The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [38]
“Let’s just take the historic Christian creed: ‘I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose again from the dead.’
“Well, Pontius Pilate is situated historically in Palestine in the first century. A claim is made that Jesus of Nazareth lived at the same time. An assertion is made that he rose from the dead. God is called the Creator of heaven and earth. You see, it’s inherent to the Christian faith to make claims about the real world. According to the Bible, God has revealed himself in time and space, and so Christianity—for good or ill—is going to intersect some of the factual claims of history and science. There’s either going to be conflict or agreement.
“To make NOMA work, its advocates have to water down science or faith, or both. Certainly Gould did—he said religion is just a matter of ethical teaching, comfort, or metaphysical beliefs about meaning. But Christianity certainly claims to be more than that.”
This particular statement about Gould seemed vague. I wanted to pin him down by demanding specifics. “Could you give me one concrete example of how Gould watered down Christianity to make NOMA work?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “In his book Rocks of Ages, Gould reduces the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to doubting Thomas to being merely ‘a moral tale.’ 10 This was necessary for Gould to do under the rules of NOMA because all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances come from a religious document—the Bible—and NOMA says religion must confine its claims to matters of morality and values. But the Bible clearly portrays Jesus’ appearances as being actual historical events. Christianity hinges on the conviction that they really occurred.
“NOMA may try to exclude this possibility by restricting religion to mere matters of morality, but the writers of the Bible did not see fit to limit their claims about God to the nonfactual domain that NOMA has allocated to religion. Now, there might be some religions that can fit comfortably with NOMA. But biblical Christianity—because it’s built not just on faith, but on facts—simply cannot.”
Law professor Phillip Johnson also has been strongly critical of the NOMA concept. “Stephen Jay Gould condescendingly offers to allow religious people to express their subjective opinions about morals, provided they don’t interfere with the authority of scientists to determine the ‘facts’—one of the facts being that God is merely a comforting myth,” he said. 11
“So,” I said to Meyer in summing up, “while much of science and biblical religion are concerned with different things, they clearly do have some overlapping territory.”
“Precisely. And when that happens, either they agree or disagree. The judgment of nineteenth-century historians, who were writing mainly out of an Enlightenment framework, was that where they did overlap, they invariably disagreed—and of the two domains, science was a more warranted system of belief. They believed conflict would continually grow between science and biblical religion.”
“What do you believe?” I asked.
“My judgment is quite different,” he said. “I believe that the testimony of science supports theism. While there will always be points of tension or unresolved conflict, the major developments in science in the past five decades have been running in a strongly theistic direction.”
He paused momentarily, then punched his conclusion: “Science, done right, points toward God.”
CREATIO EX NIHILO
Meyer’s perspective couldn’t be more different from the one I had when I was studying evolution in school. I had concluded that the persuasive naturalistic theories of Darwin eliminated any need for God. Meyer, however, was convinced that science