Subversive Christian Unity

I lately came across a really good presentation on why scientific reasoning cannot preclude the miraculous; read the whole thing on the Veritas forum: http://www.veritas.org/can-scientist-believe-resurrection-three-hypotheses/ Snippets from the article: I’m a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.  So do dozens of my colleagues. How can this be?... Science cannot and does not disprove the resurrection. Natural science describes the normal reproducible working of the world of nature. Indeed, the key meaning of “nature”, as Boyle emphasized, is “the normal course of events.” Miracles like the resurrection are inherently abnormal. It does not take modern science to tell us that humans don’t rise from the dead. People knew that perfectly well in the first century; just as they knew that the blind from birth don’t as adults regain their sight, or water doesn’t instantly turn into wine... Today’s wi...

Here is something I had not seen before: an argument that creation of the earth in six days, of twenty-four hours each, does not conflict with modern science. See the slides linked below. How the argument works: Due to relativistic time dilation, the amount of time seen to pass on the earth would be variable. It would depend on the location of the observer. Six days from God's external point of view could well be long millions of years when seen from the local time rate perspective, on earth. The Bible's time scale shifts then, after telling us about that initial stage of creation, to talking about earth days, after Adam shows up to observe days from our perspective. Other possible explanations exist as to why Genesis explains things as it does, some of them at least as plausible. But insofar as this new, highly scientific approach adds one more such possibility to the discussion, it strengthens the overarching point that people have been making all along. A woodenly liter...

By Charles Marsh The problem is that science, well suited to look at repeatable events, is at a loss about singular ones.  Some people suppose that science trumps religion, that a modern understanding of the world through science renders religious understandings obsolete. Some others suppose that religious understanding can be used to refute science. Both views are wrong. Science is rooted in philosophical naturalism. That is the stance that says we will explain what we see without reference to supernatural agencies. Science describes what happens without recourse to explanations involving angels, demons, gods, fairy godmothers, humors, vapors or ghosts. Acting on this basis, science has done a great deal of good. It has gotten rid of superstitions about what causes disease, where insects come from and a good many other misunderstandings. Notice that science is morally neutral. The same disciplines that give us vaccines and disease prevention can as...

A certain type of unbeliever, whose trust is in science and whose faith for the future is in more of the same, loves to make fun of a certain sort of Christian. That Christian is the fellow who insists that the earth is of recent origin, some five to ten thousand years old, mankind was contemporary with the dinosaurs and science's dating of the creation is all wrong. I do not object personally to Christians who believe that view of the world's origin. But by proclaiming it to the world, as if it were a central or even an important doctrine, they do harm to the cause of the gospel. The whole idea repels the unbeliever whose education has told him everything to the contrary. All anyone needs to know about origins, for full Christian orthodoxy, is to understand that God is the unmoved first mover in creation, however it happened. Let us not place a stumbling block in the road that leads to Christ, by insisting on a narrow and particular view of an event none of us saw. Chr...