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Asking for a Friend – Week 2

Whether we’re new to Christianity or we’ve been Christians for years, there are questions we think about and sometimes argue about with others. Over the next five weeks, we’ll take a look at the top five questions our community has.

Does science contradict religion?

The beliefs we have strongly influence the beliefs we form.

• 3 things involved in this question
  1. Scientific data
  2. The conclusion that religion is a story that fits with the scientific data we have.
  3. OR The conclusion that all that exists is what we can see, touch, and study—hence, no God.
• 3 questions we need to ask
  1. Does the Bible or Christian belief fit with scientific data? (evolution, age of the earth, dinosaurs, etc.)
     • Genesis—There is a continuum of beliefs about creation.
     • In all these different views, there is no direct conflict with the scientific data we have
  2. Does science cause us to doubt religion?
     • Data that we have should cause people to doubt the purely naturalistic view.
     • Anthony Flu is an atheistic scientist who came to believe in God through his research based on the complexity of DNA arrangements required to create life that must have involved an intelligent Creator
     • Big Bang looks a lot like “Let there be light.”
  3. What about beauty, emotions, morality?
     • Science can’t account for things like beauty or the emotions we feel when we look at art or listen to music. It can’t account for morality, which is a deep part of who we are.

The beliefs we have strongly influence the beliefs we form.

• What we find is different people with different experiences and different beliefs looking at the same data and believing by faith that their conclusion is right.
• A. N. Wilson, “The existence of language is one of the many phenomena of which love and music are the two strongest as well as morals, which suggests human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convinced me that we’re spiritual beings and that the religion of the incarnation asserting that God made humanity in his image and continually restores humanity in his image is simply true as a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.”

Ask yourself:

• When I look at everything that I experience as a human, all of my desires and fears and hopes and dreams, my inner sense of right and wrong—which one of these stories is the most likely?
  • Humans as a bunch of cells and meat with no purpose OR
  • Humans created by a personal God with hopes, dreams, morals, and purpose