Science and Faith on Campus and in the Church


Hi all,

Here's a presentation I gave a couple of weeks ago at River Terrace Church on the way in which science and faith can interact with one another and how this should affect our lives.

I would love feedback from other campus ministers — does this fit with your students/churches? Does this kind of presentation help fill a gap between the academic work of places like the Faraday Institute and the average individual in a church?

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I'm not a campus minister.  But I have attended both secular and Christian campuses as a student.  I've obtained degrees in both the ARTS and in Science.   So maybe you will accept some of my comments.  I appreciate your attempt to create peace between scientists and the religious.   It might work for some.   But I would suggest that until people realize that the conflict is not really between science and faith, they will continue to have the wrong kinds of conflict.   The real conflict is between good and evil, between truth and falsehood, between seeking the supremacy of God vs the supremacy of man.   The conflict is really in essence today not between science and faith, but between random never-ending evolution and God's hand in creation.   The conflict is between a materialistic world view and a world view that allows the concept of God to intervene. 

Whether scripture is read as poetry or as literal events depends not first of all on science, but mostly on world-view.   Even the idea that the struggle is between faith and science is one that is encouraged by those who want to discredit faith, while Satan knows full well that both science and scripture have been used illegitimately to promote lies and falsehoods.   Today, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, even though we know that the earth cycles around the sun.   It is difficult to separate the literal from the figurative in this case, since our physical worldview sees the rising of the sun daily, and the cycling only through repeated observations and calculations.  Therefore the figurative explanation does not contradict what we know to be true.   We don't really know what the sky looked like before the flood, at a time when there was not yet any rain on the earth.  It is difficult to imagine the impacts of the global flood upon the earth, or the circumstances that accompanied it.  

The evolutionary worldview can only see or be comfortable in a particular parameter of scientific examination;  mostly this is because for evolutionary scientists, any question of intervention by God is a non-scientific question and thus ineligible in the discussion.   In addition, for many (not all)evolutionary scientists, their scientific approach which relegates God to irrelevance, has made even a belief in God absolute anathema, and thus their scientific objections to non-evolutionary approaches are in reality religious objections, not scientific objections.   Their objections to alternative explanations become emotional rather than scientific, because they have too much psychologically invested in their evolutionary atheism. 

It is not science vs faith.   Science leads to better crops, better machinery, micro-wave ovens, trains and planes, and the internet.   None of this is against faith.   The issue is truth vs falsehood, good vs evil, God vs Satan, the relevance of God vs the irrelevance of a god. 

There is something to be said for the opinion that "The issue is truth vs falsehood, good vs evil."  Centuries ago they were asking, Is it true or false that the earth is spherical?  Is it true or false that the earth revolves around the sun?  Today we are asking, Is it true or false that the universe is 15 billion years old?  Is it true or false that the human race can be traced back about 160,000 years to a single female living in a larger clan?  Is it true or false that humans have animal ancestors?

If the answer to these questions is Yes, then there will have to be a lot of rethinking of our theology and of our way of understanding Genesis.

Hi, you might read and respond to my book, Doubtbusters! God Is My Shrink! which touches on your discussion and provides unusual reasons for the priority of the Bible in looking at God's universe.  Retired CRC pastor Bruce Leiter.