Think God, think science

Squaring the circle?

THINK GOD, THINK SCIENCE
Conversations on Life, the Universe, and Faith
By Michael Pfundner and Ernest Lucas
Paternoster. 112 pages. £8.99
ISBN 978-1-84227-609-9

I found this an extremely frustrating book.

It takes the form of a dialogue between Michael Pfundner of the Bible Society and Ernest Lucas of Bristol Baptist College, focusing upon three broad areas in which science interacts with the Christian faith: our understanding of the physical universe, the origin and development of life, and the historical reliability of the gospels. The big bang, neo-Darwinian evolution, and a vast age for the earth are all taken for granted, and science is defined as a way of looking at the world ‘without invoking the existence or action of God’ (p.3). The authors see their task as demonstrating that Christianity is compatible with these ideas.

The authors make some good points. They helpfully emphasise the importance of the Christian worldview generally, and the Protestant Reformation specifically, in the rise of modern science (pp.4ff); they correct popular misunderstandings about the Galileo affair (pp.10ff); they discuss the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Christ (pp.101ff); and they establish the biblical view of heaven as a renewed creation rather than a disembodied spiritual existence somewhere ‘out there’ (p.104ff).

Science is always right

However, other parts of the book are much less helpful. We are informed that where the revelation in Scripture and the revelation in nature appear to contradict one another, ‘we must revise our understanding and interpretation of Scripture’ (p.13). But this gives science an authority that does not belong to it! The possibility that it might be our understanding and interpretation of the natural world that is in need of revision is apparently not considered.

Furthermore, alternatives to theistic evolution are given short shrift and there is a tendency to resort to clichŽs and caricatures when dealing with them. This is especially true of the book’s treatment of young-age creationism, which is dismissed as slavish and naive biblical literalism, blind to the nuances of language and genre, having arisen as a result of 20th-century social angst and the influence of Seventh Day Adventism! These are all highly contentious points.

Issues that pose difficulties for theistic evolution are dodged, such as the almost inescapable corollary that not all people are physically descended from Adam. Lucas acknowledges this point (p.64), but doesn’t follow through the serious theological implications. Evangelical eyebrows will be raised at other points too. According to Lucas the ages of the patriarchs are not to be understood straightforwardly (pp.38-39), Paul may have thought of Adam as ‘an archetype’ rather than ‘an individual, historical being’ (p.64), the goodness of the original creation is not to be understood in a moral sense but as fitness for purpose (p.73), some of Jesus’s healings may in fact be explicable in natural terms (p.94), and process theology and open theism are referred to seemingly positively (p.89).

Overall I was disappointed. The book begins by lamenting Christianity’s loss of cultural relevance and pointing out that so much of modern spirituality is ‘fuzzy, trend-driven and privatised’ (p.2). But many of us have come to the conclusion that theistic evolution, as advocated by the authors, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Paul Garner,
researcher and lecturer with Biblical Creation Ministries and a Fellow of the Geological Society; member of Soham Baptist Church, Cambridgeshire

Conversations on life, the universe and faith

Squaring the circle?

I found this an extremely frustrating book.

Science is always right

Main Articles

Other articles