Redeeming Science, Vern Poythress

Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006). http://www.crossway.org/books/redeeming-science-ebook/

I’ve been reading this book digitally on my Nook Color, and am finding it to be helpful. Poythress deals with the large issues of worldview from a reformed evangelical perspective. This means that he respects and appreciates science as a useful set of disciplines, but he takes scientists and society to task for setting up naturalism as a worldview associated with science. Poythress seeks to establish a redeemed scientific worldview in which God is on his throne, the Bible is respected as his word, and science itself is affirmed in its role.

In dealing with the days of creation and the age of the earth, Poythress affirms a six-day creation, but argues for the viability of a “mature creation” with the appearance of age, fossilized remains, and so on. In this way he makes room for both biblical creation and contemporary science. This approach seems to solve the antithesis that strict young-earth creationism sets up with the rest of professional science.

I have not yet finished the book, so I should probably add to this post as time goes on.

I would recommend this book for high school students or undergraduates who are working on worldview questions. I would like my h.s. junior to read it this year and talk about it with me.

 

Edwin Abbott, Flatland

Abbott’s 1884 novella, Flatland, never exactly took the world by storm, but remains a moving commentary on society, as well as an enlightening discussion of mathematical dimensions. It is narrated by “A Square,”  a gentleman from Flatland who has been granted visions of higher dimensions and who has been imprisoned for preaching the “Gospel of Three Dimensions.”  It could be read and enjoyed by someone in the middle grades, although the deeper meanings will probably not become apparent to him until later.

The first part of the book is an explanation of Flatland society, and the higher dimensions of life (thus, the often striking spiritual allusions) do not enter the book until Part II. The reader will find Flatland a rather heartless place, with its strict caste system and its degradation of women, but should not denounce the author as holding such views himself, for he defends himself (in the mouth of his narrator) by saying that he “identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views generaly adopted by Flatland and . . . even by Spaceland, Historians; in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.” We may take much of his more offensive statements, therefore, as ironical.

It is impressive how much more plain a matter can be made when it is laid out (so to speak) in two-dimensional black and white, and if we find Flatland cruel, we should remember that all of its principles are those supported by the evolutionary worldview: To judge a figure’s intrinsic worth by the size of his vertex angle is no less wrong than to judge a man’s value by the size of his brain or intelligence. The “merciful” destruction of Irregular Figures advocated in cap. 6 is much the same as the “merciful” destruction advocated by some today of less-than-standard humans. The Flatlanders are ruled by the Circular class, the members of which look down on all others, spend years in school pursuing the sciences (which serve them rather than religion), and generally bend every effort towards what they deem the preservation of the species at the expense of its “lesser” members. In one historical case, the Flatland patricians are recorded as having gathered together the leaders of the “Chromatic Sedition” (which they feared would tear their society apart) and killing “seven score thousand” in one day, before decimating the Working and Military classes and going through the country until “every town, village, and hamlet was systematically purged of that excess of the lower orders which had been brought about . . . by the violation of the . . . natural Laws of the Constitution of Flatland,” (cap. 10, “Of the Suppression of the Chromatic Sedition”) .

We may judge the Flatlanders, but without understanding of the “higher dimensions” present in our world for those who search for them, we run the risk of committing the same crimes.

 

Blaise Pascal, Pensees

Whatever lasting fame has belonged to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) has been mostly centered around the argument known as “Pascal’s Wager,” which appears in the the third section of his posthumously published Pensees. The Pensees (literally, “thoughts”) are collected fragments of writing from the last six years before his death. He was planning to write an “Apology for the Christian Religion,” but he never finished it, and these notes were edited and compiled (and numbered, 1-924) by the Jansenist Catholics (of which he  had been one) after his death, and have since been an important text in Church history.

Some of the Pensees are long, well-developed arguments, such as 139, (one of several entitled “Diversion”) or 194, (which begins, “Let them at least learn what is the religion they attack”). While complex at times to follow, these essays are usually insightful and interesting. Other notes are shorter, from one to five sentences long, often rather pithy metaphors or statements, such as 132: “Methinks Caesar was too old to set about amusing himself with conquering the world. Such sport was good for Augustus or Alexander. They were still young men and thus difficult to restrain. But Caesar should have been more mature,” or the end of 162, “Cleopatra’s nose: had it been shorter, the whole aspect of the world would have been altered.” Still others of Pascal’s notes are truly fragments, with sometimes just a name or a few words (and sometimes in Latin,) such as 814, “Montaigne against miracles. Montaigne for miracles.”

This uneven quality makes for a different reading experience than that found with most books, but the reader patient enough to get through the more jumbled and cryptic of the Pensees will be rewarded with insights on topics often not even thought of. The more diligent of readers will benefit from reading the entirety, in order (for Pascal builds on previous topics as he goes along), and from taking notes when something catches his attention. The reader not yet ready for all 924 Pensees at once could dip into them slowly, for there are worthwhile nuggets even in the shorter notes.  The famous Wager, Pascal’s proposition that the Christian life, whether founded on truth or not, is the better lot in this life as well as in the next, if found in the 233rd note but is built up to over the entirety of the third section, from 184 on. If I were to recommend another of the Pensees to one unready or unwilling to read the whole, it would be the 553rd, “The Mystery of Jesus,” which is a moving meditation on the person and works of that Man.

He who reads Pascal’s last work gains an appreciation for the man and the background to his Wager, whether or not he agrees with every statement.

 

Thomas Jefferson Education

Oliver Van DeMille, A Thomas Jefferson Education (George Wythe College Press, 2000).

This short book describes a way of teaching that seems highly rewarding, if intensive. It requires mentors to guide students in reading and studying classics and the work of great teachers. The mentors themselves need to have read and wrestled with the content of the classics that they assign. So this is a co-educational program for mentors and students.

This blog is the place to post notes about classics that we have read: How interesting they are, how “classic,” what age-level they are appropriate for.