Good science depends on a good understanding of our good Creator and Lord.

All things were – subsist – in him as causes before they are in themselves as effects.

  - Eriugena, Homily on John 1:1-14

For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

  - 1 Corinthians 2:10

It’s not by accident that the modern scientific enterprise has its roots in the Christian intellectual tradition. Among Christian thinkers, “Knowledge of nature was considered deeply relevant to problems of order, not least because nature was widely understood to be a divinely authored book” (Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 125). Shapin elsewhere explains, “Direct experience of nature was accounted valuable insofar as it was understood to be engagement with a divinely authored text” (78).

The creation fulfills a plan which existed in the mind of God before it became all the many and varied particulars of the cosmos. The early scientists approached the creation out of the context of having been trained, to a greater or lesser extent, in the art of thinking God’s thoughts after Him. They were Christians. They had the mind of Christ (1 Cor. 2:16). They were indwelled by the Spirit of God Who searches all things, even the mind of God.

So it does not surprise us to read the palpable joy with which they report being able to prove this or that hypothesis through observation and experiment. Believing God to be orderly and knowable, the cosmos to be agreeable to study and understanding, and the mind of a man capable of engaging the mind of God about as-yet-unknown patterns, structures, and ways of working – all assumptions grounded in their Christian convictions – these early pioneers expressed in their writings the joy that comes through participating in God Himself.

It follows that the better we are able to engage and enter the mind of God, the better will be our work of understanding God’s world and of making our way about in it. Cut ourselves off from divine thinking and we’re likely to make a mess of things. The Enlightenment hope of being able to set God aside and usher in a bright new world of human freedom and flourishing has only succeeded to the extent that its heirs and promoters have continued to draw on the built-up capital of the Christian worldview without acknowledging that this is what they’re doing. Every time Enlightenment thinkers have substituted man’s views of such matters as truth, goodness, order, and value for those which exist in the mind of God, science’s glory has been turned to mankind’s and the planet’s detriment.

God planned the cosmos. He spoke it into being and continues to uphold it by His unchanging Word – a Word which we may know, at least in part, and certainly well enough to fulfill our God-given mandate to exercise dominion over the creation for the good of humankind and the glory of God.

I have little doubt that most Christians who are working in the sciences will agree with this point: Only by thinking God’s thoughts after Him can we do anything whatsoever that will allow us to fulfill our twofold charge of loving God and our neighbors. But how does this apply to the work of science? Are engaging the mind of God and relying on His Word and Spirit as much as we ought to? Or have we allowed the language and protocols of a secular age to lead us to muffle God as we take up the work of His creation?

Are we reading the book of creation in the way that God intends it to be read? Or are we reading it the way our secular age prefers? We do not need to fear trusting in God, relying on His Spirit, and following His Word in the work of science. Our Christian forebears did, and the modern scientific enterprise – minus its secular trappings – is their legacy.

What legacy are we leaving as we work in the sciences according to a different set of assumptions than those which guided our Christian forebears?