Science can explain many things, but it can never answer the deep human questions about the meaning of life that most of us want to ask. Why should we have faith in God or Jesus? What good has Christianity done in our world? What about suffering? However, the notion that science and religion historically have been at war with each other is actually a myth. As a matter of fact, historically again, in our day people tend not to know this , science emerged primarily from people of faith.
A guy by the name of Rodney Stark at Baylor University did a study on this about seventeenth-century Europe. Out of the 52 leading scientists he did a study about their thoughts , 62 percent of them were what he called devout believers, 34 percent of them were conventionally religious, and only 2 out of the 52 were religious skeptics. Of course, by that time, seventeenth-century Europe, there were a fair number of skeptics. Only 2 of the leading 52 scientists were among them.
Not only were science and faith not enemies, there are a bunch of folks who work in the history of science. One of them is named Paul Chamberlain. It runs counter to a lot of current understanding. Folks who are nonbelievers sometimes think it is. Faith in God is based on observations of meaning and value and order that actually underlie the rise of science itself.
The rise of science happened at a particular point in a particular history in a particular civilization.
Historically, the rise of science required a worldview that involves the notion our world is orderly and will reward rational investigation. In the ancient world, they thought the earth was involved in this endless cycle of existence. Things go up and down, get better and worse. The notion that the world is orderly and will reward rational investigation came from a worldview that began with faith in an all-powerful, rational God.
Of course, there are many other ingredients required for science to emerge, but a certain kind of worldview that the world is orderly and will repay orderly investigation was part of what was needed for science to arise.
Alfred North Whitehead, one of the dominant thinkers of the twentieth century, when he was asked for the causes of the rise of science when it came about said it was the medieval insistence on the rationality of God. This has become a huge hot-button topic.
Evolution is a really controversial thing. He notes that in studying the Bible you always have to begin by asking how it would be understood by the audience reading it in that day when it was written. You have to start by asking about the historical context of the intended audience, because the Bible always emerges out of a conversation in its day.
For us as a church, to be wise readers, wise students of the Bible, we really have to be grounded in this. In our day, even in the church, very often people get off track with the Bible, especially the very beginning in Genesis and the very end in Revelation. I can just read into it whatever I would happen to read into it out of my own time and culture and agenda.
Walton spent a lot of time taking a look at this. There was a conversation, as there always is among human beings, in the ancient Mesopotamian world. How did the earth get here?
I grew up in the church. I just assumed the Bible was this magic Book and Genesis just got dropped down out of heaven. It was actually kind of threatening to me to find out there was a very rich conversation going on, and of course the language and concepts of that conversation were part of what God used by the writer of Genesis, because it got written in the context of this discussion. They were very concerned with how order triumphed over chaos. That was the big thing their stories were about.
Of course, in our day, different Christians interpret Genesis differently. Those questions were not around back then. Genesis is addressing questions that were around back then in ways that have laid out the identity of human beings and our place in the cosmos with matchless, world-changing truth.
I want to say a personal word here. I have seen too many young people in too many churches exposed to bad science, shoddy thinking, false claims, and the misguided idea maybe well-intended but misguided that somebody was defending the Bible when what they were really defending was a wrong interpretation of the Bible. On the other hand, I want to say this. Sometimes secularists will misuse the language or theory of evolution to make claims about human identity that are false and destructive.
For example, a few years ago, a study found that chimps share One guy writing about this actually titled his book The Third Chimpanzee. Would you elect one to Congress? You can make up your own joke here. Would you date one?
Would you put one on trial for an ethical breach and hold one morally accountable for its behavior? See, human identity, the human condition, human worth, are huge questions. When they get expressed as if they were, it is not right; it is not bright. Now you have to decide…Is that true, or are you a third chimpanzee? Again, I understand there are really bright people who wrestle and struggle with that.
A lot of you have heard about the idea of the big bang, that the universe had a beginning. A hundred years ago, scientists just assumed the universe has always existed.
They did not think there was a beginning to it. They thought matter and space had always been around. Scientists now believe the universe is actually about For scientists to come to grips over the last century with the notion that there was a beginning was quite astounding. Francis Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project. By the way, he used to be an atheist. He is now a devoted follower of Jesus Christ. A major turning point in his conversion was when he read Mere Christianity.
He writes about this in another wonderful book about science and faith called The Language of God. It certainly demonstrates the limits of science as no other phenomenon has done. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
That little phrase, in the beginning, starts to look a whole lot different than it did a century or two ago. There is something even more staggering than just the existence of the big bang itself. There is this fact that the universe appears in the strangest way to have been designed to support life. This is sometimes called the anthropic principle. Anthropos is the Greek word for man. The universe seems strangely fine-tuned for life in a bunch of ways.
I will tell you one. About one millisecond after the big bang, the universe cooled down enough for what are called quarks and antiquarks to condense out. The way that worked, as I understand it, is any quark encountering an antiquark would result in the complete annihilation of them both and the release of a little photon of energy.
For every one billion antiquarks, there is one leftover lonely little quark. Now why there is this asymmetry nobody knows, but it turns out if there had been an equal number of quarks and antiquarks they would have annihilated each other and there would be no universe. There are some, more conservative Christians who believe that the seven days of creation outlined in the Bible refers to seven long periods of time. They argue that the order in which living things were created according to the Bible may have similarities to the order scientists accept evolution took place plants, sea creatures, flying creatures, land animals and finally humans and that this makes the Bible's account more credible.
Theory of evolution Evolution of human beings over millions of years from ape-like ancestors In , a British man called Charles Darwin published a book called 'On the Origin of Species'. These reasons included: The theory of evolution seemed to go against religious teachings that God made the Earth and created all living things, as they knew them. Christians believed that God had created humans 'in his own image', that humans were superior to all other creatures and had a soul that is immortal.
The theory of evolution challenged the idea that God is the designer of the universe and that the beauty, order and complexity of the universe is evidence of this the design argument. The idea that living things adapt to their environment was opposed to their belief that God had created the perfect environment for them.
The Bible says humans were created on the sixth day of creation, not over a period of millions of years. Is the theory of evolution compatible with Christianity? Why might it be compatible?
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