SCIENCE AND FAITH.
(This post will be updated as more books and quotes come)
I have seen and heard many people say that faith and science cannot go together. Some say that science has made the existence of God irrelevant. This is a serious issue because most of the founders of modern science were Christians but people don’t realize that. If you are interested in science and faith, I want to point you to some books and quotes to show you that faith and science work together. God exists independent of what science says and He created the world the way it is for us to be able to study it. Science is simply a tool that can help us understand the world around us. It does not have the ability to disprove the existence of God.
The quotes are from the Exploring Christianity science section http://www.christianity.co.nz/science.htm
Be encouraged as you read and learn to the glory of God.
Some of these quotes came from people who were not christians and some of them are still not believers, but the quotes show the limits of science; what it can do and what it can't do.
Random Quotes on science and faith
Here are the words of Kepler, from the secret of the universe:
Here we are concerned with the book of nature, so greatly celebrated in sacred writings. It is in this that Paul proposes to the Gentiles that they should contemplate God like the Sun in water or in a mirror. Why then as Christians should we take any less delight in its contemplation, since it is for us with true worship to honor God, to venerate him, to wonder at him? The more rightly we understand the nature and scope of what our God has founded, the more devoted the spirit in which that is done.
John Ray said in 1705:
The treasures of nature are inexhaustible...If man ought to reflect upon his Creator the glory of all his works, then ought he to take notice of them all and not to think anything unworthy of his cognisance.
Here are some words that Newton used to describe God
‘Though these bodies may indeed continue in their orbits by the mere laws of gravity, yet they could by no means have at first derived the regular position of the orbits themselves from those laws. Thus, this most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.’ (Pricipia)
He went on to say:
“This God is not only intelligent, but also faithful and worthy of trust, as the Scriptures often declare. His faithfulness is expressed in the regularity and order of the created world, a regularity that could be expressed scientifically as "laws"
In his very helpful book, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born, D. James Kennedy gives a list of some of the outstanding Bible-believing scientists who gave the lead in founding the following branches of science:
Antiseptic Surgery | Joseph Lister |
Bacteriology | Louis Pasteur |
Calculus | Isaac Newton |
Celestial Mechanics | Johannes Kepler |
Chemistry | Robert Boyle |
Comparative Anatomy | Georges Cuvier |
Dimensional Analysis | Lord Rayleigh |
Dynamics | Isaac Newton |
Electronics | John Ambrose Fleming |
Electrodynamics | James Clerk Maxwell |
Electromagnetics | Michael Faraday |
Energetics | Lord Kelvin |
Entomology of Living Insects | Henri Fabre |
Field Theory | James Clerk Maxwell |
Fluid Mechanics | George Stokes |
Galactic Astronomy | Sir William Hershel |
Gas Dynamics | Robert Boyle |
Genetics | Gregor Mendel |
Glacial Geology | Louis Agassiz |
Gynaecology | James Simpson |
Hydrography | Matthew Maury |
Hydrostatics | Blaise Pascal |
Ichthyology | Louis Agassiz |
Isotopic Chemistry | William Ramsey |
Model Analysis | Lord Rayleigh |
Natural History | John Ray |
Non-Euclidean Geometry | Bernard Riemann |
Oceanography | Matthew Maury |
Optical Mineralogy | David Brewster |
Modern day science
Here are some quotes from modern day scientists and thinkers on the issue of the origin of the universe:
We have to recognize the difference between materialist philosophy and scientific investigation. We need to have a separation of the philosophy from the real science, both in order to have an honest, unbiased scientific enterprise, and to protect the public from getting the false impression that scientific evidence has shown that [the] evolutionary process is our true creator.
Phillip Johnson
Dr Michael Denton, a medical doctor and molecular biologist, in seeking to convey the complexity of a single living cell, uses the following illustration in his book Evolution, A Theory in Crisis:
...to grasp the reality as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity...
Many have sought to show the impossibility of all this happening by chance. In 1981, Sir Fred Hoyle, mathematician, astronomer, and a long time anti-theist and evolutionist, together with Chandra Wickramasinghe, head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at University College, Cardiff, and a lifelong Buddhist-atheist - brainwashed, he reported, into believing that any concept of God must be excluded from science - calculated it to be one chance out of 1040,000! (That is one chance out of 1 followed by 40,000 zeros). However, statistics tend to become rather meaningless at this level. Hoyle has declared that the probability of an evolutionary origin of life is equal to the probability that a tornado, sweeping though a junkyard, would assemble a Boeing 747. He says:
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.
Dr Hugh Ross, in Creation and Time, states:
As of October 1993, twenty-five different characteristics of the universe were recognised as precisely fixed. If they were different by only slight amounts, the differences would spell the end of the existence of any conceivable life. To this list of twenty-five can be added thirty-eight characteristics of our galaxy and solar system that likewise must fall within narrowly defined ranges for life of any kind to exist.
Physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson notes:
The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Paul Davies, who in the past has denied the possibility of God as Creator, stated in his book Superforce:
[I see] powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.
In a more recent book, God and the New Physics (1992), Paul Davies even goes as far as to say:
It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.
Stephen Hawking, one of today's most brilliant physicists, stated in Black Holes and Baby Universes:
...science may solve the problem of how the universe began, but it cannot answer the question: why does the universe bother to exist?
Albert Einstein, perhaps the most revered scientist of the twentieth century, wrote in Ideas and Opinions:
The scientific method can teach us nothing beyond how facts are related to and conditioned by each other...knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduce from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.
Dr. George Lundberg, professor of sociology at the University of Washington, in Can Science Save Us? says:
Science only provides a car and chauffeur for us. It does not tell us where to drive. The car and the chauffeur will take us into the highlands or into the ditch with equal efficiency.
General Omar Bradley, in a 1948 address put it well when he said:
We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount...Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.
Sir William Bragg's said:
Religion and science are opposed...but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed - and between the two, one can grasp anything.
John Polkinghorne, is a theoretical physicist and a member of the Royal Society. He was a professor of mathematical physics before his ordination to the Anglican ministry in 1983. Here is what Polkinghorne said in an article in the Daily Telegraph:
Men of religion can learn from science what the physical world is really like in its structure and long-evolving history. This constrains what religion can say where it speaks of that world as God's creation. He is clearly a patient God who works through process and not by magic. Men of science can receive from religion a deeper understanding than could be obtained from science alone. The physical world's deep mathematical intelligibility (signs of the Mind behind it) and finely tuned fruitfulness (expressive of divine purpose) are reflections of the fact that it is a creation.
Here is what the eminent philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed on the relationship between science and christianity:
When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.
Gordon Cooper, American Astronaut, who named his spacecraft "Faith 7" said:
At an altitude of more than 150 miles over the Indian Ocean, I had faith and thanked God for the privilege of being on the space flight. Our launch team had faith in God, in the hardware we had developed and in each other. As we learn more about the universe we gain greater faith in the work of the Supreme Architect. Upon contemplating the complex workings of millions of planetary bodies - and the unknown immensity of the universe - we realise what a fantastic miracle it all is, including our little earth.
J. Stafford Wright, in God's Answer, expresses this relationship between God and his creation well when he says:
God the Creator is different from a human creator. If I make a piece of furniture, its continued existence does not depend upon my own existence. When I die the piece of furniture will still be here: my life is not in it. But if the Bible is correct, the relation of God to the Universe has in it something more. God himself sustains the Universe in existence so that if it were possible for God to die, at that moment the Universe would fall into nothingness...The Universe is not in any sense necessary for the existence of God, but God is necessary for the continued existence of the Universe.
Professor Simpson, who in 1891 was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians, said in his farewell address on July 28, 1905:
I do not know in what mood of pessimism I might have stood before you today had it not been that ere the dew of youth had dried from off me I made friends with the Sinless Son of Man, Who is the well-head of the stream that vitalises all advancing civilisation, and Who claims to be the First and the Last and the Living One: Who was dead and is alive evermore, and has the keys of Death and the Unseen. My experience compels me to own that claim.
Here are some books to consider on the issue of science, faith and naturalism
How then shall we live by Charles Colson and Nancey Pearcy
The Soul of Science by Charles Thaxton and Nancey Pearcey
Science Blind spot by Dr. Cornelius Hunter
Darwin’s proof by Dr. Cornelius Hunter
Darwin’s God by Dr. Cornelius Hunter
God’s undertaker: Has Science buried God? By Dr. John Lennox
The Origins of Modern Science by Herbert Butterfield
The Biblical Basis of Modern Science by Henry Morris
For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark
The Rise of Modern Science by Ronald L. Numbers and Lindberg
A meaningful world by Dr. Benjamin Wiker and Dr. Jonathan Witt
Beyond Opinion from RZIM
Miracles by C.S. Lewis
The Dawkins Delusion by Alister McGrath
The Devil’s Delusion by Dr. David Berlinski
The myth of the separation of Faith and Science by Amos Tarfa (coming soon). I am still working on the manuscript, so please let me know if you have any ideas.
