When you mention that science is the best evidence for God I’m not sure exactly what you mean. Intelligent Design? Gaps around cosmic origins?
Looks like an interesting book, coming from your background in youth ministry and science.
Thank you for the comment. To me intelligent design, if you choose to accept it, is a good reason. There are just too many information based complex mechanisms in nature and particularly in biology that occur by chance.
Also the creation process and the preciseness of the physical constants in the universe that make the earth a habitable planet. If you look at the Cosmological Constant, which governs the expnsion rate of the universe it is precise to 10 to the 120th power. That is a decimal plus 120 zeroes. I do not know of any physicist today who doew not declare that the level of preciseness is beyon chance and strongly suggest some intelligent source behind it. Well this is where faith comes in and those with faith believe that source is God. So for me, and I cannot speak for others, all of the information seems to speak to a creator and as I say we call the source God. Even, as I pont out in my coming new book, if you align the sequence of events in Genesis 1 with the evidence from Archeology, Geology and Paleontology the sequence matches well. I am sure the writers of Genesis were unaware of the scientific support given to the creation story so again sounds like a creator to me and an intelligent one itself.
I believe in lowercase ‘id’ and know who is sovereign over chance. A significant statement in my progression from OEC/ID to accepting the science of evolution was from a molecular biologist:
…the most common mutations, transitions, are not really ‘copying errors,’ because the keto-enol transition of the base is driving them and the polymerase is working correctly. So if you’d like, that can be seen as providence more than chance.
I came across a youtube channel called “Useful Charts” which includes some great discussions on The Bible and world religions. It takes a strongly academic approach (i.e. “liberal”) approach to the topics, but I think the youtuber (Matt Baker) does a great job of being both frank and respectful. He is also a practicing Jew, if that is important for anyone.
In two of his videos he discusses the possibility that there is an atheist “personality”. In other words, is our personality one of the driving forces that pushes us towards or away from religion.
Wouldn’t you know it, I fall into the personality type most associated with atheists. It is also a personality type that is associated with technical fields like science. I am very skeptical of his findings, partly because they seem attractive to me. I also think Baker himself doesn’t think he has found some magic bullet that explains everything. However, it is intriguing.
This makes me wonder if the title of the thread is confusing cause and effect. It could be that the type of people attracted to higher education, especially in technical fields, are the type of people that tend to leave the faith. Of course, this is not a 1:1 correlation. There will be many people who buck the trends. And yet . . . I can’t help but feel that there is something deeper connecting education and views on religion.
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Of course the unbeliever will cite the self-selection effect, but I like this response to that argument:
I believe in God , specifically Yahweh and his son Jesus Christ , but I don’t personally believe in a fine tuned universe or intelligent design. I feel the argument could be made for everything such as what are the chances that hydrogen and oxygen both just happen to develop and then be in the same spot at the same time to make water and so on. But I don’t think that the existence of water is a good argument for intelligent design just like I don’t see it as a good argument for anything personally in science. But I still agree it’s by faith that I believe in our creator and I believe he had some kind of role in cosmology but I think it won’t be evident just like a chance encounter at a book store where you run into someone whose car broke down and so they are there waiting for it to be fixed and that encounter turns out to be the first time you’ve met your significant other. Could God have played a role? Sure. Did God override free will or make y’all both get interested in books at a young age and blow up an engine ot something? I doubt it.
I also don’t think genesis 1 aligns very well.
Light before the sun? No.
Angiosperms before fish? No.
Birds before crawling and walking tetrapods? No.
It’s actually not lining up at all really.
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Thanks again. You bring up very important points.I have had simllar observations regarding the creation steps but Genesis 1 is still pretty close considering the writers of Genesis even though inspired had no concept of how creation came about from a science standpoint.
I think of light before the sun in Genesis 2 as not the sun but taken on face value God created light and of course without light there is darkness. Sort of a universal light not yet specific to earth. Just a thought.
Regarding the water and everthing else think about this. Read Ephesians 1: 4-10. What you see there is that before the creation of the world (universe) God had predermined that man (You and I ) would be found holy and blameless in his sight through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That is before time God had predetermined that he would accomplish the above. But there was no creation, no man to be found holy and blameless, no sin to be found holy and blameless from and Jesus was yet to come. This is God’s plan of salvation before the creation of the world.
Now think about that. If it all had to be created and God knew the outcome everything in creation including H2O came about as a result of creation. Water was esential for life and I believe part of the design.
Atheist like to quote Carl Sagan who said “The Cosmos is all there is.” Well no, God’s plan of salvation was before the Cosmos. The Cosmos was just part of the plan.
You are right. Without faith all of the above means nothing.
Any thoughts on life in our Galaxy or others?
Thanks for the discourse.
I appreciate the conversation as well. I think we just both come at this subject very differently. To different for there to really be to much common ground and implications.
As for life on other planets I just have no idea. I believe there is probably bacteria or even something similar to animals out there somewhere or some form of life that’s so different from ours like a AI driven prion or something. I think there may even be intelligent life out there somewhere and I believe that God would have also accommodated their cultures and perhaps the Holy Spirit manifested as flesh there too. But there is no proof. Maybe Cixin Liu ( horror and science fiction writer ) is right and there is a micro universe out there lol.
I have found several congregations where I feel welcome, where the emphasis of the leadership, and attitude of the community is quite like what Knor talks about, three different ones where I was a member, in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Virginia. There are some of these in the USA!
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Yes I’m sure you’re right and in Berkeley, California I’m sure most churches would be more progressive. But for me, worship isn’t anything I look for even though I do appreciate communicating with others with a high regard for the sacred which I’ve been able to do here with quite a few. If only there wasn’t the constant yapping of those few who take it upon themselves to tell me what God thinks of me as if they had any clue at all. Any who don’t take to heart Jesus’ message in John 13 and Paul’s in Cor. 11:1 obviously aren’t talking about the same sacred as I have in mind. If only they would love themselves just a little less vigorously and find more humility perhaps they would be more forebearing.
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Are you talking about creationism? If not, then what? Certainly, the church is going to lose many young people if it tells them false things, like claiming the earth is young, or that they can change their sexual orientation.
In general I would say it depends on the person. Are you the sort of person who believes what you are told or do you question and think through things yourself. On the other hand, when it comes to the type of church that would say education is a threat, they are not going to do so well in the first place at holding onto the people who think and question. How can a church teach its people to simply believe what they are told and yet expect them not to believe when they are told something different?
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What is your view on Fred Hoyle’s statement regarding the Cosmological constant?
The church needs to teach both sides of any issue or at least reference what the students learn in science class versus the church position. But the church needs to do its own research on its traditional interpretations and on things taught in school. It would fund that much can be acepted under the umbrella that it is the way God did it. To the Bible says what God did. Science tells us how He did it and it is very remarkable and getting more so.
A glaring example is creation. It takes nothing away from the faith to show that evidence supports that creation was over billions of years or that people lived on the earth before Adam and Eve were created. In fact I believe it strengthens the faith when scripture aligns with evidence.
You raise some good thoughts. Let me respond with what I believe. Let’s take the water example as a result od intelligent design. Water molecules are made in space and it is believed that water got to earth by way of water laden asteroids about the same time that the earth was formed, 4.6 Billions of years ago. Accident? Maybe, but on anything about creation one has to consder not only Genesis 1:1 but Ephesisns 1: 4-10, i.e., our salvation was planned before the creation of the world. Awsome stuff!! But back to water H2O. Consider that the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atoms are held together by the nuclear forces of the atom known as electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. These forces have to be very precise or we would not have water and in turn no life. Is it by accident that these forces are so precise?
I think your statement “what are the chances that hydrogen and oxygen both just happen to develop and then be in the same spot at the same time to make water and so on” is a great description of an intelligent involvement in the making of water.
Re free will, God allows it. He could overide but let’s us choose.
Re the alighnment of Genesis , I am talking about an alignment in general. The writers of Genesis had no idea of the biological order of things.
Re the light. I am sure there was light in a created universe and a corresponding darkness. The sun, earth and moon came later. Just my thoughts, cannot prove. I arrive at this thought because science believes the earth was formed after the sun and the moon after the earth. So perhaps Genesis 1:2 speaks to the period before the moon’s creation as a result of a massive body colliding with earth. When the moon is created is what Genesis 1: 14-16 is describing.
Admittedly, I am trying to fit science with scripture here in the form of an explanation. Thanks for the communication.
Not to mention that Genesis 1 contradicts Genesis 2
And when it doesn’t align with the evidence?
For someone like me, coming from the scientific world view and thus a scientist before being a Christian, that makes that aspect of scripture simply meaningless. For example in Genesis chapter 1 the order of creation makes that aspect of the text meaningless and thus the only meaning I find is simply the point that sun, moon, stars, plants, and animals are creations of God rather than gods themselves.
But for Genesis 2… I see no reason to make it all into just some vague metaphor. Nothing in science precludes two particular people from existing over 6,000 years ago. But created like necromancy golems from dust and bone in a place with magical fruit and talking animals? That is too divorced from reality to take literally, and the Bible doesn’t take it completely literally either. But I found it could fit with reality and science and still be historical with a little symbolism.
We can have God creating man of the stuff of the earth and bringing the human mind to life with divine inspiration. The Bible suggests the snake is an angel who became our adversary. The tree of life representing a relationship with God since that is the source of eternal life in evangelical Christianity. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is more troublesome and theories vary a great deal. For me it makes the most sense if this represents the authority to say what is good and evil since that is something fraught with danger and great potential for derailing human life. In that context the story makes a great deal of sense to me and the “curse” fits the consequences you can expect in real life.
And Noah’s flood? Do I think human civilization can get so bad that “the imagination of every thought is only evil continually?” I do. I think recent history with Nazism, communism, child soldiers, and other abominations demonstrate this quite clearly. Also important to me is the anguish I see in a God who goes from thinking His creation is “very good” to regretting that He created man at all. Whether such a thing actually happened looks to me like a critically important thing to understand. And thus to dismiss this as nothing but a parable loses to much. But a global flood? nonsensical. But in a text where the earth is never described as a planet or a globe but at best only a small portion of a planet, there is little reason to take the Bible to mean any such thing.
In this way I avoid both extremes of excessive literalism and excessive metaphor to seek the most meaning from the text.
Why didn’t you address my previous statement?
You mean there is one church position?
Water really is an amazing molecule. But if intelligent design is involved we should ask why humans were not given gills.
Which, the ‘fudge factor’ one?