Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?

Science has not disproved Christianity, and modern science developed in a culture in which most scientists believed the Bible was true. Science is the study of order in nature; the Bible tells who is responsible for that order. God’s hand in creation is why nature is beautiful. Its laws are extraordinarily finely tuned in a way that lets life exist. The Bible and best science agree that the universe had a beginning; the Bible tells who caused it, and science suggests that the universe was once extremely small and dense – perhaps even a point – which grew to what we see today. The explosive early stage of this expansion can be called the ‘Big Bang’. (More could be said about fine-tuning and an actual point beginning only if we have a full quantum theory of gravity, but scientists have not found one yet.) The timescale is billions of years ago, and the Hebrew word yom appearing in Genesis 1 in the six yom of creation is capable of meaning ‘era’ (as in Job 18:20); but the accord between science and scripture that there was a beginning is more significant than the divisive question of the age of the earth. Say simply that science done correctly and scripture understood correctly will agree, because God is responsible for both, except when a miracle is performed. Remember also that when Satan fell – an unknown time before the Fall of man – the laws of physics may have fallen and changed as a result. Certainly the laws of biology will be reverted when they are redeemed, for wolves and lambs will feed together and lions eat straw (Isaiah 65:25). That the laws of physics were created good can be seen in their beauty, which is evident to all physicists whether secular or religious. (This beauty points to an intelligent designer, and then the most important question for any human being is: what is my relationship to that designer?) Science does an excellent job of uncovering the laws of nature as they are today, but the assumption that they have never changed is not necessarily accurate.

Science is capable of shedding light on the meaning of scripture, for it was once believed that the sun orbited the earth in view of such verses as Psalm 104:5 (God set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved), but after Copernicus and Galileo had explained otherwise the Hebrew was understood to have a wider meaning without harm to the authority of scripture.

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