I Was Just Thinking Running and Watching Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. (Albert Einstein) June 2007

Don Huntington

The confusion of boundaries between science and religion continually generates unnecessary friction in this world.

In my opinion, evolutionism and creationism have worked together to create a matched set of equal and opposite errors because evolutionism attempts to elevate a scientific theory into a religion or philosophy, while creationism seeks to diminish a theological doctrine to a mere scientific theory.

Both sides confuse the subject that they are trying to explain.

Scientists (or lay people, for that matter) are certainly confused when they say things like, “Science shows that God didn’t create the world. The universe just came about through evolutionary processes.”

Determined Evolutionists have made claims about the absence of God that surely make real scientists blush. In 1961, for example, the Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov supposedly returned from orbit and said that he didn’t believe in God because “…in my travels around the earth all day long, I looked and didn’t see Him.”

I imagine that many atheists and agnostics who heard the comment wished that Titov had kept his mouth shut. Any supernatural being who could be visible outside the view port of Titov’s capsule wouldn’t be the God of Christian theology or, indeed, of any thoughtful theological system.

Science-based assertions about the absence of God are based upon fuzzy thinking since no theory of origins could possibly provide a basis for responding to philosophical questions such as, “By what power, if any, did the world come into being?”

It is egregious to suppose that a microscope or telescope could possibly be powerful enough to reveal the absence of God or to reveal the futility of the universe.

Scientists must not suppose that the inability of scientific instruments to discover a power behind or purpose for the universe in any way indicates the non-existence of either that power or that purpose.

Any assertion that the scientific method could be used to discover ultimate truth stems from bad science and even worse philosophy.

The only reasonable and ethical scientific response to such philosophical questions about the existence of a creator or purpose for existence is to say, “Nothing in science provides answers.”

But, of course some scientists are neither reasonable nor ethical. In a few cases (very few, I hope), scientists attempt to employ the pseudo-philosophical doctrine of Evolutionism as a weapon against a Christian worldview.

Some religious people, however, commit the opposite kind of error. Just as evolutionists suppose the findings of science to have philosophical legitimacy, these people suppose the language of the Bible to carry scientific validity.

Believers are just as wrong to imagine that God meant the language of the seven days of creation to be taken literally in support of some Young Earth theory as they formerly were wrong when they supposed that the biblical language about the sun riding from one side of the earth to the other, in Psalm 19:4-6, should be taken literally in support of the theory that the earth is the center of the universe.

The only reasonable and ethical religious response to the cosmological question of origins is to say, “Nothing in religion can provide answers.”

The Bible’s comments about cosmology should never be taken literally. For example, the Bible says, “There was an evening and a morning, one day,” about the first day of creation when, in fact, the sun wasn’t even created until the fourth day.

The obviously figurative use of the word “day” should prepare a reader to interpret the account of creation as something other than as a description of a literal week-long process. I’m grateful for the promises of the Bible that illuminate my daily life. I’m glad to live in a universe full of purpose and order.

I’m also thankful for the advances of science. I’ve have had a dilettante interest in the topic since I was a young child. I have always been fascinated by the power of the microscope and telescope to reveal things about the universe that God has made.

I intend to be neither lame nor blind, to use the words of Einstein from today’s quote. I want to walk through this world amazed and dazzled by the miraculous things I see around me, beneath my feet, and above my head. I want to live my life in perfect harmony with the Creator who made them all.

And by His grace I do!

Don Huntington
Editorial Director
don@110mag.com