What does it mean to “believe” something?

The big idea or main point behind Sunday’s message was that you can be a Christian and think deeply. I think that often times highly-educated atheists paint a picture of Christians as simple-minded, which admittedly we often run that risk; however, it is possible to be a well-educated deep-thinking Christian and there are scientists who are Christians.

For instance, Professor Henry F. Schaeffer, for 18 years a professor of chemistry at the University of California—Berkley and then Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia, reverses a common assumption by asking, in a lecture, Why Are There So Few Atheists Among Physicists? He answers as follows:
“Many scientists are considering the facts before them. They say things like:
–The present arrangement of matter indicates a very special choice of initial conditions. —Paul Davies
–In fact, if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged, the odds against a universe that produced life like ours are immense. —Stephen Hawking
–A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. —Fred Hoyle
As the Apostle Paul said in his epistle to the Romans: ‘Since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.’” (From a lecture titled “Scientists and their Gods,” on the web site Leadership U (http://www.leaderu.com/offices/schaefer/docs/scientists.html), copyright 1995-2007.)

I think an underlying question is that of epistemology, or how we know something. Scientists use the scientific method to “know” things about how the world works. I think Christians can know things in this way too. To what degree do we know something? Can we ever be 100% certain of anything?

That kind of question involves also the realm of faith and imagination, things that science doesn’t highly regard because it does not have a high degree of certainty very often. Even Christians have neglected the imagination and creativity, but we hold very highly our Faith. Science and Faith (or Religion or Spirituality) have very different ways of going about knowing something. But just because they’re different doesn’t mean they correspond in one way or another. Look at how one preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, explains it:

“My answer is: I do not reconcile the two. They are utterly irreconcilable. Take the Bible’s picture of the universe, for example. According to that the earth is flat with the “fountains of the great deep” underneath it; it is stationary, “established, it shall never be moved”; within the earth is a great pit, sheol, where all the dead go; the sky is a solid firmament, “hard as a molten mirror”; beyond it are “the waters which are above the firmament”; the rain comes from that supercelestial sea, down through “the windows of the heavens”; and the sun, moon, and stars move across the underside of the stationary firmament to illumine man. In common with their contemporaries the writers of the Bible held in their minds that picture of the world. From the Bible’s beginning to its end that cosmology is presupposed. . . .
That is to say, the Bible is not a book of science. It contains many literary types — history, poetry, fiction, biography, drama, preaching, letters — but it contains no book that can be called scientific. I take my hat off to the man who wrote that first chapter of Genesis. Of course, I do not believe that the world was made in six days, or that light was created on the first day and the sun on the fourth. But that is not what the first chapter of Genesis is chiefly affirming. Someday you may read the creation story as the Babylonian tablets contain it, which quite possibly the author of the story of Genesis knew. There you will find in the end the same general picture of the universe which the Hebrews held, but their fellow Semites in Babylonia got at it by having the god, Marduk, slit his enemy, Tiamat, in two, like a flat fish, and then use the upper half to make the sky and the lower half to make the earth. Turn from that to the stately opening of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and you move up to a loftier level, and sense what the author is really driving at in those first chapters: one God the Creator, and men and women his children.
The Bible is to me a priceless treasury of spiritual truth, and from it have come the basic ideas and ideals on which the best of our democratic culture is founded. It is inspired and inspiring, filled with divine deeds and teachings, but it is not a textbook on science.
One of the most lamentable aspects of the Christian Church’s history is the way religious leaders have insisted on clinging to the outmoded world view of the Bible and have fought every new expansion of knowledge about the universe. If only they could have foreseen how ridiculous they would look in retrospect!” (Fosdick, Dear Mr. Brown: Letters to a Person Perplexed about Religion. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1961.)

So the Bible and Science help us to know different things, but yet both help us know God (in different ways). Science helps us know things with our head and our mind. There are ideas that we can agree with or upon. But Faith (or religion) speaks of “belief” as more than ideas that we agree to be true or factual. When I say I believe a person, it’s different than saying I believe a fact. There’s a subjective, relational quality that is hard to measure when believing or having faith in people. But ideas and facts we tend to be more certain about, a lot of times it’s black and white, yes or no. In Faith and spirituality we walk through more mystery than certainty, yet we still know truth or at least grope and search for it and have it revealed to us. Mystery is not a place that many Christians want to be for very long. We’d rather have it all figured out because that makes us feel safe and secure, but we also run the risk of being foolish and weak-minded. My hope is Christians (and scientists) can continue to grow, learn, discover, and journey into the future that asks us tough questions about what we thought we knew in the past.

Part One: Science and God

This conversation focuses on the existence of God, looking at a number of arguments that some scientists who are atheists propose against the existence of God. Basically, human knowledge, due to science and academic discovery, has progressed beyond needing the idea of God any more. The Christian response sees the scientific discoveries and sees God’s handiwork behind them. Posted here is the original sermon preached by Adam Hamilton at Church of the Resurrection January 7, 2007. (Due to technical difficulties, my sermon is not available) If you would like to have the outline and the study guide to go along with the sermon, post a comment and let me know.

http://www.epworthit.com/clientimages/40317/sermon_2007-01-07.mp3