GOD VS. SCIENCE: – There are two great debates under the broad heading of the God vs. Science. Can Darwin evolution withstand the criticism of Christians who believe that it contradicts the creation account in the book of Genesis? In recent years creationism took on new currency as the spiritual originator of “intelligent design “ (ID), a scientifically worded attempt to show that blanks in the evolutionary narrative are more meaningful than its very convincing totality.

Science and religion – far from being complementary responses to the unknown, are at utter odds. We humans want to cheer on science’s strides and still humble ourselves on the faith. We want access to both MRIs and miracles. We want debates about issues like stem cells without conceding that the positions are so intrinsically hostile as to make discussions fruitless. We seek those who possess religious conviction but also scientific achievements to credibly argue the widespread hope that science and God are in harmony – that indeed Science is of God.

The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a GOD, is one of the most important that we have to answer. God cannot be completely contained within nature, and therefore God’s existence is outside of science’s ability to really weigh in. For centuries the most powerful argument for God’s existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, an intelligent designer could only have made them. But the Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is gradual incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, and more adaptive perfection. By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence at the moment of creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out.

The gravitational constant, if it were off by one parting a hundred million, then the expansion of the universe after the big bang would not have occurred in the fashion that was necessary for life to occur. When one looks at that evidence, it is very difficult to adopt that view that this was just a chance. But if one is willing to consider the possibility of a designer, this becomes a rather plausible explanation for what is otherwise an exceedingly improbable event – namely our existence. God is the answer to all of those “How it must have come to be” questions.

We humans can ask, such as “Why am I here? “What happens after we die?” “Is there a God?” If you refuse to acknowledge their appropriateness, you end up with a zero probability of God after examining the natural world because it does not convince one on the proof basis. But if your mind is open about whether God might exist, one can point to aspects of the universe that are consistent with that conclusion. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. All kinds of things may happen, which we by the lights of today’s science would classify as miracle just as medieval science might think of a Boeing 747.

From the perspective of believer, once you buy in to the position of faith, then suddenly you find yourself losing all of your natural skepticism and your scientific credibility. The scientific instincts of some scientists are less rigorous than others. The difference is that for some scientists the presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero. Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation. There are answers that science is not able to provide about the natural world – the questions about why instead of the questions about how. We find many of these answers in the spiritual realm. If there is God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed. While physics and mathematics may tell us how the universe began, they are not much use in predicting human behavior because there are far too many equations to solve.