“Hasn’t Science Disproved Christianity?”
In the 1500s, most people were taught and most people believed that the earth was the centre of the universe. There was an astronomer named Galileo whose studies led him to believe that this wasn’t the case – the sun and all the other planets didn’t seem to revolve around the earth at all.
The scientific community and the church at the time objected strongly. They insisted that the earth WAS the centre of the universe. In fact, the Roman Catholic Church claimed that this is what the Bible taught on the issue. They put him on trial and forced him to recant, and kept him under house arrest for the final years of his life.
Many non-Christian scientists still refer to this incident today to demonstrate that religion or faith is opposed to science. Galileo is, in a way, where the “Science vs. God” mentality started.
You’ve probably all heard it: the accusations that a claim is “not scientific” as if that puts an end to any debate; the question or challenge, “can you prove that scientifically?” as if science is the great unbiased and universal arbiter of all that is true.
For many people the following equation is true:
• Science=fact, religion=faith
You get that sort of idea from many of the police shows out there today – the CSI franchise in particular. Scientific, forensic evidence is irrefutable, unbiased fact – and if you can’t prove something scientifically, you really can’t prove it at all.
And so we come to our question – Hasn’t science disproved Christianity? Isn’t faith in some divine supernatural being the exact opposite of rational, scientific thought? If you go to church, do you really have to leave your brains at the door?
In order to answer these questions, I’m first going to deal with some broad principles of scientific methodology, the nature of science and Christianity, and then we’ll look at the question of God’s existence and creation and evolution and things like that if we’ve got time.
Much of modern science as we know it began with Christians trying to bring glory to God. Moreover, theology, or the “study of God” was known as the “queen of sciences” . Many scientists in the early modern period weren’t just Christians, they were priests, monks and clergymen. Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle to name but a few are recorded as saying that the very motivation for their scientific endeavour was to investigate the wonders of the world and by so doing bring glory to its maker.
This supposed enmity between science and religion has not always been there. In fact, it’s certainly not present today as more and more scientists are coming to the view that believing in a creator is not intellectual suicide and nor is it irrational – in fact, some would say, it makes perfect sense of the evidence. But more on that later.
We also need to understand that science is not by definition fact, and that scientists need just as much faith as Christians.
Let me start out with a few examples. At the end of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin, an eminent and well-respected scientist said this: “heavier than air machines are impossible”. Less than two years later, the Wright brothers flew their first plane. A short time later he said: “radio has no future”; “x-rays are a hoax”.
I don’t want to heap ridicule upon the man, but you get my point. History is littered with rejected scientific theories and discredited scientists.
And this should not be surprising if you understand the way science actually works – scientific methodology in other words.
Science is a process, not a series of facts. Science is a process which falsifies. What do I mean by that?
Well, the way scientific enquiry works is like this: someone comes up with a series of hypotheses, theories by which they can explain certain natural phenomena. Then, by repeating experiments under controlled conditions, the hypotheses are tested. Just like experiments in high school science – data is recorded and a conclusion drawn. Any theory which doesn’t fit the empirical data is demonstrated to be false – falsified – until one (or perhaps none) are left. If you get the same result enough times which supports a certain hypothesis, the theory is considered “proven”.
But any theory is only one experiment away from falsification.
Consider this: Suppose you come up with this hypothesis – all swans are white. You experiment by viewing and investigating swans. You visit their habitat. You see thousands of swans and they’re all white. The theory is considered proven. But then you visit another part of the world and around the bend in the river you see floating a black swan. All it takes is one verifiable experiment - in this case one black swan – to falsify your theory.
And that sort of thing happens all the time in science. Theories which are widely held to be true are demonstrated false by the next big discovery.
Sir Carl Popov said, “All scientific knowledge is either hypothetically true or definitely false”.
Now I’m not saying that every scientific theory is false – far from it. But the very nature of science should bring into question this “science=fact” equation.
Given this, how do you go about “proving” something scientifically? Well, like I said – scientific evidence is based upon repeated experimentation under controlled conditions. This means that asking somebody to “scientifically prove” that Jesus rose from the dead, for instance, is a complete nonsense. You can’t repeat historical events under controlled conditions. It’s just silly.
We’re now going to watch a brief clip from the 1997 sci-fi movie “Contact”. In the film, the world is currently awash with speculation about certain radio signals that have been detected from space. Jodie Foster plays the scientist who lost her father when she was young and who first detected these signals. Matthew McConaghy plays some sort of religious writer. They’re at a reception at the White House.
Show clip.
Many people claim to believe that if something can’t be proven scientifically then it’s a myth. But that in itself is a myth. No one actually lives that way. If it were true, you could never prove what you were doing this morning. You could never prove that John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia. You could never prove that you loved someone.
But there’s other ways of proving things. In a murder case in court, we don’t ask for the murder to be repeated over and over again in front of us so we can observe, record and conclude – I’m sorry, can you just stab him in the chest again so I can check my data! No, we look at the evidence, we hear the testimony.
Science, therefore, can’t prove or disprove Christianity because the Bible makes claims which fall outside of the realm of scientific enquiry.
If you ask a “how” question” then science is usually very ready to supply an answer. But it struggles with “why” questions. Why does the universe work this way? Why are we here?
Let me illustrate: a young boy walks into the kitchen to find the kettle boiling on the stove. He asks his father, a scientist – “dad, why is the kettle boiling?” His father replies: “Well, son, it’s because the combustion of gas transfers heat to the bottom of the kettle which, being a good conductor, transfers heat to the water. The molecules of water become more and more agitated, give off steam, and there is your boiling.” Slightly dissatisfied, the boy asks his mother. “The kettle’s boiling because I’m making us all a cup of coffee”, she says.
Science and faith are not fundamentally contradictory because they seek to answer different questions. As the character in the film clip notes, science can’t really give us meaning or purpose. It can’t tell us much about relationships or emotions. I mean, if your concept of human feelings is limited to brain chemistry then you’re not going to be very fun to be around! It can’t tell us how we should treat others. It can’t tell us who made us. If science is all there is, then it’s pretty depressing – because we are no more than a bunch of cells, a mutated fluke of evolution.
Science in and of itself is not anti-Christian. But it has been used by atheists and agnostics for the last two hundred years to try to discredit Christianity. It has enabled them to coat their faithlessness with a sheen of intellectualism. Before science, any number of perfectly natural but misunderstood occurrences were explained away as acts of God. And as scientific knowledge has increased that has meant that atheists have tried to portray people of faith as backward and naïve – just those ignorant people of centuries ago who were controlled by myth and superstition. Science has given atheists an out – and perhaps the most significant theory in this regard is Darwinian evolution.
It’s important because, according to some, it enables us to explain how the world came to be the way it is – how we got here, in other words, without reference to God.
Charles Darwin himself wasn’t an atheist – more an agnostic, probably- but many of the most enthusiastic believers in his theories were and still are. The basic idea of evolution is this: Over millions if not billions of years, life has changed and developed by a process known as natural selection where the fittest and strongest species or sub-species would survive, pass on their genetic mutations and thus organisms would evolve and adapt over time by natural processes. “By natural processes” is the key point. As soon as Darwin released his theory it became clear to some that now humans had an explanation for the world that didn’t require God.
Now many people here – many Christians - might believe the theory of evolution to be perfectly acceptable for a Christian to hold to – God created evolution. As far as that goes, you might be right. But if you’re a Christian you don’t believe in the basic premise of Darwin’s theory – natural selection. You believe that God designed and created the world. Now God may have used natural processes, so I’m not saying they’re necessarily contradictory – but ultimately he did it!
The position of biologist turned atheistic evangelist Richard Dawkins is that science has made belief in God irrelevant and ridiculous. Yet there are many scientists just as eminent as him who do not share his view.
I’ve read a little bit of material on intelligent design. Its basic premise is that the nature of the universe, of cells, of organisms is positive evidence of an intelligent designer. It questions evolution and natural selection as reasonable ways of explaining life. According to proponents of intelligent design, the more we know about the world the more complex it appears, and this complexity can only be explained by an intelligent designer.
It’s like the story about famous scientist Benjamin Franklin. He was a believer in God. Some of his fellow scientists were not. They were constantly arguing with one another over the question of God's existence. Franklin crafted an elaborate model of our solar system with moving parts that depicted the planets' orbits around the sun. After his work was finished, he placed it on a table in the scientists' meeting room before anyone arrived. On purpose, he was the last one to arrive for the meeting. They were all excited about the marvelous model but their biggest interest when he entered the room was, "WHO MADE THIS?"
Franklin immediately seized the moment to point out their hypocrisy. If they could easily recognize that the order and design in this model called for a maker, weren't they inconsistent not to ask the same question about the actual solar system?
Now intelligent design is a lot more complicated than this. I’m not going to try to go into detail. I’m just not qualified to explain it.
But let me give you just one example – a little thing called DNA.DNA is an incredibly intricate molecule in which the information for each cell is stored and manipulated. The coding behind DNA reveals such intelligence that it staggers the imagination. A mere pinhead of it contains information equivalent to a stack of paperback books that would encircle the earth 5,000 times. And DNA operates like a language with its own extremely complex software code. Microsoft founder Bill Gates says that the software of DNA is “far, far more complex than any software we have ever developed.” It’s simply so ingenious and so complicated and so miraculous that it becomes a leap of almost irrational faith to believe that it just popped into existence from nowhere – and yet that is the atheist position.
Professor of Philosophy Antony Flew has been a renowned atheist for 50 years, travelling around universities, schools and elsewhere preaching his message. But this came to an abrupt end when he learnt about DNA. He’s not a Christian, but he has publicly repudiated his atheism. He said this: “What I think the DNA material has done is to show that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements together. The enormous complexity by which the results were achieved look to me like the work of intelligence. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.
Dr Paul Davies, a famous physicist – and also not a Christian – is another scientist who believes that the scientific evidence points toward a designer. He has shown that the probability of fluking the environmental requirements for life to exist – amount of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, the amount of gravity and a range of other factors – makes intelligent design much more probable. In fact, he has said that the likelihood of it happening by mere chance is the same as winning the jackpot in the lotto 100 times in a row. How ironic it is that some atheists say Christians are irrational in their faith!
The intelligent design material I’ve read rejects natural selection because it does not and cannot explain the evolution of living things from non-living matter, the utter complexity of the cell or the explosion of new species at particular points throughout history rather than a gradual evolutionary movement as Darwin predicted.
As you can imagine, intelligent design has been heavily criticized by those in education circles, and by some scientists. Some have wanted to teach intelligent design alongside evolutionary theory in schools but others have strongly protested.
Many say that it is “unscientific”. You can’t test the supernatural in a laboratory so it’s not scientific, it’s not repeatable. True, but neither is natural selection in any practical way – you can’t test evolution by putting a mouse in a cage and seeing what happens. If atheists want to engage with intelligent design they should argue on a scientific basis rather than just saying “it’s not scientific” as if that ends the conversation. Read the material and you’ll find it’s highly scientific.
Some Christians have argued against it because it is merely a “God of the gaps” theory. What I mean by that is this: it just says “we can’t explain this by anything we know now, so it must have been God”. And what happens is that as scientific understanding grows the place for God becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. This is a problem, but fundamentally I don’t think intelligent design is a “god of the gaps” theory. It basically says the more we know about the complexity and ingenuity of the universe the more we are certain that an intelligent designer is required. The more we know about the world the more unlikely it is that we’re all here as a result of a cosmic fluke.
And finally, I think that at its heart it’s a biblical position because it is arguing that from looking at the wonder of creation we can see the power of the creator. That’s what we read from Psalm 19 – the heavens declare the glory of God. God’s creation announces to us the reality of his existence and the breadth of his power.
When I was in year eight and year nine, myself and Cameron Smith would constantly spend the half hour of our bus journey home evangelizing and arguing with one other chap - his name was Chris (you might know him!) and both his parents were (and still are) agnostics and university physics professors. We would discuss with him creation and evolution and the big bang. We’d constantly invite him to church and to youth group. Eventually, after much persisting he finally agreed to come. Our youth group leader spoke to him and asked him where he stood on Christianity. To our compete surprise he replied – I’m a Christian. He has been a faithful follower of Christ ever since.
I asked him what it was that made him put aside his scientific objections to Christianity. What convinced him that God had created the universe?
In response he said something that was really quite profound. He said “You know, it was never evolution or science that was my real objection to Christianity. I thought that was the reason, but the truth was I didn’t want to give my life to God. I knew there would be consequences for believing in Jesus and I wasn’t prepared to face them. Apologetics wasn’t what made me become a Christian. It was useful to have those conversations, as a way of getting into a conversation about Jesus. But what changed me was the gospel. I read the gospels and found that Jesus was worth following. All my questions about evolution didn’t just go away then, but they became far less significant.”
So when it comes to arguing with people about creation, realize that it is sin and the devil we need to overcome, not scientific theories. Know your stuff and be able to give answers, for sure. But it’s the gospel that is the power for salvation, and intelligent design or whatever arguments for God’s creative work you use are only useful if they point to Jesus, glorify the Father who sent him and challenge people to put their faith in the death and resurrection of Christ.
