So let’s see, we have Lucent, AT&T, Honeywell, Bayer, Novartis, Intel, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson. We are swimming in test tubes! You and I are surrounded by a virtual cocoon of high tech science and research. How many of you are either trained to be or make your living as some kind of scientist? Well then, I am guessing that at some point you had to make your peace with today’s topic. Of all the misconceptions that we will be talking about in this series, the apparently accepted contradiction between science and faith is the closest to my heart because it was probably the biggest sticking point for me when I was first considering becoming a Christian. For the longest time I just assumed that the conflict between science and faith was inevitable—that if you believed in science, or had a scientific mind, you couldn’t really believe in God, and that if you did believe in God, you couldn’t possibly be much of a scientist.
I had taken to heart the sentiment that lurked behind bumper stickers like these ones I have copied onto the sheet in your bulletin. Have you seen any of these before? I realized that not only did many non-Christians feel that faith and science were utterly incompatible, not only was there a certain simplicity or naiveté attributed to those who dared to believe in God, but there was actually a fairly hostile attitude, at times, towards those who believe; like this bottom image where we see the Darwin fish eating the poor little Christian one. Ouch! So where did all this hostility come from?
There wasn’t alays this antagonism between faith and science. The truth is that the rise of science and the scientific method itself grew out of a foundation that was laid down by the Christian faith. Scientists, secular historians, and philosophers all agree that science, as we know it, was born out of three basic theological assumptions: a monotheistic which led people to expect a uniformity in nature that they believed could be counted on for constant laws of nature through time and space; the belief that because a rational, intelligent God had created the universe, they could count on the world to be both ordered and intelligible; and finally, that because God had created the world and made it good, it was a worthwhile pursuit to study and learn as much as possible about God’s creation.
Our faith has also provided many if not most of history’s most brilliant and prolific scientists. Copernicus, who laid the foundation of modern astronomy and is considered to have sparked the entire scientific revolution by first suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun, was a church man first and a canon at his Cathedral in Frauenberg. Galileo was not only the founder of modern mechanics and experimental physics and the first to argue that the earth was not the center of the universe, he was also a firm believer who said, “There are two big books, the book of nature and the book of super nature—the Bible!” The founder of modern optics, Johannes Kepler, was a deeply sincere Lutheran who said that he saw himself as “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” And perhaps the greatest scientist of all time, Sir Isaac Newton, the man who made countless discoveries in optics, astronomy and calculus while formulating the laws of gravity, was well known not just for his scientific books but for his theological books as well. He actually used to argue to anyone who would listen that his theological books were more important than his scientific ones. The list goes on and on—Robert Boyle, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Gregory Mendel, Lord Kelvin—nearly all of history’s first and greatest scientists were deeply committed Christians. James Simpson, the man who made many medical advancements and pioneered the use of anesthesia in surgery, when asked what his most important discovery was, said it was the day that he discovered Jesus Christ. Of course I agree, but I am glad he got around to anesthesia too.
Even today, it’s not the top scientists that are fueling this supposed conflict between science and faith. The truth is that it seems the deeper people go into science the MORE apt they are, not the LESS apt, to believe in God or at least to leave the door open to the creator’s possibility. Albert Einstein, a Jew by birth, spent most of his life a staunch atheist, certain that man would, or at least was capable of, discovering all the mysteries of the universe. And yet the older and wiser he got, the more he discovered, the deeper he dug and the more confident he became of what science could and could not know, the more deeply religious he became. Albert Einstein died a devout Jew writing as one of his parting shots, “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist. Religion without science may be blind but science with religion is lame.” Stephen Hawkings, arguably the most brilliant scientist alive today, a self avowed atheist who has probed the universe more deeply than anyone else throughout all of history, began to have some doubts as to whether he could really continue to firmly disbelieve in God. In his book, Black holes and Baby Universes, Hawkings says, “Science may one day solve the problem of how the universe began, but it will never answer the question of why the universe bothers to exist in the first place.” Even Charles Darwin toward the end of his life said, “It is nearly impossible to conceive this immense and wonderful world, including man, to be the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a first cause having an intelligent mind and deserve to be called a theist.” Does that seem unbelievable to you? Does it feel like I must be making these things up? We don’t ever hear this stuff.
Perhaps the most fascinating thing about modern science is that every new discovery is making it harder and harder to believe that this was all just an accident. There is a lot of press these days over this concept of Intelligent Design. Bruce Baker, an astrophysicist out of Cal Tech, explains what scientists now know needed to happen from an astro-biological perspective just to set the stage for intelligent life to arise on our planet:
He says, “First you have to have the right kind of star; in this case a main sequence G2 Dwarf Star which is not that common in the galaxy but our Sun happens to be one. Next, that star must be exactly the right distance from the galactic center so that everything doesn’t fry from its radiation. Next, the orbit of the planet has to be just the right distance from the sun so that it’s not too hot or too cold. Astrobiology is a lot like Goldilocks; everything has to be just right. Next, the planet has to be the right size and mass and the atmosphere has to be just the right thickness. There has to be liquid water, the atmosphere has to be oxygen rich, there needs to be a large moon if the planet is to have a stable axis of rotation and not precess on its axis causing havoc with the seasons or just stand still causing one side of the world to burn up and the other to freeze over. There has to be a molten core in the center of the planet of just the right consistency to produce a magnetic field during rotation that shields the planet from solar wind. And it helps if the composition of the planet is just so, so that plate tectonics are possible so that you can get a carbon cycle going to circulate the carbon out of the crust and back into the atmosphere and so that the whole planet doesn’t end up under water.”
And you know what? That’s not even half of it! Not even half of the “astro” or the astro-biology that is necessary for life. Once you’ve met all the astro-physic pre-requisites, then you have to begin on the biological ones which is a much longer, more involved list. In fact, I guess secular scientists have recently attempted to calculate the odds of life forming under these conditions. They figure it is about 100 billion to one. One scientist, Chandra Wick-rama-sing-he, has said that this is basically the equivalent of taking a Boeing 747, which has about 6 million different parts, completely disassembling it, scattering it out over a football field and then waiting to see what happens. Throw in some lightning strikes, earthquakes, fires, floods, you name it, and then wait 13 billion years (which is science’s best guess at the age of the universe). Chandra says the statistical chances of life just happening to form on this planet are about the same as the chances of those parts forming themselves into a 747. Now, there are still many scientists who will say, “I know! I know! It’s unbelievable! 100 billion to one! That is precisely why it is such a mind blowing coincidence!” In the church we have a name for those kinds of coincidences. We call them miracles. Could it be fair to say that it might take as much imagination to NOT believe in God as it does to believe in him, that it might be easier to believe that God made something out of nothing than nothing made something out of nothing? Is it any wonder that even Einstein, Darwin and Hawkings began to believe?
So, if this antagonism is not coming from our top scientists, then why is it that so many people today seem to want to fuel this supposed war between science and faith? I realize that at times the church has closed its mind to science—like when we insisted the earth was flat—and that, at times, science discovers new things that challenge the way we are used to interpreting things in the Bible. BUT I think more often than not, the conflict comes from ordinary people, just like us, who simply are not sure that they want or are ready to believe in God—people who would rather cling to the illusion of believing that they are completely in control, that they are able, through their own mental abilities to study everything and figure it all out; people who think they can build levees, steer hurricanes and predict and control nature to make sense of things out of pure reason; people who would rather cling to their rugged independence than to face the implications of a living God who came into this world to die for us.
This longing for control is not just happening today and it is not just about science. This is the exact same thing that Paul was fighting against in our scripture passage this morning. Here, at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, Paul is struggling against the same conclusion that has been reached by two different audiences for two slightly different reasons. Both the Jews and the Greeks had made up their minds that Jesus Christ could not possibly have been the Son of God—the Jews because it just didn’t make sense according to their theology or their laws and the Greeks because it seemed totally unreasonable. Despite what it says in Isaiah 53 about a suffering servant, the Jews had never even conceived of a Messiah who might come and suffer. They looked to their law and it stated clearly in Deuteronomy 21 that “He who is hanged is accursed of God.” They didn’t need to look any further. The cross was impossible according to their world view. Jesus could not possibly have been the one they were waiting for. For the Greeks it was slightly different. For them the sticking point was that it didn’t make sense in their line of philosophical reasoning. Through the deductive methods taught to them by Aristotle and Plato, the Greeks had concluded that God could not possibly have any emotions. Their reasoning went like this: If God could feel joy or sorrow or anger or grief, logically it would mean that some human had affected God. And if a human being could affect God, than logically, in that moment, that human would be greater or more powerful than God. That obviously could never happen. Therefore, since God can never have any emotion, it is only logical that God could never have come into this world to suffer and die. To them it was an airtight, open and shut argument.
But Paul looks past their rationales. He goes under the surface and what he sees are people who are not so much unable as scared to believe in the cross of Jesus Christ. To Paul the real issue at stake was, “Is there a God?” If there is then all of our deductions, theologies and laws can only describe God’s activity. They can never control it. What Paul saw were people who were scared to let go of their control. And to them he says, “I know it is not theological, I realize that it breaks all of your laws of nature and defies your powers of deduction but that is what God does! God’s order of things makes our best explanations seem foolish in comparison and the foolishness of God is wiser than our wisest moment. Your theologies and philosophies, your laws, theories and science are all great, but God is so much more!” Even Newton’s theory or Newtonian Physics was deemed uncontestable until Einstein came along and showed us that Newton’s laws broke down for the very, very small (quantum mechanics) and the very, very fast (the Law of Relativity).
The longer I remain a Christian, the less contradiction I see between my faith and science. Perhaps I cling a little less tightly to my neatly packaged theologies as I allow science to inform my faith and my faith to shed light on and circumscribe the boundaries of my science. Perhaps I have just realized how much these two disciplines have in common. Both deal in evidence: science with the empirical evidence gathered to try to make sense of a physical, temporal world and faith with the evidence that points to what is going on behind what we can taste, touch, see and feel. Neither discipline can be proven once and for all and both require imagination. Both involve value judgments and each requires its own unique leap of faith.
You need faith to enter into either scientific study or the Christian life. In either case you need to commit yourself. You need to let go of your need to control and you need to be able to imagine, “What would it mean for the universe, this world, my life, if this were actually true?” And it’s not until you take that leap that you suddenly find that the things that seemed foolish before suddenly make sense. Time travel becomes possible and 747’s are created from a heap of scrap metal. Your wisdom becomes foolishness and God’s foolishness becomes your wisdom. Humility blossoms, assumptions are challenged, inquiry grows, laws are broken and cups are filled. It makes no sense but it no longer needs to make sense because in the most fundamental, the most empirical way of all, it works! And that is the real miracle of what God is doing in this universe, in this world and in our lives.
AMEN
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“I'd be Kicked out of the Einstein Club ”