A Baptist with more sense for history than lab science


Brett Younger is pastor at Fort Worth’s Broadway Baptist Church.  In the Baptist Standard he tells a story of a near-disaster in his high school chemistry class, on the way to urging Christians to use common sense on the issues of evolution in public school science classes.  One more voice of reason, for sanity.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Creationism, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Public education, Religious Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to A Baptist with more sense for history than lab science

  1. elbogz says:
    August 21, 2006 at 4:52 pm

    This Baptist pastor hits the nail on the head.

    “The church has often acted as if science is the enemy. In the 16th century, Copernicus had the audacity to argue that the earth circled the sun instead of the other way around. Galileo defended Copernicus. The Church condemned Galileo and Copernicus as heretics, because a superficial reading of the Bible suggests an earth-centered universe. The Book of Joshua says the sun stood still, so the sun must move around the earth.”

    I especially like his Quote of Ralph Waldo Emerson

    “But the church is mistaken when we’re afraid that science threatens our belief in God. When religious teachings require belief in false claims about the world, they force intelligent people either to reject science, a choice that’s terrible and unnecessary, or to leave the church. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God.” Any God who can be threatened by research is too small. “

    We didn’t have the same high school chemistry teacher but we did come to similar conclusions

    “When we were in the eleventh grade, what some of us learned at church and what we learned at school didn’t fit together, because we were led to believe that God is in the pages of Scripture, but not in the pages of a science textbook. God wants us to discover that God is at work in the universe in ways past our understanding. God wrote the rules for chemistry set the planets spinning around the sun and created in ways beyond our comprehension. Thanks be to God who is bigger than we’ve imagined.”

    A pastor once reminded me that we don’t have to devote our lives depending God’s reputation. God is big enough to do that. Our job was defined by Jesus when he said, ‘feed my sheep’.

  2. Gleeful Gecko » Blog Archive » Sensible Religion says:
    August 21, 2006 at 2:03 pm

    [...] Via Milard Fillmore’s Bathtub [...]

Play nice in the Bathtub -- don't splash soap in anyone's eyes.

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