Faith and science: Is there a conflict?
“GOD’s works are so great, worth a lifetime of study--endless enjoyment!” Psalm 111:2 (MSG)
“but test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (New Living Translation)
A. Introduction
Today we begin a new series of messages called “Tough Questions.” Why we need this? Because we need a …
1. AN EXAMINED FAITH: God does not want us to shut down our minds. No blind faith please. The Bible does not encourage people to be unquestioning machines. In fact one whole book of the Bible called “Proverbs” is dedicated to applying wisdom to everyday life. It requires common sense thinking, and not merely going by what feels good. Listen to this…
“but test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (New Living Translation)
“And the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica, and they listened eagerly to Paul’s message. They searched the Scriptures day after day to check up on Paul and Silas, to see if they were really teaching the truth. As a result, many Jews believed, as did some of the prominent Greek women and many men.” Acts 17: 11-12 (New Living Translation)
The reputation of the Berean believers is legendary – they were known for their thorough study and open-mindedness and so were commended in Scripture for it. So should we as believers strive to emulate their example.
2. A GROUNDED FAITH: Preparation is vital for every Christian. We need to be ready to give valid reasons for the hope we have. So when asked we are able to articulate an intelligent reply that is hopeful, and not demeaning others or putting others down.
“…in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you the reason for the hope you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” 1 Peter 3:15 (New International Version)
If we cannot provide a reasonable answer for the hope we have, we’re on shaky ground. Then we might as well be followers of Yoda and not Jesus Christ.
3. A GROWING FAITH: We are to grow up in our thinking
Challenge from the Bible
“Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.” 1 Corinthians14:20 (New International Version). We must not have infantile ideas, but become grown-up in the way we view things. The Bible throws out a challenge to use our brains and not let it go to waste.
Furthermore, growth is expected for Christians as the Bible says “…build yourselves up in your most holy faith” Jude 20 (New International Version). Our faith must not remain stagnant but must constantly grow in response to the Spirit of God who is moving us to become more Christ-like.
B. Is there a conflict between faith and science?
1. The greatness of creation
“GOD’s works are so great, worth a lifetime of study--endless enjoyment!” Psalm 111:2 (MSG)
These words from the Bible tell us God’s creation is worth studying. In fact right off the bat, God’s wondrous creation is not to be kept away from genuine research and study. It would seem there is no conflict when there is honest inquiry and study. In fact, It is “worth a lifetime of study”
Look at each snowflake… what glorious design there is. See pictures of design of each individual flake! Endless enjoyment!
Let me tell you the story of Allan Sandage who devoted his life to doing exactly that. SOURCE: Science Finds God, by Sharon Begley, Newsweek, July 20, 1998 jul98.
72 year old Sandage has spent a professional lifetime coaxing secrets out of the stars, peering through telescopes from Chile to California in the hope of spying nothing less than the origins and destiny of the universe. As much as any other 20th-century astronomer, Sandage actually figured it out: his observations of distant stars showed how fast the universe is expanding....But through it all Sandage, who says he was "almost a practicing atheist as a boy," was nagged by mysteries whose answers were not to be found in the glittering panoply of supernovas. Among them: why is there something rather than nothing? Sandage began to despair of answering such questions through reason alone, and so, at 50, he willed himself to accept God. "It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science," he says. "It is only through the supernatural that I can understand the mystery of existence." --
And so it seems the more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you’d expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds but the truth is if they are honest, it will reveal more of the genius of a wondrous mind of a Creator, a Designer of the universe.
We need to FACE the difficulties of the theory of evolution. As Hank Hanegraff pointed out with his acronym of FACE
F - Fossil record - shows no evidence of transitional forms of life. The "Missing link" is still missing! After more than a hundred years of Darwin’s death there is no fossil to prove the theory right. Quote: "Fossil evidence should on the whole support the claim that today’s complex organisms evolved step-by-gradual-step from specific common ancestors. . . . It is generally conceded today, however, that fossil species are remarkably stable over long periods of time and the appearance of new forms is typically abrupt.: – Phillip Johnson, quoted from Reason in the Balance.
A - Ape-men hoaxes - documented hoaxes such as the "Nebraska Man" where a single tooth is used to construct an imaginary ape-men shows there is serious flaw in accepting evolution.
C - Chance - is not acceptable theory for the complexity of the universe to exist.
E - Entropy - second law of thermodynamics militates against the theory. Things tend to go to randomness, disorder not the other way round.
2. The conclusion of the matter
Psalm 19 says:
The heavens tell of the glory of God.
The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known.
This story illustrates for me very nicely Psalm 19.
Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano. To them in their piano-world came the music of the instrument, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony. At first the mice were impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone who made the music--though invisible to them--above, yet close to them. They loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see.
Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had found how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths which trembled and vibrated. They must revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player.
Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Hammers were now the secret, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world. The Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth.
But the pianist continued to play.
The music that we hear from the nature, created things is like the piano music. It is beautiful, people this weekend are paying money to go camping, go to the Rockies or the beaches, setting up campfires, just to hear the music of creation. But sadly, many theorize that it is chance that brought into being the music. They think through their limited observations, that creation is something like the wires in the piano or hammers. But the music of creation plays on, the heavens tell the glory of God, it sings of a creator, it resonates the sound of marvellous craftsmanship, and no matter what theories we have, the music keeps playing. We can say and theorize whatever we want about the universe and its origins, and deny the Creation activity of God, yet we can never succeed in driving God Himself away as 72 year old Sandage have found. Abraham Lincoln once said: “I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heaven and say there is no God.”
The story is told of a native from a remote mountain village who had the opportunity to visit a large modern city for the first time. He could not bring much home with him, and he had little money. But he was amazed at the electric lights which he saw everywhere. So he bought a sack full of electric lights bulbs and sockets with switches so he could turn them off and on.
Arriving home he hung the light bulbs in front of his home and on his and his neighbor’s trees. Everyone watched him with curiosity and asked him what he was doing, but he just smiled and said, "Just wait until dark--you’ll see."
When night came he turned on the switches, but nothing happened. No one had told him about electricity. He did not know the light bulbs were useless unless connected to the source of their power.
You see, there is a source for the power that turns on the lights in the universe. Jesus said, "Apart from me you can do nothing." There are many people who do not know that the way they are living their lives is useless. They got the education; they got the job; they made the family; and bought the home but when the sunsets and night comes and they reach for the switch nothing happens. They do not know that there is a source, which makes all these things light up!
Real research and science does not conflict with Christian faith. The earliest scientists who shaped scientific thinking and study were people who understood Psalm 111:2. They looked at the world with wonder, and they saw something worth their time and effort studying, they saw the hand of a Creator who thought of the world and designed it with purpose. As Rodney Buchanan in a sermon he wrote, noted:
The earliest scientists were people of profound faith. People like Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Kepler and many others were men of deep personal faith and conviction. Isaac Newton wrote that the world arose from “the perfectly free will of God,” and that we must investigate the world by “observations and experiments.” Copernicus was convinced that the world, which the God he loved had made, was mathematically precise, and before telescopes were even invented he theorized that the planets orbited around the sun rather than the earth, because it fit the mathematical formulas better. Galileo, who held to the theory of Copernicus, was called a heretic by the church of his day, but he claimed that even though his work contradicted popular beliefs of the time, which had been influenced by Greek philosophy, it did not contradict a proper understanding of the Bible. Galileo was a man of deep faith who believed he was revealing the laws of God in his work.
These great men of faith paved the way for modern scientific thinking. They understood that at the center of the universe is a divine Intelligence. Life is not random and chaotic, as the world of that time believed, it is rational and ordered. The world is not subject to the whims of thousands of gods, there is One God who is good. To know him is to know truth. There is design and purpose built into the universe.”
Phil Yancey, in his new book Soul Survivor writes: “. . . religion, and not science, at least proposes an answer to two questions. (1) Why is there something rather than nothing? (Or, as Stephen Hawking put it, Why does the universe ‘bother to exist’?) (2) Why is that something so beautiful and orderly?” The burden of proof is on those who see order and try to explain how it came from chaos; they see intricacy and say there is no Artist; they see design but refuse to admit even the possibility of a Designer; they see beauty and intelligent life forms and say it all came from randomness; they see a world packed with pleasure, goodness and joy and say it was all an accident; they see the sky but do not see heaven; they see a tree but do not see the hand of God. As someone said, “Pity the poor atheist who sees a beautiful sunrise and has no one to thank.”
Listen to what Dr. James Tour of Rice University, has said: “I stand in awe of God because of what He has done through His creation. Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.”
C. The challenge of faith
1. The key to Christian faith is the very person of Jesus Christ
The belief in creationism is not the acid test of faith. I personally do not need to hold on a literal six days of creation to become acceptable and loved by God. There is nowhere in the Bible you will find that you must intellectually hold to a literal six days of creation to become a bona fide true believer.
However, the Bible is very clear that it is the faith in the person of Jesus that makes the difference, not your hypothesis of the world’s beginnings, nor your theories of faith and science. Romans 10:9-10 (NIV) says: “That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.” The key to Christian faith is the very person of Jesus and His resurrection power. It is only when we know who Jesus is that we can accept the Bible’s teachings.
For William Lane Craig, a Ph. D. who has written for the Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation and other scholarly publications, the virgin birth was the main sticking point in keeping him from the Christian faith. He said, “When the Christian message was first shared with me as a teenager, I had already studied biology. I knew that for the virgin birth to be true, a Y chromosome had to be created out of nothing in Mary’s ovum, because Mary didn’t possess the genetic material to produce a male child. To me, this was utterly fantastic. It just didn’t make sense.” But as he continued to study the life of Christ and his teachings, he became overwhelmed by the attraction of Christ’s life. He says, “I guess the authenticity of the person of Jesus and the truth of his message were so powerful that they simply overwhelmed any residual doubts that I had.” When he was asked how he got past this problem, he said, “Well, I sort of put that issue aside and became a Christian anyway, even though I didn’t really believe in the virgin birth. But then, after becoming a Christian, it occurred to me that if I really do believe in a God who created the universe, then for him to create a Y chromosome would be child’s play!” The same can be said for the resurrection. If God can create life out of nothing, raising someone from the dead would not be a problem.
The scare over SARS, the need for find a vaccine, the need to quarantine suspected SARS carriers, even in China they are considering execution for people who spread SARS, demonstrates people are looking for life and they think science is the answer. In a world devoid of God, science is the faith by which people pin their hopes on. But we can see that no one is able to be raised from the dead and be kept alive and live forever yet through science.
But once we accept the truth regarding Jesus, believe, stake our hopes in His message, we can begin to accept the truths that God made this world special, designed it so beautifully so you and I can exist and love freely.
2. There is personality and purpose behind creation
“We should take care not to make intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." - Albert Einstein.
Now what the Bible does teach is that creation is not random, it is well-thought out, well-designed, and well put together by a creative genius, whose character is holy, loving, purposeful and personal. We did not evolve into human beings by chance. The Bible says in Ephesians 1:4-5 (NLT)
Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure.
This shows we were made for the purpose of love, a relationship through Christ. This is what God enjoys! We were not made to become religious fanatics that blow people up in suicide bomb attacks.
Recently reported in the news on Friday 9th May 2003, somewhere in England, a group of students spent £2,000 of taxpayer’s money to find out monkeys can’t write Shakespeare. The students from Plymouth University left a computer in a monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in Devon for four weeks. They were researching the theory of whether an infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite number of typewriters would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare?
The results of this trial involving six Sulawesi crested macaque monkeys showed they couldn’t, reports The Guardian. In fact the six - Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan - produced just five pages of text between them, primarily filled with the letter S. There were greater signs of creativity towards the end, with the letters A, J, L and M making fleeting appearances, but they wrote nothing even close to a word of human language.
www.canada.com in an article entitled “Monkeying around with Shakespeare” reported the same story on May 13, 2003, “the dominant male succumbed to the inherent frustrations of the loneliest profession, writing, and picked up a stone and started smashing the keyboard with it.”
Calgary Herald’s take on that “They broke the computers, used them as toilets, and when they finally got past the monkey business and settled down at the keyboard, turned out pages filled with the letter S. The failed experiment should be a relief to people whose bosses tell them that a monkey could do their job. The next time the boss makes such a remark, it would be scientifically correct to tell him he’s bananas”
You gotta listen to what Geoff Cox, of Plymouth University’s MediaLab, who designed the test said, "It was a hopeless failure in terms of science but that’s not really the point. It wasn’t actually an experiment as such, it was more like a little performance.” "The monkeys aren’t reducible to a random process.” (ananova.com)
Random process is not the answer, that we thinking loving, choice making people must be product of an intelligent mind.
3. The wonder of it all!
John Piper (Let the Nations Be Glad, 1993,p.12)quotes Charles Misner, a scientific specialist in general relativity theory, who expressed Albert Einstein’s skepticism
The design of the universe ... is very magnificient and shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, I believe that is why Einstein had so little use for organized religion, although he strikes me as a basically very religious man. He must have looked at what the preachers said about God and felt that they were blaspheming. He had seen much more majesty than they had ever imagined, and they were just not talking about the real thing. My guess is that he simply felt that religions he’d run across did not have the proper respect... for the author of the universe.
Think about Misner’s observation. When we fail to appreciate the design of God’s universe could we as believers be blaspheming the author of the universe?
Have we failed to wonder at the wonders of God?
"People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and they pass themselves by without wondering." (St. Augustine)
“So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Gen.1:27 (NKJV)
Just look at the design of the human body. It is wonder that mothers have not evolved into beings with eyes behind their heads, beings with 3 or more hands, and it is because God made us after His image. Look at the where the body is put together, the heart, liver, blood… the way it heals itself when it gets injured… The wonder that God bothered and then bothered to send His Son to suffer on the cross for the sins of the world, the wonder of it all! Let’s wonder!
