Book Questions Whether Science and Faith Can Co-Exist

A math professor and author from Oxford University, Dr. Lennox utilizes his book to advocate his position that science and faith can peacefully co-exist. According to The Blaze, the book “maintains that Christians can believe in science’s theoretical constructs, while embracing Biblical scriptures as truths.”

Lennox explains:

I think that sometimes people have been taught there are only two possibilities: Possibility one is that if you are being faithful to Scripture, you have to be a young earth creationist. Otherwise you’re an evolutionist or a theistic evolutionist, and you’re not faithful to Scripture. I don’t think that is the case…

…it’s not a quest of trying to keep up [with science], but it’s a quest of looking at what God has revealed of Himself in nature, and looking at what God has revealed of Himself in the Bible and trying to make sense of those two.

Lennox is no novice to having to reconcile science and faith, as he has debated well-known atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

In his book, Lennox encourages Christians to search for openings in the Bible where God’s account of the world’s creation may intersect with modern scientific discoveries.

The entire foundation of Lennox’s book rests on the notion that the book of Genesis suggests a more complex process to the creation of the world. According to Lennox, it is purposefully written as an oversimplification.

“If the Biblical explanations were at the level, say, of twenty-second century science, it would likely be unintelligible to everyone, including scientists today. This could scarcely have been God’s intention. He wished His meaning to be accessible to all,” said Lennox. He adds, “Jesus told parables about farming, building and fishing, not about factories, aviation and jungle exploration…His parables are accessible to anyone in any age. Similarly with Genesis.

What is the Nature of this Universe?– World Atheist Convention ...

Issues and content aside, the most compelling upshot of this past weekend’s meeting of atheists in Ireland is what it tells us about the universe we Westerners (and increasingly, all of us on this hot and crowded planet) inhabit– believers and atheists alike. Succinctly, we don’t live in a universe anymore. We live in a multi-verse– or, less charitably, we live in a chaos (the opposite of a cosmos).

The way that I am asking this question– what kind of universe do we inhabit?– is a metaphysical/philosophical question, not a physical/scientific question.  The evidence that we live in a multi-verse, is that there is no common understanding– in fact, there is very serious disagreement– about the nature of what is real ; about what we can know and how we know it ; about where we came from and where we’re going ; about what is beautiful and good, and on what ground we can make that judgment – in sum, about all questions of meaning and purpose . Any universe begins from assumptions about the nature of what exists; the defining characteristic of those assumptions is that they themselves cannot be proven. Even the universe of Western material science is not exempt from the logical necessity for this epistemological first move, which for materialistic atheists is the functional equivalent to, ironically, a religious leap of faith.

Western culture has been in turmoil– more or less– since at least the Enlightenment, and as the West has bumped elbows with non-Western cultures, those cultures have at various times elbowed back. Fundamentalisms of all stripes– Christianism, Islamism, scientism– have wide appeal, because they aim to supply us once again with a universe to inhabit– a cosmos instead of a chaos. Such a tidy resolution to questions of ultimate purpose– such a tidy restoration of the universe– is not possible, because the commitments that people have to their cosmos– to their way of making meaning of experience– are, at root, non-rational.

A multi-verse– a world with different and competing ways of ordering morality and meaning, origin and destiny–  is always at risk of becoming a chaos. The opportunity of our time is achieving a widely-shared, deepening appreciation for all that is life-affirming in the multi-verses we inhabit together– and for the mystery at which our knowing cannot reach.

On the nature of the universe

The Hebrew Bible, A Comparative Approach

The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Tertullian, pt. 4th; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, pts. 1st and 2d

Popular Science

On the moral nature of the universe, theology, cosmology, and ethics