Science and Faith

Before any disagreement, the agreement. Genesis 1:1 says that God created the heavens and the earth, the Hebrew way of saying everything there is. Every Christian view of creation in this lesson affirms that sentence without reservation, and with it the doctrine the church built on it. God alone is eternal; everything else has a beginning and depends on him. Creation is not made from any pre-existing stuff that rivals God, but at his word; Hebrews 11:3 says what is seen was not made out of what was visible, and Romans 4:17 that God calls into being what does not yet exist. The church's teachers, from Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus in the second century, spoke of creation out of nothing, ex nihilo. The Nicene Creed confesses one God, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

Notice what follows from this, all of it common ground. Creation is not God, so it may be studied without impiety; the sun and moon are lamps, not lords. Creation is good, so it is worth studying. Creation is ordered by a faithful God, so we may expect it to be regular; Jeremiah 33:25 speaks of the fixed order of heaven and earth. And creation is contingent, depending on God's free choice rather than on necessity, so we cannot know what it is like by pure reasoning, only by looking. Some historians have argued that these convictions helped give rise to modern science in Christian Europe: Reijer Hooykaas made the case in Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (1972). Other historians think the claim overstated, and point to the earlier achievements of Greek, Indian, Chinese and Islamic science, such as the work on optics of Ibn al-Haytham in Cairo in the eleventh century. A Christian should not claim that science could only have come from Christianity. He can say that the doctrine of creation gives good reasons to do science, and that most of the founders of modern science believed it.

Notice also what Genesis 1:1 does not settle. It does not say how long ago the beginning was. It does not say by what processes, over how much time, God brought about the world we see. Whether the days of Genesis 1 are ordinary days, long ages or a literary framework, and whether God made living things by direct acts or through processes like evolution, are questions on which faithful Christians who share a high view of scripture disagree. This lesson will set those views out at full strength. First it must deal with a story nearly every student has been told, which is not true.

In 1874 the American chemist John William Draper published a History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, and in 1896 Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. Between them they gave the English-speaking world the idea that science and religion have always been at war, and that every advance of science was won against the church. Draper's main target was the Roman Catholic Church; White's was dogmatic theology in general. Both books were widely read, and the story they told is still the one most people know.

Historians of science have abandoned it, and not because they are Christians; many are not. They abandoned it because the evidence did not fit. John Hedley Brooke, in Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991), showed that the real relationship has been complex: sometimes conflict, often cooperation, frequently both at once, and always shaped by local circumstances. In 2009 Ronald Numbers, himself not a believer, edited Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion, in which historians took apart twenty-five common myths, including the claim that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. Educated medieval Europeans knew the earth was a sphere; the Venerable Bede taught it in the eighth century, and a thirteenth-century textbook called On the Sphere was standard in universities for four hundred years. The flat earth myth was largely popularised by Washington Irving's romantic biography of Columbus in 1828, as Jeffrey Burton Russell showed in Inventing the Flat Earth (1991). Peter Harrison, in The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), argued that the very categories of science and religion as two separate realms are modern, and did not exist in the forms we know before the nineteenth century.

Look at who did the science. Johannes Kepler, who discovered that the planets move in ellipses, understood his astronomy as a way of praising the Creator whose geometry he was uncovering. Robert Boyle, a founder of modern chemistry, left money in his will for lectures defending Christianity. Isaac Newton wrote more on theology than on physics, though his theology was unorthodox, for he rejected the Trinity, and honesty requires saying so. Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell, who between them laid the foundations of electromagnetism, were devout Christians. Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics, was an Augustinian friar. Georges Lemaitre, whom you met in the first lesson, was a Catholic priest. Today many leading scientists are Christians, among them Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project, and many are not.

None of this means there has never been conflict. There have been real disputes, and some continue, including the ones in sections 4 and 5. The point is that conflict is not the whole story, or even the main one, and that a student who has been told that Christians have always opposed science has been told a myth. The best-known case of all, the one used to prove the myth, is Galileo. So it is worth getting Galileo right.

In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon of the cathedral at Frombork in Poland, published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which placed the sun rather than the earth at the centre and dedicated it to Pope Paul III. A Lutheran theologian, Andreas Osiander, added an unsigned preface presenting it as a mathematical hypothesis. For decades the book was used by astronomers and caused little trouble. Some Protestant leaders were hostile; Luther is reported in his Table Talk to have mocked the idea in 1539, though the report is second-hand. A line often attributed to Calvin, asking who would put the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit, has no source in his writings; the historian Edward Rosen showed in 1960 that it appears to have been invented in the nineteenth century.

Galileo Galilei turned a telescope on the sky in 1609 and 1610 and saw mountains on the moon, the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, all of which counted against the old earth-centred system of Ptolemy. He became convinced that Copernicus was right, and in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, written in 1615, he argued that scripture speaks in the language of ordinary people and does not intend to teach astronomy. He quoted a churchman, generally identified as Cardinal Cesare Baronius, as saying that the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go. That is a sound principle of interpretation, and many Christians today would accept it.

The church's response was cautious and then hostile. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the leading theologian in Rome, wrote in April 1615 that if a true demonstration were found that the sun is at the centre, the church would have to reinterpret the passages that seemed to say otherwise, but that no such demonstration had been given. In February 1616 a panel of theologians declared the sun-centred view foolish in philosophy and formally heretical; Bellarmine instructed Galileo not to hold or defend it; and in March the Congregation of the Index suspended Copernicus's book until corrected. In 1632, under Pope Urban VIII, who had been his friend and admirer, Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It argued strongly for Copernicus, and it put an argument the pope himself favoured into the mouth of a character named Simplicio, who loses every exchange. In 1633 Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition, found vehemently suspected of heresy, and made to abjure. He was not tortured, though he was formally threatened with it, and he was not thrown into a dungeon. His sentence of imprisonment was commuted to house arrest, which he served at his villa at Arcetri near Florence until his death in 1642, still writing; his Two New Sciences, a foundation of modern physics, was published in 1638. The famous words, and yet it moves, first appear in print more than a century later, in Giuseppe Baretti's Italian Library of 1757, and are probably legend.

Two further facts complete the picture. First, the science was not as settled in 1633 as it is now. Galileo had no proof that the earth moves. The system of Tycho Brahe, in which the planets circle the sun and the sun circles a stationary earth, fitted the phases of Venus as well as Copernicus did; Galileo's favourite argument, from the tides, was wrong; and he ignored Kepler's discovery of elliptical orbits. Evidence of the earth's motion came later, from the aberration of starlight in 1729 and stellar parallax in 1838. Second, none of this excuses the church. The theologians in 1616 made a scripture reading into dogma on a question scripture was not addressing, and used force to protect it. In 1992 Pope John Paul II, receiving the report of a commission he had established, acknowledged that the theologians who condemned Galileo had erred. The Galileo affair was not science against religion. It was a clash of personalities, politics and authority, in which a church mistook its reading of scripture for scripture itself. That is the warning every side of the debate below should take.

Young earth creation holds that God created the universe in six ordinary days, a few thousand years ago, and that a global flood in Noah's time accounts for much of the geological record. Its case begins with the text. The days of Genesis 1 are numbered and marked by evening and morning, which in the rest of the Old Testament indicates ordinary days. Exodus 20:11 grounds the weekly Sabbath in the creation week: for in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, which makes most sense if the days are of the same kind as ours. The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 connect Adam to Abraham in a continuous line. Romans 5:12 says death entered the world through sin; Romans 8:20-22 that creation was subjected to futility and is groaning; Genesis 1:29-30 gives plants as food to humans and animals, and God called the whole creation very good (1:31). On this view a creation full of death, predation and disease for millions of years before Adam is not what God called very good. Jesus said that from the beginning of creation God made them male and female (Mark 10:6). Much of the church through history read Genesis in this way: Basil of Caesarea, Luther, Calvin, and Archbishop James Ussher, whose chronology of 1650 placed creation in 4004 BC. Augustine is often cited on both sides: he thought the world less than six thousand years old, and he also thought God created all things in a single moment, so that the six days are not a sequence of ordinary days.

Modern young earth creationism took shape with John Whitcomb and Henry Morris's The Genesis Flood (1961), and it is promoted by organisations such as Answers in Genesis, the Institute for Creation Research and Creation Ministries International. Its scientists include Kurt Wise, who earned a doctorate in palaeontology at Harvard under Stephen Jay Gould; Andrew Snelling, a geologist with a doctorate from the University of Sydney; and John Sanford, a plant geneticist at Cornell and co-inventor of the gene gun. They argue that the scientific evidence can be interpreted within a young earth framework, and they propose models such as catastrophic plate tectonics during the flood. Their most thoughtful members are candid about the difficulties. The young earth biologist Todd Wood wrote in 2009 that evolution is not a theory in crisis and has a great deal of evidence for it, and that he holds his view because of scripture. The Institute for Creation Research's RATE project, completed in 2005, concluded that a great amount of radioactive decay has occurred and proposed that it was accelerated in the past, while acknowledging that the heat this would release is an unsolved problem. The hardest questions for this view are scientific: the convergence of many independent dating methods on an old earth and universe, starlight from galaxies millions of light-years away, and the order of the fossil record. Young earth creationists answer that the evidence is interpreted through assumptions, and that the word of God is a surer guide than any reconstruction of the unobserved past.

Old earth creation holds that the universe and the earth are billions of years old, as mainstream science concludes, and that God created in stages, including by direct acts, especially in the creation of human beings. It comes in several forms. The gap theory, taught by Thomas Chalmers in the early nineteenth century and printed in the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, places long ages between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. The day-age view reads each day as a long period; Hugh Ross, an astronomer with a doctorate from the University of Toronto who founded Reasons to Believe in 1986, is its best-known modern defender. The framework view, proposed by Arie Noordtzij in 1924 and developed by Meredith Kline and Henri Blocher, reads the days as a literary structure of forming and filling rather than a chronology. C. John Collins, in his commentary on Genesis 1-4 (2006), reads them as analogical days, God's workdays described on the analogy of ours. John Walton, in The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), argues that the chapter describes God assigning functions to the cosmos as his temple rather than the origin of its material, which leaves the question of age open. Old earth creation has a long history among conservative Protestants: Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield at Princeton accepted an old earth in the nineteenth century, and so did several contributors to The Fundamentals (1910-1915).

Its texts include Genesis 2:4, where the whole creation happened in the day that the LORD God made them; the seventh day, which has no evening and morning and which Hebrews 4:3-11 treats as God's rest continuing still; the number of events on day six, including Adam naming the animals (2:19-20), which some think too many for one ordinary day; and Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 on God's days. Psalm 104:21 says the young lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God, and Job 38:39-41 has God providing prey for lions and ravens, which suggests that animal predation is part of God's provision rather than a result of the fall; Romans 5:12 speaks of death passing to all men, which many old earth creationists take to be human death. They add the principle of the two books: if creation reveals God truthfully (Psalm 19:1, Romans 1:20), its evidence of great age is not a deception. Most old earth creationists reject the common descent of humans from earlier creatures and hold that Adam and Eve were specially created. The hardest questions for this view come from both sides: young earth creationists say it accepts death before the fall and loosens the plain sense of the days; evolutionary creationists say that if one accepts the scientific evidence for an old earth, consistency requires accepting the evidence from genetics for common descent as well. Old earth creationists reply that the age of the earth and the descent of humanity are separate questions resting on separate evidence, that the genetic arguments for common descent rest on models whose assumptions can be questioned, and that Romans 5 and Genesis 2 require a specially created first pair, so accepting one conclusion of science does not oblige them to accept every other.

Evolutionary creation, sometimes called theistic evolution, holds that God created the universe billions of years ago and brought about living things, including the human body, through the process of evolution, which he designed, sustains and governs. Its defenders insist that evolution is no more a rival to God than embryology is: Psalm 139:13 says God knit me together in my mother's womb, though the process can be described by biology. Its texts include Genesis 1:11 and 1:24, where God says, Let the earth bring forth, and Genesis 2:7, where the man is formed from the dust of the ground; Psalm 104:30, which speaks of God creating by his Spirit in the present; and the doctrine of providence, that God works through secondary causes and that in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). They point to Calvin's comment on Genesis 1:16, where he notes that astronomers had shown Saturn to be larger than the moon, and says that Moses wrote in a popular style for ordinary people, and that whoever wants to learn astronomy should go elsewhere. They argue that Genesis 1 speaks in the cosmology of its time, with waters above the expanse, and that its purpose is theological, not scientific.

Its history is longer than many expect. Asa Gray accepted evolution as God's method in the 1860s. B. B. Warfield, one of the great defenders of biblical inerrancy, was open to the evolution of the human body under God's providence, as the historians David Livingstone and Mark Noll argued when they collected his writings in 2000; some Reformed scholars think they overstate how far he went, so it is fairest to say he did not regard evolution of the body as ruled out by scripture. C. S. Lewis accepted the evolution of the human body in The Problem of Pain (1940). The Roman Catholic Church, in Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis (1950), allowed research into the evolution of the human body while insisting that the soul is directly created by God, and John Paul II said in 1996 that evolution is more than a hypothesis. Its scientists include Francis Collins, who directed the Human Genome Project and founded the BioLogos Foundation in 2007; the astronomer Deborah Haarsma, who later led BioLogos; Denis Alexander, founding director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge, whose Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? appeared in 2008; and Denis Lamoureux, who holds doctorates in both theology and biology. They point to evidence such as shared genetic errors, including broken genes and viral insertions in the same places in human and chimpanzee DNA, and the fusion of two ancestral chromosomes to form human chromosome 2, which they argue is best explained by common descent.

The hardest questions for this view are theological, and they are pressed hard by other Christians. If humans descend from earlier creatures, who were Adam and Eve? Paul's argument in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 and 45 sets Adam beside Christ; Luke 3:38 places Adam in Jesus' genealogy; Acts 17:26 says God made every nation from one man. And if death, suffering and predation were part of creation for millions of years, how can it have been very good, and what did the fall change? In 2017 a large volume edited by J. P. Moreland, Stephen Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann Gauger and Wayne Grudem, Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique, set out these objections at length. Evolutionary creationists answer in different ways. Some, following a suggestion John Stott made, propose that Adam and Eve were a historical couple within an early human population whom God chose and addressed, so that they became the first to bear his image in covenant relationship. S. Joshua Swamidass, in The Genealogical Adam and Eve (2019), argued that a specially created Adam and Eve could be genealogical ancestors of everyone alive today without contradicting the genetic evidence. Walton argues that Adam was a historical person whose primary role in Genesis is archetypal. Peter Enns, in The Evolution of Adam (2012), argued that Paul's Adam reflects ancient assumptions and need not be historical, a position most evangelical evolutionary creationists do not share. Most population geneticists conclude that the human population did not pass through a bottleneck of two individuals in the last several hundred thousand years; Swamidass and others have argued that an earlier bottleneck has not been ruled out, and critics of evolutionary creation, among them Ann Gauger, have questioned the assumptions on which the models rest.

Set the three views side by side and their strengths and costs come into view. Young earth creation keeps closest to the most straightforward reading of the days and of death through sin, and pays the cost of standing against the conclusions of nearly all working scientists. Old earth creation accepts the scientific age of the universe and keeps a special creation of humanity, and pays the cost of reading the days less straightforwardly, accepting animal death before the fall, and rejecting the case for common descent that mainstream biology accepts. Evolutionary creation accepts the mainstream science in full, and pays the cost of a harder account of Adam, the fall and death, and of standing furthest from the way most of the church has read Genesis 2 and 3. Each view's defenders think their costs are worth paying and that the others' are too high. A good introduction that lets each speak for itself is Four Views on the Historical Adam (2013), in which Lamoureux, Walton, C. John Collins and the young earth scholar William Barrick each state their case and answer the others.

Here is what is settled, and should be said without hesitation. God created all things; nothing exists that he did not make or that does not depend on him. Creation is good, ordered and not divine. Human beings are made in his image, and no account of origins can make them less. Scripture is the word of God and does not err in what it teaches. The earth goes round the sun, and the church that said otherwise was wrong. And the claim that science and Christianity have always been at war is a myth that historians have rejected.

Here is what is not settled among Christians who hold scripture to be the word of God: the age of the earth, the meaning of the days, the mechanism by which God brought living things into being, and how the historical Adam relates to the human population that genetics describes. Each of the three views has faithful, learned and godly defenders, and each has serious questions it must answer. Galileo's story gives a warning to every side: do not make your reading of Genesis into the gospel itself, and do not let a scientific theory, however well established, become the master of scripture. Bellarmine's principle, that a true demonstration would require the church to look again at its reading, and the opposite principle, that the word of God is surer than any human reconstruction of the past, are both voiced in this debate, and both deserve a hearing.

In conversation with an unbeliever, the most important thing is usually not which of the three views you hold but that you can show that Christianity does not depend on any one of them. A student who believes he must choose between his biology lectures and his Bible has often been told by both sides that there is no third option. Show him that there are several, held by people who love the Bible, and he may stay to hear about Christ. Equally, a student whose church holds a young earth view should not be made to feel that faithfulness requires abandoning it; it is held by many careful readers, and its scientific difficulties are acknowledged by its own best defenders.

Now write the fifth paragraph on your page headed My defence of the faith. Imagine someone says to you: Science has disproved the Bible. Write your answer in three parts. First, what Genesis 1:1 claims, which every Christian holds. Second, one sentence on the conflict thesis and one accurate fact from the Galileo story. Third, a sentence describing each of the three views so fairly that someone who holds it would accept your description, and then a sentence saying which you hold, why, and the strongest text or fact that counts against it.

Then, this week, find a Christian who holds a different view of creation from yours: a pastor, a teacher, a friend, a science student in your church. Ask them to explain their view and the reasons for it, and listen without arguing. Write down their strongest argument in their words. When the last lesson of this track asks you to finish your defence of the faith, you will be glad to have learned to state another believer's view at its best, because it is the same skill you need with an unbeliever.