Science or Faith? You No Longer Have to Choose

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Decades ago, as I can recall from personal experience, there seemed to be only two choices: If you doubted that Darwinian natural selection of random mutations could explain all the magnificent species in the living world — including intelligent, conscious humans — you had to believe that the Grand Canyon is only a few thousand years old. 

And if you saw the story of Noah and the ark not as a newspaper account but as an allegory, however profound, you had to believe that everything in the universe is the product of blind, unintelligent forces.

Evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) sarcastically remarked that our Creator “must have an inordinate fondness for beetles” because there are so many species. In line with that quip, in the first creation-evolution debate I attended, back in the mid 1970s at the University of Texas at Austin, the evolutionist spent perhaps half of his allotted time showing us dozens of species of butterflies, pointing out the similarities between species. 

Meanwhile, the creationist in the debate spent much of his time defending the Biblical story of Noah and the ark. Some years later I saw a T-shirt with a picture of the Grand Canyon on the front. On the back was the message, “Six thousand years or four billion years — you decide.” 

Since then, things have changed dramatically. The Big Bang theory, now widely accepted by science, says that the universe had a sudden beginning some 14 billion years ago. Since there were no natural causes before nature came into existence, it is today quite reasonable to take the first verse of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth,” as scientifically verified truth. 

The beginning of time is one of the “three scientific discoveries that reveal the mind behind the universe” highlighted in philosopher of science Stephen Meyer’s 2021 bestseller, Return of the God Hypothesis. The cosmic beginning is also a focus of the new theatrical documentary based on that book, The Story of Everything.

The second discovery is that the laws and constants of physics are now known to be exquisitely “fine-tuned” for life. “The values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life,” wrote physicist Stephen Hawking. 

Atheists have long ridiculed those of us who believe in God for imagining that there is another reality outside our universe, beyond the reach of science. But to “explain” fine-tuning, atheists are now reduced to imagining many universes with random values for the constants of physics. They must argue, “The reason the fundamental constants have the values they do [in our universe] is because otherwise we would not be here to wonder about them.” 

They now have to imagine a huge or infinite number of other unobservable universes with different laws and conditions. We are only asking you to imagine one!

There are still many things about the history of life on Earth, such as the long times involved and the huge number of beetle species, that may leave us thinking, “God would not create things that way.” But Darwin’s implausible explanation for evolution becomes more implausible with every biological and biochemical discovery, and we are still clueless about the origin of life. 

The third discovery highlighted in the book and the movie is that, far from being the blob of protoplasm imagined in Darwin’s day, the cell is actually an incredibly complex factory. The astonishing molecular machines found in every living cell are especially difficult to explain by Darwinian selection, or by anything other than a very intelligent designer. 

Fifty years ago, many Christians insisted on the inerrancy of even the earliest stories in the Bible because they feared that questioning these stories would leave us with the absurd “creation” story of the atheists as the only alternative for what really happened. Today we can examine these stories critically, knowing that even if we conclude that the Biblical account of creation is allegorical in part, what really happened is that God really did create “the heavens and the Earth” in the beginning. 

Some scientists now are willing to attribute the universe and its laws to a Creator but still insist that Nature was left to take its course after the beginning. The rest of the Biblical account, however, paints a picture of a God who was more directly involved after the beginning in the creation of plants and animals and humans. And there is now powerful scientific support for this view, as I summarized in a recent article at Science and Culture Today.

As the German geneticist and intelligent design proponent Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig put in an interview: “The Bible, 2,000 years ago…, was much closer to the truth than the current story of chance.” After examining all the scientific evidence on origins, I think many Christians and Jews — and perhaps some fair-minded agnostics — will agree.

Photo credit: Canva Pro/Photo Credit: popba from Getty Images Pro/Dee from Sakorn Sukkasemsakorn

Granville Sewell is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso and the author most recently of Christianity for Doubters.