This post was written on the occasion of the recent debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, which my wife has just blogged about and which you may view here, for a limited time (forward past the 13-minute countdown at the beginning). The image above was captured during Ken Ham's presentation.
As a born-again Christian with a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, I firmly believe that science and God’s Creation go hand-in-hand. And although Christians disagree about how literally to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis, at the core of our faith is the undeniable fact that we are all the result of God’s design, not the product of random natural processes.
We know and respect two organizations that promote this worldview: The Discovery Institute in Seattle and Answers In Genesis in Kentucky. The former is a leader in the field of Intelligent Design (ID), which holds that the Laws of Nature are too perfect and the intricacies of life too complex to be the result of random chance. I think that, for the most part, the group agrees with the generally accepted age of the Earth and the universe.
Answers In Genesis, headed by Ken Ham, a former science teacher and devout Christian, goes a step further to claim that God created everything about 6000 years ago, in six literal, 24-hour days. Many find this ludicrous, but until my wife and I read some of their literature, we did not know that there is actually quite a bit of evidence that agrees with that premise, and there are many respected scientists in a diverse range of fields, who also hold to this belief.
“What’s the big deal?” you ask. “Aren’t science and religion incompatible anyway? You can’t prove or disprove the existence of God using scientific methods, so why even argue about it?” The fact is that there are many staunch atheists in the scientific community, who believe that God is merely a man-made notion, created to explain the unexplainable. They believe that if they can prove that we all came to be here through purely natural processes, then there would no longer be a need for anyone to believe in God.
Rainbows, for example, seem so magical that it’s easy to believe they’re put there by our Creator, to reassure us that the Great Flood will never again be repeated. Oh, but what they really are is light passing through tiny water droplets, resulting in a prism-like effect. Ah, since we now know how rainbows work, then "clearly" the Genesis account of Noah’s Flood must be baloney. Yeah, sure.
Likewise, the Theory of Evolution is man’s attempt at providing a Godless alternative to how we got here. And since the process would require great spans of time to take life from an amoeba to an intelligent human being, a young earth would blow the whole thing out of the water.
Why are atheists so against anyone believing in God? I’m not sure. I was once one myself (not a god, but an atheist), and although I thought religious people were wrong to believe in anything supernatural, I still respected their beliefs and did not try to dissuade them. Yet, I did not realize at the time that if God did indeed exist and if He did create me, then I also had the responsibility to obey and follow Him. His moral law would also apply to me, and I would indeed suffer the consequences if I did not accept His gift of Salvation. But if atheists can prove that God did not create us, then we have no obligation to Him (were He even to exist), and there is no moral standard by which we need to live. I think that at their core, atheists do not want to be held accountable for what they do.
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