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Science and Christianity Genesis 1 Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday evening, 04 Nov, 2007 THE CAKE stood in the middle of the room. Many people gathered around it to try a piece and to offer their comments. Nearly everyone was an expert and had observations to report. “Truly beautiful!” said the Cake Show judge. “Dense but smooth, fruity, with a hint of rum. I can see how the ingredients were mixed and baked to perfection. And what a delicious fondant coating under a truly remarkable icing! Exceptional! I’d say it was cooked sometime around the end of last week.” “But you must agree,” said the nutritionist, “that it is a concoction of large quantities of carbohydrates and sugars with only a small amount of roughage. Far from a healthy addition to a diet, despite the fruit in it.” “I was more interested in it from the chemistry point of view,” said the organic chemist. “I don’t see it as a piece of cookery or consider its place in a balanced diet. This is an interesting combination of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms in chains, rings, and branched chains. I agree that it is probably several days old, because I some chemical processes have progressed further since this was cooked. And some of the original molecules were clearly modified by heating, and I would be glad to explain the processes to you.” “We can do without your explanation,” said the mathematical physicist, “After all, the real facts of this thing have to do with mathematical descriptions of the movements of the atoms that make up this object, and then we have to go beyond that and see how the subatomic particles move in relation to each other, the electrons, protons, neutrons and all the rest.” Everyone was feeling smug about giving such profound explanations of the cake. But someone hadn’t spoken. No one thought she would have anything useful to add. She wore an apron: perhaps she was with the caterers. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked around nervously. “You are all very learned people. I studied some science when I was young, but that was a long time ago now. But I read New Scientist magazine sometimes, so I have an idea of what you are talking about. However, I can say something about this object which none of the rest of you has said. This is, of course, a cake. I can tell you who made it, because I am the cook. And I can tell you why it was made: I cooked it for my grandson for his birthday, and he left you some, because it was so big.” All those scientists gave useful, but very different, descriptions of the cake. They could say a lot about what and how. But only the maker can tell us about the who and the why. And that’s mainly how it is between science and religion everywhere. Science tells us what and how; only God can tell us who and why.
People often think that Science came with the Enlightenment in the 18th Century, as religion’s influence declined. But that is not what history says. Science advanced when the Greek principles of enquiry met Judaeo–Christian theology. Many leading scientists of the past were Christians. Among the very earliest was Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan Friar active in the 1200s. Nicholaus Copernicus, the 15th Century astronomer who proved that the earth circles the sun, was also Canon of Frauenburg Cathedral in what was once called Prussia. He also trained Georg Joachim Rheticus, a Protestant mathematician from Wittenberg. Galileo Galilei, shortly after Copernicus, wrote that the earth was not the centre of the universe. Despite Church persecution, he was a devout Christian, who revered the Bible. The Lutheran astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) founded modern optics. He said that science is ‘...thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” Sir Isaac Newton (1646 – 1727) is famous for the laws of gravity, inventing differential calculus, and developing basic laws of physics which stood until Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in 1904. Even now, unless you are bulding an atomic bomb, you still use Newton’s formulae. Newton implicitly accepted the Bible’s inspiration, and considered his theological works more important than his scientific ones. Michael Faraday died in 1867. His foundational work in electricity and magnetism, gave us the first electric motor and dynamo. Some others are: Robert Boyle, the 17th century pioneer of chemistry and physics and promoter of Christianity in Asia. James Simpson, who pioneered anaesthesia for surgery towards the end of the 19th century, claimed that the most important discovery of his life was “...when I discovered Jesus Christ.” Lister with antiseptics, Pasteur, Lord Kelvin, and many more, were Christians. Christianity is fertile ground for scientific thought, for several reasons. It deals in facts. As Paul says, If Christ is not risen from the dead, your faith is empty, and you are dead in your sins. The basis of a rational faith is fact. It has a tradition that knowledge of God’s handiwork in creation will make our knowledge of God clearer. The Psalmist writes PS 19:1 The heavens declare God’s glory; Paul says, ROM 1:20 since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made It believes in an orderly universe. God has set down the laws by which it operates. In Hebrews we read of Jesus: 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. It believes that God is separate from and external to the creation. Pantheisms see God in everything and everything in God. The God of the Bible is involved in the world, yet he is not trapped in it. Everything in the Christian world is touchable unless God specifically bans it; anything in the pantheistic world might be dangerous because of some god in it. Finally, it believes that the natural world was created good. Greek thought held that matter is corrupt and unworthy of investigation. If Christianity can be so science–friendly, why the conflict between Christians and Scientists? I read recently that an American atheistic scientist said he wouldn’t employ an assistant who was a believer, because a believing assistant could not deal appropriately with scientific data!
The current big battleground between Christians and many scientists is over creation and evolution. There are several things that Genesis clearly says about the origins of the universe.
You will notice that these are the old Who and Why questions. Before you buy into any anti-Science arguments, you should realise that much of it is based on a fear that humans will lose their dignity if we have apes among our relatives. There was a famous debate at Oxford in 1860. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who had a science background, asked his opponent, Thomas Huxley, if he was descended from an ape on his grandmother’s side or his grandfather’s side. Huxley said he would rather be descended from an ape than from a Bishop who would use his intellect to obscure the truth. Are we really defending the Bible, or just afraid of having embarrassing relatives? And don’t dismiss evolution as just a theory, which shouldn’t be taken seriously. I hope that none of us denies Jesus’ resurrection. But we need to understand the facts. The Bible reveals a lot of physical evidence. There’s the empty tomb, the appearances of Jesus to numbers of people, the testimony of those who saw and spoke to him, and the failure of anyone, friend or enemy, to produce a body. The best-fit theory to cover all of that is that the Jesus who died also rose again. The resurrection is a theory because, if someone were to find his body, we would have to throw it out and come up with a new theory. In the same way, evolution is probably the best explanation around for how all the fossil evidence hangs together, but, if really good evidence that things were different can be found, Evolutionists would need a new theory. Take the theory of the resurrection seriously, and take the theory of evolution seriously, even if you don’t agree with it. Many Christians believe in six–day creationism, as though it took God 144 hours to create everything that exists. This theory became prominent around 25 years ago, when Duane Gish in the US and the Australian, Ken Ham, began pushing it. Other people who find no common ground between science and scripture sometimes see Genesis as only a kind of useful fairy story to give people with no scientific knowledge a creation story to hang onto. I think that neither group takes evolutionary theory seriously, and I don’t believe that they do justice to the Bible. C. I Scofield, the fundamentalist Bible commentator, had a more considered view, though I am sure he was wrong. He said that there is a gap of millions of years between Genesis 1: 1 and Genesis 1: 2, and everything evolutionists talk about happened in that gap. The problem is that nothing in Genesis suggests that that is the case. He made it up! Theistic Evolutionists say that the creation occurred mainly according to the scheme set out by Evolutionary theory, and that Genesis roughly follows that scheme in its account of creation, but that Genesis is mainly about the fact that God did it all. Bernard Ramm, an Evangelical scholar, points out that Genesis 1:2 says, Now the earth was formless and empty... (utohu wavohu ha’arets) Ramm argues that the six “Days” of creation were never intended to be taken literally, but are a sort of container for accounts of how God formed the formless earth and then how he filled the empty earth. I like Ramm’s theory. I have two warnings First, you can’t really prove any theory about the creation, so don’t be nasty to people you disagree with. Punishing people who don’t agree with you is evil. We aren’t entirely sure of how to interpret Genesis, and all you can do is keep thinking and keep reading. The second is, always hold to the basics: like “God created it all with a good purpose.” But be flexible, because new discoveries about both the Bible and about evolution keep coming up, and our views will change.
Finally, about miracles. Some scientists claim that belief in miracles is illogical because miracles can’t occur in an orderly universe. That‘s a bit of a circular argument. C.S Lewis points out that you can’t have miracles if you don’t have an orderly, predictable universe, because miracles are, by definition, events which stand outside predictable order. In Jesus’ time, people knew what was likely to happen and what wasn’t. People didn’t believe that virgins give birth or that dead people come back to life, or that sick people become well at a single word. That was why the Bible records these events — they were unusual, and people sat up and paid attention. Science really can’t say much about miracles, because the basis of science is observing repeatable events. A couple of years ago scientists in Europe reported that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperatures, rather than the predicted thousands of degrees. But no one could repeat the experiment, so eventually people decided that it probably hadn’t happened. That’s how science works. But, by definition, a miracle is not repeatable. You can apply the rules of historical research and legal enquiry to find out if it probably happened or not, but you can’t go beyond that. It seems to me that there are three kinds of miracle. The first is a timing miracle. That is, what happened is easily capable of explanation, but the miracle is that it happened exactly when it did. For example, the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry land when the river suddenly dried up. In fact, certain weather conditions can combine to make the Jordan River suddenly stop flowing for a while and then restart. The miracle was that this rare event occurred just as the Israelites needed to cross over. The second is a combination miracle. Some one–off event happens just in the nick of time. They say that the fiery pillar which led Israel through the desert was possibly something to do with the eruption of the volcano on Santorini in the Mediterranean. But it happened just when Israel needed it. However, because it was a on–off event, and the records are sparse, we can never be sure if it was Santorini or something else which caused this. Perhaps Jesus’ walk on the water or his calming of the storm were these kinds of events. The third is an obscure miracle, with no obvious explanation. I can’t see how water can be changed to wine or how a man crippled from birth could not just get up, but actually walk and leap. Some of these events may eventually be explained when we know more, some may never be explained. We are silly to try to give a scientific explanation. Just accept that that is what people saw happen, we know who did it and why, but we may never know the how and what.
Conflict between science and Christianity is a fact, but there is little reason for it. Science can’t disprove historical events. All it can say is, “There is probably a further factor here that we don’t know about.” And Christianity alone will never make a competent scientist of you. The world needs both. As Christians we should read about science from time to time, so that we keep abreast of the basics that scientists are concerned about. If we do that, we can also expect that scientists respect us and read about Christianity. Most of the conflicts are caused by ignorance of what the others are on about. Let truth and love prevail! AMEN (Parts of this sermon based on N. Gumbel, Is there a conflict between Science and Religion? |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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