Science and Faith?

Question

I'm trying to plan a youth session on Science and Faith- does anyone have any good ideas? Quotes on Science from the Bible would also be appreciated!

Answer 1

The bible isn't a science book it is a spiritual book. It was completed in the 1st century AD, long before the scientific method was pioneered in the 13th century by a monk called Roger Bacon, (he is worth looking up on the net if you want some interesting material for your group). This began a long conflict between the church authorities and scientists which led to a very messy divorce between the two in the 19th century ;(
Science is the way we investigate nature to find out how nature works at the physical level using observations, methods and experiments etc. Science is a completely valid way of looking for and understanding physical truths about the physical universe. However, science cannot help you understand spiritual matters.
The bible contains lots of information about spiritual matters, gathered over centuries of spiritual experience i.e. it is written to help people explore who God is, how to live in relationship with God and with others etc. It isn't reasonable to expect the bible to be based upon scientific principles, because it was all sewn up before people even understood those concepts.
Looked at more positively, we can use science to explore the created universe and at the same time, without any compromise, we can use the bible to explore our Creator and how we can live well.

Answer 2

The Bible is not a science book, and it never will be. Faith is believing in something - with or WITHOUT proof. Science has rules that you can only state that something is true if you have the EVIDENCE you need to back up your claim. Faith isn't as tough on the truth as science is.

There are no "science" quotes in the Bible, but their are plenty of scientific errors - the Bible says that the number "pi" is 3 - it isn't.

Answer 3

You won't find anything, since science was invented thousands of years after the Bible was written.

Science is a method of studying the natural world, and it's a method that actually checks to make sure the answers it comes up with aren't completely wacky. As a result, it has vastly improved our understanding of nature, in many cases proving wrong teachings that priests had been passing down through the ages, and in other cases demolishing arguments for the existence of gods. Philosophy does this too, but science and philsophy seek answers on different subjects (at least now that the two are considered different disciplines rather than science being a branch of philsophy).

The most famous example is how Darwin put the final nail in the coffin of the teleological argument for a god, joining Kant as the two people who did more than anything else to make atheism a more justified philosophical stance than theism.


Edit: 'Tell Me No Lies,' you'd do well to follow the advice of your avatar name and stop presenting deceptive arguments. Your pastor is dead wrong.

Chairs don't evolve because they can't move. They're dead. Living things evolve because they reproduce and change over time, and the favored changes are preserved algorithmically. It's a process that should come intuitively to anyone familiar with mathematics or computer science or anything at all like that.

Other misconceptions you have are the idea that things get 'better' through evolution. No. We're all just cousins. We're not inherently better than any other species, though we do happen to be smarter just like elephants happen to be bigger and dogs happen to have better hearing. That is because changes resulting in those characteristics were preserved through some sort of selection algorithm.


It's really hard to doubt this stuff if you see it for yourself. Once you can internalize just how simple the process really is, you'll see how brilliant the original idea was, and how plain cool it is that such neat structures can be the result of simple algorithms. In that sense, life has something in common with fractals or similar mathematical objects.

Your "order versus disorder" argument has been discredited for so long that it's not even funny anymore.

Answer 4

You are treating it as science and religion are mutually exclusive. Many Christians like myself have no problem with a big bang, or God working in an evolutionary process. Day is used figuratively for a period of time in many scriptures, and the day/age theory of the creation believes there can be millions to billions of years between the days of the creation. The order for the creation parallels the same order science gives. First comes the heavens (stars, etc.), then an empty earth without form, then land followed by oceans, then plant life followed by the first intelligent life in the sea, then comes birds (which according to science are descendants of dinosaurs), then mammals, then a more specific wild animal, and finally man. It's actually amazing that it gives an order 3,000 plus years before science confirms that same order. Adam is not created until after the seventh day, and the day/age theory believes the man created on the sixth day is not the same as Adam who is first mentioned after the seventh day. Many Christians are stuck in centuries old past traditions. but not all Christians view science as the enemy of the faith, and you shouldn't automatically view the faith is opposed to scientific discovery.

Answer 5

Those aren't real scientists. When I mean real, I mean you have to propose a theory, find a n experimental way to test it, then make observations. It's not a secret that a great amount of people in those times were extremely ignorant, including scientists AND religious leaders, who tortured people suspected of Satanism, witchcraft, killed people who didn't have the same belief as them, and upheld a corrupt system and lived in luxury while the people lived in desolate poverty.

And finally, Science and Faith do not necessarily have to be counters. Just because you disagree with evolution doesn't mean you can't appreciate the VAST improvements and benefits science has bought to almost every aspect of life.

Answer 6

As a scientist, the simplest thing to do is observe that the bible has nothing to say about science.

The reason is that religions make affirmative statements about what is true. Each religion makes its own set of statements and they can be totally contradictory. Science actually makes statements about what is not true. It estimates the truth through theory, but it is truth without certainty. Religion has been criticized as certainty without truth.

The bible doesn't anticipate the idea of science or the ideas behind science. Gallileo was condemned for proving about fifty passages of the bible were in fact false. The Catholic Church retried his case in the 1990's and he was still convicted. The pope ultimately went in and said that he was not a heretic, that the adherence to a belief that is known to be false is false. The bible was written by people who did not know the world was round, the blue stuff above us was the diffusion of light through nitrogen (they thought it was water held by by flood gates behind the clouds), the sky is not solid though the bible actually says it is, the Earth is not on pillars nor is it in a foundation, the Earth goes around the Sun not the other way around (a variety of passages can only work if it is the other way around), and dinosaurs died before men existed, implying that Adam's sin could not have brought death into the world since creatures died long before Adam existed.

You do not get to criticize religious statements, unlike scientific theories. The bible even forbids it, since Peter is given the Keys to the Kingdom. All power of truth is handed down through the apostles and their successors the bishops of the Catholic, Orthodox and Coptic Churches (see Acts 2 on the election of Mathias). Further, the bible contains statements that are not open to interpretation. The meaning is clear. That does not mean they are a good idea, that just means that they cannot be criticized or even shown false.

Religions depend upon divine revelation of the truth, rather than discovering the truth. A moderate religious view would state that religious belief is not valid if it is contradicted by science, rather the religious belief is not properly understood. For example, is the important point that God wants all people to live a happy life in paradise and we do not seem to be able to pull it off, or is it that Adam was magically dropped in a garden in Mesopotamia? (if you look at the rivers in the Garden they are in Iraq)

Evolution, planetary rotation, gravitation, hydrodynamics and a variety of other fields touched by incorrect biblical statements literally have billions of pieces of evidence in support of them. Evolution is so well supported that biologists are now taking planetary blood samples to watch evolution happen in real time. We have even watched over one hundred new species form. It is even now a trivial lab experiment to have college students create their own species where none existed before. So when you hear stuff on hear about the earth being flat (yes some creationists insist on it still, they must not fly) or evolution being false, go look at the actual data don't use the bible.

Let us assume the bible is true, but written by shepherds for shepherds in a primitive culture, what is it that God was trying to say but which us limited people mucked up.

You are embarking on a really hard task, if you do it well. I suggest you read up on biblical passages that are in fact false. If you have high school students and they are as irritating as the ones I know, they will go out on the net and find them first and you will not know how to answer them because you will not know the actual science.

If you do a very good job, then you will look at what science actually does and how it works. For example, meteorology and economics do not get to do experiments. People do not like you to create another Great Depression or cause a hurricane just to test a theory, yet both are sciences. Particle physics does not permit the knowledge of the outcome before it happens, but you can know what is likely and unlikely. Some fields of science only permit knowledge about the shape of things, but not the actual size of things. Science is a method of inquiry where people use the known knowledge of the world, look at what has gone before, look at the contradictions between what is believed and what is, and find better explanations and mechanisms for how it works.

Strangely, science uses falsehood not truth. If you do an experiment and it works out how you expect, then you have no new knowledge. It is only when it does not work out that you can learn anything. What a scientist does is find where the belief system fails and works to build a better belief system. Each iteration of that process builds a system of beliefs that is closer to the truth, but still is never the actual truth.

Relgion depends upon passing down knowledge believed to be from God from one generation to another. The knowledge is trusted because the last generation trusted it. It depends upon your personal belief for validity. Otherwise everyone would be Christian or everyone would be Buddhist or everyone would be a cargo cultist (look them up, they are in Polynesia a fascinating real religion), or everyone would be a Rastafarian (also look it up, also a fascinating religion) because the external world would ratify the truth of the religion not simply faith.

Answer 7

Science in the modern sense dates from maybe the sixteenth century, so you are unlikely to find the Bible commenting upon it. You could try looking at the website of a well known scientist turned priest:

http://www.polkinghorne.net

or maybe the Christians in Science web site:

http://www.cis.org.uk

I should add that neither John Polkinghorne nor CIS are likely to side with the anti-evolutionists (because they DO dispassionately examine the evidence).

Answer 8

Listen my friend don't worry about some of the fools who answered you.They certainly prove one verse of the Bible to be correct;--'The fool has said in his heart there is no God'.I believe in God and I believe in science.True science has proofs to back it up.Evolution is not a science .It is an unproven theory believed and taught by those who want to believe there is no God.The theory might have looked pretty good at first.Louis Pasteur proved conclusively --life only comes from pre-existing life only 2 years after Darwin published his book.During the last 50 years much has been discovered that completely bankrupts the whole theory.
This has left unbelievers in a sort of vacuum.They have to invent something new.

Answer 9

I believe science and faith can go hand-in-hand. There are a lot of respected scientists who are also Christians. Try this site it has plenty of scientific articles on it as well as the "nutty" religious ones!
www.answersingenesis.org

Answer 10

Just remember, many stories of the Bible are written in a way to give a simple explanation of how things came about. They would not be considered factual. Poetic license if you will.

God's way, God's time.
Many paths, One God!