Mueller, Gerald S.

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Faith vs Science: The Demons Like It!

Wilfrid Laurier University

ConsensusVolume 23Issue 2 Essays by Younger Theologians Article 1211-1-1997Faith vs Science: The Demons Like It!Gerald S. MuellerFollow this and additional works at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensusThis Sermons is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Consensus by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationMueller, Gerald S. (1997) "Faith vs Science: The Demons Like It!," Consensus: Vol. 23 : Iss. 2 , Article 12.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/consensus/vol23/iss2/12Faith vs. Science:The Demons Like It!Gerry MuellerRector, Christ Church (Anglican)—Scarborough VillageScarborough, OntarioMore than two generations ago C. S. Lewis published TheScrewtape Letters’, letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to hisjunior devil nephew, Wormwood. Lewis claimed that he hadmethods for intercepting this correspondence, but that theywere not for the faint-hearted. Herbert O’Driscoll, a Cana-dian Anglican preacher and author, also has published faxesbetween these devils. He claims he does nothing to receivethem, they just appear, smelling faintly of sulphur. He conjec-tures that nether regions apparently use available technology,but, as with us, sometimes technology fails them. That’s oneexplanation for my strange experience.I was looking for ideas on how to begin this talk on faith andscience, wanting to begin with some current thought about theapparent conflict between science and faith. I started my Inter-net browser, went to one of the many search engines and lookedfor sites dealing with science or technology and faith or religion.I began cruising through a series of home pages, clicking on in-teresting looking links, and soon found a Web site that wasvery odd indeed. Where, and what, was heelzehuh.sheolcomlI followed a link to “Department of Damnation—Faith andScience Section”. Another link caught my attention: “Screw-tape: Letters—Latest” . With horrid fascination, I clicked! Myscreen flashed, there were noises from my hard drive, I couldsmell something quite unpleasant, and there it was!My dearest nephew Wormwood; I am taking the unusualstep of publishing my letters on the Net, because all our in-fernal Master’s devils, demons and imps can benefit from the136 Consensusalmost schizophrenic split between faith and reason that hu-mans have created and deepened for nearly 500 of their years.Why our Enemy has created them able to go contrary to hispurpose, and has given them free will to accept or reject hislove (what a sickening word that is!) is forever beyond me! Butit is to our great advantage; we lead them away from our En-emy, and make them our food! Reason, properly misdirected,is our great tool; if we get them to reason that our Enemy doesInot exist, or that the Enemy is unnecessary in their theories of ^their world, they are ours by default!jI wish the legions of our fiendish Master could take credit,|but the humans did it to themselves. I take devilish joy inknowing it was the Enemy’s chief agent, the Church, that be-^gan the great divorce of reason and faith. Knowledge amidst ig-norance is power, and as a human institution, the Church liked ipower. When knowledge threatened them, they suppressed it.|So they tried Galileo for teaching a moving Earth contrary to|Scripture, and change in the supposedly unchangeable heavens,and condemned him for declaring what any reasonably brighthuman could easily see. With that verdict the die was cast,the Church insisting that the evidence of the senses and math-ematical proof must yield to scriptural interpretation. Galileo’sworks were banned, and with this notoriety ensured their cir-culation to scholars throughout Europe.Within a century the separation was complete. JohannesjKepler developed laws of planetary motion, showing that the;Earth indeed moved around the Sun. Isaac Newton, with uni-versal gravitation, discovered the force necessary for movingplanets, showing that once in motion, they would continue for-ever. Suddenly the heavens and the earth, and a God to keepthem working, were replaced with clockwork that could run|on its own. In the minds of scientific humans, the Enemy of ;our hellish Master, who is the creator and sustainer of all, wasbecoming unnecessary!William Harvey, studying blood circulation, started the un-^derstanding of the human body as just another machine. RenejDescartes and Blaise Pascal developed the mathematical, logi-cal, and philosophical foundations of a new world view. Roger 'Bacon articulated the scientific method. By the end of the17th century of human time. Science triumphed over Religion. !Faith 137Henceforth empiricism, observation and discovery replaced rev-elation as the way of understanding the world, the universe,and the deepest yearnings of the human heart. A new way ofthinking came into being, and with it a great harvest of soulsfor our hellish Master.Dear Wormwood, it was not our doing, but we gladly reapthe fruits. Simply, in this worldview there is no room for ourEnemy. God is either unnecessary or non-existent. Because theEnemy wants a relationship of love (I hate, I don’t understand,that word!) with these humans, and they can’t relate to theunnecessary or non-existent, therefore we gather the harvest ofsouls by default.Dear Wormwood, we have gone from strength to strength.It has not taken much for hell’s legions to persuade certain hu-mans that if only the observable and measurable is valid, thenobservation and measurement must be applied to human be-haviour. We cannot take credit for psychology, but we can de-light in the conventional psychological wisdom that belief in afsupreme being is neurotic. After all, such a supreme being can-inot (by definition) be observed or measured. Meanwhile, belieft in the ego, id, or super-ego, or even a collective unconscious,which can no more be measured or observed than a supremebeing, is said to be the height of sanity! Oddly, these observersand measurers totally ignore common behaviour present in mil-Ilions, even billions, of people who have religious faith—an un-derstanding of oneself as more than a body, a relationship withsome Other, greater than oneself, that Enemy of our hellishLord. O how I wish that we had caused this, but they havedone it entirely themselves. Why the Enemy created themblind to all but their own prejudices is a mystery; it must bethis “free will” we do not comprehend.Mind you, my dear Wormwood, some on the Enemy’s side,some of the faithful, have helped. The more science insists ononly its worldview, the more stridently they insist on only theirinterpretation of their scriptures. Since those often fiy in the1 face of the plainly observable, and deny every-day experience,many humans simply ignore what religion insists is absolutetruth, and believe every claim of science, no matter how ab-! stract or improbable. Others simply divide their lives in two:weekly they attend worship services and assent to the creedsof their faith, and the rest of the time they act as if none of138 Consensusit mattered. Others retreat into ignoring common sense andexperience, and insist against all evidence that their religiousunderstanding of the world has to be true. Needless to say,none of that creates the relationship the Enemy wants, and webenefit.Some devils have promoted specialization. With few excep-tions, young humans destined to work in science are discour-aged from learning about humanities, or about our Enemy.Education is a great help; there are so many demands on timeto learn all the minutiae of science, it is impossible to read evencasually in another field. Better yet, some of these young sci-entists take “survey courses” in humanities so trivialized thatbright young humans cannot take them seriously. At the sametime, those destined for the humanities (and study of the En-emy, theology) are weaned early from science and mathematics,and even simple theories are beyond them. Their teachers andmentors even encourage them to be proud of this ignorance.Many of our imps and demons working in educational bureau-cracies have done excellent work to ensure that this state ofaffairs continues, and gets worse, to our great benefit.Specialization in humanities and sciences, and wide-spreadgeneral ignorance, ensure that few ideas become known outsidetheir narrow field. Seldom is there a synthesis of knowledge.If that ever happened, it might point to the Creator, our en-emy. There are theologians who sound like cosmologists, andcosmologists who sound like theologians, but they don’t un-derstand each other, and they are not understood by otherspecialists or by the rest of the humans. Of great amusementare evolutionists, who have theories of the complexity of life onearth developing randomly, quite unaware of probability the-ory demonstrating that the time available has simply been tooshort by many orders of magnitude, unless there was guidance.Or thermodynamicists proving that all systems, if left alone,will always go from complexity to randomness, contrary to evo-lution, unless there is an input from “outside” . If these groupsgot together, they might be forced to realize that their work,collectively, leads to strong evidence for the existence of ourEnemy, which would be a disaster for our devilish Master.Dear Wormwood, you worry about the new interest in spir-ituality, particularly prayer and healing. You express concernthat recently Time magazine devoted a cover and several pagesFaith 139to the subject. You worry that the popular press seems tobe fascinated with things spiritual. But there is little actualthreat, if you read carefully. Scientists are firmly in control;studying, probing, measuring, looking for scientific reasons whyprayer and meditation heal. Since the Enemy cannot be mea-sured, what results is a utilitarian understanding of religion.Faith and prayer work; they are cheaper than pills or surgery,and there are fewer malpractice suits from patients who pray,so why not use faith? But that is far from what faith and prayerare intended to be by our Enemy. Very few of these utilizersof prayer will have the experience that millions of genuinelyspiritual humans have daily; a deep sense of the presence ofour Enemy in their lives. Let them use spirituality for theirown purposes, and they are ours!Dear nephew, the division between faith and science is ourgreat asset. There are a few humans making an effort to healthat great rift, but they are easily dealt with. Here is how wedo that....My screen went black. A message appeared; “Connection toRemote Server Lost”;and despite trying for hours to reconnect,I kept getting “Remote Server Does Not Exist”. There was notrace of the letter from Screwtape on my computer. Why hadI been allowed to see it at all? Was the situation indeed asScrewtape presented it? Was I to feel hopeless about the effortto re-integrate faith and science? I remembered then that thedevil is also called the “Father of Lies”. I finally gave up, andthought that there might be a sermon in all that!

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Faith vs Science: The Demons Like It!

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