Science Doesn’t Contradict Christianity

David Marvin // May 5, 2020

It’s been said that science contradicts Christianity. Many think embracing science will unravel their faith, but we’re confidently making the claim that this isn’t true. In this message, we fact check this statement to show how science points us to God, not away from Him.

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All right! Well, what is up, everyone tuning in from wherever you are listening? Friends who are here today… I have a handful of friends who are jumping up as we continue this series Fact Check where we are putting Christian beliefs on the stand, so to speak, and examining and evaluating, "Is this belief something that I can really be confident is true?"

We've been told a lot of things if you've grown up in the church and you have a Christian faith. So each week, we've been covering different ideas or beliefs that are a part of Christianity and examining, "Are we sure that's true? Can we fact check that?" Let me start by telling a little bit of a story that will tell us some direction of where I'm going.

Every year in recent history, I have gone and had a dermatologist appointment. Do you guys go to the dermatologist? Anybody here? Yeah, you do. Come on, my man. If you can't tell, I'm what you would call extra Caucasian so I, for sure, have to make sure that I go. Skin cancer doesn't feel like fun. Nobody has time for that.

Every single year I go in there. It's one of my least favorite things, and here's why. There are several things that are involved, and you know what I'm talking about if you've been there. You get in the room. You sit in that little doctor's office. You're waiting in the room. They tell you to get in your underwear. So you're sitting there in your underwear.

The doctor comes in, and he begins to just inspect everything. So he is sitting there with his assistant just looking over your entire body like he is a mommy baboon or something, looking and making sure. He is seeing, "This doesn't look normal. What is this over here?" Every time I've gone, he'll flag something where he is like, "Aw, this doesn't look good." He circles it with a Sharpie.

Then he is like, "We're going to have to take a biopsy of that and send it off to the lab, because it looks like it possibly may be cancerous." It just produces this angst in me where I'm like, "Oh man, I'm about to go find out." Thankfully, it hasn't ever been cancerous when it's come back, but every time I have that exam or doctor's appointment coming up, I do not want to go.

I even just want to pretend like I don't have anything. I just want to move on. I don't even know that I even want to know the truth if there is something suspect on my body that shouldn't be there. I don't even want to go to a doctor and have that examination. It just puts a week of anxiety in my head and mind while I wait to get that biopsy back.

What does that have to do with what we're talking about tonight? Well, in a lot of ways, I think that is the experience of this desire that, "I'm not even sure that I want to know the truth. I don't want to always know everything there." That's how a lot of Christians feel as it relates to the topic of science.

There's a hesitation on, "I just don't want to spend too much time looking into the scientific realm. I'm not even sure that I want to know everything that is involved with evolution or creation or the big bang. It just feels like if I did know it, there is a possibility that my faith could begin to unravel. I just don't want to even think about that. Good vibes only. I don't want to know."

The crazy thing is as Christians, we believe that all truth is God's. We believe that there isn't any truth out there that could dismantle this thing and science, as we understand science, is something God created. Any time there is a scientific discovery, it's not something we need to be afraid of. It's something that explains, "Oh, that is how God did it."

So tonight, I want to talk about the idea of science and Christianity. Specifically, I want to fact-check that science doesn't contradict Christianity. Let's talk a little bit about that. Because I think a lot of people, if you're anything like me, you went to a college or university and you sat there and you had professors go, "This is why we can't trust the Bible. Christianity has been disproven. Evolution makes it no longer necessary for God. We know that the biblical narrative is not true."

You were told that you can't even really trust the faith that you grew up with or that your parents said was worth trusting in, that science has really disproven a lot of it. Maybe there is some truth, but not all of it. I want to talk tonight about the fact that science doesn't contradict Christianity. Specifically, I want to look at three buckets.

So we won't have time to do an exhaustive look at all of this, but as best I can, I want to talk about the big bang theory (not the TV show), the idea of evolution, and then I just want to talk high-level about science, Christianity, what they are even in pursuit of, and how they don't contradict one another.

The first thing I want to dive into if you take notes is…Does the big bang theory contradict Christianity? What is the big bang theory? The big bang theory is a belief system almost unanimously embraced today in the scientific community that the origin of our universe had a beginning or there was an origin. There was a moment in time where the universe began to exist.

A lot of this comes down to Einstein and his theory of relativity and expanding universe. Basically over the last 100 years, science shifted from going, "Hey, the universe may be eternal, steady-state theory, or there may have been the universe always." To, "No, there was a moment in time where it all began."

Stephen Hawking… Has anybody seen TheTheory of Everything when that came out? Yeah, you have. Stephen Hawking is an incredibly brilliant guy. In his book A Brief History of Time, he said, virtually everyone now believes the universe had a beginning. "Many people do not like that idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention."

There was a professor from Harvard University, a professor of physics. He wrote a book called The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe. What an interesting thing. The First Three Minutes was on the first three minutes of the universe. He basically studied it and worked on producing, "Hey, this is what the first three minutes in universe history, when the creation happened, this is what it was like."

Here's basically how he summarizes what took place initially. "At the beginning there was a bright explosion of light and energy, and the universe was filled with light and heat." The Christian understanding does not in any way contradict the scientific idea of the big bang theory. Why do I say that? What he just said is, "Hey, there was a moment in time when there wasn't anything, and then all of a sudden, there's this explosion of light and the universe was created."

What are we told in Genesis, chapter 1, in the first handful of words on the page? Again, this isn't like… I'm not reading this from Christian.com. I'm reading it from an MIT professor and his book on the first three minutes. Universally, almost accepted this is how it took place: an explosion of light and the universe began.

Genesis says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." The very first thing that he says is created. "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." The idea of a big bang is not a problem for Christianity. If anything, it's a problem for any type of belief or system that doesn't involve God.

The big bang theory was actually, oddly enough, created or came up or coined by a Belgian Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître. I think we have a picture of George. There he is. There's George doing some math problems. He is actually hanging out with Einstein, I think, in another one of the pictures.

He came up with this idea or this teaching that the big bang was something that was created or happened because a big God caused it to take place. Furthermore, I just want you to think about the idea of Genesis 1. Let's say it's true. Maybe you don't believe me, but just go with me for a second.

God creates the heavens and the earth and he says, "Let there be light." What do you expect would happen when God creates into the world or creates the universe in a moment? Of course there's going to be a big bang, a loud, volume-filled eruption as everything that we see exists comes into existence. A Belgian priest comes up with this idea. It wasn't a contradiction to his faith.

Big bang didn't push him away from God. If anything, it supported it and reinforced his belief that there was a big God behind the big bang. Science was a road sign that pointed to God, not away from him. There's a leading NASA scientist who I believe was a part of Apollo 11. It may have been Apollo 13, but he was one of the leading scientists in NASA, and he was an astronomer. He basically studied galaxies and all that stuff.

One of the leading astronomers who was out there was a Columbian professor and head of physics and astronomy at Columbia University. His name is Robert Jastrow and he wrote a book. He was an agnostic as it related to religion, but in studying the universe and what we know, he came to the conclusion that, "Man, it really does align with what the Bible says."

He is not a Christian. He just said, "It aligns with the first couple of chapters that we see there." Here's what he wrote. "Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the Biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis are the same…"

He goes on to say, "For the scientist…" Again, this is a leading NASA scientist. This isn't Christian dad out there writing this. This is a leading thinker who worked with White House administrations, who was a part of some of the most significant launchings in terms of NASA saying, "This is what we've discovered."

"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance…" As it relates to how the world came into existence or how the universe got created. He scaled it, and he began to discover what happened. "…he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians…" That's just a big word for people who study the Bible. "…who have been sitting there for centuries."

Sitting there for thousands of years, saying, "Hey, we knew there was an explosion of light and a big bang because a big God started and created it." You may be thinking… Here's where I'll probably get an email. Somebody is going to be like, "No, wait a second. The big bang has different theories about the earth is 15 billion years old or a certain length of time that was involved or this many years a part of it. That contradicts the six-day creation that we see in Genesis."

No, not necessarily. And here's what probably a lot of you may know. Maybe if you're listening in and you don't have…you're still searching on, "What exactly do I believe?" Christians don't all agree on whether or not the six-day creation, which is in Genesis, chapter 1, is a literal. Is he literally saying six actual days? Because God is outside of time.

The Bible says in 2 Peter, chapter 3, "With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day." So is he saying like, "Hey, on the first day, I made this," was it actually a 24-hour day or was that just speaking of a designated season or time period in which God created it? A lot of Christians disagree.

I'm not here to really tell you which one you need to land on. I'm just saying that is not a contradiction to the scientific evidence we see as it relates to the big bang. A lot of Christians believe… The word in Hebrew, not to go too heady, in that first chapter is that word yowm. It just basically is a word, even in the Bible, that is sometimes translated day, sometimes it's translated season, sometimes it's translated era. Which one is it? Man, you decide.

I wouldn't die on any of those hills because it doesn't change anything about the fundamental beliefs of the teaching of Jesus and the message of the Bible. The big bang is not a problem and doesn't contradict Christianity. It is a problem for a belief that doesn't involve God. Here's why I say that.

I mean, it goes almost without saying why less and less people are able to hold onto the big bang itself as an explanation for why God wouldn't be there. The reason why it would contradict the idea of God or as a problem for any view in life that doesn't involve God is because if you take God out, what caused the big bang? What was behind it?

This is where people begin to go, "I don't really know." None of us would live that way. I want everybody right here to think. Have you ever had one of those moments where you heard something outside and it was like a gunshot? You're like, "Dude, what is going…? Was that a gunshot or hopefully a firework? What is going on with the neighbors down the street? Honey, lock the door."

You have that moment where you're like, "Man, what was that?" Am I alone? Maybe I just live in the 'hood or something. When that happens, here's what nobody does. Nobody goes, "Hey, did you hear that?" "Yeah, I did, but I'm pretty confident nothing caused it. It was just a big bang. There's no explanation behind it."

All of us would rationally go, "Okay, that doesn't make any sense." So when you take God out of the equation, if anything, the big bang theory was so devastating to the worldview that doesn't hold God in it because it begs the question of, "Then what caused it?" and it takes a lot more faith to say, "Nothing!"

Just like in that scenario, it takes a lot less faith to say, "I think that was a gun that caused the gunshot." It's much more of a leap of faith to say, "No, I think nothing caused the gunshot." In the same way, it's a bigger leap of faith to say, "Hey, I think nothing caused everything I see around me," than it is to say, "Maybe there could be a God and a big one who caused that big bang."

Okay, the second reason it's problematic is because not just who caused it, but who designed everything you see around us? Without a designer or a God behind those things, you begin to look at the world and you're like, "It's just increasingly challenging to believe. Things are so intricate and complex and finely tuned of our universe."

What do I mean by that? There are things that if you change them like the smallest degree…You guys are smart, so you probably know all of this. But you change the tiniest little fraction of a fraction of a degree and life would not exist on the planet. What do I mean? Here are a couple. If the earth's rotation took any longer than 24 hours, temperatures would be too extreme.

Alternatively, if the rotation period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocity would be too great. Large planets. Nobody has probably wondered this. This was fascinating to me. I thought it was interesting. Have you ever wondered, "Why is Jupiter there? What is it doing out there, and why would God make this giant…? It's the biggest of all of them. What is Jupiter doing out there?"

One of the things that Jupiter does, in case you're wondering. This is how important it actually is to the world around us. Jupiter, if it were not in its current orbit, the earth would be bombarded with space material such as comets and meteors. Jupiter's gravitational field acts like a cosmic vacuum cleaner to attract space debris away from the earth.

Here's another one. The earth's mantle, which is just like the ground around us or the outside of the earth. If the thickness of the earth's crust were greater, too much oxygen would be transferred to the crust to support human life. If it were any thinner, volcanic and tectonic activity would make life impossible. The world around us…

There's a humungous list about this world. It's incredibly well-designed. It's finely tuned. If you take God out of the picture and the equation, who did that? Why is it that way? I'm confident if we were all hanging out and walking along the beach and we came across a piece of driftwood that was up there on the shore, most of us would be like, "I don't know where that came from. My guess is probably one of these trees back here and that's how it ended up here."

But if we walked and I found an iPhone. I picked it up out of the sand and I was like, "Guys, dude, look at this! Look at this thing that natural forces in a collision of salt water and wind and forces and things brought together. It's unbelievable! I mean, look at all the detail. I mean, this thing is unbelievably complex and incredible."

You guys would go, "You're an idiot. Somebody dropped their iPhone. That's where that came from." I mean, think about it. I know that's silly, but all of us would rationally connect the dots. The world around us is infinitely more complex than an iPhone is, yet people will hide behind, "It didn't have to have a creator there."

Often, just to be candid with you, generally speaking the people who are like, "No, there doesn't have to be a God behind the big bang," the reason they're there is they don't want there to be a God behind the big bang. Not because it makes sense or not because it's rationally there anymore than going, "No, there doesn't have to be. It's possible that this could've been made by the wind and a tornado came together and things smoothed it out and chiseled over time."

Sure, is it possible? I guess. Is it probable or rational or logical? No. Generally speaking, that's why most people hide behind, "Ah, the big bang doesn't have to have God." Because they don't want it to. But the big bang complements and confirms the Bible. It doesn't contradict it. Now what I do think is often the more problematic idea in terms of science and Christianity contradicting is evolution.

Big bang, even most astronomers, scientists, leading thinkers will go, "Yeah, the big bang is a pretty tough one to escape." But evolution, that is a field in which it totally contradicts the biblical narrative. So does evolution contradict Christianity? First, let's define what evolution is. Most of us probably went to a school or studied a textbook at some point that brought up, "Hey, here's what evolution is." Evolution being the theory that… There are a couple parts of it.

First would be microevolution or minor evolution which would be small adaptations within a species over time. Science, generally speaking, has confirmed that there have been small adaptations over time that allow whatever species, in the species itself, to be more effective at surviving. Does that make sense? One of the theories behind a giraffe would be, "The giraffes with taller necks were able to reach leaves on trees higher and so those just ended up living while other ones weren't able to get as much food. So over time, giraffes had longer necks."

Macroevolution would involve the idea that everything on the planet spontaneously generated from some amoeba life form and that began to evolve and adapt. It eventually became an organism that turned into a fish. That may have turned into an amphibious lizard. That turned into something that walks on land, and then it turned into a mammal. Everything in the tree of life evolved from the same thing.

You may have seen something like this or seen the tree of life as it relates to evolution where every single thing kind of connects back to the same thing. The problem with this idea, and you probably have never heard this or maybe you had professors who are like, "Hey, it's a proven thing; you can take it to the bank," is that those who study this field even acknowledge, "We have not found the transitional fossils in between those."

In other words, if you had a giraffe that eventually morphed into an elephant, you would think that we'd have a gir-elephant in between there at some point where it was kind of a giraffe-ish-looking elephant and it morphed along the way. We don't have evidence of that taking place. We have evidence of small adaptations in the fossil record. We don't have the evidence of the intermediaries.

Does that make sense? We don't have the kind of in-between ones. If you don't believe me, here's Harvard professor paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who says this. He's an atheist, by the way. "The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record…" Which is like those in-between ones. "…persists as the trade secret of paleontology."

As in, paleontologists know it, but everybody else doesn't. "The evolutionary trees that adorn our text- books have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils. …Darwin's argument…" Charles Darwin came up with the whole evolutionary theory, On the Origin of Species.

"Darwin's argument still persists as the favored escape of most paleontologists from the embarrassment of a record that seems to show so little of evolution." Here's what he just said. This is a Harvard professor. Again, you should go Google this quote. Look it up. This is not coming from sources that are Christian biased.

This is a Harvard professor, Stephen Jay Gould, writing "Evolution's Erratic Pace" in Natural History. Here's what he just said. "Hey, the paleontologists and people believe this, but they don't believe it because we have a record. They believe it by faith." We only have, and this is kind of what only paleontologists realize.

When you look at that tree with all the different animals that are on it, we really only have the ends of those animals and maybe some minor adaptations on things. But we don't have an ability in the fossils that would allow us to trace further and further and further back. The idea of evolution at a macro level is just not proven.

So you believe it. If you believe it, as much as this may upset you, by faith according to Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould. Here are the problems with evolution. First, the fossils don't support it. We just said that. Secondly, science can't reproduce it. We need to think about this because this is pretty interesting thing to think about.

The idea of evolution is that species could come together and begin to slightly adapt. They could interbreed with other types of animals and other species and would form new animals that would be a part of the chain spreading and going out. Today, if a scientist or if a breeder or somebody who wanted to work on speciation and take different species and breed them together to make a new type of animal in a test-tube scientific environment.

They begin to go, "Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take a lion and we're going to mix it with this horse. It's going to be a lorse. It's going to be amazing." They can't do it. We can do it within species. We can do it within dogs. You can take a chihuahua and a poodle and you can make a puhuahua, but we can't take a cat and a dog and make a dat.

Think about that. It can't happen. Even when you go in the same family, you take a horse and donkey. You guys know this? You can make a mule. A mule can't reproduce. It's sterile. They can't continue on, and that's in the same family of animals. So the idea that, "Hey, animals over time by natural selection and natural processes and a blind…

Which is what the process of evolution would be. This blind, guiding force to continue to drive animals to evolve and change and procreate. If we can't do it with science intentionally trying, why would anyone believe that nature was somehow able to do it over time? So the second problem is that science can't reproduce it, which is at the heart of what science does. They embrace things that they can observe, test, and reproduce. To scientifically conclude that evolution is a fact contradicts science.

The third problem with it is the idea that evolution is built on simpler things moving into more complex things. If enough time is given, simple things move into more complex things. Anybody who has been alive any amount of time here has seen that's not the way our world works. Things don't generally get more complex and more intricate and more impressive over time. More chaos is introduced.

What do I mean? No one is ever… I'm condensing a time period down really fast. Let me just explain. Does anyone bike here? You have a bike, dude? Look at you. Oh, come on! Anybody? He has long legs. He looks like a biker. Biker, runner, triathlete. Okay, let's assume Seth had a bike.

If he went into his garage and there are bikes hanging out there, how crazy would it be for him to show up the next day and be like, "Oh, man, this bike just turned into a golf cart?" He showed up the next day, and it turned into a car. Then he showed up the next day, and it turned into two cars. Then it reproduced itself and had two little baby cars, little MINI Coopers, out there. Then it turned into a spaceship over time. It would be crazy.

The idea of simple things moving in the direction and becoming increasingly complex over time doesn't make sense. It doesn't operate in the same way the world around us works. In that scenario, you may be going, "Oh, but that's like a dead object. It could with a living object." In what world do simpler things get increasingly more complex entirely on their own? You add nothing to it. There's no mind and mental intelligent design that's a part of it. It just is going to get increasingly more impressive on its own. It doesn't.

The fourth problem with the idea of evolution is spontaneous generation, which is at the heart of the entire thing. What does that mean? That there was this blob in this kind of melting pot of forces that came together in this cocktail of things in our world and somehow inanimate objects spit out life.

It may have just been bacteria or an amoeba or something really small, but it was generated spontaneously and came from nothing, and then there was something. The idea that something came from nothing makes no sense. Let me use this. Yesterday, I got a call from my wife at 5:30. She was like, "Hey, there's a bird in our house." I was like, "There's a bird in the house?"

She said, "Yeah, there's a bird that's been flying around. I'm trying to keep the dog from killing it. I've been calling Animal Control, and Animal Control is apparently not doing stuff because of corona." I'm like, "You called Animal Control? That escalated so fast." She's like, "Yeah, I didn't know what to do. There's a bird in our house."

I was like, "You know, I don't want to hurt the bird. What do I do?" So I came home, and she was just like, "Hey, I just tried to shoo it upstairs. I don't know where it is." I go, and I'm looking all throughout the house. I don't even know how big the bird is, so I'm kind of going, "I hope this is not like a hawk or anything. It's a little bird, right?" She's like, "Yeah, it's kind of a little bird."

So eventually, I find it. It's in our master bedroom closet. I get a pillow and I just try to guide it out the door and get the bird out of the door. Do you know what never crossed my mind? "This bird came out of nowhere. This thing could've spontaneously generated. The doors were not open. The only way that this bird… It's not like she was like, 'Hey, come on in, bird,' and that's how it went into the house. It must've spontaneously generated. It must've come out of nowhere and just popped up there."

No, because that's crazy. Maybe it came in through the chimney. I have no idea exactly how it came. Maybe she didn't even realize it, but one of the doors was open and it came in. But that bird came from something and from somewhere. The idea of spontaneous generation is at the heart of the evolutionary theory. It is an idea that something could spontaneously generate from nothing, and something coming from nothing makes no sense.

Anyone who tells you that it does is hiding behind a smokescreen where they do not want to believe there is a God. They're not hiding behind evidence that logically makes sense. Candidly, they have more faith than you do, because they're going, "Something came from nothing, which makes sense." No, it doesn't.

Evolution does not contradict God in that macroevolution has not been proven. If anything, the picture that we get when we look at the fossil record and the world around us when you look at it, aligns right with God. Why do I say that? When you read Genesis, chapter 1, where he begins to talk about the creation of animals and mankind, he says.

God created animals and he made fish and livestock and all those living creatures that are on the ground. God made them, it says it over and over: according to their kinds, according to their kinds, according to their kinds, like their species. They were placed in these groups and they reproduced in those groups. Then it says he made man distinct from all other animals.

Genesis, chapter 1, verse 27: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." He said, "Hey, I'm giving you the ability." "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

Is that going to convince you that God is there? No, but it aligns with what you see in our world. There's something distinct. When God made all of creation, he said, "I made just man in my image uniquely." There's something distinct even about humanity. Why? If we all came and we all evolved and we're like, "Hey, right behind us is the chimpanzee…"

Chimpanzees can do a lot of cool things. I don't know if you guys have seen it. Some of them can do sign language. They can learn some stuff. Do you know what they're not writing? Poetry, Shakespeare, playing music, like beautiful music. We can teach them to hit things in rhythm, but that's the extent to which the highest height of the closest next animal in our world can catch up.

Why? Because they weren't made in the image of God. They weren't given all the faculties and the reasoning and a soul and the ability to think and reason like humanity. So whatever you think about the Bible, you may not even believe that, but that at least aligns with the world around you that you see.

It certainly aligns with the fossil record where animals seem to be grouped in their kinds, not in these transitional species. Finally, does science contradict Christianity? No. Of course you would expect me to say that, but the reason I say that is if it does, you have a big problem with the scientific community. My guess is you're not a scientist because the average scientist believes in God, a personal God.

Another stat from the American Association of the Advancement of Science conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2009. It said 51 percent of scientists say they believe in God or a higher power. Christianity has fueled the advancement of science.

The development of chemistry in the scientific world advanced in Western civilization which was Christian and had a Judeo-Christian underlying to it unlike any other place in the world. We're the only place where chemistry and biology the way that they had began to advance because Christians believed science was an explanation of how God made the world around us.

They had been wed together and haven't been disconnected in a way that Christians were ever afraid. Some of the most famous scientists in history were Christians. Let me list some of them. Francis Bacon established the scientific method. You have probably heard of that. Isaac Newton. Michael Faraday came up with the electromagnetic field theory.

James Maxwell founded electromagnetism. Louis Pasteur with pasteurization, vaccination, immunization, bacteriology. Johannes Kepler. Today, some of the leading thinkers in the scientific world see that science drives them to God, not away from God. One of those is Francis Collins. He was the founder of the human genome project.

He wrote a book called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. He was an atheist until in his 20s, he began to study DNA. He looked at everything and he wrote a book called The Language of God, which is about DNA, where he looked at cells, and he saw DNA. Do you know what he discovered?

He said the amount of information contained in a single human cell, not just a DNA molecule inside the cell, is equivalent to all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica several times over. Essentially, "When I read it, I'm reading the language of God. I'm seeing how he wove the DNA and things in our body." It didn't drive him away from God. It drove him to him.

Rosalind Picard, artificial intelligence expert, invented affective computing, a professor at MIT, and a follower of Christ. Ian Hutchinson, a nuclear science professor at MIT. Kenneth Miller, professor of biology at Brown University. I could go on and on and on. If science contradicts Christianity, it certainly doesn't for them.

My guess is if you believe that, you are not a scientist. Because flip a coin, and the average scientist is going to believe in God, is going to have a faith you say they don't. The truth about science and Christianity, the reason why they don't contradict each other, is they share the same goal. Here's why I say that.

The word science comes from a Latin word like scientia, which I probably butchered for somebody out there who speaks Latin. That word means knowledge. The goal of science is to pursue knowledge and truth, the pursuit of truth. The goal of Christianity is not some blind, "Hey, we don't trust the world around us or trust facts. We're all about faith blindly." It is the pursuit of truth.

Jesus said, "Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Paul, in 2 Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 8 said, "For we cannot oppose the truth, but must always stand for the truth." Christianity has always had, at its epicenter and heart, the pursuit of truth. The church was a part of funding and fueling Isaac Newton's research on gravitational theory.

The church and Christians were the reason why Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown all began as Christian institutions. Harvard's original motto was, "For Christ and Church." It is not anti-intellectual. In fact, if anything, Jesus says you cannot check your mind at the door and follow him.

In Mark chapter 12, verse 30, he says, "And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength." With your mind. Christianity has nothing to be afraid of when it comes to science because every time there's a discovery, all it does is gives us a chance to go, "That's how God did it! That's amazing!"

That's all that science is. Science really can't be anything beyond that, because here's what science does. It has limits in what it can study. Why do I say that? Science is all about what happened or how it's there. It's not about why. Think about this. This is kind of profound to me, but maybe it'll only be to me.

If tonight, we all walked outside, and in Dallas it's too overcast and we won't be able to see the stars, but if we were out in the country and we could see the stars and the stars had moved together and grouped up and it said, "Hey yo! God is real. His name is Jesus. Told ya!" Scientists would not go, "Huh. Wow. I guess it's true."

Science would say, "How did those all move together and at what temperature are they burning and how far away from us right now?" They wouldn't be concerned with the actual message. They would just evaluate the contents of what and how it's there, not why. Because science has limits, and it can't explain every single thing that's out there.

It is concerned about the pursuit of truth and providing data toward that truth. As amazing as it is, and science is amazing and Christians don't need to be afraid of it… We should embrace it. We should celebrate it. We should encourage it. As amazing as it is, it still has limits where it can't be the extent of entire truth.

In other words, there are certain things you just can't test in a test tube. There are certain things in this life where you can't go, "Man, it's repeatable and measurable." Most of us would recognize the reality, but we wouldn't say science could do anything to test those and put it to… Why would I say that?

Things like beauty. There is no way to evaluate and scientifically say even such a thing as beauty exists. Especially if you take away God, it does not. It's just something in your brain firing off going, "Oh man, it looks so pretty right now." Or "She looks so pretty right now." Things like purpose. They don't exist.

You're here with no purpose, and when you die, worms eat you and that's it, apart from embracing the understanding that God is there and he wove you together and he made you on purpose. Things that science can't explain, like morality. Science cannot explain why Hitler doing what he did in Germany was wrong. It can just tell you what he did in Germany.

It can't explain that it is wrong or the sense of morality in your heart that's like, "Man, there's real evil in the world around us." It can't explain that. Origin of life. The best explanations and attempts at explaining the origin of life fall short or just go, "I don't know, but it just somehow existed." They stop asking the question from there, but Christianity provides the answers to all those.

It says that things are beautiful because there's a God who is out there who is like an artist who painted and sees the works of his handiwork all over the night sky and all over the world around us. We're told that, "God made you with a purpose." He tells you that purpose is to know him, to make him known. That's why, no matter what you do with relationships or alcohol or a job, it never satisfies. It can never fill that, because your purpose wasn't to have those things. It was to know God.

It tells us the origin of life happened with him, and he created you and he created the world around us. He wove it together. It tells us that morality is in your heart and there's something inside of you that says, "There really are messed up people. There are messed up actions. What happened in Germany was not okay. Sexual abuse is not okay."

The Bible says that's because in Romans, chapter 2, verse 14 God says, "That's because I put that there." It gives an explanation for things that science will never be able to do. Science alone leaves you lacking. Science plus Christianity provides answers because they're both in the pursuit of truth.

Unlike the limits that are on science, Christianity provides answers where science is limited, and it does not contradict the answers where science can give explanations. The biggest reason why most people don't believe this stuff is it's just a smokescreen, dude. If there's any part of you, look at me right now, if there's any part of you that's like, "I don't want to believe in God because if I do, I may have to stop smoking that or stop doing that or I may be accountable to someone…"

If there's any part of you, just be honest with yourself. You don't have to tell anybody. Just be honest. You owe it to yourself. If there's any part of you, "I really don't, I hope it's not true," you should be concerned and think about that. Could it be you're deceiving yourself and you're trying to justify, "No, man. Evolution is why I can't trust the Bible."

Could it be you don't want to? Because you think it may involve you being accountable or changing or it's just easier to not. You're like me in that moment at the dermatologist where you're like, "I don't want to know the truth." Here's why that's a tragedy, and let me close.

This past weekend, I had a chance to go with my wife. Texas is getting to open up a little bit more where we can go more out and about. We took the kids out to this park up kind of North Dallas. We went out there, and we went out these different trails and went all through the park that was out there. It wasn't like the Greenbelt Trails. It was like you were going hiking on dirt stuff.

It was really fun. Took my 4-year-old son and 1-1/2-year-old daughter and my wife, and we're just walking through these trails. Eventually, I see this plant that I'm like, "I think that's poison ivy." I'm sitting there looking at it. It was in front of this view that we had gone up to see. It was just right there in front of us. I'm thinking to myself, "I think that's poison ivy." My son runs up and grabs the plant.

I don't know that he has ever grabbed any plant before, but he grabs this plant, starts ripping off the thing. I'm talking to my wife like, "Babe, I think that's poison ivy." She goes, "No, that's not poison ivy." I've had some bad experiences with poison ivy before, so I'm a little paranoid. I'm like, "No babe, I really think it's poison ivy." She's like, "No."

I'm like, "Hey, if it is poison ivy, we need to go wash him." A 4-year-old doesn't understand what poison ivy is. He thinks it's like a character Batman fights or something. He was like, "What does poison ivy mean?" It's like, "Well, if you touch it, it's going to have a rash." So he starts touching his sister's face. He starts touching all of us. I mean, it was like, "This is not good." My wife was like, "No, I don't think it is poison ivy." I'm going, "I think it is."

Here's a picture of poison ivy in case you haven't seen it in a while. You guys can look there. The top one is poison ivy. That is what we saw. It's almost identical. I was like, "Babe, I'm telling you. I think it is poison ivy. Here's what's at stake. Let's say you're right. It's not poison ivy even though, 'Leaves of three, let them be,' and we didn't.

Let's say you're right. It's not. We go and leave five minutes early, we miss five minutes of the trail, and we go wash our hands. What did we miss out on? Just five minutes of the trail and we got to wash our hands. Let's say I'm right and it is poison ivy and he is touching currently all of us, even still right in this moment. What is at stake? All of us are getting poison ivy and going to be incredibly uncomfortable."

So, anyway, finally I convince her. We get out of there. We go find the only water source around and we're going to just pour water on our son, who at this point is putting it on his face. We're trying to explain, "You're going to thank us later when we're pouring water on all of us." Now was it poison ivy?

Well, I didn't know until 3 a.m. that night when my wife got up and said, "I have poison ivy all over my leg." There was apparently an area where she hadn't rubbed water on. She was wrong. Even though she thought she was right, she was wrong, and it cost her. What was at stake was clearly, "Hey, we should do this. I'm glad we went and washed our hands that five minutes otherwise our son would've been decked out. Our daughter would've been decked out with poison ivy all over their bodies. You were wrong and it cost you."

If you're in the room or if you're listening tonight or you're listening down the road at some later time and you hear this message and you've embraced a worldview that seems to say, "I don't think it's true what the Bible says. I don't think any of that's true. I think we all came from nothing. There's no reason that we're here. There isn't a God behind everything.

There's no purpose to our life. I die, worms eat me, and I move on. There's no such thing as any of the stuff the Bible says. He didn't come into the world. God didn't show himself and die on a cross and give his life for humanity. I don't think any of that's true." Let's say you're right. What's at stake? Nothing. You're right. You die and you get eaten by worms. You gain nothing. You lose nothing.

Let's say you're wrong. Let's say it's true. Let's say there is a God who is there who came into the world and he made himself known in the person of Jesus, and he went to the cross to pay the punishment for your sin and my sin and every sin out there so that you wouldn't have to spend eternity apart from God.

He created you with purpose. He created this world with purpose around it. He is the one behind the big bang. He is the one who designed everything around you in the world you see. He has offered to anyone who will simply accept what he did on the cross on their behalf, dying in their place and rising from the grave so that they would have eternity with him and not be sent to eternity away from him in hell.

Let's say you're wrong. What is at stake? You cannot be too certain about this question. The evidence? You need to evaluate it. If there's any part of you that's like, "I don't even know if I really want that to be true because then I may have to change," you should be really concerned and be honest enough with yourself to go, "There's part of me that doesn't want this to be true. I need to at least, if I'm going to be objective and evaluate the evidence, acknowledge that."

Then begin to go, "Does evolution really disprove the Bible?" If hell is at stake for eternity, you cannot be too certain. What is at stake is far more than some sort of poison ivy rash. If I'm right and Jesus and everything that the Bible says about Scripture, what is at stake is bigger than anything you could ever imagine and more important than anything you will ever ask yourself.

Could it be true? If there's any part of you that wants to reject that just out of your own desire, you should be concerned. Because as it relates to the big bang… You can reject Christianity for different reasons, but the big bang is not one of them. Evolution doesn't disprove it and science doesn't contradict it. You need to be asking, "Could it be? Could it be true?"

For many of you, that question is going to take a lot of courage, but wherever you are, I want you to pray tonight, maybe in this moment, and just begin to think, "God, could it be true? If you are out there, I want to know you. I want to know you more than I want to know answers. I want to know you more than I want to be right. I want to know you. Will you help me?" That's a prayer our God loves to answer. Let me pray.

Father, thank you that you are not a God who we have to wonder what he is like. You wove together the world around us. You created everything that is. You placed us inside of it. Then, so that we would know who you are and what you're like, you entered into it. You became like one of us so that we could relate to you and we could know you. You did so in the form of Jesus.

Thank you that you didn't come into this world and say, "Everyone has rebelled and everyone is going to be punished." You came into the world you created, you formed, the atoms you held together, the world you spoke into existence, and you bore the punishment for all of our sin that you came running after us even though we ran from you.

Right now I pray for anyone listening to this that you would do what only you can do, which is reveal yourself and reveal the truth about who you are. They would begin to doubt their doubts and question. "Could it be that it's true?"

I pray that, if nothing else, the question of, "What is at stake? How much is at stake?" would penetrate into hearts and minds and your Spirit would allow those of us who have never had a moment of faith to come to trust in what you did on the cross. You died in our place. You took the punishment we deserved and you rose from death. We will be with you for all of eternity. We worship you now in song. Amen.