Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris asserted in various best-selling books that science in general (evolutionary science in particular) has disproven a belief in God. Dawkins famously asserted that “although atheism might be logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker – WW Norton, 1986, page 6). Pointing to a 1998 survey of National Academy of Sciences members he noted that only 7 percent of American scientists believe in a personal God. From Dawkins’ point of view, this proves that science has essentially disproven Christian beliefs and that the more intelligent, rational and scientifically minded you are, the less you are able to believe in God.

Scratch the surface of most modern thinkers today and you will find a rejection of miracles. Miracles are an important part of Christian belief. Christians annually celebrate the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament is filled with accounts of miracles performed by Jesus and the disciples. Scientific mistrust of the Bible began with the Enlightenment belief that miracles cannot be reconciled to a modern, rational view of the world. Armed with this presupposition, scientists turned to the Bible and said “These accounts cannot be reliable because they contain descriptions of miracles and science cannot quantify miracles, therefore these accounts cannot be reliable.”

Of course, this is a leap of faith. Science is only equipped to test for natural causes; it cannot speak for supernatural events. Science proceeds on the assumption that whatever happens has a natural cause; it can be accounted for by other events. Miracles are outside the scope of science. While science cannot explain miracles, it cannot claim they don’t exist. Just because my blind friend cannot see the color green does not mean that the color green does not exist. It simply means that my friend is unable to perceive the color.  The existence of God cannot be demonstrably proven or disproven by science, because science, by design, cannot quantify the supernatural.

The media often reports news events concerning controversy between secular and religious people over the teaching of – for example, evolution (this is by no means the only controversial subject, it just gets the most press) – as a war between science and religion. This treatment lends to the picture that you are either scientific and rational or religious and therefore, irrational.

Evolutionary science assumes that more complex life-forms evolved from less complex life-forms through a process of natural selection.  It surprises many to hear that many Christians believe that God brought about life in this way. We do not reject evolution per se, but we do not embrace philosophical naturalism, which is a view that everything has a natural cause and that organic life is solely the product of random forces guided by no one and nothing. When evolution is presented as an all-encompassing theory of everything we believe, feel and do, we are no longer in the arena of science, but of philosophy. Evolution as an all-encompassing theory of existence has insurmountable difficulties as a worldview.

Dawkins insists that if you believe in evolution as a biological mechanism you must believe in philosophical naturalism. Why? I read Dawkins The God Delusion just weeks after I read Francis Collins The Language of God. Collins is the Head of the Humane Genome Project. He believes in evolutionary science. However, Collins believes that the fine-tuning, beauty and order of nature points to a divine Creator. Dawkins would claim that Collins cannot exist, for it is impossible to hold a firm belief in evolutionary biology, but reject philosophical naturalism. Obviously, since Collins does exist and has written a book explaining his view, Dawkins is wrong about the incompatibility of belief in evolutionary biology and Christianity.

Dawkins is a brilliant evolutionary scientist, but he steps out of his realm of expertise when he starts making philosophical claims. His scheme is simplistic. There are many different models proposed about how God relates to the development of the life-forms we see today. Not all Biblical Christians are hostile to evolutionary science in its entirety. The conflict model of the relationship between religion and science was a deliberate exaggeration used by scientists and educational leaders at the end of the 19^th century to undermine the church’s control of their institutions and increase their own cultural power. It was a product not so much of intellectual necessity but of cultural strategy. Many scientists see no incompatibility between faith in God and their work. Studies in 1916 and 1997 showed this. In 1916, 40 percent of scientists said they believed in a God Who actively communicates with humanity through prayer. In 1997, those numbers had not significantly changed. Dawkins cited a much narrower study of National Academy of Science members which was designed to screen out all scientists who do not ascribe to conservative traditional beliefs. Those with a more general belief in God were screened out.  Dawkins also gives readers the impression that all atheistic scientists would agree with him that no rational, scientific mind could believe in God. Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard scientist and evolutionist, was an atheist who wrote “Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwin is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs – and equally compatible with atheism” (Stephen Jay Gould, “Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge”, Scientific American 267, no 1, 1992. quoted in Alister McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion? Intervarsity Press, 2007, p. 34.) In other words, Gould was unwilling to assume stupidity on the part of his colleagues just because they did not agree with him religiously. He was willing to admit they might see evidence that he was not seeing.

While Dawkins might be perfectly content to believe that physical science can explain the whole of human reality, there are other atheists, often scientists themselves, who disagree, or at least doubt, his premise. Science cannot explain everything. Despite popular appeal, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that we must choose between science and faith. A majority of scientists admit some degree of religious belief of their own and survey evidence shows that number statistically increasing in recent decades. There is no necessary disjunction between science and devout faith.

Doesn’t evolutionary science disprove Genesis 1 and therefore call all of Christianity into question? Not necessarily. The relationship of science to the Bible hinges not just on how we interpret scientific data, but also on how we interpret key Biblical passages. Christianity does not rise or fall upon Genesis 1. The skeptic should consider the central claims of Christianity, revolving around the person of Christ, the resurrection and the central tenets of the Christian message rather than the side issues of creation and evolution. It is my experience that once you have the guidance of the Holy Spirit, some forms of evidence that previously seemed suspect become less so, up to and including full acceptance of them.

Yes, Christians disagree on the concept of God’s intervention in the natural order. Miracles are sometimes hard to believe. The apostles didn’t necessarily believe in Jesus’ resurrection the moment they heard of it. Thomas had to see Jesus for himself in order to believe. Miracles were never given to prove belief, but to stimulate worship. We think of miracles as suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be restoration of the natural order. He healed the blind and the lame, after all, which are disruptions of the natural order. God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem and repair what is wrong and broken in the world. His miracles are not just proof that He has power, but wonderful foretastes of what He will one day do with that power. Jesus’ miracles don’t just challenge our minds. They promise our hearts that the world we all want will one day be proven reality.

To many in American culture, divine judgment is the most offensive of Christianity’s doctrines. People object to hell and judgment for a variety of reasons. Many believe that a judgmental God simply could not exist or could not be called “loving” or would simply not allow Hell.

Note that Muslims are deeply offended by the idea of a forgiving God. Such a God could not, in their opinion, uphold righteousness because He would allow sinners to “skate” for their misdeeds. In a truly post-modern discussion, Western ideals are not the final court from which to judge whether Christianity is valid. If truth is relative then one does not have a frame of reference to deem God judgmental or His judgment wrong.

If Christianity truly is transcendent, a product of the divine rather than an outgrowth of any particular culture, then it would be reasonable to expect that at some point it would clash with every culture on the planet. After all, cultures are humanly built. Christianity claims to be God-given. Right is right because God says this is right and that is wrong. No human culture will ever completely line up with God because the Bible teaches us that human beings are never completely capable of following God. We’re always going to, somewhere, be out of alignment with God.

Many people struggle with the idea of the Christian God Who wields both love and justice. How can a loving God be a judging God? A God of love would never get angry!

Really?

I know quite a few truly loving people who at times are filled with wrath because they love. Haven’t we all had the experience of seeing someone we loved hurt by a relationship? Do we respond with benign tolerance or are we angry on their behalf? I submit most of us become angry. There is a difference, however, between our anger and God’s.  God’s wrath is not a temper tantrum, but His settled opposition to the cancer of sin that is eating the inner soul of the human race. The Bible teaches that God’s anger flows from His love for His creation. He is angry at evil and injustice because it is destroying the peace and integrity of His creation.

Yet, there are those who will insist that those who believe in a God of judgment will not approach enemies with a desire to reconcile with them. If God smites evildoers, then it would seem perfectly justified to do some of the smiting yourself. While this has sometime been true of Christians, I think we should look at the Amish of Nickel Mines, PA, who had the peace of their community shattered by a madman, yet turned in love toward his wife and embraced her and saw to it that she and her children would be cared for in the aftermath of her husband’s violence. The Amish believe that God is a God of judgment, Who will punish wrong-doers, but their belief has not led to a more brutal society; rather, it has created a more loving community. In interviews, the Amish have said that, left to their own human hearts, they might still be angry, but God does not allow them to hold onto rage that is His to wield. They are expected to let it go and let Him deal with it. This frees them to forgive those who have hurt them.

Fighting evil and injustice in the world is one thing, but the Bible teaches that God sends people to Hell, a place of eternal punishment, where even if you are sorry for your sins, you can’t get out.  First, I would submit that this is a caricature of Hell. The Bible teaches that human beings were made to thrive in the presence of God, but that sin has separated us from that presence. That was not God’s doing, but ours. To be outside of the presence of God is to dwell in Hell. Thus, truth be told, all human beings are in Hell already because “all have sinned.” Because of God’s mercy, He still interacts with human beings, so that this world is not truly Hell, but it is not really what it should be and our contact with God is at best limited. For some, it is virtually nonexistent, so they are, in essence, already dwelling in a Hell of their own making.

In The Great Divorce CS Lewis described a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. They are there urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell, but they refuse. Grumbling and complaining, blaming others, they cling to their pride, paranoia, self-pity and own sense of intelligence. They literally lock themselves in a prison of their own making. They chose Hell because they reject Heaven.

It is a travesty to picture God “sending” people to Hell who are sorry to be sent. The people on Lewis’ bus preferred their “freedom” to salvation. They insisted that if they glorified God, they would somehow lose power and freedom. Ironically, their insistence upon self-promotion ruined their potential for true greatness. Lewis explained that hell is “the greatest monument to human freedom”. Romans 1:24 said God “gave them up to … their desires.” God simply gives people what they most want, including freedom from Himself. What could possibly be unfair about giving people the dignity of their own choices?

Both Christians and secularists believe that self-centeredness and cruelty have very harmful consequences. Christians believe souls don’t die, so moral and spiritual errors affect the soul forever. Secular liberals believe that there are terrible moral and spiritual errors like exploitation and oppression, but they don’t believe in an afterlife, so they don’t think the consequences of wrongdoing go into eternity. Are Christians narrower than secularists because they accept a belief in more long-term consequences?  Consider if two people argue over the safety of eating a cookie. The man believes that the cookie is poisoned while the woman believes that it is not. The woman believes that the man’s mistaken belief will keep him from enjoying a nice treat. The man believes that the woman’s mistaken belief will kill her. Is the man more narrow-minded than the woman just because he thinks the consequences of her mistake are direr? I think that would be a hard argument to propose.

During the 1960s, it was an extremely popular belief that God was all-loving and forgiving. Popular culture taught that all religions basically centered on the belief in a loving God. Unfortunately, this was an unfounded belief. No other religious text outside the Bible teaches that God created the world out of love and delight. Most ancient pagan religions believed the world was created through struggles and violent battles between opposing gods or supernatural forces. Buddhism does not believe in a personal God at all; love is an action of a person, not God. Muslims balk at the idea that Christians feel intimacy with God that is almost spousal in nature. They find it incredibly disrespectful when we speak of such intimacy as knowing God personally. What makes us think that God is Love? The Bible tells us that God is love, but it also tells us that God judges and will put all things in the world right in the end. The belief in a God of pure love Who accepts everyone and judges none is a powerful act of faith; there is no evidence for it in the natural order and almost no historical or religious textual support for it outside of Christianity. The closer one looks at history and world religions, the less evidence one finds for it.

The Christian God judges because He loves. The Christian God loves through judgment. As a firm parent provides discipline for his beloved offspring, God provides discipline for His beloved creation. This is what the Bible teaches. We may disagree with it, but in doing so, we must accept that we may be denying reality.