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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Christian leaders join Dominic Steele for a deep end conversation about our hearts and different aspects of Christian ministry each Tuesday afternoon.
We share personally, pastorally and professionally about how we can best fulfill Jesus' mission to save the lost and serve the saints.
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The Pastor's Heart with Dominic Steele
Humility and Peace: the relationship between the Bible and science - with Lewis Jones
There are understandings/interpretations of the Bible that conflict with the conclusions of modern, empirical research - where science and the Bible are thought to be giving competing explanations of the same event or concept.
One way of reading the Bible leads to the conclusion that the Earth is 6000 years old while your local science department will tell you it is more like 4.5 billion years old.
Were human beings created in an instant from dust, or over billions of years through a gradual, meandering evolutionary process?
Was there a moment in our historical timeline at the curse of God on the sin of Adam and Eve when the physical nature of our universe changed?
Were there no volcanoes or earthquakes or floods or bushfires before the curse, or has the universe operated on the same physical principles since its creation, as the conclusions of mainstream geology and astronomy suggest?
Dr Lewis Jones is an astrophysicist from North Carolina, who moved to Sydney to do post doctoral research. Lewis is now director of the Simeon Network, the postgraduate and academic arm of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students.
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humility and peace. The relationship between the bible and science. How best might we as pastors understand evangelical faith and its relationship with science? It is the pastor's art, it's dominic steel, and lewis jones is guest. There are understandings and interpretations of the Bible that conflict with the conclusions of modern empirical research, where science and the Bible are thought to be giving competing explanations of the same event or concept. One way of reading the Bible leads to the conclusion that the earth is 6,000 years old, while your local science department will tell you it's more like 4.5 billion years old. Were human beings created in an instant from dust or over billions of years through a gradual, meandering evolutionary process? Was there a moment in our historical timeline at the curse of God on the sin of Adam? Geology and astronomy suggest To help us understand how he thinks through those issues.
Speaker 1:Dr Lewis Jones is with us. Lewis is an astrophysicist from North Carolina. He moved to Sydney to do postdoctoral research. He's now director of the Simeon Network, the postgraduate and academic arm of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He's with us. On the pastor's heart, Lewis, your heart. On religion and science, the Bible and science. You used to say both were good but spoke different languages. But now you say God created us to do science.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. I think, even when I would say that they were speaking different languages, um, I still wasn't averse to the idea of christians being involved in science. I mean, that's kind of what you were in astrophysics that's right kind of the I I I.
Speaker 2:That's been my life for a long time, um, but yeah, I, I think um. One of the things I picked up in my undergraduate years at Erskine College in South Carolina, which was a Christian college taught by Christian physics professors, was the idea that Christians are actually made to do science. So Genesis 1, the very first chapter of the Bible, in that description of the creation of the world that God gives us there, says that human beings were made to rule over the earth.
Speaker 1:And you're saying, ruling the earth involves understanding the earth.
Speaker 2:That's right. If we're going to fulfill the role for which we were created, we're going to need to know how things work, and so I take it that that means science is one of the tools in the toolkit to do that job and to fulfill the purpose for which God made it. So I think we should be right in there with science, new discoveries.
Speaker 1:So go into science, go study science, you say to the young Christian.
Speaker 2:It's not ruled out, but that way, and I think it should be encouraged.
Speaker 1:So what should the Christian attitude be? Or what is your attitude to new scientific discoveries?
Speaker 2:Yeah, new scientific discoveries are often mediated to us through the media to us through the media, and the discovery is often couched in terms that gets a good headline and helps with advertising, and so they're usually sensationalized. And so I think there's two sides of that. One is take a deep breath when you read a headline because you don't really know what's going on behind the scenes. But as a general rule, the fact is I just think it's exciting. Every time I love getting to the science section of the news feed and seeing what people are discovering, because the more we know, the better we can, the better we're in touch with what God has done in the world, the better we're in touch with our ability to sort of harness the forces of the universe for the good of humanity.
Speaker 1:Okay, I want to push in to and I'm going to come to some specific questions in a moment, but first I actually want to kind of push into your brain and how you reconcile these two big systems. And how you reconcile these two big systems and I mean you've used the words humility and peace. But before we get to that, you send me a diagram and we'll put part of it up on the screen here and just show me in this top section of the diagram, here you've got creation and Bible, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right. So basically the top half of this diagram is really just a Christian view of the world, right, it's just a simple, basic Christian view of the world. That is, god exists, god is there and everything that exists has been made by God. And so in the diagram we've got on one end one side, creation, the kind of physical reality we interact with day to day, and then the other side in the diagram we've got on one end one side, creation, the kind of physical reality we interact with day to day, and then the other side of the diagram the Bible by creation.
Speaker 1:You're saying the mountains, yeah, that's right. The mountains, the rivers, the oceans yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:The path I walk down, yeah absolutely everything you interact with every day. God made it and also, but by extension, god wrote the Bible, and so I've separated those two things out in a sense in the diagram just to try and make a point here in a second. But both of those things were created by God and in our Christian worldview that God is not a liar, god is one. God is a unified whole. God is consistent within himself and therefore whole God is consistent within himself and therefore, by definition, within our Christian worldview there are no conflicts between what the Bible says about the way the world works, what the Bible says about our history, the historical timeline of the universe, and what we discover about the physical world when we go and stick thermometers into things and whatever and look through telescopes.
Speaker 1:Those things are not going to be in conflict. And you're an astrophysicist. I've actually looked through a telescope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, many times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but those things are not going to be in conflict with one another. So what we discover about the world from the world, what we discover about the world from the Bible, those things are not going to be in conflict with each other. That is our basic Christian worldview. Yeah, so that's what the top half of the diagram is trying to illustrate.
Speaker 1:And then you say there's a second half of the diagram, a subjective interpretation half of the diagram, and there are issues both in interpreting creation and in interpreting the Bible.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Unpack that for me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So this isn't sort of a shocking point. It's just, I think, helpful for people to make explicit in their minds. And that is that I mean there are two things going on in the world that make our understanding of the world a subjective thing. That is, our perspective on the world can never be removed from our understanding of what we're looking at, and by perspective it could mean the country you grew up in, the language you speak, the people you went to school with, the parents who raised you, the religion that you're a part of All these things create this perspective in our minds and they limit the way we understand the world. And so the two basic broad principles would be this we do not know everything. Full stop, bottom line. We are finite. We do not know everything about the world, and so we might be making mistakes in our interpretation.
Speaker 1:In fact, we all will make mistakes, won't we?
Speaker 2:Well, oh sorry. At any given time we might be making a mistake in our understanding.
Speaker 2:That's right. But secondly as well, again from the Christian worldview side of things, we can say we're not just finite, we're actually sinful. We're in a situation in relationship to God where not only is the world a sort of broken place because of our sin, but our own attitudes can deny the truth that seems to be plain before our faces. And we've cut ourselves off as a world hopefully not as Christian people, hopefully reconciled to God but we've cut ourselves off from the designer of all of this stuff, and so it becomes very difficult to get into the details and understand the world because of our attitude toward God. And so we have this finite problem. We just don't know everything and we can't know everything. And we have this sinful problem where we're sort of at odds with the designer of the universe, which create difficulties for us in understanding things. And so we have this line of interpretation. So the way I've described it here is I'm calling science the interpretation of creation and I'm calling theology the interpretation of the Bible. Just some shorthand for the sake of the diagram.
Speaker 1:And so different scientists will have different interpretations of creation, and different theologians will have different interpretations of the Bible.
Speaker 2:That's right, and I think it's not.
Speaker 1:And different people like you who've dabbled in them both.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I think and realize that I could be wrong about both of them at the same time, even realize that I could be wrong about both of them at the same time, even. But yeah, I mean we go to Bible study every week because we actually expect to learn new things and to change our minds about what we find in the Bible, because we don't think we know everything about the Bible. We keep doing science because we know we don't know everything about the universe, right, so we know we're limited in these situations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you've used these two words humility and peace because you and I take it with that worldview of I really don't know and I want to recognize I'm sinful and flawed and I want to recognize you really don't know and you're sinful and flawed. We actually need to have this stance of humility and peace.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So in a sense, the kind of takeaway point from the diagram is to realize, above the line between what we call creation and the Bible, there are no conflicts. By definition, there are no conflicts and we can be quite confident about that. Below the line is actually where we see the conflict, and so what we realize is that the conflict is a human-generated conflict. The conflict that we experience, the tensions we are challenged by as we experience the world and read the Bible, are actually between our theology and our science, our interpretations of the objective reality, the conflict between the interpretations, not between the objective realities. And so I would say the first stance, realities. And so I would say the first stance when you know the default stance when faced with a conflict, whether it's reading a book or it's with a friend who's challenging you about something is humility is to recognize that well, we don't know, and maybe they don't know, and we just take a deep breath right and say, okay, where is this conflict coming from?
Speaker 1:I guess. I mean there potentially are three sorts of conflicts You've alluded to. I'm having my own conflict in my mind. I'm reading a book, I'm having a thought, I'm playing a thought experiment out, you know. Then there's the moment where I'm actually in a quiet. The moment where I'm actually in a quiet, private conversation with a friend. That could take a couple of hours, you know, it could be a couple of rounds of conversation. We go off and think about things.
Speaker 1:And then there's the third kind of conflict, if you like, the bat, the shark kind of, when somebody throws a quick line at you and you need a kind of a 45-second reply. You know, I'm in the taxi talking to somebody. Now you've kind of given me the way you're approaching it. You, in your study, do you know that? And you're saying I'm taking the posture of humility and peace. But now, well, let me push you into the two areas Before we get to thinking about how you would talk to somebody else. The two issues we raised at the beginning one was an issue of creation and the doctrine of creation, and the other was the doctrine of the fall. Do you know of creation and the doctrine of creation and the other was the doctrine of the fall. Now let's do just you and your study how you think about the doctrine of creation.
Speaker 1:In terms of how do you reconcile things like 4.5?
Speaker 2:billion years on the first day, god said yeah, yep, so yeah, we're not talking about how you defend it in a 45-second clip, but what? Do you do when you're just kind of there?
Speaker 1:thinking.
Speaker 2:My sort of default is really that I like. My feeling is that most of these conflicts are related to the kind of maybe the enemy or something who's challenging us. I feel like almost every time it's a question of how we read the Bible. And so for me, I think, when I'm thinking about these questions, I'm really focusing on trying to figure out how does the Bible talk to itself about these questions? And so one of the questions is there a timeline outlined in the Bible? Do I see a timeline outlined in the Bible? How does the New Testament look at the creation? And so John 1, for example, the prologue of John 1, is very much taking us back to creation week in Genesis 1. But it has a different sort of view on what that is, and I would say even Matthew 1 with the genealogies actually has a little bit of a nod to the creation narratives as well and has its own sort of understanding of how these things are fulfilled in Jesus, for example.
Speaker 2:What do I make of, let's say, creation week itself? If the New Testament is looking back on it in this sense of showing us how it's fulfilled in Jesus? It makes me wonder how was the original readers meant to take it in the first place. And so, yeah, I think that's kind of where, that's how I, that's where my reflections go when I'm in the study and thinking about this Now in terms of, I mean, in terms of a kind of where I sit at the moment. Would that be helpful?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, creation week right up through Genesis 2, verse 3, that's day 7, through day 7, is a picture of God's eternal plan and in fact, the whole big summary of God's eternal plan, and that the historical timeline of the Bible starts at Genesis, chapter 2, verse 4, and ends in Revelation 22. And so that's the historical timeline that is given to us in the Bible, and we have this introductory picture of God's big plan, god's big eternal plan for creation that starts with creating everything, as it were, and ends at rest in eternity with God, the endless day of day seven. And so I see, time-wise, that those two creation accounts, in a sense Genesis 1 and then Genesis 2, are quite distinct and that Genesis 2 is the beginning of the storyline of the Bible, whereas Genesis 1 is actually an outside of time account of something else which I would say is actually the big picture, eternal plan of God. So that's how I sit with it at the moment. You can ask me in another month's time. We'll see.
Speaker 1:And so what happens when you're at a party and just a non-Christian says to you oh well, Lewis, you're a scientist and you're a Bible person, how do you resolve? I mean, you've just given me your thoughtful answer with the 15-minute preamble, but what's your elevator pitch, your 30-second elevator line?
Speaker 2:in that situation, my 30-second elevator pitch is John 20, 30. That is, john tells us at the end of his gospel that he has that. He could have put a lot of stuff in his story that he told the things Jesus did could fill many books, but he chose these specific things to include in his account of Jesus' life and ministry in order to persuade you that Jesus is the Christ, or maybe that the Messiah is Jesus, depending on the word order. And so the elevator pitch is the Bible is a book of theology. It is explicitly taught to us from inside of itself to be a biased account of history. Right, it is telling us A biased account.
Speaker 1:I don't like the word biased, whatever.
Speaker 2:It's constructed.
Speaker 1:It's got an interest. It's got an interest, it's got a focus.
Speaker 2:It's constructed in a way to teach us something about God. It is not constructed as fundamentally, primarily a historical book, an account of something. There are historical accounts of things in the Bible. Of course there are. It's not primarily constructed as a scientific handbook for understanding the mechanisms in the Bible. Of course there are. It's not primarily constructed as a scientific handbook for understanding the mechanisms of the world. Does it explain those things? Yeah, sure it does sometimes, but primarily by its own admission. In a sense it is a book of theology, trying to teach us something about God.
Speaker 1:I mean, we were talking about Google Maps versus WhatsApp chats. Yes, do you want to explain that to us?
Speaker 2:Oh, well, yes, I mean, you know, in a day gone by, you might have thought of a street directory and a phone book as a kind of two different ways of holding information, some overlapping information, because that phone book actually has addresses that correspond to places in the street directory. Yeah, but it's different kinds of information and it's compiled for different purposes. In the same way, google Maps I mean the same sort of idea with the maps shows us different parts of the world and the streets where we live. But WhatsApp chats is all. You know, the people you're connected with, and you've got a long list of people there. They all live somewhere in Google Maps, as it were, and you might even drop a link from Google Maps into one of your chats because you're going to meet up with those people one day and you want to make sure they all go to the right cafe, and so there's overlapping realities between these two things, but they're not created for the same purpose and they give us different insights into our lives.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, now the fall. Um, uh, I'm somebody who believes there's a historic fall. Adam rebelled against God, eve rebelled against God. Can I be somebody who holds to a historic fall and believe in theistic evolution?
Speaker 2:Short answer. Yes, I could give you a kind of longer explanation of yeah well, give me a couple of minutes.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, well, okay. So I'll try to give you two possible kind of ways of thinking about it. So one is just purely on the evolution side of things. Let's say that's the way God made everything. You know, god made the living creatures and stuff on the planet through evolution, okay, and so that takes a long time, long history, billions of years in fact, to get to where we are now, if that's the way things were done. But at some point what you could say is that all this process is going on and then walking around the earth, at some point in the past there were things, creatures, that looked a lot like you and me, mm-hmm. At which point let's say, god creates, well, puts his image into these creatures that he's chosen to be humanity and to relate to him going forward in the future, takes those human creatures, puts them in the Garden of Eden and they become the first living beings. Human beings, sorry, not living beings, pardon me.
Speaker 2:Human beings, yes, because there are creatures created according to their kinds right a couple of days earlier yeah, yeah, um, and so uh, but everything has been in a sense generated through this process of evolution. But then certain creatures are selected to be humans. They're made humans in the image of god by god, by fiat of god, at some point in history. And there they are. And then sin enters the world, through the sin of Adam in the garden. They're kicked out of the garden and they enter into this world.
Speaker 2:That has already been sort of part of the evolutionary process already, because they've been removed from that into the garden and then they're cast back out into that, into that same world out there, and so you have in a sense, a long history of evolution. That gets us kind of basically where we are now. God by fiat, makes um, certain creatures human beings, puts, separates them out, but then through sin, as it were, they get, get reconnected with the rest of the world, and so that's a way you could explain how an evolutionary process could actually fit with the story of the Bible. There's one other quick one, bill.
Speaker 1:Dembski, who's a I mean, that's a line I presume you might say to a science-type friend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's how you might say Google Maps and WhatsApp chat come together, yeah, if you're looking, you can say that that's how you might say Google Maps and WhatsApp chat come together. Yeah, if you're looking for, if you, if you, if really you know, if you're looking for some kind of plausible explanation, right, I mean, that's in a sense right that that allows you to sleep at night, you know, that just kind of helps you sit with that as you, as you keep thinking and doing the rest of your going through the rest of your life, then it's, it's a plausible explanation. Bill Dembski has this great one in his book called the End of Christianity. He's a real proponent of intelligent design. But he says he's got this.
Speaker 1:That's a provocative title the End of Christianity. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's meant to be provocative, but really it's. The goal of Christianity is what he's saying Is he a? Believer, he is a believer, and he's a believer and wants you to be a believer as well.
Speaker 1:I don't know. He wants the rest of the world to be a believer. I doubt Bill will ever watch this, but I think that's a bad title.
Speaker 2:Well, it may take a little explaining. Well, it may take a little explaining, but in there he explains. He gives this explanation of kind of how you could have a historical fall in the timeline, in our timeline, and still have this evolutionary process. And he says his scheme is this. He says look, the cross of Jesus works both forward in time and backward in time Right. All the sins committed beforehand looked overlooked.
Speaker 1:And we'd say that from Roman history, yes.
Speaker 2:And then God is seen to be just by actually dealing with those sins through the cross of Jesus. But we can also say it's not just post facto, because Abrahamraham is declared righteous in the moment. Yep, right, well, how is that?
Speaker 2:well, that's because the cross has this effect, the sins committed beforehand left unpunished, right yeah and so and so bill demsky just says well, what if the fall works forward and backward in time as well? So that is, there's a moment in time, just like there's a moment in time when jesus dies on the cross, and yet the implications of that moment stretch through all history. So what if the fall, the impact of the fall, which is a moment in our historical timeline? Actually the impacts stretch both backward and forward in time, and so the effects of the fall are baked into the creation in which we live so effectively.
Speaker 1:he's saying you could have had an earthquake or a volcano or a bushfire before Adam's historical sin. That's right.
Speaker 2:Could have had a disease. Yep, yep, that's right. So there's another.
Speaker 1:But you wouldn't have had. I'm feeling nervous about my nakedness.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I don't know. That's a really good one actually, Because I would want to say that before Adam and Eve sinned, they were naked and no shame.
Speaker 1:They were totally vulnerable with each other because there was no risk of you to me, yeah.
Speaker 2:And yes, and despite my reaction, the fact I agree with you and particularly, I want to say particularly, though, what makes it easy to agree with that position, I think, is to say, is to realize that these people who were without sin, were in the garden, they had been separated. They were created outside the garden in Genesis 2, and then God placed them inside the garden, separated them from the rest of the world out there, where the effects of sin, again according to the Dembski idea, where the effects of sin had been baked into creation, and so they've been separated, and so it's actually, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:so I agree with you, but it sounds like. Even though I don't like the title, it sounds like a super stimulating read it is a good book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is, it is a good book?
Speaker 1:yeah, what do you, as an astrophysicist, think about falling stars and just the idea that a star existed, was extinguished and all of that took place? And so when I see a falling star, I'm thinking, wow, that's got a history that's way, way, way back. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, sorry. When you say falling star, do you mean the shooting? You're not talking about meteors in the sky, you're talking about like kind of the winking out, as it were, of a star, like the disappearing of stars.
Speaker 1:The disappearing of a star, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just wanted to clarify that's had a whole history and it's all gone and I'm now just seeing its demise, yeah, yeah. But it all happened. Because of how long it takes for me to see this, it all happened a billion years ago or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's right. This is. This is one of those. Yeah, god creates things partly just for the fun of it, partly for the beauty of it, partly for the joy of the creation, and I mean we see that right through, well, through the Bible. But the Psalms, I think, often kind of give us that picture of just the joy of God at creation, and in some of the wisdom literature as well. And so it doesn't have to be about us, because what we know from the New Testament is actually it was all about Jesus, it was for Jesus, and Jesus hasn't missed it. Jesus gets to enjoy it. So, yeah, so I think it's God's joy in creation.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for coming in. It's been super stimulating and I've learned some good things. Lewis Jones has been my guest on the Pastor's Heart. An astrophysicist, he hails from North Carolina, although for the 30 years I've known him he's lived here in Sydney. He's director of the Simeon Network, the postgraduate and academic arm of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students. My name's Dominic Steele. You've been with us on the Pastor's Art and we will look forward to your company next Tuesday afternoon.
