Conversations with an Atheist: part one

Conversations with an Atheist – part one
“God and Science”


Rev. Dr. Eddie Bromley Grace Church 4 January 2009
Genesis 1 and Genesis 2:1-4
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Genesis 1
The Account of Creation
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.[a] 2 The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day" and the darkness "night."
And evening passed and morning came, marking the first day.
6 Then God said, “Let there be a space between the waters, to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth.” 7 And that is what happened. God made this space to separate the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens. 8 God called the space “sky.” And evening passed and morning came, marking the second day.
9 Then God said, “Let the waters beneath the sky flow together into one place, so dry ground may appear.” And that is what happened. 10 God called the dry ground “land” and the waters “seas.” And God saw that it was good. 11 Then God said, “Let the land sprout with vegetation—every sort of seed-bearing plant, and trees that grow seed-bearing fruit. These seeds will then produce the kinds of plants and trees from which they came.” And that is what happened. 12 The land produced vegetation—all sorts of seed-bearing plants, and trees with seed-bearing fruit. Their seeds produced plants and trees of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. 13 And evening passed and morning came, marking the third day.
14 Then God said, “Let lights appear in the sky to separate the day from the night. Let them mark off the seasons, days, and years. 15 Let these lights in the sky shine down on the earth.” And that is what happened. 16 God made two great lights—the larger one to govern the day, and the smaller one to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set these lights in the sky to light the earth, 18 to govern the day and night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And evening passed and morning came, marking the fourth day.
20 Then God said, “Let the waters swarm with fish and other life. Let the skies be filled with birds of every kind.” 21 So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that scurries and swarms in the water, and every sort of bird—each producing offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 Then God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply. Let the fish fill the seas, and let the birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And evening passed and morning came, marking the fifth day.
24 Then God said, “Let the earth produce every sort of animal, each producing offspring of the same kind—livestock, small animals that scurry along the ground, and wild animals.” And that is what happened. 25 God made all sorts of wild animals, livestock, and small animals, each able to produce offspring of the same kind. And God saw that it was good. 26 Then God said, “Let us make human beings[b] in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”
27 So God created human beings[c] in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
28 Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.”
29 Then God said, "Look! I have given you every seed-bearing plant throughout the earth and all the fruit trees for your food.30 And I have given every green plant as food for all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, and the small animals that scurry along the ground—everything that has life.” And that is what happened. 31 Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good! And evening passed and morning came, marking the sixth day.

Genesis 2
1 So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. 2 On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested[a] from all his work. 3 And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.
4 This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth.
L: The Word of God for the people of God.
P: Thanks be to God
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A number of ideas found in this sermon came from Anthony Flew’s wonderful book, There is a God: How the world’s most notorious atheist changed his mind. I highly recommend this book to any interested in the relationship between faith and science.

Has science eliminated humanity’s “need” for God?

Oxford Biologist, Richard Dawkins says “yes.” According to Dawkins, religion provided an explanation of the world to primitive people; however, we are not primitive anymore. We have learned a great deal about the nature and origins of our universe and ourselves, thus, we have no further need of the “god-hypothesis.” The word God, in his view, has lost all of its explanatory power.

In this sermon, I want to take this charge head on and offer some rebuttals to the claim that science has eliminated our need for God. But, before I do this, we need to look at the Scriptures together; because, for Christian people this is our starting place. For any atheists we may have here today, this may not sit well with you. That’s okay. We are not asking you to accept our beliefs because the Bible says you should. I will try to make an appeal to any atheists or agnostics we may have with us today on other grounds; but for the Christians here today, I want to start with the Scriptures. So, let’s talk about the creation stories found in Genesis.

Let’s talk about What Genesis does and doesn’t say

The Protestant Reformation taught us that all Christians should read and seek to understand and apply the Bible to their lives. Reading Scripture is not just something for priests and pastors to do. That said we need to know that the Protestant idea is that Christians should seek to understand the Bible for themselves not by themselves.

This means we should always read the Word of God in the context of the whole Body of Christ, taking into consideration how the various parts of the Bible have been understood throughout the centuries. This is of course a huge task and one that cannot be done perfectly or completely. But, we should read the Scriptures in light of all the guidance we have available to us personally. This means being a student of the Word, being diligent to read the Bible with the best spiritual and intellectual capacities we have.

I have sought to do this very thing all of my life as a Christian. And as I have studied the book of Genesis, I have learned that there have historically been a number of ways in which it has been read and understood by the Church. Sure, some have read the first creation account of Genesis and come to the conclusion that our world was made in 7 24-hour days. But other important teachers in the Church, both ancient and modern, have read an understood the account in another way. Which brings us to an important topic that often comes up when discussing the Bible and specifically the creation accounts.

Are we to read these accounts literally?

G. K Chesterton, the great Christian writer of the early 20th century was once asked if he read the Bible literally. He answered by saying, the Bible says that King Herod was an old fox; but, I don’t take that to mean he had pointy ears and a fluffy tail. Yes, I believe the Bible to be completely truthful and reliable; yet I don’t take this to mean that when reading it I am not required to giving what I am reading a great deal of thought. When we read the Bible, we need to give attention to type of writing we are dealing with: the Bible contains poetry, stories, legal writing, history and many of genres of writing. Different parts of the Bible were written at different points in time, by different human authors and for various different audiences. All of this must be taken into consideration when we study the Bible.

And yet, I say all of this while holding on to a very high view of the Scriptures. I believe what the Church says when it tells us that Bible is God’s message, it is His Word, fully reliable and containing all that is needed for living the life of faith. And it is precisely because of this high view of Scripture that Christians have always felt appropriate to ask hard questions of our God’s Word. So as we look at Genesis one together we notice a number of things about the creation account.

First we see that we may or may not be dealing with literal 24-hour days.

The Hebrew word for day used in Genesis one is the word “Yom” and can mean simply a 24 hour day. However it can mean an indefinite period of time, such as when someone says, “Back in mom’s day girls didn’t act like that.” When used in this way, our English word means simply a period of time. The Hebrew word “yom” can be used this way too.

When you first read Genesis one, each of the seven days mentioned have an evening and a morning, the usual way of speaking of a normal day from Jewish point of view, and so you might think that the creation account all happens in 7 normal, 24-hour days. But upon closer inspection, another possibility comes into view.

[Make the below a PP slide]

DAY ONE DAY FOUR
The Heavens and the earth Moon and Sun


DAY TWO DAY FIVE
The Seas and the Skies Water Creatures and Flying Animals


DAY THREE DAY SIX
Dry Land and Vegetation Animals and People

[end pp here]

If by word day we mean how long it takes for the world to be spin in relationship to the sun, it really is difficult to understand what we are to mean by day for the first three days of creation, since we do not even get a sun until the fourth day. This would be our first hint that Genesis one may have something to tell us other than the time frame in which God created the world.

Instead, Genesis one is showing us how God created our world in such a way that each piece fits. God first creates a place for the stars, sun, and moon to belong; then he creates in day-four the stars, moon, and sun. In day two he creates seas and skies, and then in day five makes animals suitable to each environment. The whole point being that God has created our world with love and care, each piece having a place.

Folks like Dawkins hate and mistrust the Faith because they think that it is a show stopper when it comes to science. Dawkins says the following:

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. Richard Dawkins

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” Richard Dawkins

“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.” Richard Dawkins

A launching pad for the scientific endeavor

Far from being incompatible with science, Judeo/Christian faith provided the perfect context in which science could bud and grow because our faith teaches us to expect the world to make sense. A Biblical world view encourages us to assume that our world will make sense because it has been put together by marvelous creator. The Jews and Christians believed this, but not all ancient people did.

Many in the ancient world believed there world to be a dark confusing world of chaos, in which some parts of the cosmos were ruled by some gods and other parts ruled by other gods. They believed that some information was forbidden for man to know. Stories like Prometheus giving the technology of fire to human kind taught the ancients that there were some avenues of information into which we should not look.

We should not be surprised that Science would come to bloom in Western culture, because as Christianity and Judaism made their way into the West, they encountered thinkers like Plato, who believed that our world has a logical order to it. Christianity and Judaism affirmed this notion, saying; yes our world is orderly and can be understood, because an orderly creator has made it so. Biblical faith is not something we believe in spite of the evidence. It is trusting what God has told us about our world; and far from letting us down, believing that our world has been logically ordered by a loving creator has created the context in which scientific exploration has soared.


All good and well; but having provided the context for science to grow and flourish, does a mature scientific culture have any longer a need for God? Has science replaced our need for faith?

The vital question science can never answer: Should we do it?

Science plays an indispensible role in helping us to answer questions about how things work, but it fails miserably along the question of whether or not something should be done. It fails, not because scientist are not moral people, but simply because science does not provide any help in answering questions about whether something should be done.

Science has helped us to split the atom, but cannot help us distinguish the moral difference between splitting the atom for heating homes and splitting the atom for the purpose of eliminating 100,000 people.

Science has helped us decode the genome, but is useless in answering questions about whether it is right or wrong to clone people for medical testing.

Science has provided a number of technologies that have made our lives easier and more convenient, but offers us little in the way of reflecting on what responsibility we may have in monitoring the impact some of these technologies may have on the environment.


For all of these questions and more, Science needs the faith in helping to sort through the ethical side of technical issues.

Please here me; I am not saying that Christians and Jews are the only people with the moral tools for sorting through these ethical issues. But people like Richard Dawkins have certainly tried to exclude people of faith from the conversation. The ethical issues of our day involve and concern the human race, and unfortunately Dawkins and others would exclude the communities of faith from the conversation, thus disenfranchising 90 percent or more of all the people in our world. I believe this would be both an unnecessary and foolish thing to do, asking communities with thousands of years of collective wisdom to back out of the conversation and let technicians do all of the important decision making about what should and should not be done. This is an especially foolish thing to do, when science provides absolutely nothing in the way of tools for deciding these types of questions.

All that science can answer is how something can be done, not whether or not it should be done.

Difficult questions

Science loves a good question. And, I want to be careful in how I make the next point. Sometimes Christians and Jews fall into the trap of making a “god-of-the-gaps” by trying to prove the existence of God by finding a question science cannot yet answer, such as how did animals come to have eyes; “betcha can’t explain that one.” And once the scientist comes up with an answer, the believer says, well “I betcha can’t explain this.”

God does not need the gaps in our understanding in order to have a place to exist. For Christians and Jews, God is the Reason for existence itself. When we speak of God, we mean that a that the most real reality of existence itself if a personal being, whom we refer to as God. For Judaism and Christianity, a Personal being is what is most fundamentally real.

Atheist would want to answer by saying, we don’t need a personal God to explain what we know about reality. But, contrary to popular opinion among atheists, science is simply incapable of wrapping things up so neatly, and putting a little bow and this completely airtight explanation of things.

The myth goes a little something like this: All you need a matter, plus energy, plus a lot of time and presto, you have yourself an organized universe, well equipped with life and everything. In fact, this explanation lacks a lot. For example, in the earliest days of evolutionary biology it was assumed that a cell was very simple and thus, for a starting point, it did not seem much of a jump to move from inorganic material to a living cell. We now know that a cell is vastly more complex than a modern factory.

So to mock Christian scientists, one atheist has called the Intelligent Design movement the “Wow Man! Cells are so complex” movement. But in fact, they are rather complex; making the explanation of how we get from inorganic material to a living cell much more difficult.

Laying all that aside, we need to face how mathematically improbable it is to get to life to evolve by chance. To illustrate the point, we need to look at what Gerry Schroeder calls the monkey theorem.
[The monkey theorem] refers to an experiment conducted by the British National Council of the Arts. A computer was placed in a cage with six monkeys. After a month of hammering away the monkeys produced fifty typed pages but not a single word. Schroeder noted that this was the case even though the shortest word in the English language is one letter (I or a). A is a word only if there is a space on either side of it. If we take it that the keyboard has thirty characters, then the likelihood of getting a one-letter word is 30 times 30 times 30, which is 27,000. The likelihood of getting a one-letter word is one chance out of 27,000. Schroeder then applied the probabilities to a Shakespearean sonnet. All sonnets are fourteen lines long, with approximately 488 letters.
Mathematically, it becomes so improbable that you would get a sonnet by chance, that if you were to fill the universe with computers, each working since the beginning of our universe, you would still not have one sonnet by chance. (Page 76-77 of Flew’s book). Why is this important, because the protein sequences needed for even the simplest life form are vastly more complex than a sonnet by the Great Bard.

Dawkins and others try to work around this problem, because given enough time, the improbable becomes probable. This is not helpful for two reasons. First, modern astronomers and physicist tell us our universe has not been around forever but has been around 10-16 billion years; which is not enough time to solve our dilemma. Second, if our universe had been around forever, you have the mathematical problem of answering how we ever got to this point in the story because the time before now would be infinity.

All this is said, not to say that Dawkins and others haven’t done a great deal to reveal much about the nature of life. I am not a scientist, but I have read most of Dawkin’s scientific work. Having read it, I can’t honestly say that evolution doesn’t explain a great deal. I could not debate Dawkins on this subject; but having read his work, I did not walk away doubting what the Bible says about creation. If anything my reaction was, if this is the mechanism by which God created life on earth, I am all the more amazed at the work of God’s hands.

But science is still a long ways away from offering an adequate explanation of life, especially one based on the proposition that it all happened by chance. Dawkins would say that it is not really by chance, but the very properties of our physical reality are such that inorganic matter will become simple life and simple life will become complex life. If this is so, ought not we to be more amazed that this would be the case.

But alas, there are questions to which science will never have an answer:

Questions it can never answer

What is real beauty? What makes life worth living? What is the purpose of life? What can bring peace and fulfillment? Does all of this really matter?

Colossians 1:15ff

15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation,[e] 16 for through him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see— such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him. 17 He existed before anything else, and he holds all creation together.

What Christians can do to influence the direction and science and mathematical fields.

1. Encourage educational progress in the sciences and in mathematics.
2. Encourage young Christians who have an aptitude in the sciences to pursue them as a vocation.
3. Be a part of the cultural conversation.
4. Educate yourself about advances in science and math.
5. Make a commitment to being a life-long learner.