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If you believe in a deity of any sort, you are no longer considered a rational person. Your opinions are tainted by your ludicrous insistence that some magical being created everything, giving your arguments the same credibility as someone who still believes in Zeus or Santa Claus. It’s a mental illness, really. We live in an age of discovery and intellectualism, and in this world there’s simply no room for superstition. People need to believe in science, not God.
SCIENCE OPPOSES GOD?
I believe I first heard the phrase “I believe in science, not God” in a debate featuring Christopher Hitchens, a famous atheist and author of “God Is Not Great.” In those few words, he drew a hard line that said belief in God doesn’t allow for good science, nor does good science allow for a belief in anything beyond the natural world.
His belief is one that receives applause in our world. The idea of Christianity is antiquated, a belief only held by those still bound by superstitious nonsense. Perhaps Christians fear the truth of science. Perhaps they merely need to believe in something to comfort them during their meaningless existence on a giant rock hurtling through space. Whatever it is that causes people to cling to a religion that’s 2,000 years old, it’s not done with a rational mind.
YET SCIENCE DOESN’T SAY ANYTHING
There’s a great misunderstanding here: the difference between science and interpretation. One observes while the other tries to explain what it sees. Frank Turek, an apologist, often says “Science doesn’t say anything, scientists do,” and that distinction is critical in glorifying God through science.
WHAT SCIENCE DOES
Science seems like it presents answers. However, it’s really nothing more than observing the world or running experiments to see if new observations can be created. Basically, science is all about data collection. Like a mirror only shows what’s put in front of it, science begins and ends by what is seen. Science is completely objective, making no judgments on why things happen, only what is happening.
WHAT INTERPRETATION DOES
Interpretation is what we do when we take information and filter it through our understanding of the world. This is often bundled together with science because the job of a scientist is to take data and explain why it’s happening. However, the key difference here is that interpretation isn’t objective. Interpretation is warped by factors like our belief in the natural vs. supernatural, political ideas, or simply what we want to be true. No scientist, Christian or otherwise, can be purely objective when interpreting science.
WHAT WE SEE AND SAY
When it comes to interpretation, we must realize that we all see the same information. A fossil doesn’t change just because a Christian is looking at it. The earth’s crust isn’t somehow corrupted because someone who doesn’t believe in God is studying it. Fossils and geology and stars don’t tell us anything – they’re simply seen.
However, what does change is how those things are explained. One Christian looks at the Grand Canyon and sees evidence of a global flood 6,000 years ago. Another Christian who doesn’t think the flood was literal might agree with an atheist and say that it was formed by the Colorado River 5 million years ago. Both can agree on what they see, but can’t agree on why they see it.
SEEING GOD’S HANDIWORK
Christians may be repelled by science because of how atheists interpret information. We fear that our children will hear about evolution and completely abandon God. We mock atheists because “I didn’t come from a monkey!” rather than actually engaging with them, challenging their interpretations. We miss out on glorifying our God because we think our belief in creation can only be supported by faith.
The heavens declare the glory of God;the sky displays his handiwork.Day after day it speaks out;night after night it reveals his greatness.There is no actual speech or word,nor is its voice literally heard.Yet its voice echoes throughout the earth;its words carry to the distant horizon.In the sky he has pitched a tent for the sun. (Psalm 19:1-4)
God doesn’t work without purpose. Everything He created, from plants to DNA to clouds, was made with magnificent care and thoughtfulness. He gave us Jupiter to absorb space debris. He wrote the complexity of life on something impossibly small. God proves Himself through His creation.
Even if we don’t understand observation and interpretation, we can still glorify God by embracing the study of the natural world. We know everything in the universe was made by design, and there are scientists around the world trying to understand what the Designer has made. Rather than fear things like evolution or the Big Bang, we can learn from those Christians who spend their lives interpreting the world through a biblical lense.
WHAT ELSE CAN ATHEISTS SAY?
“There is no one righteous, not even one,there is no one who understands,there is no one who seeks God.All have turned away,together they have become worthless;there is no one who shows kindness, not even one.” (Romans 3:10-12)
The world hates God. We used to hate God. Sometimes we act like we still do.
Why? Because without Christ, we are still slaves to sin (John 8:34). If someone is determined to not honor God, the easiest choice is to live and interpret the world as though He doesn’t exist. That’s not a scientific conclusion, but a worldview philosophy.
When we’re interpreting information, what do we expect someone still bound by sin to do? It would take a great deal of honesty to say “It’s clear God made all this, but I’m still going to reject Him.” There are agnostics honest enough to say something made the universe while still denying God’s existence, but the trend today is to insist something came from nothing.
Yet a world that hates God finds itself in quite the predicament. As technology advances, we can look ever-closer at God’s brushstrokes across the universe. Our understanding of the natural world is far beyond what anyone thought imaginable, and still we continue to discover more.
The more we discover, the more people need to explain the intricacy and complexity of what we see. They need to come up with more and more interpretations. Yet we find ourselves at a point where it may take more faith to be an atheist than to believe in an eternal creator.
This is part of why religion comes under so much scrutiny. While there is certainly an unfortunate amount of anti-intellectualism in Christianity, a God-hating world finds it easier to undermine the validity of believing in God by pitting it against science and reason. Because we claim this impossibly complex universe was created by God, we are told we have no right to say our interpretations are equal to an atheist’s.
Glorify God through science
God and science are 100% compatible because a belief in God can accurately explain what we observe through science. We needn’t fear us or our children being exposed to an atheistic interpretation if we are well-equipped, both in terms of understanding the world as well as the worldviews that exist in it.
Christ died to set us free from being God’s enemies. Yet we must still live in a world filled with people who think like we used to. We can’t hide from those who explain a world without God any more than we should run from those who think money, sex, or alcohol are their key to ultimate happiness. These thoughts and beliefs are only natural for the enemies of God.
All these people need Christ. He’s given us the Bible to explain repentance and salvation through Christ’s sacrifice. God, in His majesty, has also given us an entire universe to prove that He exists and that His word should be believed. As Christians, we should understand both so that we can not only love our God more but explain to others why they need to as well.
For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made. So people are without excuse. Romans 1:20
