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The Lie or Deceit of the Warfare or Conflict Model Between Science and Faith

True science proceeds from faith.  The historical record shows that modern science arose from faith in God.  Science and faith harmonize.  They don’t conflict.

Like the tearing down of statues in the United States, the elimination of genders unto gender fluidity, and the revisionism of patriarchy as social construct, secular materialists banish faith from the public square by falsifying the true story of faith and science.  The false narrative, useful for dethroning God in the hearts of men, says Newton’s science triumphed despite and hindered by his faith.  His belief slowed his work.  The actual narrative would read something like the following:  man’s thinking, human reasoning, implausible speculation, superstition, darkness, little to no scientific progress, publication and propagation of scripture, motivation to know God through His creation, observation, scientific method, discovery and progress (subduing and having dominion).

Whatever scientific progress continues is built upon the foundation of biblical creationists of the past and borrowing from and imitating their work, even if it is separate from faith.  The riddance of faith portends to future regression, even as we see this trend and trajectory already.  For instance, without the faith in the invisible hand, the world economy is headed back to something more feudalistic.

Faux historians produced the science and faith warfare or conflict model in the late 19th century and this myth, legend, or figment of imagination burrowed itself deep into the psyche of Western civilization.  It isn’t history.  It is a philosophical presupposition of naturalism masquerading as science.  Stephen Meyer writes about this in his most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis.

Most science historians report the fideistic beginnings of modern science.  The founders believed in God and their faith buttressed their work.  A few men told a completely different story, John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1880) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).  Commenting on this happening, historian Edward Larson writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book that “they fostered the impression that religious critics of Darwinism threatened to rekindle the Inquisition. . . . Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both” (Summer for the Gods:  The Scope’s Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, pp. 21-22).  These above two books helped or aided to fix in the amassed minds that science and faith were at war with one another and always have been.  Their lie displaced or deposed actual history.  Now it is very, very difficult to dislodge.

The warfare or conflict model buttresses the uniformitarian template that man lives in a closed system without supernatural or divine intervention.  It eliminates design with everything occurring according to chance.  This view cancels God, His authority over and judgment of mankind.  Man gets to live like he wants, because nobody’s going to do anything about it.  Many if not a majority of professing Christians now at least surrender to this viewpoint, clashing with the Bible and a true, historical account.

Power Comes from Somewhere

When you turn on your lights or your appliance and open your refrigerator and see it working, you know that power comes from somewhere.  It didn’t just happen.  Your heart is beating, the power for that comes from somewhere.  You look up and see a burning sun.  The power for that sun comes from somewhere.  Nuclear, gravitational, and chemical energy all come from someplace.  They have their start somewhere.

We all need power.  Our body is burning energy, our brains are using it, our heart needs it, and every other creature does too.  It’s there.  People are but dust.  Power holds this dust together in a complex and functioning form.

The Big Bang Theory supposedly explains the origin of matter, but the explosion could not have occurred without energy.  Senior writer and editor of Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover, wrote on June 6, 2019:

The Big Bang theory . . . . pioneered 50 years before Hawking’s lecture by the Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who later served as president of the Vatican’s academy of sciences — rewinds the expansion of the universe back to a hot, dense bundle of energy. But where did the initial energy come from?

The Big Bang theory had other problems. Physicists understood that an expanding bundle of energy would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge, smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe.

Men guess, but they don’t have an answer to the origin of energy or power.

The English word “power” is found 272 times in the King James Version.  The first time the English word appears, it is koah, and it refers to God’s strength, ability, might, and force.  That Hebrew word is used 126 times.  The first is used of God in Exodus 15:6, “Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious  in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.”  Another one is Exodus 32:11, “And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?”  A lot of the usages of koah are like that one.

Another Hebrew word translated power in 1 Chronicles 29:11 is gebera, the verse reading:  “Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all.”  That word is used 61 times in the Old Testament with another example, Psalm 21:13, “Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.”

The New Testament uses mainly two Greek words, which are translated “power” in the King James Version.  Matthew 6:13 reads:

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

“Power” here comes from dunamis.  The English “dynamite” comes from dunamis, which BDAG, the foremost Greek New Testament lexicon, says means:

potential for functioning in some way, power, might, strength, force, capability

That Greek word is used 120 times in the New Testament.  The very next usage of “power” in the New Testament is in Matthew 9:6:

But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

So this very next time “power” is used it’s a different Greek word, which means something different than dunamis.  It’s exousia, which speaks of “authority.”  BDAG gives these first two meanings
1. a state of control over something, freedom of choice, right
2. potential or resource to command, control, or govern, capability, might, power
Exousia is used 102 times in the New Testament.  One of the preeminent usages of exousia type of power is in each of the first three verses of Romans 13:

1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. 2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:

I give you these numbers and examples because they say that “power” is a dominant theme in scripture.
Even though there are different underlying words in the original language of the Bible and then also differences in meaning, every one of these words are related.  Authority requires might.  Someone can tell somebody what to do, but unless he has the ability to enforce it, he doesn’t have authority.  He is both lawgiver and judge, the latter including the ability to punish.  With regard to this issue, consider the following two verses:
James 4:12, There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?
Matthew 10:28, And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Everywhere we look we see might, strength, and capability, and the existence of those results in control and command of one entity or person over another.  All of that power comes from somewhere.  The existence, life, and order of things depends on power all of the time.  It doesn’t just happen, neither does it look random.  It shows purpose and organization.
The Bible starts with God as the Cause of everything, including energy.  All power proceeds from God’s power that He has always possessed.  The origin of energy in scripture starts with God moving in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit of God moved.  Speaking of Jesus, Colossians 1:17 says, “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”  Hebrews 1:3 says He upholds “all things by the word of his power.”
Maybe you’ve heard of the fine tuning of the universe.  It reads (explained in great detail):

The Fine-Tuning Argument, to be abbreviated by FTA in what follows, claims that the present Universe (including the laws that govern it and the initial conditions from which it has evolved) permits life only because these laws and conditions take a very special form, small changes in which would make life impossible.

I always like to say that there are hundreds of things going right at every given moment for us even to survive.  One of these is that the power stays on.  Always.  Even as I wrote this and you are reading it, it should occur to you that you’re breathing, you exist, and you’re not sitting or standing there worrying about it.  And yet, it doesn’t just happen.

AUTHORS OF THE BLOG

  • Kent Brandenburg
  • Thomas Ross

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