According to his website, Kenneth Keathley is “Director of the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture and Professor of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary  (SBT) in Wake Forest, NC “.  Like many Southern Baptists, he appears to be a creationist, but an old-earth creationist. (That puts him only 90% of the way to Crazy Town.)

In the 5½-minute video below, Keathley is interviewed by Jamie Dew—professor of history and philosophy and Dean of the College at SBT—about the relationship between science and Christianity. The title of the brief interview, given on the site Between the Times, is “Are science and theology enemies?” Keathley clearly thinks not—in fact, he thinks that Christianity was essential for the rise of science.

He rejects the “warfare” hypothesis of the relationship between science and religion, originally promulgated by John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White (see the first chapter of FvF), saying that those authors had an “agenda”. Well, White (the founder of Cornell Unversity) surely didn’t: he was a believer and discovered through extensive reading that some (but not all) elements of Christianity had opposed scientific advances. His aim was actually to make religion stronger by purging it of its anti-science “dogmatism.” While some of his White’s facts were wrong, many weren’t, but accommodationist scholars like Ronald Numbers continue to use these errors to debunk the entire “conflict” hypothesis. But these scholars have their own agenda: they are determined to show that science and religion can live in harmony. That’s why they try so hard to pretend that the Galileo affair didn’t really have much to do with religion—an argument that is palpable nonsense.

What these scholars seemingly don’t understand is that while some church authorities promoted science, many others opposed the progress of science (e.g., anesthesia, vaccination, and even lightning rods!). More important, the method of ascertaining truth through science is completely inimical to the method of ascertaining religious “truths” (i.e., stuff that is made up).  In that sense, then, the “warfare” hypothesis remains, for when scientific truth opposes religious dogma, more often than not believers side with dogma rather than science. Keathley, after all, is an old-earth creationist who rejects evolution. Isn’t that a prime EXAMPLE of the warfare between his Baptist superstitions and the findings of science?

Keathley imputes the rise of science in Europe to the following influences of Christianity (as opposed what he calls those other “pagan polytheistic religions”): the ideas that nature is real and has a value and an order that can be discerned through laws. Further, the search for laws, according to Keathley, came though the Christian notion of a Great Lawgiver, and from the belief that humans were able to think God’s thoughts after Him, and so could find those laws.

This, of course, is simply post hoc rationalization: a way to discern harmony between irreconcilable ways of finding “truth” by claiming that the only real way to find truth was in fact the offspring of Christian superstition. Of course it’s possible, even likely, that some people were motivated by their religious beliefs to study and understand nature. But it’s just as likely that elements of the church inhibited that search for truth.

And one has to consider this, too: the Church held sway over Europe during the Middle Ages—for ten centuries beginning about 500 A.D. Western science as we know it is a fifteenth-century production. Why the big delay if Christianity was so important in promoting science? And didn’t the ancient Greeks (and early Muslims) also begin doing science, but science not promoted by religion? Thales, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes—did they do their work because they wanted to emulate the Mind of Zeus, the Great Lawgiver? I think not: it was simple human curiosity.

And that curiosity would certainly have resided in the early European scientists as well. Yes, they were virtually all Christians, but everyone was a Christian then. If you give credit to Christianity for science, then you must do so for nearly everything that arose in post-medieval Europe, including the printing press.

In the end, we simply can’t make a convincing argument that without Christianity, science would have started later, or would have been slowed in its progress. We have no control group—no ability to rerun the course of history to see whether, in a heathen Europe, science would have started up later. We just don’t know.

But what we do know is that, at present, religion is not a force for scientific progress. It is only an impediment. I can’t think of a single bit of progress in understanding the world over the last 200 years, for instance, that was promoted by religion. (I’m sure readers can name one or two bits, but ALL scientific progress has come from rejecting the supernatural.) We have left our childish superstitions behind, and, as Laplace said, “we don’t need that hypothesis.”

And if Keathley is so sure that science and theology aren’t enemies, is he willing to give up his antiscientific old-earth creationism? He is a living example of why his own thesis is wrong. Remember, 40% of Americans are young-earth creationists, at least as far as humans are concerned, and virtually all of those are motivated by religion. Many of these try to impose their creationist nonsense on public-school biology classes. If that’s not a war between science and superstition, I don’t know what is.

h/t: Bob F.