Does Science Make God Irrelevant?

Would you listen as I read God's word from Psalm chapter 8?

Psalms 8 · chapter mention

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

You have set your glory in the heavens.

Through the praise of children and infants, you have established a stronghold against your enemies.

To silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands.

You put everything under their feet, all flocks and herds and animals of the wild, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, all that swim in the paths of the seas.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

God, we worship you this morning as creator.

We see the beauty of your creation all around us in the world, and our hearts rejoice in who you are as creator.

Lord, we ask that as we uh think about the subject of faith and science this morning that you would give us, uh that you would help us to think about this really well, and that you would give us your grace and give us your uh the presence of your spirit to help us.

Lord Jesus, change us, we pray into the image of Christ.

And it's in his name that we pray.

Amen.

Every single day we all experience the benefits of scientific exploration.

We don't often think about it in these terms, and uh most of the time we take this for granted.

So what I want to do is just pause for a moment and ask you to marvel with me at some of the benefits of science.

By show of hands, how many of you have ever flown on an airplane?

Okay, I'm pretty sure that's every single person's hand in the room went up.

Think about how amazing it is that we crowd into a metal tube filled with jet fuel and we fly across the country or across the world with all of our luggage at about 30,000 feet in the air and going hundreds of miles an hour.

And also, it's safer than driving your car to church on Sunday morning.

Okay?

That's incredible.

Every part of the flying experience is the result of scientific exploration and innovation.

How many of you have uh take medications or multivitamins or some sort of supplement or have ever had a vaccine?

That's all of us again, science.

All these things come to us, the benefit of scientific exploration.

Uh I, for one, I check my weather app on a regular basis on my phone, and uh the reason why it's possible to get weather data in the first place is because there are satellites that are constantly orbiting our planet.

And those satellites that are flying around up there are sending pictures back to us, and they're uh sending back scientific data that we use to create projections for weather, and we get to see the weather somewhat accurately to like seven to ten days into the future because of that.

And the reason those satellites got up there in the first place is because we strapped them to a rocket that was filled with half a million pounds of fuel and we blasted them off into space.

Okay?

That's amazing.

And think about our phones, these little glowing objects that we carry around with us in our pockets that have become such an important part of everyday life.

We take for granted that through scientific research, someone figured out how to create lithium-ion batteries.

Praise be to God, right?

Someone somewhere figured out how to take rare earth minerals and create them into semiconductors and make circuit boards, and someone figured out how to program all this stuff so that when you touch the screen, it does what you tell it to do.

This is incredible.

We could go on listing numerous thousands of other examples of this, but you understand the point.

From the food that we eat to the clothes that we wear, to the electronics that we enjoy, to medicine, to manufacturing, to travel, the world as we experience it is mediated to us through science.

In fact, the world as we know it would not exist without science and without scientific exploration.

We've been in a series of messages called Asking for a Friend, and what we've been doing is we've been answering, uh not answering, we've been exploring the questions that you have submitted to us.

We believe it's important to be the kind of church that uh takes on tough questions, that doesn't feel afraid of things that might be difficult to answer or think about.

We think it's good for us and it's good for the world if we can think well and think deeply about difficult subjects.

And so we ask you to submit those questions to us.

And so we have been exploring uh how do we think about all these questions about God and faith and the Bible?

And today we are thinking about the relationship between faith and science.

And so the question that we uh really are going to be exploring this morning is this can I believe in God and it shouldn't say the science, it should say science.

It's because I accidentally put God and the Bible, and I realized that was a really dumb thing to put on there, and so I changed it, but I forgot to change that other word.

Can we believe in God and science?

And of course, with all the great things I just said about science, you may be wondering why we're even bothering to ask this question in the first place.

Because on the one hand, the answer to the question is very simple.

Yes.

Yes, we can believe in God and science.

But on the other hand, we do live in a culture and in a world where science and faith are very often pitted against one another.

And we see this in a lot of different ways.

I'll mention two of them.

We see this externally in sort of uh culture broadly and in the scientific community.

So back in the 1800s, there were two influential books that were written.

One of them was titled History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.

And the other one was titled A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

Now, before the publication of those books, there was not a pervasive sense that science and faith were diametrically opposed to one another or that they couldn't uh coexist together.

In fact, many of the early Enlightenment-era scientists were people who believed in God, and that actually uh drove their exploration into the natural world because they believed in a creator and they believed in a world that was filled with order.

But these books and uh other things have helped to create a rift between science and the scientific community and belief in God.

And so there's uh even today there there's there's an idea, sort of a culture out there that, like, okay, people used to need God and religion because they didn't know the answers to things, but now that we have science and we can look at all these different answers and all this data, yeah, we don't really need sci- you know, we don't really need God, we don't really need religion any longer.

So we see it that way.

We also see this uh this sort of tension internally within the Christian community as well.

So the historic interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2 is that God created the world in seven literal 24-hour periods, and that Adam and Eve were the first humans created by God in his image.

And then along came Charles Darwin with his theory of evolution, which says that human beings are not created by God, but are the process of millions, the results of millions and millions of years of the evolutionary process.

And so many followers of Jesus wrestle with the tension between, okay, this is the current scientific consensus, which is not entirely ungrounded, but then there's also these things that I read and understand the Bible to be saying, and so how do I how do I make sense of both of these things together?

And so the question is not as simple as, can we believe the Bible and science?

The answer to that is yes.

But there's questions that do linger underneath the surface of that question.

Questions like, can I trust the Bible?

You know, if the Bible's wrong about evolution, what else is it wrong about?

Questions like, do I have to check my brain at the door in order to follow Jesus?

Do I have to bury my head in the sand and ignore scientific data or science in order to be a follower of Jesus?

Questions like, is it okay to send my kids to a public school where they'll be taught science from a point of view that says there is no God?

There's so much to unpack here, and I want to just remind you, as I've been saying every single week, I don't have time to say all of the things.

Okay, you understand this.

Uh in fact, this morning I was actually thinking about, I was just sort of sitting with and wrestling with, the fact that I could have approached this subject in three or four different ways, and they would have all been fine, you know, because this is a multifaceted subject, but we simply don't have time to say everything there is to say this morning.

So please keep in mind that I am choosing not to say a lot of different things, and I'm choosing to uh lay a framework and a groundwork for us to take this conversation forward into our lives.

I'm not providing a comprehensive answer to every question that you may have on this subject.

So I encourage you to uh please keep that in mind and please be gracious to me because I can't say everything.

So, what I want to do today is I want to suggest an approach to the subject of science and faith.

I want to suggest an approach, and this approach includes a point about science, a point about us, and a point about God.

Okay?

So the first uh point I want to bring up this morning is this science is inherently good.

And as we approach the subject of science and faith and how they relate with one another, it's important for us to remember and to come to this believing that science is inherently good.

And here's why.

The reason is because every scientific discovery reveals the beauty and the genius of God's created world.

Every single scientific discovery reveals the beauty and the genius and the creativity and the wonder of God's created world.

And Psalm 8, which you heard uh read just a few moments ago, uh, says this.

It says, When I consider the work of your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place.

What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

You made them rulers over the works of your hands.

You put everything under their feet, all flocks and herds and animals of the wild, the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim in the paths of the sea.

Now, if you're familiar with the story of the Bible, you you may notice that David, as he's writing the psalm, is reflecting on Genesis 1 and 2.

This is this is just a meditation on Genesis chapter 1 and 2.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

And what these passages and many other passages in the Bible make very clear for us is that God is the creator of everything.

So the Bible makes very clear that you and I are not the product of blind chance.

We are the creation of a loving and generous and good and wise God.

That is who we are.

He is the one who created galaxies and the largest structures that we can imagine or see in our universe.

He is the one also who formed each one of our very bodies down to the smallest detail, the molecular level.

He is the creator.

And so the point is this science is inherently good because it is the exploration of God's world, which is inherently good.

Okay, so God Himself is good, his world is good, and therefore all of the exploration of and the investigation of his world is inherently good.

The Bible does say that our world in its present condition is not the way it's supposed to be, that it has been distorted and tainted by sin, and that creation itself is groaning, longing for the day when it will be liberated from its bondage to decay.

But even still, God's world and God's creation is good, which is why exploration of it is itself inherently good.

And if it's true that the exploration of this world is inherently good, what that means is that we should have zero fear of what scientific discovery will uncover.

You know, we we should not sit here worrying that like maybe next week someone's going to make a scientific discovery that's going to prove God doesn't exist.

Or that the resurrection didn't happen.

We should have zero fear of what scientific discovery will uncover.

And of all people, followers of Jesus ought to be the most pro-science people on the planet.

And it's because every single discovery, every part of science and the exploration and the discovery of our world, every single part of it reveals the beauty and the genius of God and his creation.

So the first part of our approach has to be recognizing that science is inherently good.

The second part of our approach needs to be a recognition of the way that we as followers of Jesus ought to come at this subject in the first place.

What kind of people we ought to be as we explore the relationship between science and faith.

And I'll put it like this we should approach science and faith with humility.

We should approach both science and faith with humility.

I don't want to get pulled into the minutia of the conversation about origins, you know, specifically creation, evolution, these kind of things.

Um that's a that's a worthwhile thing to explore and to think about and to talk about.

And there's lots of resources out there that you can look to to help you uh think about that well.

Um this point that I'm wanting to make now does sort of orbit.

It's it's in the orbit of that conversation, so it will be a part of it, but I don't really want to get into making specific arguments for or against this thing or that thing.

I really do want to keep this at the level of our approach to uh the conversation of faith and science, okay?

And that approach uh should lead us to be people of humility.

Okay, we should have scientific humility.

And let me explain why I think we should have scientific humility.

Uh, for a very long time, the scientific consensus was that the earth was at the center of the universe and that everything revolved around it.

You've probably heard the fancy word geocentricity, which just means the earth is the center and everything else goes around it.

And that was, uh for a very long time, that was the undisputed scientific consensus.

And that's just what everyone believed.

Until scientists like Copernicus and Galileo came along and introduced new data that um brought more information and challenged those long-held beliefs.

And it was replaced by the idea of heliocentricity.

That the world, our world actually orbits around the sun instead of everything else orbiting around the earth.

And of course, as you can imagine, this was a revolutionary discovery that it it changed the way people thought about their place in the universe.

That's a big thing, okay?

Or take the example of the phlogiston theory, which came along in the 1600s and it posited that every substance has a combustible element as a part of it called phlagiston.

And when something catches fire, what's happening is the phlagiston is being released.

Then in 1789, another scientist proposed a different theory that heat is a gaseous substance that flows into an object when the temperature rises and it catches on fire.

And of course, with more scientific data, both of these theories have been proven wrong since then.

So there's there's numerous other examples of this where the scientific consensus was with more data later overturned.

And so the point is that throughout history, new data has led to the change of scientific consensus.

And so as new data emerges, our existing theories uh should change and adjust to reflect that new data, and that's actually like what science is supposed to do, right?

That science at its best is we have more data, and so we should change our conclusions if the data points in a different direction.

And so I think this is why we should have scientific humility.

Now I want to be clear that I'm not saying we should live with scientific skepticism about everything.

Okay?

That's not what I'm saying.

But there are some scientific conclusions that carry a kind of theological significance to them.

So, for example, there are scientific theories, such as Darwin's theory of macroevolution, that contradicts the historical interpretation of the Bible.

And so I'm not saying that we should be skeptical about everything or to the same degree.

I am saying that where we see what is considered to be the scientific consensus coming into conflict with what we're pretty sure the Bible says, we should have the humility to say, okay, this is what we see in the data.

This is what we see, this is what's the current scientific consensus, and it could be that with more time we find out we're wrong.

And so we can hold those scientific conclusions a little bit more loosely.

If there are conclusions that contradict historically rooted interpretations of the Bible, it's okay.

And it is good to have a kind of skepticism about those conclusions and to hold those conclusions loosely.

Okay?

Does that make sense?

So we should have scientific humility.

But secondly, I want to suggest that we should also have biblical humility as well.

We believe, here at Elmwood and within our movement in the free church, we believe that all scripture is inspired by God, the Spirit.

We believe that all scripture is inspired, it is inerrant, it is trustworthy, it is infallible.

And as a result of that, we believe that all scripture is reliable in every single thing it teaches and trustworthy in every single thing that it affirms.

Okay?

We're on the same page?

That's what we as a church believe.

The Bible does not err.

But we do.

The Bible is inerrant, but our interpretations of the Bible are not inerrant.

How many times have you had this experience where you have a conversation with someone about the Bible, you're talking about a passage or an idea, and you leave the conversation and you're like, I just think that person is totally wrong.

Like, Tyler's like, every Sunday this happens.

You know, or you listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video or listen to a sermon, and you're like, yeah, like, I just don't think that person, that's not really what the text is saying.

I don't think that's what the text means.

Right?

It happens all the time that people who genuinely love Jesus and are trying to understand the Bible and understand it on its own terms and submit their lives to it, it happens all the time that we come to different conclusions about different passages.

And in a lot of cases, that we can't both be right, you know?

And so this is our experience.

And actually, I think it would uh it would benefit all of us to like to regularly pause and imagine the day where in new creation we walk with Jesus and he tells us all the things we got wrong.

It's gonna be a long walk, you know?

Scripture is inspired, scripture is inerrant, our interpretations of scripture are not inerrant.

And so applying this to this sort of orbiting around.

This question of origins, we can say this with certainty that the text of Genesis 1 and 2 is inspired by God and it is reliable in every single thing that it affirms.

Okay?

Every single thing that Moses intended to communicate is completely trustworthy.

And there are genuine disagreements among followers of Jesus as to what he's actually intending to communicate.

As you read Genesis 1 and 2, you see the who is clear.

God is the center of Genesis 1 and 2.

God is the creator, he is the sustainer, he's the one who sovereignly oversees all of creation, he's the one who spoke creation into existence simply by the power of his word.

So the who of Genesis 1 and 2 is totally clear.

But the specific how question as to how we got here today from what we see in Genesis 1 is maybe less clear.

I remember sitting in a seminary class doing Hebrew exegesis, and we were talking about Genesis 1, and my Hebrew professor is saying this is Genesis 1 is not poetry, literarily speaking, it's not poetry.

It's also not traditional, normal prose or narrative.

It's some sort of mixture of the two of them.

And so the question of should we read Genesis 1 as if it's the transcript of camcorder footage?

Maybe, maybe not.

Within our denominational movement, there is room for disagreement on these kinds of things.

Within our church family, there is room for disagreement on these kinds of things.

There is room for people who genuinely love Jesus and who are genuinely trying to understand the Bible on its own terms, seeking to submit themselves to the authority of Scripture and what it actually teaches, there's room for us to come to differing conclusions about some of these things.

And I think what this really comes down to is not letting secondary doctrine become primary doctrine.

Meaning something that is really important, but like not gospel-level importance, letting something that's really important become of ultimate importance.

I'll just put it this way: what you believe about the age of the earth is not as important as the deity of Christ.

It's just not.

And bad things happen when churches allow secondary things to become as important as Jesus.

When they allow secondary things to be as important as the gospel message itself.

And so as we approach science and faith and the Bible together, we should have lots of scientific humility to say, okay, here's what we think we see.

We could totally be wrong.

And we should have the biblical humility to say, this is what I'm pretty sure this text says.

And I'm convinced it says this.

And I have charity in my heart for other people who might believe differently than I do, who are trying to understand the Bible, who are trying to submit to the authority of the Bible, and who just come to a different conclusion than me.

We should be people of humility both biblically and scientifically.

So that's the second part of this approach, is we need to be people of humility.

But then the third part of this approach I want to suggest this morning is this worship of the Creator is the true end of science.

Okay, so as we approach the subject, we have to remember that science is inherently good, that we need to be humble in our approach to these things, and we have to remember that worship of God the Creator is the goal of science.

You see it in Psalm 8.

Psalm 8 begins with and ends with worship.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

It begins and ends with worship, and then sandwiched in the middle is more worship and wonder, where David says, What is mankind that you are mindful of them?

Human beings that you care about us.

Sandwiched in the middle, he's saying, God, who are you?

Who are we that you, the creator of the universe, would care about us?

And that's worship, that's adoration.

And so as David thinks about creation, he ends up at this place of observing, observing God's created world, and it leads him to worship.

For creation, for humanity, for God's relationship to his people, it all leads to worship.

And it's not just the first act of creation that should lead us to worship.

There's more than one act of creation in the Bible.

The message of the gospel is that there is a second creation.

See, the Bible says that we are image bearers of God with inherent dignity and value and worth, and that we have rebelled against our creator, and we've chosen to do what is right in our own eyes, and in spite of that, God has made a way for the miracle of recreation to happen inside of us.

The message of the gospel is that the heart of the creator was so filled with love and compassion for his sin-ravaged creation that he became a part of it.

That the God of the universe, who created all that we see, took on creation and experienced the crippling weight of the world's brokenness so that recreation could take place inside of us.

Listen how Paul says this in 2 Corinthians chapter 4.

2 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

He says, For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness, made his light shine in our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ.

So what he's saying is the same God who spoke the world into existence, who spoke life out of nothingness, spoke life out of nothingness in your spiritually dead heart.

The same miracle of creation that we see, God speaking everything out of nothing, he does a miracle just like that inside of your heart when you choose to follow Jesus and you're born inwardly.

You experience new life, you experience new creation, recreation inside of your heart.

When we look at creation, when through science and through exploration we understand creation, the right response is worship.

Worship of the Creator.

And when we look at the recreation that we have experienced through Jesus, the right response is also worship.

Have you experienced the inner recreation that Jesus alone can provide?

Do you know the creator, the one who formed you?

Do you know that the creator of the cosmos is for you and that he is on your side?

You can trust him today and join with the chorus of God's people in worshiping the creator.

Each week here at Elmud we take communion, and the communion table points us to three different places.

These elements of bread and juice that are made from the stuff of the earth.

Taking these elements into our hands points us to the goodness of God's created world and the very stuff that they're made of.

The elements also point us to the cross, because the communion meal is something that is designed to point us to the cross and to remind us that Jesus died so that recreation can happen inside of each one of us.

These elements also point us forward to the reality of new creation.

When he returns to make all things new.

And so as we come to the communion table today, we get to remember God is the creator of all things.

And we can worship him not only for the act of creation that he's done and bringing about this world and bringing about us, we get to worship him for the act of recreation that he has done inside of each one of us.

As we come to the communion table, let me invite you to take a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come celebrate Christ together.