Making Elbow Room for Faith:

This talk was given by John D. Mays at the 2014 Society for Classical Learning Conference in Austin, TX, June of 2014.

How should faith statements be balanced with scientific statements in science classes? Various camps in this debate have staked out their territory, and positions range from “leave faith out of it” to “ignore the science if it clashes with your view of the Bible,” with many science teachers in Christian schools in the middle somewhere. In this workshop we will develop four classes of observable phenomena. We will note that while the Creator is involved with his creation at all levels, our ability to formulate a natural explanation for a given phenomenon depends on which class it is in. In Class 1, scientific explanations are readily available. In Class 4, they are not, and only Christian faith can provide an explanation. In this way we will demonstrate that bringing faith into scientific discourse does not always entail a “God of the gaps” argument. Sometimes, it is essential to make sense of the world we live in.