Scientists can’t be ‘proper Christians’- Part 2

This month I want to continue thinking about how best to respond graciously whenever a Christian brother or sister wants to insist that modern science is incompatible with our faith.

We discussed one approach to this last month and, remembering again Peter’s essential advice re answering with gentleness and respect, another possible response is to point out that scripture itself encourages us to learn from creation and see in it God’s glory and power…

Psalm 19 is a great example (NIV):

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.
3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them.
4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

In a nutshell, studying and learning from creation is a scientist’s job. We could pick any one of multiple different scientific disciplines to illustrate our point, but as Ps 19 kicks off with ‘The heavens’, astronomy sounds like a good place to start…

Light is fast, we know that; but it’s not instantaneous... Light travels through space at just under 300,000 km/second, covering nearly 10 trillion km in one year and giving us a ‘light year’: a convenient way of measuring the vast inter-stellar and inter-galactic distances. The further a planet or star or galaxy or any other celestial body is from earth, the longer the light takes to reach us…

The sun we see on earth at any point in time, is actually how it was around 8 minutes earlier, because the light took 8 minutes to get to us. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is 4 light years away so our view of it is 4 years out of date and we see the North star as it was 440 years ago. The nearest major galactic neighbour to our own Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy, is nearly 2.5 million light years away.  We can see that with our naked eyes on a clear dark night, but the light from it, the picture, we get of it today is 2.5 million years old. The night sky is awe-inspiring and it is our very own time machine!

The heavens do indeed declare the glory of God with their vast, vast scale and they show us an ancient origin.