Fact vs Faith: Is there a Conflict between Science and Christianity?
Christianity for Sceptics: Part 3
John Tucker , Milford Baptist Church , 17 April 2005
Introduction
Have you seen the film, Independence Day ? It was essentially a remake of the 1953 science-fiction classic, War of the Worlds . Both films feature aliens invading Earth. But there is one significant difference. In the 1953 movie, scientists come up with a weapon that is eventually destroyed. So the panicking population is forced to turn to God; churches are jammed with people praying. And their prayers are answered: The aliens contract an earthborn virus and suddenly die off. The final voice over says, All that men could do had failed. In other words, deliverance came from the hand of God. The film ends with a scene of people standing on a hillside, worshipping God. The contemporary update is quite different. Independence Day nods politely in God's direction by showing people praying for help. But the real deliverance comes through the deployment of advanced military technology: A few strategically placed bombs blow up the aliens and save the world. That reflects the dramatic change in Western culture within the last few decades. People believe now that science not religion is what really counts. In fact, the media today tends to suggest that science and religion are in direct conflict. Why?
The nature of nature
First, it would be fair to say that there have been times in the history of Christianity when the church has opposed the results of scientific study. Galileo, the seventeenth century Italian astronomer, found himself in conflict with the Roman Catholic Church over his discovery that planets revolve around the sun. He was tried by the inquisition in Rome , ordered to recant, and spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Persecution of scientists did not end in the seventeenth century. As late as 1925, John Scopes , a high-school teacher from Tennessee , was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching the theory of evolution. He was convicted and fined $100. (On appeal he was acquitted on the technicality that he had been fined excessively.)
But instances of hostility on the part of the church tend to be exceptional. For most of history, Christianity and scientific study have been allies, not opponents. Historians tell us that it was the Christian worldview that provided the necessary intellectual conditions for the birth of modern science. In primitive times most people regarded nature as mysterious, dangerous, chaotic. But Christians believed that God had created natural laws that governed the universe. So nature, they assumed, was orderly and worthy of investigation. And the best way to investigate it the best way to uncover those laws of nature was to go out and see what God had done, to observe and experiment. And so the modern scientific method was born.
Most of the key figures in the scientific revolution were believers working from this basis of faith. Take Johannes Kepler for example. He was famous for his study of the orbits of planets. One day he noticed a slight mismatch between mathematical calculations and actual observations of the orbit of Mars. The difference was so tiny that other scientists shrugged it off, but Kepler was convinced that everything in creation is precisely the way God wants it to be. If God had wanted the orbits to be circular, they would have been exactly circular. So for years Kepler struggled to reconcile the equations with the observations until he finally hit on the discovery that the orbits of planets are not circular, but elliptical. Through those difficult years it was his Christian faith that spurred him on.
So even though we often hear that science has disproved Christianity, the historical evidence suggests, on the contrary, that the very existence of science and the modern scientific method is a great argument for the truth of Christianity.
Miracles and microscopes
Not everyone would agree. There are a number of areas where science and the Christian faith are thought to be in conflict. One of the conflicts is in the area of miracles. In 1937 the German physicist, Max Planck, said, Faith in miracles must yield ground, step by step, before the steady and firm advance of the forces of science, and its total defeat is indubitably a mere matter of time. Planck was implying that science now explains what was once thought to be miraculous, which suggests that those who believed superstitiously in miracles in the past did so because they simply didn't understand the laws of nature. But that is not the case. In Jesus ' day everyone knew, just as we all do, that it is not natural' for a virgin to have a baby or for someone to rise from the dead. That's why they called them miracles. As C.S. Lewis said, Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible insofar as those laws are known.
The real issue in relation to miracles is this: Is there a God? If there is a God and that's a question beyond the scope of science it's logical to affirm the possibility of miracles. A God who created matter, space, time, and sustains the universe moment by moment, would be at liberty to intervene in any way that he likes. Natural laws describe his activity, they don't control it. Miracles can happen, assuming there is a God.
Darwin in the dock
Perhaps the greatest threat to the Christian faith presented by science is Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution taught in our schools today. Just a few years back Time magazine said this: Charles Darwin didn't want to murder God, as he once put it. But he did. For many people the theory of evolution in the sense that new species originate though natural processes of mutation and selection kills any reason to believe in God. But should it?
What school science teachers present as fact is only a theory, and a dodgy one at that. Experiments with breeding and mutation have shown that Darwin 's fundamental assertion that living organisms can change endlessly until they become a new species is fatally flawed. A bird cannot be bred to grow scales. A pig cannot grow wings and fly backwards. As the book of Genesis says, God created animals and plants to reproduce, each one after their own kind.
The fossil record has also stubbornly refused to confirm Darwin 's theory. Darwin 's depiction of evolution as resulting from the gradual accumulation of countless minute variations demands that the fossil record preserve an unbroken chain of transitional forms from one species into another. But that is not the overall pattern that emerges from the fossil record. Instead, what you find is major groups of organisms appear suddenly in the fossil record, fully formed, without transitional forms leading up to them.
But perhaps the greatest weakness of Darwinism it's Achilles' heel is that it offers no credible explanation for how the universe came into being in the first place, or how non-living chemicals could somehow self-assemble into the first living cell. Bill Bryson, who wrote A Short History of Nearly Everything , says that the chances of a simple protein molecule spontaneously self-assembling are basically nil. It's more likely that a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard would leave behind a fully assembled jumbo jet.
We don't often hear about it, but many of the new scientific discoveries in the last thirty years have prompted an increasing number of scientists to abandon the theory of evolution. As Ian Wishart says in yesterday's Herald , the evidence points increasingly to the existence of an Intelligent Designer. Let me run through a sampling of the evidence from several different scientific disciplines.
Big Bang: The evidence of Cosmology
First there's the evidence of cosmology. Since the discovery of background radiation in the 1960s, virtually all the world's cosmologists now agree that the universe had a beginning, that it exploded into existence at a specific point in the past. Now because we know that something cannot come out of nothing, something or Someone external to the universe must have brought the universe into being. The big bang theory gives dramatic support to the biblical teaching in Genesis 1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth
The popular version of this argument is the story of an atheist attacking belief in God. He argued that the world just happened. As he was speaking someone from the audience threw a tomato at him. Who threw that? he demanded angrily. A voice from the back of the crowd: No none. It just threw itself. It is easier to believe that God created something out of nothing than to believe that nothing created something out of nothing.
Anthropic Principle: The evidence of physics
One of the most striking discoveries in modern physics has been the realization that the entire structure of the physical universe is exquisitely calibrated to support life. For instance, Stephen Hawking has calculated that if the density of the universe one second after the Big Bang had been greater by one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed into a fireball. To state it another way, the force of gravity is so precisely fine-tuned for the existence of life, that the British physicist, Paul Davies, says it is the same as aiming a dart at a bulls-eye an inch wide on the other side of the observable universe, twenty thousand million light years away, and hitting the mark. If the universe appears to be tailor made for life, the most straightforward conclusion is that it was tailor-made, created by a transcendent God.
Irreducible complexity: The evidence of biochemistry
Charles Darwin once admitted: If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Today, with advances in the field of biochemistry, we can say that his theory has broken down. We now know about irreducibly complex molecular machines, such as the bacterial flagellum the little outboard motors that propel bacteria along. These machines could not have been built piece-by-piece through Darwinian processes because all the pieces have to be fully present in order for the machine to function. They are irreducibly complex. Let me give you another example. Suppose a fish evolves lungs. What happens then? Does it move up to the next evolutionary stage? No. It drowns. Living organisms are irreducibly complex systems. They cannot evolve one stage at a time. They are the product of design.
DNA : The evidence of biological information
Perhaps the most explosive discovery of recent years is DNA , the information molecule or software code inside every living cell. A single DNA molecule contains as much information as the Encyclopaedia Britannica all thirty volumes three or four times over. Where did this kind of biological information come from? Could it be produced by natural processes? Or would it require an intelligent agent? If you went down to Milford beach this afternoon and saw some ripples on the sand, you'd assume they were formed by natural processes waves. But if you saw some words written in the sand, John loves Lorraine , instinctively you'd say someone produced that. That was the work an intelligent agent (or a semi-intelligent agent.) The same with DNA . It's reasonable to infer that this isn't the random product of unguided nature, but the unmistakable sign of an Intelligent Designer. So why don't more scientists accept that conclusion? They simply don't want to.
Conclusion
So I think Time magazine got it wrong: Darwin didn't murder God. The advance of science is not undermining Christian faith. It's uncovering ever more powerful clues to suggest that the Creator is alive and well. It's serving to confirm what the Bible teaches in Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. God has revealed his presence and power in a general sense through the world he made. But the second part of Psalm 19 speaks of how God has revealed himself in a special way through his word. Without the special revelation of Jesus as witnessed to in the Bible, we could never really get to know God, personally.
Albert Einstein once said, A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind. I think he's right. Science points us to God. But it can't get us to him. Science without religion is lame. Science alone can't speak to the deepest needs of our hearts. The need to know we are loved unconditionally. The need to know we are forgiven of our sin and guilt. The need for hope beyond this life. Only in the cross of Christ only in Jesus can we find these needs met.
That's what Susan Howatch discovered. She's a best-selling novelist, professionally successful and extraordinarily wealthy. But after the break-up of her marriage she said, God seized me by the scruff of the neck, and she became a Christian. A little while back she gave one million pounds to Cambridge University to finance a lectureship in theology and natural science, having come to the conclusion that science and theology are two aspects of the same truth. We need scientists. Our civilization owes a great deal to their work. But more than that, we need Christ .
Questions
Why do people think there is a conflict between science and Christian faith? What do you make of the alleged conflict?
In what ways did Christianity provide the right environment for modern science to emerge? How is this significant?
Can you think of famous scientists who were also Christians? What can we learn from them about the relationship between science and faith?
Why are miracles not incompatible with science?
Read Genesis 1 and 2. Do theories of evolution conflict with the biblical account of creation in Genesis?
In what different ways can Genesis 1 and 2 be interpreted? Which do you find the most persuasive? Why?
In what ways does science provide pointers to the existence of God?