Introduction: Some Christians, concerned about the loss of religious faith and the permissiveness that have taken hold in Western Society today, have recognized that in all probability the basic cause is the role played by the atheistic notion of naturalism, which claims that nature is all there is, was, or ever will be. Professor of Law Phillip E. Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial. 1 has written a book, 239 pages in length, which shows how naturalism is the presumption in science, law and education today, 2 and a further book pointing out how Christians should recognize the flaws in the naturalistic arguments and open up the minds of those who blindly accept those arguments. 3
For a number of years now students in almost all schools and universities have been dogmatically taught that a naturalistic explanation of our origins is the only one that is scientifically acceptable, with the consequences that real Christians have been diminishing in number in our society and the Christian ethic has been supplanted by a secular humanist one.
But there is also another notion, to which Christians who oppose naturalism have not paid as much attention, even though it is just as atheistic as naturalism and has paved the way for the latter's acceptance. This notion is known as positivism.
It gets its name from a book published in France in 1830 under the title of Cours de Philosophie Positive. Its author, August Comte (1798 -1857), claimed that there were three stages in human thought. The first was the theological stage, when men looked for supernatural causes and so invented gods and devils. The second was the metaphysical stage, when men sought to explain their origins in terms of metaphysical or philosophical abstractions. The last and final stage, according to Comte, is the scientific stage, when men by way of scientific observation and experimentation will reach the positive truth.
This notion, when applied to origins as it was meant to be, was never anything more than a fallacy for the obvious reasons that
(a) the past cannot be observed and
(b) any theory concerning unique historical events that, ipso facto, are unrepeatable cannot be experimentally tested.
Nevertheless, positivism came to be widely accepted in the scientific community. 4 The logical consequences of its acceptance are that it is now dogmatically, but falsely, claimed that, since theology and metaphysics must be excluded, only science can give us any positive knowledge of the past, and only natural causes can be taken into account.
1 Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL 60515, U.S.A.: Intervarsity Press, 1991). In this book the author looks at the evidence for and against evolution from the point of view of an academic lawyer and finds a lack of probative evidence for the evolution case.
2 Phillip E. Johnson, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education (Intervarsity Press, 1995).
3 Phillip E. Johnson, Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Intervarsity Press: 1997).
4 In a biography of Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie (1867-1934), written by her daughter, there is a photograph of Marie and an older sister (ages between 15 and 18 years). The title given to the photograph is "Two Little Positivists." Marie belonged to a Polish Catholic family, but, some time after the premature death of her mother and eldest sister, the family, influenced by their father, gave up their faith. The father was a science teacher who was attracted to Darwinism. Marie later married the son of a militant atheist and, so far as it is known, never returned to her Christian faith.
Another Nobel Prize winner, Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), in a small book that was published posthumously, wrote about himself that "absorbed in scientific studies, his mind had been strongly attracted to the German system of critical analysis and he had slowly become convinced that outside of the positive method no certainties existed" (The Voyage to Lourdes, republished by Real-View Books: Frazer, Michigan, 48026, U.S.A. - page 56). Carrel, who was a famous surgeon, made a train journey from Paris to Lourdes in 1902, when he assisted in caring for some of the very ill passengers. One of these passengers, a young woman named Marie Bailly, was suffering from tubercular peritonitis and was near death's door. Although Carrel witnessed the sudden cure of this young woman at Lourdes, which could only be described as miraculous, and later another such cure, it took some years for him to rid himself of his positivistic outlook. Despite the fact that he eventually returned to his Catholic faith, he was careful not to reveal his conversion to fellow positivists and even adopted pseudonyms in his book for himself, Marie Bailly, and some others he encountered at Lourdes.
The "logical positivists" known as the "Vienna Circle," which existed in Austria in the twenties, thirties and in the pre-Nazi forties, were positivists who claimed that most of metaphysics (and consequently ethics and religious discourse) was literally meaningless, since its propositions could not be verified either by observation or experiment, or by logical deduction. They thus followed the same fallacious reasoning as Comte. Popper claimed responsibility for their demise, when he introduced his method for distinguishing science from non-science. Apart from this, their "logical deduction" offended the rules of logic.
In 1984 the National Academy of Sciences of the United States produced a statement which was a polemic against creationism. In it they claimed that natural explanation was a most basic characteristic of science. While this is true enough of genuine natural science, it is not an argument in favour of positivistic hypotheses like evolution, which they were falsely claiming to be part of genuine natural science.