It was a cold, wet day on the island of Malta. A large company was busy making a fire. Suddenly, a drama erupted. As one of the party tended the fire, a snake emerged from it and became attached to his hand. Loud gasps and shrieks ensued. Conversations were aborted mid-sentence as all eyes became glued to the dangling creature. But amidst the mounting panic the man at the centre of the incident remained calm. A violent shake of his arm propelled the snake back into the fire. Everyone watched as it writhed frantically, then twitched more slowly, and then at last succumbed, motionless, to the fury of the flames.

Many of you will recognise the story. The man who encounters the reptile is Paul, a shipwreck having marooned the apostle on the island. The account is found in Acts 28, and it makes a gripping read. But, fascinatingly, the passage does not merely record Paul’s fireside incident; it also provides two competing explanations for it.

On the one hand there is the islanders’ explanation: the snake came out of the flames because Paul must have committed heinous acts and this was his retribution (verse 4). On the other hand there is Luke’s rather less colourful take on the incident: the snake came out of the flames ‘because of the heat’ (verse 3)! We might say that one explanation is superstitious, the other scientific. The islanders think in terms of mysterious unseen forces, Luke in terms of simple cause and effect.

In its response to Covid-19 our society has sided with Luke. Social distancing, correct coughing procedures, lowering the R number, the quest for a vaccine – all of these are scientific approaches to the virus. The leading light in the Government’s press briefings has been neither Boris Johnson nor Matt Hancock, but an epidemiologist who bombards us with graphs and statistics and the findings of the latest research. Snake attacks in first century Malta attracted a frenzy of superstitious speculation; thankfully pandemics in twenty-first century Britain are subjected to rigorous, rational analysis.

But there is something interesting here. Those islanders were at least being consistent. Convinced that ultimate reality is a plethora of capricious gods, it was reasonable for them to interpret events the way they did. It is questionable, however, whether our society is being so consistent. 

According to the prevailing orthodoxy propagated in our school classrooms and television documentaries, what lies behind everything is an unguided ‘big bang’. Thus the universe exists, and is the way it is, by chance; chance is ultimate reality. But if chance is ultimate reality, why expect anything to operate logically? Why expect viruses or vaccines to conform to fixed, dependable laws in a world that once randomly exploded into existence? That philosophy has no room for science. Science presupposes order and regularity, but in an accidental universe there is no reason for order and regularity. There is no reason for reason. The Prime Minister at his press briefings would be better served with a witch doctor than an epidemiologist.

If, then, first century Maltese society did not think scientifically, and twenty first century western society really should not think scientifically, where does science belong? It belongs within the biblical worldview, where ultimate reality is a reliable God who created the universe to work in a reliable way. Christianity animates science. It leads us to expect a natural world that functions coherently and uniformly; one where a certain cause will always produce a certain effect. As theologian Robert Reymond puts it, ‘The unregenerate scientist…is unwittingly “borrowing capital” from a Christian-theistic universe’.

Let us thank God for his orderly creation. And let us thank him, too, that in his grace he causes people to think in scientific ways even though their underlying worldview discourages it. If it were not for that, goodness knows what the response to Covid-19 might have looked like!

Guest contributor, Monday 6 July 2020