Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

Richard Dawkins

Loving Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 1 (Urbana preview)

friends photo

As preparation for Urbana, we’ll be sharing encouragement from speakers who are giving seminars, and possibly others involved in Urbana as well. Today Rick Mattson, InterVarsity staff and author of How Faith Is Like Skydiving: And Other Memorable Images for Dialogue with Seekers and Skeptics (InterVarsity Press, 2014), kicks off with an excellent series. Because Urbana is a place to engage with our vocations as Christians and missional academics, we’ll sometimes share these on Mondays, alternating with Scholar’s Call. Interested in doing a series on Urbana or an interview with an Urbana speaker? Email us here.

[Read more…] about Loving Your Atheist Neighbor, Part 1 (Urbana preview)

Is Evolution Compatible with belief in God as the Creator?

This is the third in a series of blog posts concerned with Christian questions about evolution. In my last post we saw that science does not rule out God because it is not competent to address the question of God. But, is evolution compatible with belief in God as the Creator? That is the topic of this post.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008).

A major concern for some Christians is that there is no need for God in the process of evolution. Ironically, this is also the view of atheists. In his book The God Delusion, the atheist biologist Richard Dawkins claims that evolution is not compatible with belief in a Creator God because of the automatic nature of the evolutionary process. He talks about a book Creation Revisited by another atheist scientist Peter Atkins. In this book Atkins

postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to get away with as little as possible in order to make a universe containing life. Atkins’s lazy god is even lazier than the deist God of the 18th-century Enlightenment: deus otiosus – literally, God at leisure, unoccupied, unemployed, superfluous, useless. Step-by-step Atkins succeeds in reducing the amount of work the lazy God has to do until he finally ends up doing nothing at all; he might as well not bother to exist.

A related concern for many Christians is that evolution can only be accepted by accommodating Biblical interpretation to fit contemporary scientific theories. [Read more…] about Is Evolution Compatible with belief in God as the Creator?

Does science rule out God?

This is the second in a series of blog posts concerned with Christian questions about evolution. A major question for me after I became a Christian was: Does science in general and evolution in particular rule out God? I know that is also a question that troubles many Christians. You may remember that in my first post on the Mechanism of Creation, the View from Science, I said that there were four meanings of evolution. The first three change over time, common descent, evolution by natural selection are conclusions based on scientific evidence. I have put off discussion of the fourth meaning until now. That fourth meaning views evolution as a justification for atheism. In this post, I’m going to show that this meaning is a world-view interpretation of the scientific findings, not a conclusion from science. First, not all scientists are atheists. To be sure several recent books by more fervent atheists claim that science in general and evolution in particular disproves God. Perhaps the best known example is The God Delusion by the biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has famously stated that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” Two other examples are Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Victor Stenger’s God the Failed Hypothesis.

Asa Gray (1810-1888) “could be described as the person who established systematic botany at Harvard and, to some extent, in the United States. . . .”  — From Harvard University Herbaria.

However, there are other well-known scientists who believe that evolution is perfectly compatible with their Christian faith. Examples are Asa Gray who is widely regarded as the most important American botanist of 19th century, Theodosius Dobzhansky, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, who was instrumental in shaping the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology with genetics and Francis Collins, a geneticist and former Director of the U.S. Human Genome Project, who recently wrote the book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Here is the key point. Science is a wonderful and very productive tool for studying nature. But since God exists outside of nature the question of God is not approachable by the empirical methods used by science. Thus science does not have the competency to make definitive statements about the existence or lack of existence of God! [Read more…] about Does science rule out God?