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Blending science with faith

Reasons to Believe group seeks to bridge gap between 2 sides

THE HUNTSVILLE TIMES
March 9, 2007

By Kay Campbell
Faith & Values Editor

What started life on Earth?                    

God? Goo? Cosmic atomic acceleration? Energy not yet equal to matter paired with a mysterious constant squared?

The stereotype of orthodox Southern Baptists and other people of faith is that their answer to that question would be "God alone." The stereotype of a scientist puts the answer at "energy."

But for members of the local chapter of Reasons To Believe, the answer to that question would be a more complex "yes."

"There are many people in Huntsville who are unchurched and predisposed to think of the Christian faith as not credible," said Mark Whorton, an aerospace engineer at NASA, president of the local Reasons To Believe and organizer of Rocket Science Ministries. "Our idea is to remove the impediments to faith and show that the Christian faith is based on a substantial foundation that can be tested, verified. Its credibility can be demonstrated."

Representatives of RTB will join the after-movie discussion of "Flock of Dodos," a documentary that takes an even, if lighthanded, approach to the evolution-creation debate. The movie shows tonight at 7 p.m. at the Flying Monkey Arts Center.

Neither Whorton nor the other RTB members who met at The Times office last week to discuss faith and science have seen the movie yet, but the reviews they read led them to believe they would likely agree with its portrayal of unreasonableness of certain faith-based views of the origin of the universe.

Few adherents to a creationist theory of world origins, even among fundamentalist denominations, now insist on the "Young Earth" theory, the one that puts the Earth at no older than 10,000 years, they said.

"Evidence is what evidence is; what happened is really what happened," said Joe Fikes, an astrophysicist who bites down on a good discussion of faith and science the way a Southerner chows down on a rib of barbecue.

"But the body of human knowledge is so vast, no one can know it all," Fikes said. "The best we can do is learn a part of it. And what you believe is determined in large part by who you choose to listen to."

Fikes and other RTB members, since the chapter founding 10 years ago, have worked to build a forum where people of faith and people of science can listen to each other - and recognize that those categories are not at all neatly divided.

All of the RTB members have their own stories of the difficulty of getting people to listen across the divide.

Self-described as "Southern Baptist Rocket Scientists," they have had their faith bona fides questioned when they demonstrate a scientific flaw in a creationist argument. And evolutionists have derided their willingness to see God's design in the leaps of evolutionary changes or the complexities of a trilobite's eyes.

At the heart of their ministry is a calling to reveal to others the God they've discovered as much in the physics laboratory as in the church sanctuary.

"Of all the things we believe about God, we believe He is fundamentally true - and not just what's revealed in Scripture, but also in what He created," Fikes said. "God is not deceptive."

That means that people of faith can look to science as another way to understand God, just as RTB members hope that people of science will look to Scripture as another way to understand the world around them.

RTB members understand what's a stake. At the heart of the creation-evolution debate lie the bigger questions of who God is and how the Bible is to be understood. Mark Whorton's book "Peril in Paradise" takes up the theological issues complicating the scientific debate within the Christian community itself over "Young Earth" and "Ancient Earth" views of a God-directed creation.

Members of Reasons To Believe don't think they have all the answers, but they think they do have an inkling of the actual source of apparent conflicts in different revelations of a God of truth.

"Science is humankind's interpretation of what God reveals in nature," said Cleve Morton, another member who is also a scientist. "Theology is humankind's interpretation of what God reveals in Scriptures. When there is a conflict, it has to be in the human interpretation."