12. Fox in the Hen House! – ?Science Trumps Bible?

Posted by: BibleScienceGuy | July 16, 2011

12. Fox in the Hen House! – ?Science Trumps Bible?

Continuing the Fox in the Hen House! series of blog posts exposing heresy about Genesis …

This twelfth post of the series critiques a published conversation on the relationship between faith and science. The dialogue was between two prominent Christians, Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Karl Giberson.

Collins is the founder of BioLogos, former director of the Human Genome Project, and currently director of the National Institutes of Health. Giberson is a physicist and professor at Eastern Nazarene College and Gordon College. At the time of this conversation, he was executive vice-president of BioLogos. Both men are no longer officers for BioLogos, although both support it, work with it, and have many articles on the BioLogos website.

The BioLogos Foundation is committed to the marriage of scientism and Christianity through persuading Christians to accept evolutionism and billions of years for the age of the earth by arguing that Genesis 1-11 is mythical or metaphorical.

This conversation took place at Azusa Pacific University in 2008 and an abridged version was first published in Christianity Today’s Books and Culture magazine.
(See Evolution, the Bible, and the Book of Nature, July-August, 2009. Requires subscription to read the full conversation.)
It’s also freely available in its entirety on the Biologos site in six installments. (See Francis Collins and Karl Giberson Talk about Evolution and the Church for the first installment with links in its sidebar to the successor parts.)

The first version of the conversation is an abridged and edited version. The quotes discussed below from these two men are taken from one or the other of these two published versions.

Collins & Giberson
Collins explained how he harmonized evolution and Christianity and explicitly admitted his preference for science over the plain truth of Genesis:

“I couldn’t take Genesis literally because I had come to the scientific worldview before I came to the spiritual worldview.”

This position of elevating science over Scripture is not acceptable for a Christian. It’s a direct attack on the truth and authority of Scripture, and, as was shown in a previous post in this series, 9. Fox in the Hen House! – Ramifications of Rejecting Adam, it dynamites fundamental truths of Scripture.

Giberson recognized that Collins interpreted the Bible based on his evolutionary bias when he says,

“You were interpreting the Bible before you knew there was a biblical issue to worry about. You had developed enough confidence in evolution so then when you read about origins in the Bible, you would read as we do today when it comes to those biblical passages that seem opposed to heliocentricity— we don’t think of a moving earth as a problem so we don’t even notice the biblical problems.”

Collins and Giberson interpret Scripture based on assuming evolutionism is true, rather than interpreting the facts of nature based on assuming that what the Bible teaches is true.

Giberson says to Collins,

“The fact that I believe in evolution derives from the fact that people like you that I trust have told me that it’s true. I’ve never done a genome sequence, I’ve never done a fossil dig. So what do I—Karl Giberson—really know about evolution? All I know is that people that I trust have told me that it’s compelling and have made arguments that I buy and people that I have less confidence in have tried to challenge those things.”

Giberson trusts the opinions of men over the plain truth of Genesis! Giberson also comments:

“One of my theologian friends once said, in great frustration over this issue (of interpreting Genesis), ‘I wish they had never put the Bible in the hands of ordinary people.’ It seems to me that we need to take more seriously the teaching ministry of the church. We encourage people to read the Bible on their own, but certain misunderstandings are bound to emerge with that approach. Young people are going to read Genesis and think of Adam and Eve as real biological parents of the human race.”

Apparently Giberson wants to delegate to church experts the task of interpreting and explaining the Bible. Otherwise he fears people will “misunderstand” and believe what it plainly says.

Collins:

“Right now, many churches are telling their young people, ‘You have to adhere to this absolutely literal description of what we say Genesis means,’ and they put a lot of energy into conveying that in Sunday school and in home schooling curricula. It’s not as if the church has not already invested in providing a perspective on this issue–but unfortunately they’ve invested in a view that’s counter to God’s book of nature. This is both unnecessary and tragic. But I have hopes that over time we can come to the realization that the current battle between the scientific and spiritual worldviews is not God’s battle, but is one created by us.”

Interestingly, Collins identifies home schools and Sunday schools as primary communicators of what he considers an improper view of Genesis, which is in actual fact the correct view.

Collins sees “God’s book of nature,” as he calls it, equivalent to the Bible. This is fallacious; they are not equal in authority. The “book of nature” (that is, scientific evidence) should be interpreted in light of God’s clear Word.

People like Collins like to think that “God’s book of nature” is simply evidence from nature, but they associate with that evidence fallible human interpretations as to what the evidence “says” and call the whole shebang “God’s book of nature.” This is philosophically wrong.

Using the “book of nature” to trump Scripture is logically, philosophically, and theologically fallacious. Scripture is the authoritative norm that rules over all.

Soli Deo Gloria.

©William T. Pelletier, Ph.D.
“contending earnestly for the faith” (Jude 1:3)
Saturday July 16, 2011 A.D.

Read my June 2011 newspaper column:
Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Volcanoes, & Noah’s Flood.

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)