My recent and, likely, typical posts on this blog have obviously been with a bias toward Christianity. As to this blatant bias I hold no shame. The requirement I hold up for myself is truth. Bias may sway to one end or another, but bias is altogether a wholly different thing than truth, and the man who holds a bias and yet holds truth, that man is to be envied. I may not be that man but that is my goal.
As to the bent of writing, the astute mind will immediately recognize that these things we speak on are not about sides. There is no us and them. There is no religion/faith/belief on one side and science/reason/logic on another. The intelligent individual will realize that the Christian is not anti-science, as I have been labeled in the past and will certainly be labeled in the future. Christianity is not anti-science. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That truth is this: The Christian has learned that, as Chesterton put it, God is a truth teller and we have learned to give him the benefit of the doubt. As we grow in the faith we see that God tells us the truth of things. Not because he says so and that’s that, but because he says so and, behold, we find it out to have been true. This benefit of the doubt is key. We give God the benefit of the doubt. We see His Word say one thing and creation tell us another. Yet time and again, given time, we see that He was right all along and it just took some time for modern research to see it.
I will take one example. In the story of Jonah and his preaching to Ninevah, the Bible makes the city sound great. In the past hundred years scholars have said it couldn’t possibly have been very big at all. Yet archaeologists come along and find the foundations of that city and see that it was easily as big as written about. This is just one example and there are more, some larger and some smaller.
This, though, is the crux of the resistance of Christianity to modern thought that contradicts what we know the bible to say. We know the track record of the bible is to come out right in the end. Therefore we resist. We do not resist beyond all reason, though. Prove something, such as the earth orbiting around the sun, and it will be considered and we will understand our own misunderstanding of the bible and we will correct ourselves.
Christianity has, time and again, resisted and then accepted new ideas but there are some ideas which, no matter how much time passes, can not be proven and can not be accepted. I write on a number of these, including creation and evolution, origins, and more. It is critical to understand than when an idea is resisted and then later accepted it is not because it still contradicts the bible yet we accept it because it is the “truth.” In actuality, we realize our own misunderstanding of what the bible was saying and come to see the truth in light of another truth. This has not occurred with evolution, however. We do not yet see that evolution is proven nor that there is any possibility of the scriptures writing it and we simply lacked the understanding before. We also do not foresee this changing. Evolution is not proven and, as much as we look, the scriptures do not speak to it. In fact, the scriptures speak to the opposite of it. That is why it is resisted.
I hope it is clear to all that religion and science are not adverse. Science has its tools of proof. So too does religion. Each requires that a thing pass the test before it is accepted as truth. We must all hold up rationality instead of dogmas. We must all bridge divides instead of creating them. Any given side can be accused of these things.