Christianity and Science

Most Christians are a bit defensive when the latest developments in science are being celebrated, but Evangelicals often seem especially so. I’ve never worried much about any apparent contradictions between science and Scripture, since it seems pretty clear that the Bible was not given as a science text, and is bound to be misunderstood if treated as one. So it never occurred to me that thinking about the Bible in relationship to developments in science could actually be a spiritually positive thing, until I found the blog Undivided Looking.

The blog is run by Aron Wall, a postdoctoral researcher studying quantum gravity and black hole thermodynamics at UC Santa Barbara, and is not only the best internet resource on the relationship between physics and Scripture specifically, and science and religion generally, that I’ve yet come across, but also the best that dozens of others have come across, as comments on the blog show regularly. This is only the most recent of several memorable ones:

This site has quite literally been a Godsend to me.  I’ve always loved science but until about 5 years ago, I assumed you had put your brain on a shelf to be a christian.  No big bang, no creation, etc… I now look at science as learning about God, and He becomes more incredible to me every day!

It’s also a great read if you’re actually interested in the science; I’ve tried several introductions supposed to be helpful to the layman, most recently Peter Coles’s Very Short Introduction to Cosmology, but none of them were as helpful as Wall’s blog series on ‘Fundamental Reality’. Wall’s blog has several series of this sort, and I can also recommend ‘Did the Universe Begin?’ (start here, where there are links to all the preceding posts) and the still ongoing ‘God and Time’, first post here.

I’ve found that I need to set aside quite a bit of time, an hour or so, before tackling even a single post, but the result has sometimes been that I’ve understood not only some aspect of science, but some aspect of God’s word, for the first time. If you find the subject interesting, you’ll find the time well spent, and if you just want something to recommend to the next wise guy with a ‘science has disproved all that’, I don’t see how you could do better.