Some thoughts on science and scripture

The following are my thoughts/notes/literally plagiarism regarding science and scripture/faith:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. - Genesis 1:1

God created a place for himself to dwell: heaven and earth. He put humans into that construct as a way of reflecting His love into that world and drawing out the praise and glory from the world back to Himself.

The deist point of view is that there is a God that created the universe and stepped away. Current day American-culture Christian theology appears to take another step and says that God created the universe and he intervenes when needed - this is known as transcendence. Original monotheistic Jewish theology didn't put a line between supernatural and natural - God was in everything, this is known as immanence. You couldn't talk about God intervening because you can't intervene in something you're doing, and God was doing it all.

While all views are able to align scientific theories and biblical theologies, the third provides Christians with a seemingly logical approach without creating the rather dangerous-to-faith "God of the gaps" theology that Christian apologetics so often turn to. God of the gaps essentially assumes the truth of science but explains the gaps in our scientific knowledge by essentially saying "We'll never know, God did it."

The problem with the "God of the gaps" theology, to paraphrase Charles Alfred Coulson, is that the gaps have the unpreventable habit of shrinking. And to quote the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, "If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for god, then god is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time goes on."

Our god is so much more than that. Our god is immanent.

Issues between science and Christian theology don't exist in saying "We don't understand that, God did it." It does, however, exist if Christians are so content with that answer that they no longer have curiosity about how things work. And that's dangerous, because we not only stop learning about the world that God created but we become alienated from those who continue learning about the world (thus taking ourselves out of the world as scripture told us not to). We create a bubble of if-then statements about God: If God exists, then x cannot be true (and, conversely, if x is true, God cannot exist). And if we leave our bubble and learn that x is true, our faith is shattered because we based our faith on empirical evidence being true or false. If God does not intervene but is instead already involved in everything, then it is irrelevant whether x is true or false because we have based our faith in God and not in our opinion of the scientific controversy of the time (tides, geocentric vs heliocentric, evolution, etc.).

Science doesn't necessarily challenge the authority of scripture. Both science and scripture have to be true. If Science is true and scripture is not, then as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:19, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied." If scripture is true but science is not, then we need an explanation for why we can sense and test truths that aren't true: did God create such a deceptive reality? I don't believe that sort of God is the God evidenced in scripture.

Naturally, science of this age could be wrong. Maybe science and scripture don't match up because our current understanding isn't a full understanding yet. This is entirely possible but knowing that some science isn't perfect isn't an excuse to denounce all science and refer back to the "God of the gaps".

Finally, when all else fails and science and faith are having a particularly hard time aligning in my head, I remember that science need not challenge the authority of scripture but instead may be challenging my interpretation of scripture. What method of interpretation do I use in the case of each individual passage, and does it align with what is known about the universe?

Maybe, as the Wall Street Journal recent claimed, "Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God". And maybe science is helping us interpret scripture in the way God intended. Shouldn't both science and scripture be leading us closer to the truth of our universe?

I'm sure people smarter than me would have much to say about this concept, and maybe would say that my faith should be in scripture alone (including whatever interpretation I choose) and should not be affected by science. Or maybe they'd say by doing this I'm prone to reading meaning into the bible (eisegesis) instead of out of the bible (exegesis). Dunno. But I'd be curious to hear. Cheers.