Christianity And Science Series

Jesus was a great physician who believed in preventive medicine. Curative

medicine is the most spectacular, for what can compare to saying to the leper,

"Be made whole!" Or what can be more amazing than to command the blind

to see or the lame to rise up and walk? Preventive medicine is less exciting, for

there is nothing to see, and no radical changes take place before your eyes. It

keeps the limbs from ever decaying. It keeps the eye from ever going blind. It

keeps the legs strong so lameness is never experienced. The result is no

spectacular change, but just a plateau of sameness in good health. It is far

superior to stay on that level of health than to fall and be restored to it, but it

is a quiet experience that does not grab headlines.

Nevertheless, it is still true that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of

cure. Jesus practiced preventive medicine whenever He could. He was

constantly teaching His disciples to prepare them for what was ahead, so that

they would not fall. Even some of His spectacular works were preventive. For

example, the feeding of the 5 thousand was to give the crowd a meal so they

would not faint by the way. He did not wait for them to faint from hunger and

then revive them. He gave them food to prevent them from fainting.

The principle of prevention is so reasonable because it is the best way to

deal with the reality of evil. This principle runs all through the Word of God.

God's first command to Adam and Eve was for the prevention of all the evil

that would result from their disobedience. All God's law is for the prevention

of sin, evil, suffering and judgment. The purpose of prophecy was to forewarn

so as to prevent folly and judgment. Much of the teaching of the New Testament

was to prevent apostasy and the falling away during persecution.

The Bible and Science agree that prevention is the ideal. The goal of

science is to be able to predict so men can avoid what is bad and gain what is

good. The whole point in forecasting the weather is so people can plan to be

prepared for what is coming. Prediction for the sake of prevention is of the

very essence of science. Without the ability to predict what is going to happen

under circumstances science could never have gotten men to the moon and

back. They had to know how to prevent every possible threat in order to

survive.

The ability to predict and thereby prevent is to have dominion over the

forces of nature, and in this way fulfill the command of God to have dominion

over all the earth. Science plays the role of aiding man to obey God's first

commandment. The goal of science is to put man into dominion over all the

forces of nature. Someone might get technical here and say that the text says

for man to gain dominion over all the earth. It says nothing about outer space.

But as Dr. Rodney W. Johnson, a Christian and an authority on lunar bases,

points out, to be able to escape from the earth and be independent of it shows

our mastery over it and its powerful gravity. Going to the moon is a part of

man's subduing of the earth.

Science is good and has produced so many blessings for man that there is

no point in trying to enumerate them. The Christian shares in these blessings

and takes them for granted, but they give him the opportunity to have a richer

Christian experience. Science is dedicated to truth, life, health, and it is

opposed to error, death and suffering. This makes it a natural ally of

Christianity, and yet there has been a whole history of conflict between science

and Christianity. Christians have made many mistakes in the past by

assuming that science is a foe rather than a friend.

It seems natural to us today to prove things by experiments, but his way of

thinking is only around 500 years old. The age of science began in 1543 when

the Polish churchman Copernicus challenged the geocentric view of the

universe by suggesting that the earth went around the sun. He offered

mathematical calculations, which stimulated men to develop experimental

methods to prove it. This was the beginning of science, as we know it. Before

this, questions were settled by authority. You didn't prove your point, but you

just quoted the authority, who at that time was Aristotle. He had considered

the idea of the earth not being the center of the universe, but he rejected it.

His authority reigned over men's minds until the scientific method destroyed

his authority.

Science from the very start was revolutionary, for it challenged authority,