In this episode of Christian Mythbusters, Father Jared debunks the myth that Christianity is at war with science. You can hear Christian Mythbusters in the Grand Haven area on 92.1, WGHN, on Wednesdays at 10:30am and Sundays at 8:50am.

Here is the transcription of this episode, the audio file is at the bottom:

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. 

This week I would like to talk to you a little bit about Christianity and science. I remember when I was a young evangelical teenaged Christian and a student at Grand Haven Middle School. I wore a shirt which ridiculed evolution in favor of a literal seven-day creation. My biology teacher told me she was actually a Christian and that she had always wondered why it was that God could not simply have worked through the scientific mechanism of evolution to create the world in which we lived. I admit that I did not have a good answer then.

There is this strange sentiment in American Christianity that we have to defend the Christian faith against the claims of science. So, let’s go ahead today and bust the myth of the battle between science and Christianity.

In my study at St. John’s there hangs a prayer from St. Thomas Aquinas, one he wrote before he would engage in study. In it, Aquinas describes the wondrous order and beautiful harmony through which God created the world and he asks God who is the true fount of light and wisdom to shed upon the darkness of his understanding a ray of God’s own light. 

That prayer is actually much closer to a Christian understanding of science than much of what you hear in popular culture or maybe even sitting in the pew of your own church. Christians believe that all truth comes from God and therefore Christians should never be afraid of the vigorous search for truth, including through the avenue of science. If the study of science is a danger to your faith, maybe it’s time to let your faith get a little bit stronger and your appreciation for science to get a little bit broader. Maybe it’s time for your faith to be more in the God who created you and less in your ideas about what that God looks like and how that God operates. 

In my own Anglican tradition of Christianity, this battle was fought well over 100 years ago as leaders of a movement called Lux Mundi, Latin for Light of the World, argued vigorously that the best of science could only lead us closer to truth and therefore closer to God. They insisted that the scientific world was another avenue of God’s revelation to us. They published a book entitled Lux Mundi, a collection of 12 essays by liberal Anglo Catholics. One particular essay by the great Charles Gore called “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration” forever changed the way that Christians my tradition considered the connections between science and faith.

Many people don’t know this, but Charles Darwin went to Cambridge in 1828 with the goal actually of becoming a clergyman in the Church of England. In the end, his desire for scientific study one but he remained involved in the Church of England. And when much of Christianity was fighting vigorously with his theory of evolution, thanks to the work of people like Charles Gore and the Lux Mundi movement, Anglicans were finding ways for scientific study and religious faith not only to coexist but actually to feed and nourish each other.

Because, you see, religion and science are actually often just interested in answering very different questions.