The year was around 60 AD. The Apostle Paul had been apprehended and almost killed in the Temple at Jerusalem by a mob of angry Jews.
A few days later, he had been whisked off to the Roman Procurator Felix because of danger from a group of Jewish plotters. Felix had heard his case and though there was no evidence to convict Paul, Felix had kept him in prison for the next two years until the new Procurator, Festus, took his place.
King Herod Agrippa II came to visit Festus and the two of them listened to Paul speak. During the hearing Paul …reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, [until finally] Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee –Acts 24:25. Then towards the end of Paul’s oration …Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad –Acts 26:24.
Festus was not speaking of scientific knowledge, but of the fact that Paul was well-studied. Worse yet, Paul was making the governor uncomfortable with his sinful life and his reasoning made clear that the only solution for both Festus and Agrippa was to follow the Scriptures of the Hebrews.
Paul was well educated. He made clear in his letters and sermons, quoting not only from the Jewish Bible, but also from a variety of Greek and Cretan philosophers and poets.
In more modern times, it seems as though science is not a friend to faith. Many scientists claim that the idea of an intelligent designer of the Universe is ludicrous. Further, many of them would say that those who believe such things are the next thing to savages.
It certainly turns many Christians away from science entirely. They do not see something so antagonistic to the fundamental Christian faith as being useful.
I can understand this point of view, but I think that we should not give up learning simply because some of those who claim to be so knowledgeable are, in actuality, quite foolish.
Creation
When I think about the subject of science, I often begin with the subject of creation. This is the beginning of everything and is the first place where “science” and the Bible first come into conflict.
Science is simply unable to accept that there could have been a Creator God who set in motion everything that we see.
There are many books delving into the subject of intelligent design and seeing God’s fingerprints throughout creation. It takes a lot more faith to believe that the universe happened by chance, than to believe in a Creator.
The Bible makes it clear that God was not only present at the time of Creation, but it was also He who began it (John 1:1-3). Paul says For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse –Romans 1:20.
People should be able to discern that there is a Creator God involved in our world and the universe from the time of Creation. They should be able to understand a few other things about Him as well. Perhaps most important for our discussion here, we can tell by looking at creation that God is an orderly God and that He created the world to function with a specific structure and laws that govern it.
This is one of the big differences between the Creation account found in Genesis and the myths of creation found in other cultures of the time. The Bible makes it clear that God intentionally created the world, that He did so in an orderly fashion, and that He made certain that every part of it meshed with all the other parts. There is no magic or mystical thinking in the Genesis account.
The Laws of the Universe Still Stand
There are many people who believe that they can alter the way that the universe functions, that they can behave in immoral ways and not suffer the rewards of sin, and that they can do foolish things and not suffer the consequences of their behavior.
The Prophet Jeremiah tells us that there are laws which are in place that will not cease to function. Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name: If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever –Jeremiah 31:35-36.
There is a whole set of laws that governs the way that the earth rotates on its axis and orbits the sun. Everything from the speed of light to the way that gravity pulls things towards large bodies of mass was instituted at the time of Creation—…all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation –2 Peter 3:4.
Since those laws continue and do not fluctuate, we are able to understand them—at least in part. This is what science is—the study of the natural world that we see and an attempt to comprehend the ways in which it works. God created our world in such a way that if you do an experiment the same way every time, you will get the same results every time.
Science Will Never Understand Everything
The Prophet Isaiah says, For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts –Isaiah 55:8-9.
Even the smartest quantum physicists will admit that they don’t understand everything. In fact, the number of questions that they have is greater than the whole storehouse of knowledge that has been accumulated.
Most of us will have far less understanding of the universe than that. We won’t understand all the details of how the atom functions. We won’t be able to do the calculus necessary to put a satellite into orbit. That’s all right. The important thing is that we learn what we can in order to understand what an amazing and orderly God we serve.
Presuppositions are a Problem
The biggest problem that we see in science is not the science itself, rather it is the biases of the people performing the science. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God… –Psalm 14:1. By this definition, many scientists are fools.
I don’t say this lightly. Atheists observe the universe and since they believe that there cannot be a God, they must then explain how it exists without the presence of an actual Creator. This is the heart of foolishness.
When they come to gaps in their knowledge, they are silent and yet the Christian can explain them in a few simple words. As I said before, when we look at the complexity of the universe, from the tiniest things to the largest galaxies, we can see the hands of God at work.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? –Psalm 8:3-4. When we think about the world around us, when we read what scientists write, it is crucial that we come to it with a knowledge that God is behind all of this. For in him we live, and move, and have our being… – Acts 17:28, and nothing that science can discern will change that.
Science should be like a detective, uncovering God’s fingerprints on the universe, not someone bound and determined to discredit His very real presence.
Many Scientists Believe in God
Looking into the past, many scientists were men who believed in the God of the Bible. Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, Nicholas Copernicus and many others believed in the Bible and were forthright in their expression of this faith to others.
In more modern days, there are many men and women of science who believe in the God of the Bible. Just because one is working in science doesn’t mean that they are unable to have a life of faith.
Many people have co-opted scientific discoveries to push messages that are against Christian belief and teaching.
We need to remember that when there is a set of facts, there are usually different explanations that can account for their presence. Creation and evolution examine the same facts of nature, yet from a different perspective or bias, thus they end up with vastly different conclusions. Perhaps it is a little like a Sherlock Holmes story, where Dr. Watson routinely takes the facts and gives an inaccurate explanation of them, while the detective takes the same information and gives the right explanation.
Science and Medicine
It is not against Scripture to research how things work in our universe, as long as we do so within a Biblical framework and understanding that there is a Creator God who is ordering it all.
Modern medicine is an application of many various fields, including anatomy, microanatomy, genetics, and biochemistry. The point, in this case, is to observe the human body the best that we can and then to fix the things that go wrong with it. Doctors can be scientists, but most of them are simply applying knowledge which has been passed down to them through their training.
Observation is where things start. Let’s consider diabetes as an example. Aretaeus of Cappadocia in the second century AD was the first person to give a complete description of diabetes and actually gave the disease the name diabetes. The problem was that while he was able to diagnose people with this illness, he had no treatment to help his patients. Observation had only taken him so far.
Over time, other work was done that demonstrated that the problem was an issue in the pancreas and that something was specifically wrong with the islet cells. Even into the early 1900s, there was no cure for Diabetes Mellitus and the only solution that doctors had to offer was an extremely low glycemic diet with severe calorie limits—attempting to keep patients at 500 or 600 calories a day. As can be imagined, this wasn’t an ideal treatment.
It wasn’t until the 1920s that a couple of researchers in Canada discovered a way to extract insulin from dogs and administered it to a 14-year-old who was dying of diabetes. The extract saved his life and began a new era for people with diabetes.
This is the way that things work. We begin by observing a disease and various medications that seem to be effective for it, then over time and through meticulous testing we can assess what treatments are most effective for that illness.
Studies in which half of the participants with a disease are given a medication or treatment and half are given a placebo (a pill without medical efficacy) are still the most effective way of telling whether something really works.
Why Treatments Need to be Studied
There is a real tendency to believe that the things that you have been taught are effective. We know that George Washington died of pneumonia. His doctors probably damaged his chances of recovery by bleeding him four times for a total of close to 40 percent of his blood volume. They probably would have bled him a fifth time, but he wasn’t thought to be strong enough to survive the procedure.
Doctors bled patients because they believed that there were toxic build ups in the blood stream that had to be let out. Most of the people who died after bloodletting would probably have died anyway, but bleeding people who are really sick certainly doesn’t help them recover.
Maybe the doctors simply wanted to be doing something. Patients expected bloodletting and so they met those expectations, even though it harmed the patients.
Experience is what lets you make the same mistakes with a lot more confidence.
What Makes a Good Study
Good studies—have plenty of patients in them, have a control group (that either receives an inactive pill called a placebo, or the current best treatment for that disease), and have the test group getting the new treatment. It is also important for the control group and the test group to be matched as closely as possible. Finally, the size of the groups in the study is vital to the conclusions of the study. If there are only ten or twenty patients in the study, it is not a large enough group to really sort out if something works or doesn’t.
For many diseases there is something called a placebo effect. This placebo effect is when people get better from an illness even though they are not receiving something that should be effective at treating the malady. Interestingly, in studies, many people get side effects from the inert pills. If 20 percent of the people getting the placebo get better and 45 percent of the people getting the treatment get better, that would indicate that the treatment is effective. If the difference is minimal—say 20 percent of the placebo group and 23 percent of the treatment group improve—then the treatment isn’t effective.
Problems
The biggest problem with many treatments is that they simply aren’t studied. Vitamin supplements and herbal compounds may work, but many of them have never actually been studied in a trial comparing them with a control group. Most of the information is anecdotal. The fact that someone’s grandmother or uncle benefited from something is possibly an indication that it is effective, but it doesn’t tell us how effective this treatment is or what dosage level is ideal.
Another issue is when studies simply don’t have enough participants to really give accurate information. Many studies only include ten or twenty patients. That is simply not enough to identify how well a treatment works or what side effects can be expected. For a drug to be approved by the FDA, it will typically have been studied on between 1,000 to 3,000 patients with the disease.
A final issue with studies is when they show that a medication is effective, but the effect isn’t clinically significant. As an example, a new injectable medication for dementia (aducanumab) was recently approved by the FDA. It is very expensive, and the benefit seemed to be small. Patients who were on it got an average of 1.5 more test questions right on an 85-question mental status questionnaire after 18 months compared to the control group.
One can rightly question if the benefits shown by this medication are worth the 50,000 dollar-per-year cost. More than that, how much of a meaningful improvement in someone’s everyday activities would come from using such a medicine? It seems unlikely that it would make very much of a difference.
It is unfortunate, but drug companies will always try to make it seem like their medicine is the best, even if the studies do not show significant benefit over existing, cheaper options.
Conclusion
Christians are faced with a world which does not love them or their beliefs. Many would try to use science as a way to bludgeon them into giving up their faith. I hope that does not lead us to give up on the scientific method or to give up attempting to understand the laws behind the universe that God created.
The scientific method is valid, even if many of the people who use it are atheists or agnostics. If a treatment works, it should be observable, testable, and repeatable.
Even as we approach it, we have a basic understanding of the universe that atheists don’t have. Knowing that there is a Creator God who loves us makes a major difference as we interpret the results of all the different observations that are being made in the fields of medicine and other places.
Those who do not know God are bound to be ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth –2 Timothy 3:7. On the other hand, if we begin with a Biblical understanding, we can use science as a tool to help us to understand the creation that He has placed around us.
