Science is all about and progression in knowledge – the business is about testing, discovery and learning, and applying that knowledge so that the human race will benefit and improve the conditions under which we live. Certainly the rate at which we are ‘progressing’ is impressive – most people alive today are reaping benefits that would have been scarcely imaginable to our forefathers – but one can’t help but wonder whether we are in danger of ‘progressing’ too far for our own good; to a rate where human mindsets are so far from what we were created to be that we lose a bit of our humanity. If the ultimate truth has been the same from the start then this so-called ‘progression’ could just as easily pull us further away from the truth of Jesus, just as the permissive society pulled many people away from monogamy and good family values. 

 

When it comes to salvation, what many people see in earthly terms as ‘progression’ could in fact be ‘retrogression’ - our improved knowledge and scientific innovation sometimes pulls people away from contemplating God. The edifice of science doesn’t by itself tell us whether a development or an endeavour is morally beneficial beyond its intrinsic qualities – that is why we cannot be neutral about science and its correlative human behaviour; for whether any of us makes good use of the progress that science offers depends very much on human nature and the way we choose to organise our thought processes.

 

Christians and atheists both agree that human discoveries lead us to beneficial states, but as regards the above, they are not always in agreement as to how the benefits occur. Christians state that if a man finds God he will discover his true self, and he will be united with God who can give him a full life. Although atheists contest this, I do believe that most atheists would concede that if the notion of an all-loving, all-powerful God were true, we would be in a more beneficial state than the state they presently believe is true, and that knowledge of Him will certainly benefit humans to a great extent. Equally they would probably concur with me that many of the theories of the world’s proponents of existential ‘progress’ may culminate in states that are not beneficial at all. This is true even on a practical level; for example, there will be little value in future medical discoveries unless the people who need them can have access to them or, in some cases, afford them. And what good will it do to harness power and achievement if it only results in dividing nations further apart?  Who can say that these methods will not send our human heart backwards in time? That is why the best conditions that one can create always involve a deep understanding of human nature, and this can be achieved only if the social sciences replace their ideology-laden, fragmented approach with objective science grounded in a unitary theory of behaviour, and mindfulness of human betterment. 

 

Whether the future will provide us with greater evidence for God, or perhaps more accurately, greater evidence that God is necessary for life as we see it, I cannot say. It could be conceivably true that some science is actually leading us further away from our own intrinsic human needs, and if so, is there any evidence that we will be better? In the future nanotechnology and biotechnology could give us too much power over our own evolution. Lifespans could be extended by far too much – if God allows us to progress that far we will probably be able to suppress or reverse ageing; our senses could perceive things beyond their natural ability; or perhaps virtual reality could conflate fact and fiction into a matrix of confusion where the self’s identity becomes dwarfed by an outer reality that bears no resemblance to our deepest longings for God. The future technologies themselves carry grave risks. With nanotechnology, humans could devolve into large, inert and immobile sediment where the physical body is largely supplanted for a virtual reality type existence (I’ve seen a documentary on this subject). In other words we could lose faculties we value, such as our capacities for empathy, creativity, awe or reflection and live is some strange neutral simulation of reality. So we see that in some cases the intrinsic qualities of science will not aid progression in the deepest sense. 

Christianity is the only doctrine that can steer human evolution away from the dead ends of selfishness and addictive absorption, and towards greater self-awareness and reason. Whether God will step in and proclaim final judgement before we turn ourselves into creatures that perceive ourselves as demi-gods I cannot be sure – we are at present only flirting with the potential. But I certainly perceive in science a capacity and a potential for advancement that is a severe and spiritually harmful departure from the sort of conditions and lifestyle for which we were created. 

 

When you examine human progression over the last few thousand years, you will see that more scientific changes have occurred in the past 50 years than the previous few thousand combined. If advances continue with such increasing rapidity, our future generations could find themselves living in a world that is barely recognisable from what we know it to be. It is, in my opinion, both very scary and very exiting. Just as our palaeolithic ancestors could not have anticipated our great cities, art, or machines, we too cannot imagine the grandeur of the accomplishment of transhuman civilisations. 

 

That is why I offered a warning against our being ‘windswept’ – that is to say, I think one part of the dangers of getting caught in this is that science is so unpredictable; we just do not know the sorts of conflicts we may face in the future between what science offers and what God intends for us. This point is compounded by the fact that if we think back 50 years and look forward from then, we will see that none of the greatest discoveries in the astronomical sciences were foreseen. The transformation in the practice of science brought about by the web is nearly thirty years old. No one predicted it. Pulsars, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, the standard model of particle physics, the isotropy of the microwave background, and string theories were all equally unexpected. None of these were predicted 50 years ago. 

 

Even outside of the scientific domain, life itself remains unpredictable – we cannot be sure what we will have to face 50 years henceforward. Politicians 50 years ago failed to predict the fall of the Iron Curtain, and the climactic implications of capitalism and globalisation. Who would have thought 50 years ago that our potential for communication would be so great - the Internet being a good case in point? In Christ we know that He has already achieved for us that which many who do not know Him are still hoping for; our future is in fact more certain than any human postulation could describe. In the future we will very probably be faced with mankind’s vision of utopia on earth – and by then some future scientists may well feel that they have the technology to make that dream a reality. If Christ has not already returned by then we may well find ourselves faced with man’s view of utopia becoming more than just a technological possibility – they may push it further than we want it to go - and it will be then that we will have to be on our guard. 

To reiterate, most Christians and most atheists both agree that epistemological advancement leads to human progression, and as a corollary, that human progression leads us to beneficial states - it is just that they are not often in agreement as to how the benefits occur. As I have said, Christians state that if man finds God he will discover his true self and he will be united with God who can give him a full life. Atheists tend to be wedded to the philosophy of existential progress - that is, progress by one’s own merits and efforts. Yet we have also admitted that an atheist probably would agree that if a loving, all-powerful God does exists, knowledge of Him will certainly benefit humans, and it would be in our interest to know Him.

 

Human progression and augmented scientific knowledge has led to one vital agreement between believers and unbelievers; that what we call the big bang was not the beginning of everything, merely the time when our part of space stopped undergoing an explosive stretching called inflation. Thanks largely to Edwin Hubble, all of us are rightly dissatisfied with the contention that the universe (or universes) is all that exists. Progression and epistemological endeavour remain the key watchwords amongst any that desire scientific improvement and ontological betterment. Yet from the above observations we have seen that many of the theories of the world’s proponents of existential progress may culminate in something that is not beneficial at all. 

 

It is from this standpoint that we realise how open-ended science is, and how much of it is always work in progress. As I said, many current scientific theories could be unexpectedly improved upon or proved completely wrong by the year 2050, just as many that were posited in the last century have been unexpectedly improved upon and proved wrong. Equally, we could advance with so much knowledge that we understand the governing principles of existence much more than we first thought we would. Christianity offers something complementary, but quite different. Far from relying on and hoping that scientists and politicians will get it right for us in the end, we are told that in actual fact, Christ has already got it right for us; that our future is in fact more certain than any human postulation could describe. In fact every year or every decade that scientists propound some theory about what will happen in the next year or the next decade, we can say that we have a very different certainty on offer. The place people are striving to reach is already existent within their own soul – a place where inner-focus can produce astounding results. 

 

It is a popular belief in atheistic circles that religion was our first (and worst) attempt to explain our existence and that we have progressed and advanced to greater theories about life and the universe. The wider this feeling extends the harder it is for Christians to connect with people, for it seems to the sceptic that Christians are trying to posit outdated and disproved contentions which do not fit in with modern day thinking. As well as giving the warning for how scientific advancement might impact ‘negatively’ on the human race as well as ‘positively’, my aim in attempting to correct the fallacy that Christianity is outdated and irrelevant is to explain briefly why I think that science and Christianity are not just compatible but complementary. Progressive knowledge is so described because it improves upon past knowledge; that is, the framework becomes too small for the increasing size of the improved knowledge. But despite our increased knowledge, there are going to be many things which have been true from the outset – things that are true whether we know about them or not. We no longer believe that the earth is at the centre of the universe but we still know that two and two is four and always will be. Now the truth about Christianity falls into the second category - the ultimate facts of Christ’s plan for salvation have been in the Divine mind from the beginning, thus no scientific or philosophical progression will improve upon these facts – the glory of universal salvation cannot be diminished by anything scientific. But it is also true that scientific and philosophical progression need not necessarily mean that we were bound to move closer to an absolute knowledge of why and how we should become Christians. 

 

Some think that progression of knowledge has added weight to the atheist cause. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our theories about the universe might all be different in 50 years time (they were certainly different 50 years ago). Our understanding of God and His purposes will still remain (providing we are still here). When Christ became man He brought into our consciousness the very real fact of what man is, and what man was created for; it is a stupendous fact which involves the death of our old selves - it involves our being reborn into the eternal plan. Nothing in nature can change that fact. The quality of the story will remain true, however it is written and recorded. I asked how more knowable minds can still find time for Christianity. The answer is a simple one - we see it happening all the time. A great Bible passage does not lose its truth or its meaning by becoming old text any more than arithmetic loses its essence. Five and five is ten remains the truth whether it is noted by Pythagoras, Pascal or Popper. A young boy learning that it is wrong to hit his sister is in a different position to a judge who must decide whether to send a convict to his death or not, but only inasmuch as the situational differences require different contemplations - the essence of moral goodness does not change. A kitten grows to be a cat; if it became a horse that would not be growth, it would be a different thing altogether. And finally, there is a vast difference between measuring the height of a small boy and contemplating the weight of the sun - although both involve the timeless laws of mathematical calibration. 

 

Before I close, I ought to say, I have not contended these views with the intention of undermining scientists’ vitally important work, I am simply contending that one must keep a watchful eye on science and not get windswept by progressions and advancements that could cause us to recede from the Divine plan. After all, even in this day and age, many people think there is a good case to be made that as human beings learn to advance further, they will be well equipped to create a place where mankind lives in utopian harmony. But all the evidence in the Bible is to the contrary. Christ describes what the end times will be like (the time just before the Final Judgement), and it is not described by Him as utopian at all, far from it (see the book of Revelation). 

 

From all this I want to draw the following conclusion. Every time we progress in what we are able to achieve we always keep something that remains an integral part of knowledge itself. Once a man worked out the height of one of the pyramids by walking along their shadows. Now we can analyse its atomic and sub-atomic structure - there are some parts of our knowledge of pyramids that are superseded by time, and this plays out in most of life. By all means let us advance from fingers to beads to calculators to the most advanced computers. But we do not change from mathematics to something better. The same is true of everything else; that is, the essential elements remain. We might evolve to become better at marriage, but we shall not change the beauty of love itself. We might evolve to be better at national governance but we will not change the moral standard. And this precept applies to Christianity quite unlike anything else; we might evolve to know many things, and through science we might vastly improve our human capabilities, and discover things that we do not know at present, but we shall not change the vast nexus of the truth of existence that God drives, and from which all the extrinsic qualities fit into our lives for the purposes of blessedness.