The current MAGA evangelical attacks on science threaten to make America less safe, less healthy and much dumber.
This anti-science compulsion is no surprise. Evangelical Christianity in the United States has rejected science at least since Charles Darwin. There is a straight line from evangelical abhorrence of evolution to their climate change denial. Their creationism and steadfast belief in the rapture has divorced them from the doctrine of creation, stewardship of the earth and its inhabitants.
Here’s the tragedy in this drama: MAGA evangelicals have disowned one of the most significant of the children of the church — science. The Christian church served as the incubator of modern science. Christianity is a mother of science.
The early church’s role
The evangelical rejection of science includes a repudiation of the early church’s role in the emergence of science in the Western world. My primary source for this discussion is David Lindberg’s defining work, The Beginnings of Western Science.
“Lindberg maps the beginning of the scientific mentality to Greece in the sixth century B.C.”
Lindberg maps the beginning of the scientific mentality to Greece in the sixth century B.C. The dominant philosophy of this age was the supernatural interference of the divine on the affairs of humanity. As Lindberg puts it, the ancient Greek world was “a capricious world, in which nothing could be safely predicted because of the boundless possibilities of divine intervention.” The possibility of a scientific mindset was impossible in such an age.
In the sixth century B.C., philosophers developed a worldview of a “cosmos,” an ordered world. The revolutionary difference became the exclusion of the gods. Lindberg says: “A distinction between the natural and the supernatural was emerging; and there was a wide agreement that causes …. are to be sought only in the nature of things,” not in the “personal whims or the arbitrary fancies of the gods.”
In the fourth century, the seismic plates of an emerging scientific view shifted again with Plato. His view included the gods. “Plato’s deities never interrupt the course of nature.” Plato provided a divine Creator who never interrupts its causal processes. His theistic naturalism paved the way for the scientific mind.
Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, also had a supreme divinity, the “unmoved mover.” According to Aristotle, the world was not created but was eternal.
The early church found Plato’s cosmology much more congenial and in line with Genesis 1-3.
Over the next eight centuries, Christianity appreciated and employed the Greek heritage, preserved and transmitted it. The church accomplished this through patronage of Hellenistic schools, preservation of manuscripts and support of the early universities. This support was essential to the emergence of modern natural science.
The church’s support of the Greek heritage was not universal. During the time of the church’s intellectual moribundity (eighth to 12th centuries A.D.), the Greek heritage was kept alive in the Islamic world. Science owes an incalculable debt to the Islamic world.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, the church gave tremendous support and freedom to the universities. In this manner, the church provided the emerging discipline of science an institutional home. This means the credit for the emergence of modern science goes to the Christian church. The church was the incubator of modern science.
Modern disassociation
This story matters more now that the MAGA evangelical church has declared the church is not the mother of science. They have disowned science at least since the early 20th century. From the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn., in 1925 to a plethora of court cases attempting to enshrine intelligent design into the biology curriculum of public schools, evangelicals consistently opposed, resisted and attempted to destroy science.
The effort to stop evolution became a futile dream of evangelicals. No matter how many times they misused the word “theory,” to claim evolution was “only a theory,” they have lost again and again, not only in court, but in the universities where science is taught and in the public where evolution is accepted.
Yet for the determined evangelicals, evolution is far more than a mistaken scientific theory. It is the cutting edge of a dangerous and destructive materialism that threatens the heart and soul of our civilization and culture, and it must be opposed at all costs.
Cell biologist Kenneth Miller argues America’s scientific soul is now under attack from MAGA evangelicals. Universities are being subverted, science grants, projects and programs are being canceled or dismantled. An anti-vaxxer is now in charge of our nation’s health. Our president is a climate change denier.
In the name of God, conspiracy theories, misinformation, outright lies and political expediency, scientific evidence is replaced by opinion. From Charlie Kirk to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, we are bombarded with the opinion that global warming is a liberal hoax.
Under threat
Science always has been characterized by a deep and long-standing embrace of discovery, exploration and innovation. All this intellectual integrity is now threatened by the opinions of evangelical leaders.
The church needs to be proud of the child she helped bring into our world: Science. As Miller explains: “In almost every respect, Darwin did get it right, and that was the message I intended to bring to my audience. The very ground upon which we stand is eloquent testament to the age of this planet. The expanding richness and diversity of the fossil record documents one case after another of descent with modification.”
For example, the evangelical geneticist Francis Collins and his team mapped the human genome system. In the early phases of Collins’ research, he gained a national reputation as the “Indiana Jones” of the genome project, seemingly able to find any needle he wanted in that great biochemical haystack we call human genes. In 1989, Collins and his team identified the gene for cystic fibrosis, then Huntington’s disease, neurofibromatosis, one type of adult acute leukemia, and more. By 2000, the 3 billion DNA letters of the human genome had been mapped.
Science is not a demonic presence in our midst. Science, as Miller puts it, “is nothing more than organized common sense.”
“Science is nothing more than organized common sense.”
Despite evangelical commitment to an anti-science worldview, evolution never has been on stronger scientific ground than it is today. A simple DNA test would show the church is the mother of science and evangelical disavowal is a tragic drama.
The methodology is the threat
I have reached the conclusion that it is the methodology of science that frightens evangelical leaders. In the world of MAGA evangelicals, there can be no dissent from the received truth. They live in a fantasy of atomism, an unhealthy dogmatic contrarianism. It is a dreary conformity, a boring contrarian dismissal of truth aligned with a fixed set of improbable beliefs impervious to rational discussion.
The church could use more of the fresh air of invention, discovery, exploration, risk-taking, new ideas and a fierce openness to truth. No Christian is being served well by the misplaced and misinformed opinions of MAGA evangelicals. They are a danger to the survival of the species.
We would be better served by Plato’s rich cosmology of a Creator who sought to bring about the best possible results through persuasion. There is no time like the present to reunite with one of our children: science. Christianity and science, after all, are partners in the search for the truth.
