“Can One Believe in Science and God? - Part 1”

Friday, May 03, 2024

Can One Believe in Science and God? - Part 1

By Tom Rose

We live in an age in which people all but worship the word 'science.’  In essence, science enables us to explain and understand how the universe, and the world in which we live, works and operates.  Yet because of this knowledge many have come to believe that science has made a belief in God unnecessary or obsolete.  Some think that one no longer needs to believe that God is behind the origin of life since many of its operations can be understood and explained by modern scientific inquiry and analysis.  Is such thinking valid?  What would you think if someone told you that airplanes did not have to be made by anyone, because we can understand and explain how they work and operate?

When one considers the topic of evolution, it is important to establish the meaning of several words.  Micro-evolution (also termed specialization) is easy to envision as a part of the natural world.  Varieties of flowers or domestic animals account for diversity within their kind.  For example, a breeder’s new rose creates a new species, but it is still a rose!  Macro-evolution, on the other hand, is a theory that all of the varieties of creatures we observe today developed by a gradual set of changes, over a very long time, from common ancestors.  Usually this theory includes the concept of life itself having developed from lifeless chemicals.  Micro-evolution is often mistakenly used as evidence for macro-evolution, but these are two vastly different concepts. There is no evidence that large changes above the “family” level (a taxonomy term) could occur or have ever occurred (e.g. the cat family with lions and tigers are distinct from the horse family with family with asses and zebras).

When Curt Sewel, a respected scientist, read The Genesis Flood, by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, he stated, “It made the entire Genesis account reasonable, in terms that were compatible with my knowledge of science .”  He then added, “I saw that the problem wasn’t with any kind of scientific measurement; the basic problem was the set of assumptions behind the theories.”  To illustrate, a foundation stone of modem science proclaims that everything in nature has always followed the laws of nature, and that these laws have always behaved in the same ways they do now.  This is known as the “Law of Uniformity.”  Implicit in this assumption, though seldom stated, is the belief that a supernatural event never took place.  Arguing that any such supernatural action, such as creation or a Noah flood, would have been a “singular event” that obviously could not be repeated in a scientific experiment, it must be placed outside the domain of science. In this way, the Genesis account is put aside as a non-scientific story, and is automatically ruled out of any scientific explanation.

(To Be Continued)

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