Kuyperianism and Science

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Tonight we’re going to explore part three of our series centers and Circumferences and in this part as you’ve already heard is we’re going to be talking about kyperianism and science by way of review remember that Kyperianism is just a term that we use to encapsulate an idea that the ideas that were espoused by the Dutchman Abraham Kuiper You’ve often heard us to refer to his famous quote that which says, there is not one square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign overall, does not cry out, it is mine. The idea for this series actually came, partly from this book by Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism.

The book itself is based on a series of lectures that he gave at Princeton University in 1898. And the book’s been pretty influential in our thinking here at TEC, because it argues so well for the sovereignty of God in all spheres of life and against dualism in all its forms. Now for those who still struggle with using non-biblical terms like Hyperionism, just think the sovereignty of God in all of creation when you hear us use that word, that just Hyperionism is just a simple way of embodying a larger thought which centers around the sovereignty of God and hopefully everybody here tonight has no problem with saying that God is sovereign over all areas of life.

Kuyper was very much a Calvinist. Most people, when you hear the word Calvinist, define it way too narrowly. They just, they boil it down to a theological term such as the famous tulip that we all know about. When you say I’m a Calvinist, that’s, you know, most people that are uninformed think that is the scope of what you’re talking about. But Kuyper argues that Calvinism and its belief in the sovereignty of God has implications that go far beyond a simple set of theological statements. He believed that Calvinism rightly understood, put it at the table among all the other competing world views. He actually argued that if you understood what Calvin believed and the whole, what we now call Calvinism and the Calvinism idea, that that actually isn’t just a quaint little theological idea over here, but it’s actually a world view that belongs at the table with all the other world views.

To support his claim, he proceeded to show how Calvinism provides answers to the big questions in life and it’s actually its own life system that addresses all the spheres of life. For example, some of those spheres would be religion. It speaks to religion, it speaks to government, it speaks to science, it speaks to economics, it speaks to art, it speaks to family. pretty much any sphere you can bring up, Calvinistic ideas answer the big questions that those spheres bring up in ways different than other world views do. Some of those spheres are represented then by the Circles and Circumferences series that we’re gonna be doing.

A few weeks ago Dave discussed this circle or the sphere of religion, and again tonight I’ll be doing science. I’m going to show how Kuyper’s understanding of Calvinism influenced science for the better at a worldview level. Truth be told, it was Calvinistic principles that enabled the study of science to blossom, even though today most scientists would distance themselves from religion. But in fact, hopefully I’ll convince you that Calvinism and the thoughts that come out of that actually set science free to really begin to make inroads. So I’ve already mentioned the book, Lectures on Calvinism, one other book that I’d recommend for your reading and pleasure is The Soul of Science by Nancy Piercey.

Piercey does a really good job of exploring the development of the study of science. She goes back into history and just shows, again, how science blossomed and she discusses all the issues about the so-called, the church was anti-science. you’ll hear that said today. What did the early scientists actually think about God? How did all of a sudden science shift gears and become as anti-God as it is today in a lot of corners? So she gives a really good history of all of that. I really recommend a lot of her stuff. She’s pretty thorough in her research. In her introduction, she wrote, in this book we will identify and track some of the more significant philosophical streams of thought since the scientific revolution.

As we proceed, it will become clear that the progress of science was a far cry from the simple emancipation from religion, and that’s kind of what you hear today. On the contrary, science has been shaped largely by debates among Christians over which philosophy of nature gives the best way to conceptualize the kind of world God created and the nature of his relationship to it. Even after philosophical materialism began to penetrate scientific thought, Christian influences remained vibrant. References to God and public discourse were common. Not until the late 19th to early 20th century did Christian faith lose its hold as a shared public commitment and retreat to the realm of private individual belief.

And actually, it looks like I’m gonna quote off there, but I thought I had a quote for her there, I don’t. Much of the antagonism and or influence science has today towards religion stems from the false understanding of early disputes such as the one we’ve all heard about between the Roman Catholic Church and Galileo over his support for heliocentrism. At the time the conflict arose, the common belief among the astronomers was geocentrism, which says that the Earth is stationary in the solar system and all the other planets are revolving around it. This belief was not based on ignorant superstition or religious precepts.

It was based on well-reasoned Aristotelian physics. When men like Galileo and Copernicus claimed that the sun was the center of the solar system, the ensuing battle was between competing scientific explanations for heavenly observations. It was not a science versus religion debate at all. Where it got messy, however, was when the Catholic Church asserted its authority and matters beyond its God-given sphere of responsibility. The church at that time saw itself as the arbitrator of all things spiritual and otherwise. It sided with the Aristotelians and ended up then treating Galileo pretty harshly. If you read the history, they were not very kind to him.

but again, it was because he was challenging the conventional scientific wisdom of the day and the church saw itself as the authority in that arena and so they didn’t like it. That Galileo was bucking the system and then they sought to punish him for that. This is one way that Calvinism helped influence science by granting it greater freedom than it had under the Roman Catholic control. And we’re gonna talk more about that in a few minutes. The Reformation challenged and eventually ended the Catholic Church’s stranglehold on every area of life. Calvinism understood that God worked through various agents such as government and family to accomplish his purposes.

Each domain had its own unique responsibilities under heaven and the only expectation was that all of those spheres would remember to come under the domain of the lordship of Jesus Christ. that this fear, this fear, this fear, they each have their responsibilities and they shouldn’t be interfering with each other. Now they should in some ways influence each other but they shouldn’t interfere. But they must all remember that they all must yield to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Most of the great names of the science from the 17th and 18th centuries were people of faith. Da Vinci, Copernicus, Vesalius, Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Boyle, Newton.

They’re just some of the examples of early scientists who were either Catholic, Anglican, or Lutheran. Now I’m not saying that they were all necessarily believers as we understand believers, but they were men who perceived themselves to be believers in God. And they saw God certainly is very integral into what they were studying. And again, you already saw this quote a moment ago. Just run through a few of these so you can get a feeling for what these guys thought. Galileo, the prohibition of science would be contrary to the Bible, which in hundreds of places teaches us how the greatness and the glory of God shine forth marvelously in all of his works, and is to be read above all in the open books of the heaven.

Then we had Isaac Newton in his seminal work titled Principia Mathematica. He was discussing the works of the solar system in that writing. He wrote, this most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. This being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord over all, and on account of his dominion, he is wont to be called Lord God, Pentacritor, or universal ruler.

And then Kepler said, I had the intention of becoming a theologian, But now I see how God is by my endeavors also glorified in astronomy for the heavens to clear the glory of God. So I could have gone on and given you more quotes by more scientists, but this kind of gives you a feel for what was going on in these guys’ heads as they were coming up with a lot of the science that we still rely on today. Doesn’t sound very anti-God to me at that point in time.

Well, it’s important to state up front that a recognition of the sovereignty of God over all of creation, i.e. Kyperianism, is necessary in order for scientific inquiry to be truly free, and I’m gonna try to flesh that out. This was once understood hundreds of years ago, but would be considered foolishness by most scientists today. Thomas Aquinas, who was himself was a Catholic, was the first person to call theology the queen of the sciences. The earliest universities in our country were familiar with that term, and they would have been in full agreement that theology should be viewed as the queen of sciences. In other words, you need to understand theology to really put all the other sciences in their proper place.

Now, of course, we know today that that didn’t last, and as a result, religion, if there is any religion in the universities, it’s off there in the philosophy department, you know, somewhere out of sight, out of mind. So let’s take a modern day scientist, or well, he’s now dead, Stephen Hawking, who was a Nevada atheist and heralded as one of the smartest physicists of all time. How does his thinking line up with these guys? I went backwards on me, didn’t I? Okay. I’m going to figure out how to derive this thing. Where are we at? Newton. Kepler, okay, I’m sorry. I was apparently… If I’m not on the right slide, you guys just throw a hymnal at me.

Okay. Hawking. He wrote this in a brief history of time, that physics has usurped theology’s crown, get that, it has usurped theology’s crown, taking over as the discipline that answers the ultimate answers about who we are and why we are here. A little different take today, right? Hawking was so adverse to religious explanations for the cosmos that he considered it more plausible, such bizarre alternatives, such as, we’re living in an alien controlled matrix, in other words, you know, the Martians or somebody have set up a matrix, and right now, you’re all plugged in, you just think you’re right here listening to me talk, you’re actually in a simulation.

He held that as plausible, he also held as plausible that there’s some 10 to the 500th power number of universes, and given that number of universes, then it was very probable that one like ours just spontaneously erupted out of nothing. He could see how that could have mathematically been possible to happen. But he saw those as more plausible that in the beginning was God. Christians know that to understand the cosmos and humanity, we have to study God’s general revelation and his special revelation. With few exceptions, modern day scientists do not allow God’s special revelation, i.e. the Bible, to be used. It’s just a tenet.

If you’re gonna make scientific inquiry, you cannot refer to anything that they would deem as religious, supernatural, the Bible is out of bounds. That cannot be a source of the answer to the question you’re asking. As a result, they are doomed in many cases to never finding the answers they seek. Examples would be, where do humans come from? What happens after death? Why do people do evil things? When does life begin? How many genders are there really? Is it really 52, Mr. Zuckerberg?

We cannot bring the Bible into those discussions. That’s out of bounds for the scientific inquiry today. Well let me ask you this, which way I gotta go to drive that right, okay. Imagine if you were asked to answer the question, What is two plus two? But you were told that four is not an acceptable answer. That in a nutshell is what unbelieving scientists are up against in many other inquiries. They are out of square one. They have already precluded themselves from finding many of the answers they’re looking for because they’ve said, we can’t bring God into the equation. We can’t bring the Bible into the equation.

This restriction would be fine if science would only ask questions that could be answered by a study of general revelation. You don’t really need your Bible to measure the circumference of the earth. I can be a pagan and go figure that out. But for a lot of the questions they’re trying to answer, they need the word of God. So for the rest of the time today, I’m going to be then basically doing a review of the chapter out of Kuyper’s book on science. He brings up four ways that Kyperianism helped promote science. And those in kids, if you’re tracking in your kids’ corner, those are the four main points, four main blocks.

There we go. First off is that Kyperianism fosters a love for science. In his lecture on the science, he brought this first point up and went on to elaborate what it means. He said because studying God’s natural revelation is one more way to know him better. It’s the same point that Galileo made in the quote that I shared a moment ago, where just by studying the cosmos can’t help but bring one who actually wants to know the truth closer to God. In defining what he means by science, what Kuiper means by science, he contrasts scientific inquiry in order to know God and inquire to just know the facts. There’s basically, you’re going to have to go down one of two trails.

Your scientific inquiry for the sake of knowing God, your scientific inquiry just to learn facts. He wrote, he wrote, I speak of human science as a whole, not of what is called among you, sciences. Especially do I deny that mere empiricism in itself ever is perfect science. Even the minutest microscopic, The farthest reaching telescopic investigation is nothing but perception with strengthened eyes. This is transformed into science when you discover in this specific phenomena perceived by empiricism, so you observed something, but it becomes science when you then discover the universal law and thereby reach the thought which governs the whole constellation of phenomena.

That is really the endpoint of God’s revelation is for us to discover the thought, to understand who is behind all of this. If we are simply stopping at our Hubble telescope and we can go peer into the universe, we really, Kuiper would argue that that’s stopping short of true science. Notice that in Kuiper’s view, science occurs when you go beyond the mere empiricism and discover the thought behind what’s observed. It’s the Calvinistic impulse driven by the belief that God is speaking in everything that leads us to the fullest answers of what, why, and how. He goes on to describe how limited an agnostic approach to science is by describing it, he uses these words, he says it’s like drawing a curtain across the background and over the abysses of life and being satisfied only with a study of the phenomena of the several sciences.

And this then, he says, leads to spiritual vandalism of the mind. They’ve got a lot of data, they got a lot of facts, but they miss the point of the revelation. Romans 1.18 tells us that men willfully draw a curtain over their minds by actively suppressing the truth. The problem isn’t that general revelation isn’t clear enough. In Calvin’s Institutes, he makes the same point regarding the unmistakable hand of God in general revelation. He wrote, lest anyone then be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, special, okay, but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe in general.

As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him. And then I attributed that to Kyper, but that’s actually Calvin. Another way that Kyperianism fosters a love for science is that it teaches us that there is logic and order in creation because there is a mind behind it. If you rule out intelligent design, i.e. God, then all you are left with is chance. And how do you build a coherent system that holds true when there is no apparent telos or purpose behind anything? Another good book I could recommend is How to Be an Atheist. He also delves into these ideas about what does it mean if there is no God, then all of a sudden a lot, we really have no basis for arguing certainty in really anything, no matter if the fact that we think we see rhyme and reason and but the reality is that that can exist without a God behind it.

But quoting Kuyper again, But if you now proceed to the decree of God, what else does God’s foreordination mean than the certainty that the existence and course of all things, i.e. of the entire cosmos, instead of being a plaything of caprice and chance, obeys law and order, and that there exists a firm will which carries out its designs, both in nature and in history. Kuyper asked the follow-up questions, what are you left with if you deny God is the creator? He says, do you abandon this point of view that it is uncertain at any moment what is to happen, what course things may take, what every morning and evening may have in store for you, your family, your country, the world at large.

Man’s capricious will is then the principle of concern. Every man may then choose and act every moment in a certain way, but it is also possible that he may do just the reverse. If this were so, you could count upon nothing. There is no interconnection, no development, no continuity, a chronicle, but no history. And now tell me what makes a science under such conditions. You may speak, yet speak of the study of nature, but the study of human life has been made ambiguous and uncertain. Nothing but bare facts may then be historically ascertained. Interconnection and plan have no longer a place in history. history dies away.

Kuyper admits that you can go out and study nature without a belief in God. People do it all the time. But to what end? You don’t have the confidence that what you observe will hold true tomorrow. If it’s all randomness, if it’s not order, it’s random. If it’s all random, just because it happened every day the last hundred years does not guarantee it’s gonna happen again for the next hundred years. you’re left up to random chance in the cosmos. From the days of the Greek philosophers until now, it has been the dominant view that all laws fall into either natural law or conventional law. Natural laws are those laws that are deemed universal.

They’re true for everybody, everywhere, all times. And we often, more often than not, they’re associated, these universal laws are associated then with some kind of divine decree. we recognize that there’s a God behind these divine laws. Principles of physics, such as gravity, would be a universal law. I don’t care where you go in the world, but jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is going to be a bad idea. Doesn’t matter where you’re at. You can go anywhere you want in the world and jump out of an airplane without a parachute. We would all agree that’s a bad idea at all times, right? Conventional laws are those laws that men make up and are not universally true or enforceable.

An example would be laws in some Muslim countries of forbidding women to speak to men that they’re not related to. That’d be a man’s law. That’s not a universal law. That’s not something we can say it applies to everybody everywhere. Our founding documents are full of appeals to natural law based on the belief in the supreme creator. An example would be that all men are created equal and endowed by their maker with certain unalienable rights. You ever heard that one before? America’s principles of freedom are directly traceable to the influence of Calvinism and its teaching on natural law that it had on its formation.

Now I’ve sometimes wondered myself if an atheist can actually really truly claim to be an American. Because if they think about it, all of their freedoms that they insist on having are based on natural laws that our founders sourced all the way back to the creator that they deny exists. So here they stand with, I demand my rights, my inalienable rights. Well, where do those rights come from? Who said so?

I just get a bigger gun or more money and I can change those rights in a hurry. Without natural law, it’s the wild, wild west. Everyone is free to do as they please because there is no universal truth. What was taken as truth in one generation is quickly discarded by the next. History dies away because history holds no value to the current generation. Without natural law, basic things like biology become confused. A boy is a girl is a boy. Life begins whenever we say it begins. Definitions lose their substance. Without a Kiparian understanding of the world, science lacks what it needs to come up with universal truths and in many cases, any truth statement at all.

There’s no confidence because there is no underlying bedrock to the assertions that are made. Just because the majority of the people agree to something does not make it a fact or true. It just means that’s what you all decided to do today. Next generation can change the rules. I mean, just, it’s crazy to start to think about how to go. Black and white, the next generation can reverse the definitions. Boy, girl, they’re already reversing the definitions. On and on it goes. And this is science today that is trying to get us to change these definitions. Without God, certainty and meaning are no longer possible. The best we can hope for is to eke out as much pleasure as we can before we turn back into cosmic dust and are quickly forgotten.

Now, Kuyper sums up his first point by saying, faith in such a unity, stability, and order of things, personally as predestination, and cosmically, as the counsel of God’s decree, could not but awaken as with a loud voice and vigorously foster love for science. Without a deep conviction of this unity, this stability, and this order, science is unable to go beyond mere conjecture. And only when there is faith in the organic interconnection of the universe will there be also a possibility for science to ascend from the empirical investigation of the special phenomena to the general and from the general to the law which rules over it and from the law to the principle, which is dominant over all.

So if you followed all that argumentation is that without God in the equation, science comes up short. It can observe the data, but it cannot come up with an absolute conclusion of what we should believe and how we should order our life and how things work and answer the big questions. All’s I can say is here’s the data and here’s our opinion about what we think, how you should interpret the data. Well then there was a second way that Calvinism affected the development of science. That is it restored science to its domain. Prior to the life of Christ on earth, so going back prior to Christ, Greco-Roman views on cosmology dominated.

Much of it was based on mythology and life revolved around how to appease a pantheon of capricious gods. The Greeks and the Romans were interested and trying to understand the cosmos, but they tended to view its operation in terms of what the pagan gods were up to. So they had explanations for what they saw, but it was all revolving around their mythology and this God’s doing this and this God’s doing that and we gotta make this God happy. Oh, but don’t be careful there, you make him happy, you make that God mad. And I mean, that’s kinda was life for them. Following Christ’s time on earth now, post Christ, during the medieval age, which came about during the fifth to the fifth, covered fifth to 15th centuries, belief in the ancient Greek and Roman gods gave way to then a Christian worldview.

When I use the word Christian, I mean obviously it was largely the early church and then the Roman Catholic church became the, pretty much the only, mostly the Christian game in town. Reformation had not occurred yet, but we begin to see Christianity begin to shape and change thinking. And, but then what started to happen is the Catholic Church began to become the definer of what it meant to be godly. These early Christians typically did not have much interest in understanding the universe during this period of time. Their worship of God tended to focus more on the mystical. Things such as Gnosticism was a common error during that time which taught that the material was evil, but the spiritual things were good.

So during this medieval period within Christendom, There wasn’t really a lot of interest in studying the universe, it’s all material, that’s not important to us, you know, being super spiritual is. So this dualism then among the Christians effectively retarded their interest in science and the Christianized parts of the world were late in exploring the world God created. And it wasn’t until after the Reformation and the rise of Calvinism that Christians then began to appreciate the real value of science. Kuiper wrote, it was Calvinism which, without losing sight of the spiritual, led to a rehabilitation of the cosmic sciences.

He goes on to say that if we were to choose today, do you wanna go live back in the medieval times or in the ancient Greece times? You know, the choice would be pretty obvious. We’d probably rather live in the medieval days when Christ had already come. But then he goes on to say, but not withstanding all this, I assert and maintain that Aristotle knew more of the cosmos than all the church fathers taken together, that under the dominion of Islam, better cosmic science flourished than in the cathedral and monastic schools of Europe, that the recovery of the writings of Aristotle was the first incentive to renewed the rather deficient study, and that Calvinism alone, by means of its dominating principle, which constantly urges us to go back from the cross to creation, and no less by means of its doctrine of common grace, through open again to science, the vast fields of the cosmos, now illuminated by the Son of Righteousness, and the Scriptures testify that in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

So it’s a mouthful. But he’s saying that in those early Christian days when they were focused more on mysticism, and they were, you know, Gnostic thinking was still floating out there, that they had this sort of dualism, and they really weren’t that interested in the sciences. And so we had other areas, even in Islam countries and others, were doing more in the areas of science than the Christians were. But he’s saying, as Calvinism came into play, and it brought that impulse that, hey, this is God’s dominion, his world, his creation, we should get out there and study it. That’s when it began to really turn on the burners for scientific study and inquiry.

He goes on to give numerous examples from scripture that show that a dualistic approach to life is wrong-headed, however well-intended it may be. He points to the Apostle John’s reference to the eternal word by whom all things are made and who is the life of men. He quotes Paul’s claim that all things were created by Christ and consist by him. He points out that Christ’s work of redemption is not limited to just individual sinners, but also includes all of creation. Do you ever think about that? that God is not, he’s not just going to redeem us people, but he’s also, this whole creation is groaning, and he’s gonna bring our redemption to the whole creation.

The whole creation groans, waiting for the bursting forth of the glory of the children of God. Kuyper’s point is that God is ultimately going to restore all of his creation. It is his handiwork, and it’s a part of his revelation to us. It follows then that a study of creation is not only permissible, but profitable and dutiful. And again, I’ve got another rather lengthy Kuyper quote here, so hanging in there. He’s just got so many good things to say. Trust me, I started off with like 300 pages of notes and I whittled it down to like 40, so. I’ll spare you all to read the book. It’s really good stuff. So Kuyper says, if you’re following this thought, he says, in keeping with this, the final outcome of the future foreshadowed in the Holy Scriptures is not the merely spiritual existence of saved souls, but the restoration of the entire cosmos.

when God will be all in all under the renewed heavens on the renewed earth. Now, this wide, comprehensible, cosmical meaning of the gospel has been apprehended again by Calvin, apprehended not as a result of a dialectic process, but of the deep impression of God’s majesty, which has molded his personal life. Certainly, our salvation is of substantial weight, but it cannot be compared with the much greater weight of the glory of our God, who is revealed as majesty and wondrous creation. This creation is his handiwork and being marred by sin, the way was open, it is true, for a still more glorious revelation in its restoration.

Yet restoration is and ever will be the salvation of that which was first created, the theodicy of the original handiwork of our God. This capering understanding of the sovereignty of God leads one to conclude that Christians should be at the forefront of studying the creation because who better understands the purpose for which it was created? If anybody should be doing science, it should be us.

Kuyper summarizes his second point by saying, thereby, of course, Calvinism puts an end once and all to the contempt for the world, neglected, neglect of temporal and under, I’m gonna start that over. Thereby, of course, Calvinism puts an end once and for all to contempt for the world, neglect of temporal and undervaluation of cosmical things. Again, he’s been poking at the early church. Cosmical life has regained its worth, not at the expense of things eternal, but by its virtue of its capacity as God’s handiwork and as a revelation of God’s attributes. So again, I know I’m giving you a lot of data, a lot of quotes here, But with Calvin’s idea and the sovereignty of God, all of a sudden he said, hey, Christians, there’s a big old wide world out there that’s all a part of God’s revelation.

We should be out there. We should be the ones studying it, making the discoveries, because we can understand the purpose behind it. Well, Calvin then goes on to his third argument. He said, Calvinism delivered signs from unnatural bonds, The next evidence of Calvin’s advancement of science presented by Kuiper is how it helped free science from stifling bonds placed upon it by the early church and state. Early in church history, all of life was pretty much controlled by church and state. These two domains, you were going to answer to one or the other, and one or the other was going to tell you how to live your life.

You had to play a big game of Mother May I with them. You just didn’t, you couldn’t do anything without their approval. They had the authority and the power to make you live your life whatever way they saw fit. Early in church history, all of life was pretty much controlled by either the church or the state. The church lived by a world view called ecclesiasticism where every facet of life came under the church’s ecclesiastical order. The church had to approve an order for something to be true or acceptable. And the state operated under a world view called statism, which is a form of secularism. In this world view, the state dictates most aspects of economics and social policy, and they think the church should stay out of it.

They want religion off in the corner. Stay in your stained glass aquariums, we’ll take care of the rest. Each of these two domains vied constantly for preeminence as the dominant authority. Between the two, they controlled much of the wealth and determine what was allowed and not allowed. That they were the authorities. Around the 13th century, the earliest forms of what we might call universities began to form. These were institutions where intellectuals would gather for the purpose of studying various disciplines such as astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy. It was kind of a new thing. And these smart people would get together and start studying these topics.

Now they knew in order to continue to grow and flourish, these universities needed money and they needed some recognition. And so they basically needed either the state or the church to give them some street cred, if you will, and some financing. And since many of the members of these schools were men of faith, they really ended up going and seeking support largely from the church. And of course the church, fighting to have absolute control over everything, was more than happy to take him under their wing. And when I say church at this point, we’re talking largely the Catholic church. As these early scientists’ understanding of the cosmos grew though, they began to postulate theories that ran counter to prevailing beliefs.

You already mentioned the debate about heliocentrism versus geocentrism with Galileo. But because of the ecclesiastical nature of the church, new discoveries had to be run up the chain of command with the Pope being the final arbitrator. So Galileo’s out there doing his thing, Copernicus, and they’re saying, hey, wait a minute, we’re going around the sun, it’s not the other way. And they can’t just put that out there, they’ve got to basically get the Pope’s blessing to agree with that, otherwise, it’s not gonna be accepted truth. But that’s, you can see the problem. That left men like Galileo with a problem. His new heliocentrism was correct, but the church clung to the geocentrism based on the Aristotelian physics.

This arrangement put an effective stranglehold on the scientific inquiry. So again, remember we’re talking about how Calvinism sets science free from unnatural bonds. The church was a ball and chain at that time in the scientific exploration. Kuiper wrote, without regarding the papillospsis over the university as such, the church exercised pressure upon science by harassing, accusing, and persecuting the innovators on account of their expressed opinions and published writings.

There wasn’t the freedom to reveal what they were discovering. When the Reformation came about and later Calvinism proper, it removed the power of the state and the Catholic Church that they held over all of life. Science was set free from bondage under the church to pursue scientific inquiry without interference. Calvinism set science free from the improper earthly spheres of control. However, again, all the spheres, including science, were still expected to yield to the lordship of Christ.

I should note here that Kuyper’s application of the sovereignty of God led him to formulate what has been called sphere sovereignty. So up until this time, you had statism and Ecclesiastesism, you had to stay in the church, right? That was the worldviews that were controlling everything. And Calvinism came in and kind of blew that up and said, wait, wait, wait, no, no, that’s, there’s these, the earlier thoughts on spheres was being developed, but then Kuiper, you know, what he added to the equation, is he more formally identified this idea of sphere, sovereignty, which again is its own worldview. The idea is that every area of human life exists equally and without agent before the face of God.

That includes the individual. Before this time, before the rise of Protestantism, the Reformation, we needed the priestly mediators, right? And part of what the Reformation did is says, no, we all stand before God directly. We don’t need a priest as our mediator. But this whole idea just expanded out to all these different spheres of life, that wait a minute, we don’t have to have everything under life coming under the church or the state’s control. Now this idea, this idea that all of these spheres and individuals stand before God equally without agent, before the face of God, this idea necessarily required separation between church and state, as well as other societal spheres, such as family, politics, science, education.

To us it seems like, duh, I mean, can you imagine if all of a sudden your family wants to go on vacation, you gotta go get the church’s permission. You wanna start a business, you need the church’s permission. You don’t wanna do anything, you need the church’s or the state’s permission. That was life.

But that’s where Protestantism, the Reformation, and then as the Calvinistic idea developed, where we got these ideas that we live by today, these freedoms that we enjoy. Culture functions best when each sphere fulfills its purpose in submission to Christ, who is Lord overall. Chaos ensues when the various spheres start to try to control the other spheres.

Calvinism’s influence removed the church’s dominion over civil governments, the arts, family, education, economics. We wouldn’t even have economic systems like capitalism without, you can trace that back into Calvinism’s influence on economics. We wouldn’t have that.

This set these spheres free to function under the lordship of Christ, and later the Enlightenment, while agreeing with the principles of separation of church and state, went a different road. They then sought to get rid of religion altogether from society. To the proponents of ecclesiasticism and statism, this idea of each sphere being independent under God must have sounded like madness. What would keep such a system from descending into chaos? And we have in history an example of what happens when you, where you can go bad. The French Revolution, with its creed of no God, no religion, no keen, was an example of what would happen if men rejected all authority.

Calvinism is not anti-authority. Calvin is simply saying, let’s recognize that God has ordained different areas of life and different responsibilities and put different people in charge and they all stand before God and they need to function within that. In the case of the French Revolution, as we all know, they said, no, we wanna throw off everything and we can see how that played out in history for them versus our, we don’t like using the word American Revolution here right there. We prefer the war for independence. So how, a lot of people try to make those, a parody, they try to make them equivalent stories and they’re not at all, they’re way different stories.

Because in our Calvinistic stream that America was born out of, we were not anti-authority at all. We were just simply saying, look, let’s recognize these spheres and have them operate freely. One of the other core beliefs that Calvinism holds to is the doctrine of common grace. Kind of back to the point about, well, what would happen if there’s like, all of a sudden we let all these domains free to do what they wanna do. You know, everything’s gonna break loose, it’s gonna be crazy. Well, Calvinism also brought with it the idea of common grace. And the doctrine just simply says that while men are totally depraved, we do not fully act out that depravity because of the common grace of God in our lives.

God works through agencies such as government and conscience to restrain man’s sinfulness. If it wasn’t for common grace, men would descend into greater and greater sin. We see that happens, we see that happen to those whom God has given over to a depraved mind, right? But thankfully, many unbelievers today still operate under the parameters that common grace allows for. God has given all men intellect and the ability to make discoveries for the good of all. And as such, we have all benefited from many discoveries made by people who did not know Christ. And so we can be comfortable that while God has set up these different spheres, he is also placed into play, common grace, so that while again, men can be horribly wicked, they can also do some pretty good things.

we all benefit from some good discoveries and good things that unbelievers did. But because Calvinism recognizes common grace, it’s not threatened by unbelievers working in the sciences and it does not feel the need to impinge these efforts like the early church did. We don’t have to have the world come to us and say, mother, may I? But there’s a caveat there. In cases where unbelievers start to violate God’s laws, then Christians should speak up and resist. An example of this, a current day example, would be the emergence of genetically splicing human and non-human DNA together. I don’t know if you’ve been tracing that.

Japan has recently legalized the ability for people to create, what do they call them? Shimmerons or part human, part animal. Japan has now said that they can start doing experiments and trying to merge human animal DNA, supposedly for the sake of growing human organs or transplants, but talk about a ball of wax. They’re getting into there. And of course we see the gender confusion issues today, all of these things. So science, apart from God, can go very bad, very wrong, and we should speak to that and challenge that, but we don’t have to be the checkpoint for all scientific discoveries, all scientific inquiry, because God’s working through all people through common grace.

Calvinism provides science both the freedom to explore and the proper limits upon it. And that’s, you know, when we bring Christ into the equation in our scientific inquiry, then we have the best of all the worlds. We have that ability to go out and use our faculties and make discoveries. We have the ability to understand what’s it for, what’s it pointing to, we know the tell us. And then we can make the proper applications for the benefit of mankind and for the glory of God. Kuyper summed up his third point this way. Calvinism called Christendom back to the order of creation.

Replenish the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over everything that lives upon it. Christian life as a pilgrimage was not changed, but the Calvinist became a pilgrim who, while on his way to our eternal home, had yet to perform on earth an important task. The cosmos in all the wealth of the kingdom of nature was spread out before, under, and above men. This entire limitless field had to be worked. And then lastly, the last argument that he makes is that Calvinism provides a solution to a scientific conflict that occurs. So we’re turning science loose, all right? All right, so we’re now saying that under this sphere called science, Anybody who’s interested in science and Christians should be included, go for it.

But there’s gonna be a problem that’s gonna occur. There’s gonna be a conflict and he’s gonna address that conflict and what he says the solution is. He states that as science began to enjoy greater freedom, it also created a conflict of principles which Calvinism then provided a solution for. So what is this conflict of principles he’s referring to? He writes, free investigation leads to collisions. One draws the line on the map of life differently from his neighbor. The result is the origin of schools and tendencies. Optimists and pessimists, a school of Kant and a school of Hegel. Among jurists, the determinist opposes the moralist.

Among medical men, the homeopaths oppose the allopaths. Plutonis and Neptuneus, Darwinus and Anti-Herbinus compete with one another in the nature natural sciences. Wilhelm Van Humboldt, Jacob Graham and Max Mueller form different schools in the domain of linguistics. Formalists and realists pick quarrels with one another within the classical walls of the philosophical temple. Everywhere contention, conflict, struggle, sometimes a human and keen, not seldom mixed with personal animosity. And yet, although the energy of the differences of principle lies at the root of all these disputes, these subordinate conflicts are entirely put in the shade by the principle conflict, which in all countries perplexes the mind most vehemently.

The powerful conflict between those who cling to the confession of the triune God and his word, and those who seek the solution of the world problem in deism, pantheism, and naturalism. So if you’re following what he’s saying, everybody’s pursuing science and we’ve got a problem. Those that hold to the triune God, and those who are looking to the natural, materialistic answers, or in this case, deism, pantheism, naturalism, that’s gonna create a problem in this scientific community. Kuyper goes on to say that this conflict is not faith versus science. He says such a conflict does not exist because science at some level rests on faith.

And that’s a really important point that we have to always remember is that everybody, everybody at some point rests on faith. There’s not a single human being that’s ever existed that does not at some point rest on their faith. He says that faith that does not lead to science is not real faith. That’s a pretty bold statement. True faith should spark curiosity in God’s general revelation. In order for a scientist to begin his work, he must by faith presuppose the following things. All scientists, believers, unbelievers, have to presuppose at least these things. Confidence in himself, in his self-consciousness, that his senses are working correctly and not deceiving him, that the rules of logic are true, that universal principles exist behind the special phenomena he’s observing.

And he could go on and on and on again, and I’d recommend again that book, How to Be an Atheist, because he really dives into these concepts and why an atheist just has some serious problems with what they’re trying to maintain, there is no God. If you say it is normal, well, I’m sorry, at the root of the conflict then, at the root of the conflict that Kuyper speaks of, He says that you have to decide on one of two basic assertions. Either that the cosmos, as we observe it today, is normal or it’s abnormal. If you say it’s normal, then that says that what you see is as it should be and it’s continuing to evolve to its ideal state, whatever it is.

It’s just getting better. But what we see, because it’s all natural and materialistic, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. If you say abnormal, then that means you’re saying that something has disturbed what we’re seeing, and it requires some regenerative action to get it back on track. Kuiper says all science has to start with one of these two basic beliefs. The normalists, everything’s a hunky dory, will only consider natural data. Data that comes from non-materialistic sources must be rejected. They must reject, for example, the creation story found in Genesis. Evolution explains how the cosmos is progressing from its less mature state to its ideal state.

Kuyper then defines the abnormalists this way. Congratulations, you guys are all abnormal, I believe, based on his definition. The abnormalists, on the other hand, oppose the position of the normalists with all their might. They maintain inexorably the conception of man as an independent species because he, in him alone, is reflected the image of God. They conceive of sin as the destruction of our original nature and consequently as rebellion against God. And for that reason, they postulate and maintain the miraculous as the only means to restore the abnormal, the miracle of regeneration, the miracle of the scriptures, the miracle in the Christ, descending as God with his own life into ours, and thus owing to this regeneration of the abnormal, they continue to find the ideal norm, not in the natural, but in the triune God.

The normalist and the abnormalist have fundamentally different starting points, and if they are consistent within themselves, never the twain shall meet. And hence then, the conflict in the scientific approaches occurs. Kuiper goes on to discuss how the abnormalist’s view of the cosmos was gradually replaced by the normalist. So once upon a time, the abnormalist, those understood that God was behind it, that prevailed. And then over time, it changed to where now the normalist dominate the discussion. You probably heard, I assume you’ve heard in your history lessons about the Scopes monkey trial. You guys have heard about that?

1925, how long ago was 1925? Like 95 years ago? Not really very long ago. John Scopes, a school teacher in Tennessee, was taken to court for violating state law and teaching evolution. Can you imagine that? Imagine today. Wait, John over there, he’s teaching evolution. We’re suing him. Turns out he was, I think he was getting fired, so he took the school district to court saying I should be able to teach this. But he was violating state law. The law of the state of Tennessee was you cannot teach evolution. Pretty crazy, huh? 95 years ago. At the time, the Genesis account was the accepted scientific explanation for our origins.

Kuiper documents how many liberal theologians then, and here’s the problem he’s gonna say, so we got this rift between the two scientific approaches, normalist and abnormalist. So, what do the Christians do? A bunch of the liberal theologians basically succumbed to the pressure to make religion more respectable among the scientific community. They began coming up with various theories to try and harmonize scripture with the theory of evolution. Their solution to the conflict was to capitulate to the peer pressure. They wanted to be respectable within the scientific community, so they had to start bending the scriptures to make it fit the other side’s view of the world.

Kuyper’s solution to the conflict in a nutshell is stick to your principles. Oppose false signs with truth, not censorship. So he’s saying let them, let them, you know it’s kinda like Jesus and the tares of the wheat. Let the normalist go down their dead end trail. You abnormalist, you get out there. You duke it out. You stick to your principles. Don’t be ashamed to follow that path. Calvinism with its belief in the sovereignty of God does not lose heart or shrink back just because it holds the minority viewpoint. He also says in his opinion that it was wrong for the abnormalists back in the day to oppress the normalists.

He commends the normalists for being consistent with their worldview. But he suggests that the abnormalists do likewise and instead of surrendering science to the normalists, get in the fray and pit faith versus faith because that’s what it really is, it’s faith versus faith, and let the truth win. You summarized his viewpoint this way. Instead of seeking relief for your scientific conscience in downhearted complaints, so don’t go off and have a pity party, or in mystic feeling, or in unconfessional work, the energy and the thoroughness of our antagonists must be felt by every Christian scholar as a sharp incentive himself also to go back to his own principle in his thinking to renew all scientific investigation on the lines of these principles and to glut the press with the burden of his cogent studies.

If we, there you go, if we console ourselves with the thoughts that we may without danger leave secular science in the hands of our opponents, if we only succeed in saving theology, Ours will be the tactics of the ostrich. To confine yourself to the saving of your upper room when the rest of the house is on fire is foolish indeed. So he’s saying, again, don’t freak out about the normalist, but let’s get more Christian scientists out there. You know what I mean by that. And go toe to toe. Because guess what? We actually know the truth. It’s the same idea as when we did the downhill apologetics. We don’t have to apologize.

We have to just state the truth and let the truth prevail. So in summary, all this, you’ll note that I’ve been interchanging the terms Calvinism and Kyperianism back and forth throughout this talk. Kiparianism is simply taking the core Calvinist doctrine of the sovereignty of God and pushing it out into the corners of life. This little diagram is trying to show you. We start with the proposition that God is sovereign. Everybody okay with that statement? Calvin comes along and he basically, from the scriptures, he says, God’s sovereign. Kiparianism continues to develop. Well, what does that mean in life, and he starts developing what he called sphere sovereignty.

That’s what I’m trying to show that. All these different spheres, that’s just some of the spheres, and we could come up with more spheres. But all of them operating under the lordship of Jesus Christ and doing what God has called them to do. And I mentioned earlier that I do believe these spheres can and should influence each other. I mean, it’s not on my notes, but a quick sidebar is the separation of church and state. On the one hand, a good principle. But the state says church, don’t talk to us.

We don’t wanna hear what you have to say. Well that’s a problem because the church’s job is to know the word of God and to communicate the word of God. The state should be listening to the church to say, what does God think? And then the state can go off and make laws and do whatever else they do based on what God says. But when they start saying, no, we’re autonomous, we don’t have to listen to anybody, it’s what we got going on today, right? And we can see what the state’s coming up with when they vacate God from the equation. I recently read some comments by a well-known and respected preacher we would consider in our theological camp.

He likened Christian activity, such as Kuyper’s suggesting, to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. He said that any work of Christians, other than manning lifeboats, meaning getting people saved, was failing the mission of the church. I disagree with that narrow view of what we’re supposed to be doing. Clearly evangelism should be all of our concern and practice but I believe it is a mistake to say that it’s a waste for Christians to strive to take dominion in the domains they live in and ask God to bring those domains under the lordship of Jesus Christ. So may God be pleased to honor our efforts as we seek then to live out of Kyperian life before him.

And so I just pray even as I look around and we see all these young people here, that as they are preparing for their future careers, that they would consider that going out and being those scientists and in whatever other sphere they might be interested in, that they can come and make a real difference as they boldly go like the abnormalists they are and be willing to go toe to toe with the wisdom of this world. So give us that kind of vision, that kind of courage, the kind of wisdom that we’ll need, that you would be pleased with our efforts and that as we strive to do that, we’d see much fruit come out of it. Just pray this down, your son, Jesus’ name, amen.

And so I just pray even as I look around and we see all these young people here, that as they are preparing for their future careers, that they would consider that going out and being those scientists and in whatever other sphere they might be interested in, that they can come and make a real difference as they boldly go like the abnormalists they are and be willing to go toe to toe with the wisdom of this world. So give us that kind of vision, that kind of courage, the kind of wisdom that we’ll need, that you would be pleased with our efforts and that as we strive to do that, we’d see much fruit come out of it.