In the last article I shared, I explored the idea that there are different ways of understanding the world. I quoted Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science and the scientific method, who said this:
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called nature.
The Bible acknowledges two books in Psalm 19. The first half of the psalm celebrates the book of the natural world: “The heavens declare the glory of God…” Nature speaks – it tells a story. The second half celebrates God’s revelation in scripture: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul…”
Both nature and Scripture work together to give us a richer, deeper, fuller understanding of reality. If God has written both books, then of course we can expect that they will tell a complete and consistent story.
When you watch a movie, the story comes to you in two ways – audio and visual. If you only listen to the audio track you can guess at the full story, and you might do a pretty good job, but you’ll also miss a whole lot. And if you only watch the visuals without the sound you’ll only get part of the story. But when you see and hear both together, the story will make more sense, and the two sides won’t conflict with each other but work together.
So why are the two books often thought to be in conflict?
About five hundred years ago, the astronomer Galileo challenged treasured interpretations of his day. Scholars in those times were invested in the ancient Greek model of the solar system, in which Earth was fixed at the centre, and the sun and the planets orbited around it. This was also affirmed by the Church, because they interpreted certain passages in the Bible to back up this claim – passages such as Psalm 93: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” So they interpreted it as saying that the earth doesn’t move – it doesn’t orbit.
But Galileo, a scientist and a Christian, looked up through his telescope at the heavens and made amazing discoveries which challenged this belief. He argued that Earth wasn’t at the centre of the solar system. The sun was at the centre, and Earth orbited around the sun. The Church at the time didn’t approve of lay people deciding for themselves what Scripture meant, so things went pear shaped. Then when Galileo wrote a book that basically insulted the Pope, calling him a simpleton, he was tried, convicted and forced to renounce his scientific claims that Earth moves through space. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
This event is often cited as an example of why science and faith are incompatible. But Galileo never saw it that way. In fact, Galileo wholeheartedly believed that God was the author of two books – Scripture and nature. He argued that the intent of Scripture is not to teach astronomy. He said, citing Cardinal Baronius, “The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
God does not tell us one story in nature and a contradictory story in Scripture. There is a single story. If science and Scripture appear to disagree, it is a mistake to choose science over Scripture or Scripture over science. Instead, we hold onto both, and test our human interpretation.
I’ll come back to Galileo, but first let me lay out some principles of what makes for good science and good biblical interpretation.
Science is a bit like detective work. Detectives look for different kinds of evidence – fingerprints, DNA, clothing fibres, eyewitnesses in order to deduce the story of what happened. In the same way, scientists pursue many kinds of evidence in nature in order to piece together a coherent story about the history of the universe. These scientific clues are called lines of evidence. While new scientific theories might have one or two lines of evidence, confidence grows as more and more lines are discovered, reinforcing each other and filling in the pieces of the story.
Like detective work, science uses a range of different techniques for gathering and analysing data: observation, experiments, surveys, case studies, numerical methods and more. The data is collected, analysed and interpreted.
So, like science uses methods to work out what nature is telling, biblical scholars have developed methods to help work out what Scripture is saying.
One important method to use is the process of looking at Scripture as a whole. There’s always a risk of taking a single passage out of context, so we need to consider how each passage fits with the Bible’s overall flow, and coheres with the whole Bible. When one part of Scripture seems to conflict with another part, we can look at the whole to better interpret each part, and so get a better understanding of each passage.
Another method is to get into the mind of the author, asking questions like, “Who was the original audience?” and “What was the original intent?” To work that out, we need to step back into the culture and customs of the day, and also take the historical context into account.
It’s also important to be mindful of the genre of scripture. The Bible has many different genres – from historical accounts to poems and prophesies. If an author uses poetry, for instance, we don’t interpret their words literally, but look for the deeper meaning behind the text.
Let’s return to Galileo, and the Church’s interpretation of Psalm 93’s statement that “the world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” It took a while, centuries in fact, after multiple lines of scientific evidence showed that Earth does move, for the Church to reconsider these passages. Nowadays, we recognise that the Psalms are poetry, in which their authors masterfully use metaphors and symbolism. These poems invite us into an experience in which we can ponder ideas slowly and from many angles. Rather than taking these words literally, scholars have come to appreciate that this psalm is speaking about the firmness of God’s throne and sovereignty – not about Earth being in a fixed position in space.
Let’s look at another example. Recently, my sister Sarah sent me an email which makes for a pretty good case study. This is what she said:
Someone asked me this question and I’d really like to answer them intelligently… Do you think the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, as the science would suggest, or 6,000 years old, as some biblical clock theories posit? The person has specifically mentioned they have an issue with science and faith. They think it clashes.
A few things going on here. The person asking believes that science and faith are in conflict. They interpret the biblical genealogies as a literal account of all the people that existed, which sum up to suggest that Earth is about 6,000 years old, whereas science suggests that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
Do the stories of nature and Scripture disagree, or is this person interpreting nature or Scripture incorrectly?
Scientists who’ve done detective work on the age of Earth have discovered excellent lines of evidence to support a much larger number than 6,000 years! Geologists have found annual layers in ice that are easily counted to many tens of thousands of years old, and when combined with radio isotope dating, we find hundreds of thousands of years of ice layers! And radiometric dating indicates the oldest rocks in our solar system to be 4.5 billion years old! It’s difficult to refute what scientific evidence is saying about the story of nature.
Were the authors of the genealogies intending to tell us the age of Earth or were they saying something else? Let’s dig deeper and test this particular interpretation. This interpretation is a literal reading of the genealogies. It was first given by Bishop Ussher, who back in the seventeenth century added up all the genealogies and arrived at the conclusion that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. He even specified the month and the day! But, like the Church in Galileo’s situation, he didn’t employ good methods. He didn’t attempt to get into the mind of the original authors or ask what they intended to communicate.
When we dig deeper, we discover that in historical Hebrew culture, genealogies served to create a foundation for families in community, by connecting them to specific ancestors. Similar to the Māori practice of whakapapa, reciting genealogies reminded families of how significant ancestors have used their lives and overcome challenges. Genealogies do not necessarily include every generation but focus on important ancestors, enabling people to find their place within a story that provides identity and meaning.
In the Bible, the authors of Genesis script the whakapapa of the heavens and the earth, and then of the peoples of the earth, conveying the message that human beings are precious, wonderfully created in God’s image to be a blessing in the world.
Biblical genealogies were about identity. They were never meant for tallying up the age of Earth and therefore do not conflict with scientific evidence for Earth being 4.5 billion years old. Rather than competing, the two books function together to provide a deeper, richer, more complete understanding of the world and our place within it than either would on its own. If there appears to be a contradiction, we don’t choose Scripture over the science, or vice versa, but dig deeper to discover what might have gone wrong in our interpretation.
We love the idea of proof or certainty. There is something about being human that draws us to the clear, simple, still, waters of truth which leaves no room for doubt. But you won’t find certainty in science. And outside of mathematics and logic, there is no proof. Scientific theories deemed to be the “best explanation” for one thing or another often change – sometimes quite radically – and there can be enormously complex issues with devising what the best explanation of a given set of data actually is. In other words, what we believe through science is, to a certain degree, based on faith. There may be good reason to trust a particular scientific theory, but there is no absolute certainty that it is true. You always need some degree of faith.
In my last article I shared this quote by Peter Atkins:
Religious knowledge is probably the paradigm of unreliability because it’s based on sentiment, on authority and on wishful thinking… Scientific knowledge is the only way of acquiring reliable knowledge because it’s evidence based and it’s consensus based.
He speaks of religious faith as faith without evidence, and he speaks of science as the only way of acquiring reliable knowledge. So Atkins is making two mistakes. I explained previously, that science doesn’t claim to be the only way to obtain reliable knowledge. It is illogical to make this suggestion on the basis of science. But more than that, Atkins misrepresents Christianity. The Christian faith is not based on wishful thinking. Like science, faith in Jesus - who he claimed to be, his life, his death and resurrection is based on astounding evidence.
Many of the world’s greatest minds have been drawn to Christianity by the evidence – and also because it makes sense of the world and it makes sense of the successes of the natural sciences.
C.S. Lewis, one of those great minds, has inscribed on his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey the words:
Lewis could see compelling evidence for the Christian faith and the risen Son. And Lewis came to believe in Christ realising Christianity made imaginative and rational sense, and that it offered a coherent account of all things including the sciences. It gave him a lens that brought them into focus – a source of illumination that allowed him to see more clearly than he otherwise might.
The book of God brings to life the book of nature. And the book of nature declares the glory of the one who has given us life.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
We have invited these writers to share their experiences, ideas and opinions in the hope that these will provoke thought, challenge you to go deeper and inspire you to put your faith into action. These articles should not be taken as the official view of the Nelson Diocese on any particular matter.
In the last article I shared, I explored the idea that there are different ways of understanding the world. I quoted Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science and the scientific method, who said this:
God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely Scripture. But he has written a second book called nature.
The Bible acknowledges two books in Psalm 19. The first half of the psalm celebrates the book of the natural world: “The heavens declare the glory of God…” Nature speaks – it tells a story. The second half celebrates God’s revelation in scripture: “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul…”
Both nature and Scripture work together to give us a richer, deeper, fuller understanding of reality. If God has written both books, then of course we can expect that they will tell a complete and consistent story.
When you watch a movie, the story comes to you in two ways – audio and visual. If you only listen to the audio track you can guess at the full story, and you might do a pretty good job, but you’ll also miss a whole lot. And if you only watch the visuals without the sound you’ll only get part of the story. But when you see and hear both together, the story will make more sense, and the two sides won’t conflict with each other but work together.
So why are the two books often thought to be in conflict?
About five hundred years ago, the astronomer Galileo challenged treasured interpretations of his day. Scholars in those times were invested in the ancient Greek model of the solar system, in which Earth was fixed at the centre, and the sun and the planets orbited around it. This was also affirmed by the Church, because they interpreted certain passages in the Bible to back up this claim – passages such as Psalm 93: “The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” So they interpreted it as saying that the earth doesn’t move – it doesn’t orbit.
But Galileo, a scientist and a Christian, looked up through his telescope at the heavens and made amazing discoveries which challenged this belief. He argued that Earth wasn’t at the centre of the solar system. The sun was at the centre, and Earth orbited around the sun. The Church at the time didn’t approve of lay people deciding for themselves what Scripture meant, so things went pear shaped. Then when Galileo wrote a book that basically insulted the Pope, calling him a simpleton, he was tried, convicted and forced to renounce his scientific claims that Earth moves through space. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
This event is often cited as an example of why science and faith are incompatible. But Galileo never saw it that way. In fact, Galileo wholeheartedly believed that God was the author of two books – Scripture and nature. He argued that the intent of Scripture is not to teach astronomy. He said, citing Cardinal Baronius, “The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.”
God does not tell us one story in nature and a contradictory story in Scripture. There is a single story. If science and Scripture appear to disagree, it is a mistake to choose science over Scripture or Scripture over science. Instead, we hold onto both, and test our human interpretation.
I’ll come back to Galileo, but first let me lay out some principles of what makes for good science and good biblical interpretation.
Science is a bit like detective work. Detectives look for different kinds of evidence – fingerprints, DNA, clothing fibres, eyewitnesses in order to deduce the story of what happened. In the same way, scientists pursue many kinds of evidence in nature in order to piece together a coherent story about the history of the universe. These scientific clues are called lines of evidence. While new scientific theories might have one or two lines of evidence, confidence grows as more and more lines are discovered, reinforcing each other and filling in the pieces of the story.
Like detective work, science uses a range of different techniques for gathering and analysing data: observation, experiments, surveys, case studies, numerical methods and more. The data is collected, analysed and interpreted.
So, like science uses methods to work out what nature is telling, biblical scholars have developed methods to help work out what Scripture is saying.
One important method to use is the process of looking at Scripture as a whole. There’s always a risk of taking a single passage out of context, so we need to consider how each passage fits with the Bible’s overall flow, and coheres with the whole Bible. When one part of Scripture seems to conflict with another part, we can look at the whole to better interpret each part, and so get a better understanding of each passage.
Another method is to get into the mind of the author, asking questions like, “Who was the original audience?” and “What was the original intent?” To work that out, we need to step back into the culture and customs of the day, and also take the historical context into account.
It’s also important to be mindful of the genre of scripture. The Bible has many different genres – from historical accounts to poems and prophesies. If an author uses poetry, for instance, we don’t interpret their words literally, but look for the deeper meaning behind the text.
Let’s return to Galileo, and the Church’s interpretation of Psalm 93’s statement that “the world is firmly established; it cannot be moved.” It took a while, centuries in fact, after multiple lines of scientific evidence showed that Earth does move, for the Church to reconsider these passages. Nowadays, we recognise that the Psalms are poetry, in which their authors masterfully use metaphors and symbolism. These poems invite us into an experience in which we can ponder ideas slowly and from many angles. Rather than taking these words literally, scholars have come to appreciate that this psalm is speaking about the firmness of God’s throne and sovereignty – not about Earth being in a fixed position in space.
Let’s look at another example. Recently, my sister Sarah sent me an email which makes for a pretty good case study. This is what she said:
Someone asked me this question and I’d really like to answer them intelligently… Do you think the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, as the science would suggest, or 6,000 years old, as some biblical clock theories posit? The person has specifically mentioned they have an issue with science and faith. They think it clashes.
A few things going on here. The person asking believes that science and faith are in conflict. They interpret the biblical genealogies as a literal account of all the people that existed, which sum up to suggest that Earth is about 6,000 years old, whereas science suggests that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
Do the stories of nature and Scripture disagree, or is this person interpreting nature or Scripture incorrectly?
Scientists who’ve done detective work on the age of Earth have discovered excellent lines of evidence to support a much larger number than 6,000 years! Geologists have found annual layers in ice that are easily counted to many tens of thousands of years old, and when combined with radio isotope dating, we find hundreds of thousands of years of ice layers! And radiometric dating indicates the oldest rocks in our solar system to be 4.5 billion years old! It’s difficult to refute what scientific evidence is saying about the story of nature.
Were the authors of the genealogies intending to tell us the age of Earth or were they saying something else? Let’s dig deeper and test this particular interpretation. This interpretation is a literal reading of the genealogies. It was first given by Bishop Ussher, who back in the seventeenth century added up all the genealogies and arrived at the conclusion that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. He even specified the month and the day! But, like the Church in Galileo’s situation, he didn’t employ good methods. He didn’t attempt to get into the mind of the original authors or ask what they intended to communicate.
When we dig deeper, we discover that in historical Hebrew culture, genealogies served to create a foundation for families in community, by connecting them to specific ancestors. Similar to the Māori practice of whakapapa, reciting genealogies reminded families of how significant ancestors have used their lives and overcome challenges. Genealogies do not necessarily include every generation but focus on important ancestors, enabling people to find their place within a story that provides identity and meaning.
In the Bible, the authors of Genesis script the whakapapa of the heavens and the earth, and then of the peoples of the earth, conveying the message that human beings are precious, wonderfully created in God’s image to be a blessing in the world.
Biblical genealogies were about identity. They were never meant for tallying up the age of Earth and therefore do not conflict with scientific evidence for Earth being 4.5 billion years old. Rather than competing, the two books function together to provide a deeper, richer, more complete understanding of the world and our place within it than either would on its own. If there appears to be a contradiction, we don’t choose Scripture over the science, or vice versa, but dig deeper to discover what might have gone wrong in our interpretation.
We love the idea of proof or certainty. There is something about being human that draws us to the clear, simple, still, waters of truth which leaves no room for doubt. But you won’t find certainty in science. And outside of mathematics and logic, there is no proof. Scientific theories deemed to be the “best explanation” for one thing or another often change – sometimes quite radically – and there can be enormously complex issues with devising what the best explanation of a given set of data actually is. In other words, what we believe through science is, to a certain degree, based on faith. There may be good reason to trust a particular scientific theory, but there is no absolute certainty that it is true. You always need some degree of faith.
In my last article I shared this quote by Peter Atkins:
Religious knowledge is probably the paradigm of unreliability because it’s based on sentiment, on authority and on wishful thinking… Scientific knowledge is the only way of acquiring reliable knowledge because it’s evidence based and it’s consensus based.
He speaks of religious faith as faith without evidence, and he speaks of science as the only way of acquiring reliable knowledge. So Atkins is making two mistakes. I explained previously, that science doesn’t claim to be the only way to obtain reliable knowledge. It is illogical to make this suggestion on the basis of science. But more than that, Atkins misrepresents Christianity. The Christian faith is not based on wishful thinking. Like science, faith in Jesus - who he claimed to be, his life, his death and resurrection is based on astounding evidence.
Many of the world’s greatest minds have been drawn to Christianity by the evidence – and also because it makes sense of the world and it makes sense of the successes of the natural sciences.
C.S. Lewis, one of those great minds, has inscribed on his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey the words:
Lewis could see compelling evidence for the Christian faith and the risen Son. And Lewis came to believe in Christ realising Christianity made imaginative and rational sense, and that it offered a coherent account of all things including the sciences. It gave him a lens that brought them into focus – a source of illumination that allowed him to see more clearly than he otherwise might.
The book of God brings to life the book of nature. And the book of nature declares the glory of the one who has given us life.
Check out other articles in the
series below.
More articles in the
series are to come.
