The Fool and the Heretic by Todd Charles Wood & Darrel R. Falk

Author:Todd Charles Wood & Darrel R. Falk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2018-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

GENESIS IS HISTORY

Todd Charles Wood

Darrel is right when he says that the big issue for me is the Bible, not science, but it goes much deeper than that. As a scientist, I think science is extremely important, but I don’t think Christians ought to divorce their science from their faith, as if we could hold back something from the authority of Christ. That was the strategy of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. People thought it would be great to do science without consulting Scripture. Reason and evidence were supposed to be able to establish the Christian faith all by themselves. Today, we call it “methodological naturalism,” this exclusion of God from science.

Think about what that means. I’m a Christian. I’m a slave to Christ. There’s no part of my life that Jesus does not claim as his. My soul doesn’t have a man cave where I can retreat and do what I want. I’m not a Christian on Sunday and a scientist on Monday. That’s not how the Christian life works. For a little while, I might be able to do a thought experiment about what things might be like without my faith, but eventually that thought experiment has to come back under the sovereignty of my Savior.

So the idea of doing science as if God did not reveal himself in the Bible is incomprehensible to me. Even more, if you try it, you’re going to go really wrong. Darrel looks at science today and sees such a powerful model of evolution that explains the history of life on this planet, and he does not see this as being incompatible with Christian theology. I look at modern science, and I see discord and confusion created by a process that never intended to consider God in the first place. Sounds crazy, but science needs to be redone. I don’t doubt we’ll keep a lot of science, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we discover mistaken interpretations of Genesis along the way. But we can’t make those decisions by doing science in isolation from Scripture or by interpreting Scripture in isolation from science. They have to go hand in hand. Jesus must be Lord of all.

How do we do this? It seems impossible to me. Science is such a massive thing in the modern world, and it overshadows everything we do. How can we twenty-first-century Christians separate the practice of science from the conclusions of four hundred years of research? Just as important as rethinking science is reexamining Scripture, and again, how can we do that with all of our scientific bias and baggage?

I believe we have reason to hope. First, we have Jesus’ promise that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. We really have to ponder that; we are not left to our own devices to figure out what is true. Second, I think we need to give up our egotistical notions that we already have all of the answers. Whether we’re talking about science or the Bible, there are many unanswered questions.

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