Is There a Contradiction Between the Bible and Modern Science?
This is a transcript of the video below, which has been changed to make it easier to read.
I don’t think the Bible goes against real science, but the problem is that science has become very mixed up with what I would call an impersonal list or a materialist worldview, which says that scientific studies are all there is. And when popularizers talk about interesting scientific discoveries and results, they often keep this view of the world in mind. And if I’m a Christian parent and I watch something like that, it’s almost like you have to do a debriefing to say that the science is great and that materialism is just a layer on top of that. And there is no God who made these amazing things happen.
This kind of thing is just a philosophy that leads people to wrongly think that what they see is real scientific evidence. The talk going around the world is that evolution is proven. It’s an important idea. Just let it go and move on. But that’s really bad science and bad rhetoric because the word “evolution” can mean a lot of different things. And most of the time, mainstream and popular conversation doesn’t make the difference.
So, you can say that evolution just means that things change over time. The car has changed over time. Marx’s ideas have changed over time. That has nothing to do with Darwin’s ideas about how life evolved. Then, when talking about how life got to be the way it is now, you can make a distinction between micro evolution and macro evolution, which means you can breed dogs. Certainly. And everyone agrees with that. Darwin used that as a kind of starting point for his ideas. He spoke with the breeders. That was something everyone knew. You can have puppies. There can be small differences, and as a human breeder, you can even control those differences.
The other one is to do macroevolution, which means to find out if whales can come from land mammals. That’s a much more difficult question. And if you can tell by gradual stages, did God do it? Was he involved in using things that happen naturally? So, even if it did happen, which I’m not willing to admit, if God is involved, it’s a very different picture and worldview than saying it just happened for no reason.
The third way people talk about evolution is in terms of how life started. But the beginning of life is a huge problem for materialists because there has to be so much there, even in the first cell, for there to be life. They kind of gloss over the fact that no one knows how to do it. Evolution is hard to talk about because there is a lot of information to take into account. And there are a lot of assumptions at a higher level to think about. I would recommend my own book, Redeeming Science, which has a big part about evolution. Sorry to plug it, but I wrote it. Science and Faith is a book by Jack Collins. Friends or foes? I think both of those are good ways to start. After that, I believe there are a ton of additional books that may be used as resources.
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