>
> It is because of my past 30 years training (in geology, history,
> anthropology, and theology/philosophy) that I believe an attempt to
> harmonize the Bible and science is doomed to failure. We either accept that
> the flood of Genesis (the Trinity, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, etc.)
> occurred by faith or we don't, and neither science nor the Bible can be used
> to prove to a skeptic either that it occurred or it didn't. That is the
> nature of these two different forms of knowledge. We live in a dichotomy
> when we live by faith.
>
John's position here is quite similar to that of the 12th century Islamic
philosopher Averroes, who, when faced with apparent contradictions between
the Koran and Aristotelian science, solved the conflict by relegating the
former to "truths of faith" and the latter to "truths of reason." The two
thus stand in logic-tight compartments similar to John's "two different
forms of knowledge." Thomas Aquinas went to great pains to refute
Averroes. He maintained the principle of the unity of truth. (He would
have agreed with the slogan that "all truth is God's truth.")
I believe that Averroism is not only false, but dangerous to the truth of
the Gospel. An Averroist can hold, for example, that "God created the
world in six literal, consecutive, 24-hour days less than 15,000 years
ago," and also that "The world is 4.5 b years old, and life is the product
of a 3.5 by process." Now if these two statements are both asserted in
the same way (with the same view of truth), then since they are
contraries, they cannot both be true. But to hold that they are both
true, but true in different senses, makes no sense to me. As others have
pointed out, on that view nothing could, even in principle, falsify
*whatever* one takes to be a "truth of faith"--whether the bodily
resurrection of Christ, or the mothership trailing Hale-Bopp.
Let me suggest that part of what lies behind John's position is an
equivocation on the use of "true" or "truth." As George Murphy pointed
out here some time ago, the OT Hebrew almost always, and the NT Greek
generally, use "true" in the sense of "dependable, faithful, reliable,
trustworthy." Thus truth in this sense may be predicated of a person, a
disposition or attitude, or a situation (state of affairs). (This is my
description, not George's.)
The common contemporary understanding of truth is (*contra* pragmatists
and relativists) is that truth is a property of propositions: a
proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to reality. Now the
biblical concept clearly entails that propositions can be true in the
contemporary sense, but allows the ascription of "true" to things other
than propositions.
Perhaps John is overlooking the fact that when we say God is truth, we are
not only claiming that he is dependable, trustworthy, etc., but also are
claiming that propositions about him correspond to the reality of what he
is (note: even though we can never know him exhaustively, we still can
know true propositions about him), and propositions which he "uttters"
correspond to the reality of the world. If that is so, then it follows
that we too can utter true propositions about the world--propositions that
correspond to the reality of what is.
Briefly, I have argued that (1) the Averroistic notion of two kinds of
truth is false; truth is a unity. And (2) that some of the disagreements
in recent posts on this thread may be due to equivocation on the concept
of truth. But there is one more point: (3) We should not confuse truth
and method.
John is right in this: science does not *make* a proposition true, but
this does not mean, as he says, that "Science knows nothing of truth; at
best it can only verify or deny a hypothesis." For what does it mean to
verify a hypothesis other than to show that it corresponds with reality?
Science is the method by which we determine whether a proposition
about the physical world actually corresponds to physical reality, just as
historical investigation is the method by which we determine whether a
statement about the past corresponds to what was the case. Methods do not
determine truth in the sense of creating truth, but they do determine
whether a certain proposition corresponds with the appropriate state of
affairs in reality.
Garry DeWeese