Conversations: Sharing Our Faith with a Skeptical World
Doesn't Science Disprove Christianity?
Rev. Richard H. Thompson, November 8, 2009

Genesis 1; Matthew 6:25–33

Does science disprove Christianity?

Can a person be a scientist and a Christian? This question was raised by biologist Richard Dawkins. He says, "Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence... Faith, being belief that isn't based on evidence, is the principle vice of any religion."

Richard Dawkins, philosophy professor Daniel Dennett at Tufts University, Sam Harris at Stanford, and many others lampoon people who believe in God, saying it's like believing in the Easter Bunny, ghosts, or elves, or other silly superstitions.

Of course these folks have upset a lot of people of Christian faith. But you have to admit, they have also done us a huge favor because they've gotten us out of our Lazy Boys. They've forced us to wake up and think about the reality of what we believe.

At one time or another many of us will probably have a conversation around the question, "Does science disprove Christianity?" In preparation I think, as I've said before, it's important to ask why this question gets asked. Because it hasn't always been asked. In fact the early disciplines and discoveries in science were produced as a result of progress by medieval clergy that led to the Scientific Revolution in the 16^th century.

For a time science and Christian faith were kissing cousins!

So what lies behind this skepticism science has about Christianity? What lies behind this animosity?

I think we need to look way back, to about the 7^th century before Christ. There you find a conversation between two basic ways of looking at life. One is called the "materialist" and the other the "immaterialist". "Materialist" means that what's real is purely physical. "Immaterialist" means the basic components of reality are not just physical or material. One of the very first Greek philosophers, named Thales, was a materialist. He decided that "water" is the ultimate reality (this after he fell into a well while thinking about what's real). A little later Anaximander thought that everything was made of basic "stuff". Anaximenes thought everything was made from "air". Heraclitus said it was "fire". Democritus said reality is made up of ... atoms (460-371 B.C.) Pythagorus on the other hand thought that ultimate reality wasn't physical at all. He would be in the immaterialist camp. He thought the ultimate elements of reality were numbers. Heraclitus (the same as before) apparently evolved in his thinking and said that reality is change but with an underlying... logos, or logic, or meaning.

The question, and the debate, has always been around. What's real?

One philosophy professor likes to hand out a questionnaire to his students the first day of class and asks them to rate on a 1 to 10 scale how "real" are the following items. I picked just a few.

It would be interesting to compare our ratings. Maybe some would be more "materialistic" than others. I wonder if one reason we have the conversation about what's real is that some of us prefer materialist reality more than immaterial reality. Maybe some are more comfortable in the world of stuff, and others are more comfortable in the world that you can't see, touch, smell, hear or taste. Maybe some of us love the sculpting, and others of us love what the sculpting evokes. Some of us like to garden. Some of us prefer just to eat what comes out of the garden.

Maybe the question, "Does science disprove Christianity?" is asked by some who simply wonder, based on their own preference for how they judge what's real. Maybe part of the reason for the skepticism is that we don't understand each other's way of thinking very well.

But it can also become a power struggle-- like two little boys fighting to see who gets to be king of the hill.

More history. Many have written about the conflicts between scientific discovery and the Church beginning in the 16^th century. There is the famous issue of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, all believers in God by the way, who built an increasingly compelling case for the movement of the planets around the sun, rather than around the earth. The Catholic Church found these conclusions incompatible with Scripture and the conflict went on for decades. The new powers of scientific discovery proved a threat to many Christians. Sound familiar?

Another powerful force for increasing antagonism between science and Christian faith arose out of rebellion against the oppressive authority of the French government allied with the Catholic Church during the 18^th century, which came to a head in the French Revolution. Abuse of power, hypocrisy and corruption by church leaders led some to equate the church with God. No surprise, revolutionaries decided it was time to throw it all out, including God!

So philosophies developed in Europe that left God on the sideline as perhaps a "first Cause" but now off somewhere and uninvolved with human beings, what is called "deism". Most atheist philosophers developed their take on reality in this same period of time: among them Comte, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schoepenhauer.

The Anglican Church in England also had become very powerful. You couldn't rise in politics without its blessing. You couldn't get key appointments without a nod from the Church of England. Imagine the mood when Charles Darwin wrote his book The Origin of the Species articulating a process he observed in nature he called "evolution by natural selection". It seemed to suggest that if there is a God, God has nothing to do with the real world - sort of fits with what those philosophers were saying on the other side of the channel. That it's really all a matter of the interplay of chance and necessity. Christians who took a literal view of Scripture felt, to put it mildly, threatened. So did the Anglican establishment. Science, it seemed, had a better explanation, a more rational, more reasonable and useful way to understand the real world than did religion. Darwin's theory was so simple. It seemed to explain everything without any reference to God. You don't need God to explain how we got here. Given the charged atmosphere in England and on the Continent, Darwin's studies became another way to challenge the overweaning power possessed by the Church, and not only in England or on the Continent.

Sociologist Christian Smith has studied what he calls the "secular revolution" that took place in the U.S. in the 18^th through early 20^th centuries. He documents, for example, the shipping of our best and brightest off to Europe for graduate and post graduate degrees in places like Germany, France and England and their return to highly placed positions, especially in our colleges. At the same time he shows a rapid decline in the number of clergymen (no women) serving as presidents in these same colleges during the 19^th century and early 20^th. Science and research took pride of place as the basic model for the modern university while religious studies and theology (once called the "Queen of the Sciences") were relegated to elective classes. So, given the history, we can at least understand why the question was continuously posed, "Doesn't science disprove Christianity?" Because Christianity was perceived, by at least some, to be a problem.

There's a lesson here for Christians in any age, isn't there? Sometimes people get mad at Christians because Christians use their faith for other purposes.

The more recent barrage of attacks on Christianity by Richard Dawkins and others has helped us realize science also has some learning to do. There's something missing in their "logic", something not quite right about their... confidence that science can tell us everything we need to know, or one day will. Here's the thing: strictly speaking, all other historical, political and cultural agendas aside, the disciplines of science are applied to "stuff" and its observations and conclusions based on testing repeatedly this stuff, what is found in nature. This is what science was always designed to do. Science per se is supposed to be "materialist". Strictly speaking, when it comes to immaterial reality, science has no comment to make. Things such as love, hate, compassion, sacrifice, moral obligation, and God, science can only study from certain limited angles. Science, for example, can study the brain while it thinks about love, hate, compassion, sacrifice, moral obligation and God. But to say that firing synapses "explain" love, hate, compassion and the rest is like saying candles and wine "explain" a romantic dinner. This is called "reductionism", it's what you call "materialism" - taking something down to its material elements and saying this is all there is. It's like the chemist saying a person is worth $1.56 because that's what all the chemicals in the human body can sell for. But we know we're worth more than that, don't we? How much are we worth? The scientist cannot answer that question.

So to the question, "Does science disprove Christianity?" the first answer is clearly, "No". Science is not equipped to prove or disprove what it cannot put under a microscope, or spin in a centrifuge.

So are we going to be materialists or immaterialists? How do we decide this? How do we balance these two most basic ways of looking at what's real? Maybe now, only now here in the 21st century, after 500 years of tension and struggle between Science and Christianity, we are figuring out how this might be. And guess what? Irony of ironies, our best models of how to do this are found in, of all places, the Bible!

I wanted us to read together some of this extraordinary wisdom in Genesis chapter one that begins, "In the beginning when God created..." Now I realize there's a huge assumption in this very first line, that there is a God. I've already talked about this assumption several weeks ago and I would ask you to pick up that sermon if you would like to see it. Suffice to say that it is very reasonable for a person to be able to know there is a God.

The other huge assumption is that the universe had a beginning. Before some startling discoveries in the mid 20^th century, the Genesis creation story may have made for nice bedtime reading for children, but most people had believed since the time of Aristotle that the universe is static and eternal, without a beginning. Again, ironically, it was science, the use of telescopes, mathematics that showed us that the universe is stretching out like an inflating balloon. The discovery of background radiation in the 1960s led to the realization that this radiation was what remained of light beams emitting from what came to be called the Big Bang. This discovery meant scientists could look back in time to a smaller universe, and to a point in time about 15 billion years ago. Listen, it was only 40 years ago that there was a sober realization about Genesis chapter 1. The progression of creation described in this ancient document written 2,800 years ago parallels in an uncanny way what our scientists can observe in the heavens, and on the earth. Even what constitutes a "day", a measure of time, which is a function of light, can be thought of as phases in the universe's as well as our earth's development observed by physicists and biologists.

The biblical view of what's real seems to jive closely with what science tells us about our beginnings. Don't get me wrong. Genesis is not a science book. It's a wisdom book. But neither is it telling us unreal things. It is telling us the truth. Isn't it interesting that in the Bible, "truth" is what is "real". The universe is real. So is God. So is God's wisdom. There is plenty of evidence. Just look around.

Now we're hearing from more and more scientists who have thought this through and concluded that God is as real as the stuff we can see with our senses enhanced by our most powerful instruments. If you haven't yet read Francis Collins' book, The Language of God, I commend it to you. Collins was head of the Human Genome Project, and now serves in the Obama administration. Former atheist and physicist Anthony Flew is another who has concluded there must be a God who created all of this. Another is Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, trained both as a theoretical physicist and theologian. Another is physicist Stephen Barr. There are still others sitting in this church this morning. (Check the "For Further Reading" at the end of this manuscript)

What about the New Testament? At the heart of Christianity, as we said two weeks ago, is a non repeatable Event, a kind of "singularity" in history (sort of like the Big Bang alluded to in Genesis 1) -- what Christians refer to as the Resurrection of Jesus. We talked about this in some depth two weeks ago and I've also had copies of that sermon prepared for you. I said then that events in history cannot be studied using the disciplines of science, if for no other reason than that historical events are non repeatable. But they can be studied using the disciplines of historical research. The New Testament documentation and historical evidence for the Resurrection is impressive.

So here is a question for the scientist and anyone else for that matter. It's not "Did the Resurrection happen?" The disciplines of historical research strongly indicate that it did. It's "Can such a thing happen?" I'm asking again the materialist vs. immaterialist question, aren't I? What kind of universe is this? Is it "closed" so that only what we observe with our five senses is what is real? Or is it "open" where God can act on or in the universe? It's another way to ask, "Are miracles possible?" By "miracle" I mean what is unexplainable by the laws of nature. The Resurrection of Jesus, if that really happened, means this is an open universe. It means much more. It means that God the creator has not just walked away. It means quite the opposite. It means you, and I, and this whole creation, matter. It means God cares...

It means this creation is "really" beautiful and "elegant", as the mathematicians like to say. That it is worth studying because the more we discover of how it works, the more we are gaining insight into the Mind of God, as Stephen Hawking once said. It means that God wants us to know God. It means that God has even intervened in amazing ways to show us Godself as the Bible says. Maybe after all these years, all these battles and debates, name calling and attacks, fighting to see who gets to be on top of the hill, it means that science and Christian faith are realizing they are both after the same thing - the truth, what's real.

Maybe faith-inspired imagination can lead to new scientific discoveries. And when we have them, to remind ourselves to give thanks to God for them.

It means this creation is filled with wisdom.

Jesus can help us learn how to find this balance of science and Christian faith. One day while standing on a hillside, he mused, "Look at the birds of the air, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds. Has anyone by fussing in front of a mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion -- do you think it makes much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers -- most of which are never even seen -- don't you think he'll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I'm trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God's giving. People who don't know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God initiative, God-provisions. Don't worry about missing out. You'll find all your everyday human concerns will be met." (The Message, Matthew 6:25-33)

Maybe the cousins can start kissing again.

You think?