Science vs. Religion

(I wrote this on February 2, 2014 and published it as a Faithful Reader Note, which is a note I include with sermons that are emailed to folks who have signed up to receive my sermons by mail.  A slightly altered version appeared in Faithlab, and another will be published in the Henry County Local newspaper.)

For all my adult life, I’ve begun my mornings with a cup of hot, black coffee and a newspaper.  I may have to give that up for Sunday mornings.  If not, I need to get Donna to pre-read the paper for me and to tell me what articles to skip. 

It was a good morning.  I was sipping my coffee, just after finishing a deliciously sweet grapefruit—a gift from my mother—and enjoying the Sunday Courier-Journal.  The sermon was finished and all that awaited my attention was the writing of this note.  I hardly ever know at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday what I will write.  I just wait until the breakfast routine is over, go up to my study, sit before the computer, and begin to write.  I’m sure, under normal circumstances, I would have written something about the sermon series I’ve begun from the Sermon on the Mount.  Oh, well.

There was an article in the paper about an upcoming debate between “Bill Nye the Science Guy” and Ken Ham of the Creation Museum.  I am so tired of this debate.  It is not new.  It was going on when I was a kid and when my parents were kids and when their parents were kids . . . .  Enough already!

We embrace science on so many levels.  I’m writing on a laptop computer that amazes my simple brain.  Many of you reading this received it in your homes seconds after I pressed “send.”  I can watch the Olympics live from halfway around the world.  With lasers, doctors are now performing surgeries that were unheard of and impossible just a few years ago.  Children are living today who would never have survived birth a few years ago.  All of this made possible by SCIENCE.  But when it comes to understanding beginnings, we don’t want to listen to science.

God gave us brains and surely expects us to use them.  Finding out the how of our origins and the origins of other things is not a threat to belief and faith in a living Creator God.  I am anxious to know what else science can tell us . . . about anything and everything.  But I already know what science can neither prove nor disprove: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  I know this through faith manifested in my walk with Jesus.  Oh, I know something else which science can neither prove nor disprove: A “new heaven and new earth is being created," and “behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”  It’s enough!  Science doesn’t scare me nor threaten my faith.  Science has made and is making my life better.

Why do we spend so much time focused on science vs. religion?  Is it because it is easier to affirm Genesis 1 & 2 than to embrace the hard teachings of Jesus as we find them in the Sermon on the Mount?  Perhaps we think if we make enough noise we will divert attention from the hard sayings of Jesus.  It won’t work.  We are not Christians because we believe and embrace creationism as the only truth of our origins.  We are Christian only to the extent we follow the Christ.

Skip the debate and read the Sermon on the Mount.  The debate will still be going when you are gone, and it will not have aided you in living or in preparing for where you’re going.