Why Should I Believe Christianity? (The Big Ten: Critical Questions Answered) by James Anderson

Author:James Anderson [Anderson, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Christianity
Publisher: Christian Focus Publications
Published: 2016-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

God and Science

Science is an indisputably wonderful thing. All of us benefit daily in thousands of ways from the advancements of science, whether we recognize it or not. I’m currently writing this book on a pretty sophisticated laptop computer, the product of decades of scientific research. I’m sitting in a café equipped with electric lights, wireless internet and air conditioning (thankfully, because it’s nearly 100°F outside). From my armchair I can see the car in which I drove to the café. In the distance, an airplane is descending for landing. I can scarcely imagine the many scientific inventions that were used to grow and harvest the coffee beans, to transport them to this location, and to create the near-perfect cup of French Roast that I’m sipping. And that’s just a small selection of examples of how science has changed our lives for the better. (Of course, we should also recognize that science has also been used for many evil purposes, which points us back to the earlier arguments from value and morals.)

Atheists who claim to have reason on their side will often insist they have science on their side too. They’ll cite statistics about how scientists are less likely to believe in God than non-scientists. They’ll argue that science has disproven many of the central claims of Christianity: for example, that the theory of evolution has discredited the biblical account of human origins. It’s important for Christians to address such challenges, but I want to do something else here: to dig below the surface of these objections into the foundations of science itself. I’m going to argue that science is only possible because God exists. In other words, the very existence and success of science depend on God.

It’s rarely recognized that science rests on a whole host of philosophical assumptions about the universe and about human beings that science itself cannot justify. No scientific experiment can prove these assumptions; rather, scientists have to take them for granted. But if those assumptions were false, science itself would be futile. It would take a whole other book to explore all of the presuppositions of science, so I will only mention a selection here.

In the first place, scientific work takes for granted the existence of objective moral values. For example, scientists have a moral duty to be thorough and careful in their research, and to be honest and accurate when they publish their results. Indeed, the whole scientific enterprise is driven by a value judgment, namely, that it’s good to understand how the natural world operates, and that we ought to pursue and promote truth and knowledge in the natural sciences. Furthermore, we take for granted that science should be used for objectively good purposes, rather than to advance personal agendas, partisan political ideologies, and so on. But as I argued earlier, atheism doesn’t comport at all well with the idea of objective value judgments.

Leaving aside the moral dimension of scientific work, however, there are other underlying assumptions of science that expose our dependence on God.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.