Christianity & Science

What's the issue?

There is an ongoing argument as to whether you can have faith in God and accept scientific discoveries. Some Christians dismiss certain things most scientists accept, and some scientists reject religion in return. Big names like the antitheistic scientist Richard Dawkins would have us believe that you're either religious, a scientist or neither, but you certainly can't be both. I strongly oppose this notion since I've known all sorts of people who see no conflict of interests and can just as easily accept God as they can science.

It is important to realise that the two aren't fighting against each other, but complement one another. Both religion and science are concerned with our knowledge of the world we live in, and both rely strongly on evidence. While science seeks to ask how things are the way they are, religion instead asks why. It would be absurd to suggest that you can't ask both questions as if having the answer to one means we don't need the other. For example, science might explain how the universe came about - our most popular contemporary theory being the Big Bang - but religion asks why the universe should exist in the first place, a question which science can never answer, no matter how developed it gets, because that's not what science is about.

As mentioned above, both faith and science depend on evidence. Scientists often conduct experiments or look at trends to come to conclusions and establish scientific laws. Gravity is accepted as existent even though it is invisible because we see its effects, and many an experiment has been carried out over the years to establish how (but not why) gravity works. God, similarly invisible, can also be accepted on the basis of evidence but not through experiments. The historical evidence for the divinity of Jesus is what gives Christianity its credibility, and not some empirical measurement. The fact that science doesn't answer every question, and never will, irritates some scientists as though they feel cheated, but it should just encourage us to embrace science and faith together more rather than trying to play them off against one another all the time.

If this is the case, then why do some people still feel the need to take sides? To me it is like saying you can't support a football team because you support a certain tennis player. Yes, they're both connected with sport - just as science and religion are concerned with knowledge of the world we live in - but they're completely different ball games and it will never boil down to one defeating the other. Still, the topic of "science vs religion" is often under great discussion, so below I shall explore a couple of concerns that make people believe you have to take sides.


Evolution and Creation

Anyone who knows me well would know that I am an evolutionist. I don't want to put everyone under the same heading by suggesting that all scientists accept evolution as an explanation for how life has reached the stage it has, but similarly I don't appreciate it when scientists (or even non-scientists!) think that all Christians have a "creationist" view of the world. Before I proceed to explain why I believe in evolution, let me first explain how they are different (oh, look, it's those two questions again!)

Evolution is the belief that living species - which can include micro-organisms, plants, animals and even humans - have developed slowly from less complex life forms and have adapted themselves for their environment. The champion of this theory is Charles Darwin who is known to have coined the phrase "survival of the fittest".

"Creationism" is the belief that living species have not evolved over time but were once created as they now exist by an omnipotent Creator, normally God. The two theories normally don't go hand in hand although I am aware that some people believe in something called "micro-evolution" (that species can adapt to their surroundings) but do not accept "macro-evolution" (that species have altered significantly over millions of years).

So how can I, a Christian who believes that God created all life, possibly accept the process of evolution?! Quite simply I believe that God created evolution. It's not a cop-out answer, trying to win favour with both sides; it's based entirely on evidence. Even evolutionists have to admit that the process must start somewhere. It's all very well tracing life back to simple single-celled beings, but who else could have inspired life into otherwise inanimate matter but God? For that matter, how can inanimate matter exist without God? It is interesting to note that Darwin himself did not think that evolution was the result of a random act with no cause, but in his autobiography said, "I cannot believe with my mind that all this was produced by chance".

Creationists tend to reject evolution on the basis that it is not mentioned in the Bible and that the first book, Genesis, teaches that God created the world in six days, including plants, animals and finally human beings. This leaves no room for the long process of evolution because apparently everything just sprung up as and when God told it to. I am not arguing for one second that God is incapable of creating fully-formed life just like that; I'm rather arguing that all the evidence we have suggests that's not the case. The problem with the six-day creation story is that people who subscribe to this literally are not only ignoring the poetic qualities of Genesis (it was never meant to be read as a science text book), but are also ignorant of what was originally written. Genesis was written in Hebrew and the word for "day", yom, can indeed refer to a 24 hour period, but it can also mean an era. Funnily enough, English can use this meaning too. Take, for example, the phrase "back in my day": it's unlikely that someone would think that you are referring to a 24 hour period if you were to say that. So if we apply this wider meaning to the original Hebrew text, then there really is no reason to suggest why evolution can't fit into God's design for the world. The reason evolution isn't mentioned in the Bible is because the writers didn't know about it (in fact, no one really did before Darwin!) and yet it's incredible that that Genesis describes how God created creatures of the sea prior to creatures of the land, then creatures of the air and finally mankind, because that's the exact same order as evolution suggests! That's pretty advanced thinking for people of thousands of years ago...

You don't need to look much further than fossil evidence to see that life has existed for millions and millions of years before humans, and how modern-day species (such as the horse - see above) have developed. This is further confirmed for me by looking at the shape of the continents. Notice how South America looks as though it would fit snugly into the west coast of Africa? The theory is that 225 million years ago all the continents were clustered together to make the super-continent Pangaea (see left) and have gradually drifted apart over millions of years (explaining why some fossils are found thousands of miles apart on separate continents). Such a theory would collapse if, as some suggest, God created the world in literally six days. That's why I find it hard to accept that we are supposed to read the Bible literally all the time, forgetting that it has been translated and was written thousands of years ago by people who never intended the Bible to be read in the same way you would a science journal. Amazingly though, if taken in a wider context, the Bible is remarkably close to the scientific discoveries made thousands of years later. This suggests to me that Genesis is more than just a pretty story for how the world came about - it's accurate and trustworthy too!

Further Reading

If this topic interests you, whether you regard yourself as a creationist or evolutionist, and whether you believe in God or not, you may well enjoy reading Creation Or Evolution: Do We Have To Choose? by Dr Denis Alexander, which I found to be very engaging and is much more comprehensive than this page!

Also, another page of thought from a Christian who has trained and worked as a scientist is here for you to view, and it covers not only issues surrounding evolution and creation but also delves into other aspects of Christianity:
http://www.languagesoftheworld.co.uk/nutshell.html




Miracles

Another thing some scientists can't accept is that God, and those whom he chooses, can do miracles. If we take the definition of a miracle as being an occurrence which goes against the laws of nature, then it is easy to argue from a scientific perspective that they aren't possible. For some scientists this is the end of the matter - anything that goes against nature can't exist, therefore miracles don't and so things like the Resurrection obviously never happened and consequently Christianity is false. The problem with this conclusion is that it is making the assumption that God in confined to the laws of nature, but if God is the creator of nature, this doesn't follow. If God transcends it then He can work outside of the laws of nature and break rules as and when He so desires. Whether He does these days or not is a totally different question and not one I will explore here because the focus is on whether it is possible for them to exist. But if God is bigger than His creation, then it's entirely possible for Him to break laws of nature, for example turning water into wine, instantaneous healing or even raising to dead back to life. There seems to be no reason to argue that science disproves miracles because they go beyond what science is capable of explaining.