The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [34]
I knew I needed to get some answers to those questions before I could go any further. I pulled the blanket up to my neck and decided to get some sleep. Tomorrow, I’d be planning another journey.
FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE
More Resources on This Topic
Denton, Michael. Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1986.
Hanegraaff, Hank. The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution. Nashville: Word, 1998.
Johnson, Phillip. Darwin on Trial. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, second edition, 1993.
Wells, Jonathan. Icons of Evolution. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2000.
4
WHERE SCIENCE MEETS FAITH
I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for an intelligent person to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
Physicist Steven Weinberg, 1
Science and religion . . . are friends, not foes, in the common quest for knowledge. Some people may find this surprising, for there’s a feeling throughout our society that religious belief is outmoded, or downright impossible, in a scientific age. I don’t agree. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that if people in this so-called “scientific age” knew a bit more about science than many of them actually do, they’d find it easier to share my view.
Physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne 2
Allan Rex Sandage, the greatest observational cosmologist in the world—who has deciphered the secrets of the stars, plumbed the mysteries of quasars, revealed the age of globular clusters, pinpointed the distances of remote galaxies, and quantified the universe’s expansion through his work at the Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories—prepared to step onto the platform at a conference in Dallas.
Few scientists are as widely respected as this one-time protégé to legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble. Sandage has been showered with prestigious honors from the American Astronomical Society, the Swiss Physical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, receiving astronomy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The New York Times dubbed him the “Grand Old Man of Cosmology.”
As he approached the stage at this 1985 conference on science and religion, there seemed to be little doubt where he would sit. The discussion would be about the origin of the universe, and the panel would be divided among those scientists who believed in God and those who didn’t, with each viewpoint having its own side of the stage.
Many of the attendees probably knew that the ethnically Jewish Sandage had been a virtual atheist even as a child. Many others undoubtedly believed that a scientist of his stature must surely be skeptical about God. As Newsweek put it, “The more deeply scientists see into the secrets of the universe, you’d expect, the more God would fade away from their hearts and minds.” 3 So Sandage’s seat among the doubters was a given.
Then the unexpected happened. Sandage set the room abuzz by turning and taking a chair among the theists. Even more dazzling, in the context of a talk about the Big Bang and its philosophical implications, he disclosed publicly that he had decided to become a Christian at age fifty.
The Big Bang, he told the rapt audience, was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it. Science had taken us to the First Event, but it can’t take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed to the need for some kind of transcendence.
“It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science,