scientific view of nature was that it
was static; had always existed, endlessly repeating itself in perpetual cycles;
and was an imperfect shadow of the ideal world. But the Judeo-Christian view
was that nature was good; that humankind had a privileged position in it; that
it had a fixed beginning, before which was chaos; and that it followed the
rules of an orderly deity.
Foster argued that as the Christian theology of nature developed in the Middle
Ages, it delivered an indirect blessing and boost to the study of nature.
Foster, according to Teel, believed “Christian theology transformed the ‘otherworldly’ Greek rationalism and produced a new rationalism which, surprisingly, needed a
kind of empiricism in order to be itself.”
But beyond the question of the empirical scientific method, Teel argues, is the
question of where the Age of Science’s appetite to explore nature came from, and where the speculative leaps came
from that have so advanced science in this era.
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Teel told his audience they come from the Judeo-Christian view of creation found
in Genesis.
Other Middle Eastern accounts of creation portray it as an accident, and the
world as an island of order in a universe of ongoing chaos which may prevail at
any time. In contrast, the Judeo-Christian world, said Teel, “is good, and will stay ordered and full.”
Again in contrast with the other religions, Jews and Christians did not worship
nature. Instead it was a gift from God for their use – and study.
Also significantly different are the views of humankind. In the Babylonian
story, they are created to serve the gods, and are made from the blood of a
god. They are created from the tears of a god in an Egyptian story.
In Genesis, Teel observes, “humans are not made out of the flesh or blood or tears of the gods; humans are
not the results of violence, anger or sadness. They are wanted.”
Moreover, nature is created for them. It, too, is wanted.
Scientific exploration of nature is, therefore, a good thing; and because nature
was the thoughtful creation of an orderly God, scientific exploration of nature
promised the revelation of laws – even laws which would reveal more about God. Science, too, is good.
Teel says that while Genesis takes an approach to nature that is more scientific
than competing creation stories, it is not a treatise on natural science; its
purpose is theological.
He tells his students at PCS that Christianity is fully compatible with the view
that evolution is the best available explanation for the development of life on
earth.
At Regent, Teel is on faculty for the Pastoral Science program, a once-a-year
intensive course for pastors on reconciling religion and science. He says he’s worried about how little support there is in evangelical churches for workers
in scientific fields.
If their pastor is a fundamentalist, scientists may feel themselves to be
classed among the “enemies” of faith.
Extremists on both sides feed off – and feed – each other, he says. When Christians aggressively seize upon any discrepancy or
gap in evolutionary theory for the purpose of discrediting the entire theory,
it encourages so-called ‘New Atheists’ – such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens – to write one-sided books describing religion and its dangers, while exaggerating
claims for evolutionary theory. This, in turn, encourages more attacks on
evolution. “The New Atheists are good writers who use satire and mockery very effectively;
but the possibility for a fruitful discussion is lost,” says the pastor/scholar.
Teel is organizing a symposium on the New Atheists.
January 2010
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