“Where knowledge grows without wisdom and without reverence, it threatens both our humanity and our world.  Yet modern man suppresses his natural desire to throw himself in the path of science and ask his baffling normative questions (baffling to science, but not insignificant to man).  Scientific technology, acting like an opiate, calms his normative inquisitiveness with the hype of its gadgetry’s comfort and security and with the fusion-promise of technological answers to all foreseeable problems.  This opiate, like all opiates, destroy’s man’s critical faculties and makes him blind to the fact that the technological ‘fix’ hides its evil consequences by taking a position of moral aloofness while ‘pushing’ the practical value of its narcotic.  Science must be pulled down from its nonnormative pedestal.  The penetrating intensity of its analysis must be used to expose the narcotic effects of technological advancement on man and on his inquisitiveness.”  – David Hicks, Norms and Nobility

I teach middle school science at a classical Christian school.  I used to think this meant that I teach science the way it was taught to me, except I ratchet up the rigor a few notches and make sure to mention the Intelligent Designer whenever we encounter something in nature that is precisely ordered or astoundingly beautiful.  I still believe very sincerely in at least that second part–in fact, just this past week my 8th grade students and I were wondering at some of the complex three-dimensional symmetries of the electron orbital geometries.

But the longer I am a teacher of science in a classical Christian setting, the more I realize that one of my most important responsibilities is to continually put science in its appropriate place.  In Postman’s words, I have to “break the spell.”  Hicks would probably say I have to smash the opiate vile against the floor.  Repeatedly.

I will not take space here to make the case for what I believe is pretty self-evident: the ubiquitous and uncritical adoption of new technology and its promises in our Western culture (Christian education not being exempt from the spell). Hicks and Postman wrote about our surrender to technology before the Internet and the iPhone became demigods (Hicks’ Norms and Nobility was published in 1981, and Postman’s Technopoly was published in 1993).

When it comes to new technology, the mentality is: “if it can be done, it will be done.” The skeptical outcries of the Luddites are invalidated by references to “extensive research,” “increased efficiency,” or “decreased cost.” The normative questions—Should we adopt this new technology? At what cost to our humanness are we adopting this new technology? Is this new technology good for our soul?—will only be asked if science remains subservient to a normative sniff test.

But the aroma of new technology—and, as Hicks says, its narcotic effect—is overpowering and growing increasingly irresistible, despite our best intentions.  Just like Edmund unwittingly dropped his guard with the White Witch, we are inclined to do the same; before we have even realized it, we have become enslaved by the promise of more Turkish Delight.

N.T. Wright has said that “precisely because Christianity means freedom, it’s important that nothing is allowed to give me orders: not my appetites, not my habits, not the surrounding atmosphere of my culture” (1 Corinthians for Everyone). As the STEM push in our country cultivates the taste for Turkish Delight in our youth, teachers of science in classical Christian schools must fight to maintain the study of science as a liberating art. This means that we must design our curriculum and teaching methodologies in such a way that we are constantly “pulling science down from its nonnormative pedestal.”

Hicks summarizes by saying that “a resolution of values must attend the study of science, and analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry if science is to serve life, not destroy it.” I would go on to say that we must accomplish this normative approach while simultaneously affirming the goodness of God’s creation as well as our mandate to exercise wise dominion over this creation.

What does this radical approach to science instruction look like in practice? As I continue to wrestle with this question in my own classroom, I have started making a list of what might constitute a “classical, Christ-centered approach” to science education. In my next post I will outline some of these thoughts.