7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

No.

End of the story, now you can go home ...

... you can go home, I said ...

... wait, you want the details?

OK, this will take a little more time. This sounds like one question, but is in fact several questions.

Hasn't archaeology and palaeontology proven the earth and universe are lots older than the Bible and therefore Christianity teaches?
Hasn't evolution proven life, its diversity, and man, owe nothing to God?
Hasn't science proven there are laws of nature so miracles are impossible?
Hasn't Biblical criticism proven the Gospels are unreliable, since too late?
Hasn't Assyriology proven that the stories in Genesis, from Creation to Flood, are polemically tainted plagiarisms?
Hasn't comparative religion proven Jesus is a copy-cat of pagan deities?
Hasn't science shown there is no God?

Let's take them one by one.

Hasn't archaeology and palaeontology proven the earth and universe are lots older than the Bible and therefore Christianity teaches?

Or astronomy? Some stars the light of which we see are supposed to be 13 billion light years away. If they and we are just 7222 years old, their light shouldn't be reaching earth yet.

Well, you have to prove they are 13 billion light years away first. And to do that, you have to prove Heliocentrism first.

And to do that, you have to exclude God — while the existence of God leaves room for Heliocentrism, only the non-existence of God and angels leaves no room for anything other than Heliocentrism.

Palaeontology, then?

Uranium Lead dates are moot because of the uncertainty on how much lead there was in the sample to begin with. Stratigraphy of "Geologic column" is often presented as if one Permian layer were lying blow one Triassic layer and above a Carboniferous one, but in land vertebrates at least, it's more like different faunal types lying side by side in geographic or localised zones in whatever the layer is that's exposed on top. For sea creatures, there is the possibility of several layers having coexisted in the waters before the Flood.

OK, but archaeology?

Not really. The main go to is carbon-14, where a buildup in the atmosphere would skew the dating results more and more the further back to and beyond the Flood you came.

Creation vs. Evolution : What Project? https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-project.html

Hasn't evolution proven life, its diversity, and man, owe nothing to God?

No. Abiogenesis, the development of new cell types, the development of the human language, are all of them major hurdles to this theory.

Hasn't science proven there are laws of nature so miracles are impossible?

Laws of nature do not prove miracles impossible.

Laws of nature describe the working of certain material cause types. For instance, the cause of free fall will not propel the body towards the centre of a much heavier body like the earth other than as accelerating in distance by the square of the time, or in other words, in speed by time. On Earth, this is the value, for the metric system, of ...

At different points on Earth's surface, the free fall acceleration ranges from 9.764 to 9.834 m/s2 (32.03 to 32.26 ft/s2), depending on altitude, latitude, and longitude.

However, this says nothing of other factors than the free fall acceleration.

If a body intervened and stopped the fall, this would not falsify the natural law, it would just mean the situation had changed due to another factor.

If an angel intervened and stopped the fall and saved a life, it would also mean the situation had changed due to another factor.

Hasn't Biblical criticism proven the Gospels are unreliable, since too late?

No. Biblical criticism, as in Higher Criticism, is itself unreliable, and lots of historic sources we usually trust are even later than Higher Criticism pretends of the Gospels, in relation to the events.

Hasn't Assyriology proven that the stories in Genesis, from Creation to Flood, are polemically tainted plagiarisms?

Once upon a time, a certain Hislop, who was not an Assyriologist, but who wagered on the then budding discipline to prove his hunches right, considered Easter Eggs and the Eucharist as plagiarisms of the Babylonian religion. Well, Assyriologists have so far not even bothered very much about him, that's how wrong he is. Eating eggs is a fairly popular hobby even outside Easter, except we Catholics have tended to forbid it during Lent. And nothing known in any Assyriological find, pictorial or textual, approaches the Eucharist. So, Assyriologists either don't know about him, or don't give him much credit.

However, they are a bit more prone to come up with this other plagiarism charge, but they are not much better than Hislop when doing so. The problem is, they are precluding from the outset the possibility that neither side borrowed from the other, but both sides, both Hebrews and Babylonians, were heirs to those who had lived the events.

Hasn't comparative religion proven Jesus is a copy-cat of pagan deities?

If so, He's a copy-cat of too many of them. And each role fits His own a bit too well to be just tacked on.

Hasn't science shown there is no God?

No. A certain type of science education has been hijacked into an education into Atheism. That's something else.

But what about science? Just plain science? Hasn't that disproven God?

No, and that's precisely what I mean with a certain type of science education.

The good points in favour of scientific methods apply to at least some of the scientific fields. It's misapplied in the case of Heliocentrism or Deep Time. But it has no bearing on whether there is a God, no bearing on whether the miraculous can occur, since the miraculous is precisely a different result than calculations from material factors by natural laws would account for, and accounting for that by God.

I mean of course the scientific methods used in scientific fields. Because philosophy, which deals with God is another field, and it has its method.

Electric calculations may tell you the max speed of a train using that electricity, but it won't tell you whether the train slows down for a station, or whether the train changes tracks to another line. Those things depend on the train driver. And the question about God is pretty much like the question whether the train we are on has a locomotive and a train driver or not. The kind of questions that are so typical for so many sciences and which do not take God into account are like questions about the electric tension in the line from Münster to Bremen. Which does not answer whether the driver will stop between or whether he will continue beyond, like to Hamburg.

Yeah, but natural laws are about ultimate possibility!

Well, natural laws are about potentials of the material factors. Any other possibilities depend on whether anything else than material factors have potential. If a non-material God created material things and allotted them the potentials, He certainly has more potentials than they have.

You couldn't identify the potentials of material (or quasimaterial) factors with "ultimate possibility" if you weren't (without evidence, and against quite a lot of evidence) assuming that they were the only factors in existence.

But haven't the natural laws determined the possible outcomes so that any miracle would be a breach of them?

Precisely not, as I have argued in this series:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Sabine Hossenfelder Studied in Mainly Non-Catholic Schwalbach am Taunus · somewhere else: Do Determinisms in Material Processes Leave Room for Free Decisions by Souls or God Over Matter? · New blog on the kid: Angels chosing orbits = no violation of laws of physics ?