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Based on Gen. 1:26-28
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.
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