Why the Conflict Between Science and the Bible

Why the Conflict Between Science and the Bible?

Ultimate Questions Series

October 14, 2007 - Neighborhood Bible Church

December 2, 2997 – Valley Church

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” Genesis 1:1

Review:

Why believe in God?

Why believe the Bible?

Why the problem of evil?

Why Jesus?

We ended last week with C.S. Lewis’s “Lord, Liar, Lunatic” with a addendum… Does the quality of our lives in the community we live in support the claim we make that Jesus Christ is the risen Son of God, and that he was who he said he was… or does it support the idea that we, like Jesus, are also liars, lunatics, or worse…

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, in a New York Times book review wrote “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”

I was talking this week with a friend who has a Ph.D in Molecular Biology and asked him if he was ignorant, stupid, or insane…

Dawkins - “Faith is the great cop out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.” (http://freethought.freeservers.com/reason/faith.html)

All of this begs the question: "Is faith, in particular, Christianity, irrational?" Does becoming a Christian mean that you have to throw your brain out the window, swallow a bunch of lies, make excuses not to examine evidence?

The answer is a resounding “NO” and in fact I believe we’ll see that it takes as much if not more faith to believe in evolution than it does to believe in the God who created the universe.

Testimony of Dr. Jeffrey Dunn.

Within the scientific community there is a growing openness to other wordviews than Darwinian evolution. Some say it is a revolution…

Today I want to show you that there are Positive examples of science strengthening the Biblical account of creation. AND Negative examples of science - Flaws in evolutionary theory. Do we need science to PROVE that God exists, that the Bible is the true and accurate Word of God, that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh??? NO!

In the beginning…

The UNIVERSE had a beginning.

I remember being at San Jose State and hearing about The Big Bang. I grew up swallowing everything my public school teachers taught me… Virtually every scientist believes it…

Stephen Hawking, a cosmologist from Cambridge University, says “it is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

“The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental "fireball" that erupted at or close to an initial timepoint in the history of our observed spacetime.” Wikipedia

Prior to 1920 science could deny the need for a creator by appealing to an infinitely old universe. They could point to the Bible and laugh and say, see how ridiculous the Bible is?

So, with the establishment of the Big Bang, did scientists say, “Oh the Bible is correct after all”??? You look at the biblical account of creation of the universe at a distinct point in time and look at science and add it up!

Unfortunately not. Stephen Hawking, in an interview with Shirley McLain said, “We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.”

Others have another view… For all the criticism that Christians are closed minded, not willing to examine the facts, some materialists also admit…Geneticist Richard Lewontin of Harvard, in his 1997 review of Carl Sagan’s book, Billions and Billions, admitted that evolutionists “have a prior commitment, a commitment to naturalism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door” Lewontin, Richard (1997), “Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review, January 9, p. 31.

But The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 4:17 that "God calls into being things that are not as though they were."

But since he is one God in three persons we also believe -- as the scriptures teach -- that "Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him" (Col. 1:15,16; cf. 1 Cor. 8:6; John 1:1; Hebrews 1:2).

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” John 1:3

But what about BEFORE THE BIG BANG? If there was a “Big Bang”, who lit the fuse? EX: Mexico fireworks on the beach…

Scientists have come up with all kinds of ideas – string theory, spontaneous singularities within quantum mechanics, hidden parallel universes in other dimensions (not making this up) … talk about THEORETICAL!!! This is before time began!!!!

God created…

God created everything OUT OF NOTHING.

The view that life arose out of nothing is a notion Christian and scientists both agree on, and I suggest we both arrive at that view by faith…

Materialists believe that life arose spontaneously from non-living matter and then evolved by purely natural means. Chance, combined with physical law, created life on this planet and evolved it to its present state. Carl Sagan’s famous words, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”. God is excluded, unnecessary in the scientific mind. The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”

Galileo said, “Science tells you how the heavens go, the Bible tells you how to go to heaven.”

"Scientists, like many others, are touched with awe at the order and complexity of nature. Indeed, many scientists are deeply religious. But science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience. Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each." National Academy of Sciences, 1999. Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences Second Edition, p. ix.

“By the word of the LORD were the heavens made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth…For he spoke, and it came to be, he commanded and it stood firm.” Psalm 33:6,9, NIV

Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ "reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, upholding the universe by his word of power.

The Bible does not attempt to explain HOW the universe was created as much as it says WHO created it.

The Bible talks about WHAT happened… it doesn’t say how. "For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever!" (Rom. 11:36).

I’m NOT going to discuss - Young earth, old earth, theistic evolution. These are all THEISTIC explanations for the creation of the universe and life. If you want to get together with your Christian friends and fight about that fine… These are not the discussions that most unbelievers are having.

EX: if you found an ipod while walking on the beach…

Intelligent Design vs. blind watchmaker – if a blind watch maker took enough time to continually put every piece of machinery on the face of the earth together, COULD he conceivably, make a watch that works?

One colleague of Stephen Hawking’s, John Polkinghorne, respected theoretical physicist and past President of Queens College Cambridge says, “It is a possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability, and to my mind, of greater elegance, would be that this world is the way it is because it is the creation of a creator who purposes that it should be so.” (Polkinghorne, John C., "One World: The Interaction of Science and Theology," [1986], SPCK: London, 1987, p.80)

…the heavens and the earth

God is the author OF LIFE.

The materialist would say that there is NO INTELLIGENT DESIGNER, nothing to guide the design of life. Therefore, it is random and undirected. The theory of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin and set out in detail in Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

the Oxford Concise Science Dictionary we find the following definition: "evolution: The gradual process by which the present diversity of plant and animal life arose from the earliest and most primitive organisms, which is believed to have been continuing for the past 3000 million years."
One of the most respected evolutionary biologists Douglas J. Futuyma defines “Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual.” Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986
Encarta Dictionary definition – “…the theoretical process by which all species develop from earlier forms of life. According to this theory, natural variation in the genetic material of a population favors reproduction by some individuals more than others, so that over the generations all members of the population come to possess the favorable traits.”

In other words, random chance mutations in cells produce “heritable” changes within species that are strengthened by natural selection, stirred up with a little genetic drift, and then move that species on to another form of life… enzymes become single celled organisms, then multi cell organisms, reptiles to birds to mammals… “From Goo to you by way of the zoo… “

Have you heard of the “Darwin Awards”? People doing foolish things that get them killed – “Chlorinating the Gene Pool” (10 January 2007, East Germany) A 63-year-old man's extraordinary effort to eradicate a mole from his property resulted in a probable victory for the mole. The man had pounded several metal rods into the ground and connected them to a high-voltage power line, with the intent of rendering the subterranean realm uninhabitable.

Incidentally, the maneuver electrified the very ground he stood upon. He was found dead at his holiday property on the Baltic Sea. Police had to trip the main circuit breaker before venturing onto the property.

Certainly there isn’t much debate over the issue of Micro evolution. Small variations or changes within a species. Ie. People grow taller, animals adapt to survive in different environments, etc.

But Macroevolution says that all species, including you, came from small gradual changes taking place over long periods of time guided by natural selection, a completely random and blind process.

EX: I’m addicted to the TV show “Heroes” – bending time, healing spontaneously… The next step in the evolutionary process… Of course it’s TV so there has to be a BAD GUY… (natural selection isn’t doing too good a job of wiping the BAD GUY out!) but none of them are turning into OTHER SPECIES!!!

Macro evolution says that life went from prebiotic soup to Ape to Man. Are you all familiar with the poster that shows an ape, then other apelike creatures, and then a man?

- Ardent Evolutionist, Dr. Henry Gee, Ph.D. in Zoology, Senior Editor, Biological Sciences for the journal Nature discounts evolutionism's supposed organic chain of ancestry as "…a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.” P.133.
"To take a line of fossils and claim that they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story - amusing, perhaps even instructive, but not scientific." In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life, New York, The Free Press, 1999, page 126-127.

Because of the lack of archeological evidence for the graduated time line theory, evolutionists developed the Punctuated Equilibrium theory…

“Punctuated equilibrium helped to explain why many transitional forms apparently were missing from the fossil record. According to the hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium, transitional forms existed for brief periods of time, and so were unlikely to become fossils.”
Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History/Department of Paleobiology

Biochemist Michael Behe in his book “Darwin’s Black Box” states that these processes are “irreducibly complex”. That the evolutionary process of DNA and cell structures evolving over time to produce POSTIVE mutations is impossible. I.E. the eye -
The universe is incredibly complex. The "anthropic principle” says intelligent life is possible only because of a precise combination of "seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics." As one physicist put it, it is as if the "universe knew we were coming." Charles Colson Breakpoint
The origin of the mind, morality, beauty, transcendence…

Cambridge anatomist Sir Arthur Keith “Evolution is unproved and unprovable. We believe it only because the only other alternative is special creation, and that is unthinkable.”

Sir Fredrick Hoyle, a distinguished astronomer assed the odds of life coming from non life like this, “What are the chances that a tornado might blow through a junkyard containing all the parts of a 747, accidentally assemble them all into a plane, and leave it ready for take off?”

The Bible says in Genesis 2:7

the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

God DELIGHTS in His creation.

Gen 1:31

³¹ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.

APPLICATION:

Can I prove to you today that God exists, that He created the universe, and our complex world, and life, and YOU? No I cannot. But neither can anyone prove he does NOT exist.

Pascal's Wager

"If you believe, and God exists, you gain everything. If you disbelieve, and God exists, you lose everything."

Alternatively :

"It makes more sense to believe in God than to not believe. If you believe, and God exists, you will be rewarded in the afterlife. If you do not believe, and He exists, you will be punished for your disbelief. If He does not exist, you have lost nothing either way. "

Jones corollary:

If you and I really believed it, we’d be doing everything we could to let others know…

Psalm 24:1, "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein."