It has become common in recent years to believe that science has become so advanced that it has disproved the existence of God, many speak of the "God particle" or our new understanding of quantum physics which has been widely reported in the media and assume it to have explained the origins of the universe.
To hold a Christian worldview for some is to somehow be superstitious, backward thinking and ignorant of reason and fact. It also presumes that we have to choose between one or the other, Science or religion and that they are completely incompatible. Many love to highlight these battles between protagonists around subjects such as evolution, stem cell research and I.V.F. Scientists are often projected as just believing in a material natural world, the view that everything has a natural cause and is the subject of random undirected forces. This ignores the fact that many people believe in God mainly because they recognize the limitations of science and that the perfectly ordered nature of the universe is unlikely to be random or undirected but resulting from some ultimate power or intelligence.
Many cite Darwin’s theory of evolution as fact or at very least best explanation and view the Genesis account of creation as unscientific. The creation account covers only 15 verses in the bible which is written in a simple poetic style. Christians hold a variety of views about the creation story from an allegorical idea about the nature of God’s creation and the dawn of human consciousness, intertwined with certain ideas about the realities of humanity. There are those who believe in a literal seven-day creation but the vast majority see no conflict between the biblical account, evolution and science in general, in fact Christians believe that we are to evolve into spiritual beings because that is Gods ultimate purpose for us.
Whatever our viewpoint we understand in all humility that there is a limit to our understanding and for now we only 'see dimly' We hold that God is ultimate in the process as a matter of faith in the same way that scientists believe that explaining the origins of the universe will only be explained by the scientific method as a matter of faith. The Bible is understood not as a science text book but rather a text aimed at human transformation.
The word 'created' has a number of meanings in the bible the most common of which means 'to create stage by stage' so very much an evolved process. The seven day time span in which God created the world uses the same Greek word used to describe an 'age' or 'epoch' which might suggest a day as meaning a much longer period in the same way as we might say "back in the day" to mean a greater length of time. So the creation story was passed down through the generations through a story telling tradition, in a style to be easily understood by all and not necessarily a literal seven day account. We cannot be sure of the process so are left to decide for ourselves but we believe that God created the universe and everything in it. There has to be an originator or first cause but it seems less likely to be something solely physical but rather something of mind, consciousness or spirit.
There are many things that science cannot tell us. If a child were to ask the most eminent scientist ‘’What went bang and where did it come from’’ at the beginning of the universe, the scientist would not be able to tell him. If we were to ask what guided the space dust to arrange the various known chemical elements in such complex ways so as to form the solar system and the whole of life on earth (including sentient human beings) the scientist would not be able to say. If we were to ask how did a complex system as found in our DNA ,the genetic information system for life arise from a random explosion? He would be able to convey what he believed to be the process of how it evolved but not what guides it nor the reason why it has happened. Why is there something rather than nothing and how did that nothing get here?
Science tells us that we do not have the mathematics available to convey the improbability of all those factors coming together to create life on earth as we know it. There are around 30 finely tuned constants that make life possible on earth, just one of these constants has an extremely low probability of being so, almost to the point of impossibility. If we believed we would win the national lottery every week for the rest of our lives we would be laughed at but this would be highly probable compared to the conditions necessary for life on Earth to randomly exist. Scientists speculate that there are multiple universes and if there are it would make our existence mathematically more probable but there is currently no evidence for it. We are discovering smaller and smaller sub atomic particles, learning how they work but not how they originated.
Evolutionary theory whilst being a good theory of natural development on earth has weaknesses which Darwin himself recognized and today despite all the studies there are gaps in the record of transitional fossils as well as other anomalies. What we know for sure is that there are lots of species which are similar. Science can be highly speculative often creating more questions than answers. Science is believed because it tends to deal with physical visible things which are measurable, what we can see we can more easily relate to, because objects are common to the everyday. The spiritual in contrast is invisible but rather experienced by the person. Science presumes that all reality is ultimately visible or measurable and that we will achieve total knowledge in time.
Science has been brilliant at manipulating our environment to make our lives more comfortable but much advance has led to difficult moral and ethical issues in medicine and technology, solving some problems but creating others. All aspects of science have a moral application because for example the thing that creates cheap clean electricity caused horrendous death at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the internet which allows access to education, like a library in your own home also presents the opportunity to bully somebody on line. Examples of the mixed blessings of science are almost endless. Science is clearly limited in its scope in the task of human well being because the spiritual dimension is thought to be invisible, by dealing only in the material is not in a very good position to be able to prove or disprove God. It has yet to discover a unified theory of everything and much of its theory on origin’s remain highly speculative. If you are struggling with a personal problem the discovery of a new atomic particle while interesting is not going to help you very much.
Christians at the time of the enlightenment embraced science as a way of revealing Gods glorious creation and its sheer complexity make a creative mind behind the origin of the universe at least plausible. For this reason many scientists hold a faith. In areas where there is an absence of scientific proof everybody has to admit that all viewpoints carry an element of faith. Christians admire scientists who have brought us so many good things and it is down to humanity to use those discoveries in an ethical and moral way to enhance human well being. We believe that God has made us creative and imaginative beings for a purpose and that is to love and bring glory to him, to embrace the spiritual life and to love one another. Science in itself is not love, but Jesus is and it is in his love we share the highest human calling.