In the light of the paradigmatic anomalies of irreducible complexity, gene entropy, and the lack of transitional species in the fossil record, macroevolution has more problems as a theory regarding the origins of life than many allow.1
Along similar lines, it often is argued by materialists and atheists that Scripture cannot be truthful on the grounds that it contains supernatural events which, it is alleged, are intrinsically at variance with science and human reason. We have already seen in a previous chapter that this is an absurd argument. Science deals with temporal, finite causes which are observable and quantifiable. Miracles and other supernatural events occur because the supernatural God, who cannot be seen or limited, can transcend the laws of nature as He so chooses. Allowing that miraculous events have occurred in the past does not call into question the rational causal order of the universe. Rather, the entire point of a miracle is that it is an exception to the rule of imminent causation, thereby validating this natural causal order and the ability of the sciences to investigate it.
On another level, though, we should note that the atheist argument for the incompatibility of the Bible and science is ultimately self-contradictory. First, there is a growing body of historical evidence that Christianity and the Bible made the Scientific Revolution possible.2 Only by believing in a God who created the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) according to a rational plan could science work conceptually.3 Although the Greeks did engage in some science, by the Pax Romana classical science essentially had stalled.4 And science was possible for the Greeks only because their philosophy often posited a rational or divine principle underlying and organizing the chaotic matter of the universe (prime mover, demiurge, logos, etc.). Still, since at its deepest level nature remained chaotic, one could argue that science and rationality could go only so far in explaining it. Only a doctrine of creation ex nihilo as taught by the Bible, where God’s rationality determines nature all the way down to its deepest level, could provide a stable and consistent basis for science.
To be continued…..
Part 1 available here; Part 2 available here; Part 3 available here; and Part 5 available here
[1] See Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996); David Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Philip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).
[2] Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 121–200.
[3] Stark, For the Glory of God, 176–77.
[4] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67.
Adapted from Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 115-116.
Image from Richard Beck, “Creation Ex Nihilo,” Experimental Theology, April 23, 2019, http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2019/04/creation-ex-nihilo.html.