“Proving” God's Power and Might

I believe the driving force behind "creation science" and Intelligent Design is the desire to demonstrate, in concrete terms, that God exists and impacts the natural world.

From the faith position, the argument goes something like this (I am generalizing about many evangelical and conservative Christians -I realize that this does not represent the experience or beliefs of all people of faith):

A large number of people believe in God. They base this belief on a combination of personal experience and revelation. We have books that claim to contain the words and acts of God. We have subjective experiences that we believe are the result of God interacting with us. We observe effects in our life and in the social, political and natural world that we attribute to the activities of God.

From these experiences and observations, we come to believe that God has a tangible impact on our lives and the workings of the world. By tangible impact, we mean measurable, noticeable - that God is potent and effective. Isaiah 55:10-11:

quote:

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10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,

11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

---

The success of science in the past few hundred years has been to describe how the world works without reference to God (not in denial of God, but reflecting the understanding that supernatural intervention is not needed for all natural processes so far identified). So far, no cause-and-effect has been demonstrated to depend on God, and no experiments have been successful in detecting God's activities.

To be sure, there are many, many stories of things happening that are attributed to God - healings, recoveries, fortuitous happenings, incredible coincidences, chains of events leading to results that people feel can only be the action of God - but so far, no way to demonstrate that belief in the laboratory or in the field to a "scientific" level of proof.

This stands in stark contrast to the success of science in understanding how the natural world works.

The "creation science" and ID movement is an attempt to rectify this imbalance by demonstrating the power and effectiveness of God in terms that cannot be denied. So far, this attempt has not been successful. This has resulted in some people of faith "declaring victory" anyway, and trying to convince the rest of the world that areas of uncertainly, complexity and debate represent the genuine activity of God. The world's response has been skeptical.

For now, it seems that the kind of hard proof people of faith are looking for is not forthcoming. It makes sense to keep looking - but integrity demands that we be up front about how the search is going - full of confidence and faith, yes, but declaring victory - not yet.

Of course, there is another approach - to consider the possiblity that the world that science uncovers is the world God has made. God may not be detectable via science because what science reveals is what God does - all of it. In ways that we obviously do not understand, perhaps God makes his will known though what we perceive to be the natural processes we experience everyday. If this is true, then we will never (or always) find God via science. This does not make science any less useful, but it can make science less threatening.

Science and Religion Both Faith-Based?

Do scientists who accept evolution have equivalent a priori assumptions (old earth, evolution, common ancestor etc.) that causes them to process all facts through a filter that can yield only support for their assumption? That is, are YEC and evolution two faith-based competing theories?

I do not think so, because there are many, many independent lines of evidence that do not make sense in a YEC interpretation of Genesis, but do make sense in the context of evolution and common descent. And of course, this is how the theory developed. A YEC scientist (Darwin) went out and looked around, and realized what the facts he observed led to - evolution. After some rather contentious debate, other scientists came to the same conclusions. Years later, thousands of scientists recognize that evolution makes sense of the facts, whereas special creation does not. Some of these facts include the geological column and the fossils indexed to them, psuedogenes, broken genes, junk DNA, greater similarity correlating with shared ancestry, etc. etc.

So you have evolution emerging from the systematic observation of facts about the world, and the YEC approach coming from an assumption about how to interpret Genesis 1.

While science does not have anything to say about the existence of God, it does have things to say about things that have and have not happened in the natural world. When your confidence in God is tied to the accuracy of statements about the natural world contained in books of revelation, then science is in the uncomfortable position of “disproving” some possible interpretations of that revelation (Genesis can’t be both "true in a scientific sense" and teach that the world is 6,000 years old, for instance, if science is a reliable guide to nature).

Unfortunately for creationists, criticism of our evolution is not the same thing as defending the Genesis account of creation. It may be that mutation and natural selection are not the only forces acting on species to cause evolution. This just means that the theory will get better over time – that there is more to learn. While the theory of evolution will change and grow, there is no reason to expect that the evidence will suddenly start pointing to special creation, a global flood, and a young earth.

None of this rules out the possibility that God designed the universe, especially if He did it in some way that is beyond our detection – and in a way that also preserves the true random nature of the cosmos. This is a position that cannot be proved or disproved by science – two people look at the same facts, some see God, some see chance.

So faith and science two faith assumptions? Christians challenged to believe the Bible or believe science? I don’t think so. Do the findings of science challenge our beliefs? Of course. All Christians used to believe that the Bible taught geocentrism – today, YEC-ers argue strongly that the Bible teaches no such thing. The reason everyone agrees on this point is because scientists demonstrated a fact about the world (heliocentrism) that no one can successfully dispute. Like it or not, we have to test our interpretations of revelation against our real world experience. Science is a tool that magnifies and strengthens our ability to think accurately about our world. And that is all it does – but that is quite a lot.

So What is Wrong With ID?

I have a few objections to ID. These include:

ID is an interventionist theology, that states that God MUST miraculously intervene to do the "hard parts." By this I mean that ID in general agrees that some evolution has taken place, but that certain things (e.g. species, major organs (like the eye), the bacterial flagellum) represent too much complexity to have evolved. So God, in some unspecified and unknowable way intervened in the process of evolution and added the missing information. This is not my view of how God acted in creation, based on the evidence so far - so I am not an advocate. It also specifically EXCLUDES my theistic evolution approach *which essentially states that science is uncovering how God made the world). Id differ from young earth creationism only in that ID accepts far more of evolution and grants a much longer time frame for life on earth than those folks who think that Genesis 1 accurately describes creation events.

The whole movement is driven by a prior commitment that we know, based on our interpretation of the Bible, better than the evidence of the natural world. Though ID claims to be agnostic about the Designer, both Behe and Dembowski have admitted that they think the designer is the Christian God. The only reason to remove "god talk" is the hope that it will then stand up to constitutional challenge. ID has not made its case, so we are jumping the gun, and asserting things contrary to fact, when we advance the ID idea.

I also think that most of the furor over ID has been whipped up under false pretenses. Conservative Christians have been told that "mainstream science" promotes atheism. This is not true (though there are scientists - both Christian and atheist - who do claim that science supports their beliefs). Science is the most successful tool we have to explore the natural world. Because it has not turned up evidence of the existence of God (something it was not ever designed to do), it is now being made to suffer accusations of being anti-Christian.

Yes, there are cultural, moral and ethical issues we need to face. Yes, scientists (just like pastors, lawyers, politicians, plumbers, etc.) have a variety of personal views - some we embrace, some we reject. Science is being singled out for attack because it speaks with authority about issues that touch on the validity and accuracy of the Bible. ID is an attempt at a scientific case, but in spite of claims to the contrary, it has not yet made its case. Will ID be able to support its claims? Time will tell - and we should give it all the time it needs (however long that turns out to be), not rush it, half-baked, to the table, and then insist that it be the star of the banquet.

Science and the Art of Biblical Interpretation

I've written lots about what I am against, so what am I arguing for?

First, that the natural world is a continuum with revelation. What I mean by this is that the natural world is like a “fossil” of truth – it provides an accurate picture of what has come before.

An example? The world really is 4.5 Billion years old. Why do we know this? Multiple dating methods converge on this date, using independent properties of matter.

The implication? When Genesis describes creation, it is not describing the events in any sort of scientific manner. This would have come to a surprise to the original hearers, to believers during the life of Jesus, even to early scientists like Isaac Newton.

So how can I justify ignoring the plain meaning of the text? Well, because the plain meaning is not suported by any evidence - none. Not just in the timing of creation (6, 24-hour days), but also in the order of creation (light, day and night before the creation of the sun, for example).

One objection is that this is how God decided to do it; it was a miracle, and one of the (unintentional? unavoidable?) fallouts is that the scientific evidence points in a different direction (old earth), but the Bible sets us straight (young earth). This objection is unassailable – this could be the truth. But when I consider the odd situation that puts us in – the truth (young earth) is of no help to us (for example, flood geology is useless in finding oil), and the scientific “lie” (old earth) proves very accurate and useful information (a good way to find oil) - I am not satisfied with this explanation.

Is this kind of dualism really Biblical? For spiritual purposes, we believe in a young earth, but when we want to have an accurate model of the earth and how it works, we have to resort to the lie of an old earth?

I suppose the same can be said of evolution. In spite of all the hype, no evidence actually exists that disproves evolution, and no support for special creation can be found. What is left is personal disbelief that evolution can work. But inability to believe is not compelling, especially when you follow the evidence, and find that all the claims made to have disproven evolution turn out to be mistaken or worse, fraudulent.

So does that mean that science stands in judgment over the Bible? For me at least, not really. I view science as a natural extension of our curiosity about, and knowledge of, the world. We understand the world in a very different way than did the original hearers of the various books of the Bible. We do not believe in geocentrism. We do believe in the germ theory of disease. From Augustine to Galileo, the church taught that no one lived on the opposite side of the world (the antipodes), because Christ’s message could not have reached them. We now know that in fact people did live there, even before the time of Noah.

God, however, would not have been unaware of any of this. A clear implication is that God spoke to people in terms of their local cultural understandings and expectations. It turns out that the Bible is not a science textbook; God uses the language and experience of the people he is dealing with to communicate to them – how could he do otherwise?

It is true that this opens up sections of the Bible to interpretation; what in the Bible is cultural, and what transcends culture? This is a question that we must, and do discuss (consider the issues of multiple wives, slavery and the role of women to name just a few issues where our modern approach differs from the world found in the New Testament). It is naïve to pretend that we do not reinterpret the Bible for our time and culture. Even literalists have to explain away the order of creation in Genesis and the geocentrism of Joshua; so the question is not IF, but HOW to intepret the Bible. I believe that we must let our understanding of the natural world play a role in our approach to Biblical interpretation.

Science Versus the Bible?

When we discover that the natural world is different than the picture we expect from our reading of the Bible (for example, geocentrism) do we suspend our thought processes, or hold both the Biblical narrative and the discoveries of science in tension?

Some try and resolve the conflict with creationism, whereby “science-like” explanations for “literal” readings are used in an attempt to justify a pre-determined attitude toward the text. This approach is the very opposite of science, because a determination of what the text means has been made before any facts are checked. For example, the existence of a global flood in 2,500 bc is inferred from the text, and facts are winnowed for support, no matter how the evidence actually falls out. Even in the face of clear evidence that the case for the flood is full of omissions, distortions and manipulation, this prior commitment to the meaning of the text is maintained IN SPITE of the evidence.

Some reasons why we know the Bible is not to be taken literally:
1. Genesis 1 does not describe creation in anything like a “natural” order. For example, light is made before the sun, and day and night are separate creations, independent of light and the sun. Green plants precede the creation of the sun, and the stars are called by name (though they are virtually infinite in number).
2. Explanations of events like the lengthening of the day in Joshua are incorrect, representing a cultural understanding of the causes of day (the sun moving across the sky, Jesus rising up into the clouds on his way to heaven, etc.).
3. The Bible itself represents a consensus, based on hundreds of years of conflict over theology (see Arius, Athanasius, Pelagius, etc.). Even now, there is not unanimity about the cannon between the three major branches of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant), let alone other traditions. This does not mean that the Bible is not inspired, but it does mean we have to appreciate the human process used to assemble, recognize and preserve the Bible. These same human processes are reflected in the content of individual books – which in fact reflect the cultural assumptions of the authors and audience of the various books.
4. We do not have original manuscripts on which to base an inerrant, infallible approach to the Bible. The earliest partial manuscript dates to over a hundred years after the events recorded, and there are irresolvable textual problems that prevent us from recreating an “original” manuscript (for example, we have 4 endings of Mark, and doubt that any of them is the original). This does not mean that the Bible is not reliable – just that it is not inerrant or infallible, at least as concerns the manuscripts we have. The evidence for this is in the public domain (just Google, and skip past all the spin.

As a result, I think it is clear that the Bible cannot be taken as literally true as regards the natural world (6,24 hour days of creation, day and night created before the sun, global flood about 2,500 years bc, the notion that stopping the sun would cause the day to be longer, etc.). The Bible reflects the cultural assumptions of the age in which it was written. We have to keep this in mind when we read and interpret the Bible. As a result, we have to recognize that the Bible does not teach science. Instead, it communicates spiritual truths in the context of the cultural beliefs of the author and original audience.

This does not mean that all historical details are inaccurate – just that the Bible’s authority does not rest on its containing a modern, scientific understanding of the world. Accurate understandings of the world can be used as part of the interpretation process. For example, Genesis 1 should not be viewed as literal history. We only know this because science has demonstrated that the order, timing and cause-and-effect relationships between various elements of the creation story in Genesis is not accurate. When the accuracy of certain historical claims are crucial (for example, Moses’ existence or Jesus resurrection) certainty can be based on other foundations than the claim of an inerrant, infallible Bible.

The Long and Short of Biblical Literalism

Some people have been having trouble knowing just what to take literally in the Bible, and what can safely be explained away. For example, the story about the sun standing still in Joshua DOES NOT teach geocentrism. But Genesis 1 DOES teach a literal 6, 24 hour day creation. How can you tell them apart? Well, you can't. That is why you need good Bible teachers (cause you'd never figure it out on your own).

I guess the moral is, take the Bible at its word, except when you need to reinterpret it. If you don't keep its literal meaning (except when you have to change it), then it will lose its authority. Except when Catholics interpret the Bible - good conservatives don't hold with those Popes. Or Protestants who don't reach the same conclusions we do. And don't get me started on Orthodox Christians. Where did all these churches come from, anyway?

You see, we can't have any interpretation going on, except when WE say it is OK. And when it is OK, we'll let you know - because you sure can't tell by looking at the passages. Its tricky - two passages can seem to be historical recitations of facts, but one needs to be interpreted, and the other must be treated as literal truth.

Only we can tell you which is which (and don't ask us how we know, it is a spiritual thing - you just know, if you are us). And those Church Fathers - they don't know what they are doing either, except when they agree with us. In fact, this is how we know the interpretation is right - we agree with it. Those other Christians in the past 1900 years - you just can't trust them. Stick with us, we'll tell you when to interpret, how to interpret, and who you can trust (mostly just us, and if it comes right down to it, me and not them).

Faith in A Scientific World

The past few hundred years has witnessed a sea-change in the way we think about the world. Science, not theology is accepted as the final arbiter on everything from the power of prayer to the age of the earth. This would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of folks even 300 years ago. True, the YEC camp has to fall back on an alternative science to justify their positions - but the point is, they don't just say "it was a miracle" and leave it at that - no, they go to amazing lengths to argue that THEY have the 'true science" and the more accurate view of the world. In other words, they grant the primacy of science when it comes to the natural world.

Most religions record interactions between gods and people. Gods are revealed to change history, perform miracles and dwell in the heavens (or some such place) - which were viewed not as extra-dimensional or outside of space and time, but as PART of the natural order - albeit generally inaccessible. All the same, Orpheus went into Hades, and John had visions of heaven - which are portrayed as actual, physical places.

The point is, we are transitioning from a worldview in which God built the universe, populated it, and physically inhabits it, to a vague notion of God as Spirit, but no longer actually living in the same physical universe with us. Yes, we discuss God as being present in Spirit with us - but the notion that God, who is part of the Universe, extends that presence via his Spirit is quite different than the notion that God is somehow outside space and time, with no natural properties at all, yet somehow interacts with us via spirit, which itself has no natural properties at all - but still has the power to impact us in undetectable (that is, purely subjective) ways via an unknowable mechanism.

Do we need to update our theology (in the classic sense of knowledge about God) to take into account what we now know about the universe?