I’m going into some awkward territory today. It’s a little like what it was like when I tried out one of the new exercises on the Wii Fit Plus we’ve got at home. It’s a video game that’s supposed to help you get fit and one of the exercises has you stand on the Wii Fit board and move your hips to hit numbered mushrooms that appear on the screen. Hit the right mushrooms to add up to 20 and you’ve succeeded. My family enjoyed watching me try this out because it combined two of my worst features – math and balance – to great comic effect.
Well, today’s sermon does something similar. We are beginning a series today on faith and science which means that I will have to combine two more of my worst features – understanding science and talking about it. There is a reason I am not a scientist. But I think it is worth doing because there are many people who believe that faith and science cannot coexist.
On the one side there are people who are so steeped in the scientific method that they think of religious belief as something akin to superstition. When you believe that science is the only reliable road to truth, then religion seems archaic and unhelpful. When you believe that nature is all there is, there seems to be no point in talking about meaning and purpose. Ideas of the soul and of eternity have no significance. There is no Creator and theology just seems to be a lot of invented language with no evidence to support it. Why do we need God or faith when I can explain the universe without reference to either of them?
On the other hand, there are believers who feel that science is a great threat to Christian belief. Ever since Galileo had his famous run-in with the Catholic Church in the 1600s because he refused to recant his belief that the earth revolved around the sun (and not vice-versa), there has been tension in the air between faith and science. The tension became intense in the 19th century when Charles Darwin introduced the idea of evolution. The effect of these discoveries was to suggest that human beings had a different role in the world than Christians had assumed. If the sun didn’t revolve around us, then we occupied a place in the universe that didn’t seem as central as it used to. If creatures were evolving and had ancestors who looked quite different, then was that true for human beings, too? What, then, do we make of the biblical accounts of creation? What of the special role of humanity within creation – made in the image of God? What was that image and where was that God? Some Christians decided it was all a plot by scientists to destroy faith altogether.
I’m going to mark out some territory between those two poles today, recognizing that I still have a lot of questions, many of which are not going to get answered. I don’t believe that the discoveries of science have done away with the need for faith. We have learned a whole lot from the pursuit of truth in science. We know so much more about where and how and when the universe came into being and what the history of life in it has been. Science is great at answering those questions. It’s not so great at other questions that we also want to know the answers to – things like why the universe was created or what its character is – whether there is purpose and meaning in its history and what the significance of human life is. These are questions that take a different sort of knowing. I believe that faith is proper realm for asking these sorts of questions and the kind of truth we get by going to the Bible and to our experiences of God is still truth, though it may not have scientific evidence.
I also don’t believe that we have to reject science in order to pursue this truth, though. Astronomical discoveries, natural selection, the theory of relativity – all of these things challenge the way we understand God and they blow my mind – but they aren’t things we have to reject out of hand in order to hold on to our belief. In their own way, they expand our knowledge of the wonder and majesty of the universe. It is more grand and more intricate than we ever imagined. That doesn’t mean that God has disappeared – it just means that we have more ways to marvel and more language to do it in. As the psalmist says in Psalm 8, “When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” [Psa. 8:3-4]. That could have been uttered by a shepherd two thousand years ago looking into the night sky over Palestine or an astronomer peering into the deepness of space using the Hubble telescope.
So my opening response to the question of whether I believe that faith and science can co-exist is similar to the response of the man who was asked whether he believed in infant baptism. “Believe it?” he said. “Heck, I’ve seen it!” I have seen faith and science work together because I’ve seen it in my own life. Galileo himself was a man of faith and he said something that seems to me just right: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."[i] In other words, why would God give us the tools of science and forbid us to follow where they lead in understanding this universe?
Now this is where I get a little intimidated by the science. The picture of the universe that modern science presents us with is so vast that it does make us human beings seem very small. For many years we had a much shorter chronology for telling the history of the universe. When the Archbishop James Ussher used his interpretation of the Bible timeline to calculate the origins of the universe in 1654 he famously determined that it began on the evening before the 23rd of October in 4004 BC, right about suppertime.
A universe which began 6,000 years ago and in which human beings have existed since, O, about the 29th of October, 4004 BC, is comprehensible. But what if the days that Genesis describes were not twenty-four hour days? What if Genesis presents us with a picture of a process that took place over millennia, eons, vast stretches of time?
Astronomers looking into the origin of the universe now tell us that it all began almost 14 billion years ago – an almost unimaginable length of time. George Coyne, a Jesuit priest who used to direct the Vatican Observatory, tries to put it all in perspective by comparing that vast stretch of time to a single year. If we consider the Big Bang that created the universe to be the event that starts the year on January 1, then it took over 7 months before the earth took a form somewhat like we know it. August 14 would be the birth of the earth. It took three generations of stars living and dying to sow the chemical abundance that led to life on earth. Even so, it was not until September 4 in this imagined year that the first life appeared on earth. Dinosaurs did not appear until December 25. They didn’t go extinct until December 30. And the first humans appear on December 31 at 11:58 PM. If the whole cosmic history is likened to a single year, we humans have been here for two minutes.[ii]
This is the kind of timeline that makes some of the New Athiests say that it is irrelevant to talk about a God and human relationship with humans occupying such a microscopic portion of the story of the universe. Richard Dawkins, who is one of these prominent New Athiests says, “Deep time makes theology superfluous.”[iii] If the Creator was so concerned about making people, why did it take billions of years and what seems like an accidental process?
Albert Einstein, the great physicist of the 20th century, was not ready to stop talking about God, but he also thought that new discoveries about the nature of time and space made the idea of a personal God hard to hold onto. He could see the beauty of the underlying laws that bring a sense of order to the universe, but he could not imagine a narrative that made God more than the author of the whole thing. He couldn’t imagine a God you would talk to – pray to.
We do talk about that kind of God, though. We do talk about a God who is more than just a great clockmaker, putting the universe together like a finely-made clock and winding it up to work on its own without any more involvement from the maker. Maybe the God we read about in Genesis 1 might be that kind of God – speaking and bringing things into being…keeping an observer’s distance. But it’s certainly not the God of Genesis 2 who gets down in the mud and makes a human, breathing into its nostrils. A God who sees the loneliness of the human creature and makes a woman. A God who walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. And it’s a long way from the God who is born in a manger and eats by the lakeshore and washes feet and dies on a cross to free the people from death and sin.
Can we tell that story and still believe that the universe is the vast thing that astrophysicists tell us that it is? Is it reasonable to believe that we, who exist in just the blink of an eye on the grand scale of things, can really be the object of a Creator’s love and care?
What if the very fact that we are asking these questions points to the unique role that we play in this universe? Paul Davies, who is a physicist himself, says that “if the laws of physics hadn’t been pretty close to what they are, there would be no life. There would be no observers” of the universe.
“Now, sometimes we just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what.’ You know, ‘if it had been different, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.’ But I think that’s unsatisfactory...because the universe has not only given rise to life, it’s not only given rise to mind, it’s given rise to thinking beings who can comprehend the universe. Through science and mathematics, we can, so to speak, glimpse the mind of God…And I think that this suggests…that life and mind are not just trivial extras. They’re not just an embellishment on the grand scheme of things; they’re a fundamental part of the nature of the universe.”[iv]
Which means that science may lead us to a more faithful understanding of who God made us to be. Maybe a universe that is much, much bigger than us, much bigger than we thought and of which we occupy only a tiny corner, can give us more humility. Maybe a world in which we share more with the creatures around us than we let ourselves believe before can give us more compassion for our fellow beings and more concern for this habitat we all share. Maybe a universe that is still evolving can help us understand that there is still a story to be told. The story of the ages is still unfolding and the creation remains unfinished and we have appeared in these latter days of the drama to play a role and to take our part as co-creators with God.
When we talk about creation in the Bible we usually look to Genesis to tell the story, but there are other books that tell some of that story. Psalm 104 describes God stretching out the heavens like a tent and setting the boundaries of the sea. The gospel of John begins with, “In the beginning was the Word – the pre-existent Christ who helped to form it.” And Job ends with God appearing to put poor, suffering Job in his place.
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” God thunders. “Who sends thunder and who is present when the beasts of the field need food and protection?” The answer is God. All through these final chapters of Job, God talks about a world that is wild and gritty and untamed. But it is also a world without humans. Everything God talks about is about God’s care for the creatures and the land.
So why does God tell Job this? John Holbert, a biblical scholar at Perkins School of Theology, says that perhaps God describes the world this way to show that “we are a part of God’s created order – simply a part.” And the amazing thing is that we are invited to join God in the wildness and the wonder – taking on the fight against chaos and evil, in confidence that God opposes it and has overcome it, and marveling in the majesty.[v]
The biblical story tells us this. Science can help us in this. They do not have to be alien methods. They can speak to each other and sometimes with each other.
The energy Christians have put into fighting evolution is misplaced. Yes, evolution is an inadequate way to talk about the creation of human beings. Every scientific model is inadequate and is only waiting the next discovery to be remade or replaced. But evolution, the Big Bang, quarks and dark energy are not deceptions. They represent the best attempts within the language of science to describe the world. Scientists are teaching us how to be better lovers of the universe God has created. And when we are steeped in our own story of how God is reconciling all things to God’s own self in Jesus Christ, we are offering the world the language that will help us love God and live out of that love. Thanks be to God.
“We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological, and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.” - from The United Methodist Church’s statement on Science and Technology, The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church 2008, para. 160.F.
Genesis 1:1-4 [NRSV]
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
[i] Galileo Galilei, quote from the radio program “Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God,” Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, April 1, 2010, American Public Radio, http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/asteroids/transcript.shtml.
[ii] Chart provided by Fr. George Coyne, from the radio program “Asteroids, Stars and the Love of God,” Speaking of Faithhttp://blog.speakingoffaith.org/post/491338401/the-dance-of-the-fertile-universe-trent-gilliss. with Krista Tippett, April 1, 2010, American Public Radio,
[iii] Richard Dawkins, quoted by Dr. John F. Haught, “Biblical Faith and Evolution,” Fondren Lecture delivered 1 February 2010 at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, author’s notes.
[iv] Paul Davies, in Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit, [New York: Penguin Books, 2010], e-book location 585-594.
[v] John Holbert, “Preaching and Creation: The Convenient Texts of Genesis and Job,” delivered 1 February 2010 at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, author’s notes.
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