Over the subsequent few weeks, the autumn 2025 semester will start at universities all through the U.S. Many new and returning college students will pursue a course of examine in numerous scientific fields.
I educate chemistry to 2 separate teams of scholars. One is made up of these making ready for careers in medication, forensics, marine biology and additional analysis in graduate faculty. The second and far bigger cohort is enrolled in our college’s faculty of nursing.
However educating chemistry is just half of what I do. Since I educate at a Christian college, I’m afforded the distinctive privilege of integrating a Christian worldview into my lectures and laboratory courses.
If the idea of blending the Bible and science collectively in a university classroom appears alien, that’s as a result of widespread ignorance of Christianity’s function within the historical past of the event of science.
We’ve been bought a invoice of products. Scientists have advised us that theology and science don’t belong collectively, and that solely science has the authority to make fact claims about actuality. This isn’t science, it’s scientism, a worldview primarily based on the vanity of philosophical materialism.
Most of the best scientists of the Seventeenth and 18th centuries had been religious Christians, whose religion motivated them to pursue their research. They noticed a world that was ordered and concluded, as Stephen C. Meyer explains in “The Return of the God Speculation,” that “nature had been designed by the identical rational thoughts who had designed the human thoughts.”
The Seventeenth-century astronomer Johanes Kepler stated that God “wished us to acknowledge pure legal guidelines and that God made this potential by creating us after his personal picture in order that we might share in his personal ideas.”
The daddy of classical physics, Sir Isaac Newton, and the daddy of quantum physics, Max Planck, had been each capable of seamlessly combine their Christian religion with science. Perception in God didn’t current a contradiction to their understanding of the design and the mechanics governing the respective worlds they studied. They believed that God had created a universe that was ordered, predictable and contingent, that it had been designed like a exact clock, and that it was ruled by legal guidelines. These traits led them to conclude that arithmetic and science demonstrated God’s exact handiwork.
Science doesn’t have all of the solutions. After over 70 years of analysis because the discovery of the construction of DNA in 1953, biochemists aren’t any nearer to fixing the basic query of how life started. The truth is, the extra that’s discovered concerning the cell and its unfathomable complexity, the farther within the rearview mirror any reply fades.
Venki Ramakrishnan was one in all three collaborators awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2009 for research within the operate and construction of the ribosome. Writing in “Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets and techniques of the Ribosome,” he explains how his personal analysis led him to ponder the deeper query of life’s origins.
“How life started is likely one of the nice remaining mysteries of biology … the issue [is] that in almost all types of life, DNA [carries] genetic data however DNA itself [is] inert and made by a lot of protein enzymes, which [require] not solely RNA but in addition the ribosome to make these enzymes. Furthermore, the sugar in DNA, deoxyribose, [is] constructed from ribose by a big, difficult protein. No person [can] perceive how the entire system might have began.”
College students ought to be allowed to think about that they won’t be the results of some blind, unguided course of that started thousands and thousands of years in the past in a heat little pond — the so-called “primordial soup.”
In my classroom, they may hear me say that God created man in his personal picture in order that we will share in his personal ideas, and see the world as his exact handiwork. I need my college students to think about that the primary verse recorded within the Bible — “To start with, God created the heaven and the earth” — is a fact declare, and a legitimate start line for the examine of science, because it was for among the best scientists the world has ever recognized.
Gregory J. Rummo is a lecturer of chemistry within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Palm Seaside Atlantic College in West Palm Seaside. His newest e book, “Reaching Gen Z with the Gospel within the School Classroom,” was revealed in January 2025 by Wipf and Inventory.