By Assoc. Prof. Dr. Living Lee Chai Peng
(For Interfaith Talk 4 at Multimedia University, Malacca Campus on 8 January 2003)

CONFLICTS
Many people hold the mistaken belief that the Bible and Science are in conflict with each other and that one cannot be a good scientist and a good Christian at the same time. This unfortunate perception More…arises out of two main errors :- 1) trying to make the Bible say what it does not say and 2) science making pronouncements about matters beyond its designated boundaries. An example of the first was when Archbishop Ussher calculated that the earth was created in 4004 B.C. by adding up the ages of Jesus ancestors according to his genealogy as recorded in the Bible. This was printed in the footnotes of some Bibles and when it was proven wrong many people thought that the Bible was wrong. Likewise many assume that the Bible teaches that the sun orbits the earth because of the wrong interpretation of the church in Galileo’s time. An example of the second is when some atheistic scientists declare that there is no God because we can apparently explain the fantastic variety of life on earth by the theory of evolution or when a Russian astronaut proudly proclaimed that he did not see God in space.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE
It is very important therefore for us to understand and respect the sources, purposes, and even the languages used for these two bodies of knowledge in order to have a better and more holistic view of our world. The source for scripture is divine revelation while that of science is natural deduction. The purpose of scripture is to reveal God and His will to man as an authoritative moral guide for him. The purpose of science is to systematically describe and study natural phenomena so that man knows what goes on in the physical world. Scientific knowledge is morally neutral while the application of science, that is, technology is not as it changes and affects the world and its inhabitants. Science can provide us with knowledge of nuclear power but cannot guide us in its use for good or evil, to heal or to destroy. The language that scripture uses is general and timeless, not so concerned with “scientific” accuracy as to convey what God has in mind to reveal to man about his origin, his purpose and his place in God’s scheme of things. It is foolish therefore to try and fault the Genesis account of creation as unscientific for it is not meant to be scientific as we understand “scientific” to be. Science, on the other hand, uses specialized and time-bound language in its writings. The fact that the creation account in the Bible was written in the form of a timeless story which can convey its central message of Who created and why He did it without cluttering up the narration with unnecessary scientific details on how He did it is a plus because it can effectively convey the message to people from different ages and backgrounds irrespective of their level of scientific sophistication. This timeless quality would have been lost or need constant revisions to keep abreast of the latest scientific theories and the language used to convey them if the writer had attempted to explain the origin of the earth in terms of the science of his time.

MIRACLES
Another major area of apparent conflict between scripture and science concerns the miracles recorded in the Bible. While the Bible has conveyed to us that the universe is orderly and governed by natural laws set by the Creator, it does not preclude divine intervention from time to time whereby natural laws could be superseded or suspended by the Divine Lawgiver if it suits His purposes. Thus we read of many instances where God did something beyond the normal which our present scientific understanding has no explanation for e.g. the virgin birth of Jesus or his turning water into wine or multiplying five loaves and two fishes to feed over five thousand people or miraculous healing of diseases without medicines etc. Some of the miracles in the Bible are miraculous not in their nature but in their timing where natural causes like a persistent strong wind might have parted the Red Sea or landslide upstream might have dammed up the Jordan for the Israelites to cross during the exodus. I deem it arrogant of some to declare miracles as impossible just because they cannot explain them scientifically today. The right question to address is did it happen and if that is answered in the affirmative then one must accept it and look for a satisfying explanation if science fails to provide an answer. A miracle is a miracle precisely because the explanation is not found among the usual rational naturalistic answers to such phenomena. If one is open minded and humble enough to admit that science does not have all the answers and that miracles are possible then many of the conflicts would not be an issue.

OVERLAPS
Despite their different sources, purposes and languages used, the realms of scripture and science are not always distinct and apart. Because the spiritual affects the physical in very tangible ways, it often leaves behind its mark in the physical world. The physical universe, the rocks, the artefacts, the historical records left in ruins are there for the cosmologists, geologists, archaeologists and other scientists to study. What has consistently come out is the more we find out about the past, the more it seems to confirm the historical events recorded in the Bible. Archaeological discoveries so far has lent more and more support to the authenticity and accuracy of the Bible and in several instances even helped to clear up what were taught to be contradictions in the Bible. For example the discovery that Jericho in Jesus’ time was divided into two, much like our Old and New Town in Ipoh, has helped to resolve the apparently contradictory record of Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus in the gospels. Jesus could be leaving Jericho (Mark 10:46) or approaching it (Luke 18:35) depending on your reference point if you were between the two Jerichos!
Cosmologists and geologists are astounded by how much the Genesis account of creation fits in with the sequence of events an observer on earth would have witnessed if he were present from the condensation of matter after the Big Bang to form the increasingly more ordered universe to the physical evolution of the earth to the staggered appearance of different life forms in the sequence given in Genesis 1.
Another astounding confirmation that the Bible is indeed a unique book given by God to us is the number of fulfilled prophecies found within it. These are not general predictions like those dished out by fortune tellers. They contain very specific details which mathematicians have applied statistical calculations to and found the chances of such prophecies being fulfilled by chance alone to be most improbable. There are over 300 specific prophecies in the Old Testament about the Messiah that was fulfilled in the life of Jesus including the circumstances and place of his birth, many events in his life, death and resurrection. Some of these were so specific that Bible critics had tried to prove that the Bible was doctored to make them look convincing. Some questioned the authenticity of the book of Isaiah for example because of the many prophecies including the passage about the suffering servant in Chapter 53, but the critics were silenced when a complete copy of Isaiah was found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls (dated between 200B.C.-68 A.D. and discovered in 1947) that showed that the Jews were very careful in copying their scriptures and the Masoretic Text from which our modern translation differs from it by only 17 letters out of 166 words which does not change its meaning at all. In short the Bible has been carefully and respectfully copied and transmitted down through the ages and can be trusted.

CONCLUSION
Does scripture and science conflict? They appear to be in conflict in some instances but further studies and discoveries have resolved many of these conflicts or at least enable one to hold on to both interpretations with integrity. Most of these conflicts are due to the misinterpretation of Scripture trying to make it say things it did not say or to some scientists’ insistence on only believing in the natural and nothing else. Such a narrow view of life does not accord with reality and one must be prepared to accept the existence of both the natural and the supernatural to develop a more holistic worldview in order to live life to the full.

By Assoc. Prof. Dr. Living Lee Chai Peng
Department of Geology, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur.
E-mail: leecp@um.edu.my
Contact number: 03-79674233