Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Happy Mother's Day once again. If you haven't already heard it, my wife and I recently were down in Phoenix with our third daughter and she was moving into a new rental and so of course we became free labor.
[00:00:16] Well, one of the projects that I was given specifically was she had gone to the thrift store, which she loves to do, and she found these big old oak throws, framed mirrors, kind of like the ones I saw in every house growing up, frankly. But now they're cool again. So she buys these mirrors and wants me to hang them. I'm like, oh, that's no problem.
[00:00:39] So what do you got for tools? Now when you ask a 22 year old girl that question, you get an answer that is a toolkit about that big.
[00:00:48] It's got a hammer that long, 1 Phillips screwdriver, 2 totally random Allen wrenches, and a tape measure.
[00:00:59] So I say to her, well, if we're going to do this right, we're going to actually need to drill pilot holes because oak is really hard. We got to get some holes, get the screws in, then we can hang the mirrors. She looks at me and says, well, if we just have to start the holes, what about the screwdriver and the hammer to, to do the job? Because I don't have a drill. And we've all been there, right? Like you've done the project with the right tools and the project's actually pretty easy and you get through it.
[00:01:30] When you try and do the project with the wrong tools, bad things happen, messes occur, and it doesn't ever work out the way you hoped it would.
[00:01:40] And so today, as we are going to have a conversation about the interaction between science and faith, I'd love for you to be able to take away from this conversation the idea that I always want to make sure that I'm using the right tool for the right job.
[00:01:58] And I think when you look out into the Christian community, there are many that look at science and faith and they see those two things at odds.
[00:02:10] They see conflict between science and faith.
[00:02:15] And there are some that would go so far as to say that science and faith are actually mutually exclusive, like they cannot exist in the same universe.
[00:02:25] I just want you to know up front, that's not my perspective. I actually see science and faith as immensely significant in our everyday lives. They help us so much to understand the world that we're navigating and living in and just experiencing every single day. But I see a lot of the conflict happen, at least from my chair, when we're using the Wrong tool for the wrong job.
[00:02:53] So what do I mean about the wrong tool and the wrong job and all of that? Let me give you an example and we'll start on the side of science.
[00:03:02] Science is really good at figuring out how the natural world works.
[00:03:12] Science is really good at answering how questions. It's good at processes. And that is what it is truly designed to do. If I were to give you an example of that, if I were to ask you how did the NASA scientists get the Artemis 2 spacecraft, which weighs 6 million pounds off the Florida launch pad, through our atmosphere, into space, around the Earth, around the moon, back through the atmosphere and to land safely on Earth?
[00:03:48] If I were to ask you that, you would never pick up your Bible and go, oh, well, actually it says right here how that happens, right?
[00:03:59] You would never do that.
[00:04:01] What you would do though, is you would grab your big old physics book. Not mine, a friend's.
[00:04:09] I don't have a physics book, but if I did, this is the one I would definitely have.
[00:04:13] But you would grab your physics book because if you're going to understand how Artemis 2 did what it did, you better understand thrust aerodynamics, grass gravity, thermodynamics. Like those are the subjects you must understand if you're going to understand how NASA scientists got that big old, big old lug up into space and back down.
[00:04:40] And I know that that's a really silly example, but it's meant to be. To make the point, it's really important that you use the right tool for the right job.
[00:04:51] Let me flip that coin over.
[00:04:53] What if I was going to ask a totally different question? What if I was going to ask the question that's impressed on the hearts of people everywhere in the world? Always.
[00:05:03] In fact, you've never met a three year old who hasn't asked you this question 50 million times.
[00:05:10] Why?
[00:05:11] Why? Why that, why this, why that, why this? Right? Every three year old you've ever met, they know one word and it's why.
[00:05:19] And you have to answer that question, why is that?
[00:05:22] Because our hearts are impressed with this idea. We want to understand why knowing how has significance. It's good and important.
[00:05:31] But deep down we want to understand the whys of our world.
[00:05:36] And that is where we need to go. Faith is good at answering why.
[00:05:43] Science is good at answering how related to the natural world. And so if I was going to ask a question of you, I could ask you, why does the universe exist?
[00:05:56] If I grab this book, I'm not going to get anywhere. It's not going to Tell me why. It's going to tell me a lot of hows and a lot of really important things, but it never has the capability of touching. Why?
[00:06:09] If I want to understand why, that's where I go to faith, that's where I go to Scripture. I want to understand why does the universe exist? This is the right tool.
[00:06:23] And just for sake of argument, let's answer that question.
[00:06:28] Why does the universe exist? According to Scripture, why does the universe exist? To answer that question, we're going to go to Acts chapter 17, verse 16. To start, it says, while Paul was waiting for them in Athens, first of all, Paul is waiting for them. Who's he waiting for? Paul's on a journey with a bunch of companions and he's gotten ahead of the pace. He's on a layover in Athens. For lack of a better term, he's in Athens. He's waiting for his boys to catch up so they can continue the journey they're on.
[00:07:07] But he's in Athens.
[00:07:10] Athens is incredible. In the ancient world, Athens is the seat to intellectual thought and the community of intelligent, academic type people.
[00:07:21] You might know a few people who were Athenians, people like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, all Athenians.
[00:07:31] So he's in this hub of, of what is academic thought.
[00:07:36] And he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
[00:07:43] And so he reasoned.
[00:07:47] I'm going to pause there for a second. He reasoned, this doesn't answer our question, but it's significant in our overall discussion.
[00:07:56] Why didn't Paul pick up the Old Testament? He, he's a Hebrew scholar. He could have opened to Moses's books or the Psalms and he could have pointed to the Messiah and explained to the Athenians out of the Bible why everything he wants to talk about is significant.
[00:08:16] But Paul is wise and he says, you know what, that's not the right tool for this environment. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to reason with a bunch of people that, that value logic and reasoning to explain to them who Jesus is and about the Messiah.
[00:08:33] So Paul reasoned he was in the synagogue with both the Jews and God fearing Greeks as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happen to be there.
[00:08:46] Now. This marketplace is amazing.
[00:08:49] And how do I know that? Because I was there. I. About a year ago, Kristin and I went to Greece and we stood on Mars Hill and as we looked down Mars Hill, we saw this Marketplace, the Acts 17 marketplace. In fact, you want to see it too? So here's a video I took from my phone. On the acts marketplace.
[00:09:13] So as it zooms in, you can see that building on the right there, right in the middle, that's the barracks for the Roman troops.
[00:09:19] And as it pans left, you see a lot of trees and trails. That whole thing is this marketplace, because in the ancient world, every city had a major marketplace. And in Athens, it's called the Roman agora, because that's the Roman word for a marketplace. And that's where everyone from the region comes.
[00:09:38] They sell their goods, they buy the goods they need. This is where the they go to do that. And Paul on his layover is reasoning in the marketplace with all these different people.
[00:09:52] Now, Paul's a pretty good guy at talking and reasoning. In fact, he's so good that some of the people he talks with have some status in Athens.
[00:10:02] And so those people invite Paul to go from the marketplace to the Areopagus.
[00:10:09] Now, the areopagus is a field, effectively in front of a rock platform.
[00:10:15] And it is the seat, the home, the foundation of democracy. The very first democracy on the planet was in Athens as a city state. And the Areopagus is where the citizens would come to hear the people talk and do their votes and everything else as they ran their democracy along.
[00:10:34] So Paul's invited to go up there and speak. You want to see the areopagus? Of course. Second video Cue that.
[00:10:41] So as I zoom in a little bit, you see a rock there. And then as I pan to the left, there's the Acropolis, just a couple hundred yards away.
[00:10:51] And then as it keeps going, you see that bald rock right there? That's Mars Hill.
[00:10:55] And from there, it's Athens city skyline in the modern day. But here's the setting. Here's what I want you to understand. This is incredible. And you'll understand a second why this is so incredible. Paul is going to stand on that rock platform at the Areopagus. The citizens of Athens are right in front of him. To his right, up the hill is the Acropolis, and then just down the hill is the marketplace. So he gets brought from the marketplace up to the Areopagus, given the platform to speak to the people of Athens. And here is what he says, the God who made the world and everything in it. Now pause.
[00:11:37] That's crazy.
[00:11:39] This is Greek Athenian culture, pantheon of gods. And Paul just said, you've got that. Let me tell you about a God who is way bigger than what you're thinking. He is so big, he made everything in the world.
[00:11:55] And for the Athenians, they're like, oh, what do we do with that. And then he keeps going. He's lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples. He doesn't live on temples. Come on. That is so funny. He's standing on the Areopagus. There's the Acropolis, all the temples they made for their gods. And you got to believe. He's like, this God is so big. He made everything. And he doesn't live in a tiny little temple of marble up on the hill like you made.
[00:12:23] He goes on and he says, and he's not served by human hands. All of Greek mythology is. The people serve the gods, keep Zeus happy, do the sacrifice. Everything that they're about, he is speaking against as he is reasoning with them about Jesus.
[00:12:44] Then he says, rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.
[00:12:51] And so the scene is set. Paul's got a God who's bigger than any God they know. Your little Acropolis is a joke. I've got something you've got to hear. The people are ready to hear the mic drop.
[00:13:04] And then Paul drops the bomb. And he answers our question.
[00:13:09] Why does the Universe exist?
[00:13:13] Acts 17:27. God did this created so that they, the people, you would seek him and perhaps reach out to him and ultimately find him, though he is not far from any one of us in the Greek world and the people of Athens.
[00:13:37] You telling me that God is relational?
[00:13:39] Like he created all this stuff so he could be in relationship with me, that. That I could seek him, that I could reach out to him, that.
[00:13:50] That I could actually have relationship and find Him like he is speaking a language they can't even fathom.
[00:13:59] And he's doing that within the reason and at the areopagus to make the point. These people's mind must have been blown at what he had to say.
[00:14:10] It is absolutely insane. The reason that the universe exists, if you want to know why, it's because there's a God who cares about you. He actually wants to be in relationship with you.
[00:14:23] He wants you to seek him and find Him.
[00:14:26] That is why the universe exists. And my physics book could never teach me that. It could never enlighten me to that reality of. Of truth.
[00:14:38] The truth as to why the universe exists is because God wants to be in relationship with us.
[00:14:46] Now, there's two different kind of examples. A how question that science is really good at answering and is a good tool for a why question where science isn't so good, but the Bible and faith is excellent.
[00:15:04] And using the right tool for the right job is really important.
[00:15:09] It actually speaks into My own faith story. You see, when I was younger and I was not a follower of Jesus, if I'm being really honest, I had a very low view of Christians.
[00:15:24] It seemed to me that the Christians that were in my sphere were people that just checked their brain at the door. It was all about, just believe.
[00:15:32] Don't actually ask questions, don't think critically.
[00:15:35] Just believe. That's what we need you to do.
[00:15:40] And when you would ask them hard questions, they would communicate to you that thought and analysis and reason had no place in the. In the things of faith.
[00:15:52] I would have people that would pick this up and shove this in my face, and I'm like, dude, I don't even care what that says. I'm not interested in that. Let's talk about these things that I'm asking you that you don't seem to want to engage in. It's an example of using the wrong tool.
[00:16:10] There were other Christians that I knew that would lean on what they called experts, pseudo scientists, people that had no credentials or no credibility, that no one in the world actually believed anything they said except this little bubble of Christians who somehow thought that this person had wisdom that escapes everybody else.
[00:16:34] And I couldn't have articulated it then, but I will tell you now. What I believe I experienced was people using the wrong tools. Maybe with good intention, but using the wrong tools. Using the screwdriver and the hammer to. To poke holes in oak. The wrong tool for the wrong job.
[00:16:54] But then something changed. I met a whole different group of believers at one point.
[00:17:00] And as I experienced these Christians, they were so different.
[00:17:05] They were not afraid of science or logic or reason.
[00:17:10] They seemed to be willing to want to actually engage in hard questions and think about things.
[00:17:17] They came across as people that they didn't have all the answers. They knew that. But they sure wanted to engage in the conversation and the debate.
[00:17:26] And they did so with great humility. And the process of those questionings, back and forth, they began to take my how questions and turn them into why questions.
[00:17:41] They would ask me things like why does the universe exist?
[00:17:45] Why do you think you have intrinsic value?
[00:17:48] Why do you think your life actually matters?
[00:17:52] Things that this book speaks so well to and helps us understand.
[00:17:58] And those questions, those believers who ask those great questions of me began to change my thought process about Christians and about God. And God used the answers to those questions to soften my heart and draw me to himself.
[00:18:15] The right tool.
[00:18:18] I believe as we think about the intersection of science and faith, a lot of what we need to understand is just Using the right tool for the right conversation.
[00:18:31] It's so important.
[00:18:35] Okay, pause.
[00:18:39] I want to transition because as I was preparing for this and praying about this and talking with our staff about this, one of the things that came up was that to just stop there feels like it leaves something unsaid and that maybe we need to step into a specific question and debate and try and break that down a little bit. And. And so I'm gonna do that, much to my nerves about doing so. Because anytime you jump into a debate, you know that half the people will like what you say and half the people won't, and it doesn't matter what you say. That's pretty much how the ratios work.
[00:19:19] The debate I wanna jump into is around Genesis 1 and the age of the Earth. That's the big debate right now. And really, if you want to be honest about that debate, that debate exists within the church and it exists within the Christian community. It really doesn't exist outside of the Christian community.
[00:19:37] So this conversation is for those that have said, you know what? Jesus is, my Lord. This is the conversation we want to have.
[00:19:45] As we look at the age of the earth, there's two camps. One camp says that the Earth is probably somewhere in the 6 to 10,000 year old range. And the way they come to that number is they go to the Old Testament, they look at the genealogies, they understand the length of lives and do some math and know that there's some fluctuation. But roughly we're looking at somewhere between 6 and 10,000 years.
[00:20:08] There's another camp within the Christian community that follows more kind of the scientific thought that is in modern day science which says the Earth is about 4.6 billion years old.
[00:20:20] Don't know about you. The gap between 10,000 and 4.6 billion feels large.
[00:20:25] All right, so we're on the same page there. Now, this age debate really in Genesis 1:2 comes down to one word. It comes down to the word day, as in the six days of creation. Like that is the word that starts to create the debate.
[00:20:43] And one thing that's really challenging about just generally translating documents is you have to understand the original language to understand what's going on.
[00:20:55] So the word day in ancient Hebrew is the word yom.
[00:20:59] Y O M yom.
[00:21:02] The word yom is like a lot of Hebrew words. It has a whole swath of meanings. When we look at English, we're used to words that basically have a single meaning, sometimes two, very occasionally three. But in ancient Hebrew, many words had lots of meanings and the word yom is kind of no exception to that.
[00:21:26] If you look in Genesis chapter one, the word yom, every time it is translated is translated day.
[00:21:33] If you look In Genesis chapter 2, verse 2, the word yom is translated week or seven days.
[00:21:43] If you go to Genesis 4, the word yom, same exact word, no difference, is translated into a growing season.
[00:21:53] In other words, like spring to fall, like five or six months long if you keep going through Genesis. In Genesis 43, verse 9, the word Yom is translated to be a human lifespan, so call it 70, 80 years, several decades at least.
[00:22:11] In Genesis 44, 32, the exact same word yom is translated eternity.
[00:22:20] That's a big difference, right? Like you see the challenge.
[00:22:25] And as we think about that, then we think about maybe a preconceived notion that a lot of Christians have. In fact, I think a lot of non Christians have about Christians and that is that every Christian has always in all of history believed that Genesis 1y is 24 hours.
[00:22:48] And there's lots and lots that have believed that. There's also, though lots and lots that have believed differently.
[00:22:56] And what I want to explore for just a second with you is the scope of what that looks like, like these people that I will share with you here in just a second.
[00:23:08] These are the most intelligent, the most studied, the most theologically sound and the most devoted followers of Jesus in history.
[00:23:23] And they end up on different sides of the equation.
[00:23:26] For example, in the 200s, Origen in the 300s, Augustine in the 1200s, Thomas Aquinas in the 1900, C.S. lewis, and most recently Tim Keller.
[00:23:41] Again, all great theologians, all faithful men of Jesus.
[00:23:46] Those men all believe that Genesis 1 referred to an unspecified period of time that the poetry does not indicate 24 hours.
[00:23:56] On the other side of that, you look at Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500s, John Wesley in the 1700s, Charles Spurgeon in the 1900s, all of those great faithful Jesus loving men who believed unequivocally that yom in Genesis 1 meant 24 hours.
[00:24:19] So what I've tried to share with you is there's some debate and what we would love for you to be is a good student of the Bible and a good student of the Bible gets in there and recognizes that there's a lot of things in Scripture that are absolutely crystal clear. If you go to Journey boseman.com, you go to our statement of faith, you will see effectively the Apostles Creed. Those are things in Scripture there is zero debate about. And they're the things that we would break fellowship over and fight over anything that's not in that we would expect people that are part of the journey family would have different opinions based on their reading of the Scriptures and how they take that in their study.
[00:25:07] And a good student of the Bible does a couple things. Number one, you have an opinion.
[00:25:13] You read Genesis 1, for example, and you say, I believe a day is this. And you have that opinion, and that forms much of your theology.
[00:25:26] The second thing that a great student of the Bible does is they recognize that other people are going to have different opinions on that same thing.
[00:25:35] And I've already listed almost a dozen people that are on both sides of that equation that are brilliant, intelligent, thoughtful and dedicated followers of Jesus. And that tells us that brilliant, thoughtful and dedicated followers of Jesus can have different views on things that aren't crystal clear, aren't absolute.
[00:25:59] And so in that we want to be students of the Bible where we read and we have an opinion, but we want to hold that opinion lightly enough that we fellowship and love and care for those that disagree with us, because that's okay. There are going to be millions of people in heaven on both sides of the conversation, I promise you. And I can't wait to have that conversation then, because we'll actually kind of know the answer.
[00:26:27] So if I was to take this Genesis 1 thing and I was going to summarize it in a single thought, it would be this.
[00:26:34] Christians have not always agreed on how long God created, but Christians have always agreed on who created and why he created.
[00:26:47] Okay, pause over.
[00:26:50] So with all of that, what do we do? Where do we go? What is next?
[00:26:59] As we've talked about this series, Bob mentioned it last week as he was talking about the authority of Scripture.
[00:27:04] We are dealing with hard questions.
[00:27:08] Hard questions don't fit in a half an hour.
[00:27:11] They wouldn't be hard questions if they did. Right? And so our hope and objective is to engage the hard questions, take a step or two and then resource you and release you to investigate and pursue the things that interest you. If you're someone who comes in here and like me, that science faith thing was a challenge in my early faith years and even in my pre faith years, you might want to do a little bit more digging and looking.
[00:27:43] Others of you might go, I'm good.
[00:27:46] And that's fine, that's not a problem.
[00:27:49] But I want to give you three resources for those that want to take another step. The first one Bob mentioned last week is called how not to Read the Bible by Dan Kimball. It's a book. It's got a couple of chapters specifically devoted to the conversation around science and faith in that interaction.
[00:28:07] The second book that I want to recommend to you is one that had a place in my faith journey and it's called the Language of God by Francis Collins.
[00:28:18] Here's who Francis Collins is. He is a brilliant genetic physicist.
[00:28:24] I don't even know what that means, but that's what he is.
[00:28:28] He was hired by the US Government to lead a team of the elite scientists in the United States to map the human genome. That's your DNA.
[00:28:40] And just in case you're curious, how hard is it to map DNA? That can't be that hard. It's like in every single cell of my body. That's easy.
[00:28:47] Three million pieces of code has to be in the exact right order to make the DNA work.
[00:28:54] They map that.
[00:28:56] Can you imagine mapping 3 million destinations? I think even Google Maps would struggle with that.
[00:29:03] So this guy's brilliant. His faith story is incredible. He grew up around Christianity in a faith environment. He walked away from it in young adulthood. And as he dove deeper and deeper into his scientific research, he came back to faith. And he tells a lot of that story in that book.
[00:29:22] Now there are some of you sitting here who are like, why do you always make me read stuff? I don't want to read anything.
[00:29:30] I got your back.
[00:29:32] How about a YouTube video? Does that feel good?
[00:29:34] All right, YouTube video. Three scientists on the origins of everything.
[00:29:40] This is a great one hour video for those that don't want to read a whole book. And the conversation that is going on in this is, is three extremely crazy intelligent and accomplished scientific minds, guys in fields like organic chemistry and mathematics. Like, who would study that? But they did. These guys are having a conversation about obviously the origins of life and how does faith fit in into that and everything else.
[00:30:12] And they are really, really smart and they are really devoted followers of Jesus and they have a great conversation that I think would be helpful, in fact, if I was to just. Just make sure you keep going in the second half of that video. There's a man named James Tour who is an organic chemist, whatever that is. And he, he has some just incredibly insightful and compelling thoughts around this interaction between science and faith. And I found him especially to really hit home and resonate for me.
[00:30:46] Okay, so there's everything we've talked about, we've talked about using the right tool. We've Talked about Genesis 1.
[00:30:55] Wherever you land on all of those things, here's one message I really want you to hear.
[00:31:02] We want to be, as a faith community, people that engage the hard questions.
[00:31:07] We want to step in to that. We want to be a place that people outside the church would feel comfortable coming in and saying, I don't understand this. What about this?
[00:31:19] That we would be curious and listen and engage, and that at the end of the day, maybe we would develop relationships that would allow us to ask people the why questions that deep down they may not know they really need to answer, but you might be one to help them answer a why question and move forward in their steps of faith.
[00:31:45] That's the kind of place we want to be. That's why we want to engage in this conversation, and that's why we want to keep engaging on it going forward.
[00:31:53] Will you pray with me, Father? God, I am so thankful that you have brought us here today, that you have given us minds to think that you are a God who created reason and logic and science, that these are things that actually explore and reveal who you are, that your handwriting is written across this valley, this country, this universe.
[00:32:23] And science is a cool tool for us to get to read some of your mail.
[00:32:28] And I just pray, Lord, that as we engage as faithful followers of Jesus in and around things of science and faith, that we would do so with humility and open hands, that we would not be fearful, that we know you are the God who created all and you can handle tough questions.
[00:32:46] It's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen.
