Introduction

• To me• Clarity• Honesty• You are allowed to disagree!!

Three sections

• Philosophical fundamentals• Why I believe science points towards

God• Reconciling God’s Word and God’s

World

Not so simple…

• Most Christians will believe in evolution to some degree or other.

• Religion and science both require reason and faith.

• Theists and atheists in the field of science.

• What separates is their a priori position

Creation vs

Evolution

Sciencevs

ReligionFaith

vs

Reaso

n

World viewSummed up by two a priori positions:

i) Matter and energy is all there is. Process is unplanned and

unguided

ii) There is a creative power that transcends just the physical.

Process is designed and upheld

The computer

Formed by an unplannedunguided process.

Formed by a creative intelligent being

Which would you trust?

Faith

• ‘Belief in some thing for which there is no evidence’

• Fidês

• Blind faith• Evidence based faith

Evidence based faith

• Heb 11v 1 - Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen (KJV)

• John 21 v 24 – This is the disciple who testifies these things and who wrote them down. We know his testimony is true.

• Romans 1 v 20 – 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 men are without excuse.

Evolution

• Evolution is a philosophical necessity for naturalism. Indeed it can be deduced from it without the need for evidence.

Lucretius and Epecurus

• Becomes an a priori position – opposing evidence ignored, conflicting view ridiculed

• “any person who claims not to believe in evolution is ignorant, stupid or insane”

Richard Dawkins• Evolution has become a substitute for God

Evolution

• ‘ evolution is accepted by zoologists not because it is observed to occur or …can be proved by logical coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative ‘special creation’ is clearly ‘incredible’ The sole ground for belief is not empirical but metaphysical’

Professor D M S Watson • Chinese Palaeontologist

Statements:

“I don’t believe anything unless it is provable by science.”

“Only science can lead us to the truth”

Limitations of scienceA kettle is boiling water•Mechanisms Electricity Conduction Convection Change of state

•Who put the kettle on? •Why did they put it on? All are valid reasons for what is seen but science in limited to explaining only one of them

Limitations of science

• Mechanism - • Who did it? (agent) – X• Is it any good? - X

Art

Limitations of science

• Mechanism of action • Agent – x• When and why – x• Is it any good - x

Limitations of science

• Mechanism of action • Morals of use X

Limitations of science

• Mechanism - • Agent? - X• When? - X• Why? - X

Limitations of science

• Mechanism • Agent X

• Both valid explanations

Large Hadron Collider• Looking for sub-atomic particles• Higgs Boson

• Identifying mechanisms not agents!

A Grand Design

• Stephen Hawking’s deduction – that because of M-theory, God does not exist!

• Captain Non-sequitur

…and evolution??

• Evolution by natural selection is a mechanism not an agent. God is an agent. Existence of a mechanism is not in itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed it.

• What ever the answer to evolution you can’t produce atheism from it!!

• Captain Non-sequitur

Candle

• Mechanism • Rate of burn But…• When was it lit?• How long has it been burning?

Age of the Earth

Age of rocks - Uranium lead (4.5 billion years) - Helium in atmosphere (10,000 – 2 million years)Salt in the sea (42 million years)Magnetic strength of poles (10,000 – 10 million years)Diameter of the sun (1 million years to hot for life, 200 million years touching the earth)Cosmic dust (between thousands and billions of years)

World view – How did we get here?

• Multiverse – many (infinite number of parallel universes)

• Chance• Created

Multiverse

“Let us recognise these speculations for what they are. They are not physics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us” John Polkinghorne (eminent quantum theorist) Blind Faith!!

Multiverse

“To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe seams the height of irrationality” Richard Swinburne (philosopher)

“Parallel universes don’t disprove a creator” Christian de Duve

Chance…

…or Fine Tuning!!

Outcomes : 1 2 3 4 5 6

Probability of rolling a six with 1 die

Probability 1 in 6

1-1 1-2 1-3 1-4 1-5 1-6

2-1 2-2 2-3 2-4 2-5 2-6

3-1 3-2 3-3 3-4 3-5 3-6

4-1 4-2 4-3 4-4 4-5 4-6

5-1 5-2 5-3 5-4 5-5 5-6

6-1 6-2 6-3 6-4 6-5 6-6

Probability of rolling 2 sixes with 2 dice

Probability 1 in 36

Fine tuning - Chance

• 15 scientific constants have to be exactly as they are or universe would not exist!

• Nuclear ground state resonance• Force of gravity• Ratio of nuclear strong force to

electromagnetic force• Ratio of electromagnetic force

constant to gravitational force constant

Fine tuning - Chance

• Golf ball• Coin• Statistically impossible• “The odds of the universe existing

from the Big Bang are so astronomical it has serious religious implications” Steven Hawking

• “A good case can be made for a deistic cause for the universe” Richard Dawkins

What do you think when you see a beautiful garden?

Precise fine tuning - Design

• “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it?” Douglas Adams (author)

• How about a… Gardener!!

Scientific Laws

“the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” Einstein

• China – technology• West – scientific discoveries• Newton, Galileo etc had a belief in a law

giving God• Not a ‘God of the Gaps’ but a God of the

whole show• Mathematics

Scientific LawsLaws of thermodynamics define fundamental physical characteristics of the universe•First law of thermodynamics – mass/energy can be converted from one form into another but it cannot be created or destroyed.•Second law of thermodynamics – ‘entropy’, heat/work process from order to disorder. •Implications for ‘Big Bang Model’

Fossils• Sudden appearance – ‘Cambrian

explosion’• Demonstrate evolution:

• Of a horse to… ...another horse

Fossils“the most obvious and gravest objections which can be urged against my theory” Charles Darwin

“I will lay it on the line; there is not one transitional fossil” Colin Patterson (Natural History Museum) curator of Archaeopteryx

Limit of Natural Selection

• “Neo Darwinism is dead” Lynn Margulis (Prof at Harvard and Oxford, holder of the presidential medal for biology)

• “Natural selection does nothing” Will Provine (Evolutionary Biologist)

• Genetic Homeostasis• Experiments – Fruit fly and E. Choli

The Origin of Life?

• Biogenesis – life doesn’t occur from non-life!

• “The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have to been satisfied to get it going”

Sir France Crick• Louis Pasteur

The Origin of Life?

“The simplest bacterium is a veritable microminiaturised factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely unparalleled in the non living world.” Michael Denton (geneticist)

The Origin of Life?

• Odds of producing all proteins for life by chance 1 in 1040000 calculated to be similar probability for a tornado to pass through a scrap yard and create a 747.

• Producing a small chain of amino acids by chance

• Proteins aren’t produced by chance; they require DNA

The Origin of Life?

• “The existing translational machinery is so complex, so universal and so essential it is hard to see how it could have come into existence or how life could have existed without it”

John Maynard Smith Evolutionary

Biologist

• Which leads us to the question…

Which came first?

DNA“the code for life”

DNA is information - like a book

19531953- Watson and Crick- Watson and Crick publish apublish a

double-helix structure double-helix structure for DNAfor DNA

DNADNA is like a is like a double spiral double spiral staircasestaircase Each step represents a base

Each step has an opposite step on the other staircase

A simple bacterium would need 5 million steps

A human - 3 billion steps…

450 million miles high 100,000 years to

climb

A double helixA double helix

Four different bases:Four different bases:

A = AdenineA = Adenine

T = ThymineT = Thymine

G = GuanineG = Guanine

C = CytosineC = Cytosine

Complementary pairingComplementary pairing

AA + + TT GG + + CC

DNA is…DNA is…

A specific sequenceA specific sequence

DNA ‘rungs’

Number of combinations = 1087

Seconds in 4.5 billion years = 1025

A G C C T G A T A C A G C C T G A T A C5' 3'

Sequence strand

T C G G A C T A T G T C G G A C T A T G5'

Complementary strand3'

A code within a code

A G C C T G A T A C A G C C T G A T A C5' 3'

Sequence strand

Ser Leu Ile Glu Pro Asp

A code within a code

A G C C T G A T A C A G C C T G A T A C5' 3'

Sequence strand

Ala End Tyr Ser Leu Ile

A code within a code

A G C C T G A T A C A G C C T G A T A C5' 3'

Sequence strand

Pro Asp Thr Ala End Tyr

A code within a code

DNA

Human genetic similarity:

90% to dogs

88% to horses

75% to nematode worms

60% to fruit fly

53% to Brussels sprout

“Humans and great apes share 96-98% genetic similarity”

Common ancestry or common design

DNA

• ‘A chimp may share 98% DNA similarity with a human but it is not 98% human, it is still a chimp.

• Human genome only 3% of total DNA • Does genetics tell you everything that it is

to be human?• Alternative splicing – 1 gene different

proteins• Error correction – in vivo – 1 in 3 billion - in vitro – 1 in 100

Proteins involved in DNA replication and translation

Proteins

• Coded for by DNA• Complex - 1˚, 2˚, 3˚• Could they be produced by chance?• Haemoglobin – 4 chains of 146 aa• Probability of formation 1 in 10190

• ‘improbable into manageable parts’ Dawkins

• 1000 steps (viable or not viable)• Chance now 1 in 10300

So which came first, DNA or Protein?

• Irreducible symbiosis

DNA

RNA Protein

Special revelation General revelation

We all come to this subject with a theology!

• Folk – ‘this is what my parents believe’• Tabloid – ‘Scientific discoveries have

made belief in God redundant’ Dawkins ‘If you don’t believe in a literal meaning

of Gen 1 then you are responsible for the downfall of Christianity in this world’ Ken Ham

• Academic – requires ‘wrestling’ (with the subject not each other!!)

Even if its “I don’t believe in God”

History

• ‘Old earth creationism due to modern geology’

• Origen and St Augustine• 18th and 19th Century – non-literal

interpretation of Gen 1• 1st half of 20th Century – literal interpretation

of Gen 1 – earth 1000s years old• ‘Steady state’ of universe incorrect – Big

Bang

Big Bang Model

• Start to the universe• First thing is light• ‘humans’ appear approx 10,000 yrs

ago• Correlate with biblical account• Details of what happen in between

are the contention

Biblical Account

• Primary authorial intent – Gen 1 is the most God centred chapter in the bible

• Secondary authorial intent - ????

• Differences in interpretation often based on what type of writing the beginning of Genesis represents:

Historical account Poetic Narrative

Ten Models for reconciling God’s Word and God’s

World“All ten are models which have been

expounded by those who believe in God the creator of everything, the divinity of Jesus, the power of the Spirit, the inerrancy of Scripture (as they understand it), substitutionary atonement, miracles, justification by faith, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and everything in the Nicene Creed. “

Andrew Wilson

Young earth creation view

• Mature Creation View – the earth looks old.

• Flood Geology View – distortion of rocks and fossils due to whole earth flood.

• Contingency of Science View – no satisfactory harmonisation of science and scripture.

Old earth Creation Models

• Day-Age View – ‘day’ represents an age of time.

• Gap Theory – billions of years between Genesis 1v1 and 1v2

• Land of Israel – Genesis 1v2-21 about preparation of the land of Israel

Evolutionary Creationism Model

• Special Creation View – humans are special creations the rest is evolution.

• Neolithic farmers View – two Neolithic farmers granted God’s image; to whom he breathed spiritual life.

• Mixed ancestry view – human ancestry is mixed.

• Accommodation view – Genesis is an accommodation of different ideas about origins.

Key areas of conflict between God’s word and

God’s world1. Was God responsible for creation?2. How old is the earth?3. In what order were things created?4. Was creation perfect before the fall?5. Did animals die before the fall?6. Did humans die before the fall?7. Was Adam descended from pre-human creatures?8. Was Eve descended from pre-human creatures?9. Are all human beings descended from Adam and

Eve?10.Is the fall historical?

Philosophical Fundamentals – Summary

• A priori positions separate us not science• Blind faith vs. evidence based faith• Evolution – an a priori position• Limitations of science: - Belief in many things not provable by

science - Scientific and non-scientific explanations• Applications - Non-sequiturs - Age of the earth• How we got here?

Why I believe science points towards God -

Summary

• Design• Fine tuning• Scientific Laws• Fossil record• Limit of natural selection• Origin of Life

Reconciling God’s word and God’s world – summary

• Wrestling• History• Big Bang Model• Young and Old earth Models• Key areas of conflict