10 Top Christians in Science on Science and Faith

We are here to talk about big questions, maybe the biggest question of all. Does God exist? I won't give you a proof tonight, but I hope I will give you some things to think about. Things that have led me from being an atheist to becoming a believer and a follower of Jesus. Perhaps the most widespread fundamental assumption in the intellectual west today is that there is no reality beyond what natural science discovers, and that there is no authority or good higher than the freedom of the individual. Now both science and individual freedom are good, but followers of Jesus, like me, have a different view. We believe that both the deepest reality and the highest moral meaning or good or authority are to be found in loving relationship. Why is nature regular? Why does it follow regular laws? Why can we understand them? And we're so used to these ideas today that we don't realize that they're weren't actually that obvious to most people through most time. And the reason for that is if you just live in the natural world, it doesn't seem to be always that regular. It seems to be capricious. It changes itself all the time. And so what you can show, I think quite decisively historically, is that these ideas, these metaphysical underpinnings of science, uniformity, regularity, intelligibility, have deep theological roots. The roots go back to a long history of theological reflection on a God who is faithful and sustains the world, therefore, in a regular way. But just simply the idea that the universe could be expanding, not sort of expand into something, but just that the space-time metric changes and that there could be a beginning of time is just incredible. I mean, if you go back to before Einstein's work and you go to Newtonian world, there's basically a coordinate system. There's x, y, and z, and t. And these are just fixed. And things happen in this grid. And you describe physical processes and events by putting them in this grid. And the idea that the universe was changing is just completely ludicrous to many people. And then along comes Einstein. And now we realize that space-time not only can expand and contract, but through the work of Hubble, it actually is. The universe is expanding. Because if you play it back, there was a time when the universe was incredibly small and tiny. That, to me, is just mind-boggling. And it actually adds to, yet again, adds to my sort of confidence that the creation story has some merit. I certainly have colleagues who speak very much the way I used to speak. You know, like, how can you believe in something that you can't prove mathematically or show in this way? And in fact, a friend of mine who's a mathematician used to say that to me. How can you believe in something that you can't prove? I only believe in things I can prove. And then one day, he was reading a history book. And his friend, who happened to be a Christian, said, you know, why are you reading that history book? You can't prove any of that. And he realized there's a lot truth that has happened in the past that we can't prove today like you can a mathematical. And furthermore, of course, all of our science and our math rest upon axioms and things that we take at faith. So people who think that they can't deal with faith are really just deceiving themselves. So what I'm fond of saying, and I'll say it again tonight, is I don't have the faith to be an atheist. To me, the universe does require an explanation. The philosopher's very ancient question of why is there something rather than nothing is still a valid question. And as many people, including physicist Paul Davies, have pointed out, the laws of physics themselves demand an explanation that stands somehow out of science. Whether that is a physical explanation or a spiritual explanation, nature is not self-explanatory. And ultimately, if I had to tell someone why I am a theist, it is because precisely I think that nature, as we see it, requires an explanation. And the more we know of the world from science, the more it begs that explanation. I start by saying there is a God who created the universe, and he's not an impersonal God. He has declared himself as a loving God who seeks a relationship with us and also gives us free will to choose him or not. And our purpose then is found in being in relationship with him. The order and structure of the natural laws, to me, suggests a God who ordained and conceived those laws. The astonishing complexity of living things, to me, suggests an architect who cares about those things. The fact that there is something rather than nothing suggests the existence of a creator of that something. And indeed, one of the joys I have in studying the natural sciences is that I learn a little bit about what God has done. And in the process, I think I come to understand a little bit of what he is like. He is much bigger, much grander, much more awesome, much more majestic than I would have previously imagined. See, science, it provides a set of tools that are useful for investigating phenomena in the natural world, but as powerful as it may be for dissecting planetary motion and battling cancer, it's not really intended for questions like, why did life forms originate in the first place? And we're free to speculate, opine, and have our beliefs, but science is not equipped to answer questions like this. This doesn't itself mean, let me be clear here, that there is an answer somewhere else. It just means that we have to be faithful to what science is and that we can't extend the purview of science beyond what it is capable of addressing. The Lord led me to genetics, and I don't have time to get into that story, but it's a fascinating story, how he led me to genetics. It was not what I had planned to do, but my goodness, I'm so happy I did. I can't imagine myself doing anything else, but I see it all as part of his plan to lead me to that and to help me to see identity in a whole different way. And when I think about my own identity, I think of Christ and how he created us. He created us in his image, so we had identity with him, and then we sinned, and his grace, talk about grace, his grace, through his grace, he wanted to bring us back in relationship with him and to bring us back in identity with him.