Free Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept by James W. Sire Page A

science is to give us genuine knowledge. This, in fact, has been accepted (consciously or unconsciously) by virtually all working scientists and, until the postmodern age, most other scholars as well. What is not usually noticed is that these foundational notions are not self-evident. For science to proceed, they are necessary assumptions, but they are not necessarily true.
    When the young boy asks his father, “What holds up the world?” the father is forced to see that his answer is based on something he cannot finally prove or perhaps even understand. “God made the world to hang in space,” or “That’s just the way it is. Orderly matter and energy in a complex relationship: that’s all there is.” When one gets to the bottom, then, one is faced with naming the elephant. One must make a pretheoretical or presuppositional commitment.
    The academic world is faced with the same questions and the same alternatives as the father. What holds up the world? Why is it orderly? Science itself was born from the Christian worldview that held that the universe is orderly because an omniscient and omnipotent God intended to make a world that reflected his own intelligence. 20 The universe is orderly because God is Logos (intelligence itself). That was a commitment—a presupposition—lodged in the heart of most early scientists. It is not the commitment lodged in the mind of most scholars now.
    Today naturalism is dominant. There simply is no academic discipline—whether in the arts and humanities, the social sciences or the natural sciences—that takes as its starting assumption the notion of a God who has created both the scholars and the world they are studying.
    “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” was openly stated by astrophysicist Carl Sagan, but it is the unstated assumption of every academic discipline. 21 God is not just unnecessary; he is irrelevant and even embarrassing. Biologist Richard Dawkins has only to say that fellow would-be scientist Michael Behe believes in God (which he does), and anything Behe proposes is automatically suspect, not even worth evaluating on its merits. 22 Naturalism reigns.
    I think, in fact, that most Christians in the natural sciences, while being fully theistic in their overall worldview, are methodological naturalists in their scientific work. That is, they assume that as far as science is concerned, they do not need (and would even be encumbered by) the notion of God. Science deals with natural explanations of natural phenomena. There may be other explanations, but they belong in philosophy or theology or history or psychology or sociology. They do not belong in science qua science. God has designed and made the world; he has made us in his image. This explains the orderliness of the cosmos and the ability we have to understand it. But, they say, we do not need to call on any of this background for the scientific work we do. We can work alongside scientists who are metaphysical naturalists (that is, those who believe in no God at all) or pantheists (who believe that nature itself is divine), because the work we do does not require these metaphysical notions.
    While methodological naturalism has been the dominant position taken by Christians in the sciences, it has recently been challenged by scientists and philosophers who argue for design science. This is not the place for me to take sides in this controversy. 23 My own view is that the issue is not yet—and may never be—resolved. My only certainty is that God is always in relation to his creation as Creator. He upholds the universe by his word of power (Heb 1:3). John Henry Newman said it well:
    [Even though God as Creator is infinitely separate from his creation,] yet He has so implicated Himself with it and taken it into His very bosom by His presence in it, His providence over it, His impressions upon it, and His influences through it, that we cannot truly or fully contemplate it without contemplating