Misunderstandings or Manipulations?

This is not another post about homosexuality or homosexual rights. You might think it is, but it’s really a post about science and theology, as was the article on which I’m commenting: Science, the Bible, and the Vote to Ordain Gays by Ben Daniel at the Huffington Post.

Ben Daniel is a minister in the Presbyterian Church, USA, who affirms his appreciation for Scripture and for his church’s Calvinistic heritage. He quotes John Calvin in the course of making the point,

In the face of a conflict between science and the Bible, Calvin urged his readers not to reject science nor to ignore the Bible, but to understand the Bible differently.

I’m no Calvin scholar, but I’m just guessing that’s a little one-sided. Well, not guessing, actually. Calvin would not have said that our current understanding of the Bible must always yield to our current understanding of science. Ben Daniel ought to know better than to think that, too, for science has had to yield to the Bible’s truth many times. Archaeologists once hooted over the Bible’s mention of a large population of Hittites, since they had found no evidence of such a nation. By Daniel’s interpretation of Calvin, that meant that Bible readers should give up believing there really were Hittites. But today you can go to school and study the Hittite language. Science was wrong and the Bible was right. And how about the old scientific consensus that the universe has always existed in a steady state?

Science might still be wrong today; in fact, if history is any guide, then science is assuredly wrong in some of its conclusions today. Which ones? That’s for the future to decide. Even today, though, we can assess Daniel’s central point, the one toward which the whole article leads:

I believe we need to allow our modern understanding of human sexuality to change the way we read and understand the Bible in the same way that Calvin allowed the science of astronomy to change the way he read and understood the Bible. For indeed, knowledge gained from biological and social science — to say nothing of personal experience — tells us that sexual orientation is not a choice but a given, and those who seek life-giving intimacy with same-sex partners are not immoral but are living as they have been created to live.

The notion that science has proved sexual orientation is “not a choice but a given” is problematical on a number of levels. I don’t know where he got it from, but I’m going to take the risk of speculating. It has to do first of all with a certain attitude toward science.

Like all other sciences, the social sciences are devoted to finding observable causes. When they find theoretically supportable correlations between putative influences and behavioral effects, they conclude that they have found those behaviors’ causes. Thankfully most social scientists are appropriately cautious with their findings. They acknowledge that we do not know everything yet, that more research needs to be done, and that correlation does not demonstrate causation. Journalists and others—including ministers—don’t always pay attention to those cautionary statements, so they jump to false conclusions—such as that science knows what causes humans to end up with whatever sexual orientation they have.

That’s one level of the problem. Another is based on an unspoken assumption. This assumption is not all-pervasive, for not all social scientists hold to it but many do: that all effects are based on causes that are observable, at least in principle. Now, the process by which Individuals make free choices are not observable. If we look only to science, we’re not going to find choices influencing any behaviors or attitudes, because science doesn’t know how to look for that. I’m not saying that I think a homosexual orientation is usually the person’s choice in the sense they could choose out of it at any time. I’m saying that whatever choices may be involved in the formation of that preference, science will be blind to them. Science is the wrong lens to look through for that investigation.

So Daniel errs in multiple ways when he says theology must bow the knee to science. The better attitude when science and Scripture seem to collide is to consider that we might understand Scripture wrong, or we might understand nature wrong, or both. It’s not a one-sided affair in which science always defeats the Bible.

The final difficulty in Daniel’s analysis here is quite straightforward by comparison. Again, I’m no Calvin scholar, but I know that Calvin, theologian of “total depravity,” certainly did not say that humans’ inborn propensity to do wrong was a good reason to pronounce it right. I am sure Ben Daniel knows that about Calvin, too. But that’s pretty much what he was saying: that whatever propensity you’re born with, that’s how you were “created to live.”

He was careful not to claim outright that Calvin would draw that conclusion, but he does want us to think it flows out of a Calvinist theological tradition. Make no mistake: original sin is much more central to Calvin’s theology than the relation of science to the Bible! It was theologically irresponsible for Daniel to pluck a minor theme out of context and build a supposedly Calvinistic case on it, while ignoring major Calvinist teachings that defeat his argument.

I can see how a Presbyterian minister might jump too quickly to conclusions about behavioral science. It’s not his field. But I’m having trouble understanding how he could misuse Calvin so. He bent Calvin falsely to his own ends. Was he being intentionally deceptive? Was he self-deceived? Or what? I don’t know. But there’s something very troubling about a minister manipulating theology that way. He’s welcome to his beliefs, but not to lend them false support by manipulating theological history.

Tom Gilson is Director of Strategic Processes in the Operational Advisory Services team for Campus Crusade for Christ.  His Blog may be found at http://www.thinkingchristian.net Please email your comments to forum@ajustsociety.org

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

Picture above from flickr user El Bibliomata licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.