Science is the key to knowledge and prosperity and happiness.

We no longer believe that pure reason applied to pure facts provides pure knowledge.

  - David Faust, The Limits of Scientific Reasoning

There is a way that seems right to a man...

  - Proverbs 14.12

It is important to keep in mind that science is a way of knowing, not the way.

To listen to some outspoken defenders of the scientific endeavor, you could easily conclude that science is all we can trust when it comes to knowing things for sure and what to do with or about them.

Our political system also reflects this view. The President this week committed millions more dollars to train 100,000 new science and math teachers. He'll probably get his way, too, because most politicians are persuaded that science and math are the key to technological innovation and technological innovation is the key to economic renewal and economic renewal is the way to happiness among the electorate.

And politicians are above all about making the electorate happy.

The idea that government might shell out some big bucks to train poetry teachers is laughable. That doesn't mean it's not a worthy idea, it's just laughable. No one would support such a view. Science is the key to knowledge and prosperity and happiness.

But not really. Or rather, not exclusively. As David Faust argues in his insightful monograph, there are real limits to what science can know, and even to how thoroughly and truly science can know what it claims to know. He insists there are "judgments scientists cannot possibly make." And he's right - although you'd never know it to listen to certain scientists talk about disciplines and ways of knowing other than science.

So what are those "judgments"? And who's supposed to be making them, if not science?

Answering such questions requires an epistemology and a worldview which includes science but is larger than science. What about the Christian worldview? After all, the Christian worldview has given rise to significant accomplishments in virtually every area of human endeavor, including science.

But where are the Christians today who will speak up and insist that the Christian worldview is a way of knowing and living that ought to inform science and every other discipline of and enterprise?

Aren't at least some of them working in the sciences and every other discipline and enterprise? So how we can encourage and aid them in bringing the life of faith more emphatically and constructively to bear on their discipline or enterprise, so that the human community may come to know, use, and enjoy the world and our lives more fully?

That's the kind of question that motivates us at The Center for Faith and Science International. And we think such questions are motivating a good many other people as well, with whom we are eager to connect.

So visit our website and join the conversation about the intersections of science, faith, and life. Together let's explore all the best avenues of knowing in order to learn as much as we can for the praise of the glory of our God.

T. M. Moore

Senior Theologian and Historian