The First Cause and a Personal God
“So, when you became a Christian… did you stop believing in evolution?”
I’ve had variations of this question tossed at me several times now, when it’s come up in a casual discussion that I’m a Christian. It’s an interesting question, in that it reveals a lot about the cultural framework that we’re expected to operate in. As it’s set up, it’s an either-or question that creates a no-win scenario for both faith and intellect.
Does the believer have to ignore what science has to offer in terms of understanding the world around us? Does the scientifically literate person have to turn off his or her intellect in order to accept the existence of God? My response is to say no, and no.
Becoming a Christian didn’t erase all the things I’d learned over the years about science, or my ability to reason about the data. The best evidence of astronomy indicates that everything came into creation at the Big Bang; geological, biological, molecular, and fossil evidence all strongly indicate that the natural world as we see it has developed since then through the process of evolution.
Becoming a Christian did change my understanding of those facts. As an atheist I was stuck with “it just happened,” but as a Christian I now understand that it’s God who set all of that in motion.
My journey to faith, in fact, started with the recognition that there was a First Cause who set the universe into motion. Who that First Cause is, and what my relationship with that First Cause is, were later and necessary questions that led me, eventually, to accept Christianity.
When I was an agnostic/atheist, I took it for granted that if such a being as “God” existed (which he probably didn’t), then he wouldn’t bother to mess around with the lives of petty human beings. I suppose I visualized God as a kind of cosmic middle-manager, managing major projects like creating the Earth, and sending the occasional memo about commandments down via one of his department heads. It seemed ridiculous that this “God” would actually be interested in someone like me. The fact that Christians claimed that He did care deeply about me personally seemed like a point against the credibility of Christianity. If God existed, wouldn’t He have better things to do?
Sure, for you or me, taking care of the big picture means overlooking the small details. If I were in charge of the universe, I wouldn’t have time to worry about whether some 30-year-old college professor in Southern California was or was not ready to learn about me. I’d be busy, you know? But I’m not in charge, God is. And while we are made in His image, in some very important ways He is not like you or me.
As I sit on the beach, I am amazed to think that it is His will that the waves should form and crash onto the beach. Through all the millions and billions of years, as mountains rose up, were worn down, were pounded into tiny grains of sand and tossed up on this little beach, He was there, because this is His world. He called everything into creation, directing every atom, every neutrino, every bit of star-stuff to exist and then to unfold in the way that He saw was good. What is a day in His sight?
In one sense, I feel like nothing, less than one of those little grains of sand tossed up by the ocean. What am I in the context of all those years, all those other living beings, all those other people?
What am I? As I’ve studied His Word, I have learned that I am His child, and precious in His sight. As I’ve started to get to know Him and seen His work in my life, it has struck home to me that here is where I can really see that God is God. To grasp, even for just a moment, that His attention is infinitely undivided, that He can guide the spinning of the galaxies and the splitting of an atom while He also is present within me, guiding and healing and nurturing me… that’s just incredible.
I don’t have all the answers; I do have a lot of questions. But I do know that the God who reached out and touched my life, and called me to Him, is powerful enough to create this marvelous world in all its complexity, to call matter and energy out of the void, set it in motion, and guide it to unfold exactly as He willed it to be.
It is a gloriously complex world, full of details and relationships and delicate balances of cause and effect… and why not? Our God is a great God; why should we expect Him to create an easy, simple world for us? What a fabulous, fascinating, exciting world we have, full of surprises as we learn more about how it works. What a delight to have been given the curiosity to explore this world and the gift of reason to figure out how it works!
Science and faith are not an either-or. They’re a both-and. Praise God!
Related posts:
- No Longer Playing It Safe
- Salvation on the Street (Fair)
- A Thanksgiving for Prayer
- A Closer Look at Science vs. Faith
- Reading Genesis: Order and Chaos
4 Responses to “The First Cause and a Personal God”
Dr Holly Ordway came to Christ through reason, in the pursuit of truth. "In your hearts honor Christ as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 15).
She writes about her journey from atheism to orthodox Christian faith in her book "Not God's Type: A Rational Academic Finds a Radical Faith" (Moody Publishers).
Thank you for writing on this. I’m glad to see people new to the faith don’t throw everything out. Keep it up!
You say “The best evidence of astronomy indicates that everything came into creation at the Big Bang; geological, biological, molecular, and fossil evidence all strongly indicate that the natural world as we see it has developed since then through the process of evolution.”
Do you know this to be true or are you leaving certain preconceptions unexamined? The Big Bang event is evidence for a Creator – time, space, matter, and energy, sprang into existence from nothing. The best explanation for this is that God created. I think we are in agreement on this. However, I challenge you to think through your understanding of evolution. We are taught in school that evolution is not really a theory as much as a fact. No intelligent person today questions this. And yet, there is no “biological, molecular or fossil evidence” to support macro-evolution. Darwin expected fossils of transitional species to be discovered – they haven’t been and we should have expected to find thousands of them. Darwin thought a cell was filled with goo. We now know it is an incredibly complex factory-like structure with interdependent parts. Evolution can’t account for this. How many random mutations are beneficial? What do you think when you hear “mutant”? Now theistic evolutionists assert that the changes are due to God’s guidance. OK, could be, but why think this? Is is too difficult to abandon what you already accepted as true? Richard Dawkins will call you names for believing in God, sticking to faith in evolution will not save you from him. Evolutionists assert a strictly materialistic explanation for the universe and for life – they deny God. The Big Bang has actually thrown a wrench in the works because it indicates a 13.7 (I think) billion year old universe and a 4.5 billion year old earth. This is not enough time to account for the existence of life. This has caused some evolutionists to just raise their voices and say it must have happened because it happened. Hmm. Others have posited multi-universe explanations and suggest that the seeds of life came to earth through a meteor or perhaps from alien visitors. This is panspermia. Clearly those entrenched in the philosophy of evolution are forced to reach for more and more outlandish explanations. Why? Because real science does not support the claims of evolution. It is very hard for us to admit we have been wrong and evolutionists can’t do it. Evolution must be true because there can’t be a god.
Well, I want to know what is true even if it challenges all my preconceptions. Theistic evolution is a weak compromise position that has not been thought through.
I wonder if you are hung up on thinking that you must deny the age of the universe and the earth to believe in creation. The Hebrew word “yom” translated in our Bible as day, actually means any of the following: daylight hours, 24 hours or eon/age. If you think about it the same is true of our word “day.” When we say “the day of the dinosaur” we don’t mean 24 hours. The seventh “day” in Genesis is still ongoing. I believe that eon or age is the proper understanding of the days of creation. Additionally, the order of creation in the Bible agrees with science. We must not be fearful of science because God’s world will not contradict His Word. This is not to say that the Bible is a science text. But where creation is described it will agree with truth. If we think it doesn’t, we have misunderstood one or the other. What we must not do is blindly accept the assertions of evolution as fact. Good science tests and adjusts its theories based on new evidence. Evolutionists refuse to do this and demand that we just believe.
Lastly, if men evolved, from whence came the soul? If we evolved, when and how did we fall?
A good book to read (there are many) is “I don’t Have Enough Faith to Be and Atheist” by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek. I have thrown down the gauntlet!
Linda, you bring up some interesting points, and I think I’ll actually reserve a lot of my response to when I can write it out in more depth. I do want to point out a couple of things that are worth considering:
– The fact of evolution is distinct from the theories of how evolution happens. There is agreement among scientists that evolution has happened; there is disagreement about how it has come about. For example, the question of whether evolution is a steady process or a sporadic one is still open; in the past, it was assumed that it was steady, but Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium offers a different way of looking at it, one that would account for an apparently abrupt transition from one species to the next.
– Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection, a key concept in evolution, but he was just the first to articulate ideas of biological evolution. He’s not the final word by any means: as you correctly point out, he didn’t know many of the things about biology that we know now. We shouldn’t base our understanding of evolution on what Darwin said, alone; that would be like dismissing the modern science of genetics because Gregor Mendel didn’t understand a lot of the complexities of inheritance.
–I agree that “origin” is the spot where non-theistic science falls short. However, evolutionary theory (appropriately handled) does not attempt to answer questions of ultimate origin, but rather questions of development.
–In the evolution of humankind, presumably there was some relationship between God and man that He set up, and which at some point was broken by us. This part I don’t understand very well and perhaps never will. That the Fall happened, we can be sure of; when it happened and how it literally played out are things I don’t know. But the idea of a “day” really being “eons” in God’s eyes is part of what makes human evolution compatible with Genesis.
Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory is an effort to account for the lack of transitional fossil evidence – it is pure unsubstantiated speculation. The argument goes something like this: Because gradual transition from one species to another cannot be supported by the fossil record, then, well, that must be because life forms changed so rapidly that they did not have time to leave any fossil evidence. There were genetic leaps rather than slow changes. This explains the lack of evidence never mind that no one can account for how that might be possible. Does this really make sense to you? Sounds like evolution of the gaps to me. The cambrian explosion (http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=119) shows that all phyla which exist today appeared suddenly in the fossil record – fully formed. There are less phyla today. This is a difficulty if not an outright contradiction to the idea of all life forms developing from a single ancestor as shown on the “tree of life.” Hmm. Also look into chirality.
I used to believe in evolution because it was in the biology book, on the test and the teacher and Discovery Channel said so. (Once you are aware of the widespread and casual assumption that life evolved naturally, you will notice it everywhere – kids are indoctrinated.) Only much later did I realize that the theory of evolution is full of holes and seriously lacking in evidential support – I was horrified that I had so willingly accepted this.
You don’t need to abandon science to believe in creation. http://reasons.org/resources/apologetics/shellgame.shtml As a Christian, we believe in a caring personal God who is intimately involved with his creation – yes? Does this fit with evolution as described by the materialists? I see God as an artist taking care to lovingly create the universe and everything in it. Maybe like the conductor of a wondrous symphony. Theistic evolution fits with a deist god – set it up and leave it alone – but not with the personal God of Christianity. After looking at the “other side” I can no longer accept macro-evolution. We see micro-evolution and it certainly takes place. Yet there is no reason to extrapolate macro from micro. Because species naturally select for beneficial traits such as color or beak length this does not mean that they turn into other animals. Darwin’s finches remain finches. They have not become elephants or even toucans. I now believe that our God created, taking His time and enjoying the endeavor, using a combination of processes He designed and direct creation as needed, and upholds all things even still.
Now if you are entrenched in the acceptance of evolution you may not be interested in investigation and of course you are no less a Christian. But if you seek to understand evolution, as opposed to believe it, you may come to know more about the God who made you. I think the more we know God the more we can love Him.
I found God (or God used general revelation to draw me) by looking at creation, not Biblically but through science, so I am passionate about this. Evolution is often used to demonstrate that God is not necessary. Don’t be mislead by the apparent consensus that evolution is “fact” – accepted science has been wrong many times before. More and more scientists are coming forward to express their doubts. If you don’t look at anything else, look at this. http://www.dissentfromdarwin.org/
Whatever you do or decide, may God bless you abundantly!