Jesus was a great physician who believed in preventive medicine. Curative
medicine is the most spectacular, for what can compare to saying to the leper,
"Be made whole!" Or what can be more amazing than to command the blind
to see or the lame to rise up and walk? Preventive medicine is less exciting, for
there is nothing to see, and no radical changes take place before your eyes. It
keeps the limbs from ever decaying. It keeps the eye from ever going blind. It
keeps the legs strong so lameness is never experienced. The result is no
spectacular change, but just a plateau of sameness in good health. It is far
superior to stay on that level of health than to fall and be restored to it, but it
is a quiet experience that does not grab headlines.
Nevertheless, it is still true that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of
cure. Jesus practiced preventive medicine whenever He could. He was
constantly teaching His disciples to prepare them for what was ahead, so that
they would not fall. Even some of His spectacular works were preventive. For
example, the feeding of the 5 thousand was to give the crowd a meal so they
would not faint by the way. He did not wait for them to faint from hunger and
then revive them. He gave them food to prevent them from fainting.
The principle of prevention is so reasonable because it is the best way to
deal with the reality of evil. This principle runs all through the Word of God.
God's first command to Adam and Eve was for the prevention of all the evil
that would result from their disobedience. All God's law is for the prevention
of sin, evil, suffering and judgment. The purpose of prophecy was to forewarn
so as to prevent folly and judgment. Much of the teaching of the New Testament
was to prevent apostasy and the falling away during persecution.
The Bible and Science agree that prevention is the ideal. The goal of
science is to be able to predict so men can avoid what is bad and gain what is
good. The whole point in forecasting the weather is so people can plan to be
prepared for what is coming. Prediction for the sake of prevention is of the
very essence of science. Without the ability to predict what is going to happen
under circumstances science could never have gotten men to the moon and
back. They had to know how to prevent every possible threat in order to
survive.
The ability to predict and thereby prevent is to have dominion over the
forces of nature, and in this way fulfill the command of God to have dominion
over all the earth. Science plays the role of aiding man to obey God's first
commandment. The goal of science is to put man into dominion over all the
forces of nature. Someone might get technical here and say that the text says
for man to gain dominion over all the earth. It says nothing about outer space.
But as Dr. Rodney W. Johnson, a Christian and an authority on lunar bases,
points out, to be able to escape from the earth and be independent of it shows
our mastery over it and its powerful gravity. Going to the moon is a part of
man's subduing of the earth.
Science is good and has produced so many blessings for man that there is
no point in trying to enumerate them. The Christian shares in these blessings
and takes them for granted, but they give him the opportunity to have a richer
Christian experience. Science is dedicated to truth, life, health, and it is
opposed to error, death and suffering. This makes it a natural ally of
Christianity, and yet there has been a whole history of conflict between science
and Christianity. Christians have made many mistakes in the past by
assuming that science is a foe rather than a friend.
It seems natural to us today to prove things by experiments, but his way of
thinking is only around 500 years old. The age of science began in 1543 when
the Polish churchman Copernicus challenged the geocentric view of the
universe by suggesting that the earth went around the sun. He offered
mathematical calculations, which stimulated men to develop experimental
methods to prove it. This was the beginning of science, as we know it. Before
this, questions were settled by authority. You didn't prove your point, but you
just quoted the authority, who at that time was Aristotle. He had considered
the idea of the earth not being the center of the universe, but he rejected it.
His authority reigned over men's minds until the scientific method destroyed
his authority.
Science from the very start was revolutionary, for it challenged authority,
and when truth was on its side it toppled authority. This is where Christianity
and science got off to a poor start in relationship to one another. Christians
accepted Aristotle as their authority in matters of science. Thomas Aquinas,
the greatest theologian of his day, used Aristotle to defend the Christian faith.
Aristotle was so linked with Christianity that they were inseparable in men's
minds. And so when science began to assail the views of Aristotle, the
Christians felt it was an attack on the church, and so they fought science as an
enemy of the faith. In reality, science was only helping to get Christianity
divorced from a false worldview. Aristotle was just dead wrong, and science
sought to help Christians escape the clutches of his error. The tragedy was
that Christians did not understand, and they looked upon science as a foe.
They had believed a lie so long that they felt it had to be true.
Where Christians made their mistake was in identifying their faith with a
man made philosophy. This is done over and over again in history, and it is
always a curse to Christianity. E. L. Mascall in Christian Theology And
Natural Science wrote, "I can think of no greater disservice that could be done
to the Christian religion then to tie it up with scientific views that are merely
temporary." If you identify your Christian faith with any philosophical
viewpoint, you adulterate it. You mix the pure Word of God with the
contaminated words of men, and the result is a Christian faith that is always
endangered by the discovery of new truth.
Christians has a tendency to link Christianity with some prevailing
philosophy or authority, and then when that prevailing view begins to change
Christianity is weakened. This is what happened when Aristotle's views were
proved wrong. Scientist thought that they had proved Christianity wrong also
because Christians acted as if their faith depended upon the truth of Aristotle.
If you had been teaching something for years, and you were recognized as the
orthodox authority on the subject, you would be worried sick if someone came
along with proof that what you were teaching was false. That is why the
church silenced Galileo and others like him. They challenged the
establishment, and the church was so identified with it that they could not
accept change. Science made change inevitable, however, and masses of people who
followed science became secular and deserted the church. It was the churches
fault because it identified with a loser, which was Aristotle. In the battle
between the new and the old the church stood with the old and lost the battle.
Had Christians been wise enough not to link themselves with a man made
philosophy there never would have been a conflict with science. Science only
undermines those things, which deserve to be undermined because they are
based on a false foundation. Science cannot be subversive to what is true in
fact. Christians must have the spirit of freedom to allow for growth and
change that can come about by the scientific method.
Erasmus gave this warning to Christians who fought science at the time of
the Reformation: "By identifying the new learning with heresy, you make
orthodoxy synonymous with ignorance." Christians foolishly put science on
the side of anti-Christian forces. The anti-Christian forces were glad, for they
had in science a powerful weapon. Every advance and victory of science was
declared to be a victory over the narrow, ignorant and superstitious
Christians. In their blindness Christians took one of God's greatest gifts to
man and turned it over to the enemy to be used against them. It was one of the
most dismal periods in the history of Christianity. Christians became bigoted
and fell back into pagan superstition to fight science. They persecuted men of
science. Non- Christians began to dominate the world of science because
Christians denounced it as the realm of evil.
Jesus said that the children of darkness can be wiser in their own
generation than the children of light. It is good to remember this, for we often
wonder why God allows evil to triumph. The answer is really quite simple.
When men of evil identify with the truth, and use it for their weapon, and
children of God identify with error, and fight against the truth, then by God's
own laws His children must lose the battle. God will not bless ignorance and
error for the sake of His people. Christians become their own worst enemies
when they identify with error and fight the truth. Back in 1840 John Smith
wrote, "Evangelical castigators of science are unwittingly serving the designs
of Christianity's enemies and are secret traitors to the cause of Christianity."
Many zealous Christian men of the past would be shocked if they could see
that history has proven them to have been subversive to the cause of Christ.
Christians foolishly put the Word of God and the works of God in different
camps. They ignored the testimony of Scripture that the God of redemption is
also the God of creation. God's Word and God's works cannot contradict each other.
As science made rapid progress Christians were forced to modify their
opposition, and more and more Christians began to see science as a friend.
The pendulum began to swing to the opposite extreme. Science became a
sacred cow and a new Messiah. Christian theologians identified the progress
of Christianity with the progress of science. The millennium was to be
brought in by scientific technology, and theology became post-millennial. This
is the optimistic view that Christianity will bring peace on earth before Jesus
comes again. Christians made the same mistake they had made before. They
linked Christianity to a prevailing philosophical point of view, and when
science failed to prevent 2 World Wars, and optimism about man turned to
pessimism, Christianity was made to suffer weakness again.
Many felt God had let them down, and they forsook the church. It
seemed as if Christians couldn't win, for it made a mistake of opposing science,
and then made another by almost worshipping science. The only position left
is the middle position, which is where most Christians stand today. They say
that science can be good or evil. The Christian's responsibility is to take
science as a gift of God and use it for His glory, but it is a means to an end and
not an end in itself. It is to be a servant and not a master, for only God is our
Master. When science is in its proper place it is a great friend of the Christian
faith.
