Duke Divinity School’s curriculum would be enhanced by adding courses that address the relationship between Christianity and the sciences. If necessary, additional faculty should be hired to teach these courses.

The reasons for doing so are several. The so-called “new atheist” movement, exemplified by figures like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, is misappropriating science to attack religion, and more specifically, Christianity. What is worse, they are finding some public success. And then there are the many strains of the virus called “determinism”-at the levels of the laws of physics, evolutionary biology, genes, or neurochemistry-that have a tendency to leak out of science departments and into the minds of students. That’s not all. The unwillingness on the part of some Christians to acknowledge universal common descent or the old age of the earth and universe is both unfortunate and unnecessary. To blame is a lack of understanding, and the solution is to better educate Christians, a process that begins by educating future church leaders.

Students at Duke Divinity School should be trained to refute arguments of the sort described above. Simple, sound explanations can be given for why the doctrine of determinism is untrue. Likewise, that man descended from apes and that the earth is 4.5 billion years old does not disprove the Bible, contrary to what some Christians think.

But it’s not just that Duke Divinity graduates ought to be prepared to defend Christianity against these scientific attacks; more importantly, they ought to be prepared to offer a scientific offensive in support of Christianity. In short, we should turn the tables. The truth is on our side and therefore we need not hide from science or accept a false dichotomy between faith and reason. Ours is not a small God “of-the-gaps” but a grand God of-the-whole… and then some.

There are all sorts of reasons to think that good science and Christian faith work well together. In physics, for example, “anthropic coincidences” in the fundamental laws of the universe are interpreted by many to suggest that life was somehow “built-in” from the beginning, defying all apparent odds. And, lest we forget, a beginning ex nihilo has essentially been confirmed by the Big Bang theory. Quantum mechanics has dealt a serious blow to scientific determinism. The philosophical necessity to posit our own selfhood, free will, and consciousness, if we are to make any truth claims, is a powerful argument for a reality that is more than purely material. And then there is the issue of the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” as Eugene Wigner famously put it. As for evolutionary biology, students should be taught to distinguish between Darwinism (the well-supported theory of common descent) from what is sometimes called neo-Darwinism (the unsupported metaphysical interpretation of Darwinism holding that evolution undermines all arguments from design and/or that explains away all human behavior, past and present, as the result of evolutionary forces).

Again, it is just here that Christians should learn to turn the tables. Is human love a self-serving illusion handed down to us by evolutionary biology? The same goes for free will, morality, and good and evil. When people clearly understand their options, the Christian account of humanity appears far more reasonable than that of the scientific atheist.</p>

A wonderful argument for the truth of God on the basis of evolutionary biology can be found in Francis Collins’s book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. The former head of the Human Genome Project, Collins discovered in the exquisite design of DNA the unmistakable fingerprint of a Creator. Collins’s atheism suddenly became irrational in light of the evidence, and he accepted Christ as his savior, a story told in his book. It and texts like it should find their way onto the bookshelves of Cokesbury.

On that note, there should also be books that tell the correct history of Christianity’s relationship with the sciences. I say “correct” because the reigning narrative tells of modern science emerging in opposition to the culture of the Christian west, pointing, as always, to the case of Galileo. Needless to say, there is a great deal more to this story. It was no coincidence, for example, that modern science grew out of a Christian world that believed in a God who governed nature with perfect, immutable laws. Stephen Barr’s book Modern Physics and Ancient Faith nicely lays out this history.

Students at Duke Divinity School need to know that modern science, like everything else in the order of creation and the world of ideas, ultimately attests to the truth of God. So let’s study it, talk about it, and use it to our advantage as we go forth and preach the Good News.