THE MYTH-LIE THAT IT IS ONLY FAULTY SCIENCE THAT IGNORES RELIGION
To avoid science is to be against it. Jesus said that to avoid him is to oppose him. The point is that the truth cannot go away and if you stare the other way that is opposition to it.
Christianity says that its God set up nature and both science and religion are gifts from him. It clearly does not regard them as equal for scientists do not get a say in running the Church or half the authority over Church teaching materials. It does not stock its reading rooms with science books and religion books equally.
It is obvious that if science says a cancer cannot cure itself and a group of people says theirs has gone in a flash and God did it that the question of conflict arises.
If you are firmly for science no question will arise. Religion makes the question arise.
Miracles are supernatural events. Religion says God does them and one prime example is how he saved Jesus from eternal death and raised him to eternal life. Jesus was only seen for a short period and we are expected to take the word of the Church for it that he did not die again. That is as far from science as you can imagine. If the raising could pass the test the main point, that he has everlasting life, cannot. And no alleged witness spoke of Jesus looking healthy either.
Religion decrees, "Science will be limited to showing that there is no natural explanation. It cannot do experiments on the supernatural so it can say no more than that. You only see the alleged results of the miracle so that is no surprise." In fact this is about keeping science at bay as we shall see.
SCIENCE CAN ONLY SAY THERE IS NO KNOWN NATURAL
EXPLANATION WHILE ADMITTING THERE MAY BE ERRORS IN THE INVESTIGATION SO THAT
THERE MIGHT BE A KNOWN NATURAL EXPLANATION AFTER ALL.
The view advocated by Mark Vernon that a miracle is any event strange or
otherwise that makes a person feel they have just encountered God (Vernon, M. The
Big Questions, God, (Quercus, 2012), p. 77 is inadequate. It is too subjective
because some people believing their cow is God, feel they have experienced it.
We would be unable to take such miracles seriously. Scripture tells us to live
by faith and not feeling so that we might take faith very seriously - 2
Corinthians 5:7 For we live by faith, not by sight.
As God gives you the tendency to feel wonder
in the first place this is very engineered. And what of those
who don't even care? You can imagine some seeing the risen
Jesus and still being more concerned about where to go for the best
fish catch. God may as well make us feel amazed about the
Starbucks americano.
A miracle is to be defined as something God does to inspire us to be holier
people that does not have a natural explanation. For example, Jesus dying a
cruel death and being alive and well a few after days is naturally impossible.
It is however, according to Christianity, supernaturally possible. God has the
power to do that. The Bible speaks of the resurrection of Jesus as a
supernatural sign from God verifying the claims Jesus made to be our God and
Saviour.
Matthew 12:39,40 claims: Jesus answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign!
But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah
was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man
will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
Mc Grath approvingly puts forward Pannenberg’s conviction that “The decisive factor in determining what happened … is the evidence contained in the New Testament”. McGrath, A. Bridge-Building (Inter-Varsity Press, 1954), p. 164. This teaching appears in scripture. John 20:30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
Against that I would say that you can be totally open to miracles and still refuse to believe in them for a book says so. Three reliable people saying Jesus appeared to them to tell them the New Testament lies too much would be ignored though they would outweigh what a book by unknown authors maintains.
It is not true that to be against the New Testament you have to have a bias against miracles.
Most Christians accept the scientific doctrines that all things including space
and time began at the big bang and that there wasn’t anything until then.
Stannard, R. Science & Belief, The Big Issues (Lion, 2012), p. 55. They think
there is no conflict between miracles and science primarily because the greatest
miracle of all is creation from nothing and both science and Christianity concur
with that. Materialistic scientists tend to ignore this assertion. Science has
never accepted that the big bang was a creation from nothing. Something had to
be there to explode.
Christians argue the following in bold.
Unbelieving science may refuse to deal with the agreement between faith
and science that all was made from nothing. It may focus on the following line
of thought to deny that miracles are possible or believable. People want a
way out of believing even true and credible miracles.
The unbelieving bad scientists
assert:
1 Science says dead men stay dead.
2 Jesus was claimed to have risen from the dead according to the New Testament
evidence.
3 The claim is untrue for dead men stay dead.
Line 3 should be,
The claim is probably true for the evidence that Jesus rose is sufficient.
That version of the argument honours science. Science is fundamentally concerned
about evidence. The original version of the argument only pays lip-service to
science.
But 1 is saying that the evidence is that dead men stay dead. The new version
says that there is sufficient evidence that Jesus was an exception. Fair enough
but the quality and quantity of the evidence for both would need to be equal on
the balancing scales. Otherwise you end up making Jesus an exception against the
heavier evidence that dead men stay dead. The fact remains is that the New
Testament evidence is not enough.
The Church assumes that the weak New Testament evidence is very convincing and it is not. And if the same evidence appeared to suggest that Nero was a living statue the Christians would ignore it.
So they come up with psychic powers now. They say,
Science is about external ways of checking things out. For example, equipment is
used to measure and test. The Christian encounters the risen Jesus in her or his
heart. John 6:56 “lives in me and I live in him”. The Christian does not test
the relationship that he experiences. He just experiences it and that is better
than using any experiment or test. What is more scientific than that?
And as for the argument that you experience Jesus in your
heart and that is better than any science experiment then why not tell
scientists to throw away the machines and listen to their inner experiences
instead? Why can't scientists feel that there is no God and conclude that this
is scientific proof?
Christians sometimes say that religious experience is only enough when it is
verified by and checked out against the Bible which itself must be checked out
to see if it is probably true. This attitude would demand respect for science
and investigation it would seem. Yes but a bit is not enough. We
need more respect for science than that.
A scientist using that technique with the Book of Mormon would end up trying to argue that the American Indians are Jews despite the DNA saying otherwise. She would say, "There is a conflict but the Lord will resolve it in time. Maybe the Devil was able to change their genes to fool us."
It is not bad science that ignores religion. It is bad religion that ignores science.