Hasn’t Science Proven that we don’t Need ? Introduction: The begins with these words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” For some those words are beautiful and powerful and awe-inspiring. For others, it may as well be a declaration of war. I grew up in a Christian home and was brought to almost every week of my life. I was raised on a steady diet of the Bible, and I believed that it was true. But as I entered my teen years and began to encounter science class and evolutionary theory and naturalism, I began to have a real crisis of faith. These were smart men and women – my teachers – who were telling me that I was a product simply of millions of years of . There was no God who had made me; Charles Darwin had discovered through his research that all life on earth had evolved from the very simplest bacterium in a primordial soup countless millions of years ago. The implications of this theory also affected my history classes, my geography classes and others. It was one of the factors in causing me to stop attending church as a teenager to try to make sense of it all. On the one hand, I knew that God was real; but on the other hand, there were a lot of very smart people that I highly respected who were convinced that he wasn’t. It seemed like, in those days, that was an airtight explanation for our existence. But was it? Is it? The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” The question for today is this: hasn’t science proven that we don’t need God?

I’m often asked this question or questions like it. The assumption behind the question is that people of faith – in this case, – are anti-science, and that there is a war between and science. Is that true? First of all, we need to remember that appearances can be deceiving, and we need to go into these discussions with our eyes open. I think it’s a good question, but I think to answer it we have to peek behind the curtain and understand the terms. The dictionary defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and

Page | 1 .” The is one of experimentation and observation – it’s the study of how things work. Far from being anti-science, modern science arose within Christian civilization, and many have argued, as a result of Christian civilization.

Charles Colson wrote that: “The great figures of the , Mendel, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Boyle, were all profound Christians. Newton wrote far more on theology than any other subject, and Boyle sponsored Christian missions and of the Bible into far-flung languages. As one sociologist wrote, alchemy developed in China but in the West. The historical record belies the reckless statements of Hitchens, Dawkins, and other anti-theists that faith opposes reason and is anti-science. The truth is, the scientific method owes its existence to Christianity. “Christian influence led to the establishment of the first , not just trade schools, as had been the case in China, but communities of scholars where knowledge could be pursued because it was good for human beings to learn. The first two universities were in Paris and Bologna in the middle of the twelfth century. Oxford and Cambridge followed shortly thereafter. And then the universities spread through Europe. Christians also developed public education, fueled by the faith’s embrace of equality, as well, as all were created in God’s image.” The Oxford motto is from Psalm 27 – “The Lord is my light.”

So, yes, faith and science can co-exist. In , science thrived within the . But let’s look a little deeper at this question. Often there are assumptions underlying the question that aren’t admitted. What I mean by that is that, for many, science has come to equal naturalism. Naturalism, by definition is: “a philosophical viewpoint according to which everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted.” In other words, this new definition of science excludes the very idea of God. That is the claim. But there’s a huge difference between a claim and a truth. There’s a difference between philosophy and science.

Here’s a warning for all of us: when you make up your mind before looking at the evidence you’re in trouble.

This new definition of science based on naturalism is what many researchers and have come up against as they have simply tried to follow where the evidence leads them. For many, doing so has resulted in professional suicide as they have been summarily dismissed or demoted. For example, biologist Carolyn

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Crocker was banned from teaching evolution at George Mason after merely mentioning . Evolutionary biologist Richard Steinberg was demoted by the Smithsonian Institute after he approved an article that supported Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design proponents would say that "certain features of the and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."

It has been called pseudo-science by many because it moves away from the assumption of naturalism, and that is simply not allowed. Here’s the way that Phillip Johnson put it in his book Objection Sustained: “If science has exclusive authority to tell us how life was created, and if science is committed to naturalism, and if science never discards a until it is presented with an acceptable naturalistic alternative, then Darwin’s position is impregnable within science.” Holding an alternative view is dangerous.

One of the most prominent cases was that of Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer and physicist with impeccable credentials. He has had 68 peer-reviewed articles published. His ground-breaking research in has led to the discovery of two new . Yet when he wrote a book giving evidence that the earth is uniquely situated to sustain life, over 400 faculty members of universities across Idaho petitioned his University to deny him tenure. And they did.

Simply put, you’re not allowed to arrive at any conclusions that do not arise from a naturalistic . To me, this is not a scientific position, this is what is called “scientism” – the of science. Ian Hutchinson – Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – defines it this way: “Scientism is the belief that science is all the real knowledge there is.” This is philosophy – not science.

What is remarkable to me is that there are so many Christians who are scientists, in spite of the odds, people like Bill Phillips, a winner in Physics; and Francis Collins, the 2nd Director of the Human Genome Project, which is charged with mapping out the information found in human DNA. John Lennox said that he has several Christian friends who are the heads of Science Departments at Oxford University, including Bio-Medical Sciences and Nano-Technology. It is possible to survive in that hostile environment, but you’ve got to be prepared to take the heat.

Some believe this is a battle about evolution, but it’s not. There are actually many devout Christians who believe in the theory of evolution, that God used the mechanics of evolution in the creation process. I think it’s interesting to read the

Page | 3 different viewpoints. Here’s what I know about evolution. The word evolution means change, and of course micro-evolution is something that is easily observed and demonstrated. For example, dog breeders over generations of selective breeding can enhance certain characteristics of a breed or diminish others. What has not been demonstrated is speciation – the ability to evolve from one species to another, or macro-evolution, the big leaps. Even the Cambrian Explosion seems to indicate that thousands of life forms arrived fully mature at the same time. How did that happen? Good question.

So the real battle is not between Science and Christianity; it’s actually between Theism and Atheism. There are two sides in this battle: God Is or God Isn’t. Those are the two presuppositions. But what naturalists would have you believe is that their presupposition is scientific, and ours isn’t. I don’t buy that for a moment.

Listen to what Bertrand Russell had to say. “What science cannot explain, humanity cannot know.” He was a brilliant man in some ways, but this is not a logical statement. As John Lennox said, “This is not a statement of science, therefore, if it’s true, it’s false.” It doesn’t make sense. There are many things that science will never tell us: • Why am I here? • Where do I come from? • What is the purpose of life?

The curious thing about math and science is that it leaves out almost everything that we think is important. The atheists have tried to answer these questions, but their answers have led, rather, to despair.

Here’s what Aldous Huxley had to say: "Science does not have the right to give to me my reason for being. But I am going to take science’s view because I want this world not to have meaning. A meaningless world frees me to pursue my own erotic and political desires.” Well, I guess that’s honest anyway.

George Bernard Shaw is perhaps most renowned as a free thinker and liberal philosopher. In his last writings we read, "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand . And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith."

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Ravi Zacharias touched on the challenges to pure naturalism at the Summer Institute in July of 2015. He said that atheists will agree that, in order to explain everything, they only have to cross these gaps: 1. How did we get life from non-life? 2. How did we get consciousness from non-consciousness? 3. How did morality develop? 4. How did sexuality develop? As Ravi, would say, “Yes, please, explain those things.” Science says “From nothing, nothing comes.” Yet, here we are. Some would say that huge strides are being made in the effort to reproduce life in the lab, and there are huge strides being made in molecular mechanics, etc… Now try that with no raw materials. Is there anything within science that Christians can be excited about? Is there a reason for us to encourage our children to go into the sciences? Absolutely there is.

1. Cosmologists agree that the universe had a beginning. This logically means there must be a cause that transcends the universe.

Evidence seems to point now to Creation Ex Nihilo - creation from nothing. It is a scientific fact that from nothing, nothing comes. Therefore, someone or something that is outside of the universe must have caused it, the God of the Bible fits that description perfectly.

Now, some would argue that the doesn’t imply that the universe came from nothing, but from a singularity very tiny and very dense. But if that was matter then it would also be subject to the laws of thermodynamics and must have also had a beginning – it just throws the question backwards, like speculations about an oscillating universe – one that keeps expanding and retracting. Eventually you get back to the same question.

Nobel Prize-winner Arno Penzias said about the beginning of the universe: “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.” (NY Times article.)

2. Contemporary physicists have discovered that the laws of physics appear to be fine-tuned to permit life.

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In fact Guillermo Gonzalez and others have determined that there are 122 variables that have to be in place in incredibly exact formulas in order for life to even be possible on this . Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson, in 2016, published an article that stated that while there are an estimated 700 quintillion planets in the universe, there is only one like earth. He stated that we’ve been dealt “a fairly luck hand.” On earth we need the water cycle to operate, and we need the almost exact percentage of oxygen (to name just two). Our moon is just the perfect size and at the perfect axis to allow life to survive on earth. We need the gas giants ( and Saturn) to soak up asteroid hits. We are at the perfect distance from the , which just so happens to be the right kind of star and in the right period of its life cycle. On and on we could go about all of the variables that have to be within the narrowest of parameters to make life possible.

This logically implies a designer who fine-tuned all of these variables. But don’t take my word for it. Sir Fred Hoyle (a non-Christian) states: "A commonsense interpretation of the suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature." Modern-day physicists have demonstrated that the position of the earth in its solar system, in its galaxy, is ideal for the maintenance of life. The evidence seems to point to the fact that were it anywhere else, under any other circumstances, that life would be impossible. The laws of physics seem to have been designed to allow our planet, and perhaps only our planet, to sustain life.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.” (Psalm 19:1-2)

3. Molecular biologists have discovered complex information in the cell; and that the origin of life itself required biological information.

I often ask people what they would do if their boat landed on an island thought to be uninhabited and they came across the letters SOS spelled out in rocks in large letters on the beach. Each of them said that they would start to look for someone who was in need of help because SOS is a well-known distress signal. Three letters would tell them that. They would not assume that the ocean somehow, over time, created the recognized pattern. That is possible, but not likely.

When Darwin first formed his theory of evolution, he believed that the cell was a very simple thing with a couple of components. In the notes on the website I’ve

Page | 6 included a link to a short video from Harvard from a few years ago that illustrates the complexity of a simple human cell.

You may notice that I have placed on the stage here just a few volumes from my office. There are 106 of them if you want to count. The reason I put them here is so that you could visualize something. Scientists have now found a way to read human DNA – the information that is in each human cell. Geneticists have discovered that the same methods of processing information, programs and subroutines, instruct our bodies as DNA and in our brains, as neural networks. They now edit DNA as a software program by sequencing or decoding its meaning and intent. It’s called the Genome Project. I read in a science magazine last week that some scientists in China are now experimenting with substituting animal DNA into human DNA – that’s a little scary. How much information is in one strand of DNA smaller than the tip of your little finger? Enough to fill 106 volumes of an encyclopedia.

Richard Dawkins of Oxford (an atheist) states "the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like." Stephen C. Meyer, who received a PHD from Cambridge University and is now the Director for the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, said this: "Every experience we have about information - whether it's a computer code, hieroglyphic inscription, a book, or a cave painting - points toward intelligence. The same is true about the information inside every cell in every living creature."

If you want to tell me that time and chance wrote a complex code full of information that fills a 106 volume set of encyclopedias, please feel free, but don’t call that science. This logically points to an intelligent cause.

"And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." (Matthew 10:30) I believe that they literally are. Your DNA contains information about you. How tall you will potentially become, as well as your natural hair color, eye color, basic shape, and a million other details. Psalm 139:14 says, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”

In 1992, the historian of science Frederic Burnham said the God hypothesis "is now a more respectable hypothesis than at any time in the last one hundred years."

Conclusion: Now some scientists and many philosophers may believe that Christianity and science are at odds. I disagree. True science is the pursuit of truth,

Page | 7 wherever it leads. I’m all for that. Just don’t start by saying that it cannot lead to God; that’s not science – it’s presumption.

There’s a real contrast, however, between the naturalist and the Christian. Bertrand Russell, the famous atheist and naturalist, spoke of building his life on the “firm foundation of unyielding despair.” What does that even mean? Of his death, he pointedly referred to that moment as the “night of nothingness.” He notes, “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

But the Apostle Paul, who came to after persecuting the church and experienced a radical transformation, spoke of the end of his life this way: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” – Philippians 1:21

As he sat under house arrest, awaiting his execution at the hands of the Romans, he wrote to his young protégé, Timothy, and said in 2 Timothy 4:7-8, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

My faith is enhanced by true science, not hindered by it. And modern science grew out of a Biblical understanding of the world around us. Here’s an interesting stat: over 65% of Nobel Prize winners in the 20th century believed in God. We are not enemies. Remember: when you make up your mind before looking at the evidence you’re in trouble. I believe the Bible to be true. I believe that Christianity and true science are friends, not enemies. I believe that God created this world, and us, for Himself, and that we messed it up. I also believe that He sent His Son, , to redeem us and restore us to relationship with Him. This gives meaning to life.

Prayer Benediction: Creator God — as we return now to our homes, workplaces, and communities, may Your Spirit open our eyes anew to the vastness and splendor of Your all around us. May we hear, and smell, and see, and touch Your glory evident in all of Your creation. Above all, let us see Your beauty even in the brokenness of our brothers and sisters— all of them, created in Your image, and waiting to experience that redemption that comes only through Christ Jesus our Lord. We go now to love and serve our Lord—Amen

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Resources: The Inner Life of the Cell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJyUtbn0O5Y https://www.johnlennox.org/resources/145/how-many-nobel-prize-winners https://evolutionnews.org/2016/12/why_the_royal_s/ https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/david-klinghoffer/scientists-confirm- darwinism-broken https://evolutionnews.org/2019/01/genetics-and-epigenetics-new-problems-for- darwinism/ https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/ More on the Supposed Conflict https://www.johnlennox.org/resources/169/has-science-buried-god-israel https://jameshannam.com/conflict.htm Scientism https://www.str.org/blog/scientism-obstacle-gospel https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-scientism-self- refuting/ Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/is-god-real-the-case-from-cosmology/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CulBuMCLg0 https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of- god/the-kalam-cosmological-argument/ Fine Tuning of the Universe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tQKCz19K78 (Tim Barnett presentation) https://reasons.org/explore/blogs/todays-new-reason-to- believe/read/tnrtb/2014/07/07/astrosphere-habitable-zones-display-fine-tuned- characteristics https://coldcasechristianity.com/videos/three-illustrations-that-demonstrate-the- degree-to-which-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-video/

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Intelligent Design https://www.discovery.org/multimedia/audio/2018/11/socrates-in-the-city-with- eric-metaxas-and-stephen-meyer-pt-1-2/ https://www.discovery.org/id/

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