FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS: A COMPARISON

One conclusion I have come to after years of discussions with Christians is that much of our disagreement is ultimately grounded not in the differences in our beliefs or even in the differences in the logic that we rely upon but in the fundamental working assumptions that underlie our understanding of the nature of the world.

When we construct or refine our views about the nature of reality, there are certain working principles that we assume to be true without conclusive proof.  They are fundamental givens.  And we use those givens in evaluating other observations and in fitting those observations into our overall worldview.  I believe that the fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality that are held in the name of science differ from those held in the name of Christianity.  Here is my take on those different sets of assumptions. 

Fundamental Assumptions of Science.

1.  The world is orderly rather than chaotic.  Everything happens for a reason, and a fundamental goal of science is to discover the reasons for what happens.   Without exception events are governed by rules of cause and effect.  At the level of everyday life there appears to be a great deal of chaos: We witness earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and disease epidemics that seem to defy predictability.  At an astronomical level there are black holes, supernovae, even galaxies in collision that appear to add to the chaos.  But in fact the reason these events seem chaotic is only because they are incredibly complicated and our science is still getting its arms around the factors that contribute to their causes.  No scientist is going to say that an earthquake happens without a cause.

2.  The rules by which the world operates are uniform and constant.  There is one set of rules and those rules work everywhere and for all times, past, present, and future.  That’s not to say that we fully understand those rules.  We may have none of them exactly right.  But whatever the actual rules are, they are universal, both as to time and to place.  Part of Newton’s genius was his assumption that the gravitational force that explains the path of a planet orbiting the sun is the same force that explains an apple falling from a tree.  This principle of uniformity, by the way, is important in the context of consciousness and free will.  The  electrochemical processes that apply within the nervous system are the same as those that apply everywhere else. 

3.  The world is natural.  Everything that happens can be explained by reference to the natural world.  There are no supernatural forces or events.  Explanations are ultimately reducible to the rules governing elementary subatomic particles and the fundamental forces of nature.  That said, some events and some observations are most usefully described at different levels of abstraction.  It may be more useful, for example, to describe weather phenomena at the level of warm and cold fronts and high and low pressure systems than at the level of elementary particles.     

Fundamental Assumptions of Christianity.

1.  God exists.  There is a deity who is omnipotent and omniscient and who created the universe, including humankind.  Christians differ as to when and how this creation took place, but ultimately it was clearly God’s design.  Some Christians maintain that God created the world along the lines described in the book of Genesis, while others accept that God set up the rules of nature billions of years ago, knowing that those rules would eventually lead to the evolution of humans.   

2.  God is all-loving.  God loves humankind and intervenes in human activity for the sake of our wellbeing.  He does this in answer to prayer, to prevent or to alleviate suffering, and to provide guidance to humans.  Although God set up the rules by which the world operates most of the time, God in his omnipotence sometimes overrides those rules to perform miracles.

3.  We can obtain eternal life through the grace of God.  In addition to our physical bodies, we each have an incorporeal soul, which does not perish at our physical death.  As a facet of God’s omni-benevolence, by reason of the death and resurrection of Christ, God offers the promise that, under certain conditions, our souls may enjoy eternal life following our life on earth.  Christians differ as to the conditions God poses for humans to attain eternal life as well as to the timing and nature of that life. 

4.  God communicates with humans.  He does this directly as well as through certain messengers.  Scripture represents one form in which those communications have occurred.  Christians differ as to how that communication occurs and the extent to which scripture accurately reflects God’s communication.

Well, how did I do?  Are there fundamental assumptions, either on the scientific or the Christian side, that should be added to or removed from these lists?


© 2019 John M. Phillips