Kepler’s Exasperation, St. Augustine’s Exhortation, and the Science and Faith Conversation
Kepler’s Exasperation, St. Augustine’s Exhortation, and the Science and Faith Conversation
By Melissa Cain Travis
For this Roundtable, we’ve been asked to respond to a recent comment or question related to one of our books, articles, or presentations. Not long ago, I received a note from a reader of Thinking God’s Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility who was struck by (and sympathized with) the attitude Kepler had towards Christians who rejected the Copernican (heliocentric) model of the cosmos:
But whoever is too stupid to understand astronomical science, or too weak to believe Copernicus without affecting his faith, I advise him that, having dismissed astronomical studies and having damned whatever philosophical opinions he pleases, he mind his own business and betake himself home to scratch in his own dirt patch, abandoning this wandering about the world.[1]
Kepler is clearly exasperated with fellow believers who, based upon a hermeneutical precommitment, had condemned heliocentrism without any understanding of the geometrical technicalities of astronomy. In reading this passage, I was reminded of St. Augustine’s exhortation to Christians to refrain from ignorant assertions about natural philosophy:
Often, a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, … and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant person is laughed at, but rather that people outside the faith believe that we hold such opinions, and thus our teachings are rejected as ignorant and unlearned. If they find a Christian mistaken in a subject that they know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions as based on our teachings, how are they going to believe these teachings in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think these teachings are filled with fallacies about facts which they have learnt from experience and reason.[2]
I wonder if Kepler was thinking of Augustine’s seemingly prophetic words when he expressed his frustration with the geocentrists.
Today, the science and faith conversation still suffers from this plight—Christians making uninformed pronouncements that create intellectual obstacles for nonbelievers and needless debate within the church. Sometimes this involves a misunderstanding of scientific data. Other times the problem is a philosophical error or merely a lack of information. I encountered an example of this very recently, when a Christian in a scientific vocation penned an article that referred to intelligent design (ID) as a “fringe” view that doesn’t take evidence into account. This person clearly hadn’t done much (if any) homework on the intellectual history and contemporary prevalence of ID or its extensive use of evidence from a diversity of scientific disciplines to support design argumentation. I wonder how many readers of that article were misled, and what the net effect will be.
Another, more common example is when well-meaning but underinformed Christians make poor or outdated arguments against some aspect of evolutionary theory. In doing this, they hurt rather than help the project of apologetics. This is not to say that there aren’t any good arguments against things like a naturalistic origin of life, universal common descent, or the power of natural selection as a naturalistic evolutionary engine. My point is that there are bad (and embarrassing) arguments that continue to be used, such as the claim that Darwin, while on his deathbed, renounced his own theory as fraudulent.
What’s the solution to this problem? I don’t think there’s a quick, simple answer, but a great rule of thumb for all of us is to investigate science and faith issues thoroughly and from competing perspectives. Read books by those with whom you currently disagree and make sure you accurately understand an issue before critiquing it. If we desire to showcase the intellectual integrity of the Christian worldview, we must always be teachable, exercise charity, and hold our positions with humility, especially when we lack expertise in the subject at hand.
One final note. Lest we should conclude that the natural world can’t serve as a powerful testament to the existence and majesty of God for a person untrained in the natural sciences, consider Kepler’s next words:
He should raise his eyes (his only means of vision) to this visible heaven and with his whole heart burst forth in giving thanks and praising God the Creator. He can be sure that he worships God no less than the astronomer, to whom God has granted this, that with the mind’s eye sees more penetratingly, and that he himself is able and willing to celebrate his God above whatever he discovers.[3]
Notes
[1] Johannes Kepler, Astronomia Nova, trans. William H. Donahue (Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 2015), 33.
[2] Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis Book I, (19):39.
[3] Kepler, 33.
— Melissa Cain Travis, PhD, is an Affiliate Faculty at Colorado Christian University and a Fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture. She is the author of Thinking God's Thoughts: Johannes Kepler and the Miracle of Cosmic Comprehensibility (2022) and Science and the Mind of the Maker: What the Conversation Between Faith and Science Reveals About God (2018). She serves on the Executive Committee of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and as President of the Society for Women of Letters.
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