Science, Religion, and Christianity

Many scientists are serious Christians, including the Yale-educated physician who led the National Genome Project and was Director of the National Institutes of Health under three presidents. His Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief was a bestseller.
People sometimes confuse two broad categories of questions: scientific and philosophical. Scientific questions have to do with physical causes, effects, and what appear to be laws or principles concerning the relationship between the two. Philosophical questions have to do with issues that cannot be settled by physical experiments or observations.
Religious (theological) questions fall into the latter category, although theologians follow the principle that nothing can be true for faith that is false to reason, and “reason” includes physical phenomena that can be publicly verified. The Bible is not a scientific textbook and should not be treated as if it were. Statements in the Bible that appear to describe scientific phenomena are metaphoric and are intended to point us to God, not serve as substitutes for astronomy, geology, chemistry, or any other hard science.
There are two kinds of materialism, methodological and metaphysical. All scientists operate on the foundational premise that their job is to study physical (material) correlations and causes. But only some scientists subscribe to physicalism, the thesis that everything in existence can be reduced to the material. Thus, even mental events are believed to have only physical causes sufficient to explain them, and human freedom of choice, therefore, is an illusion.
Metaphysical materialism has been used to explain everything from the presence of life on earth to the workings of our brains. Many celebrated scientists, some atheists, have pointed out even the 13.8 billion years the universe has been around would not have been enough time for life to emerge.
Scientists who pass off their personal philosophic opinions as if such opinions were science create confusion. Unless a particular scientist has been educated in philosophy or theology, competence as a scientist guarantees nothing about competence in either of the two domains. Such scientists resemble movie stars promoting the virtues of soap as if they were chemists. When these scientists announce with great confidence that science has demonstrated there is no God, they either intentionally mislead others or display their philosophic naivete.
The idea that science and religion are at war emerged in the late nineteenth century when two well-known public figures wrote books suggesting this. Despite their previous accomplishments, they were biased against religion, and because of egregious flaws what they wrote was unworthy of them. Science and religion have had their points of strain but they have rarely been at odds. The idea that they are, or ever have been in any substantial way, is a comparatively recent invention.
Scientific findings can have implications for theology. An example of this is how, during the twentieth century, scientists discovered that almost fourteen billion years ago the universe instantaneously came into existence. Before the “Big Bang,” as it is called, there was nothing. No space, no physical matter, and apparently no laws of nature. This may not prove bit certainly suggests the existence of a creator. To claim that aliens caused the Big Bang merely raises the question of who or what created them.
It was long believed, including by Einstein until he eventually changed his mind, that matter had always existed. It isn’t that the universe appeared in space that already existed because there was none. The universe originated in an infinitesimally small fraction of a second, from a point of unimaginative heat and density, which expanded and then cooled.
It has also been suggested that, given enough time, a money randomly striking keys at a keyboard would eventually produce the entire contents of an encyclopedia. From this, some hypothesize that life as we know it would have developed by the accidental combination of chemicals. Many noteworthy scientists have ponted out The problem is that even the five billion years that our planet has been around would not have been “enough time.”
The universe is so delicately balanced that the odds of it having developed by chance are remotely small. Science is not only compatible with a divine creator but makes the probability of one more likely.The universe hinges on a set of delicate balances that seem impossible to have derived from the Big Bang by chance. Essential for life, water, if the earth were closer to or father away from the sun, would either turn to ice or evaporate.
According to physicist Stephen Hawking, if the universe’s overall density were even infinitesimally changed, no galaxies would exist, and if its rate of expansion after the Big Bang had been minutely different, the universe would not exist. Nor could it exist if its mass were even a tiny bit less because gravity would not have been strong enough to prevent what started at the Big Bang would have evaporated into a gaseous cloud. If it were a tiny bit more, everything would have collapsed into black holes or neutron stars.
A Cal Tech physicist has suggested that if the mass of the universe were different by only one part in 10 to the 60th power, no physical life could exist anywhere in the universe. And according to another scientist who won the Nobel prize, if its energy density were different by one part in 10 to the 120th power, life could not exist.
Physicists long ago established that four fundamental physical laws work together to determine everything that happens to matter: electromagnetism; gravity; strong nuclear forces; and weak nuclear forces. All four forces emerged within a millionth of a second of the Big Bang, and have remained unchanged for nearly fourteen billion years. They also work so harmoniously together that the slightest variation in how they cooperate would instantly destroy everything in the universe.
Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Our moon came into existence almost 100 million years after that as the result of an object, roughly the size of Mars, crashing into Earth. Some of it spun into space and because the moon, which is about one quarter as large as Earth. Before this event, the atmosphere of Earth had been viscous and unbreathable, but it then became thin enough to allow respiration. It also allowed enough sunlight through so plants could grow.
It was once thought that life had spontaneously emerged from the random combination of chemicals, but this notion is no longer tenable. The inner workings of even a single-cell organism are far more complex than anyone assumed a few decades ago. Because of this complexity, a celebrated scientist has suggested that the idea even something so small came into being by chance is preposterous. Another highly-esteemed scientist has estimated that the odds of even a minutely small virus having spontaneously emerged from “primordial soup” are perhaps 1 in 10 to the two-millionth power. Even in billions of years, the spontaneous emergence of life as we know it is unlikely.
The Christian is in the wonderful position of embracing science rather than backing away from it as if it were the enemy. Science reveals God’s countless designs and Christianity provides an overarching context in which to place them.