A few months ago, a friend asked me about my widely criticized, Biblically-influenced, belief that our planet is only several thousand years old, rather than the hundreds of millions of years believed by most scientists (though to be honest, even if one goes by the Bible, he still has no positive idea how old this world is). I didn't want to debate my beliefs, and basically stated that I trust God more than I trust man, and that I believe in the divinity of His word, this Book we came to call the Bible. I don't dispute that my spiritual beliefs are dogmatic - if I believe something to be an absolute truth, such as "2 plus 3 makes 5," I also can't help but be "dogmatic" if I refuse to believe the possible answer could be pi. When pressed further about my beliefs, I pointed out how many times scientists have been wrong over the centuries; for example, many of Aristotle's theories are now known to be butt-over-tea-kettle wrong, and yet he's still lauded as one of the grandfathers of science.
My friend's response was simply, "That wasn't science."
For a while, I thought that to be a silly and dodgy answer. But the more I thought about it, I realized my friend was right. No, Aristotle's misses weren't science. I believe God gave us science to study and better care for our environment, our bodies, and so forth - and being so, I believe true science, much like true religion, holds one true answer to our questions, even if man provides a myriad of blunders to try and explain them.
Man's wrongs don't render science null and void. Even now-defunct scientific theories that were widely held until just the 19th century - the Miasmatic theory of disease, Luminiferous aether, the immovability of Earth's continents, the "static universe" (if I've misspelled Miasmatic or Luminiferous, I apologize) - have been debunked and abandoned in droves, yet that doesn't make science a waste of time. And it didn't negate the many times scientists have been right to be somehow wrong.
Likewise, man's wrongs don't render my God or my faith in Jesus as the Messiah to be useless. The Westboro Baptist Churches, the false doctrines of Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and etc., are all against God's words, twisted doctrines that claim Him but are in direct opposition to His truth. Man's lies and evil actions don't render God's truth ineffective. Fred Phelps was to Christianity what Immanuel Velikovsky was to independent theory. The abominable "Phinehas Priesthood" is to Christianity what Cyrus Teed was to...to um, not-getting-electrocuted-and-developing-wildly-inaccurate-theories-about-the-planet.
If a person does something in the name of Christ that is actually against Christ - picketing funerals, condemning someone to hell while frothing at the mouth, banishing someone from attending their church because they've been divorced, etc. - this is not the command or love of Christ. Much like my friend's assertion that it was not "science" to believe the universe to be spherical and finite. Just because I misidentified that obsolete belief with science doesn't make it science.
A disproven theory is not science, much like hypocrisy is not Jesus.
I've always found the Bible to be in harmony with nature and science. Certainly the Bible acknowledges God's creation and sovereignty over these things (Psalm 147:8, Isaiah 5:6, Job chapters 38 and 39), which many dispute. I understand that. But, the Bible doesn't claim that angels dump buckets of water from the sky to make rain - it acknowledges rain as moisture and precipitation descending from clouds (Psalm 147:8, Proverbs 25:14, Ecclesiastes 11:3, etc.). The Bible doesn't claim mischievous sprites make flowers and grass in underground factories - it acknowledges that plants need seeds, rain, soil, and such to grow (Deuteronomy 32:2, Leviticus 26:4, Jesus' parable of the sower in Matthew chapter 13, etc.).
The Bible never described Earth as a flat center of the universe, but a planet suspended in space, when as yet no images from satellites and space stations existed (Job 26:7 - Job is, by the way, widely accepted, even among non-believing scholars, to be among, if not the, oldest recorded book of the Bible).
The Bible never claimed a fixed amount of stars or celestial bodies, as other early astronomers did - God alluded to an uncountable amount of stars when He told Abraham in Genesis 15:5, "'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.' And He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.'"
Likewise, when contrasted with myths, the Bible always makes a distinction between the natural and the Supernatural. Unlike in the myth of Icarus, where it was supposed that men are just somehow able to fly when they strap wax wings to themselves. I once read a Native American legend during which a warrior went to sleep and told his thigh (or in other versions, his excrement) to keep watch and speak to warn him if enemies approached - because apparently that's just how it works.
Not in the Bible. When miraculous and awesome events are described, they're always separated from natural occurrence and attributed to the supernatural work of an omnipotent and all-powerful God. This ranges from Creation to the plagues of Egypt to Jonah surviving in the belly of a large fish, and most importantly, to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. It's a Pasteur-like dismissal of spontaneous generation - the Bible teaches that the awesome doesn't "just happen."
Scientists and science may not always, nor have they always been, in harmony. And, those who claim the name of Christ are not in harmony with the truth of the Lord when they blaspheme His name with evil ideas and doctrines.
But truth can never be separated from itself.
My friend's response was simply, "That wasn't science."
For a while, I thought that to be a silly and dodgy answer. But the more I thought about it, I realized my friend was right. No, Aristotle's misses weren't science. I believe God gave us science to study and better care for our environment, our bodies, and so forth - and being so, I believe true science, much like true religion, holds one true answer to our questions, even if man provides a myriad of blunders to try and explain them.
Man's wrongs don't render science null and void. Even now-defunct scientific theories that were widely held until just the 19th century - the Miasmatic theory of disease, Luminiferous aether, the immovability of Earth's continents, the "static universe" (if I've misspelled Miasmatic or Luminiferous, I apologize) - have been debunked and abandoned in droves, yet that doesn't make science a waste of time. And it didn't negate the many times scientists have been right to be somehow wrong.
Likewise, man's wrongs don't render my God or my faith in Jesus as the Messiah to be useless. The Westboro Baptist Churches, the false doctrines of Mormonism and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and etc., are all against God's words, twisted doctrines that claim Him but are in direct opposition to His truth. Man's lies and evil actions don't render God's truth ineffective. Fred Phelps was to Christianity what Immanuel Velikovsky was to independent theory. The abominable "Phinehas Priesthood" is to Christianity what Cyrus Teed was to...to um, not-getting-electrocuted-and-developing-wildly-inaccurate-theories-about-the-planet.
If a person does something in the name of Christ that is actually against Christ - picketing funerals, condemning someone to hell while frothing at the mouth, banishing someone from attending their church because they've been divorced, etc. - this is not the command or love of Christ. Much like my friend's assertion that it was not "science" to believe the universe to be spherical and finite. Just because I misidentified that obsolete belief with science doesn't make it science.
A disproven theory is not science, much like hypocrisy is not Jesus.
I've always found the Bible to be in harmony with nature and science. Certainly the Bible acknowledges God's creation and sovereignty over these things (Psalm 147:8, Isaiah 5:6, Job chapters 38 and 39), which many dispute. I understand that. But, the Bible doesn't claim that angels dump buckets of water from the sky to make rain - it acknowledges rain as moisture and precipitation descending from clouds (Psalm 147:8, Proverbs 25:14, Ecclesiastes 11:3, etc.). The Bible doesn't claim mischievous sprites make flowers and grass in underground factories - it acknowledges that plants need seeds, rain, soil, and such to grow (Deuteronomy 32:2, Leviticus 26:4, Jesus' parable of the sower in Matthew chapter 13, etc.).
The Bible never described Earth as a flat center of the universe, but a planet suspended in space, when as yet no images from satellites and space stations existed (Job 26:7 - Job is, by the way, widely accepted, even among non-believing scholars, to be among, if not the, oldest recorded book of the Bible).
The Bible never claimed a fixed amount of stars or celestial bodies, as other early astronomers did - God alluded to an uncountable amount of stars when He told Abraham in Genesis 15:5, "'Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.' And He said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.'"
Likewise, when contrasted with myths, the Bible always makes a distinction between the natural and the Supernatural. Unlike in the myth of Icarus, where it was supposed that men are just somehow able to fly when they strap wax wings to themselves. I once read a Native American legend during which a warrior went to sleep and told his thigh (or in other versions, his excrement) to keep watch and speak to warn him if enemies approached - because apparently that's just how it works.
Not in the Bible. When miraculous and awesome events are described, they're always separated from natural occurrence and attributed to the supernatural work of an omnipotent and all-powerful God. This ranges from Creation to the plagues of Egypt to Jonah surviving in the belly of a large fish, and most importantly, to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. It's a Pasteur-like dismissal of spontaneous generation - the Bible teaches that the awesome doesn't "just happen."
Scientists and science may not always, nor have they always been, in harmony. And, those who claim the name of Christ are not in harmony with the truth of the Lord when they blaspheme His name with evil ideas and doctrines.
But truth can never be separated from itself.
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