Obstructed View
Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism
by Cornelius G. Hunter
Brazos Press, 2007
(170 pages, $14.99, paperback)
reviewed by Terry Scambray
Most people think that science and religion were entangled in the past, to the detriment of science, but that the modern, experimental science of the last 400 years, with its reliance on natural explanations, has eliminated any lingering religious influence. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” Cornelius Hunter writes in the opening pages of Science’s Blind Spot.
In the ensuing pages, Hunter, a biophysicist and adjunct professor at BIOLA University, documents how the success of experimental science, with its trial-and-error method, is compromised when it is misapplied to other areas of study. This misapplication forms “theological naturalism.” It is not a discovery of science—it is a presupposition of science as currently practiced.
Theological naturalism emerged in the seventeenth century, at a time when the telescope and the microscope were revealing the harmony and beauty of the cosmos in a deeper way than had been previously seen. But these instruments also showed a cosmos that was more imperfect and grainy than had been previously realized.
Hunter offers the example of the seventeenth-century Anglican cleric and geologist, Thomas Burnet, whose popular and influential book, Sacred Theory of the Earth, extolled the great beauty of the Alps. Yet he was disconcerted by the mountains’ “incredible confusion” and “ill figured” lack of symmetry. “Burnet’s paradoxical observations would become commonplace,” and from the belief that the world looked designed yet was imperfect was born Deism, the idea of a distant, rationalist god who remained unsullied by contact with an evil world.
Indeed, God was thought to be a “greater God” if he could create and sustain the world from a distance, rather than degrade himself by acting as a handyman who had to keep fixing his own bungled creation. As Burnet wrote: “We think him a better Artist who makes the clock that strikes regularly at every hour rather than having to put his finger to it every hour to make it strike.”
Thus, the desire of theists to protect God’s image, not of atheists to deny him, resulted in theological naturalism. Whether this move was justified or not is not Hunter’s point. His point is that naturalism was not a discovery of science. It developed as a presumption of theologians who wanted a god who could be divorced from all the evil and disorder in nature.
Confused Sciences
Certainly the great success of science in the last 400 years is due to its reliance on observable experiments that themselves presuppose that God does not intervene capriciously in nature.
But when experimental science is confused with the study of origins, or with the study of consciousness, then subjective beliefs can be smuggled in where experimental observation necessarily ends and conjecture must necessarily begin. Conjecture must take over at a certain point because the study of origins deals with one-time, unrepeatable events from a deep past, and the study of human consciousness depends on the subjective responses of those whose minds are being studied.
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