Eyes of the Heart

Seeing God in an Age of Science

Russell Haitch

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781506450544
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506450551
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Growing up in a world shaped by science and technology, young people may easily lose sight of God. Or, as this book shows, their "eyes of the heart" can become opened like never before. With wit and insight, Russell Haitch offers a model for unifying faith and science that does not compromise either good science or Christian convictions.

In Eyes of the Heart: Seeing God in an Age of Science, Haitch puts this model to the acid test by showing how it resolves long-standing (and still heated) issues of creation and evolution.

Compelling stories and clear explanations make this book appealing to a wide audience, including parents, youth workers, and young people themselves. The ideas are deep--Haitch covers a lot of ground, from Einstein and Hawking to Augustine and Hildegard of Bingen. But the book's arguments are easy to follow, and its bite-size chapters are enjoyable to read.

Part I

Faith and Science

Chapter 1

Opportunity Knocks

And you, of tender years,

Can’t know the fears that your elders grew by.

—Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Teach Your Children Well”

The goal of this book is to help youth see reality through eyes of both faith and science. Though we live in an age of science, and though technology courses through our cultural bloodstream, still most parents and pastors will shy away from topics in which science and faith converge. Many of us feel inadequate to the task. We may recall a failed chemistry exam or some other proof of our scientific ineptitude. We may also harbor fears that faith is bound to lose some ground any time it interacts with science. Youth ministers, charged with protecting the tender faith of their young flock, have an especially hard time seeing how discussions of science are going to help young people have fewer doubts.

For many problems and temptations of adolescence, avoidance is a fine strategy. As my mother used to say, “Just wait; they’ll grow out of it.” But this strategy will not work with issues of faith and science. If there are doubts, they will deepen over time, and where there are conflicts, the rifts will widen, and the gravitational pull for youth will be toward a secular culture and naturalistic worldview, which science is purported to support.

Even when youth are not formally studying science subjects in school, a scientific, technological, and naturalistic sense of reality pervades their lives. Young people learn to trust science implicitly, through the medicines they take and the devices affixed to their fingertips. They trust scientists. The “scientific community” inspires twice as much public confidence as “organized religion.”1 In the United States, science is indisputably our public truth. If we want youth to see their faith convictions as something more than just private opinions, then we need to help them think through the relationship between Spirit and science.

In facing our fears, we encounter opportunity. Youth can grow more deeply into their faith when they are able to integrate it with the science and technology that govern daily life. This book is structured in terms of opportunity, obstacles, and solution.

First, we have a beautiful opportunity to tell youth about intersections and harmonies between faith and science. Without presuming to put faith and science on the same plane or equal footing, we can explain how faith and science are allies in our seeing the amplitude of God’s reality. Both often begin in wonder, and though they proceed along different lines, the two endeavors can complement and even correct each other. The scientific impulse to observe, inspect, and test is found within the Bible. After healing a leper, Jesus tells him, “Go, show yourself to the priest.” The priest was supposed to examine the evidence and verify that a healing had taken place.

In seizing this opportunity, we encounter obstacles. Though faith and science were once conjoined in Christian history—including in the early modern period, when natural theology and natural science were partners—today theology and science have drifted apart and sometimes been wrenched apart. Former allies are now portrayed as foes. The topic of human origins comes to mind. Issues of creation and evolution continue to vex many young people.

Perusing popular media, we now and then see other ways that science and faith get pitted against each other. For instance, the new governor of Wisconsin proclaimed in 2019 that the seasonal tree in the state capitol building would be called a holiday tree rather than a Christmas tree—and he took one step further. Announcing the theme of “Celebrate Science,” he asked schoolchildren to “submit science-related ornaments to adorn the tree.”2 The copresident of the Freedom from Religion Foundation applauded this move as being “more inclusive.” While not an earthshaking story, still it conveys how science is considered public truth, and it fuels the notion that to be pro-science is to be anti-Christian, or at least anti-Christmas. However, this sort of conflict is not the worst problem youth ministers face with regard to faith and science.

Where there is conflict, it means there is some kind of relationship, along with the hope of reaching resolution. This book takes the position that the bigger problem is not conflict but non-interaction. The divorce between faith and science means that people struggle to live integrated lives in two parallel universes—the Sunday universe of faith, the Monday universe of science and technology. Though young people may see threads of faith and science closely connected on digital feeds, there is a mental chasm between their disparate thought worlds. Both science and Christianity claim to be true. Yet they arrive at their truths by starting from different premises, relying on different procedures, and arriving at different proofs.

In short, we are caught between two kinds of obstacles. Conflict and non-interaction are the Scylla and Charybdis of our attempts to help youth relate faith and science.

As a solution to the problems of both conflictual interaction and non-interaction, I propose a model that takes us back to the person of Jesus and a method that hopefully scientists and ministers alike will find fair-minded. This solution is not meant to be a cure-all but rather a road in the right direction. To test this approach, I will offer a reading of Genesis and Romans that unlocks hidden meaning and resolves antagonism with modern science. In the process, we will discover content to teach youth about two topics of supreme importance in Christianity—namely, life and death.

The need for this kind of teaching becomes obvious if we look again at recent social science research. In a national study, about 80 percent of American teens said they were Christians, but only about 8 percent were described by researcher Kenda Creasy Dean as being “highly devoted.” These teens were more likely to be able to state clearly what they believed and demonstrate the difference those beliefs make in their lives.3 If we want our youth to be part of the 8 percent (for their fulfillment and God’s glory), then we need to address the gap between faith and science.

Overall, teens who are more receptive to mainstream science have a harder time articulating a coherent God-centered worldview, whereas teens who are more lucid about their faith have a harder time harmonizing it with mainstream science. Put another way, teens who profess a scientific worldview struggle with how God fits into it, while teens who profess a biblical worldview struggle with certain issues of science, such as the age of the universe and origins of human beings. Most youth embody both biblical and scientific sensibilities, but the two are not on speaking terms. They are being told, by strong voices on both sides, that they must choose this day whether to be modernly scientific or biblically faithful. But what about the young person who wants to be both?

That is the person for whom this book is written. In writing to parents, pastors, youth ministers, and thoughtful young people, my goal is to help us see through eyes of science but also through what the Bible calls the eyes of the heart (Eph 1:18). In this way, the universe of science can become again the cosmos of our Creator. The goal is to help young people develop a Christian frame of mind and sense of reality—a Christian feeling for how things are and what life is all about. This goal, I realize, faces two initial objections.

First, a parent or pastor may say, “Look, I’m really not too focused on what my teenagers believe. Their active minds come up with all sorts of stuff. I just want them to feel like they belong in church—that they are part of our community.” It’s true, a sense of belonging matters. And someone else may say, “Look, I just want them to learn some spiritual practices and habits of good behavior.” It’s true, behaving also matters.

But so too does believing. In fact, believing, belonging, and behaving are intertwined. What we believe will shape how we behave and where we belong. And “belief” does not necessarily mean a list of things that teens can stand up and recite (though creeds do have their place), but instead belief encompasses their frame of mind, their sense of reality, their intuition of what life is all about. Is the youth meeting one more activity in an overscheduled week or a joining together of the body of Christ? The answer depends on what we believe—our frame of mind and sense of reality. Is a spiritual practice one more task on the long road to self-improvement or a graceful conduit of the Holy Spirit’s power? Again, the answer depends on how we think and what we believe. In short, it is worth paying attention to our frame of mind, as the following pages intend to do.

A second objection to engaging faith and science is that it may feel risky. Since science can become as divisive as politics in some church settings, it might seem prudent to say little or nothing. However, if you are silent, other voices will guide your youth in the faith-and-science discussion, and you may not be happy with what they hear. Still, I can appreciate the apprehension. Already some readers must be skeptical. Is this book going to be pushing “creation science”? Is it going to be pushing “billions of years”?

My aim is not to push anything so much as pull young people toward God at a time when science and technology seem to be pulling them away. This centrifugal force is not the fault of science and technology. Scientists have worked hard, done their job, and made good discoveries. Technologists have capitalized on those discoveries and made good money. The church has often adopted a similar mindset. Maybe there’s some breakthrough discovery that will cause our church to grow or some shiny new technology we can deploy. Maybe there is. But it could be that much of what we hope to discover has already been found. Still, we would need to find it again for ourselves. In the depths of Christian tradition, we can find ways of thinking that will help youth unite faith and science and in the process draw them closer to God.

1 Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 77.

2 “Scott Walker Wades into ‘Holiday Tree’ Fight with Menorah Tweet,” CBS News, November 8, 2019, https://tinyurl.com/y3qbue2v.

3 Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19, 46. See also Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Chapter 2

How Science Can Help Faith and Vice Versa

Life in the Psalms is not altogether easy. There are many enemies whose teeth we’d like to smash. But we also find moments of sublime consolation. Stand under the night sky, unpolluted by electric light, and drink in the jeweled beauty of God’s handmade moon and stars (Ps 8:3). After a cold desert night, feel the sun’s awakening warmth (Ps 19:6). Then think about us, humanity. Why should God care for us, given our puny size in comparison with the incredibly vast cosmos (Ps 8:4)? Yet God does care, supremely, looking favorably on us as we were formed in our mother’s womb (Ps 139:13). These depictions arise from a place of observation and wonder, the same place science also begins.

Turning to Leviticus and to medical matters such as mildew and leprosy, the biblical instructions even start to sound a bit scientific. If you suspect mildew, “go and tell the priest, ‘I have seen something that looks like mildew in my house’” (Lev 14:35 NIV). The priest for his part should “examine the mildew on the walls, and if it has greenish or reddish depressions that appear to be deeper than the surface of the wall,” the house should be shuttered for seven days, then reexamined, and then repaired according to a set protocol. If the mildew has not spread, then the house is to be purified with the blood of a bird killed over fresh water in a clay pot (Lev 14:50).

Don’t let the bird throw you; some of our present-day protocols will sound strange to people three thousand years from now. The main point is that Leviticus contains these God-given instructions to figure things out by observation (“greenish or reddish depression”), measurement (“deeper than the surface”), and testing (“for seven days”). It almost feels like a command to be scientific.

Solomon was king but also a science teacher who taught about mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish (1 Kgs 4:33). Jesus explained the deep things of God by referring to seeds, soil, flowers, birds, fish, trees, and very many sheep. People then did not see a universe divided between natural and supernatural forces but rather beheld a cosmos suffused with God’s presence. The physical and spiritual dimensions were more united for them than they are for us today. It makes good biblical sense to bring faith and science back together. It also makes good historical sense.

Western science began inside the church, and for most of the past two thousand years, faith and science were conjoined. In Syria, in the seventh century, Saint Isaac taught that we have both physical eyes to see the world and spiritual eyes to see God’s glory hidden in creation.1

In Germany, in the twelfth century, Hildegard of Bingen reported that her physical eyes were actually the means through which she received spiritual visions. She used those same eyes to study plants and other things in nature and so became the mother of science in Germany.

Across Europe, in the sixteenth century, Protestant Reformers said the “book” of nature (scientific study) reveals God when read alongside the book of Scripture.

The idea that nature and the Bible are two complementary “books” was proposed in the Latin Middle Ages. These years were once called the Dark Ages, on the assumption that people were in the dark about science and classical learning, but more recent scholarship has sought to dispel this notion by casting light on medieval progress. Rodney Stark contends that science flourished under church patronage, and along with science came new technology: eyeglasses, stirrups and saddles, chimneys, dams, water- and wind-powered mills, and selective plant breeding undertaken in monasteries by devout believers such as Hildegard of Bingen.2

These developments may seem rudimentary and slow, but science is cumulative. The average physics PhD today knows more than Newton, though in his day Newton was the greatest scientist who had ever lived. Likewise, you can earn a doctoral degree in evolutionary biology without reading a single page of Darwin because the field has progressed so much since his time. Science and technology also seem to follow what the inventor Ray Kurzweil has called the law of accelerating returns. The entire human genome was transcribed in fifteen years, but starting out was slow going. After the first year, they had completed only one ten-thousandth of the project. Toward the end is when the pieces fell rapidly into place.3

In short, the science done by believers in former centuries set the stage for the explosive growth we see today. Further, when science was accelerating during the Enlightenment, the central figures were all still religious people, such as Newton and Bacon. The vocal opponents of religion, such as Voltaire, were “literary men” and not scientists.4

For centuries, therefore, the church staunchly supported science, and most scientists were fervently faithful. People of science and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue. Just a Glass of Water
• Part I. Faith and Science
• Part II. Creation and Evolution
• Epilogue. A Monk and His Peas