Hasn’t Science Disproved Christianity?

WELCOME

Pastor Chris Paavola:

Thank you band for leading us in worship.

BIOLOGY CLASS

When I was in college, there was a core biology class that I had to take and the professor, if you’re going to picture him, if you’ve ever seen the show cheers, he looked like Frazier Crane, but with less fashion sense and a little bit more bug-eyed. But anyway, so my professor, I knew he was a Christian man, we had had other conversations, but when we got in the classroom, he started talking about evolution or he started talking about the Big Bang or the Miller experiment where there was all these gases and then you shoot an electrical charge into it and you create amino acids, the building box of life and Darwin’s Tree of Life and the missing link. And he started talking about all these things and the more he talked about them, the more it started to give me a little bit of a crisis of faith.

And I didn’t quite know how to navigate that in square everything he was telling me in the classroom with what I had learned growing up in my faith. And so after class one day I went up to him and I said, why don’t you talk about creation? Why don’t you talk about a creator or intelligent design behind all of these things? And he goes, well, I can’t talk about my faith because I teach science. And that there’s this idea in the science in the classroom that everything in science needs to have a hypothesis that can be tested, weighed, or proven. It needs to be falsifiable or verifiable. And if it’s not, then it doesn’t fit in the realm of science anymore than ballet or basket weaving wood. It just doesn’t fit with what we’re talking about. It’s something else. But in here we raise, we deal with the realm of silence.

And this is why I walked away from the conversation a little frustrated, but I understood why he couldn’t talk about it. But I was frustrated by that because it just felt like science and faith were at odds. And this is why if you were a scientist and you wanted to apply for a grant to do research to prove creationism, you would never get a grant. And it’s why in a textbook you won’t see an alternative theory for creationism because there’s no alternative hypothesis that can be weighed or measured unless it’s God. At our eight o’clock service, one of the attenders at our eight o’clock service is the lead professor of anatomy at Kellogg’s Community College. And she said, absolutely, I’ll use the word creation in class. I’ll raise eyebrows because if I say created or something like that, that I know what I mean when I say this amino acid was created, but the science community doesn’t have a place for God.

SERIES

And what I want to do today is kind of answer some of the questions because I really feel like faith doesn’t give and the Christian faith doesn’t get an opportunity to give an answer to the questions that science raises. And I feel there’s just not a platform for us to be able to give these answers from a Christian perspective to the question science has raised.

And so that’s what we’re going to be doing today as we continue and near the end of our series. The reason for God is we talk about hasn’t science disproven Christianity, and we’re going to look at some of the main questions that Christianity or that science has for Christianity.

GENESIS

Now, before we get into any of this, the main text that Christianity uses to talk about creationism and the origin of life and all that stuff is this book called Genesis.

And really the beginning of Genesis chapter one, and as it outlines the days of creation. Now, before we dig into this, I think it’s important to bring up a couple things about this Genesis account itself. The book of Genesis was written by Moses after Israel miraculously was freed from the Egyptians, and they’re wandering in the desert and they’re trying to figure out who’s this God who parted the sea and is making food reign from heaven? Who is this God? And Moses writes down the oral tradition of Israel, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all that kind of stuff, but then also writes down God’s commands for his people. And that’s what makes up the Pentateuch. The first five books of the Torah or the Old Testament, excuse me, as the people are wandering in the desert, they had just listened for hundreds of years, listened to the Egyptians talk about their gods, and their gods had conflict with one another and whoever won, that’s how we got whatever it would be, right?

And that God would reign over that God and there would be this hierarchy among the gods. And like most creation myths, there was disorder and chaos and the Gods created order out of the disorder. What’s different about the Pentateuch and the creation account of Genesis is God starts without any rivals. He’s God, and he speaks with such authority. He just, whatever he says goes, this is the God who defeated all of the Egyptian gods by freeing them from Pharaoh. And this God creates order and then it descends into disorder after the fall. So it’s not disorder than order, it’s reversed. God starts with order and it descends into disorder.

1 In the beginning

Genesis 1

And the of Genesis one is not how the earth was made. The point of Genesis one is who made the earth? That’s why it begins “In the beginning.”

God created the heavens and earth

Genesis 1

God, the question that is mainly being answered is who made all of this? And it changes the way we read this book. We don’t approach it like a science textbook, though it does have questions and help inform our understanding of science. It’s not a science textbook, it’s not describing how the earth is made on a detailed level. It’s describing who made it and the sequence with which he made it. That changes how we read it. Lemme demonstrate how. Okay, so in the beginning, God, well, how long is that beginning?

It’s just the beginning. It is just this indefinite demarcation of time. And before everything is God. God is the source of everything. He is the uncreated one. He exists out of time, space, and matter. Beginning He exists outside of it. Just like if we were looking at a piece of fruit on a table, he kind of observes all of it. He’s outside of time, outside of space, outside of matter. He’s God. “In the beginning”, God. And then it continues. “God created the heavens and the earth.” Hebrews don’t have a word for the galaxies. They don’t have a word for the universe. It’s just heavens and God created heavens and the earth. And there’s some problems with this. Is this descriptive of what we’re about to read or is this sequential to what we’re about to read? In other words, does this predate the first seven days of creation when it was just the beginning and God, and I’ll show why that’s kind of like a question that we should ask as we continue reading.

2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

Genesis 1

Because, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Here’s the problem, the terms that it uses, specifically heavens earth. Go ahead. Next slide. And waters, you know what hasn’t been created yet in the first six days of creation, any of the planets or stars, any of the earth or any of the waters. And yet those are referential terms that are being used in Genesis one to describe this state of being called the beginning.

God was present before it. Then there’s the beginning and then again, is this referring to a period of time that’s about to follow? Is this a foreshadowing of what we’re about to read? Like it’s telling us what’s about to come or is this sequential with the six days of creation? I don’t know.

3 And God said “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening and there was morning-the first day.

Genesis 1

And then we get into day one and there’s some other complexities that are introduced. Day one, whoop, go back if you don’t mind. God said, let there be light. Interesting. Not the planets yet. Not the sun, not the stars, just light. And there was light. He has so much authority, he’s able to create it with Word and God saw the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness by nature of its properties. God called the light day. That’s the Hebrew word yom, and it shares a root word with the word hot.

So these are people wandering in the desert. He’s like, what’s day? It’s when you’re hot, the sun is up, sun goes down. That’s a day. And the darkness, he called nights and there was evening and there was morning the first day. Here’s the other complexity with the word yom. Most times it’s referring to a 24 hour period of time, day and night. It seems like it’s intimating here with a description of evening and morning, first day, by the way, it’s reversed. We would start with morning and evening and just interesting. But yom is also used in scripture several times to refer to a period of time like the industrial age, it’s era, age season. So, yom is not. All I’m saying is that yom is not only used exclusively for a 24 hour period of time. The other problem here, how do we measure a day? How do we measure a day, you guys rotation of the earth and how do we measure that? The earth was rotating the sun and the stars, they go like this across the sky. You know what hasn’t been created yet? The sun or the stars and quite frankly land.

So there’s nothing to rotate and there’s nothing to measure across the sky. It’s just light and it’s dark day one. So I just hold it with an open hand. There’s complexities in here that create a lot of room for us to understand science better and for science to help us understand faith better. Now, if you’re going to ask me, do I lean towards this being a 24 hour day or not? I lean that way, but it’s not an essential understanding for me. I just lean towards that. It seems what the writer, what Moses is trying to get across, and I’ll get into some reasons why later on, but that’s kind of where I lean. But again, I don’t think it’s an essential. So then we have the other day as a creation and take a look at the order. Light and darkness. Day one, water and sky. Day two. Remember the spirit of God was hovering over the what waters, some very interesting things going on. Then land is created what? Right? So you have something, but then land emerging from the waters. And so the earth is a water world at first or something going on, don’t quite know. And then you have finally the sun and moon to help us govern the day and the night is what it talks about. And then you have birds and fish, and then you have land animals and man, day six.

So there’s the order of creation in day seven. Now what day did the devil tempt Adam and Eve? We don’t know. So how much passage of time is there between day seven and day of the first bite of the apple? We don’t know. Again, there’s a lot of space in here, pun intended, but there’s a lot of space in here for us to hold the discoveries of science and faith together and just ask questions and let each one inform the other. Now that’s the setting with which we are going to answer any of the major questions that science brings to Christianity. But I think it’s a really important background because it then helps explain some of the answers that I have for the major questions of science. And the first one is the big one. It’s the Big Bang. What about the Big Bang?

BIG BANG

So the Big bang is this moment where there’s nothing and then an explosion of all gases and then dark matter, and then eventually the emergence of light and then planets and stars and it all just explodes out from a single point of origin.

This is a theory that developed after Einstein’s theory of relativity. Some people started doing some measurements and thinking about the relativity of earth with light and space. And then they started noticing that everything seems to be emanating from a central point, a point of origin, a source of it all, and somebody dubbed it The Big Bang and the term stuck. It’s the big bang and everything kind of expands out. And subsequent research has been done, mathematics and cosmology, and it is confirming the hypothesis of a single point of origin. Now, the cosmologist would say this is from nothing. The creationist says this is from someone. So everything that exists came from nothing or everything that exists. And by the way, that’s never ever happened again in the history of ever something coming from nothing. It’s never happened ever again. So everything coming from nothing or everything coming from God, both of them require faith.

They both require a leap of faith for something you can’t prove. And science, the more it learns about things and the observable universe, the more questions it has about the Big Bang than answers. When we sent the Hubble telescope up, they started confirming some of the things they’re like, yep, the universe is expanding. And then as they looked into the edges of the universe, they’re like, hold on a second. It’s accelerating. That goes against everything we understand about physics. The things should naturally just slowly slow down or maintain a constant rate of speed, but as things get out in the edge of the universe, it’s terrifying to think about it’s speeding up and this literally makes no sense at all. And so more questions are raised, is there something oscillating going on or what is possibly happening here?

So you take all this together and you kind of have to concede there’s a leap of faith that happens at some point in time. There’s the world’s leading cosmologist named Alan Sandage and he was about to give a lecture near the end of his life it seems. Well, he became a person Faith and he was the heavyweight champion of the world of cosmologists. He studied under Edwin Hubble. He published dozens of papers, won tons of awards, wrote multiple books, and he’s giving this lecture at symposium with some of his peers. And here’s what he dared to admit.

The Big Bang was a supernatural event and there was a gasp through the crowd, a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it, science has taken us to the first event, but it can’t take us further to the first cause. We can’t study it, we can’t weigh it, we can’t measure it, we can’t experiment. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence. Alan Sandage

And so that’s my answer. What about the Big Bang? I think both the Big Bang and creationism require an article of faith and I think any honest person would concede the same.

AGE

Well then it brings up the next question. Well, what about the age of the earth? Okay, the big bang happened. Well, how old is the earth? Is it a literal day, Chris? Is it a figurative day? Is it a season? How old is all of this? And I am willing to admit that there are some big questions about this, some of them you probably haven’t even ever thought of. So yeah, you can look at strata in the Grand Canyon and the geological layers and you can look at that and be like, well, if things develop at a constant rate, that would mean we’re this many million years old and that’s how old this strata is. I get it. However, I would also say that things get really wild when you have catastrophic events like earthquakes and floods and volcanoes and especially a worldwide flood that can really mess up your sedimentary layers or light. A star is hundreds of millions. Let’s say there’s a star a hundred million light years away.

How long did it take for that light that we see in the sky to arrive at Earth a hundred million years? Hence the term a hundred million light years away. That light traveled at, traveled a hundred million years to get to us. When we look up at the night sky and we’ve seen stars go out, they were there and now they’re gone. Now is that a snapshot of time or is that like a photograph of time that didn’t and God is just playing games with us? It’s a big question. However, that also assumes a constant rate of speed lights in space. We assume it travels at the same rate of speed as we can observe, but what happens when light travels through dark matter or stronger gravitational fields? What happens when light gets near a black hole or slingshot out of a black hole around it?

Is it a constant rate of speed? We don’t know. It could be like when we see an object at the bottom of a pool, we reach down and actually it’s over there, but the water defract the imagery of it and you’re not sure. So it just plays with your mind a little bit. If you’re spearfishing, you have to aim away from the fish and it plays with your mind. Is that the same thing that happens with light when it gets into space? We don’t know We’re learning, but we can’t assume that the light is a constant rate of speed with all the questions that we have or take our dating system, not like swipe right dating system. I mean how we date things with Carbon 14 dating, you absorb carbon on your life as a living organism. Then when you die, that carbon is slowly released from your body at a certain rate.

And we can look at something and see how much carbon is left in it and deduce its age by how much carbon it has released over time. That’s carbon 14 dating. Maybe you’ve heard about it and it’s great, but there’s some problems and limitations with Carbon 14 dating. It’s really messed up with water, which is a problem with a worldwide flood and it also has some other baked in assumptions like if I have a candle, let’s say I have a candle 10 inches long, we light it and we observe the rate of decay and it takes 10 hours for this candle to go extinguish, we would assume that a candle extinguish or the candle burns at a decay rate of one inch per hour. Now you see a candle that’s five inches long and you deduce, well, it’s been burning for five hours, but there’s a lot of assumptions baked into your deduction.

What if that candle was burning in a room that had a draft and it made the flame burn hotter? What if the wick was longer and making the flame burn hotter? What if somebody lit it, blew it out, let it sit there for a minute, lit it again, blew it out, waited a let it sit there, lit it again, or what if the candle was only originally six inches long? There’s all sorts of variables that come into play where we can’t assume this equals this. And the same thing happens with our carbon dating and our argon dating. So a rock, we take a rock and we can date it using potassium argon, right? How many guys were alive when Mount St. Helaman went off 1980? We fact checked this, the last service, 1980. All right, so I was just born, okay, get that in there.

But when Mount St. Helen went off, there were rocks that were formed from the ash and the lava and researchers from Cambridge University wanted to study these rocks obviously in incredible events. They studied these rocks and they dated these rocks and they found that these rocks that were only a few months old came back as testing as millions of years old. And they’re like, what could have been the problem? Why is there this error in our experiment? And this is what these geologists from Cambridge wrote, considering that the half-life of potassium 40 40 K is 1.25 million years, the potassium argon method cannot be used to date samples that are much younger than 6,000 years old. This is a problem if the earth is a young earth that’s only 6,000 years old, my friends, because a few thousand years are not enough time for 40 ar to accumulate in a sample at a high enough concentration to be detected and quantified or actually measure argon in samples that are only a few million years old.

I’m just pointing out that there is some variables and inconsistencies with dating carbon 14 dating or potassium argon that we have to keep in mind when we hear about the age of the earth. To put it a simple way, and I think this is reductionistic, but I think it’s memorable. How old was a rock when God made it? So that would be my answer about the age of the earth. Another question that we get all the time is a big one.

EVOLUTION

What about evolution? What about evolution? This idea that we have simple organisms and there’s modifications in the organisms that develop over millions and millions of years, and bacteria becomes a slug, becomes a snail, becomes an amphibian, becomes a mammal, becomes the apex of creation. Chuck Norris, how do we, it’s this idea that we all share a common ancestry descending from other organisms, okay?

That’s the theory of evolution. You guys have all heard this in science class and everything and in textbooks, but there are some problems with evolution. As science is developing, we are getting more questions about evolution than answers. For instance, just on a very simple scale, the missing link is still missing. There’s millions of us. Why aren’t there thousands of fossils of the missing link that we found yet? It’s a really good question. Or you have something like the era, the Precambrian area, Precambrian era where it’s slugs and snails. And then all of a sudden in our geological straddle era, we all of a sudden have what’s called the Cambrian explosion and the appearance of fish, crabs, other animals with exoskeletons, and they just appear dozens and dozens and dozens of different species of animals just suddenly appear with no precursor, with nothing in a Darwinian tree of life leading up to it. They just appear. And there’s other problems like with missing links. We’ve never observed one kind of animal becoming another kind of animal animal. We’ve observed micro evolution, but we’ve never seen macro evolution from a kind as the Bible would call it, to another kind. We can cut a road through the Amazon forest. We’ve seen this and split up a species of a bird, and it’s scared by about crossing the road. And so these species get different modifications over time and develop slight modifications from one another, but they don’t suddenly become another kind of animal.

Way back in the day this fossil was discovered, it’s the AOP ops. I had to practice to say that name a dozen times, the arches. And it’s basically when it was discovered, it’s like there it is. It’s a lizard and it’s a bird. We found a missing link and when it was discovered, it was said that it brought tears to everyone’s eyes. It brought tears to the eyes of the scientists because finally we found the missing link and it brought tears to the eyes of the creationist because it disproved everything they once held true. Here’s half bird, half lizard, Jekyll and Hyde, but with developments of new technology, we’ve done DNA samples on this. It’s a bird, it’s a bird and it’s a species. This is extinct, but it doesn’t share any commonalities with a lizard at all. And we’re still missing the missing link.

And this isn’t even to get into moving from one kind to another.

“As we go up these different levels of taxonomic hierarchy – species, genus, family order, class – common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but is it true at higher levels? It becomes an increasingly uncertain inference the higher we go in the taxonomic hierarchy. When you get to the level of phyla, the major animal groups, it’s a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it’s disconfirmed. The evidence just doesn’t support it.” Dr. Jonathan Wells

There is a professor of biology. Next slide please. At Berkeley University, probably the most liberal university in our country, and the professor of biology at Berkeley University, Dr. Jonathan Wells writes, says, we go up the different levels and the taxonomic, you know what I’m saying, hierarchy. That’s my third service guys. I’m like species, genus, family order class. Common ancestry is certainly true at the species level, but we cannot say it the same. The same at higher levels. It becomes increasingly uncertain. Inference when you get to the level of Fila, the major animal groups, it’s a very, very shaky hypothesis. In fact, I would say it’s disconfirmed no longer true.

And yet that’s maybe a footnote in our kids’ science book that teach evolution is fact. Why? Because there is no alternative theory other than creation and science cannot test, experiment or prove a creator. And so it can’t even begin the conversation. And we haven’t even delved into the problems of chemical evolution. This is a picture of a bacteria cell and this is a real, real, real problem for the theory of evolution. Explain why Darwin believed that if something could be shown to have a complexity, that it was an irreducible complexity, meaning that you can’t remove something and show how it could exist in a previous form due to modification that if can prove something has an irreducible complexity, then it disproves evolution. Make sense? Well, he didn’t know the depths of details that we do about things like a bacteria cell. A cell is made up of several rooms. It’s like a house all around that bacteria cell, okay? So it has a flagellum on the back of it. It’s like a motor spins it a few thousand RPM. It runs on acid. It has a sensory navigation system.

There’s nothing like it before it or all of those hairs around it, Celia, that’s about 200 hairs that it uses to navigate. Those hairs are made up of 200 proteins. You can’t reduce any of that, the flagellum, the proteins from the CLIA and still find a functionality. And this is a huge problem to explain how difficult this is. Here’s what one molecular biologist named Dr. Steven Meyer said for a protein molecule to form by chance just one of the 200 protein molecules in one of the 200 hairs outside of one bacteria cell for a protein molecule to form by chance, you need the right bonds between amino acids and it goes through the process describing, and then the amino acids must link up in a specified sequence. The probability of forming a rather short functional protein at random would be one in a hundred thousand, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. That’s a 10 with 125 zeros in it just to make a protein cell.

You will be hard pressed to find a chemist who would posit that proteins formed by chance. It defies logic. And we’ve even gotten to the DNA my friends like DNA of you. You are a six foot long sequence that’s of trillions of letters tightly coiled around and making you the DNA that makes you up like my kids. We just did ancestry.com, we spit this tiny little thing and it’s just this information, this owner’s manual of who we are. It’s software. It’s a sequence of four different letters and it’s not just a book, it’s not just an encyclopedia set, it’s an entire library of information in you. Trillions of letters long that make up you, distinctly you different than you.

And the idea that that information came about by chance, it doesn’t even register. Meaning you came with an owner’s manual. If I showed you a computer program of ones and zeros, you would deduce an intelligent designer behind it, programming it. And we are more and more machine-like than we realize. And it just suggests an intelligent designer behind it all that makes you different than a frog, different than a banana plant because that would be my answer for evolution.

DINOSAURS

What about dinosaurs? That’s the fun one. What about dinosaurs? Man, when I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs. We would go to the black hills in South Dakota on summers and they have this amazing museums, there’s multiple museums there, and I loved it. And my parents weren’t afraid to just let me have fun and explore and buy dinosaur play things and coloring books. They were fine. It wasn’t like they were like, oh, the devil put dinosaur bones in the ground to deceive us.

They were fine. They were like, yeah, sure, go ahead, have fun. And I remember asking my dad about where dinosaurs, what happened to the dinosaurs? And he had such a simple explanation that I just kind of was like, oh yeah, that makes sense. I think dinosaurs are a part of God’s creation in the Garden of Eden. And when reptiles live, they keep on growing. At least in my basic understanding. It’s why you have giant anacondas and Amazon and giant crocs in Australia, right? They keep growing over the years. They just keep growing. So if you’re living in a place called paradise for an indeterminate amount of time and you just keep growing, what happens?

Get big after the fall. Adam and Eve bite the apple. What does God do? He cuts off the legs of the serpent. And then not only that, after the fall, death is introduced into the world. Maybe these animals got so big that the vast majority of them couldn’t sustain their size because there were now predators and there was not enough vegetation perfectly growing in this biosphere of utopia called Eden. There’s not enough vegetation and food supply to sustain these large massive bodies. And maybe they just died out because the planet couldn’t sustain them. It’s a crazy theory. So is a meteor hitting the earth and making a cloud of gas and killing them all? Or as one British scientist proposed in a peer reviewed paper in 2012 that maybe dinosaurs gassed themselves into extinction. You’re reading that correctly.

Maybe they tooted to death. You can sketch that honey, if you’re sketching pictures during church, draw a picture of a dinosaur tooting another dinosaur to death she’s going to try. Now, maybe it’s a crazy theory, but I think so is this cutting winds theory? And then I also, I’ll throw another one out there and you can call me crazy. I’ll just throw another one out there. Dinosaurs. Let’s say some dinosaurs continue to make it all the way onto Noah’s arc. You don’t need full grown animals to make it onto the arc. You just need two babies, right? You need two of them so they can reproduce and you don’t need every kind of bear. You just need one kind of bear to create a brown bear, black bear, grizzly or polar bear. We can observe this kind of evolution within a species. So we’ll talk about no ark some other time, but imagine, let’s say a few dinosaurs made it onto the ark and then existed.

There’s evidence that dinosaurs walk the earth at the same time as humans. And it’s evidence that we have to consider. Do you know there’s not a region in the world that doesn’t have dragons in its folklore, whether England, south America, north America, Asia, Europe, Africa, there’s dragons in all of the folklore. Hundreds of townships in England talk about their knights of valor slaying the mighty dragon. And then you look at the artwork all around the world, and it’s fascinating. These people had no idea what a dinosaur was, no idea what a dinosaur bone was, but they depicted things like, next slide please. Over in Cambodia, they have the temple of Anor. It’s hard to see people in the front can see it. You guys in the back, we’ll have to sit closer next time. But at the temple at Angkor, it’s a carving of some kind of lizard with plates down its back.

It looks like a flipping stegosaurus, you guys. It’s crazy. Or the cave painting at the natural bridges, national monuments in Utah, it looks like a brontosaurus or the inscriptions on a cylinder seal that was discovered in Mesopotamia. These two dinosaurs looking things are dragons with necks twisting together and then necking behavior that we observe in giraffes. And what’s interesting is you see the same necking behavior in dragon depictions in China. And by the way, in China and the zodiac, all of the animals that are in the zodiac, the rat, the pig, the bear, the co whatever, then there’s a dragon. Why would there be one mythological creature in the entire zodiac? And everyone else is a real animal. These are really good questions to ask. Maybe the dinosaur extinction is a little bit closer than we realized. That would be what I say about dinosaurs.

Now go to the next slide please. In the book of Job, we heard in that reading that Willie did for us, how the Lord responded to job and said, look at the horse and consider me. Look at the lion and consider me, look at the raven and consider me. We saved this one job 40 verse 15. He says, look at the behemoth. The what? Yeah, not imagine it, not read a story about it. Look at the flipping thing. Look at the behemoth, look at it, which I made along with you. And which feeds on grass like an ox, what strength that has in its loins. What power in the muscle of its belly, its tail sways like a cedar. Can you think of any other kind of animal with a tail like a cedar tree? I can’t, especially one that feeds on grass.

The sin use of its thighs are close knit. Its bones are tubes of bronze. Its limbs like rods of iron. It ranks first among the works of God, the behemoth. Now what is he describing? I think so. I think it’s a brontosaurus.  Maybe the extinction of dinosaurs is a lot closer than we realize. And it’s kind of a question I have for science. What are they talking about? What do we do with these commonalities? So that’s my response to, that’s dinosaurs. Now we don’t have time today. We’re already at an hour and you’re the 11 o’clock service. So you guys get the bonus material and here’s why I’m doing this. And if you need to leave, you can leave. It’s noon. I won’t be offended at all. I understand you have things to do, but this is going to be our podcast. We’re going to make sure it gets out there.

And there are people who are listening who I need to say something else. And so you guys are getting the extra material because I’ve never studied for a sermon like I’ve studied for this sermon this week. I have read books by geologists, anthropologists, biologists, chemists, paleontologists, geneticists. I’ve read so much material. If you pour anything in, something is going to spill out. That is the level of where I am at right now. It felt like I was cramming for a final exam, just an insane amount of research. But I think all of this matters. I have reduced this and condensed this as much as I could to try to give this to you in a way that encourages you and your faith to show you that science and faith aren’t at odds with one another. That all said, these are the questions that science has of faith.

QUESTIONS FOR SCIENCE

As a person of faith, I have some questions for science. If they’re going to put us on trial. I think there’s a few questions that science needs to answer for itself, starting with, well, what about morality?

If we came from nothing, there’s an atheist named Quentin Smith who said, if we come from nothing, it means nothing and nothing matters. And the words of Queen, nothing really matters. Nothing matters. That means that if we came from nothing, there is no morality and any honest atheist will tell you the same. You’re right. And you can’t complain about child slavery. You can’t complain about murder or theft. You can’t complain about genocide because nothing matters. We came from nothing created us and the end of it all is nothing. So if it’s nothing, then there is no morality. But even more there is no beauty. There’s no reason that we should say a sunset is beautiful. And the Mona Lisa is beautiful because that’s just all hard wiring and programming. There’s real no objective beauty in the world. It’s just we’re programmed for that.

And love the love you just celebrated on Valentine’s Day. It’s just chemicals. You’re just a collection of atoms and chemicals. And when you look at each other, that’s not really love, it’s just a chemical reaction. No different than eating a bunch of chocolate. But I think deep down inside love is real. Morality matters. Beauty is beautiful. And so I ask the scientist, what about morality? What about beauty? What about love? How do you explain it without intelligent design? Another one. What about fine tuning? What about this idea? We’ve heard about the fine tuning of a single cell of bacteria, the fine tuning the of the stars over overhead and the movement of light. If you walk up to a river and you saw a stack of rocks that looked like that, you wouldn’t say a tornado must have come through and thrown all these rocks on top of each other.

What would you say? You would say? There was an intelligent designer who with precision and accuracy and delicacy, balanced all of these things on top of each other to create this stack of rocks. How much more precise is our world? Well, here’s just a few examples. The ratio of the electron to proton mass is one to 1,836. If it was any larger or smaller, molecules could not form. Life could not exist. A 1% change in the strong nuclear force of the sun would’ve a 30 to thousand to thousand fold impact on the production of oxygen and carbon and life could not exist. Increase the mass of a neutron, one part in 700 and nuclear fusion in stars would stop and life would not exist. The distance from the sun is crucial for a stable water cycle any closer and everything boils any further and everything freezes and life could not exist.

Any percentage of increase in gravity would crush humans. If the electromagnetic force was slightly weaker, you couldn’t create hydrogen. If the mass of a hydrogen was lowered by just 0.007%, it could not transfer into helium and the universe could not exist. Fortunately, our sun is the right mass, but it also emits the right colors. The most common star in the universe are red dwarves and don’t produce enough ultraviolet light for the Earth’s tilt is exactly 23.5 degrees and holds the stability of life on our planet together. But this is held in place by the moon that keeps the earth at this angle and prevents major temperature swings. 60% of the tide comes from the moon that flushes nutrients into and out of our oceans. The earth has an iron core that is 9,000 degrees surrounded by liquid iron that prevents it from cooling. Our delicate atmosphere helps with the exchange of gases.

20% oxygen happens to be just right for humans. If the earth were just a fraction bigger, the mountains would collapse and the oceans would rush across the continents. Plate tectonics caused by the oceans that move continents and release gas through volcanoes, act like a sophisticated thermostat for our planet. Plate tectonics thereby create a magnetic field that protects us from radiation. Even an eclipse seems unlikely. Our sun is 400 times bigger than the moon and also happens to be exactly 400 times or further away than the moon. So when an eclipse happens, and it’s not like a tiny dot going across the sun and it’s not like this giant moon blocking out the sun, isn’t it fascinating that we get to see this perfect moon match perfectly with the sun and an eclipse? And everywhere you look, there is just precision upon precision upon precision.

And when you take things that have a likelihood of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion with another thing that has a likelihood of a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, and another thing that has a likelihood of a trillion, trillion, trillion, you put them all together. You go, wait a minute, what do we do about fine uning? What is science answer for fine tuning? And it just seems like life is created perfectly in balance by a master designer. If I have a quarter and I bet you a thousand dollars, I could flip five heads in a row. Jonathan, would you take that bet five times for a thousand dollars? All right, because the odds are in your fair, the likelihood is 50, 50 and five times in a row you’re probably, if I bet you 50 times in a row, I could flip ahead 50 times in a row and if I don’t, I’ll give you a thousand dollars. Would you take that bet? That one for sure. How about a thousand times? How about a million times? I flip a quarter a million times in a row and if I hit heads every time you give me a thousand dollars, you take it, right?

But if I hit heads 10 times in a row, 20 times in a row, how soon before you would cry foul. If you’re tinkering with this thing, the odds are impossible, staggering. That’s what it’s like with fine tuning. We’re hitting heads millions of times over and over, and it suggests that someone has tinkered with the quarter. Last question I have for science. What about the gaps? Why is it okay for science to accuse Christians of Well, what we don’t understand, we just fill with God. It’s called the God of the gaps. What science can’t explain, we just say that’s the God of the gaps.

Science hasn’t explained it yet, so you just insert God there. But isn’t that exactly what science is doing with more and more discoveries, creating more and more questions? Isn’t science saying, well, that’s just what we haven’t discovered yet? Why is it any different for science to say that and not people of faith? I’ll end with this. I believe that it’s going to become more and more acceptable for science and scientists to admit that a creation theory is a viable option. The more we discover, I think the more science is going, just kind of throwing their hands up like we don’t know. DNA, chemistry, atoms, electromagnetic fields, these things are all pointing us to an intelligent designer.

And I have a hunch that eventually creationism will be taught as a viable theory. That’s what I believe. It’s also what a professor at Harvard named Dr. Gingrich confessed, professor of science. He wrote that I believe the book of nature with its astounding details, the blade of grass, the conus sennottorum, or the resonance levels of the carbon atom, the calcium cycle. These all suggest a God of purpose and the God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist. And that’s my hope for you today. My friends. I’m sure you have lots of questions. I don’t have time to get to them today, but my hope for you is that you see that science and faith are not at odds with each other. It’s a false dilemma. Science can inform your faith, and faith can inform your science. And yes, at the end of the day, your faith matters more. But these things are not at odds with each other and they can be kind of held with an open hand when we don’t know the answer. And at the end of the day, I believe because of the resurrection of Jesus, not because of dinosaurs.

And I hope at the end of the day you can walk out of here today believing there is a reason for God. Will you guys please stand in? I’ll give you a blessing. Just a couple, two quick things. Next week we wrap up this series as we talk about how can I trust the Bible? It’s a great question. And then also tonight, kids, you guys are in middle school and high school. You guys going to be asking questions about all these fun things at our youth night? You’re going to be, actually, we have a scientist coming to our youth night that’ll be kind of fun, middle school, high school, asking questions about faith. I hope you guys can, either you or your kids can be here and be a part of that because it is just kind of a continuation of this morning’s discussion.

BLESSING

Receive now the blessing of the Lord. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the Lord look upon you with favor and give you his peace. Thank you, guys so much for your patience today. I hope it was worthwhile. I hope it blessed you. Be safe and we’ll see you soon.