Mere Science and Christian Faith

Bridging the Divide with Emerging Adults

Greg Cootsona

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780830838141
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830887415
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Many Christians have been brought up under the assumption that mainstream science is incompatible with genuine Christian faith—so when they see compelling evidence for biological evolution, for example, they feel forced to choose between science and their faith. The devastating effects of this dilemma are plain to see, as emerging adults either leave the faith or shut themselves off to the findings of the scientific community.But it's a false dilemma. In this book, Greg Cootsona argues against the idea that science and faith are inherently antagonistic. We don't have to keep them scrupulously separated—instead, we can bring them into dialogue with one another. Cootsona brings this integration to a number of current topics in science andfaith conversations, including hermeneutics, the historical Adam and Eve, cognitive science, and the future of technology. His insights are enhanced by his work with Fuller Seminary's STEAM research project.Emerging adults want to believe that science and faith can coexist peacefully. Mere Science and Christian Faith holds out a vision for how that integration is possible and how it can lead us more deeply into the conversations around science and faith that confront the church today.

CREATION,
BEAUTY,
and
SCIENCE

The world doesn’t want to mention both religion and science in the same sentence. But it shouldn’t be that way.

ELIANA, AGE 18

One summer not too long ago, when my daughter Melanie was about to head to college, I found myself on a backpacking trip with her, a number of other high schoolers from our church, and their parents. We were making our way through the lower reaches of the Sierra Nevadas, where stunning, speckled-grsolideyish granite filled our view. Our group of about sixteen had just left the beauties of California Highway 20 as it wound its way past the former mining town of Nevada City and climbed for a couple dozen miles through glorious pine forests. We arrived at a dirt road, full of divots and ruts, which we drove for several miles until we arrived at a parking lot near the trailhead. It was a warm summer Sierra morning with the hint of a few clouds. Backpacks filled with tents, sleeping bags, freeze-dried food, a few clothes, toiletries, and the like, we began our hike toward the Five Lakes Basin.

I thought the primary point of the trip was to get to the camping spot on Grouse Ridge. But on the way, Ella, the seven-year-old daughter of the trip leader and youth pastor, taught me something surprising. As we worked our way up the trail, she found beautiful rocks and brought them to her father, who had a degree in geology.

“Aren’t these amazing? Isn’t this one really pretty, Dad?”

He affirmed her discoveries and dutifully collected each of her finds (which gradually filled and weighed down his backpack). Once a rock was deposited, Ella would run off and search.

“Here’s another one, Dad! Look at the colors!” It was an implicit and exuberant celebration of the goodness of creation. “This one’s even prettier!”

Ella’s exclamations about geological beauty probably don’t sound as significant as a fresh proposal for unifying quantum and relativity theories, but later I remarked to myself, “What Ella did—that’s the beginning of science.”

I later recalled a science and theology conference, particularly a discussion with a biologist who simply stated, “I find biological science fascinating and have ever since I was young. In fact, every scientist I know began with a profound experience with nature as a child.”

It was my Outdoor Education class in fifth grade, when my classmates and I discovered banana slugs among the redwoods along moist dirt paths in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a chemistry set my friend received as a present for her eleventh birthday that helped her begin to find the joys of how chemicals interact. It was “just being fascinated as a kid by the bugs in the cracks of the sidewalk—I simply had to study them for hours,” a PhD student in biochemistry said when describing the beginning of his life as a scientist.

As Ella’s surprise and discovery that summer showed, the love of the surprisingly intricate beauty of nature is the beginning of science. This experience is intuitive in our early years of life—God created the world; let’s figure out how to understand it.

Kids know this, but they’re not the only ones who do. The great astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus observed, “The universe has been wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator.” That order led Copernicus to study the organization of the solar system and to rethink the configuration of the planets with our sun. (Enter heliocentrism.) Copernicus began with a conviction that God’s good creation invites us to investigate. In our day, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health—and also a follower of Jesus—once commented, “I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God’s creation.” And though Collins is quite clear that nature can’t prove God’s existence, studying God’s works leads him—and us—to recognize fingerprints of God the Worker.

Collins, Copernicus, and Ella all agree. And they’ve got the Bible on their side: we are created to relate to the creation around us. The thrill scientists experience is a sense of excitement at discovering the natural world. In this sense the psalmist was acting as a natural scientist when he exclaimed,

What a wildly wonderful world, GOD!

You made it all, with Wisdom at your side,

made earth overflow with your wonderful creations.

(Psalm 104:24, The Message)

While the study of nature is the beginning of science, it’s also a call to all believers. Although “the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1), many of us have become dulled to nature’s divine speech, and scientists help us tune our ears to the mystery of a starlit night, the sophisticated order of our bodies, and the glorious structures of physical systems. In a graduate seminar on theology and science, I listened to a Berkeley biochemist describe the formations of polymers to the theologians. (Full disclosure: until that moment I had never carefully observed polymers.) He showed us a magnified picture, and in the midst of his careful explanation, he couldn’t help exclaiming, “Look how beautiful these are!” After forty years of university teaching, his wonder and excitement were no less profound than Ella’s.

When we grasp beauty in nature, we are drawn to the source of beauty. And the nature of beauty is that it draws us in. I’m reminded that in Eastern Orthodoxy, theology begins with philokalia, or “the love of beauty.”1 It also brings to mind the great Puritan pastors of the eighteenth century like Jonathan Edwards, who studied both nature and Scripture as sources for finding beauty. Edwards wrote,

For as God is infinitely the greatest being, so he is allowed to be infinitely the most beautiful and excellent: and all the beauty to be found throughout the whole creation is but the reflection of the diffused beams of that Being who hath an infinite fullness of brightness and glory.2

Finally, I think of the lyrics from an alternative rock band (one of my favorites), Future of Forestry: “I will go where beauty leads me home.” In this home we find God. Science thus leads us to grasp both the mystery and the majesty of creation. Jeff Hardin, zoologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, summarized it well at a recent BioLogos science and Christian faith conference: “Why be a scientist? Worship.”

With this book I want to inspire more ministry leaders to point emerging adults toward studying nature as an act of worship. And it’s not difficult. We love the natural world because God created it. And with the book of Genesis, we celebrate that this world is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). We see in and through this world the good God we know in Jesus Christ. All that is good news. And we who don’t practice science as a profession but who seek to know God more deeply need to listen to scientists.

The Crooked Path of Nature

Through that listening we find praise and wonder and mystery. Scientists have also taught me honesty and a somewhat recalcitrant commitment to avoid easy answers by pondering intricacies we would have never guessed. (This may be why, in fact, some believers resist science—because scientists resist easy answers.) “Consider what God has done,” Ecclesiastes 7:13 says. “Who can straighten what he has made crooked?” Sometimes the works of God in the ways of nature are not as straightforward as we would like, even though science has figured out numerous things ancient thinkers and New Testament writers didn’t know. Nevertheless, through all this beauty, awesome display, and puzzling natural reality, we still somehow discover the “eternal power and divine nature” of our Creator (Romans 1:20). It strikes me that affirming the “eternal power and divine nature” of God offers both a wide place for scientific discovery and a respectful silence and patience for future answers. I believe that scientists ultimately lead us to admit our limits and declare the majesty of God, echoing what Paul exclaimed ten chapters later: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33).

We in the church need scientists to lead us to appreciate God’s creation, which is our call as Christians. That’s one major reason to “bring science to church”—to bring together our faith in Christ and the insights and discoveries of science.3

The Complications Begin

At some point, often after early childhood, this process of enjoying nature (and thus science) while believing in God (which most of us do naturally in our early childhood, as research by the cognitive scientist Justin Barrett has demonstrated4) becomes unwound by the voices around us.

Maybe we hear, like my daughter did, that bringing science and belief together is flat-out impossible. One day at Marigold Elementary School in Chico, California, parents came and described their careers to eager fourth-graders. That night at dinner Laura and I asked Lizzie, “How was career day?”

“Mom and Dad, it was weird. We had this scientist come to class—Brin’s mother—and she basically told us that you couldn’t be religious and be a scientist.”

Naturally, I found this declaration a bit alarming and first channeled the empathic listening skills of my pastoral training. “Lizzie, I’m sorry to hear that—it must have been difficult.”

“Well, it was uncomfortable, and it made me wonder about the Bible and science.”

Now I couldn’t restrain myself. “This has been my area of focus in work for the past two decades, and I can tell you that there are a number of great scientists who are Christians and many church leaders who accept the conclusions of science.”

Crisis averted? Perhaps. But many people also hear in church that combining science and faith is impossible. Recently I had a conversation with an astronomer who told me a tragic story. James was brilliant in science and later a Rhodes Scholar, and he had grown up in a church that rejected the consensus of science. His pastors declared simply that modern mainstream science and human evolution were false (even though this paradigm has been tried and tested for over 150 years). As James began to study mainstream science, he realized how hard scientists had worked to derive their theories and how well it all fit together. This caused an astoundingly poignant psychological crisis, one so severe that in college James simply could not keep his faith without losing his mind. “The pastor taught me absolute gibberish about science,” he said. “So how I can believe what he told me about the Word of God?”

Listening to ancient voices reminds me how old this problem is. Augustine (354–430), perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of antiquity, believed we should not speak rashly, even out of ignorance. Instead we need to engage the best science of our day or we mar our witness to the gospel. Here’s why:

If they [people outside the church] find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?5

To be sure, the best science of Augustine’s day was a universe of several thousand years. But we have better, more complete science, and if we talk about a six-thousand-year-old earth today, that sounds like nonsense to those outside the church—and most inside as well. (More on that in chapter four.) So let’s not fool around with science that cannot be supported by scientists. This is a theme that we’ll revisit throughout this book.

Christians have every reason, therefore, not to twist science into their own convenient configurations. In a speech to Anglican youth workers, C. S. Lewis noted that “science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be a sin and a folly.”6 This means the church needs scientists. They keep us honest, helping us avoid superstition and error. One emerging adult–ministry leader in Silicon Valley told me, “We are committed to teach things about science...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 Creation, Beauty, and Science
• 2 Emerging Adult Faith: Not an LP, but a Digital Download
• 3 Emerging Adults: Are They None and Done?
• 4 On a Crash Course with Hermeneutics
• 5 Adam, Eve, and History
• 6 Calling Out the Good in Technology
• 7 Give Technology a Break
• 8 Moving Forward
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Praise for Mere Science and Christian Faith
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright