SOME REFLECTIONS OF A PARTICIPANT IN PENTECOSTALISM AND SCIENCE

by Paul Elbert

Presented at the Society for Pentecostal Studies, Lee University, 2007

We may think of God as the leader of a cosmic community.¹ But God is not encountered only in spectacular and physically improbable or counter-intuitive historical events; he is also detected in his manifestation of human experience. One of the distinctive features of the NT documents is the description afforded the interaction of the God, the heavenly Jesus, and the Holy Spirit with Christians.² Global Pentecostalism³ and the international charismatic renewal⁴ are familiar with Christian experience that is evidently interventionist and that thereby would add energy to the universe.⁵ While pneumatological action can have a hidden character, such activity is perhaps more consistent with the God's decision to be invisible than with an intrinsic reticence of the nature of the Holy Spirit's presence. The creative activity of the Spirit in personal reception of the gift of the Holy Spirit, in the sharing of interpersonal spiritual gifts, or in interior giftedness via the Johannine chrisma demonstrates an evident experiential or observable manifestation. For this reason, Pentecostals should not feel constrained to conform to theories that God will not and does not interact with physical reality and that there is no room for the Holy Spirit in the continuing dialogue between religion and science. Rather, they might contribute to the picture of spectacular non-natural actions of the Spirit and to the probability of creative work of the Spirit in past Earth history and terrestrial life.⁶

In this dialogue,⁷ Polkinghorne suggests that "the most grievous absence from this conversation is that of the theologians."⁸ Exceptions, for example, like Moltman's conclusion that theology and science share a common wisdom,⁹ Marcum's observation that "Christian theology without the input of the natural sciences may become imaginary,"¹⁰ and Yong's recognition of the possibility of a new theological paradigm that grants to the book of nature and to science an authentic role in a pneumatological theology wherein a diversity, distinctiveness and integrity of voices may be "as heard originally at Pentecost to be divinely ordained for the glory of God,"¹¹ are all encouraging developments. Nevertheless, Polkinghorne is no doubt correct that twentieth-century theology has been, for the most part, "conducted from within ghettoes walled off from scientific culture."¹²

I see no good reason why Pentecostals need be "walled off" from or unaware of science and technology. The way forward is to fully understand that it can be God's calling and a blessing to be a Christian within a scientific career.¹³ Pentecostal-based educational institutions need to move rapidly beyond the idea of simply offering science courses as a means to get students into medical school or just to meet some minimum mandated requirement of accrediting agencies. In this regard, the chemistry department here at Lee University has made a great deal of progress with undergraduate research so as to offer a good major. While science is expensive to teach, Pentecostal education needs to step up to the plate and attempt to boldly enter the main stream of American scientific education with more faculty, much more emphasis on academic production than on the acquisition of academic history, and vigorous participation in research. In my view, this is more important for Pentecostals and their potential place of influence in the thinking community than their current effort to educate the masses. The fact that the Church of God Theological Seminary offers a course in theology and science--which, in my opinion, given the urgency for Pentecostal ministers to be at least acquainted with the experimental discoveries of modern science, might either be made mandatory or offered as a part of the theological requirement--is also a positive sign. Pentecostals will also find that the experimental discoveries of modern science are both eminently preachable and not at all biblically threatening. In fact, I have found these two categories, the book of nature and written revelation, to be quite harmonious.¹⁴

To take advantage of this circumstance and to explore the relationship between the experimental findings of modern science and the past and present creative actions of the biblical God, Pentecostals in the United States need to do two things. First they must seriously disentangle themselves from the pseudoscientific propaganda served up over more than a quarter-century by the physical cessationism or young-Earthism devotees that function within the Evangelical community at the behest of businesses touting videos of dinosaurs riding in Noah's ark.¹⁵ Physical cessationism is dispensational erasure extended to physical reality. Pentecostals need to recognize that every professional scientific organization in the United States, from the American Chemical Society to the American Paleontological Society, has issued a statement for the public good, advising and warning against this culturally harmful sect. Even smaller state academies have gone on record, like the Iowa Academy of Science, which equates adherence to the pseudoscience of "creationism" as equivalent to belief in levitation. Secondly, Pentecostals must disentangle themselves from the notion that the theory of macro-evolution is an assured result of modern science. It is not that at all, but a theory, based on an unknown phenomenon that requires the discovery of a heretofore unknown law of increasing complexity, and one that cannot provide an exclusively naturalistic account of the origin of life on our planet. While the experimental findings of experimental biology are often, but certainly not always, described with some reference to the theory of macro-evolution, this sector of the scientific community does not speak for the entire scientific community. Their theory, like a theory of divine intervention to effect the diversity of life-forms and/or provide Christian experience, is not a scientific theory since it is not falsifiable. In any case a working theory in other sectors of science guides experimental work. I don't see this guidance in the biological sector with respect to this particular theory; rather new experimental findings are just automatically put back into the theory and coated with evolutionary language. While a few vociferous evolutionary biologists, perhaps due to some form of scientifically immodest "intellectual inebriation,"¹⁶ display hostility to religion in their public pronouncements,¹⁷ the majority of experimental biologists are wisely content to go about their research to benefit humankind without the dogmatic and evidently premature insistence that humankind evolved from some non-living molecule.¹⁸

The engagement of Pentecostalism with modern science can proceed in at least two quite profitable and outstanding ways and I would like to illustrate these by several examples. First, is the way of using previous experimental results responsibly. Second, is the way of developing ongoing familiarity and expertise with respect to spectacular experimental discoveries that do not fit, either easily or at all, into natural circumstance. These observable events may well be indicators to humankind that the invisible God does not wish to be rigorously invisible, but instead is now allowing intriguing clues of his involvement in past spectacular events to be able to be perceived, given the rational transparency he has built into physical reality, perhaps for this very purpose.

As to the first category, using previous experimental results responsibly, consider Smith's exhortation for Pentecostals to eschew the "dominant rationalism (particularly in evangelical philosophical and theological circles) and provide a fund for unique developments in phenomenology and our accounts of knowledge. In ontology, the Pentecostal belief in a continually open universe, evidenced in the central belief in the miraculous and God's continued activity in the world, should make a fundamental difference in the way we construct our metaphysics."¹⁹ Smith advocates that a key aspect of a Pentecostal worldview should be "A positioning of radical openness to God, and in particular God doing something differently or new."²⁰ Since metaphysics is based on physics, and since the discovery of quantum physics and of a probabilistic uncertainty with respect to simultaneous exact knowledge of dynamical variables at the quantum level of physical reality²¹ is widely believed to afford a built-in openness to divine action, Pentecostals are right to espouse a worldview open to the miraculous and the supernatural. This worldview allows them to be able to understand past spectacular historical events and contemporary events within the framework of the potentially non-natural if scientific observations or contemporary experience would so warrant or suggest.²²

In the second category, the perception and appraisal of past spectacular historical events, I would single out four of these dramatic and physically unexplainable attention-getting events in which Ruach Elohim may be suggested as playing a creative role. First, the discovery of the beginning of the universe in 1965, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978, immediately enhanced the stature of the Genesis narrator worldwide and ignited the serious inference that a beginning signaled a beginner. The possible existence of God became a much more attractive philosophical speculation. Arno Penzias, one of the Nobel laureates, commented at the award ceremony to this effect.²³ Agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow, former director of NASA, in his very popular tome describing this discovery, quipped that "For the scientist who had lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."²⁴ Second, the discovery of a cosmic beginning, via finding the heat radiation left over from the hot big bang, led, in 1992, to what Stephen Hawking called "the discovery of the century, if not of all time." A well-respected physicist at Fermi Lab in Chicago (Michael Turner) announced to the world press that this discovery was "Unbelievably important . . . The significance of this cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of cosmology." The discovery made the front page of the London Times for five consecutive days. George Smoot, the experimental team leader, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006, told the media that "It's like looking at the face of God."²⁵ I have suggested that if humankind is at all able to define ages and times it seems quite a good idea to think of ourselves now as having passed into the "Age of the Glimpse of God, based on the two spectacular cosmic discoveries cited above.²⁶

Thirdly, the world-wide explosion of shelly creatures, in a narrow window of time--perhaps less that a million years--following the onset of the Cambrian geological period, certainly raises otherwise passive macro-evolutionary eyebrows. These animals appeared suddenly and simultaneously 520 million years ago. Seventy body plans of the Cambrian animals have been reported, but only thirty of those body plans exist today.²⁷ Similar to this widespread surge of diverse speciation in the Cambrian period is the equally mysterious surge of speciation in the preceding Ediacaran period. Here we find another rapid diversification, this time of soft-bodied animals, at various sites and times that show no appearance of macro-evolutionary change and, amazingly, were "not ancestral to Cambrian life at all."²⁸

Lastly, I single out as representative of spectacular discoveries that are both suggestive of non-natural events and compatible with the creative involvement of Ruach Elohim, the experimental finding that modern humankind is genetically distinct from and unrelated to the last of the hominids. The presumption that humankind was ancestrally related to Neaderthals was a long-held lynchpin of macro-evolutionary theory. The original finding,²⁹ of which I have my theology and science students read portions so that they can satisfy their questions of "How do we know?" and "Why do we believe?," has been independently confirmed by four other subsequent studies from different Neanderthal fossils and I expect will continue to be further confirmed, even though it is in no doubt whatsoever (most scientists, like the experimental biologists here, appreciate repetitive experiments to confirm a major finding). In conclusion, it seems clear enough that the sudden geochronological appearance over a few million years of these various upright bipedal animals, which precede the creation, on my argument, of wise man (Homo Sapiens) some 50,000 years ago, is consistent with their genetic separation from modern humankind. There is no physical evidence for a macro-evolutionary increase in complexity to modern humankind from the hominids. This suggests two things to me, that God enjoys creating and experimenting and that when he thought the time was right, a new "day" in a progressive cosmic plan was initiated.

ENDNOTES

¹ Ian G. Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: Harper, 1990), 260.

² Paul Elbert, "Possible Literary Links Between Luke-Acts and Pauline Letters Regarding Spirit- Language," in Intertextuality in the New Testament: Explorations of Theory and Practice (ed. Thomas L. Brodie, Dennis R. MacDonald, and Stanley E. Porter; New Testament Monographs 16; Sheffield: Sheffield-Phoenix Press, 2006), 226-54.

³ Steven J. Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom (JPTSup 1; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993); Paul W. Lewis, "The Role of Experience in Pentecostal Hermeneutics," Spirit & Church 2 (2000), 95-125; Gary B. McGee, "To the Regions Beyond: The Global Expansion of Pentecostalism," in The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal (ed. Vinson Synan; Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2001), 69-95; Kenneth J. Archer, A Pentecostal Hermeneutic for the Twenty-First Century: Spirit, Scripture and Community (JPTSup 28; London: T&T Clark, 2004); Kimberly Ervin Alexander, Pentecostal Healing: Models in Theology and Practice (JPTSup; Blandford Forum, England: Deo, 2006).

⁴ Howard M. Ervin, These Are Not Drunken as Ye Suppose (Plainfield, NY: Logos, 1968), passim; Léon Joseph Suenens, Une nouvelle Pentecôte? (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1974); Claus Heitmann and Heribert Mühlen, eds., Erfahrung und Theologie des Heiligen Geistes (Munich: Kösel, 1974); Heribert Mühlen, Einübung in die christliche Grunderfahrung (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1975- 76); Michael Harper, ed., Bishop's Move (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978); Mary F. Ingoldsby, Padre Pio: His Life and Mission (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), 87-97; Francis Martin, "Le baptême dans l'Esprit, traditiion du Nouveau Testament et vie de l'Eglise," NRT 106 (1984), 23-58; Francis A. Sullivan, Charismes et renoueau charismatique: Etude biblique et théogique (Loir-et-Cher, France: Nouan-le-Fuzelier, 1988); J. Rodman Williams, Renewal Theology: Systematic Theology from a Charismatic Perspective >(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996); Raniero Cantalamessa, The Mystery of Pentecost (tr. Glen S. Davis; Collegeville, MN; Liturgical, 2001); Ralph Del Colle, "The Holy Spirit: Presence, Power, Person," ThSt 62 (2001), 322-40.

⁵ There would be little interest here in a noninterventionist theory of divine action, as proposed by Denis Edwards, "Resurrection and the Costs of Evolution: A Dialogue with Rahner on Noninterentionist Theology," ThSt 67 (2006), 16-33 (818-21).

⁶ Once one rightly gets past the faulty deistic conception of God, based on a closed Newtonian worldview, one is led to a probable picture of the Holy Spirit at work in the microcosm of nature, present in intervention to influence chance and present to add energy and matter into creative processes or "into the open grain of (otherwise) natural processes" (John Polkinghorne, "The Hidden Spirit and the Cosmos," in The Work of the Spirit: Pneumatology and Pentecostalism [ed. Michael Welker; Grand Rapids, MI; Eerdmans, 2006], 169-82 [180], parenthesis mine).

⁷ John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 76-124. A part of this dialogue may be illustrated by John Leslie, "How to Draw Conclusions from a Fine-Tuned Universe," in Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (ed. Robert J. Russell, William R. Stöger, and George V. Coyne; Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1988), 299-311; B. J. Carr, "On the Origin, Evolution and Purpose of the Physical Universe," in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy (ed. John Leslie; New York: Macmillan, 1990), 134-53.

⁸ Polkinghorne, Belief, 80.

⁹ Jürgen Moltmann, Wissenschaft und Weisheit, Zum Gespräch zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Theologie (Gütersloh: Kaiser, 2002).

¹⁰ James A. Marcum, "Exploring the Rational Boundaries Between the Natural Sciences and Christian Theology," Theology and Science 1 (2003), 203-220 (214).

¹¹ Amos Yong, "Discerning the Spirit(s) in the Natural World: Toward a Typology of ‘Spirit' in the Religion and Science Conversation," Theology and Science 3 (2005), 315-29 (319).

¹² Polkinghorne, Belief, 80.

¹³ See my review of Review of Walter R. Hearn, Being a Christian in Science, in the Ashland Theological Journal 34 (2002), 177-80; an expanded version is available on-line at http://atlantaapologist.org/rtb/resources/resources.cfm#Science%20and%20Theology.

¹⁴ Paul Elbert, "Biblical Creation and Science: A Review Article," JETS 39 (1996), 289-91; available on-line at http://www.etsjets.org/jets/journal/39/39-2/39-2-pp285-289_JETS.pdf; idem., "Genesis 1 and the Spirit: A Narrative-Rhetorical Ancient Near Eastern Reading in Light of Modern Science," JPT 15 (2006), 23-72, abstract available on-line at http://jpt.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/1/23.

¹⁵ Physical cessationism or young-Earthism is a dangerous sectarian misrepresentation of all of physical reality and of prophetic biblical history. Hebrew scholar William Sanford LaSor, "Biblical Creationism," Asbury Theological Journal 42 (1987), 7-20 (7), refers to this misleading combination of physical cessationism and pious charlatanism as the "cult of creationism." Langdon Gilkey, Blue Twilight: Nature, Creationism, and American Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001), views the theocratic agenda of young-Earthism as a perversion of the gospel (52). Much more than a bizarre irritation, Gilkey, a theologian who was called into courtroom battles with the sect, sees its dangerous pseudoscientific theories as destroying culture and as a recipe for national self-destruction (52, 54, 57), cf. my review of Blue Twilight in Pneuma 25 (2003), 134-38; an expanded version is available on-line at http://atlantaapologist.org/rtb/resources/Papers/Blue_Twilight.cfm. For a critique of this cessationist movement from the point of view of a science historian, cf. Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), who concludes that "To understand twentieth-century creationism, little knowledge of formal science and philosophy is necessary; familiarity with the Byzantine world of popular religion is essential" (337).

¹⁶ Polkinghorne, Belief, 79.

¹⁷ This insistent performance, no doubt based on a belief that an evolutionary mechanism will eventually be found, could also be due, perhaps in no small measure, to the bombastic claims made in legal proceedings by young-Earthism devotees whose misrepresentation of Christianity paints a devastating picture, engendering both anger and patriotic reactions. My reservation with respect to this overly intense insistence is that it seems to me that noisy advocates of macro-evolution have got the cart before the horse. Normally in science, a working theory must be confirmed by repeated experimental confirmations before it is afforded this kind of allegiance. The theory of relativity, predicting that gravity bends light, comes to mind.

¹⁸ I say evidently premature because it is obvious that the two main theories underpinning evolutionary dictums re the origin of microbial life-forms on Earth around 3.85 billion years ago, have found no experimental or even theoretical confirmation. Further, the two theories, the cold prebiotic soup theory and the hot volcanic or "pioneer organism" theory, are mutually exclusive and the subject of controversial discourse employing language like "mechanistically obscure self-organization" and "magic of self-organization," cf. "Debating Evidence for the Origin of Life on Earth," Science 315 (2007), 937-39.

¹⁹ James K. A. Smith, "Advice to Pentecostal-Philosophers," JPT 11 (2003), 235-47 (246), parenthesis his.

²⁰ Smith, "Advice," 245.

²¹ Of course Heisenberg was not thinking about this, or about how his discovery would later be misused by some secular humanities and religion scholars to invoke a "postmodern" age of relativism, but his own words (Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science [World Perspectives 19; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958], 144-45) are still appropriate: "The physicist must postulate in his science that he is studying a world which he himself has not made and which would be present, essentially unchanged, if he were not there. . . . we see that the statistical nature of the laws of microscopic physics cannot be avoided, since any knowledge of the ‘actual' is--because of the quantum-theoretical laws--by its very nature an incomplete knowledge. The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct ‘actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however."

²² Also, in this first category of using experimental results responsibly, a counter-example is the leap taken by some secular humanities and religion scholars who posit that humankind inhabits a "postmodern world," based upon the supposed tiny indeterminism that physicists find with respect to dynamic variables in sub-atomic systems. This ambitious and naïve leap leads these scholars to deny authorial intention, denigrate meaning of texts, applaud relativism, and denounce the scientific method of gaining knowledge by observation and experiment. I do not find the use of modern physics to support such a theory at all persuasive. Therefore, I am glad to see a Pentecostal journal publish an article which convincingly demonstrates that the invention of "modernity" and "postmodernity" cannot be based upon modern physics, cf. John C. Poirier and B. Scott Lewis, "Pentecostal and Postmodern Hermeneutics: A Critique of Three Conceits," JPT 15 (2006), 3-21. I have always wondered whether these literary and religious theorists, when traveling by air, would look out the window at a jet engine and consider what would happen if the aircraft industry employed their methodological relativism in the manufacture of jet engines. I have also wondered if they pause to consider why the great liberal arts of modern science, engineering, and technology have nothing to do with their methods and conclusions.

²³ At the ceremony the Nobel committee also stated that "The discovery by Penzias and Wilson was a fundamental one: It has made it possible to obtain information about cosmic processes that took place a very long time ago (13.7 billion years ago) at the time of the creation of the universe" (Physics Today [December 1978], 18), parenthesis mine.

²⁴ Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (2 edition; New York: Norton, 1992), 107.

²⁵ For the story of the first glimpse of mystery of how the cosmos went from primordial concentration to one hundred billion galaxies, cf. Keay Davidson, Wrinkles in Time (New York: Avon, 1998).

²⁶ Paul Elbert, "The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Review Article," Trinity Journal 23 (2002), 81-101 (96)

²⁷ Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Springer, 2000), 125-56.

²⁸ Martin Brasier and Jonathan Antcliffe, "Decoding the Ediacaran Enigma," Science 305 (2004), 1115-17 (1115). Very interesting too is the recent discovery that the first Ediacaran animals in Newfoundland, complex multi-cellular animals, appeared abruptly 5 million years after substantial amounts of oxygen reached the deep sea 580 million years ago (Richard A. Kerr, "A Shot of Oxygen to Unleash the Evolution of Animals," Science 314 [8 December 2006], 1529). These Ediacaran animals arrived on the scene suddenly 575 million years ago when the oxygen levels rose high enough to support them. The cause of the higher oxygen levels is unclear, but it is difficult to imagine that these animals quickly evolved from some less complex life due to an environmental change. Alternatively, one may suggest their creation after the preparation of requisite conditions.

²⁹ Matthias Krings et al, "Neandertal DNA Sequences and the Origin of Modern Humans," Cell 90 (1997), 19-30.

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Paul Elbert is a physicist-theologian and New Testament scholar. He is an adjunct professor at the Church of God Theological Seminary, Cleveland, TN. (http://www.cogts.edu/directory/p_elbert.htm).

Prepared for the Pneuma Foundation website by KenJ