Science: I Guess I'm An Atheist

(dynamic music) Did you hear? Saturn won a world record. Well yeah, I guess it would be a galactic record. It's got like 20 new moons. They used to think i it just had 62 moons and then they discovered 20 more. That's so cool. Galileo was the first person to discover Saturn. Did you know that he was a Christian? Then the Inquisition put him on house arrest for the rest of his life just for saying the earth revolves around the sun. Why are science and religion always in a fight with each other? The Bible and science seem to say different things, so you can't believe in both? But it's almost like, if you're a Christian then you have to believe in creation. And if you believe in evolution, you have to be an atheist. (dynamic music) I have a secret. All my life, I've had questions about my faith, about God, about religion. But now, I'm gonna tell you my question, my struggle, my doubt. Hope you can handle the truth. So my grandma, she's very old school. There's a lot of things that she just kind of doesn't believe in. Like if it doesn't talk about it in the Bible, she just does not believe in it. And that's just that. You think that we just got here on accident! And I'd rather trust a God who was there than a scientist who wasn't. Ouch. People sometimes think that science is based on atheism because scientists look for natural causes for things we see in nature, not for miraculous interventions from God. But the first scientists started looking for these natural causes not because they didn't think there was a God in charge, but because they did. They weren't asking, is God at work in nature? They were asking... How does God sustain nature? The Big Bang is the idea that the universe began as an incredibly small, incredibly dense, incredibly energetic dot. And it's been expanding ever since. This theory was first suggested by a Roman Catholic priest named Gerges Lemaitre. Atheist scientists at the time laughed at the idea. It sounded dumb. It also sounded too much like the Bible story of creation where God made the universe out of nothing, at one point in time. The fact that the universe had a beginning is universally accepted by scientists. And since the universe had a beginning, there must have been a cause. Scientists have theories about how complex life forms developed from simpler organisms. But how life got started, or why anything exists at all, is a total mystery. I grew up trusting in the Bible. But as I've gotten older, I think I've started to wonder how the Bible and my experiences can hold up together. The first time that really happened was in my freshman biology class. It was a really broad overview of kind of a lot of different things. I don't remember what what it was specifically about, but I do remember there being just a whole lot of questions about how old the world really is. And we learned about how gradually the sun and our planets are moving a little bit farther apart. And we talked about evolution a lot. (dynamic music) A lot of people think that the more we understand science the less we need to believe in God. Like people used to not understand why thunderstorms happen. So they imagined gods throwing lightning bolts around. But now we understand electricity, so we don't need the God hypothesis anymore. But actually, scientific understanding doesn't replace belief in God. For instance, you could do a scientific analysis of your best friend and find that she's completely made of molecules. You could do another scientific analysis and find that she is a mammal. These two scientific explanations are both true. They don't cancel each other out. They also don't cancel out other ways to understand her. She's not just a mammal, or made of molecules. She's a student, a daughter, an amazing friend. The Bible says that we are ultimately dust, like atoms and molecules. But that's not the only way to look at it because it also says that we're beings made in the image of God, and called into relationship with him. We're not just dust. I've read that there were all of these conditions that needed to be just right in order for life on Earth to be possible. Like this huge number measures the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together, divided by the gravity between them. This tiny number represents the ratio between two fundamental energies. If any of these numbers were even fractionally different, there would have been nothing; no stars, no Earth, no life. It's like, (sighs) what is the explanation for that? If not God, then what? But if it is God, how did that all work? Like did God create humans all at once? Or did he set a series of events into a motion that eventually led to their creation over millions of years? You'd think God would've seen the future and been like, "Hey, in a couple thousand years, people are gonna debate about this whole Genesis creation thing. So I'm gonna be a little bit more clear about what I'm doing here," you know? Was there a reason why he doesn't bring up certain stuff? Were there certain things he just wanted us to figure out? And just, that's life. I don't know. (dynamic music) When we open the Bible, we tend to expect that God will always say things in the most obvious way. But if we look at the teachings of Jesus, we find that he often spoke in stories and metaphors to make people think more deeply about what he was saying. And sometimes, Jesus performed miracles that went beyond the rule of nature to make us realize the power of God. Okay, here is my problem. I'm starting to think about college. And as I think about what I might want to study, I really think I wanna be a scientist. But the thing is, I am so scared of going to college while holding a Christian viewpoint, and just getting totally burned for it. So it makes me super afraid to go deeper into this thing that I really love. Lots of Christians have this fear, but there are world class scientists in every field who are also serious followers of Jesus. For example, Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project that first sequenced DNA, and is the head of the National Institutes of Health. He became a Christian when he was in his 20s, after previously identifying as atheist. After looking into the evidence for God, he decided that atheism was the least rational option. Dr. Collins now says he believes that the God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. (dynamic music) When it comes down to it, I guess what seems totally clear, is we have this incredibly complex and beautiful universe that had it been constructed just the tiniest bit differently, would've never given birth to stars or planets, let alone bacteria or people. Some people look at this and say an intelligent God must have created it. Others say it was just impersonal natural causes. For me, it's just not something I have to run from. I can keep exploring how science and faith fit together. (bell ringing) (dynamic music)