God and Science… Dissected.
Has Science disproved God? What is the relationship between Christianity and Science? Can I be a thoughtful scientist who has faith in Jesus? Or should I compartmentalise my faith and my studies?
The interaction of Science and Christianity has had a fascinating history, dating back to the birth of modern science. The interaction is more than just over creation versus evolution – it involves many other important issues such as the place of mankind in the universe, sexuality and gender issues, the beginning and end of all things, environmentalism and medical ethics.
At different times and with different issues, we hear of conflict between Science and Christianity. Much of the time the root of this conflict is the presuppositions. The Christian view of the world presupposes a God who created everything, who speaks truth through the Scriptures and who created humans to be caretakers of his creation. On the other hand, much of modern science is practiced with presuppositions such that only things which can be detected or measured are real, and that events proceed purely as a result of cause and effect based on simple, universal laws. As a result, humans are just highly evolved animals, just a product of the genetic and biological processes arising out of the physical and chemical laws governing the molecules of which we are composed.
Is there a way of conducting scientific investigation from Christian presuppositions? As a matter of fact, the growth of science came as a direct result of the Christian worldview. The presupposition that God created things in an ordered way for us to understand and control drove early scientific investigation. Isaac Newton noted “God created everything by number, weight and measure.”
Some of the tension between Science and Christianity comes when there is an apparent contradiction between the teaching of the Bible and the results of scientific inquiry. Before discussing the issue of the timing of creation, we should reflect on the fact that Galileo ran into trouble with the Church centuries ago over the issue of the movement of the Earth and the Sun. At the time, the following verse was used to demonstrate that the Earth was the immovable centre of the universe: “Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved.” Psalm 93:1b (ESV).
However, to understand this verse as teaching an immovable Earth is to ignore the context of this verse as part of a poetic description of the majestic rule of the LORD over all of creation. Our understanding of science has actually assisted us in understanding Scripture better!
I wonder if the debates over Genesis 1, six-day creationism and evolution would be more productively pursued if, rather than seeing Genesis 1 as a section of a scientific textbook, we understood it as a poetic description of God’s creative action – creating a world that is ordered, good, creating humans as caretakers and with the ultimate goal of rest and enjoyment of that which was created.
Theologian B. B. Warfield, writing at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, just a generation after Darwin’s treatise “The Origin of the Species” argued that, while he was not entirely persuaded by evolutionary theory in its infancy, there need be no necessary conflict between an orthodox understanding of God’s revelation in Scripture and some forms of evolutionary thought. He was quite careful to insist on the unity of the human race as a species, however. Some of his writings on these issues are collected in “Evolution, Science and Scripture.”
Even J. I. Packer, one of the staunchest defenders of the orthodox doctrine of Scripture, comments in his book ‘Fundamentalism and the Word of God’, “…to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the imaginative and poetic form in which they are sometimes couched would be… a violation of the canons of evangelical ‘literalism’…“ (p104).
Having noted that there may be points of unnecessary conflict between Christianity and Science, there still remain areas where the disagreements between the two are fundamental. Humans are more than just intelligent primates, we have rights and responsibilities to God, to each other, and the to world that are not shared by the rest of creation. There is more to reality than what we can investigate using scientific means.
To continue thinking about these issues, come to a talk by Dr Lewis Jones at 12:30 this Thursday in Kembla Room (up the stairs from the Unishop). Also, Kirsten Birkett has written a series of books for Matthias Media on this topic: “Unnatural Enemies”, “The Myths of Science” and “The Essence of Darwinism”.
[Stephen Bell]
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