Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation: The Problem with Profiling Objections to Mainstream Science (Ken Wilson)
Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation: The Problem with Profiling Objections to Mainstream Science as Part of the Cost of Discipleship :: September 9-10, 2006
All right, we're in a little series called Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation. We've got outlines for today's message on the soundboard there in the back, and then also I'm trying to reproduce an actual entirely written version of the previous week sermon because it's important material and that way you can read it at your leisure and interact with me as you wish about it. So those are also available in the back. I'm not sure we have enough for everybody. I know we don't because they've been going like hotcakes, but we'll make more available next weekend and by the grace of God I'll be able to get the time to write them up more extensively each week as we go through the series. Science and Faith at the Crossroads of Creation. This is so important for us as the Ann Arbor Vineyard because we're called to humbly bear the transforming presence of Jesus into the heart of Ann Arbor and surrounding communities. And so it's our obligation, especially, to thoughtfully, prayerfully, and biblically engage the question of science and faith at the Crossroads of Creation, the pesky question of origins, of the universe, of the earth, of humankind, of ourselves. This is really the stuff of meaning, the stuff of faith. Where are we? Who are we? Who's are we? And what are we here for? I said it before last week, I'm going to say it again in the very same words. I wrote them down so I can get them straight. I hope when we're finished with this series, you won't feel the slightest obligation to agree with my particular leanings about how science and faith intersect at the Crossroads of Creation. I do hope you'll love Jesus more. I hope you'll appreciate His book more. I hope you'll have a wider love for the world that Jesus loves so that together we can serve be more useful to Jesus in His passionate pursuit of the world that His Father created and holds in being still. My motivation for tackling this topic is not intellectual curiosity. I can do that in other places, but it's missionary zeal. I'm doing this series out of flat-out missionary zeal. I'm a Jesus freak, have been for a long time, who believes that Jesus is on a mission from God in search of humanity, that He is God in search of humanity. I've also come to the conviction that the Evangelical Church, which is the dominant form of religion in our society, has made a fundamental and strategic error in profiling the Gospel of Jesus as requiring a posture of protest toward mainstream science. When I say that as a son of the Evangelical Church, it was Evangelicals who introduced me to Jesus. It was Evangelicals who gave me a love for the Bible as Evangelicals who saved my marriage. I think the Evangelical Church is a source of great good in America. I mean, there's Evangelical communities where people are being cared for and loved and marriages are being saved and just wonderful things are happening. If it weren't for the Evangelical Church in America, we wouldn't be giving as much money as we are to AIDS in Africa, I believe they're just much good that's going on in the Evangelical Church in America. But on this particular issue, I think we're missing the boat. You know, there are four main perspectives held by Christians on this issue of how faith and science intersect creation. There's what's called the Young Earth position, the Old Earth position, I'll describe these later, intelligent design and theistic evolution. Each of these positions is a different strategy for engaging the story of science. Now it's in the heat of the controversy that surrounds this issue, it's really easy to forget that there's much more that we agree about regarding what Genesis 1 and 2 are saying than we disagree about in these four different positions. In fact, these four different positions are only handling a very narrow slice of the meaning of Genesis 1 and 2. We're only talking about how Genesis 1 and 2 intersect with science and that's really not that huge an issue for our actual lives. I know people who hold each of these views and they hold the views with intelligence and with integrity. I have dear friends who hold different views than my own, we have different views on our pastoral staff for which I'm glad. I'm thankful for the friendship of my friends who love me in spite of my mistaken views. It's just lovely, it's a lovely thing to be loved by people who will love you in spite of your mistaken views. You're really not loved until you're loved like that and I'm loved like that. My concern though is with the assertion that faithfulness to Jesus and faithfulness to his book requires that we adopt the position of protest toward the story of science. My problem is this. History teaches us a lesson. It's possible that this may be in fact a false choice. John Paul II, one of my heroes, apologized in the year 2000 for the Catholic Church rejecting Galileo who said that the earth was not the center of the solar system. The entire church, Protestant and Catholic, objected to Galileo and that objection lasted for about 200 years. Finally someone spoke up, JP2 and he apologized for it and the objection was completely across the board on biblical grounds. Now if it turns out that we're wrong again, I think that means that we've got an unnecessary and merely human obstacle to faith in Jesus, that it's not in fact part of the scandal of the gospel and there's plenty of scandal in the gospel to go around. But either way, however it turns out, it's a bad missionary strategy, the posture we've taken in the evangelical church in America. Oh man, I saw a movie, I recommend this, I mean it's called The End of the Spear. I don't know how many of you saw The End of the Spear, it was out about a year ago, it's on DVD, run to wherever, get the end of the spear and watch it. There's a documentary that's associated with it, there's a great companion piece, it's a film about actual missionaries who gave their lives to reach an unreached people group along the Amazon basin. I met Elizabeth Elliott, who was one of the women, her husband Jim Elliott died. That particular tribal people had a homicide rate of 60%, 60% of the people on that tribe died by homicide and so these missionaries went in and after they were done, this is according to anthropologists who studied the area, the homicide rate dropped from 60% to about 5%. In the course of one generation, the mission strategy of those missionaries was go in, learn the language of the people, learn the thought forms of the people, listen carefully to the defining stories of the culture in order to share the gospel within that framework so that Jesus could become a transforming presence from within rather than an external force from without. They took a non-confrontational approach and that allowed them at critical points to speak prophetically to the culture. The first words, those missionaries learned in that alka language were "I want to be your friend." In fact, it's a very poignant part in the movie, it happened in real life, one of those missionaries died at the end of the spear speaking those words, "I want to be your friend." Now you don't say, "I want to be your friend" to a culture and then blast there how the world works story without giving it a careful listen, looking for how the story of God in search of humankind might fit with this story so as to transform it. I just don't think we've done that well with the story of sight. When I say story here, I don't mean something made up. I mean story like your life story or story like a news story, many kinds of stories. You know in some churches, if you try to engage the story of science in that kind of a way, you might find yourself at the end of a figurative sphere and I'm not exaggerating. Mainstream science tells a story. It has a beginning, goes back 16 billion years ago, give or take a few billion years, not quibble about details. There's a middle to the story roughly that we're in right now according to the story of mainstream science and there's an end to the story. I don't know if you saw the ABC special report a couple of weeks ago entitled "Last Days on Earth." Wow, what a powerful piece, man, that just sent me running to the book of Revelation. Incredible story about the scientific understanding of the end of life on planet earth. But science functions as one of those stories within our culture that orient us to the universe. Every society has stories like that and science is just a very powerful story that serves that function in our community. You know there are authorized storytellers of the science story, the innermost circle. These would be the scientists at the research universities and the primary disciplines, physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology and the like. Then you have an outer ring of popularizers of the story. This would be like Discover Magazine, Nature, National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, PBS, the Nova series, a Star Trek in its own way as a popularizer of the scientific story. Then you have the outer ring, the mass audience. These are the people who've not mastered the details of the scientific story. They're not judging it based on their own research, but they identify with it as their story. Now, large sections of this group of people have never been socialized to the American evangelical Bible Belt culture. They've never read a purpose-driven life. They've never listened to focus on the family. It's just outside of their frame of reference. And this constitutes a large segment of the population in the United States who are on the outside of faith looking in. And what I'm saying is our particular tribe is not well positioned to reach them and that's just not acceptable. Let's get dicey. Two issues that conservative Christians object to when it comes to mainstream science, evolution and the problem of global warming. I asked Emily to come up here. She's not coming up to take over or anything like that. She's going to share in just a minute. Both of those are based on mainstream science. Now, evolution, with this evolution, say in a nutshell, evolution says that all life is related, that species change over time by way of natural breeding. So populations of a given species over time tend to become more like the individuals in the population who do the most breeding. Over long periods of time, as the populations adapt to different circumstances, different environmental changes of our vast segments of time, by way of this mechanism of natural breeding, there's a change in the species so that even one species can branch into two or more species. And this is the mechanism behind much of the diversity of life on planet Earth, according to the theory of evolution. The theory of climate change says, hey, the globe's getting warmer. It's called global warming, and our output as humans of hydrocarbons is a factor. And if it keeps getting warmer, at this pace, a lot of people and a lot of other critters will suffer. And so we'd be wise to do something about the part that we can actually control. Now, thoughtful people disagree with science on both these issues? I think it's good to have a society where this kind of disagreement takes place. It's good to have perspectives outside the mainstream. It helps keep the mainstream honest. But in the United States right now, evangelicals, for some reason, are a power block of protest. And one could get the impression that it's the Christian agenda to forbid the theory of evolution being taught in schools or to teach it alongside a preferred view as if they have equal weight in the scientific community. You could get the impression that global warming's a crock. We shouldn't worry about it. And I'm not saying anything except, I mean, we have a right if we disagree with science to protest. It's America. We have a right as Christians to protest. But you know, I just don't know what time in history when the gospel has advanced by Christians asserting their rights. As far as I can tell, the gospel really advances when Christians are willing to yield their rights, when they're willing to give up their lives. I mean, those missionaries who went to the Alka Indians, I mean, they brought guns with them, but they never used them. They had a right to defend their lives, but they yielded their rights for the sake of the gospel. That's when the gospel really spreads in a culture. Now, here's the point we all have, perhaps. Many people, neighbors, coworkers, family members, maybe we ourselves, who stay away from the gospel of Jesus because of its association with this posture of protest against mainstream science. I wanted Emily to share, she had a great conversation recently with one of her neighbors on this very point. Yeah, it was over at this friend's house a couple of weeks ago, and I was sharing with her about how I may end up doing a longer-term mission trip in the next year or so. And this friend's normally very gentle and very sweet, and she turns to me with a force that I could never have seen her with, and she says, "Why would you want to do that? Why would you ever want to join the Global Culture War? Why do you want to go around proselyzing people?" And then she went down through a laundry list of things that she perceives wrong with the evangelical church, and the two chief ones were the items that Ken just listed. She said, "You know, Christians don't care about the environment. They don't care about global warming because they think Armageddon is coming." And all you see is I'm trying to yank evolution out of schools. And as she went on, I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, "Wow." You know, usually I'm kind of met with a sort of suspicious silence with that group of friends whenever I talk about church or about mission trips. I thought, "You know, good for her. She's getting it out there. Now we can actually dialogue about it." So I was able to share with her that, you know, while I do know some Christians affect some of her in my family, and that I love very dearly, the who do fit that mold, the evangelical. I said, "But they don't necessarily equal anti-evolution or anti-environment." I said, "I know a lot of people who care very deeply about the environment." And so as a conversation progressed, we talked for at least an hour, and let me tell you, it was really tense at some points, but I really felt like there was a softening of the soil as we were able to make some access points for her to connect with. So the next day was a Wednesday, and she comes knocking at my door about noon, and she has a pie, and she says, "Hey, would you want to have some lunch?" I'm like, "Come in. You've got pie." So she comes in, and we start to eat, and she says, "You know, my husband and I don't go to church, because he has no context for Christianity at all. Everything he knows of, he sees on TV, and he just really doesn't connect with it." She says, "It's not even a question of us going to church, but, you know, I've been going to a neighborhood prayer group on Wednesday mornings for the past few years, and this is something she'd never shared with me in three years." So she said, "You know, I was talking this morning with the ladies about what you told me yesterday about how Evangelical doesn't necessarily mean anti-environment or anti-evolution." She said, "And they get really excited." And since that time, this friend and I, our relationship, has definitely softened, and I felt like a wall came down just because I was willing to engage her on those points. Thanks, Emily. Yeah. I mean, that just perfectly describes. I just think it'd be great if there were more emilies in Evangelicals all across America. I think more people would get saved. I think we'd be just a lot farther down the mission path if there were more emilies in the Evangelical church. So are we ready to dig into our topic today? You thought I was already in it, but that was just a warm up. My topic today is, "What does the Bible teach about different ways of knowing?" Because that's a really central issue when we're talking about science and faith. Science and faith are different ways of knowing. What does the Bible have to teach about different ways of knowing? Well, a lot. There are two ways of knowing that are contrasted in the Bible, represented in this verse from 2 Corinthians, for we walk by faith, not by sight. Faith, like sight, is a way of knowing. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, it's the conviction of things not seen. Assurance is a way of knowing, conviction is a way of knowing, sight is a way of knowing, faith is a way of knowing. God turns out that Jesus was more interested in faith as a way of knowing than he was about sight, although he cared about people's sight, that's why he healed their blindness. When one of Jesus' homeboys, by the name of Thomas, after reports of his resurrection were circulating, he said, "Well, I won't believe it until I put my hands in his side and feel the wounds." Jesus appeared shortly thereafter and said, "Go ahead, Thomas, felt the Lord's wounds. He fell to worship." Jesus unimpressed said, "Because you've seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen me, and yet have believed." That's a blessing for everyone who believes today, receive it if it applies to you. Jesus wants to be known by faith more than he wants to be known by sight. Sight, what does that mean? Well, that stands for the natural senses. More broadly speaking, hearing, smell, touch, taste, verum detection. That's a new one that was recently discovered by which we are able to know the natural world around us. These are the natural world detection devices of humanity, the world of matter and energy. By extension, I think sight also represents other ways of human knowing like math. Some of the ancients knew the world was round. Many people in the time of Christ knew the world was round because they knew geometry and math. And that's how they figured it out. Isn't that amazing? These guys were geniuses. And it turned out to be right, but it took a long time before we could actually see it. In fact, it's been in the last hundred years that we could actually see it since we got far enough from the earth to actually look at it and say, "Oh, they were right. The math was right. The geometry is right. It is round, dog, on it. I can see it." Science is only an extended way, a very extended way of knowing by sight. Science is not something that God created. Science is something that we created. And I'm sure God's very proud of us for it, and he delights in what our hands have created. Although I think he looks at us a little bit like the parents who have seen that their child has discovered a chemistry set, and they're like, "Oh, I'm glad they're interested in science." But, "Oh, they're interested in science. What could happen?" Science is just a human invention. It's a human set of lenses. It's not some kind of ultimate arbiter about the truth. Science has a set of rules, like if it doesn't agree with experiment, well, it's wrong. Or if an experiment can't be duplicated over and over again, we'll forget it, if it can't be measured, or it can't be connected somehow in some long chain to something that can be measured, well, then it just can't be known scientifically. Those are some of the rules of science. Now, stay with me. This is going to be a little bit dense, but there's a payoff. Scientists are divided over whether the reality that is knowable through the lens of science is all there is. Scientists are divided over that philosophical question. I think, given our limitations, it's kind of absurd to think that we could know there isn't anything beyond the lens of science. I just think that's kind of an absurdity, but some scientists think that. So science thrills you, it might be tempting to think, well, this is also wonderful. It must be all that is. But science itself does not assert that. That position is called philosophical naturalism. Boy, now you're a genius. You know what? Philosophical naturalism means boiled down basically. What you see is what you get. So if the scientist is like Maxwell's silver hammer, Maxwell loves his silver hammer, he tends to see everything as a nail because a nail is a wonderful opportunity to use your hammer. When scientists speak against faith, and they do sometimes, often what they're doing is they're simply expressing their philosophical position that the natural realm is all that is. This point of view is especially strong among some, but by no means all, evolutionary biologists, people who are specialized in the field of evolution. Here's a tale of two evolutionary biologists, one by the name of Richard Dawkins, who teaches that Oxford. And he wrote a book called the God Delusion. That gives you a little sense of where he's coming from on the philosophical naturalism question. He compares belief in God to a computer virus. He wonders why people object to evolution. Now many in his field think that when he talks like that, he's way beyond his expertise. There's a guy named Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary biologist. I read one of his books, Life Solutions, and I liked it, so I emailed him, sent him a fan letter, and I said, you know, when I was reading that book, I kind of got the impression that you were like a God-connected person. Would you be willing to admit to that? And he wrote me back this email, he said, I am a thorough-going supernaturalist. And although I don't claim to understand them, I am sure the universe, without incarnation and resurrection, doesn't make any sense. He's saying, I'm a supernaturalist, I believe in the incarnation, I believe in the resurrection, but I still think trilobites and humans evolved. There are people like that among evolutionary biologists. It's important for us to know that because it's such a polemical issue, we're so bristling on this question that we, you know, we don't see the anger of man that just doesn't work the righteousness of God, apparently. Now faith is a different way of knowing than sight or science. It's a mysterious way of knowing because life is full of mystery. In biblical thought, faith is not the same as blind faith because faith takes evidence into account. I don't think I would be capable of believing in God without the evidence of Jesus of Nazareth. And that's true in all of our workings and life, I mean, in a sense, none of us can live without faith. Like in the realm of relationships, you know, we have faith in people based on their behavior toward us and what we know about them over time, but there's always an element of risk in trusting anybody because people change or we don't read them right, all sorts of things. But we can't survive, we can't really live without faith, we have to trust somebody sometime, we have to place our bets or die with all the chips on our table and it's so fun living playing poker with all the chips on the table, unused. You have to pick an auto mechanic, you have to pick a doctor, you have to find someone to marry, you have to share our dirty secrets with someone and that requires more than just sight, it requires faith at the end of the day. Faith goes deeper than that though. Faith is the knowledge of things hoped for, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction, the knowing, a different kind of knowing, but a real knowing of things not seen. If there is a transcendent realm, something beyond the natural realm, then for beings like us who are creatures made of matter and energy, the only way to perceive that would be through something beyond sight or mere science and that something is called faith. Listen to this from Hebrews 11, chapter 11, verse 3. By faith we understand that the universe was formed, that God's command, so that what is seen was made out of what was not visible. I believe that with all of my being, I know that by faith. Science can't settle that question. Science as far as I can tell has no means of detecting God, because God is both involved in the universe, but he's also beyond the universe. There's just no other being, there's no other factor like that in the system. So, a set of lenses that was created by humans to detect the natural realm, there's no way science can detect God, doesn't mean God doesn't exist, there are just two ways of knowing faith and sight. What else does the Bible teach about knowing? Well, the Bible says we know in part. Paul is writing to the Jesus movement in Corinth, they're on a knowledge kick. They've received the gospel and just a lighthouse of knowledge to them and they're going a little overboard. They think they have perfect knowledge, like God himself. Paul says to them in a very pastoral tone, "You're full of it." And I don't mean you're full of God and I don't mean you're full of knowledge, you're full of something else. And he wrote this letter to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 13, "For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. Now we see but a poor reflection is in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am, fully known." We have a tendency, don't we, as human beings, to fall off of the horse and every horse has two sides you can fall off of. We fall off the side that says, "I give up." I can't know anything. We can't know anything in this world. Postmodern philosophies lean in that direction. We all have a point of view that's subjective, we don't know what we don't know, which means we don't know that if what we think we know wouldn't be changed by what we don't know. So why don't we just be honest with ourselves and say the only thing we can know for sure is that we can't really know anything besides that just allows us to, you know, eat drink and be merry, you know, but like a dog chasing its tail, as soon as you say that, you say back to yourself, "How can you know that you can't know for so doggone sure?" To that Saint Paul says, "We know there are some things we can know, there are certainly some things we're going to be held accountable for knowing." The other side of that horse that we fall off of as human beings is the kind of arrogance about our capacity to know. We are as gods. We can know everything. That's what got the earliest humans in trouble back in Genesis chapter two, hunger for a kind of knowing that they weren't ready for. Give me some of that so I can be like God. To that Saint Paul says, "We know, but we know in part." We know, but we only know in part, now conservative religion feels more comfortable saying, "We can know. We can know God's love, we can know God's ways, we can know the answers, proceed with confidence." But if that's all we know about what the Bible teaches about knowledge that we can know, is that confidence turns into arrogance, doesn't it? Religion can be something nothing more than certainty run amok. Now liberal religion feels more comfortable saying, "We can't know, so celebrate the quest. Don't get hung up on the destination, celebrate the questions, don't trust the answers, proceed with humility." It's just fine, but why proceed with the questions? If you have no hope of finding any answers, and if the search is all there is, when do we get to rest? It's hard all this seeking never. Where do you take a shower? Where do you lay your head down at night? But Saint Paul says, "Hello, there's a horse we can actually ride on and not just fall off of one side or the other, we know, but we know in part." Think about your own life as a story. Say you're going to live 80 years and you're 47 now. You know, but you know in part. You're pretty well oriented to the middle part of your story, and not just because your middle part is expanding. You know where you live, you know where your car keys are right now, you know, fiber one's the only cereal you can eat, you know a lot about the middle, but when you look back to the beginning of your story, there's a kind of fog that sets in. People make their way through fog, but you know, you're just less certain when you're going through fog. Certain things can be known, but it's still foggy, that beginning part of your life, and as you look to the end of your story, you see that same thickening fog. Jesus Himself, who is pretty special, is supposed to be pretty highly regarded by Christians, pretty connected to God. In fact, the image of the invisible God said, "I don't know." He said it about something you'd think he would have known about too. He's talking with his disciples in Mark 13 about the end one day, and he anticipates a reasonable question which is, "Well, when's it going to happen?" He doesn't even let them ask the question he knows, they want to ask the question, he just says, "I don't know, only the Father knows the day and the hour." So even for Jesus the statement held, "We know, but we know in part." So maybe God gives us just enough to proceed with some measure of confidence, maybe that's all we can be trusted with. We're in the middle of the story, so we can count on his giving us enough understanding about the beginning so that we can proceed, and enough understanding about the end so that we can make the next step. But when we're looking at those realms where the fog sets in, maybe that's the time to remember that we know in part, maybe that's the time to be a little bit more humble about how we apply Genesis to science and vice versa, and how we apply revelations to today's events. We know, but we know in part what we need to know, and sometimes if my life is any measure, that just barely. Let's apply these understandings, what the Bible teaches about knowing to those four points of view I mentioned earlier about how science and faith intersect at the crossroads of creation. Again, remember, this is just a thin slice, and it's certainly not the most important one of the meaning of Genesis 1 and 2. I mean, everyone in those four positions that I outline, I'll mention them in a moment. Everyone agrees about a massive amount of understanding about Genesis 1 and 2. The disagreement is only about a very thin slice, which is how does this intersect with science? In fact, it's certainly not the most important slice when you think about it, and because of the controversy about this issue, we sometimes forget that it's really only a very thin slice of our understanding of Genesis 1 or 2, where it certainly should be. In each of those four positions, how much intersection is there between faith and science site? And when I say science, I mean mainstream science. Faith is the narrow lens used to perceive the natural realm. Faith is the wide-angle lens used in the natural realm, especially so we can take into account the transcendent realm that is beyond and maybe shot through the entire natural realm. Now as I go through these four positions just describing them, if I misrepresent any view that you hold dearly, please let me know. Give me your background documentation. I've worked hard to get this correct. I'll check your documents. And if it's mainstream off for your position, I will make the correction in the online version of the notes. It's my intention to get this spot on. The young earth position, what does that teach? It teaches that the earth was created 6 to 10,000 years ago, that each species was created separately. Once the various species were created, it was fixed. So changes within species, but once a species develops in two different directions so they can become two species, no, no, none of that is allowed according to that reading of Genesis 1, the young earth reading. Now this is a position that has what I would think of as maximum disagreement with mainstream science. Mainstream geology says, hey, the earth is 5 billion years old, paleontology, people who study bones. They go around, they find these big bones, they think, hey, they're dinosaur bones, and they do tests on them, and they say the dinosaurs existed long before humans, they went extinct about 65 million years ago. The young earth position disagrees with science that says the sun must have been here before the plants grew because under that understanding of Genesis, day theory brought the plants, but day four brought the sun. And so that tradition would say, well, God must have provided warmth before the sun, he's God, he could certainly do that, and then came the plants and then the sun. The main writers of this position are Ken Ham and Henry Morris. Now the advocates of this position are a veritable hit parade of evangelical leaders in America. It has much less currency in Europe, but in America it's very, very strong. People like John MacArthur, who really didn't like the vineyard at all, Josh McDowell, a great evangelist, Chuck Swindall, great Bible teacher, Max Lucado, popular author and speaker, John Maxwell, Charles Stanley. Well, just great men of God, men of the Bible. The old earth position says, well, you know, the earth could be as old as the scientists say it is because those six days of creation in Genesis chapter one, you could understand them as six eras. When each species was separately created in its own era, there's no dissent from common ancestors, the theory of evolution has no merit except within a given species, but the species are still fixed. This still has much disagreement with mainstream science, but less than the young earth position. The best writer I know of in this tradition is Hugh Ross, an excellent writer on the old earth position. Intelligent design is a rather newcomer to the debate. We've heard a lot about intelligent design because some of the court cases. Now intelligent design means different things depending on who's saying it. The confusing part is that there are those who hold the young earth position, as well as those who hold the old earth position, who also use the language of intelligent design. But there are others like Michael Beihy, a biologist, author of Darwin's Black Box, I read that book, excellent book. He leaves lots of room for evolution. But he says, you know, as a biologist, as I look at certain life structures like the intricacies of the inner life of the cell, I think they're irreducibly complex, which means there's no mechanism that could just be built piece by piece and lead to something that's functioning. So that's saying to me, there's no way the mechanism of evolution can account for that kind of irreducible complexity. So science, not faith, but science tells us that an intelligent designer must have interrupted the process at least at these key points. So intelligent design is a philosophical and scientific critique of evolution. But there are so many people who are using this language. It's really hard to pinpoint how much disagreement there is with mainstream science. It ranges from lots of disagreement to substantial disagreement. Now the fourth position, much less well known among evangelicals is theistic evolution, as compared with atheistic evolution. God working through the mechanism of evolution created the heavens and the earth and humankind. Now the only concern that theistic evolution people have with evolution is not the theory itself, but with proponents of evolution who step beyond the science to say that the natural world is all that is. Who say the fact that we have a mechanism in evolution that accounts for the diversity of life means, hey, no God, no design, not even a big picture sense, no purpose in it all. Theistic evolution says, well, hey, this is bad philosophy. That's just importing atheism into science. There's nothing in the science itself that justifies that conclusion. Thankfully, there are many big guns in the field of evolutionary biology who agree. Theistic evolution would say, you know, Genesis is not meant to be read as scientifically accurate. As the rules of science weren't made up back then, God is the author, the text is fully inspired, it's fully reliable, it's fully authoritative, but it's not written according to the rules of science. In the United States today, this is definitely a minority view among evangelicals. Many pastors would lose their job if they admitted to holding to this particular position. CS Lewis held this position or some version of it according to his writings, a guy named BB Warfield, but a hundred years ago, he was a very conservative biblical scholar. He actually wrote in the book The Fundamentals, from which the fundamentalist got their name. He was a proponent of the inerrancy doctrine of scripture, BB Warfield, was a theistic evolution person. Francis Collins, who has recently come out as an evangelical, you know, he's so evangelical that he takes a guitar and sings hokey songs. Not like our band, they're much better than that, but if you've ever been in an evangelical church, there's always going to be a setting where someone pulls out a guitar and sings a hokey song. And he does that. He writes some of the hokey songs, as a matter of fact. He loves CS Lewis, he loves the Bible, you know, he just believes in miracles, but he also believes in evolution, or he believes certain things about evolution, I should say. We believe in Jesus and everything else we believe about. So it's a minority position. One writer wrote expressing this perspective. There's every reason to think that a scientific evolutionary account and a religious belief and a guiding creative force are not just compatible, but mutually reinforcing. That would be an example of theistic evolution. Now, my reason for swimming in these stingray infested waters is not to say, "Hey, we have a position now. This is what it is." And you're an idiot if you think differently. It's not to say that Christian orthodoxy requires that you adopt one or another of these views. I'll get around to giving you my candid perspective on it in another sermon, but that's not my point. I think there's freedom in Christ to integrate science and faith as we see fit, or maybe the majority of us as we see fit not to. Like it's not an issue for me. I've got my directions from God. I know how to proceed. I know enough about the beginning. I've got bigger fish to fry than this issue. Well, the only reason we need to fry these rather little fish is our mission to the heart of Ann Arbor. God in search of Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor in search of God in this issue standing between. Here's what I'm trying to say. For the sake of the evangelical mission to Ann Arbor, we cannot take our cues from the evangelical church in America, which is content too often to make adopting a posture of protest toward mainstream science part of the cost of discipleship. I believe Christians have a prophetic word to speak to science, but that our unsophisticated posture of protest is keeping us from speaking with more surgical precision, that prophetic word. You know, we've done pretty good the evangelical church in America, then we've done pretty good at saying, you know, the cost of discipleship is to be in a position of protest towards mainstream science. If you look at all the polls, I mean, it's a very popular opinion. We've done great at that. I'd say we've done better at that than at saving our marriages or breaking free of pornography or decreasing rates of domestic abuse or doing something about injustice or actually helping the poor because shaping opinions is just a lot easier than making disciples. We shouldn't be surprised by that. Here's my concern. We, and I speak as an evangelical in America, we don't seem to be at all concerned that maybe we're making it easier for those who identify with the story of science as their story, we're making it easier for them to remain on the outside looking in. No, in fact, the more we beat up their story, the better evangelicals we are. I say shame on us. Once again, so right, we may in this case be wrong. The voice that I'm hearing is the voice of Jesus crying out to his church, I have other sheep who are not of this fold, not part of the evangelical mainstream in America right now. Let's bring them also, and they will heed my voice if you'll only let them hear my voice. On May 20, 2001, we dedicated this church, the Ann Arbor Vineyard, to Christ for the lost. Not to Christ for the church, not to Christ for ourselves, not to Christ for our comfortable Christian club, but to Christ for the lost. We have a dedication stone out there in the corner. You can see it on the way into the church every Sunday dedicated May 20, 2001. We took that stone, we put it here on our dedication celebration. We said, "If you have a loved one, someone you really care about, who is an exile from God right now?" God hasn't found a home in them, and they haven't found a home in God, and everyone's the loser because of it. If you know someone like that in your life, write their name on a slip of paper, and in solemn procession, come up here, and put that name under that stone. And we did that, and we lifted up that stone, and with solemn prayer, we dedicated this church to Christ for those people, representative of the lost. We have some of those people whose names are in there. We put it behind the stone, secured it there forever, as long as this building shall last. And some of those people I know are now part of our church and have found Christ. Now, I put a name, I myself put a name on one of those slips of paper, and it grieves my heart that I wouldn't invite that loved one to many evangelical churches in America right now, because she would get the idea that you have to bristle when you hear the word evolution to be a disciple. And that to me is an unnecessary obstacle to this person finding faith, and it breaks my heart. I have sheep who are not of this bold. I must bring them also, and they will heed my voice. So what price are we willing to pay? Well, okay, we just have to play it as safe and conservative as possible, and make sure that there are no evangelicals who call our faith into question or whatever. How are we willing to pay? I'm not willing to pay that price. I don't think it's a price Jesus is asking me to pay. I'm not saying we have to have a church where everyone lines up on this issue. I hope we have a church forever where people have different points of view and figure out what they hold in common because their shared treasure is Jesus, and they love each other because of that. I think that would be wonderful. What I'm saying, though, is we cannot take our cues for our mission from the current culture on this particular issue of the evangelical church in America. I think I've stunned saying what I wanted to say, so if the band could come back up, that'd be great, the leaders in worship and communion. I don't think we're going to be able to do communion, Pete. But because of time, I don't think we're going to be able to, because I talked a little bit too long. I think that's my apologies, but a stand-up. I think as we close with worship, my sense is that it would just be good. And, you know, I just know.