God's Two Revelations - Psalm 19

I've seen many young people deeply troubled by the assumed conflict between modern science and the Bible. Older folks struggle too. As recently as this week a retired geo-physicist shared his appreciation for the help I gave him to find ways to reconcile his lifelong experience as a scientist with his faith in Jesus and the authority of the Bible.

This is, undoubtedly, a very real challenge for many and a leading cause for the destruction of childhood Christian faith. There are significant resources and great and powerful reasons why that need not happen. Here are some organizations and individuals working toward this common goal of reconciling modern science with the Bible.

1. Reasons to Believe - sample article

Reasons To Believe : Hobbits Grab Headlines, Again!: Our assertion is that the hominids were animals created by God. These extraordinary creatures walked erect and possessed some level of intelligence. These abilities allowed them to cobble crude tools and even adopt some level of "culture." The RTB model maintains that the hominids were not spiritual beings made in God's image, however. RTB's model reserves this status exclusively for modern humans. Based on this view we predict that biological similarities will exist among the hominids and modern humans to varying degrees. But also major biological differences, as this new study attests.

2. Answers in Genesis - sample article

Creationism:There are various forms of creationism, including old-earth creationism, progressive creationism, and young-earth creationism (some also label the Intelligent Design Movement as being a form of creationism). Most forms of creationism contend that an intelligence, not natural processes, created the universe and all life. However, only young-earth creationism is supported by a straightforward reading of Genesis without introducing outside suppositions and beliefs foreign to the text (e.g., that “science” has proven the ancient age of the earth).

 3. Genesis Veracity - sample article

Level of Logic of Old Earth Creationism: Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe) would have us believe that after billions of years of geological processes (which caused the rock strata that we see), Noah's Flood then occurred only in Mesopotamia, and wiped out all of humanity except the eight who were saved on the Ark. Why would some of the humans have not successfully migrated away from a merely regional flood? And why would have all of humanity (Ross estimates 1 billion people) been confined to merely Mesopotamia, thousands of years ago? (And why would all of the animals also have been only in Mesopotamia, with none having migrated from harm's way?)

4. Evidence for God from Science - sample article

Does Genesis One Conflict with Science? Day-Age Interpretation : I would first like to point out that God has not revealed the entire creation process in the Genesis creation account, but only that which is particularly relevant to mankind. Many events in the creation account of the Bible have been intentionally left out (unicellular life forms, dinosaurs, etc.), I believe, because they would have been difficult to express in the Hebrew language, and would have lead to confusion, since they would not have been understood through the vast majority of mankind's existence (i.e., only understandable in the last two centuries). The interpretation of the Genesis creation account should not be made independently of the remainder of the Bible, as many "young-earth" creationists do. The interpretation presented here is based upon the creation accounts found throughout the entire Bible (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, etc.¹) as it relates to God's creation of the heavens and the Earth, and is consistent with all the biblical texts in addition to the revelations of science.

The Bible was the first written work to describe the expanding universe model for the universe (indicated by verses stating that God spreads out the heavens, 2), which is consistent with the Big Bang model.

5. Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne - sample article

How the Resurrection Makes Sense: In the history of much Christian thinking, and in much popular piety, people have thought of themselves as if they were apprentice angels. In that case, the "real me" would be a spiritual component, trapped in a body but awaiting release at death. Today, that is an increasingly difficult belief to hold. Studies of brain damage and the effects of drugs show how dependent our personalities are on the state of our bodies. Charles Darwin has taught us that our ancestry is the same as that of the other animals. Earth was once lifeless and life seems to have emerged from complex chemical interactions. Many scientists think that we are nothing but collections of molecules and they write popular books to assert this belief. 

Yet that also is a pretty odd thing to believe. Could just a bunch of chemicals write Shakespeare or compose Handel's Messiah, or discover the laws of chemistry, for that matter? There is something more to us than the merely material. Yet, whatever that extra something is, it is surely intimately connected with our bodies. We are a kind of package deal, mind and body closely related and not wholly detachable from each other. It is a puzzle.

These samples are enough to indicate that there is plenty of controversy among Christian apologists as they work diligently to demonstrate that there are no irreconcilable conflicts between God's two revelations in nature and the Bible.

In addition, there are conservative Jewish resources that are also very helpful. Chief among them is the work of Gerald Schroeder. Once a teacher at MIT, he now resides in Jerusalem.

6. Gerald Schroeder - sample article:

The Age of the Universe:  In 1959, a survey was taken of leading American scientists. Among the many questions asked was, "What is your estimate of the age of the universe?" Now, in 1959, astronomy was popular, but cosmology - the deep physics of understanding the universe - was just developing. The response to that survey was recently republished in Scientific American - the most widely read science journal in the world. Two-thirds of the scientists gave the same answer. The answer that two-thirds - an overwhelming majority - of the scientists gave was, "Beginning? There was no beginning. Aristotle and Plato taught us 2400 years ago that the universe is eternal. Oh, we know the Bible says 'In the beginning.' That's a nice story; it helps kids go to bed at night. But we sophisticates know better. There was no beginning." 

That was 1959. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the echo of the Big Bang in the black of the sky at night, and the world paradigm changed from a universe that was eternal to a universe that had a beginning. Science had made an enormous paradigm change in its understanding of the world. Understand the impact. Science said that our universe had a beginning. I can't overestimate the import of that scientific "discovery." Evolution, cave men, these are all trivial problems compared to the fact that we now understand that we had a beginning. Exactly as the Bible had claimed for three millennia. 

Of course, the fact that there was a beginning does not prove that there was a beginner. Whether the second half of Genesis 1:1 is correct, we don't know from a secular point of view. The first half is "In the beginning;" the second half is "God created the Heavens and the Earth." Physics allows for a beginning without a beginner. I'm not going to get into the physics of that here. "The Science of God," my second book, examines this in great detail.

7. The Torah Science Foundation - sample article:

Time and Purpose in Science and Mathematics: The infinite number of questions asked in every sphere of human culture can be reduced to three general, fundamental questions. These questions contain many more detailed, more elaborately phrased questions, which can be expressed in complex philosophical forms, or spelled out through professional scientific analysis. These questions relate to both the simplest objects encountered in everyday life and to complex cultural or scientific systems, to concrete objects and realities that people cannot help but notice, and to creations of the mind, whose actual existence is uncertain. These three questions may be summarized in very simple words: "What?" "How?" "What For?"

In more abstract language we can say that "What" is the question about the essence of things, their definition and identity, and their relationship to other entities. "How" is the question of the reason for things: why do things happen the way they do, what brings about their existence, and what causes various events. "What For" is the question of purpose: what is the purpose for which certain things are done, or exist.

There is enough information here to keep all of us busy for many, many hours. Regardless of where you end up in your conclusions, there is one thing that impresses me in them all. They take the Bible very seriously. They believe in its authority. God has two revelations, nature and His Word (Psalm 19:1-5). And the two agree with one another.