Do Faith and Science Contradict One Another?

Some people believe faith contradicts science. In this episode, we discuss the foundation for that argument and how faith and science can actually complement each other. If you have comments or questions, use the link below to text us! 

For more teaching from City Awakening, visit www.cityawakeningchurch.com 

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Transcript

Zack 0:00

Welcome to episode two of Between Sundays. I'm Zach Casey, the executive pastor at City Awakening Church, and today I'm joined by Louis Tambor, our lead pastor, and Alex Robinson, our community pastor. Our vision at City Awakening is to see both skeptics and believers seek truth, find joy in community, and live with purpose in our city. And the teaching series that we're currently in on Sunday mornings called Kingdom Thinking has really given us an opportunity to address some of the current issues that we can tend to struggle with from both Christians and skeptics' perspective as we navigate those on a daily basis. Last week we discussed moral truth versus moral relativism, and today we're going to be discussing faith and science, and how we can reconcile the two when they seem to be in conflict. And maybe even asking, is there a need to reconcile the two? Is there even a conflict between faith and science? So I want to start there, really, because just like the moral truth, moral relativism discussion, this is not a new topic. It's been around for a while. But in your opinions, do you think that the majority of people today would say that there is a conflict or that science and faith are contradictory?

Louis 1:19

I don't think they're going to come right out and say that. I think if you start to challenge them, press them a little bit on faith and science, I think you're probably going to see people leaning a lot more, people who aren't Christians, maybe leaning a lot more towards having faith and trust in science than they do maybe believing in any other religion or even in the existence of God. So I don't think they're going to come out and say that there's a war between the two, but in their minds, there is an us versus them mentality, that the mentality of, well, if you're a Christian, then you're ignorant because you basically believe in faith without facts, but I'm a person of science, so I believe in facts, not faith. And I think that's a misunderstanding, which maybe we can get into a little bit later.

Zack 2:04

Do you think that that's changed in recent times, or has this always been? Because what you're saying is basically the more religious people, even beyond Christianity, I think, but religious people tend not to see it as a contradictory versus... those who aren't as religious or have a faith in that way see it as more contradictory. Do you think that that's shifted

Alex 2:28

Well, I think it can be kind of a– it's more of a perception difference, I think, than an actual, like, argument difference between Christians really see the world this way and then people who value science really see the world a totally different way. Like, I don't think it's that. I think it's a perception of, again, like– people are going to look at Christians and say, Oh, you have, you put your, you know, you, you stake everything on something higher than just the observable facts of things, um, that like science would say, because there is that you do get an element of faith, but it's not that faith is this like blinding thing. I think that's what people's view is. It's this misunderstanding of faith that faith is just a, like, Totally blind phenomenon. We don't take in any facts. We just have faith. And they think that's what the Bible teaches when the Bible doesn't. I mean, the Bible gives evidences of who God is and what he's done and how he's interacted with the world. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's probably a difference there. You know, we've got—we'll probably go into some history on this, but, you know, we've got some—there's a few instances through history where the church— Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You can kind of pick and choose history to make fun of Christians and science if you want to, but you can do just as much showing, hey, here's a dedicated Christian who... came up with all these theories and all these different things that we now know to be kind of like scientific fact. Y

Louis 4:13

Yeah, and I think going through the history of things, a lot of cultures, I mean, we just study history. Most people in most cultures end up believing that there is some sort of a higher power, some sort of a creator of some sort. It doesn't matter what tribe, people, group you go to. There's always some little glimpse of that throughout history. As science developed, I think some people started to become maybe more skeptics of things that they couldn't see, treating it kind of like a blind faith mentality, like Alex was just saying, as if we believe that there's an existence of God, but we don't have any facts to base that, at least observable data to be able to back that claim up. But I think what a lot of people misunderstand when it comes to this topic is that they treat science as if it's truth when science isn't truth. It's a method for helping us to better understand truths. It's one of many methods. So we can study historical literature, and that can be a piece of evidence for certain truth claims that are made in the past. Now, it's just one method of studying a truth claim, and that's what science is. So I think the misconception a lot of people have, at least in our Western American culture, is that science is truth. No, it's not. It is a method for helping us to better understand specific truths. This is why you'll see data change. This is why the science book that I'm studying, that I studied several years ago, isn't the same addition to the science books that the kids are studying today. Well, why is it a different addition? I mean, if science is just all truth across the board, then we shouldn't have new additions. But we have new additions because new data has come in. And as that new data came in, more observations were made, more theories were made, more claims are being made. Well, that science helps us to better test that. T

Zack 5:57

That's why there are theories. That's why there are theories. Everything in science is theories, right?

Louis 5:59

r That's absolutely right. And I think that's the misunderstanding that people tend to have. And like Alex was saying, too, Christianity does have facts. that we can back our claims on. We might use some science like archaeology actually can help us to be able to back some of the claims that we make, that the Bible makes. But then there's other methods that we use to back some of the claims that we have as well.

Zack 6:24

Yeah. So, I just did a quick search. The most recent research really on this is from 2015, ironically enough, from Pew Research. And they showed that 59% of Americans say in general that science is is often in conflict with religion, but 38% believe science and religion to be mostly compatible. But 68% say that there is no conflict between their personal religious beliefs and science, which is kind of interesting because it's...

Alex 6:55

It's cognitive dissonance at work because you'd be... You can't do this in a survey very easily, but it'd be interesting... To have people give examples when they answer to the positive, like that there is some contradiction and be like, okay, what? Because I feel lost in that sometimes. I hear that and I go, okay, but what do you think is the contradiction now? When people even come back and say, well, there's nothing in my personal life. belief system or a country. Okay, well, what are we talking about?

Louis 7:22

But that's where I think the conclusion comes in. I think people don't understand really what science is about. They make it more than what it actually is. I was talking to a buddy of mine who is a biology teacher, and he's a biologist, and he's a believer in Christ. I've gone on hikes with him on the Appalachia Trail, and he's pointing out things to me that are just very intriguing to me. And he said most people have a misunderstanding of what science And he's the one who taught me early on years ago that science, you know, is a method for helping us to better understand truth. And they're not at war with each other. They're not in conflict with each other. They can actually complement each other in a lot of ways. But I think that's where, like, that stat, as you were reading that stat, I'm sitting here and I'm thinking to myself, that doesn't make sense to me. But I think it comes down to people not really fully understanding science.

Zack 8:13

Alex, you mentioned some of the history. I mean, it is true, like, the scientific method was developed by critics. really two Franciscan friars in the 13th and 14th centuries. Then it was made popular by Francis Bacon, who we probably learn about more in school in the 16th, 17th century. And then there's other scientists, or that method was largely founded in the Christian community. A lot of the universities, which were the primary sources areas of study were formed around Christian faith. You have Oxford, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Harvard, Yale, even medieval monasteries, which is where a lot of that study took place in history. But the thing looking back is there was a belief in God which laid the foundation for science in a lot of ways because these men believed that there was a process that was designed by God that made sense and that he had given humans, rational beings, the ability to discern what that process was. And so the idea was never to disprove or contradict faith in God, but to study and really understand unpack or reveal the secrets hidden within creation that would show us more of who god was it wasn't to set out to disprove god but it was more to reveal the way god had made creation which i think is a lot of times like you're like you guys are saying it's a different approach than people think about science today they think not all people think there has to be like science is um part of the process is to disprove that faith idea, you know? And that was never really the case in early scientists.

Alex 9:57

Right. I always, when I talk about this with people, I always say, you know, it's an overly simplistic view to say that, you know, Christians have a hard time with science because, you know, even if you go back into, you know, more ancient times, pre-modern stuff like that, it's not like Christians were walking around thinking that if you like cut a tree open, that it was just a blank space in there and it was just God making a tree work. Like they knew there was stuff inside the tree. They knew It had roots underground. They knew kind of the workings of it. Now, of course, they didn't have microscopes to look at, like, oh, here's what chlorophyll is, and here's exactly how this works, and here's what it takes. Like, they didn't know all of that method, but they knew, hey, there's something working here. And, like, the simplistic way to say it is, hey, God is in control of the things growing. But they knew there was some mechanism by which that was working. It wasn't just, like, God magic working all over the place. And then through... the work of a scientific method and studying things and observing things, we now learn more about it than what people you know, what like ancient times did, but people in ancient times didn't walk around just as imbeciles thinking that things didn't have a method of working. They just didn't necessarily have the method to know every detail about it. Now we can know a lot more details about it.

Louis 11:14

Yeah. You know, you brought up Francis Bacon and I'm glad you did because he is often credited to developing the scientific method, which every scientific area depends on. Well, one of the reasons why he did that, he often used the term idols whenever he talked about things which was biblical language, was to prevent scientific corruption. So he wanted to create that method to be able to keep scientists in check so that they wouldn't have their own intellectual biases tainting the data, so to speak, right? And so one of the major reasons why he created that was because he knew that humans were sinful people, and because we're sinful people, we can corrupt the data. So the very scientific method that all these other sciences depend on were actually started by a guy who held both faith and science together. And he didn't see them at war. He saw them as complementary.

Zack 12:06

c Yeah. Now, Alex, you also mentioned where the church can overstep. The case that comes to mind with that is Galileo. Sure. You know, who came up with the heliocentric model, but was condemned by the Catholic church because it went against what their tradition had taught. And so they, you know, shot that down, which obviously turned out to be true. The earth is not the center of the universe, but the sun is. And so The church has not been perfect in this, obviously, and we can't err on that side of being dismissive of those truths or those theories if we're not careful, just because it's not what we've always held to.

Alex 12:45

Yeah, I would say that's the first thing that comes to mind. And that comes from a weird interpretation of Scripture, essentially, and just like a... frankly, like a sinful view of ourselves that we needed to be at the center of the universe because God created us. And it was, it was just this kind of deeply held view that, you know, that's the older one. There's like a more modern one. I think of like kind of an America around kind of the introduction of the theory of evolution. Like when you had eventually became the scopes trial, which now it's famously called the monkey trial. And it was Williams, Jenning, Brian, I believe that was arguing for it. And just kind of in the, Way is kind of made a fool of himself talking about, hey, this method means that... And his argument, too, was not so much against this theory of evolution as a thing, but he was arguing against teaching the conclusion that, therefore, since we now have a theory of evolution, there must be no God. Because we found a method that basically does away with the need for God. And he didn't think that's what we should be teaching kids, which... in reality, is not how that should be taught. It's a perfectly fine thing to teach. There's elements of it that make sense in nature and it's observable, but it doesn't... even someone like Darwin wasn't arguing when he came up with that, that, oh, this now gets us all the way back to this and we now can do away with God. He was just saying, hey, we can observe these changes in species across time. And this could be a pretty good way of explaining how we got all these species. So those are kind of the, yeah, the scopes trial evolution stuff, more modern. And then, yeah, the heliocentrism stuff back in the day were definitely ways when the church kind of came in and you know, kind of to our chagrin, made a fool of us by kind of overly focusing on. Right. I

Louis 14:39

Can I chime in on two things on that? Fine. Let's say all that's true, whatever. I don't care. So, I mean, I do care, but how does life come from non-life? How does something that's not living all of a sudden produce something that's living? If you have a rock that is not alive, how does that rock that's not alive all of a sudden breathe life into existence? And so they've got you got to answer that question for me if you want me to not believe in the existence of God. And I've had had them say, well, you know, it's it's kind of always existed. OK, well, you're describing life. god because so now so now matter is eternal instead of an eternal you have to come to

Alex 15:47

something something eternal

Louis 15:49

right so then i go to the cause and effect argument okay well so there's a cause and effect i mean if i'm if you come into a forest one day and you find a ball sitting there and i said to you how did that ball get there well it just appeared on its own or it's always existed you'd say i'm crazy right we would say i'd say you're crazy if you said that to me well you a more logical explanation would be well a factory created that ball that ball was blown up by somebody in the factory and a kid was playing with it and just forgot it in the forest. And that's why it's there. So this is the cause and effect mentality. And God is the first causer of the effects that have taken place here. So how does life come from non-life? Okay, that's one thing. Galileo, he once stated, when I consider what, because you were talking about Galileo, right? So yes, I believe, you know, I agree with you. Like the church was wrong on that, which is one of the reasons why we're doing this podcast too. We're doing this podcast because even next week when we talk about, you know, is art artificial intelligence, helpful or harmful. We're wanting to address these things because we personally at City Weekend, we don't want to be the kind of church that's like, okay, you know, everybody's an enemy. No, we want to be in the world, but not of the world. And so we want to address some of these tough questions and things to deal with. And we've also want to learn from history that the church wasn't always on the right side of this, but some Christians were. And, you know, we have a list of names on that. Well, Galileo stated, when I consider what marvelous things and how many of them men have understood, inquired into and contrasted, Right.

Zack 17:33

Yeah, which is, you know, you go back and you study guys like that or others. And, you know, I know I have some family members who I think their approach is, distant family members, but I think to have faith in God is ignorance, right? that is unintelligent. But then you look at guys like that or other scientists, it's just not based on what? How is that unintelligent? Even some modern-day scientists, people don't think about there being these great scientists that have strong Christian faith. MIT professors, Ian Hutchinson, the guy Francis Collin, who was a major leader in the Human Genome Project. These other people that are way more intelligent than I am And they know way more than I do scientifically, and they have great faith. So it's not unintelligent to have faith in God, or the two don't. They don't have to be mutually exclusive in that way.

Louis 18:29

Correct, yeah.

Zack 18:31

So we talked about evolution. That's obviously one of the major areas. What are some of the other key areas you feel like that people tend to turn to that feels like or can feel like there's a contradiction between faith and science?

Alex 18:47

I mean, this could be repeating somewhat from kind of our more objective truth versus personal truth type thing, but I think when you get into the softer sciences, like the social sciences, you get into this big fight between... faith and what social scientists find. I mean, you find people talking through psychology or sociology or anthropology, like why people interact. And, you know, they talk about how cultures form and all these different things. And I think that has been used a lot of times to say, look, all these cultures do these things, do similar things, or they form their morality in different ways, or, you know, just... There's oppression throughout these things. And again, I look at the Bible and go, oh, the Bible tells us that we're sinful and that things get screwed up. When people are involved, things get screwed up. But you'll get people that then come in and say, well, here's these theories about why people interact this way and what's actually at the root of that. And that's where things like the Marxist dialectic comes from or the... you know, oppressed oppressor matrix kind of thing. I think that is an attempt to kind of science away the idea that People are sinful, and the world is not going to function perfectly. And God has been honest about that through Scripture. We point to the solution of Christ in that, not a, oh, here's this system, and now people can come in and kind of fix the system, and that makes it better. Yeah, I think

Zack 20:20

you think about the beginning of life argument. When does life begin? That's one that comes into play. Medical practices, when you start talking about things like genetic modification or engineering, stem cell research, those kind of things, where I think there tends to be some disagreement in that.

Louis 20:38

Cloning.

Alex 20:41

Well, even the life one is tough, because you hear people get in arguments about an abortion type idea, and they talk about all the science we have where we know genetic development and how a baby develops. When you get down to brass tacks in that argument, if someone is really pro-abortion in that, they're not arguing scientifically at that point. Because they get to the point where you're going like, well, it's a clump of cells. And I go, okay, but it's a clump of cells that eventually becomes a bigger clump of cells that is a baby. So where's the scientific difference between those two? And then it just comes down to a choice argument. A lot of times... In some of these arguments, you'll see people default away from science when it doesn't work anymore quicker than I feel like I have to as a Christian. I can kind of lean on the science and say, well, it's there. I see all of these building blocks of life going on. What other conclusion am I supposed to say other than that's life there? And you'll have to kind of deviate from that to get to a... you know, more pro-choice position a lot of times.

Louis 21:48

Yeah. Even what's coming to mind for me too, is when you get into like computer sciences, the advancement of technology, you know, some of our scientific discoveries leading to like AI and things like that. And now they're, they're, they're potentially going to be, I mean, it's going to happen where they create like humanoids, you know, you know, artificial intelligence robots and people having intimate connections and even relationships with them and what that does, or even the conversation about the uploading our consciousness, almost like uploading data to the cloud and having our consciousness eternal now to try and prolong life. And I mean, there's just so many things that I think this is paving the way towards. And as Christians, we need to have these kind of dialogues.

Zack 22:32

Yeah. The thing about that, since you brought up the artificial intelligence thing, how do you think that that will affect this debate in the future? I

Louis 22:42

I think there's going to be some... Going back to the moral issues, moral law issues, I think there's going to be some theological issues that are going to come into play. So moral issues, like is it morally right or wrong to have an intimate relationship with God? a robot with an artificial intelligence. I think theological issues. How much do we really rely on artificial intelligence? A lot of people treating it like it's their savior. And so almost creating an idol out of artificial intelligence. So I think it could affect that. And I'm not hating on artificial intelligence. We're going to talk about that in the next week. But I'm saying these are just some some issues that could arise with that where we have to have some discussions on that. How far do we take it? Do we put a kill switch on things or not? You know, what are the extreme dangers of if artificial intelligence gets out of hand and we don't have kill switches or it creates nuclear issues, all kinds of things like that. I think we have to, there's going to be things that we aren't even aware of yet that could be dangers or moral issues or theological issues, spiritual issues, practical issues that we're just not aware of.

Alex 23:49

o Yeah, what's the nature of the soul? All of that. If you create the technology that can put all of my memories and personalities somehow into a computer and my body dies is my soul still with my information in the cloud or is it gone to god now like and now there's just kind of an imitation of me walking around yeah it's and what what human rights does that collection of my data have versus it being within you know it's an interesting yeah that's an interesting question

Zack 24:25

I think on the on the positive side i think if you're familiar with like the fine tuning argument there's artificial intelligence is going to it already has begun and is going to allow a lot of simulations and calculations to take place that will I believe will show that the conditions for life and things to exist as they are is so specific that it'll even rule out evolutionary theory even more. It's so specific and has to be so finely tuned. that it points even more to an intelligent design.

Louis 25:05

I mean, that already exists. We already have incredible stats on that and scientific data on that and scientists who aren't even believers in God or Christians in general. In fact, it was interesting. Richard Dawkins wrote a book, The God Delusion, and yet he was being debated by somebody at one point because he's a hardcore scientist, but an atheist scientist. And he even admitted at some point there has to be some sort of a higher power that that started all this, some intelligent designer, but he won't call it that. He won't call it God. He just says that there's something out there that's greater and just doesn't know what that something is. He can't put a name on it. So, yeah, the fine-tune argument and fine-tune theory, we already have some of those intricate details that really point to the, well, what I call it, really random order, you know, because it's so random for life to exist, but yet it's so ordered and calculated by God, you know. It had to have been God who did that. But this is where the whole multitheory, multiverse theory comes in.

Alex 26:08

We go into comic books. to account for that it's well it seems infinitesimally impossible so there must be infinite universes so of course if there's infinite universes then at one time it's going to happen

Louis 26:20

which is a desperate grasp there's even another theory called panspermia I believe the science is called planspermia where they believe that life began from some extraterrestrial means and came here but where did it come from on the extraterrestrial means like how did it start there like all it is is just pushing the argument back and if you're saying there's an an infinite multiverse that exists. Okay, well, but again, you're going back to a description of really the infinite God. You're saying that, you know, people are crazy for believing in an infinite God, but we're going to believe that there's an infinite God. multiverse you know universe that exists and also yeah and it just keeps pushing it back

Zack 26:55

yeah so how when we think about on the practical side as as christians uh and we approach scripture how does does it matter how we interpret scripture how does our approach to scripture affect our um interaction with science

Alex 27:11

well i think there's this simple you know it it The simple stuff you learn when you start thinking about hermeneutics, the interpretation of scripture, and it sounds really basic because we do this with language all the time, is what got the church in trouble sometimes was taking... What's called phenomenological language and making it totally literal. So the Bible talks about the sun rising and setting. Now, scientifically, we know that the earth is rotating. The sun is the stationary thing. But as we perceive... life, we see the sun moving across. So we talk about sunrise and sunrise. That doesn't mean we're wrong, but it just means as we see things, that's how we perceive it. And that kind of got them in trouble saying, well, I see the sun moving across. Certainly we're the solid thing. Um, and that, you know, that just became the wrong thing. And Right. Right. Yeah, this carpenter helped with us. We can do the same things with God, saying God is in control of creation, but he also is a God of order and a God of working things. He's an immaterial God, but he's working things out in a material world, so we're going to see systems... and things that work in the material world, but God is in control of that. And so I can believe both. I can say God is ultimately in control, but yes, photosynthesis happens, and my body has a million functions that are happening inside, but I trust that God is the one who authored that and laid the plans out for it and created it, and then now it works because he's a good designer. You know, I think that's kind of the idea of interpreting scripture to... To just be, you know, the apologist Wes Huff, who's now really famous online. He's been on everybody's podcast. He does a really great job of explaining a ton of stuff. And he just really is really simple. The Bible is clear on the issues that it wants to be clear on. And it is not completely clear on the things that God didn't want to be totally clear on. And so we take the things where God is clear and says, you know, I'm sovereign over creation. And then it's okay for us to then use... the capacities that God gave us to, okay, let's study exactly how that creation works. And it just points us back to, wow, God put in some really good parameters here for why this works.

Louis 30:00

Yeah, you know, when it comes to all this too, I... I think back again to the confusion that people sometimes have on, okay, well, what is the Bible about? And then what is science about? The Bible isn't intended to be a science book. So if we're going to the Bible to learn more about science, well, we're misunderstanding what the Bible is intended to be about and what it's intended to point us to, the God it's intended to point us to and to tell us about. I'm not going to go to science to be able to, you know, understand who God is. I can help to better understand how incredible he is and how great he is. And so this is one of the beauties of science. Like you were talking about photosynthesis and stuff like that, to be able to study those things and the details of human anatomy, you know, our world and all that. I mean, to me, that's very intriguing. And I'm so thankful for God gifting us with sciences and people with scientific minds because they help us to really see just how incredible God is. And how intelligent he is and how powerful he is by the fine-tuned details of his creation. The more we study through the sciences and be able to see those things, to me, it just causes me to be that much more in awe of God. So science can help us. to better understand creation, but the Bible tells us who created it. When it comes to the beginning of creation, for example, in the Genesis account, I'm not studying the Genesis account to be able to better understand the details of creation. No, I'm going to go to a science book to better understand some of the beginnings of our creation. But I am going to go to the Bible and in Genesis 1 to better understand the God who created it. So I think it was Andy Stanley who said, and I think it was in his book, or his curriculum, Starting Point, where he mentions how um the how genesis is about us not understanding the method of the maker but getting to know the maker of the method and that to me is is the difference between the bible and and science we're getting to understand the maker of the method when we read the bible getting to better know the method of the maker when we study some of the sciences

Zack 32:14

so for me um The more I learn about science, particularly when I was in college, I was a horticulture major, so I took a lot of classes around plants and those kind of things. And any time I would learn a process or something specific about the details of the way that worked, photosynthesis, I took an entomology class where we studied insects and the way those insects interacted with each other and with the plants. I would walk away from class and just think how... That can't just be chance. It just magnified God as creator and his creativity and ability and knowledge and all those things that really became enhanced worship for me. So I think the more that we, when we approach it that way, the more that we learn about science and the way things work, it really enhances our view of who God is. And then we can come back to scripture and see how those things work. complement each other not contradict each other

Louis 33:14

yeah that's why it's not at war for me right that's why it can be beautiful friends you know like a marriage you know uh you know beautiful relationship where man we just we get to be so much more in awe of god as we study science

Zack 33:28

yeah yeah so final question i think what is our role as a church thinking about the universal church in this conversation and do we have a place to step in and say there's a limit to how much we lean into science or how those two things interact so how can we enhance this or help guide people through this as a church

Alex 33:55

i mean my first contention is i would say It's not something we necessarily need to be afraid of. I think we can trust that God is big enough to handle... human developments on things, if that makes sense. We are still the creatures. And so that's why I'm not entirely worried about AI as a thing, as of right now, because I think at some point we're going to run into a wall with AI that says, oh, we are not totally capable of replicating everything it is to be human, because we don't have that power. I think we'll run into something of a wall there. We'll get really good at copying things, but I think we're going to run into something where we can't Totally put together like consciousness like God can. And because of that, I would then say that, you know, as the church, as the people in the church, like we should have, we should have more and more Christian scientists. Like if you're you know, if you're growing up and you have a love of the sciences and love of mathematics and like go into those fields and you don't need to be afraid of them. You don't need to go in and say, Oh, my faith is going to hold me back in these areas or things like that. I mean, I would, I would say, go be a physicist, be an engineer, be a doctor, be a researcher and a chemist. Like you're going to learn more about how God's word work, how God's world works, um, And like you said, it can be this kind of spur to your faith. And you can go at it with the perspective that I'm studying the creation that God has put before me. And I'm going to use, you know, the faculties he's given me to know these. And you might be the next one that creates something that is, you know, that discovers something that's incredibly important for humans. Because you trust God and you trust that he's made an orderly world and you can observe it. Yeah. learn from it and derive things from it.

Louis 35:46

I love what Alex said about if you're a scientific mind, well, then great. Praise God for that. And if you're a Christian who has a scientific mind, get into the sciences. Go study the world and help the world in whatever ways you possibly can while also pointing people to Christ. I think that's a great thing and I don't believe churches really talk enough about that or we don't really teach it. We almost teach that ministry is really something you do on Sunday or when you go overseas. You can be a scientist but also love Jesus and live missionally through the sciences you're studying. So I love that he brought that up. I think one of the things we have to be cautious of just in the future when it comes to any of this or any scientific advancements we have, and some of it I've already brought up, is if we start to see an issue with there being a moral or ethical dilemma. Maybe there's a certain advancement and it's starting to cross the line or it can maybe even create some dangers. Let me just take nuclear power, for example. There was debates when they were creating nuclear bombs and things like that. Do we do this or do we not do this? I think the church has to step in and try and lead the way on what is the best decision we can make in this, going back to what we talked about last week when it comes to the moral laws of God. We as a church need to help lead the way in discerning that. I think if there becomes a theological issue that we feel like might be in conflict with something or a theory that's going on, I don't really get threatened when, this happens almost every Easter, where you're going to get something on TV, National Geographic, or some magazine's going to come in and say, well, we found this and it disproves Christianity and the resurrection of Jesus. And it's like, oh my goodness, no, it doesn't, right? And so I never get threatened whenever there's some new scientific discovery and then people start making claims that that's going to disprove a Christian. No, I don't. Even if we go back to like, you know, somebody making a claim that the earth is flat. Well, no, it's round. Well, so I don't get worried about that because I know that again, there's going to be another addition in science. There's not another addition to the Bible. And so I'm not worried about the Bible's claims being true. I believe those are true and time will always prove that it is true regardless of the scientific studies. And as we get more advancements, whatever claim is made today, that appears to maybe disprove a theological claim, I'm not worried about it because in time we're going to have another discovery that's going to come back and prove, oh, wait a minute, the theological claim was right that the Bible talked about. We've seen that all throughout history. We have things where it was said, well, that didn't really happen. This is what happened. But then we did another archaeological dig and we're like, oh, wait a minute, we've got to backtrack. The Bible was right on that. So that's where maybe I'll come back to the way we started things off. I think one of the major things that I try to teach people when it comes to this topic is science also requires faith. If you have a theory, then you have faith that that theory might be true. Therefore, you now have to go and do tests based on your faith that that theory is true. If you didn't believe that theory is true, then you're not going to do tests to try and do it. So even science is based on faith, just like Christian beliefs are based on faith. Both require faith. And so, again, this is not, and both have facts. And it goes back to, again, both can be very complementary if they're in sync together. Yeah.

Zack 39:20

And I think in all these things that each week we're going to kind of find this same underlying truth to be there, that it's important for us as Christians to know what we believe and why we believe it, to do our study and research and be educated on things, whether that's scientific, but certainly on our faith. I mean, 1 Peter chapter 3 says, be ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that's in you. And so if we just go through life, In any topic or situation, and we're not confident or learned, educated in what we believe and why, then we're going to be more easily swayed and we're going to be pulled in different directions, whether that's, again, from a scientific place or any other thing that comes up. I think in all these things, it's learning to think and ask the right questions and have conversations about it like we're doing here. And hopefully these conversations that we're having spur other conversations among those of you who are listening and cause you to ask deeper questions. And I think those are always good things. Just like we don't have to be scared of the science or learning, we don't need to be scared of asking questions, which is why as a church we say we want to be a place where people can seek truth. We welcome those questions and we invite people across the spectrum to come and ask those. And that's kind of who we want to be. So we're going to end the conversation there. Next week we're going to pick it up with, as we mentioned, the conversation on artificial intelligence. So be sure and join us for that. If you want to share your thoughts, you can use the send us a text link in the episode description. We'd love to hear from you. For more information about City Awakening Church or to listen to this past week's