Although they are both ultimately problematic, Fundamentalism and right-wing Postmodernist theologies are more workable than theological Liberalism because they remain committed to the basic content of the Christian faith. The issue tends to be more how they seek to establish the validity of their epistemic judgments and less at the content of their judgments. Similarly, in the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism, legalism has the advantage of at least acknowledging the existence of the law. This is true even if legalists suffers from the same delusion as antinomians, namely that we can escape the condemnation of the law. Hence, it is not wrong to acknowledge the acceptance of a law of belief (fides quae creditor) as a necessary condition for possessing genuine Christian faith (fides qua creditor). Rather, what is problematic is to see the law and not the promise of grace is the foundation of the divine-human relationship, and therefore the starting point of all our truth claims.
Postmodernism is correct that there is no neutral starting point for our epistemic projects, even if we admit that the frameworks we employ are vulnerable to critique and falsification. Therefore, we begin with the explicitly biblical presupposition that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians confess that the biblical God is always and eternally the Holy Trinity. God as Trinity is an eternal linguistic agent, who gracious gives of himself in speaking forth the Word and the spiration of the Spirit. Hence, the Christian God is an eternally gracious and responsive God. God gives and responds to himself within the eternal dialogue and self-communication of the divine life.
Only a doctrine of creation ex nihilo as taught by the Bible, where God’s rationality determines nature all the way down to its deepest level, could provide a stable and consistent basis for science.
Ultimately, science presupposes that humans have a capacity for rationality, and that their rationality in part mirrors divine reason (i.e., it is part of the imago Dei) as reflected in the created order (Psalm 19; Romans 1).1 This compatibility is what makes rational scientific investigation possible.2 As Alister McGrath observes (following Alasdair MacIntyre3), in order to remain credible, intellectual disciplines and traditions of thought must give an account of why they are true. The story of creation that the Bible provides gives a rationale for why science should work, thereby supporting science and giving an account of why it is a rational and credible enterprise, something science obviously cannot do on its own.4
If such a concept of nature and humans’ ability to investigate seems self-evident to the reader, we should note that such assumptions are not held by many cultures, religions, and philosophical schools (Epicureanism, Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism, etc.). Scientific revolutions did not arise in these cultures, because they could not account for why the external world and scientific data were both rational and knowable.
From this argument it also follows that if science is possible because of the existence of a creator God, then this same God who made all things out of nothing certainly can be relied on to have the power to suspend the laws of nature and perform miracles, as the Bible reports. Therefore, as odd as it may seem to many, to have a theoretical basis for science (i.e., an almighty creator God), one must allow for the possibility of miracles. If miracles are at the very least possible, one cannot discount the inerrancy of the Bible because it contains miracles that transcend normal scientific explanation.
The Logos creates the cosmos. God the Geometer — mid-13th century French frontispiece (image from Wikipedia).
Hence, the atheist and materialist argument against the inerrancy of the Bible is inherently contradictory. Indeed, as Alvin Plantinga observes,5 if atheists and materialists are correct and the Bible is wrong about the existence of a creator God, not only would belief in science lack justification, so would atheism and materialism themselves. That is to say, if humans are the random products of evolution and not of a rational creator God, then the human mind and its perception automatically must be called into question in a fundamental way. Although evolution may be relied upon to give humans mental pictures of the world that will help them reproduce and spread their DNA, there is no particular reason to think that such ideas will correspond to actual reality. One can imagine the human mind producing all sorts of false beliefs that would promote reproduction and survival but that would not necessarily be true in the sense of corresponding to reality. This uncertainty about whether a mind that has randomly evolved for the purpose of spreading DNA could generate true beliefs about reality would also call into question the validity of atheism and materialism. Hence, atheism and materialism self-destruct from the implications of their own premises. Ultimately, they cannot even give a coherent account of a reality in which human beings could genuinely know that atheism and materialism were true.
[1] Luther: reason is “something divine.” Disputation Concerning Man, 1536 (AE 34:137; WA 39/1:175).
[2] Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 1: Nature (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003), 197–203.
[3] See Alasdair MacInytre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
[4] Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 2: Reality (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2006), 55–121.
[5] Alvin Plantinga, “Is Naturalism Irrational?” in The Analytical Theist: An AlvinPlantinga Reader, ed. James Sennett (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 72–96.
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 116-117.
