On Friday of this last week, The Church of England’s governing body “approved a motion that emphasizes the compatibility of belief in both God and science.” This certainly sounds benign because science is something we usually trust and we live with the benefits of it on a daily basis. However, the article goes on to state that “Dr. Peter Capon, a former computer science lecturer,… urged Christians to take scientific evidence seriously and avoid prejudging science for theological reasons.” That sounds like the discussion has drifted too far for me right there. How can one even say that their faith is their faith if it doesn’t influence how you think and behave? If it doesn’t do so, then it certainly doesn’t have the faith of the one who claims it.
The congregants of The Church of England are reportedly celebrating Evolution Weekend along with other liberal denominations. The weekend occurs in conjunction with Charles Darwin’s birthday and the anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species. The author of the article from The Christian Post paints conservative Christians as narrow-minded people who refuse to accept the well-recognized, scientifically-based, facts of evolution, as he sees it. What the writer and those who accept evolution do not seem to understand is that their acceptance of evolution is based on more faith than fact. Actually, it takes more faith, based upon the evidence available, to believe in evolution than it does to believe in creationism as it is accounted in Genesis in the Bible. Further, acceptance of evolution undermines the entire foundation of the Bible and nullifies the rest of the Bible. The coexistence of the two is incompatible. For further study on the topic, check out Answers in Genesis.
The Church of England has one thing right here: science and faith are compatible. The fact of it is that science offers more to reject the hypothesis of evolution than to support it among those who are open-minded enough to consider everything that science has to offer and not just what backs up their desire to not have to acknowledge that there is a Creator. To have to acknowledge that there is a Creator means that one also has to accept that there is an authority higher than ourselves and that is too much for some to have to admit. The creation itself does teach us that there is a Creator (see Romans 1) who created as is written in Genesis.