As we prepare to read and listen to the proclamation of God's word, let's pray for the illumination of the Holy Spirit using the prayer on the screen and in the bulletin. Praying aloud together, these words. Eternal Father, who has spoken in various times and in various ways to your people in the past, but in these last days in your Son, the incarnate Word, we pray that you will open the mouth of your servant to proclaim that Word in the power of the Spirit And we pray that this same spirit will open the hearts of its hearers here assembled to receive your holy gospel and write on their hearts your holy law, even as you have promised. All of this, gracious Father, we ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Our scripture lesson this morning is from Acts chapter 17 verses 16 through 34. Acts 17 beginning at verse 16. We're continuing an apologetics series that we have been preaching our evening services. If you've missed those sermons you can find them on our website, the previous sermons in that series. As we encounter this morning another objection to the Christian faith, We hear how Paul, speaking to the philosophers in Athens on Mars Hill, brings in the truth of creation in a way that is central to understanding all of life, as we wrestle with this question, can science and faith be reconciled? We hear how the Apostle Paul brings in creation into his gospel presentation, his defense of the faith. So listen from Acts 17. Paul here is waiting for his colleagues, Timothy and Silas, that's the them in verse 16. As he's waiting, he makes use of his time and we'll listen to how he does that. Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and other devout persons. and in the marketplace every day with those who happen to be there. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers also conversed with him and said to him, And some said, rather, what does this babbler wish to say? Others said he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know, therefore, what these things mean. Now all the Athenians and foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, to the unknown God. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place. that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being. As even some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance got overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. And of this, he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, but others said, we will hear you again about this. So Paul went out from their midst, but some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius, the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. Amen. Well, friends, statistics indicate that scientists are three times less likely to attend weekly religious services than non-scientists. Less than 10% of American scientists believe in a personal God. To atheist Richard Dawkins, these statistics prove, quote, that the more intelligent, rational, and scientifically minded you are, the less you will be able to believe in God. Is he right? Does science favor unbelief? And is it true, perhaps as a corollary, that Christians must reject science? Is science another religion that believers must separate from in order to stay true to God? Can science and faith be reconciled? That's the question we're wrestling with this morning. And as we wrestle with these questions, we need to remember that both faith and science depend on revelation. God reveals himself in scripture, and he reveals himself in nature. Both special and general revelation form a coherent Testimony God in other words doesn't send mixed messages one message in his word and one message in his world apparent inconsistencies indicate not God's failure to reveal himself, but our failure to rightly read God and so there's the The presupposition that we begin with in wrestling with this question is that both believers and unbelievers must take seriously God's revelation in nature and in Scripture. Now, to develop a biblical relationship or a biblical understanding of the relationship between faith and science, we might ask three questions. The first question, and you're welcome if you have the handout to follow along. If you didn't grab a handout, you can grab it on the way out to perhaps remind yourself of what we've focused on this morning. But the outline is there. First question in that outline is this, has evolution disproved creation? Has evolution disproved creationism? All right, so backing up a minute from that question, Scripture says that God made all forms of life according to their kinds. And so to bring that into the discussion, we might say that in the beginning, humans and apes were distinct. They've always been distinct. God made humans according to their kind, apes according to their kind, everything according to its kind. Things did not have a common ancestor from which all life evolved. And in fact, this truth, as you know from the first words of the Bible, is foundational, right? And it's foundational not only to sort of a general understanding of a Christian worldview or a theistic worldview, it is foundational to the gospel. As we read in Acts chapter 17, Paul proclaimed God to the Athenian philosophers like this. I'll summarize some of what Paul said here. But he says this, the God who made the world and everything in it and made from one man every nation of mankind to live on the face of the earth has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness. And so Paul says, repent. The times of ignorance God has overlooked. And so here's what Paul is saying. The God who made the world has the right to judge the world. The God who made the world has the right to judge the world. So here's our question that we're considering this morning. What if the world has no maker? What if the world has no maker? Evolution provides a story of humanity independent of a creator. A story of humanity, a theory of humanity independent of a creator. Life as we know it, the theory says, evolved through natural selection from a common source. And so, Thoughtful people, it is claimed, should reject the myth of creation along with God's claim on our lives now that a scientifically credible theory has taken its place. We see the dilemma here, we see the conflict. And in fact, evolution, as you may know, is so fiercely defended that you cannot object to it and remain credible in the scientific community. Richard Dawkins, prominent atheist scientist, said this. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane. Now those aren't great options, are they? Ignorant, stupid, or insane. He said it's absolutely safe to say that such a person who rejects evolution is one of those three, really all the same. Those are strong words. Strong enough, as I'll be suggesting in a moment, to suggest that perhaps evolution is more a religion than anything. But evolution fails, despite those strong claims, to answer simple questions. I'll reflect on just a few of them. And of course, there's much that you could do to read up on these things if you'd like to. One question though is this, where are the transitional fossils? Where are the transitional fossils? If species evolve from a common source, we would expect to find fossils of species in transition. In other words, the fossil record should show a whole spectrum of species that don't exist now, but did, and were in transition from one to the other. For example, we should find fossil records of whatever animal was evolving into an ape. But there aren't any. And that's not something that just creationists say. That's common knowledge, at least in the scientific community. One prominent Harvard professor, atheist, wrote this. The extreme rarity, probably putting it charitably, the extreme rarity of transitional fossils forms, rather, in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology. So among those who study old things, there's a trade secret that others of us shouldn't know. And that is that there aren't fossil records of transitional creatures. The author goes on to say the evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have very little data. The rest is inference, not the evidence of fossils. Now, it's not a creationist saying that. That's a Harvard professor who is an atheist. So where are the transitional fossils? Simple question, but unanswerable. Number two, why, we ask, must similarities between creatures suggest evolution? And so we're told, well, You know, look, it's so obvious you've got humans and you've got apes and other creatures like them who look similar, have similar features, and so they must have come from a common ancestor because they've got lingering traits of one another. But as one apologist points out, similarities point not to common ancestry, but to a common creator. As an artist's various paintings resemble each other, so God's various works resemble one another. You might say, well, that's a very, you know, even as a non-creationist, you might say, well, that's a very plausible answer. But evolutionists refuse to accept this explanation. It can't be that there's a common creator. It must be common ancestry. And then there are deeper questions. Where did the first building blocks of life come from? How does life emerge from non-life? Given the law of entropy, that all things are falling apart, that things tend to wear down and decrease in quality over time, how did order emerge from chaos and refine itself to the point that we are today? And how does a purely material universe account for souls, which all but the most stubborn people acknowledge we have? We are not just matter in motion. And almost everybody would acknowledge that, though with some inconsistency to their worldview. So the claim that science has made religion obsolete, that science has made religion obsolete, and specifically that evolution has made The Christian religion obsolete is in fact a hangover from an age in which scientists knew much less about the complexity of life. And so what seemed in an age in which you could see less deeply into cells and less deeply into the universe that Darwin's theory of evolution comes along and it's like, yes, this is what we've been waiting for, a credible explanation for why the universe wasn't made by God. may have seemed credible in an age in which the complexity of life was actually much less well-known than it is today. Evolution, we should understand, is in fact a doctrine pretending to be a theory. It's a doctrine pretending to be a theory. That's why it's defended with such tenacity. One doesn't defend theories with that kind of stubborn, rude tenacity, as we heard from Dawkins. We believe, because the Bible teaches us to believe, that humans are incurably religious. You can't not be religious. We are all worshipers. And so as Michael Kruger points out, for many, Darwinism is an emergency replacement religion for the many troubled souls who need one. It's something to believe in. It answers, or at least attempts to answer the big questions of origin and trajectory and meaning and value, but with inferior answers. It's an emergency replacement religion for those who need one. But the God who made the heavens and the earth has revealed everything we need to know about his work of creation. And so in answer to the question, Evolution has not disproved creationism. It is instead a system of faith that mishandles the given data. Which may bring us to another question, not so much specifically about evolution, but about miracles in general. Are miracles impossible? Are miracles impossible? And again, starting out with the Bible, You don't have to read very far to recognize that the Bible is filled with miracles. Filled with miracles. Things that most of us have never seen. Things that seem to contradict nature's laws. And in fact, the miracles in the Bible are not incidental to the Bible's message. So we would, I'm sure, all agree with this, but Thomas Jefferson, for example, cutting out miracles from the Bible and anything supernatural and saying, well, we still have basically what God wanted us to have, is just not accurate, right? The miracles and the supernatural things in the Bible are not incidental to the Bible's message. They're central to the Bible's message. In fact, Jesus, in John chapter 10, urged skeptics to believe in him because his miracles proved that God the Father is in him and that he is in the Father. So Jesus says to his critics, if you don't believe in me sort of directly because of my words, believe in the things that I'm doing. Allow the things that I'm doing to make certain to you that God is doing these things through me. When John the Baptist wondered whether Jesus was the Christ, Jesus' answer was essentially, look at the miracles that I'm doing. He gave the blind sight, he made the lame walk, he healed lepers, he made the deaf hear, he raised the dead back to life. Jesus says, go tell John these things in Matthew chapter 11. Miracles, And particularly Jesus' miracles testify to the coming of God's kingdom. Matthew 12 verse 28, Jesus says, if these miracles, if I do these miracles, if I'm casting out demons, then know for certain the kingdom of God has come to you. So miracles are not incidental to the Bible's message. And so if modern science could disprove miracles, much of the Bible would be discredited. And then, of course, who could trust any of the Bible if the miraculous parts are not accurate? And so we need to understand that the issue of miracles is really a linchpin in the criticism of the Christian faith from the perspective of an atheist. So how do we respond to that? I think probably the simplest and really most biblical way to respond to this is to recognize that arguments against miracles are really just circular reasoning. Sort of like if somebody said, you must obey the law because it's illegal to break the law, right? You'd say, well, you didn't prove anything. You just sort of said the same thing that you've, you know, you've proved the same thing that you set out to prove. Miracles in the Bible couldn't have happened, right? Because miracles don't happen. That really is largely the argument of critics of scripture. The miracles in the Bible couldn't have happened because miracles don't happen. And hopefully we would recognize that with no, perhaps, formal training in rhetoric or logic and say, that's just circular reasoning. You're asserting the thing that you've been asked to prove. Remember though, that worldviews, the way we look at the world, are like sieves. They let pass what they were designed to let pass. And so critics disbelieve miracles not because they have examined all the evidence, but because their worldview disallows miracles. Their worldview, their sieve is constructed in such a way that miracles can't fit through. The worldview isn't designed for miracles to fit through. So we need to understand that a closed universe where there is no God who works sometimes in ordinary ways, sometimes in extraordinary ways, a closed universe is basic to a naturalistic worldview. So miracles can't happen. The miracles in the Bible must be fabricated because the universe is closed, there is no God. God can't do miracles because there is no God. Well, that's circular reasoning. There cannot be, so you see, you hear really an assertion of the heart. in this criticism of biblical miracles. There's an assertion of the heart being made here, and that is this, there cannot be a God who is sovereign over nature and therefore sovereign over me. That's the appeal of the heart from someone who would deny miracles. Naturalists then are guilty of the very thing they criticize, being closed-minded, being unwilling to examine the data given to us in genuine revelation. And in fact, friends, this is how Paul defended the most important miracle. In 1 Corinthians 15, also in Acts chapter 17, here's what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15. He says, of course Christ did not rise if the dead do not rise. Of course miracles don't happen, this miracle didn't happen if no miracles happen. But he goes on to say that Christ's resurrection is, in fact, evidence that the dead do rise. It's true that if there are no resurrections, then Christ did not rise. But if Christ arose, then resurrections happen. And therefore, as Paul says in Acts chapter 26 verse eight, he doesn't say this, but he hints at this, resurrections are not incredible. He asks the question, why should it be thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead? If resurrections happen, if Christ has been raised, then it's no longer incredible, but credible. Scripture's central argument for believing in God is the miracle of the resurrection. And so if we say miracles can't happen, we're saying that Christ has not been raised. But this is what Paul says in Acts chapter 17, which we read. He says that God created the heavens and the earth, he created a race of people from one person, and he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. Okay, how do we know that all of that's true? How do we know that we must repent of our sins and put our trust in this person, this Jesus Christ? How do we know? Show me something, give me some data. And of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. The assurance is the miracle of the resurrection. This is how the word of God handles the resurrection of Jesus not something that we believe in despite the fact that miracles can't happen. But as evidence that God is in control of the world. Listen. Scripture foretold that Christ would rise from the dead, right? Psalm 16. So this is not, and in many other places, this is not something that the apostles made up afterward. This is part of the Old Testament's message of the rule of God, that Christ would come, he'll die, he'll be raised from the dead, Isaiah 53 and elsewhere. His death, remember, in a crowded city, Acts 26, verse 26, Paul says to Agrippa, you know, this thing didn't happen in a corner. Everybody knows that Jesus died, right? And remember, it was certified by a Roman official, right? Pilate gave permission to the disciples of Jesus to take the dead body of Jesus and bury it in a tomb. And the resurrected Christ appeared to hundreds of people, most of whom were still alive when the claims of the resurrection were published in the Christian scriptures. And that's very important. What Paul is saying is, look, half the people to whom Jesus appeared are still alive. If this was a hoax, you'd find people who could say this was a hoax. But most of the people who had seen Jesus alive were still alive themselves. And so what Paul is saying to us, he's saying to the men at Mars Hill, and what scripture tells to us, really from beginning to end, is that we can know that miracles happen because Christ is risen. We don't start from the question of can miracles happen, to determine if Christ has been raised or not. We start from the answer that Christ is raised. Hallelujah. Miracles happen. God has created the heavens and the earth. He will judge all people according to Jesus. Now that brings us to a final question, more of a wrap-up question with regard to the question of can science and faith be reconciled? And that is more of a how-to question. How can I harmonize faith and science? How can I harmonize faith and science? And I want to offer six applications. We'll go through them very briefly that you can work out. perhaps through discussion later today, six ways that we can harmonize faith and science. Number one, we need to understand the stakes. This is not just an abstract, academic, intellectual question. Allowing science to dominate faith is a fatal game. Why? Because affirming naturalistic evolution cancels the historical Adam and obliterates scripture's covenantal structure and its teaching on Jesus as the second Adam. So to put it more simply, what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, 45 comes into play here. What does it mean that Christ is the second Adam if there never was a first Adam? And there never was a first Adam according to evolution. There never was a man with whom God made a covenant of works from whom all people of the earth came forth. obliterates the covenantal structure in which Christ came as the fulfillment of the new covenant, the covenant of grace, to be the champion for all those who are in him. If no one's really in Adam, then how can we really be in Christ? Denying miracles forces you to believe that Christ has not risen. And Paul reflects on the stakes there, doesn't he, in 1 Corinthians 15. If that is true, you are still dead in your sins. And everybody who has died perishes. The stakes couldn't be higher. So to begin answering the question, how can I harmonize faith and science, we need to consider the stakes. Young people, as you go off to college or even in high school, this is not something that you, the teaching of evolution, the denial of miracles is not something that you can harmonize with your Christian worldview. Faith and science can absolutely be harmonized, but evolution and Christianity cannot. Number two, how can I harmonize faith and science? Follow the lead of many other scientists. Here's what we're being told today, that ours is the first scientific age. And so finally, the data has come to full bloom to where you cannot be a Christian and you cannot deny the science here and retain your Christianity. But we need to realize ours is not the first scientific age. Don't buy that. Let's not think so highly of ourselves. Let's not be so vain. Ours is not the first scientific age. Many, many scientists who were learning things about the universe that were never previously known retained their faith in God. There have been other massive ages of discovery in which people could have said, wow, this changes everything. I can't believe in God anymore. But they didn't take that route. So Galileo, Kepler, Pascal, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, and Carver, along with hundreds of Nobel Prize winners, have believed in the God of Scripture. So you're not unscientific to believe in God. The wisest king in Israel, did you know this? Solomon was a scientist. He tells us that in 1 Kings 5, he says, I studied trees and birds and beasts and reptiles and fish. He's a scientist, he believed in God. Wisest man in the world believed in God. Follow the lead of many other scientists. Number three, recognize the limits of science. By the way, saying this is not an anti-scientific statement. It's just recognizing the limits of science. Science cannot cancel faith because it operates in a different arena. It operates in a different arena. Michael Horton helpfully puts it this way. Science, by anyone's definition, investigates ordinary, natural causes and effects that can be subjected to repeatable tests. And so he says, sciences exceed the bounds of their competence when they reduce all phenomena to natural causes. You might say to someone who says, well, I'm a scientist and I have proved there's no God. You could say, get back in your lane. That's not what you're supposed to be studying. You're supposed to be studying observable phenomena that can be subjected to tests and be repeated. In fact, to do science well requires a right understanding of special revelation. What are the rules of the universe? What should we expect the universe to behave like? To understand those basic rules, you really need the word of God. And so Horton goes on to say this, that many scientists, unbelieving scientists, operate on borrowed principles of orderliness and design while denying them in theory. Right, we have chaos somehow developing into what we have now. Nobody designed that. There's no order. There's no rationality to that. But we still do science based on rules of order and rationality. For an unbeliever, Horton says, the world exhibits rule governed and mathematical characteristics for which there can be no reasonable account. To do science, you have to believe in rules and orderliness, but you have no way of understanding how that could be, having evolved from chaos. So science swerves out of its lane when it tries to answer questions that only special revelation can answer. To harmonize faith and science, recognize the limits of science. Number four, be humble. Be humble. We believe that true faith and real science are saying the same thing. Still, in any pursuit to harmonize our knowledge of God's special and general revelation, we must walk humbly. And that's true for those given maybe more to a scientific outlook, right? Have to recognize that scientific theories are constantly changing. Theories need to be revised or abandoned based on data. It's true for others. It's true for those who are strongly committed to Scripture. Scripture doesn't change, of course, but our recognition of how it might shed light on complex natural phenomena should be constantly maturing. And so we must be humble in our pursuit of harmonizing faith and science. Number five. We must believe in order to understand. We must believe in order to understand. Human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, as Hermann Bavink reminds us, is subjective and rests on non-negotiable assumptions. In other words, what we believe always affects how we think. This is true for Christians, this is true for non-Christians, but somehow, non-believing scientists like Richard Dawkins get a pass as if they're just following the data. One writer on the historicity of Adam said this, since the late enlightenment and industrial revolution, there has been a naive cultural optimism, an overly high regard for the ability and willingness of the scientific community to pursue impartial objectivity. We have believed that scientists are simply following the data. Right? But that's impossible to simply follow. Nobody simply follows the data. We process data according to our worldviews. And so we should not grant objectivity to somebody just because he or she is a scientist, just like we can't grant it purely to ourselves as well. Everyone does science according to the basic commitments of their worldview. And so reading the Bible as a true alternative explanation of the origin of the universe is not an escape from reason. Right, revelation is a valid source of knowledge. In fact, we must believe in order to truly understand. Number six, how do we harmonize faith and science? Use science to be in awe of God. Solomon studied the universe to be a worshiper, to know God. Nature is meant to lead, to worship, to awe, to wonder. You know, those in the Bible who meet God are never casual, right? We see that when Isaiah meets God, he's not casual, he's blown away by God. And creation's majesty is meant to help us hallow God, right? We don't see God, but we see some stuff that God has made and some stuff that God has done. And it's meant that that vision of natural phenomena is meant to make us to say, wow, I may not approach God casually. Someone has put it this way, the sun will burn your eyes out from 92 million miles and you expect to casually stroll into the presence of its creator? I hope not. We see this, we don't look at the sun, but we see the sun and we say, if I have to close my eyes when I look up, that teaches me something about God. God is holy. God is so brilliant that the sun will pale at the coming of Jesus Christ. And miracles should excite us. We shouldn't be embarrassed about miracles. We shouldn't apologize for miracles as Christians. We should be amazed by miracles. They show us that the Jesus who is powerful is doing something wonderful with that power. Someone has pointed out, you know, Jesus' miracles never were like, hey, watch how far I can throw this big boulder. No, his miracles were like healing sick people, raising dead people, feeding hungry people. Miracles show us the heart of God. Miracles show people in a fallen world, as one writer says, what God is doing. They are a promise to our hearts that the world we all want is coming. It clearly isn't here yet, but miracles are glimpses into the wonderful things that the powerful God is doing and will do perfectly in the age to come. True science and true faith are not enemies, they're friends. Science is a method of understanding God's natural revelation that can help strengthen our faith in God. Let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, we thank you for revealing yourself to us in your word and in your world. We pray that we would read both rightly. We pray for those whose eyes are closed to your beauty, revealed either in scripture or in nature. And we pray for courage for scientists who are believers to be bold in professing faith in the God of scripture and in creation and in miracles and yet doing good, respectable science. We pray. that you would help us all to do the things that we must do to honor both of your forms of revelation. We pray these in Jesus' name.