Compartmentalized Christians

Secular scientists, as well as many professedly Christian scientists, espouse the uniformity of nature. They regard that as a prerequisite to science. The uniformity of nature makes nature predictable. Not only does that make it easier to extrapolate from the present to the future, but to extrapolate from the present to the past–which is important in the historical sciences. In addition, it makes it easier to interpolate. In the historical sciences, there are often gaps in the surviving evidence. If, however, nature is uniform, if the same kinds of events occur, then it's easier to postulate what happened in the absence of direct, extant evidence. Because nature is continuous, change is incremental. 

As a result, many professedly Christian scientists are scientific deists. They believe God's contribution is to put the initial conditions in place, then conserve the status quo. Everything occurs with law-like regularity.

As a further result, many professedly Christian scientists have a very compartmentalized belief system. Take Ard Louis, who's a Reader in Theoretical Physics and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He's also a contributor to BioLogos.

What's ironic about Louis is that he's a charismatic theistic evolutionist. A charismatic who subscribes to methodological naturalism. To illustrate:

"I remember one girl who had a very severe back injury. She was in traction and about to be airlifted back home to the United States. Before she left, one of my friends prayed for her to be healed. She instantly jumped up and started running around. Though I found this incredible, I did recognize that this girl's experience of prayer and healing matched exactly what I had read in the Bible." 

On another occasion Louis was sick with the early stages of malaria. He called two of his friends to pray for him and within moments felt completely recovered. "I was sincerely shocked." Thinking that he might be imagining the change, he went to a dorm wall where he had often jumped to see how high he could touch. Now, he jumped and touched higher than he had ever done before. 

"In my work, we have a very peculiar way of looking at the world, a very powerful way we call methodological naturalism. As a Christian I can make a good argument for it. It would be odd if there were miracles in my lab or in my calculations. What I am studying are the regular ways God sustains the world. If there is a God who is faithful, then I expect his rules to be trustworthy and regular, and if God is intelligent I might even need to understand his rules. 

"I think Western cessationism comes from people acting like that all day long, and they think that's the way it is. But I don't think that's the way it is. If you read the Bible, that's not the way it was. It's particularly important for me as a scientist to be involved in something like praying for the sick because that does act on a different plane." 

Louis believes that pentecostal and charismatic Christians have a particular contribution to make to the discussion of evolution. 

T. Stafford, ed. The Adam Quest (T. Nelson 2013),  chap. 9.

Louis is oddly oblivious to the glaring ironies of his position. He's a cessationist in the lab, but a charismatic in church. 

What kind of world do we live in if God sometimes heals a terminal cancer patient in answer to prayer? That introduces an element of discontinuity into natural processes. That makes nature less linear. Less predictable. 

The outcome is no longer like a machine that always does just what it's programmed to do. For God can and sometimes does override the default setting. And that, in turn, introduces more uncertainty into historical sciences like astronomy and paleontology. 

How does Louis combine methodological naturalism, medical science, and miraculous healing? Something has to give. If God is rule-bound, then God can't intervene to miraculously heal a patient. That would interrupt the usual chain of cause and effect.