126 Sermon Illustrations on Science

In-depth presentation on animal rights and experimentation. Benefits and costs outlined. Militant Fran Stephanie Trutt planted a radio-controlled pipe bomb near the Untied States Surgical Corp. Chairman's parking place. The Animal Liberation Front is a militant group.

Examples of abuse of animals: baby monkeys were stabbed by mechanical mothers and killed by psychotic real ones, to study human child abuse. Benefits: smallpox and polio vaccines. Jane McCabe (p55) argues for research because her 9 year old daughter Clair has cystic fibrosis.

"What is the relevant difference between a human subject and an animal subject? ... [A] possible answer is that we humans enjoy certain God-given prerogatives. We are, after all, the only creatures the Bible says were made in God's image. 'Most Judeo-Christian religions make distinctions about the special nature of man,' says Frederick Goodwin, director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration. 'To me, that is a distinct, qualitative difference between our primate relatives and man.' It may be a difference, but it's not an empirical, observable one. It has to be taken on faith."

[Above verses speak of compassion toward animals, and man's superiority over them.]

It is foolish to claim that present scientific knowledge is all there is to know, and that spiritual matters are rubbish simply because existing science cannot explain them. Stranger things than ghosts exist. Or, to be more precise, things that we accept as commonplace, such as radio communication, would have seemed, to our ancestors, every bit as strange and surprising as spirits. As Arthur C. Clarke, the distinguished science-fiction writer and evangelist for the limitless power of science and technology, has said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Examples of dogmatic skeptics gone wrong:

• William Thomson, the first Lord Kelvin, was one of the most distinguished and influential of nineteenth-century British physicists. He was a thorn in Darwin’s side because he “proved,” with massive authority but, as we now know, equally massive error, that the earth was too young for evolution to have occurred. He is also credited with the following three confident predictions:

° “Radio has no future,”

° “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible,”

° “X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”

Here was a man who took skepticism to the point where he courted — and earned — the ridicule of future generations.

•When Edison announced that he was working on a project to develop electric light, a British Parliamentary Commission was set up to investigate whether there was anything in the idea. The committee of experts reported that the idea (what we now call the electric light bulb) was “good enough for our transatlantic friends … but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”

• On airplanes:

° The American astronomer Simon Newcomb was unwise enough to remark, only shortly before the Wright brothers’ famous exploit: “The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which men shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.”

° Another noted American astronomer, William Henry Pickering, categorically stated that, although heavier-than-air flying machines were possible (he had to say that because the Wright brothers had by then already flown), they could never be a serious practical proposition: “The popular mind often pictures gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers in a way analogous to our modern steamships. … It seems safe to say that such ideas must be wholly visionary, and even if a machine could get across with one or two passengers the expense would be prohibitive… Another popular fallacy is to expect enormous speed to be obtained.” Pickering goes on to “prove,” by means of authoritative calculations on the effects of air resistance, that airplanes could never travel faster than the express trains of his day.

These stories are, indeed, awful warnings of the dangers of an overzealous skepticism.

Examines variety of viewpoints of Evangelical scientists and theologians regarding creation. Young-earth advocates are analyzed, as well as those who correlate the best results of science with Christian faith.

Study on interpretation of Genesis 1 & 2, and correlation with science.

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THE DAYS OF CREATION

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I. Three views on Science and the Bible.

A. Science always takes precedence over the Bible. [Liberalism]

1) Any science in the Bible reflects ancient myths.

2) At best, the Bible gives a spiritual meaning for the

creation of the world.

B. The Bible always takes precedence over Science. [Creation Science]

1) God's Revelation (Bible) is superior to human reasoning

(Science).

2) Whenever Science appears to contradict the Bible, the Bible

is to be preferred.

a) If Bible points to young universe, then observations

of age are incorrect, or created to look old.

b) Discrepancies in scientific theories invalidate them.

C. Both the Bible and Science are true, when properly understood.

1) The Bible is not a science book, but is true in everything

it affirms.

2) Science can also reveal the truth about God's creation.

a) God's qualities can be seen in nature. Romans 1:20

b) It would be unlike God to let nature deceive us.

A contrived appearance of age would be false.

3) Both the Bible and Science can be misinterpreted.

a) Even deeply cherished beliefs can be wrong.

b) Properly understood, they will complement each other.

II. The days of Genesis 1 and 2.

A. Literal and consecutive 24 hour days.

1) "Day" in Bible typically means a 24 hour period.

2) God's six days of creation and one day of rest is a pattern

for human work and Sabbath. Exodus 20:10f

B. "Day-age" theory.

1) "Day" can have symbolic meaning for a long period.

a) Can be a thousand years. Psalm 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8

b) Even Genesis 2:4 lumps all seven days into one "day."

Literally: "the generations of the heavens ... when

they were created in the day of their making."

c) Either each "day" is very long, or were short periods of

creation followed by long gaps of time.

2) Note stylized sequencing in Genesis 1.

a) "Day and night" occurs on the first day, yet the Sun

does not mark day length until the fourth day.

b) Vegetation is produced on the third day (Gen 1:11-13)

but requires water and time to grow (Gen 2:5).

c) The events of the sixth day take longer than 24 hours.

2:4-25

1> God plants a garden, which grows.

2> Adam works and cares for the garden.

3> Adam names all the animals.

4> He discovers that none of them is a suitable helper.

5> He goes to sleep, and God creates Eve.

6> Adam sees Eve and exclaims, "Now at last!"

d) The seventh day is not closed out. God's day of rest

continues into the future. (Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4)

1> God continues to create. John 5:17

2> Each human is a creation of God, yet there is a

long process.

C. The general sequence of Genesis follows scientific understanding:

1) Creation of the physical universe.

2) Earth's atmosphere turns from opaque (dark) to

translucent (light comes through).

3) Formation of stable water cycle.

4) Establishment of continent(s) and ocean(s).

5) Production of plants on the continent(s).

6) Transformation of the atmosphere from translucent

to transparent (Sun, Moon, and stars became

visible for the first time.)

7) Production of small sea animals.

8) Creation of sea mammals (nephesh).

9) Creation of birds (maybe the same as "8").

10) Creation of land mammals (more nephesh).

11) Creation of mankind (adam).

III. A young or old earth?

A. Both new and ancient. (old Scofield Reference Bible)

1) A minority view is that the earth was created a long time

ago, but was destroyed when Satan was cast from heaven.

2) God's re-creation is recent.

B. Recent creation.

1) A straight-forward understanding of "day" implies a rapid

Creation.

2) Genealogies in Genesis point to no more than 6,000 years of

history to Adam.

3) Geological strata is due to catastrophe of Noah's flood.

4) Some results of science point to a recent creation.

a) Shrinking of the sun.

b) Principle of atrophy. (Second Law of Thermodynamics)

C. Ancient creation.

1) Several results of science indicate a great age.

a) Radiation decay.

b) Gravitational relaxation.

c) Geological strata and fossils.

2) The Bible teaches the ancientness of the universe.

a) God's plans are ancient. Psalm 90:2-6, Proverbs 8:22-31,

Ecclesiastes 1:3-11, Micah 6:2

b) The mountains are ancient and age-old. Habakkuk 3:6

c) The heavens existed "long ago." 2 Peter 3:5

3) Genesis 1:1 is not necessarily part of the first "day."

4) Many genealogies in the Bible are proven to have gaps.

a) Compare 1 Chronicles 3:11-12 and Matthew 1:9.

b) Matthew deletes three kings (Joash, Amaziah, Azariah).

IV. Alternate view: Genesis 1&2 has a literary motive, not scientific.

A. Genesis is not focusing on the "how," but the "why."

1) There are four differences with its approach, and science's.

B. The order of events seems to be rearranged to make a theological

point.

1) Same thing may happen in Gospels.

2) Note that light and darkness are separated on first day,

but the luminaries that do this separation are created

on the fourth day. [see above]

3) Also, evenings and mornings exist three days before God

created the heavenly lights to mark off days.

C. God's actions are presented in highly figurative and

anthropomorphic language.

1) More a cosmogony than a "myth," which has negative

connotations.

(Much material from Hugh Ross, "The Fingerprint of God")

#2934

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Living by the belief that works best.

Charles Templeton, who preached the gospel with Billy Graham in the 1940s, went to Princeton Theological Seminary and urged Graham to join him there, to lay a firmer academic foundation for his theology. Seminary study started Templeton down the road to agnosticism, however, and in subsequent discussions, he almost overwhelmed Graham with arguments for interpreting the Bible from a modernist standpoint. As the 1993 "Time" magazine cover story on Graham tells it (following the William Martin biography), Graham eventually concluded after prayer that "I don't have the time, the inclination, or the set of mind to pursue [the intellectual questions]. I found that if I say 'The Bible says' and 'God says,' I get results. I have decided I'm not going to wrestle with these questions any longer."

Templeton charged Graham with having committed intellectual suicide, although he admitted that his friend would not have been so effective a preacher if he had allowed his message to be compromised by doubt. The modernist Episcopal Bishop John Spong, who delivered newspapers to the Graham family farm as a boy in North Carolina, appears in the story as an example of what Billy Graham might have become. Spong commented to "Time" that "I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day. I wouldn't invest a book that was written between 1000 b.c. and a.d. 150 with that kind of moral authority."

The story of Graham and Templeton illustrates the difference between pragmatism and rationalism in philosophy. Even atheists might agree on pragmatic grounds that Graham made the right decision, if by closing his mind to Templeton's arguments he was able to become the revered figure he is today rather than merely another compromising liberal. To the rationalist Templeton, however, Graham performed the secular equivalent of gaining the whole world by losing his own soul.

But did Templeton's rationalism amount to anything more than a willingness to be seduced by the prevailing academic fashion? Graham may have been wiser than his friend if he distrusted his own ability to evaluate an academic "higher criticism" that was nominally Christian but steeped in naturalistic philosophy. Odysseus did not commit intellectual suicide when he denied the Sirens the opportunity to lure his ship onto the rocks.

Pragmatism teaches that when absolute truth is elusive, we are justified in adopting as provisional truth those beliefs that seem to work best. Modern pragmatism, America's greatest contribution to philosophy, began with William James and his circle in the late nineteenth century. John Dewey carried pragmatism forward into the twentieth century, and Richard Rorty is its leading exponent today.

Paul Jerome Croce tells the first part of the story, beginning with the shattering impact of the Darwinian revolution upon an intellectual milieu in which religion and science had seemed to be united in a common enterprise. Croce's first volume deals mainly with the events and arguments of James's early life. It features not William James himself but the persons who most influenced his intellectual development: the Swedenborgian Henry James, Sr., father of William the philosopher and Henry the novelist; the Darwinist botanist Asa Gray and the anti-Darwinist scientific icon Louis Agassiz; the positivist Chauncy Wright; the early pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce; and the preeminent jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A second volume, dealing with James's mature thought, is in preparation.

Croce gets off to a dreadful start by apologizing for writing about "yet another white male from the cultural canon," a man whose concern with the relationship between religion and science rather than with race and gender oppression might make him seem guilty of "barbarism." Once he gets past this possibly mandatory expression of piety toward the Goddess Who Rules Academia, however, Croce regains his sense of historical balance and provides an illuminating description of the state of intellectual affairs in the James circle in the aftermath of the breakdown of certainty caused by the Darwinian revolution.

The main issue was not whether Darwinism was true or false, and it certainly was not whether the literal Genesis account was a viable alternative. Louis Agassiz argued against Darwinism at Harvard on scientific grounds but attracted little support despite his prestige. Whether all the objections could be answered or not, Darwinism was clearly the wave of the future in science. And whatever the backwoods fundamentalists may have thought, the Genesis chronology was not the sticking point even at Princeton Theological Seminary, where Charles Hodge led such resistance as there was to the Darwinian juggernaut.

What was the main issue was whether, in the light of Darwinism, there was still a place for "religious belief" -- even in the very general sense of a belief that there is some sort of ultimate purpose or moral dimension to the physical universe revealed by science. Henry James, Sr., had encouraged William to study science in the confidence that scientific investigation and natural theology were partners in showing that nature is a rational system ruled by a benevolent deity. Darwinism described a world in which chance variation was the creator, however, and in which apparent design in biology was the product of a cruel and wasteful struggle for existence. Was it possible to find a place for God, or a firm foundation for morality, in a world like that? After Darwin, faith and reason seemed no longer to be allies, but rivals or even enemies.

Croce recounts that the triumph of Darwinism also raised an important question about the attainability of certainty in science itself. Although the theory was sufficiently appealing on logical grounds to gain overwhelming support, its crucial factual claims could not be proved. Scientists far more sympathetic to Darwinism than Agassiz conceded the existence of serious evidentiary problems. In "The Origin of Species," Darwin had to take a defensive stance toward the fossil record, which then as now showed a remarkable stability in species rather than a pattern of gradual change from one kind of thing to another. Even T. H. Huxley had substantial reservations, saying that Darwin ought to have allowed for evolution by sudden jumps and that the theory could not be considered confirmed until animal breeders had produced new species -- a modest condition that has still not been met. Asa Gray, who was Darwin's chief American advocate and the first theistic Darwinist, said that he accepted Darwinism only as a hypothesis and denied that the variations that powered change were random.

If this most important of scientific theories could only be defended on the ground that it was superior to any presently available alternative, then how could fallible human beings be certain of anything at all? Even in science, certainty seemed unattainable, and what was accepted as valid scientific knowledge in one generation might be overthrown or substantially modified in the future. As William James expressed the resulting problem, "Unless we find a way of conciliating the notion of truth and change, we must admit there is no truth anywhere."

James argued that, in a world where we cannot be absolutely sure about anything, our wisest course may be to act confidently upon those beliefs that seem to produce the best consequences. Billy Graham did that in one way, and the nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, and theologians who jumped aboard the Darwinian bandwagon did it another way. Whether Darwinism was true or not, the inability of giants like Louis Agassiz and Charles Hodge to impede its advance proved that it was irresistible. For anyone who did not want to be left behind and ignored, to believe wholeheartedly in Darwinism was the choice that produced the best consequences.

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"Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Volume 1: The Eclipse of Certainty, 1820-1880."Paul Jerome Croce, University of North Carolina Press 350 pp.; $42.50, hardcover; $17.95, paper

Copyright (c) 1995 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review bcjan96bccurrmrj6B1005612v

#3907

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Johann Kepler (1571-1630) was the first scientist to accept Copernicus’ theories that the earth rotated about the sun, and he was an important forerunner of Isaac Newton in systematizing science. A devout Lutheran, Kepler was studying theology and planning to become a minister when he was called to teach mathematics in Graz, Austria. Kepler realized he could glorify God through his mathematical and astronomical studies, and his scientific notes were often mixed with prayers and praise to his Lord.

Kepler believed that there was an art and orderliness in God’s creation and that the more Christians recognized the greatness of creation, the deeper their worship would be. Didn’t God himself encourage the heathen to look carefully at creation so that they might come to know God? God created man in His image, and He wants us to recognize and know His design for the universe: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”

In his astronomical research, Kepler only wanted to, as he put it, “think God’s thoughts after Him.” Kepler believed that there was a mathematical precision and orderliness in the universe; the scientist’s duty was to discover what mathematical formula God had used. In Kepler’s day, scientists believed the orbits of the planets were perfectly circular, but that theory did not fit the empirical data. Kepler persisted until he could show that the orbits were ellipses, with the sun as one of the epicenters. His calculations proved Copernicus’ theory to be fact.

Through further observation, Kepler established laws for planetary velocity and for the relationship between orbital periods and the distances of planets from the sun. Kepler’s three laws for planetary motion are the basis for our understanding of the solar system today.

Throughout his scientific work, Kepler never sought any glory for himself, but always sought to bring glory to God. At the end of his life his prayer was: “I give you thanks, Creator and God, that you have given me this joy in thy creation, and I rejoice in the works of your hands. See I have now completed the work to which I was called. In it I have used all the talents you have lent to my spirit.”

Jesuit missionaries to China in the 1600s were a faithful witness to Jesus. Under threat of expulsion, they were saved by the emperor’s appreciation of their scientific excellence, a trait born of deeply Christian convictions.

One of the truths about the physical world, which they believed and applied, is that it is not random, nor is it subject to superstitious whims of lesser deities. Instead, it reveals God’s precision, order, and love of beauty.

In a particularly dramatic showdown, Father Ferdinand Verbiest successfully predicted the next solar eclipse. When the emperor’s court astronomers were unable to do the same, the emperor issued an edict of tolerance for Christians, and made Verbiest his personal advisor. Verbiest would write later in his book Astronomia Europaea, “Christian Religion in China is justly represented as a most august queen who appears publicly with her arm leaning on Astronomy.”

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Adapted from "Truth Changes Everything," BreakPoint Commentary by John Stonestreet and Kasey Leander, November 1, 2022. Copyright (c) 2022 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Sermon in Big Questions Series. Proving existence of God. Psalm 14

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CAN YOU PROVE GOD?

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I. Does God really exist? Hebrews 11:6

II. Who needs him, anyway? The view of skeptics.

A. We don't need a god to explain things.

B. Other faiths cancel each other out.

C. Why do so many believe in God, then?

III. Existence of God cannot be proven scientifically.

A. Science can only prove repeatable things.

B. Consider the alternative: existence without God.

C. Skeptics cannot be compelled to believe.

IV. Reasons to believe He really is there.

A. Human history.

B. Philosophical arguments.

C. Order and design of universe.

D. Truth of Bible.

E. Personal experience.

V. What kind of God do you believe in?

Ever since the Scopes trial, 75 years ago, public schools have adopted a rigid orthodoxy. Evolution has been taught as scientific fact. We were not created by God but descended from apes and evolved through an unsupervised process.

Over the years, literally millions of children have seen the film "Inherit the Wind," which falsely portrays Christians as unthinking censors. Try arguing with most biology teachers and you'll soon discover that they are rigidly doctrinaire. Science is science, creation is just religion, and it has no place in the classroom.

Last year's debates in Kansas sent the media into spasms of Christian bashing. We were called all sorts of things for suggesting that the flaws in evolution ought to be taught alongside the arguments for it.

But what has all this fury and doctrinaire evolutionism produced? Well, a new poll from the Yankelovich group, reported in Saturday's New York Times, shows that 79% of Americans believe creationism does have a place in public school curriculum, after all. Half the respondents said evolution is "far from being proven scientifically," and 68 percent said it's possible to believe in evolution while also believing in God's agency in creation.

All of this proves, of course, what the Scriptures teach. Romans makes it clear that the truth about God is made known to us by His invisible attributes, that His creation bears witness, so the truth is evident to all of us. It may be politically incorrect, but, as the polls show, people know the truth.

Look what happened under Communism. People were drilled over and over: "There is no God." But even communist oppression could not stop the Church from spreading. In fact, the greatest ontological argument for the existence of God is that our hearts know, as Francis Schaeffer said, that "He is there, and He is not silent."

It has been amusing to see the spin being put on these new findings. The anti-religious People for the American Way, who paid for the survey, emphasize that a majority supports the teaching of evolution. What they would prefer to dismiss, however, is that a nearly equal number support teaching "that God created humans and guided their development."

In all the spin we also find one extraordinarily profound admission: Evolutionists are acknowledging that both views cannot be true. For years they have argued, "Well, if you want to believe in God, that's fine. We'll assume that God planted souls in us at some point in time." But now, in response to the Yankelovich poll, there's a new terror that people might really know the truth, and they're arguing that these two views are incompatible - which, of course, is true.

This is a victory for Christians that our friends in Kansas ought to take to heart. We can also take confidence in knowing that those who believe in intelligent design of the universe are not the tiny minority that some would have us believe. The majority of the public believes what we do. Despite 75 years of being taught otherwise, we know the truth. And that's good news, indeed.

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Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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GENERAL REVELATION: NATURE’S TESTAMENT

Hugh Ross

Reasons To Believe

Revelation is information, not persuasion, however persuasive that information may be. Some information about God, His character, and His redemptive plan is necessary for a person to establish a saving relationship with Him, to be sure, but the information is not what saves. The spiritual transaction does. God's Spirit enables the individual to recognize the personal, eternal implications of the information God reveals; the individual responds by humbly submitting to God's authority; God's Spirit connects the individual to the body of Christ and seals the connection.

God alone knows what information, including what quantity of information, each individual requires. Amy Carmichael writes of a young Indian woman who surrendered her life to Christ after hearing just fragments of two Scripture verses. I know an astronomer who spent 35 years studying all the books of the Bible before he surrendered to Christ. With no written revelation available to him, Job (with the aid of God's Spirit) discerned his need of a Redeemer, found assurance of God's provision of a Redeemer, and preached his faith with conviction to skeptics. By contrast, I have met brilliant scientists, convinced through their own research that the Cause of the universe matches the biblical revelation of a personal, living, all-wise, all-powerful being, who nevertheless refuse to acknowledge that God exists and has authority over their lives.

I. Different Avenues of Revelation

God's revelation to man has traditionally been categorized as special and general, though some would add testimonial. The special revelation is information about God and His plan for humanity communicated by His Spirit to prophets and apostles and recorded for us in the 66 books of the Bible. Testimonial revelation is evidence of the truth and power of the Gospel that comes from observing the transformed lives of those who surrender to Christ. The general revelation is information about God and His plan for humanity that comes from considering the creation, or nature, the tangible expression of His divine nature and character. The universality of conscience, God's law written upon the hearts of all humans, is one aspect of the general revelation. The characteristics of the cosmos, from the largest scale to the smallest, reveal volumes of information about God. John's gospel declares that whoever "lives by the truth," not hiding or defending personal evil, "comes into the light" (3:21). In other words, whoever embraces truth with a humble heart receives more truth, specifically spiritual truth that can lead to salvation.

II. Commitment to Integrate

The scientific revolution has propelled us toward increasing specialization. This narrowing of focus carries certain consequences. Knowledge advances in one sense, but retreats in another as it becomes more and more isolated from other knowledge. Most scientists study one narrow aspect of nature with only some or little or no knowledge of other aspects. Worse yet, they study nature with only some or little or no knowledge of the biblical statements about it. Most theologians, likewise, specialize in one aspect of theology or Scripture with only some or little or no knowledge of others. Worse yet, they study theology with only some or little or no knowledge of science. The results have been disastrous. Most scientists now view theology as "emotional nonsense expressing nothing but our fear of death."1 Theologians disregard the importance of nature "to retain some intellectual territory forever protected from the advance of science."2 Scientists are becoming, in effect, high priests of a deified Universe, while "theologians are slowly becoming effective atheists."3

Psalms 19 and 50 explicitly identify the antidote: God's Word is written in the cosmos as well as in the pages of Scripture, and His Word is consistent. The Bible is inspired by God, and the universe is created by God. God's Word written in nature tells us that God is not capricious. Truth is discoverable. God's Word written in the Bible tells us that God does not lie. He is truth. He wants to be known. Yet, it is almost universally presumed today, even by most evangelicals, that science and theology cannot be — and should not be — reconciled. We seem to have forgotten that science is merely man's attempt to interpret the facts of nature while biblical theology is merely man's attempt to interpret the words of Scripture. The "irreconcilable" differences stem from faulty interpretations. The value, then, of integrating science and theology is that integration provides us with our best opportunity for testing truth and ferreting out faulty interpretations from science and theology.

In some academic circles, especially in astronomy and physics, I have seen a reluctant concession that science and theology may overlap to a slight degree. Theologians concede about the same miniscule overlap. I see an enormous overlap. Both science and theology give major attention to cause-and-effect relationships. It would be difficult to think of a significant scientific conclusion that does not have theological ramifications and just as difficult to identify a theological conclusion that has no scientific import. Furthermore, both western science and Christian theology are driven by the same hermeneutical principle — the testing of conclusions by a methodology (derived from the Bible) called the scientific method. The perceived gap between science and theology can surely be bridged if we have but the humility to test our interpretations and face our misinterpretations.

III. News from Nature

The primary database of theology, the Bible, has remained roughly the same for the last nineteen hundred years, though the secondary database, e.g. manuscript evidence, archeological research, and theological scholarship, has grown substantially. Since the close of World War II, the database for science has increased exponentially. In some disciplines, including cosmology and particle physics, the database is doubling every few years. Not surprisingly, the voluminous new information about the cosmos yields a long list of theologically significant facts. My attempt to document these facts, which represent new evidences for God's existence, power, character, and capacities, appears in two of my recent books, "The Creator and the Cosmos" and "Beyond the Cosmos." What follows is merely a sketchy overview of information recent research has uncovered.

Hulse and Taylor's 1994 Nobel prize winning work confirmed general relativity to better than a trillionth-of-a-percent precision. This confirmation relates to the work of Hawking and Penrose, whose space-time theorem rested on two conditions: 1) that the universe contains mass (no question about this one), and 2) that general relativity is a reliable theory. Their space-time theorem shows that the Cause of the universe must exist beyond all the matter and energy of the universe and beyond the space-time dimensions along which the universe is distributed. From general relativity and more recent physics research we learn that the universe began with ten space-time dimensions. Almost immediately, at 10 -43 [43rd power] seconds after the creation event, the ten split into six static dimensions (dimensions that can never unfurl) and four expanding dimensions, the ones we experience. These discoveries contradict virtually all religious and cultural teachings about creation — except the biblical doctrine of creation. As the atheist astronomer Geoffrey Burbidge complained, his peers in physics and astronomy are rushing off to "join the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang." He saw the connection.

At the same time as theoretical physicists and radio astronomers were discovering that the Creator must be transcendent, astrophysicists began to observe and document the "anthropic principle," the preponderance of evidence suggesting that the universe was designed precisely for the sake of the human race. In measuring the universe, they found more than two dozen characteristics that must be fined-tuned for any conceivable kind of physical life to exist at any time in the universe's history. In some cases the degree of fine-tuning required exceeds by trillions of trillions of times (and more) the epitome of human engineering capability, not to mention human power and intellect. For example, the mass density of the cosmos must be precisely fixed for physical life to exist. This fact means that the Creator built a hundred billion trillion stars and carefully guided their development for 16 billion years so that at this brief moment in the history of the cosmos we humans can exist and enjoy a beautiful, life-filled habitat. The expanse of space (and all the matter it contains) is not "wasted" on one life site; it is essential for one life site. These findings imply that the Creator is personal, not just a force. The Creator exhibits not only power, but planning and purpose fixed on the needs of the human race, i.e., the Creator expresses love. If the Creator is powerful, wise, and loving, then, indeed, we are face-to-face with the God of the Bible. Astronomers and physicists have not proved in an absolute sense that the Creator is Jesus Christ, but they have demonstrated the enormous probability that He is. The probability numbers are large enough to eliminate other possibilities from realistic contention.

Astronomers and geophysicists have found even more impressive evidence for purposeful design in the characteristics of the Milky Way galaxy and the solar system. To date, they have identified 66 distinct features that must be fine-tuned for physical life to exist. The probability that any given planet will manifest all 66 characteristics is less than 1 chance in 10 83[power]. Even if the universe contains as many as 10 22 planets, the probability of finding even one planet capable of life support remains enormous, 1 chance in 10 61[power]. These numbers imply that the Creator did not merely pick the best planet He could find and place life there, but rather, He must have specially crafted the earth, sun, moon, Jupiter, Saturn, the Milky Way, and the Virgo supercluster so that humanity could have a home today. As for life elsewhere in the cosmos, its existence is highly unlikely, to say the least.

The discovery of new design evidences for the universe and solar system continues at a rapid pace. Nearly every month, researchers add one or more characteristic to the list. For the skeptic who still doubts the Creator's existence and involvement, we can respond by saying, "If you are not convinced yet, wait one month."

Moving from the simple sciences, where everything is governed by differential equations, to the complex sciences, where we cannot even catalog the database, we find even more impressive evidence for design, providing we recognize the boundary conditions. In the past year, geochemists have traced life on Earth back to 3.86 billion years ago, almost to the beginning of the planet. Such an early appearance of life implies that life originated in a window of time much briefer than five million years. The minimum time required for a random, naturalistic origin — if the notion of cause is completely ignored — approaches infinity. God is the more reasonable explanation for the existence of physical life.

The fossil record powerfully supports special creation. The eras before the advent of humanity bear witness to intense speciation; since humanity, we see none. Referring to real-time biology, Paul and Anne Ehrlich write that "the production of a new animal species in nature has yet to be documented."4 Recent research shows that life in abundance recovered from the Cretaceous-Tertiary catastrophe (circa 65 million years ago) in only 5,000 years. Millions of species radically distinct from previously existing ones suddenly appeared on the planet. The Cambrian explosion tells the same story. While naturalistic explanations are crumbling, the Bible has a simple response: for six days God created; i.e., through six creation epochs, God introduced new species and supernaturally replaced the species that the changing conditions on earth destroyed. On the seventh day, the era from the creation of Adam and Eve until the final conquest of evil, He ceases from creating new species, in keeping with His redemptive plan.

The discovery of genetic clocks means that the date of human origin can now be tested. The latest mitochondrial DNA studies roughly date the most recent common ancestor of all women to sometime less than 150,000 years ago. Y-chromosome research yields a more precise date of 37,000 to 49,000 years ago for the common ancestor of men. Comparative studies consistently give earlier dates for mitochondrial DNA than for Y-chromosome DNA. Such a difference has baffled researchers, and yet the Bible predicts it. According to the Genesis flood account, the most recent common ancestor for males is Noah whereas for women, that common ancestor is Eve.

These DNA dates correlate increasingly well with the biblical date for God's creation of humans. Anthropological findings fit even more precisely. Research places the most recent expression of sophisticated (i.e., humanly produced) art at about 30,000 years ago. The creation date for Adam and Eve suggested by biblical genealogies (given the probability of gaps) ranges from about 10,000 to 60,000 years ago. All these dates are too recent to support any kind of gradualist descent-of-man-from-primates hypothesis. Human beings must have been specially created. Even the timing of other Genesis events, such as "the dividing of the world in the days of Peleg," can now be confirmed through research data.

IV. A Rising Tide

Today the entire spectrum of nature's record—mathematics, astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry, paleontology, biochemistry, botany, zoology, anthropology, etc. — provides us with overwhelming evidence for the existence and identity of the Creator, the biblically revealed God. The heavens and the earth still proclaim, indeed, they shout louder than ever, His glory. From the least educated to the most, each individual has been given ample reasons to trust His revelation, including those parts that speak of "things unseen," both physical and spiritual. The tide of evidence is steadily rising. No one can stop it. But we still have the choice whether to sandbag our hearts or to let the flood in, where it can change us and pour out through us to others.

Endnotes

1 Frank J. Tipler. The Physics of Immortality . New York: Doubleday, 1994, 5.

2 Frank J. Tipler, 7.

3 Frank J. Tipler, 10.

4 Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich. Extinctions. New York: Ballantine, 1981, 23.

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RESPONSE TO HUGH ROSS ON "GENERAL REVELATION: NATURE'S TESTAMENT"

Thomas C. Oden

Drew University

Hugh Ross has given us new reasons to believe that the faithful in our time are being given extraordinary gifts not fully received in previous times to behold and celebrate the heavens declaring the glory of God and the firmament showing his handiwork.

I wish first to offer a critique of a few picky points, then focus on the anthropic principle as a very promising motif.

I. CRITIQUE

A. It is regrettable that Ross in his brief essay defines special revelation as "information about God and His plan for humanity communicated by His Spirit to prophets and apostles and recorded for us in the 66 books of the Bible." Similarly general revelation is defined as "information about God and His plan for humanity then comes from considering the creation, or nature, the tangible expression of His divine nature and character." But in both cases revelation is primarily viewed as propositionally transmissible material knowledge, information.

My question: Is not God's revelation first event, and only then knowledge? Does not revelation occur in history, and not first of all in ideation? Is not revelation the history of God's acts in time and space, and not merely as information. Information is data, facts, measurements, statistics, knowledge? While revelation yields information, it is not constituted by information as such but by God's disclosure of himself through historical events.

B. Ross argues that if there are irreconcilable differences between science and theology, they stem from what he calls "faulty interpretations", not from the will, not from idolatry, not from sin, but from "faulty interpretations." This reminds me of Kierkegaard's quarrel with Hegel, who thought that any obstacle to reason could be overcome by logic, by rational reflection through the antithesis toward a rational synthesis. Rather, says SK in Practice in Christianity, reason can only stand in awe of the mystery of God's incarnate coming, revelation. If so, Christianity begins as a scandal and offense to reason. What God does in coming as a babe is a scandal to reason. To treat it as a matter of inadequate interpretation is to deflect the offense. What God does in the resurrection is folly to reason. To treat it as a matter of miscalculation is to miss the deeper offense to human reasoning of God's humiliation in Jesus Christ.

This is not, however, an irreconcilable difference, and I applaud Ross for attempting the reconciliation, but it is more than a faulty interpretation.

C. Is it not an exaggeration to say that evangelicals have "almost universally presumed" that "science and theology cannot be — and should not be — reconciled"? Assuming that Thomas Torrance and Bruce Demerest and Alister McGrath and Alvin Plantinga are evangelicals, as I would suppose, then should not this be qualified? While evangelical investigations of current science have been laggard, they have not been altogether vacuous.

D. Is it the best evangelical use of language to say that the Spirit connects the individual to the body of Christ? "Connect" is an instrumental term. To connect is to attach, combine, join, affix two entities into one. It is not an organic metaphor such as vine and branches, but essentially a mechanical metaphor. The Spirit does not merely connect me with the body of Christ but draws me personally into the body of Christ, as branch to vine (John 12:32).

II. THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

Ross's paper stimulates further reflection especially on the question: Did God provide the magnificent work of creation for humanity alone or primarily? I want to take one tiny part of Ross's larger contribution and speak more extensively of its theological implications. I wish to grant Ross his empirical arguments for the time being, and examine what some of their theological consequences might be.

Let us suppose that an almost inconceivable number of characteristics need to be "fine-tuned for any conceivable kind of physical life to exist at any time in the universe's history." If "the mass density of the cosmos must be precisely fixed for physical life to exist"; and if the "degree of fine-tuning required exceeds by trillions of trillions of times (and more) the epitome of human engineering capability": then it seems plausible to conclude that "the Creator built a hundred billion trillion stars and carefully guided their development for 16 billion years so that at this brief moment of the history of the cosmos we humans can exist and enjoy a beautiful, life-filled habitat. The expanse of space (and all the matter it contains) is not ‘wasted' on one life site; it is essential for one life site. These findings imply that the Creator is a person, not just a force." While physicists are less prone to examine the consequences of such a statement, theologians are rigorously called to such an examination.

If "The probability numbers are large enough to eliminate other possibilities from realistic contention," and if there it has been established that there are no less than "66 distinct features that must be fine-tuned for physical life to exist" in the Milky Way, and if "the probability that any given planet will manifest all 66 characteristics is less than 1 chance in 10 to the 83rd power," and that "Even if the universe contains as many as 10 to the 22nd power planets, the probability of finding even one planet capable of life support remains enormous, 1 chance in 10 to the 62nd power," then theologians have a major task ahead of them to assimilate and assess what this means for creation, Christian anthropology, ethics, aesthetics, and the order of salvation.

Insofar as scientific evidences and probability theory are drawing us to conclude that "the universe was designed precisely for the sake of the human race," then to that extent we are being invited to reclaim scriptures long neglected which point to the human story as the center of God's intent in creation.

A basic classic locus of theology is anthropos as recipient of revelation. Humanity is God's constant concern throughout scripture: the creation of humanity, the fall of humanity, the redemption of humanity, and the final glorification of humanity. The Christian study of scientific evidences cannot neglect God's own prevailing interest in this history of salvation: the redemption of humanity. In Genesis, the creation of human beings is the decisive and crowning act of divine creation, in which human creatures are provided with a capacity for communion with God exceeding all other embodied creatures. It is not an exaggeration to say that revelation is for human salvation, insofar as that salvation tends toward the glory of God.

If God is to become revealed to any creature, that creature must have some grace-bestowed capacity to receive revelation. Why would God bother to speak to a stone or a galaxy of stones to which God has not given the capacity to hear and understand? Humanity is, far more profoundly than trees or animals, uniquely the recipient of revelation.

Creation is given, according to scripture, to glorify God through free, companionate rational beings, who when freedom falls into sin, are redeemed by merciful divine grace. Creation is in order to redemption. The fall breaks the order of creation. Redemption redeems what is fallen in creation.

Yet it remains a fixed habit of older science to say that man is an accident waiting to happen, even if it takes billions of years. The naturalistically reductive way of looking at humanity says that humanity is not the purpose of creation but merely an incidental spinoff, an accident, with no purposeful teleology.

For Jews and Christians, God gives the world for humanity. What is the level of evidence scientifically and the range of probabilities mathematically that this is the case? However debatable may be the scientific inquiries that hinge on probability calculus, there can be little doubt about the clarity of scripture in this regard: It is unique to humanity that "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Of no other embodied creature is this said. And to this one form of creaturely existence a special place is given: "God blessed them and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'" Then God gave seed bearing plants to human creatures, that "they will be yours for food...And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good." The goodness of the non-human creation is compared with the exceptional goodness of human creation which is called to stewardship and dominion over creation.

This anthropic principle may be the most stunning and promising idea in this phase of research and dialogue on science and theology.

A. RELEVANCE FOR AESTHETICS

If the levels of probability are such that there is very little likelihood of life anywhere else, within these specific parameters that life requires, there are vast consequences for reflection on beauty, goodness and truth.

There are first aesthetic consequences: It is astonishing that all this is a gift of God not just to animals and rocks, but especially to and for those rational creatures most capable of beholding the beauty of God's holiness in creation: humanity and angelic creation.

"The world itself, by its well-ordered changes and movements, and by the fair appearance of all visible things," wrote Augustine in the City of God , "bears a testimony of its own, both that is has been created, and also that it could not have been created except by God, whose greatness and beauty are unutterable and invisible" (CG XI.4, NPNF 1 2:207). "The Deity is in very substance Beautiful," wrote Gregory of Nyssa in On the Soul and the Resurrection , "and to the Deity the soul will in its state of singleminded purity have affinity." Hence "the soul copies the life that is above" (NPNF 2 5:449). Although this recognition is expected fully and finally in the resurrected life in the celestial city, it may be anticipatively experienced in the present by sanctifying grace, wherein "enjoyment takes the place of desire, and the power to enjoy renders [inordinate] desire useless and out of date." In the resurrection the soul will "know herself accurately, what her actual nature is, and should behold the Original Beauty reflected in the mirror" (ibid).

If the world is indeed created for humanity, that infuses each time and space of creation with potential aesthetic attractiveness and delight shining through even the history of sin. Hence the faithful delight to "gaze upon the beauty of the Lord" (Ps. 27:4).

B. RELEVANCE FOR ETHICS

Second, this anthropic premise long known in Jewish Christian scripture, and now being potentially grasped as a scientific premise, has immense moral consequences . The whole universe would become, if this premise is indeed true, an arena for the nurturing of virtue, a theater for engendering the good life, and the redeemed life when fallen.

Here is the if/if/then syllogism: a) If God creates all the cosmos specifically for humanity, b) and if a central feature of human awareness is moral awareness, c) then to stand in the presence of the Giver is to become aware of the grace of repentance. In this way the anthropic premise reverberates in every moral choice. In this way created life corresponds to and refracts the goodness of God, even through the veil of sin.

If God gives creation for humanity, then some sufficient reason must be posited. That reason is to bestow glory on humanity by God's own becoming human when humanity is fallen, and to redeem what is fallen in creation. In this way the anthropic principle constitutes a plausible motive for doing good, as God is good.

To realize that the whole expanse of creation is ordered for the eliciting of virtue is to correlate a scientific finding with moral purpose. The cosmos does not have simply a zero purpose.

Hence there is a magnificent moral consequence of the anthropic principle, if it is indeed true scientifically. I need to do more study in physics and probability theory to assess that, but I have the simple intuition that this is right, and it surely corresponds with classic Christian exegesis on scripture passages on creation and the moral life.

Just as relative moral necessity cannot be required of the will except by that which is relatively good, so absolute moral necessity cannot be caused by any good less than the insurmountable good. A sense of absolute obligation can only come from One to whom absolute moral authority is fittingly and legitimately ascribed. It is to this transcendent ground of obligation that conscience witnesses. For conscience does not pretend to make the laws that it dictates (Clement of Alex. Christ the Educator , III.1, FC 23:199; Calvin Inst. 3.19.15).

No other creatures excepting angels can behold the goodness of God. Even angels, lacking bodies and sense perception, cannot behold the creation in the same way and with the same sensory immediateness that humans can. Humanity is honored by God above the angels because of the incarnation. God did not become embodied as an angel to save humanity because angelic being is not embodied.

The anthropic tendency is seen in the arguments about the low probability of life on other planets. Its all for humanity.

C. RELEVANCE FOR THE TRUTH QUESTION

There is third level of potential relevance for the anthropic principle: the truth question. If it should be a true and demonstrable fact based on scientific evidence that God has created the full extent of the cosmos for the benefit and redemption of man, for the moral formation of man, for communion with man, if so, then that which is most true about the world is the truth of God's incarnate coming and will to become man, a particular man. The truth is God's own coming as a man, in the One who said, I am the truth.

The power of the argument from design is best grasped by trying to take its opposite hypothesis seriously, that there is no cause of order. For then one would be forced to attribute order to chance, which in the long run would still leave the order unexplained. To say that order occurred by chance means either that we are unable to ascertain what the cause is while nonetheless affirming that some cause must exist, or that there is no cause and events occur without any reasonable or possible explanation. Both of these ways of viewing chance fail to account for the primary evidence — order in the world, an order which required human consciousness to be understood, which implies a revelation that requires a recipient to be received—which demands some sufficient explanation.

Hence the Psalmist sings: "When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet; all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the sea" (Ps. 8:3-8).

*

Intelligent Design Responds to Its Critics: Part 2

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, loved to read detective stories. In fact, he told friends that one could learn more from a murder mystery than from most philosophy articles.

Scientists who study our origins could also learn a thing or two from the great sleuths. Sherlock Holmes often warned his assistant, Dr. Watson, not to rule out any possibility before they had carefully sifted through all the evidence -- because the truth can turn out to be highly surprising, going against commonly-held assumptions. Unfortunately, many scientists today ignore this excellent advice. And that's bad news for discovering the truth about human origins.

Here's an example of the problem. Robert Pennock is a philosopher of science at the College of New Jersey. He's recently published a book, Tower of Babel, attacking the theory of intelligent design -- the view that the best explanation for our origins is an intelligent cause, a Creator.

Pennock's main argument is that the theory of intelligent design violates the rule of methodological naturalism.

Methodological naturalism sounds like a mouthful, but it's a very simple rule. It says that science works only if scientists employ natural causes -- and nothing else. A Creator may exist, but science could never discover that the Creator did anything in the history of the universe -- even if he actually did do something. Sorry, says Pennock, but the only causes science may legitimately infer are strictly natural.

Seems like an odd sort of rule, doesn't it? What would Sherlock Holmes say?

I don't know, but I can guess. He'd probably agree with William Dembski, an intelligent design theorist at Baylor University. In his new book, Intelligent Design, Dembski points out that science can use intelligent causes, and indeed it does so every day.

There's more to the universe than natural causes, and if science is going to discover the truth, then -- as Holmes warned Watson -- it can't rule out any possibility prematurely. But that's exactly what methodological naturalism does.

Philosophers of science like Robert Pennock, Dembski explains, are hung up on a flawed distinction. They see natural causes, like gravity, and assume that the opposite of these "natural" causes must be "supernatural." And since we can't test for the supernatural, says Pennock, we have to exclude it from science.

Wrong, Dembski argues. The correct distinction is natural versus intelligent causes. There's nothing supernatural about my voice coming out of your radio right now, but no strictly physical cause explains what is behind this pattern of sounds. Rather, I'm acting intelligently to convey a meaning to you.

When you send email to a friend, you're not violating any law of nature, but no law of nature alone will ever explain the complex pattern of symbols in your message. Only an intelligent cause -- namely, your mind -- provides a sufficient explanation.

Science can handle intelligent design, because it does so all the time. And Christians ought to be excited about the potential of this theory. Design promises to restore to science a vital tool that it needs to crack the mysteries of the universe: the reality of, yes, intelligent causes.

___________________

Copyright (c) 2000 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

Fifty years ago the scientific journal NATURE announced the discovery of DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid. It opened the door to gene therapy, stem cell research, major medical advances, and new horizons in police work.

Dr. James D. Watson explained the drive that led him and fellow scientist Francis Crick to the research that won them the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “I was born curious,” he said. But in addition to obsessive curiosity, Watson and Crick had an exceptional meshing of minds, an empathy that one colleague called a “marvelous resonance between two minds — that high state in which one plus one does not equal two but more like ten.”

While we honor these brilliant men for their achievement, they have said outrageous things as they have made their media rounds for the fiftieth anniversary. In interviews they have given the impression that the discovery of DNA has made God unnecessary — perhaps even documented His nonexistence.

In an interview with the TELEGRAPH of London, Crick said he went into science for religious — or anti-religious — motives. “I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs: the difference between living and non-living things and the phenomenon of consciousness.... People like myself get along perfectly well with no religious views.”

Similarly, Watson told USA TODAY, “Francis and I were ... united in wanting to explain life by means of molecules.” In the April SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, he told editor-in-chief John Rennie, “I was very lucky to be brought up by a father who had no religious beliefs. I didn't have that hang-up.... Both of us are intellectually opposed to the idea that the truth comes from [divine] revelation..... We don't think there's any spirit in a bacterium.”

Then he added, “Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours.”

Watson goes on to say that the two stupidest sentences in the English language are “Love thy enemy” and “The meek shall inherit the earth.” He credits his success to his lack of meekness — his persistence in research and self-promotion.

Yet what Watson and Crick discovered in DNA is that the very core of life is information — extremely complicated information, as we know from the years it has taken to map the human genome. Watson and Crick believe all that information came about by time and chance in a random universe. But for information to be useful, it must reflect order and intelligence.

Watson may say, “We don't think there's any spirit in a bacterium,” but common sense tells us that there is no intelligent information in bacterium either — except that which an intelligent source creates. And common sense tells us, as well, that DNA, which is more complex than any computer code, obviously could not come into being without a programmer.

So as you see scientists celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of DNA, rejoice in the discovery, but don't be taken in by their irreligious hubris. Be prepared instead to give an answer. Information presupposes an intelligent source, and DNA — a great deal of complex and precise information — can only be the work of a Designer.

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

Dr. James D. Watson and Francis Crick, “MOLECULAR STRUCTURE OF NUCLEIC ACIDS,” NATURE, April 25, 1953. (Free ADOBE ACROBAT READER required.)

“HAPPY 50TH ANNIVERSARY TO DNA,” interview with Dr. Nigel M. de S. Cameron, director of the COUNCIL FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY POLICY, TO THE SOURCE, April 24, 2003.

“THE DNA REVOLUTION: FIFTY YEARS AFTER WATSON AND CRICK, THE NEW QUESTIONS IN GENETICS,” NPR, April 2003.

Alexandra Witze, “MIRACLE MOLECULE: DNA HAS BECOME AN OVERACHIEVER,” DALLAS MORNING NEWS, April 21, 2003.

John Rennie, “A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES D. WATSON,” SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, April 2003.

“HUMAN DNA SEQUENCING COMPLETE,” THE AGE (Australia), April 15, 2003.

“DO OUR GENES REVEAL THE HAND OF GOD?“ TELEGRAPH (London), March 20, 2003.

See the FEBRUARY 17, 2003, ISSUE OF TIME, specifically “THE SECRET OF LIFE“ by Nancy Gibbs (pp. 42-45) and “A TWIST OF FATE“ by Michael D. Lemonick, TIME (pp. 48-58). (Free ADOBE ACROBAT READER required for both.)

Scott Lindlaw, “U.S. TO USE SADDAM'S DNA TO IDENTIFY HIM,” SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER, April 13, 2003.

Nicholas Wade, “WATSON AND CRICK, BOTH ALIGNED AND APART, REINVENTED BIOLOGY,” NEW YORK TIMES, February 25, 2003. (Free registration required.)

Steve Sternberg, “DOUBLE HELIX UNLOCKED KEY TO LIFE,” USA TODAY, February 24, 2003, 1D-5D.

Jennet Conant, “The New Celebrity” (article about James D. Watson), SEED magazine, 80-83.

Fazala Rana, “FYI: I.D. IN DNA: DECIPHERING DESIGN IN THE GENETIC CODE,” FACTS FOR FAITH, Reasons to Believe, Issue 8, 2002.

Charles Colson, “THE DEVIL IN THE DNA,” CHRISTIANITY TODAY, August 10, 1998.

David Fisher, “Watson and Crick Tell Press of Their Unbelief,” ASA Newsletter, MAY/JUNE 2003, 7-8. (Free ADOBE ACROBAT READER required.)

Visit the PBS page “SECRETS OF PHOTO 51,” its program on the discovery of DNA that aired on April 22.

Jonathan Imbody, “DNA AND GOD,” WASHINGTON TIMES, March 27, 2003.

BreakPoint Commentary No. 011031, “XP AND I.D.: LESSONS IN ORIGINS FROM MICROSOFT.”

David Fisher and Eric Charles Barrett, SCIENTISTS WHO BELIEVE: 21 TELL THEIR OWN STORIES (Moody Publishers, 1984).

____________

Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #18612]

One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a

long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and

tell God that they were done with Him.

The scientist walked up to God and said, "God, we've decided that we no

longer need you. We're to the point that we can clone people and do many

miraculous things, so why don't you just go on and get lost."

God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist

was done talking, God said, "Very well, how about this, let's say we have a

'man-making' contest." To which the scientist replied, "OK, great!"

God added, "Now, we're going to do this just like I did back in the old

days with Adam." The scientist said, "Sure, no problem" and bent down and

grabbed himself a handful of dirt.

God just looked at him and said, "No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!"

----------

aplication

----------

The story makes a good point. True, scientists are not able to create

life, but in all their attempts to duplicate God's feat, they overlook one

very important point -- God started with nothing! Everything around us was

not just rearranged, it was "created". God spoke, and the world came into

existence.

Every time we think we can accomplish great things (maybe even as great as

God), we need to remind ourselves of that truth. Take nothing and try to

make something out of it, and you will realize just how far short of God's

omnipotence you fall.

"By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so

that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible."

(Hebrews 11:3).

Have a great day!

Alan Smith

Boone church of Christ

Boone, NC

The recent spate of books by anti-theists (such as Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris) has recycled a number of old arguments against belief in God in general and Christianity in particular. While none of the challenges are particularly new and have been answered effectively many times (with answers in some cases going back to the Middle Ages and even the late Roman Empire), our lack of knowledge of the long history of apologetics in the Church has made it appear as if the case the anti-theists make is stronger than it really is.

In this article, we will explore why the specific charge that Christianity is irrational, anti-intellectual, and anti-science sticks so readily on the Church, as well as look at one response to the idea that Christianity is the enemy of science.

FIRST, HUMILITY

To begin, we need to acknowledge that for a large segment of the Church, the charge of being anti-intellectual is all too true. Particularly in the wake of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century, a significant percentage of the Christian world has simply withdrawn from active engagement with the intellectual movements that have shaped the culture. This is far from the historic tradition of the Church, where Christians for centuries had been the intellectual leaders of Western civilization.

A simple glance at the walls of your local Christian bookstore demonstrates how far we have gone down this road toward anti-intellectualism. In Elizabethan England, the bestselling books were collections of sermons and works of serious theology, many of which are still studied today. Look at the shelves now, and ask the owner what kinds of books and materials are selling. Ask to see the apologetics or biblical commentary section, and compare it to the more therapeutic, “feel good” sections of the store. How many of these books will still be read and studied in 400 years?

This is not an attack on Christian bookstores — they need to stay in business, and so they stock what sells. The question is: Where is the demand for more serious works that stretch our minds? The fact is, the market is not there (except for a few popular authors), and so the stores cannot afford to stock them. In our desire to preserve the simplicity of the Gospel, we have ignored Christ’s command to love God with our MINDS — something Jesus thought was so important that He added the word to the text of Deuteronomy 6:5.

But even before the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, Western culture had begun drawing a line between science as the world of fact, and religion as the world of faith. This division, explored in Nancy Pearcey’s TOTAL TRUTH, is a critical element of how the Western world has approached the relationship of Christianity and science since the Enlightenment. The basic idea is that anything that belonged to the world of facts has nothing to do with religion, and anything religious has nothing to do with fact, just opinion or faith. The two are seen as incompatible worlds that do not touch.

So scientists can simultaneously accept undirected evolution — a view that was expressly intended to take God out of the picture of creation — and yet believe in God and even be a member of one of the historic Christian churches. But compartmentalizing our thinking like this — religion here, science there, ethics in that corner, and so on — not only results in a disintegrated view of the world, but it implicitly rejects Christ’s claim to be Lord of ALL, which includes nature, science, fact, ethics, meaning, as well as faith.

Quite simply, the Christian world has largely abandoned an integrated worldview, and has lost its mind as a result. One of the most urgent needs of the Church today is to recover intellectual life for the service of the kingdom of God.

MAKING SCIENCE POSSIBLE

So how do we answer the specific charge that Christianity is anti-science? There are several approaches we could take to answer this question. Many people have pointed out, for example, that the leading figures in the scientific revolution were devout Christians. Some have made the point that the question itself dates only to the 19th century, since before then Christians Led the field in scientific enterprises. Others point to the fact that many leading scientists today believe in god.

Here, I want to look at the question from a different angle, one more directly in keeping with the need for an integrated understanding of the world and our place in it: Which worldview, Christianity or materialism (that is, the idea that the physical universe of matter and energy is all that exists), provides a surer foundation and motivation for studying the natural world? Or, more simply, which worldview makes it possible to do science — the search for explanations of why the physical world works as it does?

The biblical worldview teaches that God made the universe. Since God is a rational being, He constructed the universe in a rational way. In other words, it is possible to make sense of it. The biblical worldview also teaches that human beings are made in the image of God. Being an image-bearer of God has a number of important implications; but for our purposes, it means we are rational, because God is rational. Although our rationality is finite and God’s is infinite, it is nonetheless possible for us to “think God’s thoughts after Him” and discover the rules that govern the universe. Moreover, Christians throughout history have believed that God revealed Himself in the natural world, and thus we could come to know Him better by studying it. These studies, known as natural theology or natural philosophy, are the historical roots of science and a major motivating factor for many of the key figures of the Scientific Revolution.

These aspects of the biblical worldview also explain why what we know today as modern science developed only in the Christian West, and not in other areas of the world that had different worldviews. For example, in the East, the physical world was seen as an illusion, a dream in the mind of God. That being the case, the highest use of the mind was meditation to see past the illusion, not attempting to make sense of how the illusion worked. As a result, Asian countries produced remarkable technologies, but no science in the sense of a coherent, non-philosophical explanation of the physical world.

In the Muslim world, it was believed that God directly controlled everything. This had important consequences for how the natural world was viewed. For example, while medieval theologians were working on early forms of scientific laws, the prominent Sufi scholar Abu Hamid al-Ghazali argued that the very idea that there were laws governing the physical universe was an attempt to limit Allah’s freedom and was therefore blasphemous. Muslims who argued for ideas like this were contradicting the Qur’an, making them infidels and thus subject to execution. The net effect of this kind of thinking was that Muslims excelled at math and practical disciplines like astronomy, geography, and medicine (up to a point), but did not develop science — that is, the search for answers to questions about the natural world through a process from hypothesis to theory.

WHAT ABOUT MATERIALISM?

So the biblical worldview was the foundational idea that made science possible. But what about materialism? How does it measure up as a worldview for science?

Materialistic explanations of the universe have to rely on one of two explanations for where the universe came from. The first is that the universe is eternal. This idea runs into problems almost immediately because of the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that the useable energy in a closed system is constantly decreasing, which means that an eternally old universe would have run out of useful energy by now. To solve this problem, some physicists argue that the universe can reset itself periodically by collapsing and re-forming in what is known as an oscillating universe. While there are logical problems with this idea (see William Lane Craig’s THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT), it still leaves us with our current universe having a starting point.

This brings us to the second version of materialism, which argues that the universe came into existence at a specific moment in an event known as the Big Bang. While Christians see the Big Bang as having been initiated by God, the materialist version of the theory argues that the universe essentially brought itself into existence. How this is possible is a mystery, and this led the scientific establishment, which was wedded to the idea of an eternal universe, to resist the idea of the Big Bang when it was first proposed: The only way to make logical sense of a universe that came into existence was to argue for a creator, something a materialist can never do. Only when the old guard died off and the evidence for the Big Bang became overwhelming was the idea accepted.

The key question in the Big Bang is where the universe came from. Unfortunately, since the laws of physics as we know them may not apply prior to the Big Bang, there is no way of knowing this. (An oscillating universe theory could conceivably argue that the laws of physics are eternal, but since it is impossible to look before the Big Bang, there is no evidence for this, and it would specifically require that the fundamental second law of thermodynamics be reversible and thus not eternal.) However the laws of physics came into existence, they led to the formation of galaxies and planets. On at least one of these planets, chemicals combined to produce organic compounds, which in turn combined with others, and somehow the compounds organized themselves and came to life, despite the well-known law of biology that life does not come from non-life.

Given the extreme implausibility of this happening — it is well beyond mathematical possibility — some thinkers have posited an infinite number of universes, with ours being the lucky one in which the impossible actually happened. Others have suggested that life on earth arrived here from outer space, but that does not solve the basic problem of how it arose in the first place: In fact, it makes it worse. If the universe is not old enough for the process to have occurred on Earth, having life come from another planet shortens the time even more, because now you have to take into account the extra time it takes for it to travel from wherever it developed to Earth.

In any event, somehow life began on earth, and by a process of random mutation, living organisms grew progressively more complex as survival of the fittest weeded out weaker, non-competitive life forms. Eventually, out of these random processes, human beings evolved. Our brains, which are the product of random mutations that enabled us to survive in the distant past, have somehow also developed the capacity to decipher the laws of the universe. This is what enables us to do science.

RANDOMNESS v. RATIONALITY

So here is the question: Would you trust an airplane that was designed using a random number generator to fill in the variables for the engineering specifications? Would you trust a bridge whose loading parameters were set with random numbers? If not, why would you trust a randomly produced brain to be able to make sense of the universe? If we are truly nothing more than the products of random variations in the arrangement of matter, why should we assume we are able to make sense of anything? For that matter, why should we assume that an undesigned universe is comprehensible in the first place?

What makes better sense: to believe an explanation with so many “somehows” that provides no real answer to how you can trust the conclusions of human thinking, or to accept the idea that the universe is rational, and we can understand it, because that is how it was all designed?

Far from being the enemy of science, the biblical worldview provides the essential foundation that makes science possible. It provides a coherent explanation of both the comprehensibility of the universe and the capabilities of human reason — something materialism cannot do. In fact, materialism’s reliance on unexplained events — the source of matter and energy, the origin of the laws of physics, the ability of the human mind to understand the world, and so on — requires far more acts of faith than Christianity.

________

Glenn Sunshine, a key faculty member for BreakPoint’s Centurions Program, is chair of the department of history and professor of early modern European history at Central Connecticut State University

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #16609]

It’s being called the largest study ever to examine the effects of prayer, but a Southern Baptist professor says it’s not much of a barometer at all.

“Anyone who seeks a prayer life guided by Scripture will not take this study seriously,” Don Whitney, associate professor of biblical spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said. “Prayer is based upon a relationship, namely a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and prayer is itself a part of that relationship. And relationships cannot properly be evaluated by scientific methods.”

The study, which appears in the April issue of American Heart Journal, found that prayer by others has a neutral effect on the risk of complications after bypass surgery and that people fare worse if they know others are praying for them.

Doctors began the study on intercessory prayer nearly a decade ago when they asked volunteers from one Protestant prayer group and two Catholic prayer groups to lift up the names of patients in the trial, and they were required to include the phrase, “for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications.”

Patients were randomly assigned to three groups -- one that was prayed for, one that was not prayed for and one that was told people were praying for them. None of the patients in the first two groups knew someone was told to pray.

Results indicated that 30 days after surgery there was no difference between patients who were prayed for and patients who were not. In fact, a significantly higher number of patients who knew they were being prayed for suffered complications.

“This study approaches prayer almost mechanically,” Whitney said, noting that a particular phrase had to be prayed exactly and specific medical results had to be recognized. Also, researchers presumed that those who prayed had a personal relationship with God that would give power to prayer.

“This divorces prayer from the Gospel of Christ which establishes the relationship between any individual and a prayer-hearing God,” he said.

Whitney added that it doesn’t matter what such studies conclude because Christians do not govern their prayer lives according to the latest scientific studies.

Another Southern Baptist professor, Mark Coppenger, was quoted in USA Today in regard to the study, saying he questions the wisdom of measuring God’s response.

“It’s my experience that God actually prompts our prayers,” Coppenger, distinguished professor of apologetics at Southern Seminary, said. “But I don’t see Him cooperating in a test.”

*

[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #1438]

For many, if not most, believers, faith isn’t something that is limited to Easter or even only on Sundays — it shapes the way they live. That’s because we believe that God is at work in our lives.

But according to some neuroscientists, what people call “God” is little more that brain chemistry.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, anthropologist Lionel Tiger described what he called “relatively friendly challenges” to religious experience from scientific research. Specifically, he wrote about research “on the links between the brain and religious experience.”

This research proceeds from the presupposition that only a “tiny number of believers” believe because “they find a particular theology convincing.” For the rest, he says, “faith emerges from the group with which they are affiliating and in which they are likely to have been born and raised.”

It’s the belief that faith is a product of social connections that makes the alleged connection between neuroscience and religion possible. According to Tiger, previously unexpected “links between social behavior and brain chemistry are now almost routinely identified.”

To oversimplify that, what he is saying is that our brains are hardwired to make us feel better if we are connected to others. Belonging to a group triggers neurotransmitters such as serotonin, which makes us feel calm and contented.

Similarly, Tiger says, contemplating ideas “well outside the realm of daily experience,” especially in the company of others, can soothe our brains. From this and other findings, Tiger concludes that there is a “stunning possibility...that religion will find its sturdiest roots in the natural, not the supernatural.”

To put it mildly, I’m not convinced. For starters, Tiger is wrong about why people believe, at least in the case of Christianity, which is a religion of conversion. A majority of Christians live in places where Christianity is a recent arrival. They weren’t raised as Christians. And in many parts of the world, converts to Christianity are ostracized by their families and communities or even persecuted. That’s not the kind of thing that kicks into high gear those pleasant feelings.

And while we are undoubtedly “hardwired for connection,” as one study has already put it, such a connection does not explain why people contemplate things outside “the realm of daily experience.” If the goal is for people to come together, why not skip the metaphysics and just reward sociability with lots of chemically induced good feelings?

Of course, all of this begs the question of our being “hardwired by whom?” Why is there a “strange but durable connection between surviving in this world and contemplating another?” Tiger and others really haven’t a clue — they’re only sure because it’s their presupposition that it doesn’t have anything to do with God.

Put that way, it sounds foolish, and the late Cornelius Van Til would say “rightly so.” He argued that once you rejected the presupposition that “God is,” your attempts to make sense of the world would devolve into absurdity.

Such as reducing faith to brain chemistry and coffee hours in church.

________

Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #11772]

"I grew up as a disciple of science. I know its fascination. I

have felt the godlike powers man derives from his great machines. Now

I have lived to experience the early results of scientific

materialism. I have watched men turn into human cogs in the factories

they believed would enrich their lives. I have watched pride in

workmanship leave and human character decline as the efficiency of

production lines in creased . . ."

- Charles Lindbergh, {Of Flight and Life}

Suppose you woke up tomorrow morning to find that your neighbor had moved his chain-link fence all the way across your yard -- right up against your door. So you call him on the phone. "What's up with the fence?" you ask.

"Not to worry," he says. "Just ignore the fence. You see, I'm only claiming physical reality for my domain. And since you're such a spiritual person, you don't care about that, right? Look, you still have your personal, subjective, religious yard. Isn't that great? Now we won't come into conflict with each other! Like the poet Robert Frost said, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'"

It sounds crazy. Yet this sort of arrangement is exactly what prominent scientists like Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould have proposed as the proper relationship between science and religion. In his new book, THE WEDGE OF TRUTH, Christian thinker Phillip Johnson challenges scientists like Gould to admit that their fence-building proposal is a bad idea, both for religion and science. There can only be a proper balance between science and religion if there's an open, honest relationship between them.

To see why, start with the quote from Frost: "Good fences make good neighbors." We often hear this line quoted as if Frost thought it were true. But he actually used it as a shallow cliché. In his poem, "Mending Wall," he wrote:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

When a scientist like Stephen Jay Gould proposes to keep peace between science and religion by putting a fence between them, we need to look at where he wants to put the boundary.

As Johnson points out, Gould's boundary line claims the whole realm of knowledge for science, effectively "walling out" religion, putting it into a private, subjective ghetto.

The old adage, "Science tells us how the heavens go, while religion tells us how to go to heaven," might be reasonable only if there really is a place like heaven. And it makes sense only if there really are souls that might go to heaven, and a God who created them. In short, "religion tells us how to go to heaven" makes sense only if we genuinely know about God, souls, salvation, and heaven.

But, as Johnson explains, that's exactly what Gould doesn't want to hear. His definition of knowledge itself turns the whole of physical reality over to science, just like the neighbor's fence that, one morning, swallows up your entire yard.

Religion, claims Gould, cannot include anything about real history, including the life of Jesus, because history belongs to science. Gould calls this his "first commandment" of the relationship of science and theology. It's a view widely shared by scientists today.

In his excellent new book, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson exposes Gould and others for "dressing up naturalistic philosophy as if it were science." And he equips believers to challenge this specious argument wherever we encounter it -- whether it's in schools or in casual conversation with our neighbors. Which is precisely what we must do. Whether fences make good neighbors or not, they certainly do not encourage academic freedom in the pursuit of truth.

_________________________

Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

I recall attending a heavily advertised lecture by Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University. A topic of enormous implications lay before us: Is man determined or free? The best of minds have tackled this question, and the stranglehold of determinism seems to get tighter for a life lived without God.

When Stephen Hawking speaks, everyone listens. Severely impaired by Lou Gehrig’s disease, Hawking spoke through a speech synthesizer. Developing his carefully measured argument, he finally yielded to science as the consummate discipline, and concluded: "Is man determined? Yes! But since we do not know what is determined, he may as well not be."

There was pin-drop silence. The audience clearly felt let down, for no one was left any wiser than before Hawking had spoken. Then he added this troubling postscript: Hawking feared that since the evolutionary process had worked through the dialectic of determinism and aggression, the long-term survival of our species was in question. "However," he added, "if we can keep from destroying each other for the next one hundred years, sufficient technology will have been developed to distribute humanity to various planets, and then no one tragedy will eradicate us all at the same time."

Hawking was unavoidably caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, if there is no God he could feel the hold of determinism from which evolutionary theory could not escape - out of flux, nothing but flux. What followed from that deduction was even more troubling. For on the other hand, if evolution held true, he could not further ignore the aggression and violence through which man has evolved. Therefore, Hawking offered mankind’s only hope - that the savior of technology would come riding on the wings of science to rescue us from the clasping teeth of determinism.

Is technology the answer to the human struggle? In the twenty-first century, will it prove to be our savior? I am afraid not, my friend. Our problems run much deeper than to be solved by microchips and movable parts. The problem is that of the heart and until that heart gets right with God, we will only have improved means for deteriorated ends. That is why Jesus Christ calls for your heart - that spiritual center of you that submits to the grace of God and seeks to live for the things that are eternal, not temporal. We are free to choose and only when we are determined to live by God’s will can the will be harnessed for eternity’s purpose.

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

*

Miracles, do you believe that they actually happen? Did Jesus really walk on water? Did He really change the water into wine? In a day such as ours, where science triumphs and her handmaiden technology permeates our lives, can we even seriously ask such questions? Does the success of science with its cool rationality demand that we count such stories as mere hopeful tales?

You know, many of us often feel that the answer is yes, yes, we do have to give up our hope in miracles. We feel the pressure of naturalism, and we retreat hoping that we can at least maintain the religious meanings behind the miraculous events we heard about in Sunday school or from a parent.

We find ourselves in this predicament because we have unwittingly accepted the intellectual mindset of our time. Science, we believe, has stated unequivocally that nature is a self-sustained, orderly system governed by incontrovertible laws, and, furthermore, that miracles destroy this order.

But we need not accept this supposed antinomy between the natural and the supernatural. Science, if you pay close attention, does not demand it, nor does philosophy. A more helpful, and I believe truer, casting of the two can be found in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus referred to Himself as the Son of Man. Although a technical term, it does embody the ultimate example of what it is to be human. He is the fullest expression of humanity in perfection. To put it differently: Yes, He's divine, but He's also supremely human. More correctly, He is God's expression in human features. He shows us what is possible for humans who are attuned to God and His activities in this world.

His miracles, then, do not destroy the order of nature. The mere existence of this world is a miracle - slow ones should be as impossible by sheer naturalism as immediate ones are. Jesus' miracles just more dramatically demonstrate the super-possibilities in the realm of nature and in our lives. The supernatural, then, is super-nature realized. Nature is not merely a quasi-coherent set of mathematical laws. It is richer than that. It is the arena in which God does His work that points us to His power and His grace. That miraculous work can begin in you to make you conform to the image of His Son. That transformation is in itself a miracle, for there the natural and the supernatural blend wonderfully.

_________________________

Copyright © 2002 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

A scientist once asked author Dorothy Sayers to write a letter to his scientific organization, setting forth her reasons for believing in the Christian faith. The letter was not at all what the scientist had expected. It said:

"Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as accurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as in your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook of church history will tell you where they came from?

"Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the Three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=MC2? What makes you suppose that the expression 'God ordains' is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression 'Science demands' is taken as an objective statement of fact? You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs.

"I admit," she continued, "you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas, if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.

Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don't bother with me. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine."

*

The anthropic principle faces serious challenges from outside the disciplines of astronomy and physics. Many scholars in the humanities and social sciences fear that the anthropic principle will somehow legitimize false notions of human supremacy, justifying exploitation of the environment to the detriment of other species. Similarly, Christian scholars worry that the anthropic principle could inflate human ego to disastrous proportions, propelling humanity once again down the path toward Babel.

The warnings against exulting in the power of science, glorifying human knowledge, and exalting the human species have taken form as “humility theology.”1 Its proponents seek to underscore for research scientists, educators, political leaders, and others the limits on human understanding. Humility theology appropriately acknowledges that significant spiritual implications flow from advances in scientific research.

Most humility theologians pursue one or more of these laudable objectives: 1) debunk naturalists’ claims that physical reality is the only reality (or at least the only knowable reality); 2) refute Stephen Hawking’s assertion that scientists possess the means to discover the mind of God, to know and understand everything God knows and understands; and 3) promote religious values and practice.

As a Christian and a scientist, I readily share and support these objectives, yet with one significant reservation. Some humility theologians lean heavily toward religious pluralism, acquiescing to the notion that all (or most) religious truth claims are equally valid. On the basis of both logic and science, I do not. I cannot. To say that human knowledge is inadequate for drawing reasonable conclusions about the Creator’s identity would be false humility, not a Christian virtue. (See Kenneth Samples’ article, “Do All Religions Lead to God?” page 00.)

REFERENCE:

1. John M. Templeton, THE HUMBLE APPROACH (New York: The Seabury Press, 1981). This is the first of many books and periodicals sponsored by John Templeton in the theme of humility theology.

*

Thursday, August 23 3:02 AM SGT

Japan developing micro nuclear reactor for apartment blocks

PARIS, Aug 22 (AFP) - Japan is developing a tiny nuclear reactor designed to generate power in the basement of an apartment block, despite widespread public concern over the country's nuclear safety record, New Scientist says.

The 200-kilowatt micro-reactor, Rapid-L, measures just six metres (20 feet) high and two metres (6.5 feet) wide and was initially conceived as a plug-and-play source of power for lunar colonies.

Although colonisation schemes have long been shelved, scientists at Japan's Central Research Institute of Electrical Power Industry (CRIEPI) have revived plans for the Rapid-L, believing it could be a handy source of power for an office building or apartment block, the report says.

It would be located in the building's basement, surrounded by a solid containment structure for safety reasons.

"In the future it will be quite difficult to construct further large nuclear power plants because of site restrictions," Mitsuru Kambe, head of the research team, told the British science weekly.

"To relieve peak loads in the near future, I believe small, modular reactors located in urban areas such as Tokyo Bay will be effective," he said.

Kambe added, however: "The success of such a reactor depends on the acceptance of the public, the electricity utilities and the government."

In the past few months, Kambe's team have been testing a fail-safe mechanism to close the reactor down in the event of overheating, the report says in next Saturday's issue of New Scientist.

The work is being financed by the Japan's Atomic Energy Research Institute.

Unlike conventional reactors, the Rapid-L would have no control rods to regulate the nuclear reaction, the goal being to remove a mechanical source of potential malfunction. Instead, it would use reservoirs of molten lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that runs through the reactor core.

During normal operation the tube contains an inert gas. But as the temperature of the reactor rises, the liquid lithium expands, compressing the inert gas and entering the core to absorb neutrons and slow down the reaction.

The reactor would run at about 530 C (986 F), cooled by liquid sodium. Malcolm Grimston, a nuclear expert at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, doubted whether the Japanese public could be persuaded that the reactor was safe, given a string of incidents at large nuclear plants in recent years.

In the worst case, two workers died at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura in 1999, more than 400 other people were exposed to radation and at least 300,000 people were forced to shelter indoors for more than a day.

"There's nothing wrong with the (Rapid-L) concept," Grimston told New Scientist. "But if the Japanese public won't now accept big reactors for safety reasons, then you have to wonder what the response would be building lots of small reactors in the middle of cities."

Today's scientific advances owe their genesis to Christianity, and every new discovery of the cosmos is an affirmation of God at work in the universe he created, noted scientists and educators said in addressing a "Cosmos and Creator" conference at the Discovery Institute public policy think tank in Seattle.

"Christianity was the midwife bringing modern science to birth in the mid- 1700s," declared Sir John Polkinghorne, an Anglican priest and physicist from Cambridge University in England.

As such, both science and Christianity have things to offer each other; far from being at war with one another, science and Christianity should be good friends, Polkinghorne said at the two-day conference sponsored by the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture and attended by about 700 participants in late April.

"There is a cumulative case for God the creator," the scientist-theologian said. "Centuries of scientific discovery has done much to corroborate religion."

Polkinghorne's view was supported by nuclear physicist Peter E. Hodgson of Oxford University and five other conference speakers who are noted experts in varied scientific fields revolving around cosmology, the study of the universe and its origins.

Cosmology is a hot topic in scientific circles today. It's a special section in the June 2001 issue of Astronomy magazine, and it was the cover article in the January 2001 issue of Scientific American, with a shorter article also in the March 2001 issue.

"It is such a hot topic partially because it is so speculative and theoretical, but mostly because the origin of the universe is the point where most people expect to find God, whether they like it or not," said Discovery Institute spokesman Mark Edwards after the conference.

The Cosmos and Creator speakers explained that evidence for intelligent design of the universe is increasing (compared to the "random chance" of evolution) as is the awareness that former explanations for the origins of the universe (such as evolution) are incomplete and inadequate. The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture - one of six program areas at the Discovery Institute - has become known as the "intelligent design" movement's national think tank.

Four developments converged for the birth of modern science, Hodgson explained: systems of writing, mathematics and communication and, fourth, a well-developed social structure so various responsibilities could be divided among the people, leaving some to spend their lives studying, thinking and writing about what they learn.

Ancient Greece made an important start in the development of modern science, Hodgson said, noting that Greek thinkers showed how to ask the right questions. But, he said, Aristotle's belief that the earth was the center of the universe kept physics - the study of motion, force, light, sound and more - from being developed for 1,800 years. Aristotle died in 322 B.C.

Muslims, as their culture flourished from the 7th to 9th centuries, developed a high level of civilization and made advances in astronomy and medicine, but the impetus was not continued, Hodgson said. "They had a 500-year start on us but they did not develop modern civilization," he said. The reason? Muslims emphasized that everything depends moment to moment on God; they focused on the freedom of God, rather than his sense of order, Hodgson recounted.

The Chinese, despite their 5,000-year history, were locked into a rigid system of memorized learning that took decades to master and was rigorously controlled, thus stifling intellectual endeavor, Hodgson continued.

Hodgson suggested the reason modern science developed as it did in the 17th century was because of the cultural acceptance of Christian beliefs about the world:

- The world - matter - is good.

- Matter is rational; it behaves in an orderly way.

- The study of matter is practical; it has value to the society.

- Selfishness is counterproductive: If you discover something, share that knowledge with others.

Modern science was founded on the belief that God as creator was both free to do what he wanted and yet rational, in that what was done, was done systematically and in order - if one seed would grow after being planted and watered, so would similar seeds, Hodgson said.

Dating modern science to the last 300 to 400 years, Hodgson cited as groundbreaking the work of four individuals whose discoveries were each made about a century apart:

- German astronomer Johannes Kepler, born in 1571, who believed he was discovering the work of the Creator. Kepler broke the barrier of ancient scientific belief and set the stage for modern science to be born when he formulated three scientific laws concerning the elliptical (rather than Aristotle's circular) motion and orbit of planets.

- English physicist and mathematician Sir Issac Newton, born 1642, who studied Kepler's work and who also believed his work brought honor to God. Newton invented calculus, a branch of mathematics that dealt with continuously varying quantities. He also developed the first reflecting telescope and formulated the laws of motion and the theory of gravity.

- James Clerk Maxwell, born 1831, a British physicist who developed four equations that described all forms of electromagnetism, an essential component of studying the universe and its origins.

- Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger, who lived from 1871-1961 and laid the mathematical groundwork for a new quantum understanding of the atom. In the early 1900s Albert Einstein used Schroedinger's work when Einstein established quantum theory - that a certain precise amount of energy was required to knock an electron loose from its orbit.

"At each stage of the process Christian belief was vital," Hodgson said. "[Early 20th century theologian] Alfred North Whitehead said the development of science was due to the work of medieval theologians who embedded the idea of order, of cause and effect."

Mathematics was the key that unlocked the secrets of the universe, Polkinghorne had explained in the opening lecture of the Cosmos and Creation conference. Scientists use mathematics among other things to calculate the change in their observations, which leads to the formulation of physical laws and the development of theories used to predict new events.

In science there are three modes of explanation: chance, law and design, said Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., and director of the Discovery Institute. In the 1800s it became fashionable to combine chance and law and leave God out of the design element, he noted. This was the period when British naturalist Charles Darwin postulated his ideas on evolution through the process of natural selection - the survival of the fittest.

"Darwin accounted for designer substitutes," Meyer said. "Darwin made the theological unnecessary."

Darwin, who died in 1882, believed that the universe had existed from eternity, that it evolved into living matter, which in its most complex form - humans - conceived of God to explain what they could not otherwise explain, Meyer said.

Edwin Hubble was born seven years after Darwin died. He was a lawyer who became an astronomer with access to the big new telescopes of his day, which could identify what previously had been pinpricks of light, Meyer said. Instead of just one galaxy in the universe, or band of stars, the Milky Way galaxy, Hubble learned that there are many galaxies, Meyer explained. At least 100,000 galaxies have since been identified, out of a projected 250,000. [Holwick - I think most astronomers would put the figure in the billions.]

"The galaxies Hubble discovered are moving away from us in every direction," Meyer said, "The farther, the faster. This gave rise to the Big Bang theory."

The Big Bang theory - first published in 1948 and now accepted as the standard creation theory in the scientific community - is that matter, energy, space and time all came into existence in a single moment. The universe since that time has been expanding, and the speed of that expansion is greatest at the outside edges of the universe, Meyer said.

Christians find similarities between the Big Bang and the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo (out of nothing).

"Big Bang is not a causal theory," Meyer clarified. "It is a theory that explains why we have evidence of the beginning" and gained confirmation among Bell Laboratories scientists in the mid-1960s.

There are three major choices for an explanation as to how life exists, and three belief forms, explained Robert Spitzer, a Jesuit priest and president of Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. The first suggests there is a guiding force, but it's not God; the second, that the improbabilities of the universe shouldn't be a surprise because they have to be that way for us to exist.

"Third, there really is a supernatural intelligence that's loading the dice," Spitzer said. "Faith is inescapable. Some try to explain the universe without putting God into it, but putting God into it makes the most sense from the evidence."

Guillermo Gonzalez, an astronomer at the University of Washington, and Jay Richards, program director for the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, wrapped up the Cosmos and Creator conference with their joint addresses on the correlation between the measurability and habitability of the universe.

"The most habitable bodies appear to allow for the highest degree of measurability of their environments," Gonzalez said. "The same processes and physical conditions that optimize habitability on a planetary body also optimize measurability."

The implication, Richards explained, was that the cosmos is fine-tuned not only for the existence of intelligent life, but for scientific discovery as well.

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The Big Bang theory says the universe had one beginning. As an atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle preferred to believe otherwise, and so he resisted the evidence all of his life. He died last week at age eighty-six.

Instead of one big bang, Hoyle postulated a series of "little pops." His "Steady State" theory included "continuous creation." Matter always existed, he said, and as it expands from the center of the universe, new matter is continually created to fill the void.

The Big Bang and Hoyle's Steady State were mere abstractions, unable to be tested. Then, in 1964, Drs. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs encountered continuous static on certain microwave frequencies. Rotating their antenna in a vain attempt to remove the noise, they realized it was coming from all directions -- permeating the universe. Physicists hailed this as the first observational evidence of the Big Bang known as "cosmic background radiation" or "the radio echo of creation."

Penzias saw the philosophical significance in his discovery. "... [T]he best data we have," he said, "are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.... [T]he creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far."

Even as an atheist, Hoyle recognized an amazing complexity and precision in the universe. In his words, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

In other words, the things that exist in the universe are so complex and brilliantly made, that they look as if an Intelligent Designer fine-tuned them. Mao Zedong, by the way, recognized this as well -- which is why he would never allow the Big Bang theory to be taught in China.

Today, advocates of the Big Bang think that their theory is a substitute for God. But it's just the opposite. Hoyle rejected the Big Bang in spite of the evidence because he knew that the Big Bang pointed irresistibly to the existence of God.

Science historian Frederic B. Burnham observed that scientists consider the idea that God created the universe, "a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last hundred years." Dr. Geoffrey Burbridge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that many astronomers are rushing off to join what he calls "the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang." That's a cynic's way of acknowledging that many astronomers are being forced by their data, to recognize the existence of a Creator-God.

Whether God created the universe through the Big Bang or some other way, the one who did the creating demonstrated an amazing amount of power and wisdom as he caused the formation of everything that has been made!

As we read the obituaries about Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who named the Big Bang, we might ask our skeptical neighbors: If there was a Big Bang, isn't it reasonable to recognize what Hoyle did -- that there behind it a Big Brain. And might that not be the God of the Bible and of all creation?

For further reference:

Bergman, Jerry. "Arno Penzias: Astrophysicist, Nobel Laureate." Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, September 1994 (Ipswich, MA: American Scientific Affiliation).

"'Big Bang' Astronomer Dies."

Brian, Denis. Genius Talk: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries. New York: Plenum Publishing, 1995.

"Fred Hoyle Dies at 86; Opposed 'Big Bang' but Named It."

Gingerich, Owen. "Dare a Scientist Believe in Design?" Chapter in John Marks Templeton, ed., Evidence of Purpose. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1994.

Ross, Hugh. The Creator and the Cosmos.

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Copyright (c) 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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