Somewhere along the way, somebody started a rumor that science and the Christian faith went through a nasty divorce a couple of centuries ago, and that the two of them have not spoken since. You can follow the evidence or you can lean on your faith, this rumor says, but you cannot do both, because they live in separate corners now and they do not get along.
Plenty of intelligent-sounding people will tell you which corner to pick. Christopher Hitchens wrote that faith makes people meaner, more selfish and, above all, more stupid — then offered his own edit of the famous verse. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believe in anything. Hitchens 3:16. He died an atheist, by the way. He is not an atheist anymore.
Stephen Hawking said religion is a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark. His Oxford colleague, the mathematician John Lennox, answered that atheism is a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the light.
So which is it? Are we foolish to be sitting here this morning?
A confession
I should tell you up front that I am not a scientist, and I do not even have a good background in the natural sciences. My science teachers, by the time I reached junior high — and I want to be kind — were the pits. They were boring, and they made science boring. By some fluke I tested out of the requirement in college, and never looked back.
Then about twenty years ago I took a class at seminary called Science, Technology and the Church, precisely because I knew it was a weak spot, and it woke something up in me. So I stand on the shoulders of people who actually know this material, and a good number of them are sitting in this room.
But here is what I do know. I am sitting on roughly thirty-five thousand dollars' worth of modern medical and engineering technology. Without this chair I could not do what I do, and I would not be in front of you this morning. Without modern medicine I would not be alive at all. So when I start talking about the limits of science, understand that I owe it a great deal.
And science is like a tracking dog. It uncovers all kinds of interesting and useful things, and it is a very good thing to have around — and it needs somebody holding the leash. Somebody has to tell it where to look, and what to do with what it finds. Science can tell you a great deal about what we are able to do. It has nothing whatsoever to say about what we ought to do. For that you need morality. For that you need ethics. For that you need God.
In the beginning
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Before the evidence, a word about the people who gathered it, because it may surprise you. Kepler said that astronomers are priests of the highest God with respect to the book of nature, and ought to be mindful not of the glory of their own minds but of the glory of God. Faraday said the book of nature is written by the finger of God. Einstein — whose God was not the God of the Bible, but who was certain some intelligence stood behind the cosmos — complained that the people who deny God keep quoting him for support.
Now look at what they found. The universe is expanding in every direction at the same rate, which means it had a beginning. Roll the clock back far enough and it is one infinitely dense point. They call that the Big Bang. We call it Genesis 1:1. And here is the part that should stop you. Had the rate of that expansion, one second in, been slower by one part in a one with seventeen zeros after it, the whole thing would have collapsed back on itself. Picture a control panel with hundreds and hundreds of dials, every one set exactly so. Move any one a hair and there is nothing.
Go the other direction, from the cosmic to the infinitesimal, and you find the same fingerprints. A single strand of your DNA carries about as much information as an average library, and you do not get meaningful information out of nothing. Information requires intelligence.
Let me be careful here, because this cuts both ways. Science cannot prove God and science cannot disprove God. It works with what can be measured and reproduced, and God by definition stands outside time, space, matter and energy. Science will certainly never prove to you that he gave his only Son. For that you need the other book.
Who made the cake
Lennox puts this better than I can. Say your Aunt Gertrude bakes you a chocolate cake for your birthday. Take it to a laboratory and hand it to the chemists and the physicists, and they will tell you everything in it. The flour, the eggs, the sugar, the cocoa, the diabetes — sorry, that part comes later. They will give you the interaction of every particle, how long it baked and at what temperature. A complete and accurate account.
What they cannot tell you is who made the cake, or why.
Science answers what and how. It does not answer who and why. And who and why are the two questions you actually lie awake over.
And happy Mother's Day
Which brings me, on this particular Sunday, to the last and greatest miracle. Science can tell us that at conception a single cell carries forty-six chromosomes and a code that has never existed before; that within a month there is a heartbeat; that at eight weeks there are brain waves and fingerprints; that by twelve weeks a child feels heat and light and touch and sound. All true. All measurable.
And not one bit of it explains how a woman comes to love someone she has never met, who is making her thoroughly uncomfortable, and for whom she would lay down her life without a moment's thought. That is the nearest thing I know in this world to the unconditional love of God.
David got there three thousand years ago without a single instrument. You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
From the infinite to the infinitesimal, all creation testifies. The love of a mother exemplifies. And the Son of God personifies.
