• Question: what do you believe in more science or Christianity

    Asked by 477evnb35 to Thomas, Thad, Emily, Adam on 13 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      Imagine that you go into your kitchen at home and the kettle is boiling. You ask ‘Why is the kettle boiling?’ and your dad says ‘Ah it’s because the kettle is turned on, which allows an electric current to flow into the kettle, which heats up a special part of the kettle, which in turns is heating up the water, and when the water gets really hot it starts to boil.’

      But your mum says ‘Don’t be silly, it’s boiling because I want a cup of tea!’

      Who is right? Who do you believe more? Your mum or your dad? Both the answers are true, they both answer the question and with both the answers you understand more than you would have done if you only asked one of your parents.

      In the same way, science and Christianity are two different ways to learn about the world around us, neither is more true or more right than the other. To get a complete understanding about the world, we need to collect as much evidence as possible. By taking what we know from both these things we can learn a lot more than we would by only listening to one of them!

    • Photo: Thomas Clements

      Thomas Clements answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      I don’t agree with Steph on this one I’m afraid. This is a very difficult topic to talk about in one post but I’ll give it a shot:

      To be a scientist the first step is asking the question. So in this example we want to know how a kettle boils water.

      If your dad gives a good example explaining how it works but your mother says it works just because she wants it to, which answer would satisfy you more?

      Scientists aren’t satisfied with just being told – because what happens if no one knows? We like to observe and record evidence. Then we try to create an experiment that can be repeated to prove that the kettle boiling isn’t a fluke or luck. So in this example, we would take the kettle apart and try to understand what the filament was made of and how the interaction between it and electricity made the water boil.

      When we were finished and we were satisfied that we know exactly how it works then we write up our findings and publish them. Other scientist could then replicate our experiment and check if we are right. If they didn’t agree, we can start a discussion and come up with more experiments to try and solve the mystery of how the kettle works.

      In religion, we are told to except that the kettle works because a force or spirit that can never be observed or experimentally tested wants it to work. Many faiths are based on very old texts that are anecdotal stories or are written by authors a long time after events or by people who weren’t even there and heard the stories. Many of the accounts that tell the same stories have inconsistencies and errors and because they are stories they can never be checked.

      Let me put it another way – if we fell out of a plane together would you trust a parachute, created by scientist who have tested the shape and type of material as well as experimented on it working with test after test – or would you trust in faith to break your fall?

      I would like to point out that there is nothing wrong with having faith in a spirit or god, but you use simple experiments everyday, for example, you know from trial and error not to cross a road without looking both ways. So when it comes to understanding the world; it’s much better to ask ‘why?’ and find out, rather than to rely on the answer that it was created by a single spirit – for which there is no evidence.

    • Photo: Adam Milligan

      Adam Milligan answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      There is no need to choose and, as Stephanie has said, they both explain the world around us – one tells us why and one tells us how!

      As Christians, there are two ways we have learnt of God’s greatness: through “Special Revelation” (where God has revealed himself in special ways, such as through the Bible) and through “Natural Revelation” (where God has revealed himself through what he has created in nature), and it is through using science that we get to really understand nature – we learn how amazingly complex things are, and what processes (such as evolution) that God has used to bring these things into the world!

      It is also important to know that science cannot tell us everything. It can only study things that are controlled by the laws of nature, and anything that does not obey these laws cannot be tested by science! So, as God is not controlled by the laws of nature he cannot be studied by science – which is why Christianity is a ‘faith’ as we put our faith in it being true but we cannot test it with science!

      There are whole teams of people working to learn more about things in the Universe that cannot be explained by science (such as philosophy!) so if you told them what they do is nonsense because it’s not scientific I don’t think they’d like that very much!

      Some of the world’s greatest scientists have been Christian including a guy called Francis Bacon who pretty much invented science, and in response to Thomas’s answer, you will never have to choose between an obvious life-saving thing (like a parachute) and faith because God made us smart!

      And as for the rest of Thomas’s answer – there are thousands of examples of old bits of text from different people that all record Jesus’s existence and teachings (and some were written almost 2,000 years ago) with very little difference between them, while the records of some of the world’s most important scientists and philosophers (like Aristotle, Plato and Pliny) exist as only a handful of copies!

      So, I believe in Christianity and science equally!

    • Photo: Thaddeus Aid

      Thaddeus Aid answered on 13 Mar 2015:


      Hi!

      Well, I’m not a Christian so it isn’t too much of a problem for me. I am what is called a Humanist. I believe that morality and ethics (what we think are right and wrong) are best learned from human compassion and empathy. The world would be a much better place if everyone really worked at trying to get along and be better friends to each other.

      On the question of Christianity and science. There isn’t any real trouble between science and Christianity if you think that God created the universe and science works to discover how God did it. Yes there can be some problems between the Bible and some parts of science, if you believe that the Bible is 100% fact instead of a story that describes man’s place in the world. But if you think that the Bible was written by people that loved God and were trying to understand their place in the universe and maybe they got some of it incorrect. But can there really be a problem between God and science? I don’t think so.

      Science is the process of learning about how the universe works. If God made the universe then this is how he intended it to work. So by learning about science you are learning about the world that God made. By becoming a scientist you are increasing the understanding of God’s universe.

      You don’t need to choose between Christianity and God if you think that science is just discovering things about God’s universe. The authors of the Bible didn’t know about dinosaurs or the Big Bang, but we do and we understand more about the world than the authors of the Bible did.

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