ACHIEVEMENTS: "Science has changed civilization. What has God ever done?"
The advances of science have changed the world powerfully again and again...
You can see why some scientists feel a bit scornful about religion. It's been around for millennia, and it hasn't done half as much to promote human happiness and comfort as science has. What's it good for, apart from starting wars and cramping people's lives? Do we need God?
Well, we would say this...
| There are some things science can't do. Science has brought us power. Technology has given us enhanced lives. But it hasn't necessarily made us better people. If we want a better world, we need better people, and one of the things which Christianity does is to make bad people good. Many twentieth-century wars demonstrated graphically how scientific discoveries can be used to bring chaos, destruction and misery to the lives of millions. If we're ever going to see this world set free from evil and sinfulness, we need something more than science alone. |
There's no rivalry between "science" and
"God". God and science are not competitors; if the Bible is
right, God invented science! And so, as the great Johannes Kepler put it,
scientific discovery is just "thinking God's thoughts after him".
Science wouldn't be possible without a dependable universe which we can
explore, confident that it's based on reliable principles and rational
answers. It's interesting that science developed in countries where there was a tradition of belief in the Christian God, a god of faithfulness and reliability. In countries where the prevailing belief was that this world is just maya - illusion - science took a lot longer to arrive! | |
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God is at work in history, not sitting idly on a
cloud somewhere. If the Bible is right, God is on a trajectory to bring
us back to himself. The whole of human history isn't just a pointless sequence
of kings and queens, empires and civilizations; it's the outworking of God's
plan to reconcile the whole of his creation to himself. The centre of that plan
is Jesus and his death on the cross. So God isn't just the Creator who started everything off; or the Sustainer who keeps everything going; he's also the Rescuer who is going to bring his creation back to the perfection for which it was planned, and he wants us to be part of that solution.
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Few people are more qualified to talk about the interface of science and faith than Professor John Bryant, Emeritus Professor of Biological Sciences at Exeter University. Here's a lecture he gave at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge University, to a group of science teachers and humanities teachers who wanted to understand how science and faith fit together, and what the "New Atheists" have done to challenge that.
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