Let me pray.
We thank you, Lord Jesus, for being able to gather around your word.
And we pray it helped me as I speak it tonight that you would speak to us by your spirit
and grow us in Christ to your glory.
And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Now I got to choose a hobby horse tonight.
And so I've gone back away to something that I have preached before.
And for a time, read quite a bit about this, although not as much recently.
But in the 1990s, or before the mid-1990s, when you start talking about science and religion,
it was either like you're a creationist or you're a Darwinian evolutionist,
and there was no ground in between.
And both camps pushed one another into different corners.
And a man came along called P.E. Johnson, who was a professor of law in the United States,
and he broke new ground.
Because what he did, he looked at evolutionary arguments and the arguments of evolutionary scientists.
And rather than think science, he thought law and the nature of arguments
and the way arguments are won and lost.
And he's also a very gracious man.
I think he's still alive, but a very gracious man.
And so he would work with people who believed and thought things that were very, very different from himself.
And rather than being in a combative way with them,
he'd come alongside them, go away on weekends, talk to them,
submit what he was thinking to them to test against their thinking.
And I think relationally, probably modelled something for us that we could all learn from
in terms of how we engage people when we disagree with one another.
And rather than try to prove God, he came from a different point of view
and worked in a way to show the deficiencies of the arguments for Darwinian evolution.
So some stuff that we get in university and school is just taught as a given
and maybe not reflected on in the way that it should be reflected on
and subjected to us thinking about it in ways that would be good for us to think about it.
So often if you said you're a Christian, you just get put in a basket case
rather than listened to and debated properly.
So the whole notion of intelligent design is the idea that maybe the earth is designed
without actually having to...
So working in a secular field, you can bat for the idea that the earth is designed
without having to necessarily prove what sort of a person or an entity or a creator or a God
brought it into being.
You could discuss that part of it without pushing further.
And I think it was a really clever thing to do.
It was done with a great deal of grace and it's been run on with a lot since then
and sometimes with grace and sometimes with a total lack of grace
which hasn't helped the cause at all.
Pastors and preachers like me encounter all sorts of people in ministry
and very early in my time of ministry I was doing marriage preparation
with one of my relatives, my cousin who was a great friend but also she was my cousin
and she was a teacher and she was marrying a guy who...
and he's married still to a guy with a PhD in geology
and now a professor in geology at a major Australian university.
And he said as we did the marriage preparation, he's not a Christian
but he said he respected me as a Christian
and I said and I respect your knowledge of geology.
And guess where the discussion went to?
It got into a discussion about creation and evolution
and how the world was formed
and for my friend, naturalistic evolution was an absolute given.
Of course that's how the world was formed and how we've come about.
He was a Darwinian evolution man, he still is through and through.
He said that he believed in God
but it wasn't all that clear where God fitted into his belief system.
It was a little bit like, oh well maybe God kicked the world into being
and then stepped away and allowed it to follow its evolutionary course.
Now when my friend talked geology and the details of his science,
guess what happened to me?
I floundered.
Couldn't compete with him.
I could not presume to speak with him on his level or with his expertise.
And it was like being an absolute minnow at the foot of a giant.
And I threw a few ideas forward and he mashed me.
And if he was sitting here tonight and I did it again, he'd mash me again.
And so I said things like, I just tried things out like,
well what about the huge fossil fuel deposits in the world?
All the oil and the gas and the coal that we're now burning to our peril
and creating climate change from.
Weren't all those things once living creatures and organisms, massive forests destroyed by some sort of cataclysmic event in our past?
Where did they come from?
Could they be the result of a worldwide flood?
What about the missing links in the fossil record?
What about the Cambrian explosion where the geological record shows that all of life arose in a relatively short geological time frame?
How does that sit with the long time frames that Darwinian evolution needed to occur?
So I could ask some questions, but I couldn't compete with his knowledge and his understanding of geology.
There was no way that I was going anywhere in a creation-evolution discussion with him.
I was the preacher that he was having on toast.
That is until our discussion turned to Christ.
And I'll talk about that a little bit more as we get towards the end.
So I called this talk, it's just a talk, and I called it Science and Religion, Mortal Enemies or Helpful Friends.
Science and Religion, Mortal Enemies or Helpful Friends.
I heard a talk a while back on science and Christianity.
The speaker was Christian, he saw no conflict between the two.
Heard some great stuff last year, or the year before, from John Lennox when he was in Sydney.
He's worth listening to and reading.
But God is creator, and the discipline of science is merely a process of discovering the wonder of a creation
that God designed and brought into being in the first place.
So for him, science describes and explains what God thought up and brought into being.
And in this system of thought, whatever science discovers is no threat to God,
because we're just discovering things that are part of the magnificence of his creation.
Francis Bacon discovered the scientific method over 400 years ago.
You've probably been taught it if you've done science at school.
And Bacon had a two-books understanding of the world.
He said,
And he encouraged us to learn, he encouraged people back then,
to learn as much as they could from the Bible,
but also to be learning as much as they can from creation or nature.
Michael Faraday lived in the 19th century,
and he's regarded as the greatest experimental scientist of all time.
He discovered benzene. Is that petrol?
Close.
And electromagnetic induction.
So he was the guy that invented electric generators and motors.
And as he lay on his deathbed,
a friend asked him,
What speculations do you have now?
And he replied,
Speculations? Man, I have none.
I have certainties.
I thank God that I don't rest my dying head upon speculations,
for I know whom I have believed,
and am persuaded that he is able to keep
that which I have committed to him against that day.
And so there is no shortage of scientists over time
who have had a clear faith in a creator God.
Science and religion?
Mortal enemies?
Friends?
Or helpful friends?
The easy answer is that they're very helpful friends.
Many significant scientific and brilliant medical discoveries have been made
as people have sought to use their inbuilt creativity
to search out and understand this universe that we live in.
If the creator God is true,
then seeking to understand this wonderful world that he has made
should be no threat to any of us.
In fact, it is something that we should pursue with energy and with vigour.
Do science at university and at school.
None of my life.
Have my last three kids done any of it?
No.
Certainly not following the footsteps of an engineering father.
But the harder answer may be determined by your own prejudices.
Because matters other than science might prejudice your view about these things.
And I think some of our troubles begin when we move away from describing how the world is
to saying why the world is the way it is.
One of the world's leading evolutionary biologists has written,
if Darwinism is true, there are five inescapable conclusions.
There is no evidence for God.
There is no life after death.
There is absolutely no foundation for ethics.
There is no basis for right and wrong.
There is no ultimate meaning for life.
And people really do not have a free will.
The respected ABC science commentator, the late Robin Williams,
wrote a little book which was very popular for a while
and probably still on the shelves of ABC shops.
And it was called Unintelligent Design.
And it was subtitled, Why God Isn't As Smart As She Thinks She Is.
And so he was refuting this growing interest in the intelligent design movement
and he was tenaciously defending his views on science.
And he said things in it.
He said, I find it gobsmackingly outrageous that intelligent design can be allowed to pretend
that our state of knowledge is inadequate.
It's incomplete, certainly, but expanding at a ferocious rate.
And he also said, the science, the Darwinian naturalism, it's endlessly fascinating.
It's also rigorously tested.
Why buy a vehicle from dodgy brothers when there is one tested and retested by the best firm in the business,
which is Darwinian evolution.
And so what he does, he takes this high moral ground and he effectively slanders intelligent design
as dodgy without interacting with the issues.
Play the man rather than the ball.
On the other hand, this is one for Adam after the surface.
Edwin Erwin Schrodinger.
I'm just reading a quote from a book at this point.
Was perhaps the most important founder of wave mechanics
and the originator of the most important equation in science.
Schrodinger's equation.
Who knows what it is?
Do you know?
Yeah, he does know.
Ask him later.
I've never heard of him.
I did physics at uni and I've never heard of him before.
Quantum physics.
I probably switched off at that particular moment.
But more than 60 years ago, he wrote,
I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world
is very deficient.
It gives a lot of factual information,
puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order,
but it's ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart.
And that really matters to us.
It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight.
It knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, God and eternity.
Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains.
But the answers are very often so silly that we're not inclined to take them seriously.
For more than 3,000 years, 2,000 years,
the Bible has said that there is a contest in the world over truth.
We've been there the last few weeks with Romans.
Romans 1, the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven
against all the godlessness and wickedness of people
who suppress the truth by their wickedness.
Since what may be known about God is plain to them
because God has made it plain to them.
For since the creation of the world,
God's invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature
have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made
so that people are without excuse.
For although they knew God,
they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.
But their thinking became futile
and their foolish hearts were darkened.
And although they claimed to be wise,
they became fools.
And they exchanged the glory of their mortal God
for images made to look like mortal men
and birds and animals and reptiles.
So the Bible is asserting that the imprint of our Creator
is there to be seen in his creation.
I'm going to say more about that in a moment.
But the passage also asserts
that we are culpable in rejecting the truth.
We put our fingers in our ears
and we close our eyes
because we do not want to know about it.
You see the words,
we suppress the truth by our wickedness.
The creation clearly bears the markings of its creator
and we have chosen neither
to glorify him as God
or to give thanks to him.
So we break the second of the Ten Commandments all the time.
We live in a material world
and are so obsessed with what has been made
or what God has made
that we have turned away from him
and we have turned to these things
that he has made or that we have made.
And the Bible passage says
that that makes us culpable.
We are as guilty as sin.
Who are we to sit in judgment on God?
The physicist Max Planck,
who I don't think was a believer,
at least had a humility
as he went about his science.
He said that science cannot solve the mystery of nature
and that is in part because in the last analysis
we are part of the mystery
that we are trying to solve.
You almost need a bigger look from outside
to see what's going on.
And I think I want to say to all of us
that we need a return to humility.
We need to be able to gasp
at the wonder of the world in which we live.
There's a wonderful little...
Not an easy book,
not too hard a book,
but it's a great book,
Case for a Creator,
written by Lee Strobel.
You'll find that at Coorong.
But he summarises the thinking
of many recent scientists
in terms of some of the things
that we're talking about tonight.
But he's got some great information in here as well.
He said things like,
do you know that if the surface of the earth
was flat,
so if you brought all the mountains down
and all the valleys are,
the entire world would be covered with water
to a depth of two kilometres?
Do you know that the earth exists
in a place in the Milky Way galaxy
that protects it from huge amounts of radiation
from gamma bursts
that come from exploding stars?
Do you know that Jupiter's circular orbit,
which is the largest planet in the solar system,
helps the earth maintain a circular orbit
that gives us steady temperature
and predictable climate?
That Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus
have tremendous gravitational pull
that draws in comets and asteroids
and helps minimise the number
that strike the earth?
That if the earth's distance from the sun
moved 5% either way,
we would die.
Oceans would boil off
or they would permanently freeze.
The sun is just the right mass
and emits just the right amount
of red and blue light
to sustain our atmosphere.
The moon stabilises the earth's tilt
at 23.5 degrees
and this is what gives us
very mild seasons.
And I read tonight
that liquid iron surrounds the earth's core,
molten iron surrounds the earth's core
and its heat is driven
by radioactive isotopes
going on inside the centre
of the earth all the time.
And they create this sort of a dynamo
that generates the earth's magnetic field.
It's a huge machine.
And the magnetic field of the earth
protects us from dangerous radiation
coming from outer space.
And it stops the solar winds
from the sun
stripping away our atmosphere.
If the solar winds from the sun
could touch the earth's atmosphere,
the water vapour would just disappear.
We'd be gone.
And he's got this wonderful quote.
He says,
We are, by astronomical standards,
a pampered,
cosseted,
cherished group of creatures.
Our Darwinian claim
to have done it all by ourselves
is as ridiculous
and as charming
as a baby's brave efforts
to stand on its own feet
and refuse its mother's hand.
If the universe had not been made
with the most exacting precision,
we could never have come into existence.
It is my view
that these circumstances
indicate that the universe
was created for people to live in.
Or we turn inward.
That's the macro picture.
That's outward.
The enormity of the universe
and our place in it.
If you turn inward
and you go,
you look at the complexity of life,
the molecular biologists
who are looking further and further
into our cells
and they're dazzled
by what they see.
They're finding machines
in our cells.
See, you know,
Darwinian evolution,
everything builds a little bit
on everything else
and they're looking
into our cells
and the tiny detail
of our cells
and how our molecules look
and they see
organisation there
which needed to be complete
for it to work
in the first place.
It couldn't have just happened
bit by bit.
They're blown away by it.
It's called irreducible complexity.
We are so complex
that it couldn't have been like that.
That it couldn't have just evolved.
They said that,
did you know
that every cell
in the human body
contains more information
than 30 volumes
of Encyclopedia Britannica?
I think in today's terms
that's like a gigabyte
of information
in every cell.
The late astronomer
Fred Hoyle,
guess what his theory was?
He coined the phrase
Big Bang.
Big Bang Theory.
And he wrote
that it is as likely
that life began
from random mutations
as it is that a tornado
blowing through a junkyard
could assemble
a 747 jumbo jet.
The psalmist
looks at creation
and he is blown away.
The heavens
declare the glory
of God.
The skies proclaim
the work
of his hands.
Day after day
they pour forth
speech
and night after night
they display knowledge.
And there is no speech
or language
where their voice
is not heard.
Their voice
goes out
into all the world.
In the heavens
he's pitched a tent
for the sun
which is like a bridegroom
coming forth
from his pavilion
like a champion
rejoicing
to run his course.
It rises
at one end
of the heavens
and it makes
its circuit
to the other
and nothing
is hidden
from its heat.
So he looks
at creation
as we can look
at creation
tonight
and see it
as reflecting
the work
and the glory
of its creator.
Some
I shouldn't say
scientists
but some philosophers
look at a Bible
reading like this
and go
oh how simplistic.
Haven't we come
to understand
how foolish
this is.
The sun
going around
the earth
we all know
that the earth
goes around
the sun.
And so
you ridicule
the scriptures
in a way
but you've got
into taking
into account
that the Bible
writer is like
a scientist.
Three thousand
years ago
he's observing
the world
and he's using
the tools
which are available
to him.
He didn't have
satellites
he couldn't
go away
from the earth's
surface
and observe
things from afar.
He described
what he saw
and it was awesome.
and so
that the
regular
daily
march
of a
blazing
sun
rising
across
the
heaven
giving light
giving heat
to all
and going
down at
the end
and he
gives glory
to our
maker.
Sure his
science back
there had to be
modified along
the way
but he gave
a true
description
of what he
saw at the
time.
But he
goes further
because he
drew attention
to the fact
that the
creator
does not
just reveal
himself
by what he
does.
He speaks
words and
for those
with ears
to hear
he has
very specific
things to
say.
It's the
second half
of this
psalm.
He changes
from talking
about creation
to talking
about the
word of
God.
The law
of the
Lord is
perfect
reviving
the soul.
The
statutes
of the
Lord are
trustworthy
making
wise
the
simple.
The
precepts
of the
Lord are
right.
They give
joy to
the heart.
The
commands
of the
Lord are
radiant.
They give
light to
the eyes.
The fear
of the
Lord is
pure
enduring
forever.
The
ordinances
of the
Lord are
sure and
altogether
righteous.
They are
more precious
than gold
than much
pure gold.
They are
sweeter than
honey than
honey from
a cone.
And so
God is a
God who
speaks and
he speaks
through his
word the
Bible.
Francis
Bracken's
two books
he speaks
a specific
word through
the Bible
and a more
general word
through creation.
If you
haven't read
the Bible
you can see
something of
what God
is like by
the creation
that he's
put us in
and who we
are and
how we're
made.
But we
need to
come to
the
scriptures to
find out
what God
is really
like.
Now I've
spoken in a
really
generalised way
tonight and
some of you
may have
very detailed
learning about
some of the
things that I
know very
little about.
I'm sure some
of you guys
and girls have
done much
better at
science than
I did at
science at
school.
You asked
me a few
questions and
you soon find
them out of
my debts.
That's why if
you ask me
about Schrodinger's
equation, I'm
doing that.
And I said
at the
beginning that
I was unable
to talk on a
level playing
field with my
PhD in geology
relative who is
deeply committed
to Darwinian
naturalism.
but I was
back in the
fray when I
was able to
turn the
conversation to
Jesus Christ.
See most
people will say
that Jesus was
a good bloke
and my friend
did but he
was quickly out
of his depth
when I asked
him to grapple
with who Jesus
is.
So the
Bible makes
huge claims
about Christ
and they are
closely linked
to what I've
been talking
about tonight.
Christians,
we have all
sorts of
debates and
arguments about
how the
creator created
it.
But when
he comes to
Christ,
when it
comes to
Christ,
who he
is,
is not
negotiable.
John
chapter 1
verse 10
says,
Jesus was
in the
world and
though the
world was
made through
him,
the world
did not
recognise him.
Huge claim.
The
creator God
stepped into
the world
and we
did not
recognise him.
It's not
the only place
in the New
Testament that
says such a
thing.
Colossians
chapter 1
verse 15
16.
Jesus is
the image
of the
invisible God.
the first
born over
all creation.
For by
him all
things were
created in
things in
heaven and
things on
earth,
visible and
invisible,
whether
thrones or
powers or
rulers or
authorities,
all things
were created
by him
and for
him.
Very
bold claim
that Christ
is number
one in
the
universe,
the creator
of everything
and everything
wonderfully made
for his
pleasure.
It's a far
bigger claim
than Jesus
is my mate
and just a
good bloke.
world.
And so the
Bible over
and over
affirms an
intelligent and
awesome creator
who has shown
his face in
the person of
Jesus Christ.
And you
cannot hold to
the majesty of
Christ and
believe in a
world that
happened by
accident.
The ideas
are completely
incompatible.
The Bible
makes a huge
claim about
Jesus Christ.
He was in
the world and
though the
world was
made through
him, the
world did
not recognise
him.
And that's
either true
or it's
not.
And if it's
not, you
can sleep
soundly tonight
in the
knowledge that
at the end
of your
days your
molecules will
be dust in
the ground
with no
further
existence.
But if it
is true, you
need to know
what follows.
He came to
that which was
his own, but
his own did
not receive
him.
Yet to
all who
received him,
to those who
believed in
his name, he
gave the
right to
become children
of God, to
come into
his family.
And it is
through believing
in the Lord
Jesus Christ that
we come into
his family and
we can be
called his
children.
Not everybody
is a child of
God.
Those who have
believed in
God's Son, the
Lord Jesus Christ,
are invited into
the family and
called his
children.
And we
inherit all the
safety and
security that
goes with it.
We are
invited to be
much more than
creatures of
the Creator.
We are
invited to
become his
children.
So science and
religion, mortal
enemies or
helpful friends?
From a
Bible point of
view, in the
end it depends
on where you
stand in terms of
relationship with
Christ.
If you are in
the family,
science gives
us deep
appreciation for
the work of
the Creator.
And if you
want to stand
apart from
Christ, we
leave ourselves
in a position
where the
Creator holds
us culpable
for ignoring
what is plainly
true about
him.
Friend or
enemy of the
Creator comes
down to where
you stand with
Christ.
And you do
not need to be
a clever
scientist to
understand that.
Amen.