Genesis 2:1-9
2 Timothy 3:16-17
Today we are kicking off a new sermon series that we are calling “Your four biggest questions about God.” The idea behind the sermon series is simple: over the summer, we asked you to submit your biggest questions about God and what we might call “the things of God” – stuff like faith, the Bible, Christian living. A bunch of you responded, and we took your responses, grouped them together by theme, connecting similar questions – and picked the the most commonly asked questions for this series. Just FYI, y’all shared WAY MORE questions than we could possibly address in this sermon series, so I will be addressing some of the ones we couldn’t fit into this sermon series in some other ways – in places like our midweek Tuesday Thoughts videos, which you can find on our website or our Facebook page. Anyway, my point is, for these sermons these next four weeks, we are going to focus on the four topics that seemed to generate the most questions.
As we get going, it’s also worth me saying out loud that these are all hard topics, at least somewhat controversial, and that they don’t necessarily have settled, easy answers. They wouldn’t be your biggest questions if there were easy, obvious answers to them. So, up front, I need to say: be gentle with me. I’m going to do my best to address these topics, but sometimes I won’t so much be able to come up with a final answer as make some suggestions, point in the right direction, try my best to explore some possibilities. And, I might say something that’s not what you were taught before – and maybe I’ll be right or maybe I’ll be wrong – but, you know, there’s a little bit of risk here. It’s important for all of us to approach these questions with humility, admitting that we might be wrong, being open to new ways of thinking. Growth happens best when we push ourselves, when we allow ourselves to be challenged. So, that’s what we are shooting for in this sermon series: to be pushed, to be challenged, to have the chance to grow.
Over these next four weeks, we will tackle some big questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God seem different in the Old and New Testaments? Is Jesus the only way to salvation? And, today, we are starting with this: The question of science and faith – can we trust them both, can we believe in the Bible and what we learn from science? Or do we have to pick one or the other?
If I had to guess at why this question was so popular – and it was, y’all asked it alot, I’d bet it’s because, in the modern world, especially over the last century or so, science and faith have been depicted as enemies. You either believe in science or you believe in God, so the popular story goes, but you can’t believe in both. Now, of course, we know – or we should know – that that is ridiculous. After all, some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the last few centuries have been made by faithful Christians. Newton, Mendel, Compton, Fisher, Heisenberg – all of them deeply committed Christians, some of them actually members of the clergy. These folks – and many less-famous folks – have believed that their pursuit of scientific truth was part of their faith, was and is part of how they serve God.
Because, here’s the first big key when we are talking about science and Christian faith. We Christians believe that God is Truth – with a capital T – it’s right there in the Bible, Jesus says “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life” – and to say that God is the Truth is to say that all truth – everything that’s really true – is a gift from God. It’s the reason why good art can connect us with God, even if it’s not meant to be Christian art – because good art points us to something that’s true, and, so, since all truth comes from God, good art, whether or not it’s meant to be Christian, can be a lens, a window, for discovering something about God or God’s creation. Science, at the most basic level, is a method of exploration, it’s a way of looking carefully at the world, studying and discovering what’s really there, what’s really happening. It’s a way of looking for the truth – and, therefore, can help us learn about God’s creation. And that is the real key. If science is a study of the world, the universe, that we inhabit, and if we believe that God made the universe – that God made everything that exists – well, then, scientific inquiry is – or at least, can be – a way of slowing down and appreciating the world that God has given us. Scientific discovery, for Christians, can move us to wonder – and wonder can move us to glorify God. Have you ever stared up at the night sky, and felt a sense of awe? That sense of awe is not very far from, can easily become, a feeling of gratitude – thankfulness that this beauty, this grand cosmos, exists, and that we get to be a part of it. To pay attention to the world and be moved to wonder – that seems like something that is very much consistent with Christian faith, a way in which continued scientific discoveries can motivate us to praise God.
But I think the real crux of this question, the tension that many of us feel between quote “believing in science” and quote “having faith”, is the question of what to do when scientific knowledge and biblical stories seem to conflict, seem to disagree with each other. When you were telling us your biggest questions, y’all asked the question of science and faith most frequently in relation to book of Genesis and the stories of creation that we find there.
The theory of evolution and the story of creation don’t seem to line up. So we have to choose one and reject the other, right? That’s what we hear, at least – we hear it from enemies of religion AND we hear it from some preachers and Christians who are denouncing science or the modern world or something like that. But the real issue, if you ask me, is that we don’t know how to read the Bible. And I don’t mean that as a personal attack on you. It’s all of us. The modern church, for the last few hundred years, has tried to turn the Bible into something that it isn’t, and in the process, we’ve forgotten how to read it.
To put it directly: the Bible is not a science textbook, and it was never meant to be a science textbook. Think of it: the creation stories in Genesis were written more than two thousand, maybe as many as three thousand years ago – and they may come from stories that were told around campfires long before that. Those folks, back then, didn’t understand modern science – because it didn’t exist yet. They had no concept of a universe that was billions of years old. So, if they had, somehow, received from God a modern scientific account of how the world came to exist, it wouldn’t have made any sense to them, they wouldn’t have been able to process it. Instead, God gave them something that they could process, a story – much like the other stories told in the ancient world about the beginning of the world – but, also, very different, in very important ways, from those other stories. In the creation stories of the surrounding cultures, there was hostility between the gods and humanity, and humans were generally created to be servants to the gods. But, in the Bible, the world is created out of love, and God is all-powerful, and human beings are made God’s partners – not God’s servants – there is a very different message here, a very different story being told. And that story, what is said in it, is essential, it has shaped the people of Israel, and us people who call ourselves Christians, for millenia – and I don’t think it would have survived if it had been forced into some science textbook format that no one would have understood at the time. The passage we read from 2 Timothy says that every passage of Scripture is a gift from God, useful for teaching, for training character, so we can be trained in God’s way and equipped to do God’s work. It doesn’t say anything about “giving a perfect record of scientific facts.”
In other words, the Bible is a book designed to form our faith; it is not a science textbook. Which means that we should not go to it for science facts. It is full of a wide variety of types of literature – poems, stories, explanations for why things are the way they are, laws, political history, family history – it’s a lot of things, and we have to read it, to treat it, as what it is. We Christians are called to take the Bible seriously – it is one of our primary sources for our faith – and one of the best ways to take it seriously is to treat it how it wants to be treated, and sometimes that means that we take it seriously by not taking it literally.
Think of the creation stories in Genesis – you’ll notice that I’ve been saying stories, because there are two stories of the creation of the world: one that is roughly the first chapter of Genesis, and one that begins early in chapter 2. What we read today covers the transition between these two stories. But, here’s the thing, if you try to fit them perfectly together, it doesn’t work – the timeline of Genesis 1 does not line up perfectly with the timeline of Genesis 2 – things are created in a slightly different order in each of these two stories. And ancient people knew that – they were just as smart as we are – and they didn’t seem to mind. Because, each one of those stories has a purpose: the first one is the big picture, it talks about our place in the universe; while the second one is more personal, it deals with the realities of sin and the struggles of being a human being made in God’s image. Both of them are important, each teaches us essential things about faith, but if we treat them as “science,” as a resevoir of facts, they will disappoint us, they will seem to contradict each other. But if we treat them as stories of who God is and who we are and what God has done, then they have the potential to open the door into something beautiful.
I do not want you to hear me saying that the stuff in the Bible didn’t really happen. That’s not what I’m saying at all. God really created the world. I believe that as an article of faith. Jesus Christ really died and rose from the dead – without that, this whole thing falls apart. What I’m saying is that faith and science address different questions, and therefore offer different kinds of information. Science is pretty good at giving us the what – what happened – and the how – how it happened. Faith, on the other hand, is in the business of pointing us to the why – so, we know the world exists, and science can help us understand the history and pre-history of this world, and the ways it has developed over time, but the story of creation in the Bible tells us something very different – and more essential to being human. Perhaps Adam and Eve aren’t meant to be literal people who actually existed – after all, the authors of this story would have lived a long time after the first humans, so how would they know the details of their lives? – but, maybe, instead, Adam and Eve are representative humans, representative of early humanity or of all of us. After all, if you read the story of Adam and Eve carefully, you can see the story of each of us – how we are selfish, how we give into temptation, how we all run away from God sometimes, how God holds us accountable but also protects us. And, the reality is, I don’t know – I wasn’t alive back then, I don’t know exactly how it went down, but I know that this section of the Bible doesn’t seem too concerned with getting the exact details right – otherwise Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 wouldn’t disagree about the order of creation – but this section of the Bible is VERY concerned with the deeper questions, and those deeper questions in this story are what seem to really matter here.
So, science is about the what, and the how, and Christian faith is concerned with the why. And, just as importantly, Christian faith is about the who. The Bible does seem pretty interested in the authenticity of certain events, telling us that they actually happened. The death and resurrection of Jesus, for example, the Bible cares, clearly cares, that that actually happened. And, let’s be real, science can’t approach that one – the scientific method can be used and has been used to analyze the death of Jesus – and the best evidence we have is that he really died on the cross while Pontius Pilate was governor of the Roman province of Judea. The scientific study of history can help with that. But science is pretty useless in the face of the resurrection – because the resurrection, by definition, is an event that transcends history. The scientific study of history looks at evidence, at things that are repeatable and verifiable by so-called neutral analysis – but the whole point of the resurrection is that it has never happened before or since, that we can’t reproduce it, that only God can do it, and that we don’t get to evaluate it impartially and make up our own minds – it can only be grasped by faith. Science relies on stable, predictable rules in order to work – but the resurrection, we Christians believe, changes everything, breaks all the rules and rewrites the story of the whole world.
My point is, Christian faith is, ultimately, a question of who. It’s about who it is that undergirds the universe. Christian faith is about the who, about the God, who liberated Israel from Egypt and raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The scientific study of history can search for evidence of Israel’s escape from Egypt, but it can’t tell us who did it, and why, and what it meant. It can look for evidence of the crucifixion, but it can’t prove or disprove the resurrection, and it can’t tell us how it happened or who accomplished it or what it means.
Here’s my point: I love science. It has enabled a lot of amazing things in our modern lives – without scientific discovery I couldn’t stream my favorite TV show, I couldn’t drive my car to visit my family up and down the East Coast, my children wouldn’t get to experience the wonder of studying everything from undersea life to outer space and the joy of sharing all that they’ve learned with me. Without the advances of modern science, it would be a lot harder to feed the people of this world – science has helped us fight global hunger, and predict deadly storms, and fight disease – science can save lives. The amazing vaccines against COVID are proof of the good that science can do – and the anti-vaccine conspiracy theories out there – and that are killing people – are proof of how dangerous it can be when Christians start to believe that science is the enemy. Science is a way of looking at the world, studying the world, and it helps us to discover the truth and the wonder of this world that God has given us. And, in that sense, it is good.
Science is a way of seeing the world, and so is faith. Science is a set of glasses, a lens, that helps us examine the world around us more closely. Faith is a lens that helps us to see that everything around us, every atom, every subatomic particle, comes to us from God’s hand, is a gift.
Here’s the thing: science is about asking questions, seeking truth, and embracing new possibilities. The Good News is this: the God who we worship is big enough to handle our biggest questions. The God of Jesus Christ is big enough to handle our explorations, our doubts, our uncertainties. The God who we meet in the Bible is OK with us not being sure. Science and faith aren’t enemies – in fact, they can be partners. No scientific theory can destroy or disprove or undercut Christian faith – because Christian faith is a matter of trust – and, in particular, it’s about trusting the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead. We can learn from all sorts of awesome scientific discoveries and theories, and still trust in the God who created it all. But, the ultimate reality, the one that saves us, the one that holds all things together, is the Good News that Jesus is Lord, that God is standing behind this world, that God is working in this world to save us. And that’s Good News. Thanks be to God.