This is a posting I wrote for Calvin in Common. This conversation centered around whether Calvin has lost its way by not faithfully teaching its students the most up to date scientific positions regarding earth origins and like matters. I haven’t attended Calvin for 23 years so I can’t say what they do or don’t do, but I think a school like Calvin has a different role to play, and an important one, as opposed to any state university.

Kuhn’s work on paradigms (which I read at Calvin) pretty clearly demonstrated that “facts” find their interpretations within paradigms which are structural contexts through which the facts find their meanings. (This of course being a paradigm as well but we can’t communicate without these communities of understanding.) Again, I think a competent education within our cultural context requires both a treatment of evidence but also a treatment of the paradigms used to interpret that evidence. This isn’t all esoteric. A perusal of Nova on PBS regularly shows the kind of paradigm conflicts that about regarding a good many things. Many of the more interesting treatments recently regarding climate change, past extinctions, etc.

I think it’s more helpful to talk about evidence (data) and paradigms, models, theories, etc. which become the framework within which the evidence finds meaning and in fact becomes story.

A Christian college always has at least two stories it’s dealing with. It’s got the Biblical story and other stories derived from disciplines and cultures. It’s tempting to just shelve the Biblical story but then the college isn’t offering anything different from UC Berkeley or any other secular university. What I hope for Calvin is that it is competent in multiple stories.

Now someone might suggest that the Biblical story isn’t worth treating in matters such as geology. Clearly the Bible isn’t a geology book but part of what Calvin does have to offer is the study of geology within the context of the Christian tradition and given the world population of Christians that has clear value. A Christian geologist will be working on competency in both books and offer guidance to students as to how he or she has worked through these issues.

Now one might say “you should be a geologist on work hours and a Christian on Sundays”. We all know that doesn’t go very far. Francis Collins in his work has in my opinion demonstrated more competence in his field of genetics than with the story of the Bible, but that should be no surprise. I wouldn’t want him, however, to not engage in the working out of these two stories. He has to for his own reasons and although what he does with the Bible might not be what I would do with it that’s OK with me because for his own integrity as a Christian and a scientist he needs to work through these issues for himself. That is what I hope Calvin can equip their students to do.

I would also suggest that a Christian college has a certain advantage over a secular education BECAUSE professionals in varied academic stories have to wrestle with at least two books. A mono-paradigmatic approach to the world I think is less engaging than realizing that history is in fact a struggle between paradigms. Working to square stories from radically different cultural contexts such as the multi-cultural Christian tradition with modern scientific or academic traditions should stretch anyone’s gray matter hopefully leading not just to someone’s ability to claim “this I believe” but also a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of what belief is and why diverse people have a diversity of beliefs. To me that is of great value not only within our cultural context but within a fast changing multi-dimensional context as the world is becoming.

If I might make an argument for the value of traditional religious commitment in general it would be that it forces the adherent to live in at least two worlds. Someone who only knows one world knows their own world less than if they know at least two worlds. Having been blessed to have been a foreign missionary and always having to have navigated conflicted cultural contexts I can see this in my own life. The fish who has only known water doesn’t really know water. Once the fish learns what the absence of water is it will know water better.