HOW CAN ONE BELIEVE THAT CHRISTIANITY IS TRUE IN THIS ENLIGHTENED AGE OF SCIENCE AND REASON?
INTRODUCTION
In an earlier article which examined the nature of truth, I used science to support the idea that truth is objective, independent of man’s ideas about truth. In addition, we saw that non-scientists share this view of truth in the physical universe. I wrote:
“Science, therefore, is guided by the conviction that the universe is coherent, that ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’ in the words of Einstein. Scientists believe in the existence of universal, objective truth about the physical universe, truth that can be discovered and verified by the scientific method. Moreover, non-scientists share this conviction about the physical universe. It is common sense that the law of gravity applies to everyone whether or not they believe in it. Not even Jacques Derrida would fly in an airplane designed by an engineer who did not believe in the proven principles of aerodynamics, nor let himself be operated on by a surgeon who didn’t bother to “scrub in” because he didn’t believe in the existence of germs.
Some (especially some scientists) might cry “Foul!” at the use of science to buttress the Christian idea of the nature of truth on the basis that scientific theories must explain by natural law. In other words, only naturalistic explanations should be permitted by science. Since Christianity contains supernatural elements, some consider that it is forcibly unscientific, at least by this naturalistic definition of science.
For example, in the debate over the teaching of intelligent design (i.e. creation) alongside evolution in the public schools as an alternative theory of origins, secularists have argued that intelligent design is not scientific. The primary argument against intelligent design can be summarized as follows: “Scientific theories must explain by natural law. Because design or creationist theories do not do so, they are necessarily unscientific.”
This raises an important question: What is the purpose of science? Is it about finding natural materialist explanations or accurate explanations? One can argue that limiting the field of possible explanations to only natural materialist ones is a truncated view of science, which is supposed to consider all the possible explanations of a particular phenomenon. If intelligent design is a possible explanation, it should be considered alongside evolution and then either accepted or rejected based on the scientific evidence available.
In addition, it can be observed that “common descent” (better known as evolution) does not explain by natural laws either, but by postulating a hypothetical pattern of historical events that, if actual, would account for a variety of presently observed data. Common descent is therefore no more “scientific” than intelligent design by this definition of science.
Christianity is admittedly a supernatural religion. The Gospels record 35 specific miracles that Jesus performed. In addition, there are accounts of several miracles performed by the apostles in the book of Acts and by prophets (in particular Elijah and Elisha) in the Old Testament. Is Christianity therefore incompatible with science by definition? I would argue that it is only incompatible with a truncated view of science that admits only naturalistic explanations. Science that is open to all possible explanations in its search for accurate explanations is not by definition incompatible with Christianity.
In his book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, the physicist Stephen Barr tackles this question head-on. He writes:
“I should emphasize that this book is not about proofs. The materialist’s story had a moral, but it did not constitute a proof of materialism. There was no experiment that proved that only matter existed, nor was there any calculation that proved that the universe had no purpose. Nor did the materialist really ever claim that there was. What he claimed was that there were two pictures of the world, the religious and the materialist, and the progress of science has revealed a world that looks more and more like the materialist picture. It was a question, in other words, not of proofs but of expectations. Science, it was claimed, had fulfilled the materialist’s expectations and confounded the religious believer’s. In this book, I am making the same kind of claim, but in reverse. I am claiming that, on the critical points, recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in God.”
Another eminent scientist who has written on the subject of the relationship between science and Christianity is Dr. Henry F. Schaeffer, whom U.S. News and World Report has speculated to be a five-time Nobel nominee in chemistry. In his book, Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence? Dr. Schaeffer shows that science and Christianity are compatible, and agrees with Dr. Barr that “recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in God”.
So how can one believe that Christianity is true in this enlightened age of science and reason? This includes questions such as:
a) What credentials back up the claims of Christianity? Is there any good evidence to support it?
b) How can one know that God even exists?
c) How do you reconcile faith with the fact that the Bible is full of errors?
d) Hasn’t evolution shown that the Bible is unreliable?
e) How can one believe in miracles in an age of science and reason?
This article will attempt to answer these and related questions by focusing on three fundamental questions:
a) The universe and the human race exist and they exist in their present form and complexity. Where did they come from?
b) Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead?
c) Is it reasonable to believe that the Bible is a reliable document?
As noted before, Christianity is a supernatural religion, which causes some difficulties in an age of natural explanations for many phenomena which were imperfectly understood in the past. It seems to me, however, that there are two statements in the Bible which, if believed, reduce the other supernatural events in the Bible to details. Those two statements are:
a) “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
b) “On the third day, he (i.e. Jesus Christ) rose from the dead.” I Corinthians 15:4
If one believes these two statements, the other miracles recounted in the Bible are not difficult to believe. Since these two statements recount the two foundational supernatural events, I will treat each of them in detail. Finally, I will consider the question of the trustworthiness of the Bible as an authority in the search for truth.
A PERSONAL NOTE
Before going any further, I should admit that these questions are more than merely academic to me. I became a follower of Jesus Christ as an electrical engineering student at the University of Louisville. After graduation, I went into the Navy, where I worked as a nuclear power engineer for 6 years. I was surrounded by some very bright scientists and engineers, but I never doubted for a moment the truth of Christianity, partly because it just made perfect sense to me as an engineer and partly because of the way it had changed my life. After 6 years of working as an engineer in the Navy’s nuclear propulsion program, I left engineering to join the staff of the Navigators and begin a ministry to midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.
For the first 13 years of my Christian experience, my “fall-back” position when challenged on the objective truth of my faith was that I knew it was true because it had changed my life. Many would say, “That’s just psychological! It changed your life because you believed it was true.” To that I would reply, “Well, you didn’t know me before. Nothing that was merely psychological could have changed my life the way faith in Jesus Christ has.” Even my friends would occasionally chime in, “Yeah, you didn’t know him before!”
One day, however, after I had been a believer for thirteen years and a missionary for 4 years, I found myself wondering, “What if it is just psychological? How can I know for sure if Christianity is objectively and universally true?” At first I hoped that these questions would just go away, but I soon realized that I would have to deal with them. For the next several months, I devoted all the time and energy I could to reading and studying in pursuit of answers to questions like those above. The two sources that were probably the most helpful were the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible and the book He Is There and He Is Not Silent by Francis Schaeffer. The remainder of this article is, by and large, what I found.
HOW DID WE GET HERE? THE QUESTION OF ORIGINS
The universe in general and human life in particular, exist and they exist in their present form and complexity. How did they get here? There are three possibilities:
a) Necessity: The laws of physics and chemistry made the appearance of life inevitable, and the laws of biology (i.e. natural selection) made the evolution of human beings inevitable.
b) Chance: Statistical mechanics, then quantum mechanics, led to chance being regarded as ineliminable. Reduced to two chemical-type equations:
Matter + time + chance yielded life.
Life + time + chance yielded human life.
c) Design: The universe, from hydrogen atoms to human beings, was created by an infinite-personal Creator.
The first two explanations are obviously naturalistic explanations and the third is a theistic, (i.e. supernatural) explanation. If we do not arbitrarily eliminate the third explanation on the basis of it not being a naturalistic explanation, which of the three best explains what we can observe? I would suggest that the third explanation, intelligent design, best explains what we observe in nature, for the following reasons:
a) The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that, left to themselves, things always go from order to disorder and that entropy (i.e. randomness) always increases, is a powerful argument against both necessity and chance. Any engineer who has ever tried to make anything happen in the real world is intimately acquainted with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Left to themselves, things do not go from disorder to order, yet evolution insists that they do, or at least they have done so in the past. As noted above, even naturalistic science (statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics) has concluded that chance is ineliminable, and therefore that necessity alone is inadequate to explain our origins. To believe that chance is responsible for the complexity of the physical universe and human existence in the face of the Second Law seems to require more faith than intelligent design does. For example, some have likened it to the probability of 500 monkeys producing the works of Shakespeare by randomly typing on 500 typewriters or a tornado passing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. It is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely.
b) Irreducible complexity is defined as: a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. The human eye, for example, is an example of irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is a real problem for naturalistic evolution, because an irreducibly complex system cannot just evolve. One example would be the necessity for fish to develop lungs in order to evolve into birds. If they developed lungs before leaving the water, they would drown, but if they leave the water before developing lungs, they would do what fish do when they are pulled out of the water, i.e. die.
c) The Anthropic Principle: The universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to
make it hospitable to human life. For example, there are over 30 physical constants that, if any one were slightly modified, would make human life impossible. Scientists have calculated the probability of human life coming to be by chance alone to be on the order of 1 in 10 to the 150th power.
DID JESUS CHRIST REALLY RISE FROM THE DEAD?
Why would anyone believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? We can see three reasons:
a) The credibility of the eyewitnesses. Most of those who claimed to be eyewitnesses of the risen Christ were persecuted and some were even martyred for sticking to their story. Some would argue that men have always been willing to die for something that they believed to be true, even if it wasn’t. The problem with that is that if the resurrection were not true, these guys would have known it. In fact, they had a hard time believing it themselves. As Charles Colson has put it: “Men may be willing to die for something they believe to be true, but they won’t die for something they know to be false.”
b) The life of Jesus Christ, and the phenomenal claims He made about Himself. In John 5:18, for example, it says that the Jews “tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God”. Most men would bend over backwards to clear up a misunderstanding that was causing people to want to kill them, but Jesus then goes on to talk about all the ways in which He is equal to the Father in the next 29 verses. He not only left their impression that He was claiming to be the Son of God intact, He reinforced it significantly. In another place, He said “I and the Father are one”, which caused the Jews to want to stone him. (John 10:30-31)
If His claims were not true, either He knew they were false, in which case He was a fraud or He was deluded, in which case He was a lunatic. A simple reading of the Gospel accounts is sufficient to see that His life directly contradicts those two possibilities, however.
IS THE BIBLE RELIABLE?
There are many reasons for believing that the Bible is at least as reliable as any other book from antiquity. According to Nelson Glueck, a well-known archeologist, “No archeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference.” The manuscript evidence that we have substantiates that the Bible we have today is faithful to what was originally written. For example, our present-day New Testament has been translated from hand-written manuscripts dated from the third and fourth centuries. By contrast, the oldest manuscript we have of Caesar’s Gallic Wars has been dated at 900 AD, and no one questions its authenticity. Extra-Biblical accounts, such as that of the Jewish historian Josephus substantiate many of the details of the life of Jesus. In addition, the fulfillment in the life of Jesus of hundreds of Biblical prophecies concerning the Messiah attests to the authenticity of the Bible.
Most significantly, perhaps, is the fact that the Bible has unbelievably accurate insights that explain life and the world around me the way they really are. The Bible does indeed “tell it like it is” when it comes to human nature. When I interpret the world around me and my life in light of the Bible, it makes sense. In his book The God Who Is There, Francis Schaeffer has an excellent illustration of how this works. Imagine that you found a book out of which a chunk had been cut so that all that remained was the bottom one inch of each page. Although it would be impossible to reconstruct the book from these fragments of text, there could be no doubt that they were the product of an intelligent being. Now, imagine further that a pile of fragments of pages were found in the attic, and that it turned out that each of these fragments fit with one of the one-inch fragments of pages that we had in the beginning, so that when placed properly, they told a coherent, even riveting story. There would be little doubt that these fragments were the missing parts of the book, and that the two sets of fragments had a common author.
This is the case of Christianity. The mutilated book corresponds to the universe and the human race in its current state. The fragments of pages found in the attic correspond to the Bible, by which God speaks to man in an intelligent manner, not only with respect to “religious” truth, but also concerning the cosmos and history, domains susceptible to verification. The world around us and the human race in their current abnormal state are inadequate in and of themselves to make sense out of our existence, but they are important in understanding that the Scriptures, by which God speaks to man, are what they claim to be. In other words, when I interpret my humanity and the world around me in light of the Scriptures, they make sense. Without the Scriptures, they don’t.
BUT IS IT TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?
One problem that many people have with Christianity is that it seems “too good to be true”. In fact, this was at the origin of many of my doubts. I began to wonder if the Gospel, which says that I can be restored to a personal relationship with God solely by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as atonement for my sins, was too good to be true. In the final analysis, however, I realized that the alternative is “too bad to be true”; because life ultimately has no meaning if man is autonomous in the universe. To put it another way, human reason is inadequate to discover the ultimate meaning of life, so either God must reveal the meaning of life to us or we must live without ultimate meaning. The book of Ecclesiastes was written to show the “vanity” (or futility, a word which appears 39 times in the book) of searching for ultimate truth and meaning “under the sun” (meaning using human reason as my ultimate authority in my search), a phrase which appears 26 times in the book. The author concludes:
“Look, says the Teacher, this is what I have discovered, adding one thing to another to discover the scheme of things – while I was still searching but not finding –“ (Ecclesiastes 7:27-28a)
“When I applied my mind to know wisdom and to observe man’s labor on earth – his eyes not seeing sleep day or night – then I saw all that God has done. No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims he knows, he cannot really comprehend it.” (Ecclesiastes 8:16-17)
The author of Ecclesiastes (King Solomon) was one of the wisest men who ever lived, yet he says that he was unable to find life’s ultimate meaning and purpose, using human reason as his ultimate authority. He concludes by returning to divine revelation as his ultimate authority in the search for truth, as we saw in an earlier article on “What Is Truth?”
“The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails – given by one Shepherd. Be warned, my son, of anything in addition to them. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. Now all has been heard, here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.” Ecclesiastes 12:11-14
In conclusion, we can believe in the objective truth of the Christian story based on three things:
1. The intricate design that we see in nature is best explained by the objective existence of a Designer.
2. The historicity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
3. The trustworthiness of the Bible, which explains life and the world around us in ways that make perfect sense.
John Ed Robertson
November 25, 2003
BIBLIOGRAPHY
a) Barr, Stephen; “Retelling the Story of Science”; First Things; March, 2003
b) Barr, Stephen; Modern Physics and Ancient Faith; Notre Dame Press
c) Behe, Dembski, Meyer; Science and Evidence for Intelligent Design in the Universe; The Proceedings of the Wethersfield Institute; Ignatius Press
d) Glynn, Patrick; God – The Evidence; Forum – Prima Publishing
e) Lewis, C.S.; Mere Christianity; Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co.
f) McLaren, Brian; Finding Faith; Zondervan
g) Schaeffer, Francis; He Is There and He Is Not Silent; Tyndale House Publishers
h) Schaeffer, Francis; The God Who Is There
i) Schaeffer, Henry F.; Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence? University of Georgia
j) Strobel, Lee; The Case for Faith
k) Strobel, Lee; The Case for Christ