Faith and Science:
Perfect Together?
Week One
Greg Cootsona
Bidwell Presbyterian Church
2012
Making Something Out of Nothing
• Genesis 1:31, “God saw
the world he created… it
was very good”
• Nicene Creed: “We
believe in one God, the
Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and
earth, of all that is, seen
and unseen…”
• Big Bang: Universe’s first
moment (t=0)
Promise and Problem of an
“Awareness of Divinity”
• John Calvin (1559
Institutes): “There is
within the human mind,
and indeed by natural
instinct, an awareness
of divinity”
• Cognitive Science of
Religion—our brains
lead us to believe in
Creator God
Berkeley Nobel Laureate
Charles Townes (Go Bears!)
• “For successful science
of the type we know, we
must have faith that the
universe is governed by
reliable laws and,
further, that these laws
can be discovered by
human inquiry”
• Copernicus and Galileo:
not about inherent
conflict between
science and religion
Ian Barbour’s Four Ways
• Conflict: attack one other
as enemy
• Independence: separate
ways of understanding
• Dialogue: polite
discussion of insights
• Integration: real give-andtake where
transformation takes
place
Attacks by Scientists
on Christian Faith
• Richard Dawkins asserts
that God can be disproved:
“Yes, God is improbable.
Therefore atheism is
correct, and belief in God is
a delusion”
Stephen Jay Gould on Independence
• NOMA: Non-Overlapping
Magisteria
• “Science and religion
do not glower at each
other...[but] interdigitate
in patterns of complex
fingering, and at every
fractal scale of selfsimilarity”
Albert Einstein on Integration
“Science without
religion is lame;
religion without
science is blind”
Francis Collins on Integration
“I find that studying
the natural world is
an opportunity to
observe the majesty,
the elegance, the
intricacy of God's
creation”
Paul John Paul II on Integration
“Science can purify
religion from error and
superstition; religion can
purify science from
idolatry and false
absolutes. Each can
draw the other into a
wider world, a world in
which both can flourish”
John Calvin on Integration
“If we regard the Spirit
of God as the sole
fountain of truth, we
shall neither reject the
truth itself, nor despise it
wherever it shall appear,
unless we wish to
dishonor the Spirit of
God”
A Fifth Way?
Finding Meaning
• Nobel Laurete physicist, Stephen Weinberg, “the more
universe seems comprehensible, the more it also
seems pointless”
• Atheist Richard Dawkins: “blind, pitiless indifference”
• Augustine: “Lord, You have created for yourself, and
our hearts are restless until they rest in you”
• Calvin on faith: “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s
benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the
freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our
minds and sealed in our hearts through the Holy Spirit”
(Institutes 3.2.7)
Faith and Science:
Perfect Together?
Week Two
Greg Cootsona
Bidwell Presbyterian Church
2012
The Christian’s Call to Science
• Psalm 19: “The heavens
are telling the glory of
God”
• Jonathan Edwards:
“alone in the mountains,
or some solitary
wilderness, far from all
mankind, sweetly
conversing with Christ,
and wrapped and
swallowed up in God”
Science and the Doctrine of Creation
• A good, rational
(understandable) God
makes a cosmos (not a
chaos)
• Copernicus: “The
universe has been
wrought for us by a
supremely good and
orderly Creator”
Image is Everything
• Goodness of humankind
created in God’s image
– Genesis 1:26: “Let us create
adam in our image”
– Four relationships: With
God, one another, the
earth, ourselves
• John Polkinghorne on 20th c.
physics: “Reality is relational”
• Intricacy of the human body
seen through medical science:
“fearfully and wonderfully
made” (Ps 139: 14)
Image is Everything
• Relating creation to
evolutionary theory
– Divine image part of
God’s ongoing
creation
• The surprise of the
Anthropic Principle
• Love: created for
community, created
to care for the earth
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Everything’s Not Right With the World
•
•
The Reality and Nature of Evil
– Abuse of freedom
– Gen 2:16-17, “You may eat
from any tree… except the
tree of knowledge of good
and evil”
Evolution and the Fall
– Historical or typological
Adam?
– Adam used as generic
“human being” (Gen 1:26;
4:25) and as specific man
(2:7-8, 15-16; 3:8-9)
– Key: Jesus Christ as Savior
Everything’s Not Right With the World
• Genetic Determinism:
“The genes made me
do It”?
– Francis Crick’s
“Astonishing
Hypothesis”
• Stephen Pinker: no
“immaterial soul”
• We confess that body
and soul are one
Faith and Science:
Perfect Together?
Week Three
Greg Cootsona
Bidwell Presbyterian Church
WOW 2012
Everything’s Not Right With the World
• Persistence of care: The
Doctrine of Providence
– Providence: preservation,
cooperation, government
– Often antithetical to
scientific worldview
– Dual causation: God as first
cause, nature/us as true
secondary causes (Ps 19)
– Therefore God works
through what may be
random processes
Jesus Christ in an Age of Science
• Council of Chalcedon
(451): Jesus, fully
divine and fully human
– John 1:1-14
• CSR and Christ
• Complementarity:
wave/particle duality in
quantum physics
– Note on “evolutionary”
Christology
God’s Not Finished with Us Yet:
New Creation (or Eschatology)
• Jesus’s Resurrection
– Resurrection of body
– Science and
embodied life
• Apocalypse Soon?
– The Science of the
End: Freeze or Fry
• New creation out of
old, not ex nihilo
Those “Last Things” (Eschatology):
The Importance of Hope
• Dawkins, “The universe
that we observe has
precisely the properties
we should expect if there
is, at bottom, no design,
no purpose, no evil and
no good, nothing but
blind, pitiless
indifference”
• Or, John Donne’s “Death
Be Not Proud”
The Final Word on Hope
Revelation 7: 15-17
”For
this reason they are before
the throne of God, and worship
him day and night within his
temple, and the one who is seated
on the throne will shelter them.
They will hunger no more, and
thirst no more; the sun will not
strike them, nor any scorching
heat; for the Lamb at the center of
the throne will be their shepherd,
and he will guide them to springs
of the water of life, and God will
wipe away every tear from their
eyes.”