Phill Sacre

Tag: science and christianity

  • Genesis vs Science – Talk recording

    Genesis vs Science – Talk recording

    About 18 months ago, I ran a session at our church called “Genesis vs Science”. A few people had been asking questions about Genesis and the Bible and how it squared up with questions of science e.g. the Big Bang and evolution. The whole thing was recorded and for a while was available on our church website, unfortunately for various reasons it’s not there at the moment.

    So, I’ve decided to upload the sessions here so that there’s a permanent archive of them in case they’re useful.

    The morning was split into two halves – the first session was on the foundations of science, and the second was specifically about Genesis.

    The first session started out with this video, which you may wish to watch first:

    Downloads

    This is the handout, which you can download to refer to during the sessions:

    Genesis vs Science HandoutDownload
    Session 1 – Foundations of Science
    Session 2 – What Genesis does and does not say

  • Creation / Evolution 4 – Genesis 1

    This is the fourth instalment of my mini-series “Creation, Evolution, and Evangelicalism”. Note that the series is still technically on hold, I just wanted to expand on a couple of things I mentioned in previous posts, namely to do with Genesis chapter 1. All clear? Good! 😉

    But first, a clarification: I mentioned in a previous post that I had problems with ‘creationism’. I probably should have been clearer in this post but the particular version of creationism which I have a problem with is ‘young earth creationism’ (which for brevity I shall refer to as YEC from now on): obviously, all Christians are “Creationists” in the sense that we believe God created the world and “the fulness thereof” (a phrase which Mike Ovey is particularly fond of, from the King James version of Psalm 24:1). However, what I am arguing for is that being a ‘creationist’ does not conflict with being an ‘evolutionist’, in the sense that one can believe both in the creative acts of God and the biological process of evolution.

    The second thing I’d like to clarify is that I’m not necessarily arguing for evolution in the sense that “I’m a scientist and I believe this to be true”. I think my point is more general, that I believe science and Christianity should never be in conflict: that we can accept what science to be saying, provided that it doesn’t come loaded with any metaphysical connotations (i.e. I don’t believe evolutionism is required by science, despite what people like Dawkins would have you believe. Evolution is a scientific model / biological process, it has no concerns with God.) In other words, if scientists come up with a better theory than evolution (or a more refined version) in the future, I’d be happy to go with that.

    That turned out to be a slightly longer clarification than I intended, sorry! – but anyway, what I’d like to talk about in this post is something which is contested by the aforementioned Creationists. I touched on this in my previous post on creationism but I’d like to expand on it now: how are Christians to read Genesis 1?

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