No God? No Way!: A Science Teacher's Perspective on Naturalism and the Bible

By Chris Hathaway

Society has decided that science and religion are opposed to each other. They are not. They are united. They back each other up. Science always complements the Bible. That's the truth, and the purpose of this book is to explore that reality. Zooming in to the smallest part of a cell and zooming out to the largest extent of the universe testify to the same thing, the necessity of a creator. 'No God? No Way!' And along the "way," author Chris Hathaway uses his experience as a science teacher (along with lots of basic common sense) to show how the big bang and the general theory of evolution fall to pieces when burdened with real-life testing and analysis. But what about natural selection? Is carbon dating legitimate? What's the deal with dinosaurs and how do they fit into all this? These questions and plenty more will be answered as you journey through this exciting book. So suit up. Pack your essentials. Put on your hiking boots and grab that space helmet. We're going for a ride.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350923773

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No God? No Way! A Science Teacher’s Perspective on Naturalism and the Bible.

First Edition.

© 2024 Christopher Hathaway

E-Mail: [e-mail]

ISBN 979-8-35092-376-6 (print)

ISBN 979-8-35092-377-3 (eBook)

All rights reserved.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

This book is dedicated to my uncle, Rev. Darrick Kolterjahn. He was the first person to proofread this book, and I am very grateful for his guidance and advice. A loving husband, brother, father, and grandfather, Rick served God’s kingdom as a pastor for 47 years at churches in several states, and the dedication he has shown to his family and his Lord can only be described as tireless. God called Uncle Rick home in 2022, and while we know he is rejoicing in the perfect presence of his Savior, we all miss him dearly. Well done, good and faithful servant.

Naturalism: the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted

– Oxford English Dictionary

He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God.

– Sir Isaac Newton

Acknowledgements

I believe a Bible-based Christian education is invaluable. The naturalistic worldview, popularized by modern science and endorsed by secular education, is increasingly incompatible with the clear testimony of God’s Word and has the effect (both explicit and subliminal) of driving many from the Church. That said, I am glad I attended both a public high school and college. Without that experience I would never have been able to identify with young people who are constantly indoctrinated with naturalism, and I’d never realize how much it directly affects their faith and life. These kids have a right to know that there are significant issues with, and scientific peer-reviewed alternatives to, secular philosophy despite the way it’s worshiped in society today. On that note, I want to thank my parents for sending me to an exceptional Christian elementary/grade school (Trinity Neenah, now known as Neenah Lutheran) whose teachers and pastors encouraged critical thinking and laid the foundation for me to make it through those later institutions with my faith intact.

I want to thank my wife, Naomi, who put up with hours upon hours of my absence as I worked on this book. She has been incredibly supportive through this whole thing, and her own love of God’s truth humbles and motivates me.

A special thanks to Creation Ministries International (CMI). Over half of the citations in this book are from resources they provide and can usually be followed to a free article on their website, creation.com. I’ve had the opportunity to meet the staff from their US office and can say they are all as kind and generous as they are knowledgeable. The structure, flow, and organization of this book was largely inspired by their work, particularly Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels. Further, they have kindly allowed me permission to use many images that they have created and published, for which I am very grateful.

I would also like to thank Answers in Genesis (AiG) for having their own quality resources. They are the ones behind the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, both of which I can’t say enough good things about. Go see them!

Ph.D. scientists who work for creationist organizations like CMI and AiG have given up secular prestige, respect, and financial security for the opportunity to do science the right way, with biblical history as the starting point. Most of these folks went through public education with many beginning as ardent atheists but, when confronted with the legitimate empirical problems of naturalistic science and the amazing grace of the gospel message, are now truth-loving, Bible-believing Christians. I have nothing but respect for them.

The information presented in this book is nothing new. With few exceptions, my sources are articles and books written by these creation scientists. Even the chapter titles themselves are pretty standard when it comes to scientific apologetics. My own contribution is the organization of these topics into a structure which, as you’ll see, exposes naturalism’s utter fragility.

A word about the age of Earth: It is always best to allow the Bible to speak for itself. I believe the book of Genesis is written plainly as historical narrative and that calling it poetry or metaphorical imposes a point of view onto the text that simply is not there.¹ This book assumes the history in Genesis to be true, and based on the chronologies and genealogies contained therein, I believe that history puts the date of creation back at about 4000 BC.², ³, ⁴ This means the world/universe is only 6000 years old or so, and I treat it that way in the book. Since this is the acknowledgement section though, I want to acknowledge that there are good Bible-believing Christians out there who think the world to be several thousand years older than that. Still very young compared to the millions and billions of years we hear about.

A big thank-you to my editors and proofreaders: Scott Nickel, Emily Kim, Steven R. Kutcher, Dr. Brad Alles, Mark Bergemann, Rev. Darrick Kolterjahn, Rev. James Aderman, and Rev. Tony McKenzie. Their feedback was instrumental in bringing this work to its final version. Thank you to Martin Luther High School whose financial support helped defray the cost of publishing. Another big thanks goes out to my wife (and grammar magician), Naomi, for her editorial contributions. I can’t even ballpark the number of hours she spent with me, staying up late so we could get everything just right. I’d also like to thank my son, John. His suggestions were to add the words ball and star in random places on every page. I’m sure that would have made this whole thing more entertaining. And thank you to my baby daughter, Laura. For as much as she spits up, she never did so on my computer.

I hope you enjoy this book. It was a blast to write, and it kept me out of trouble for a few good years. If nothing else I think we can all agree that it’s got a pretty neat cover, so, if it’s not your cup of tea, maybe use it as a centerpiece.

1 Sarfati, J. (2019). Yes, Genesis really is historical narrative. Creation Ministries International. (2019, December 28). Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://creation.com/genesis-waw-consecutive-narrative

2 How old is the earth really? Creation Ministries International. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://creation.com/how-old-is-the-earth-cfk

3 Sarfati, J. (2003). Biblical chronogenealogies. Creation Ministries International. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://creation.com/biblical-chronogenealogies

4 Hardy, C., Carter, R. (2014). The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth. Journal of Creation, 28(2), 89-96. Retrieved from https://creation.com/biblical-age-of-the-earth

Table of Contents

Preface

The Hill

No Compromise

The Structure

Cosmology

The Origin of Life

Genetics and DNA

Natural Selection

The Fossil Record

The Geologic Record

Radiometric Dating

Life and Death

Epilogue

Bonus Material

About the Author

Preface

Not that long ago, I was a Bible-believing college student whose conscience needed answers. Answers on evolution, answers on the big bang, answers on fossils, answers on everything that seemed to upend the very foundation of my life – that the Bible was true. One of the many books I turned to on my journey really got under my skin and into my head. I don’t remember the book, I don’t remember the author, but I’ll never forget what I read. The Bible-believing theologian said that the more science finds out, the more it seems to go against what we find in Scripture. His main point ended up being that we need to stick to the Bible even though science goes against it.

I wanted to follow the author’s advice, but the reading raised more questions in my mind than it answered. Why would God design a world that seems to go against his Word, through which it was created? Did he deliberately make all the evidence point away from him to see who would really believe? And wouldn’t that make God deceptive? This was my battle, and in my soul it raged onward.

But not anymore. Not today. My questions have been answered. My soul is still. My faith is strong. But not because I chose to look away from science. Rather I looked at it, every bit that supposedly goes against the Word of God, and found something I did not expect even though I should have seen it coming a mile away: This world, all the evidence in it, under it, and above it, points directly to Scripture, not away.

This is the message I wish to proclaim from the rooftops until my voice fails and I’m forced to learn sign language. This is the message that I want to give to every young person who has the same inner turmoil that I had. This is the message I want all church leaders to realize, that they may encourage the curiosity of the young people in their congregations and never stamp it out with, You should believe the Bible even though the evidence says otherwise. The evidence doesn’t say otherwise. There are answers. And I’m not talking about grey, fluffy, maybe-it’s-this or maybe-it’s-that answers. There are solid, concrete, real answers, and they are self-evident. They stare us smack in the face every single day no matter where we are or what we’re doing.

As the apostle Paul explains to the Romans, What may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse (Rom 1:19-20).⁵ And Job openly implores us, But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? (Job 12:7-9).⁶

So I say let’s follow Job’s advice here. Let’s ask the animals, the birds, and the earth. And you know what, forget about stopping there. Let’s talk to the stars and planets and converse with simple cells. Let’s climb up a ladder of DNA and have a long discussion with a monkey. Let’s go on a date with carbon and run to the top of the nearest hill so we can look down on God’s amazing creation and see what this all means and why it’s important.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I’m excited to have you along.

5 Romans 1:19-20, New International Version. (2011). Zondervan Publishing House.

6 Job 12:7-9, New International Version. (2011). Zondervan Publishing House.

The Hill

(Fig. 1 – Hathaway, C.)

That hill I mentioned a few sentences ago is real. Here it is (Fig. 1).

This hill serves as our first (and will be the last) destination on our adventure. Many a battle have been fought on hills not unlike this one. And so what are we doing here? What is our battle? And, more importantly, is it worth our time and effort? The battle we must take on here is one that is often overlooked. We fight for a proper acknowledgement of God’s general revelation, the fact that all of creation points straight back to him.

Of course, Satan has taken it upon himself to persuade the world into thinking the exact opposite. He wants us to believe that all the evidence points away from a designer and toward everything just getting here randomly on its own. Why? He knows the ramifications of such a belief. If our world and universe got here on its own over billions of years, then there was no real Adam and Eve. And if there was no real Adam and Eve, there was no real Fall. And if there was no Fall, then God’s special revelation, the gospel message of salvation through Christ, is invalid. Those first few chapters of Genesis provide the foundation upon which the gospel stands. Without them, it falls to pieces.

Atheist author Richard Bozarth says, Evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God.… And if Jesus was not the redeemer who dies for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.⁷ And he’s absolutely right. Even if folks don’t go through that exact logic in their heads on their journey away from Christianity, they are smart enough to realize that if you can’t trust the very beginning of the Bible, its very foundation, there is little reason to trust the rest of it. The old, evil foe has focused much energy on this deception, and I’m not expecting you to just take my word for it. Let’s see what the studies say.

Pew Research Center did a study in 2015 that looked at young people who used to attend church but have since stopped and now identify as atheist or agnostic.⁸ Pew asked these individuals what caused them to leave the Church. Fifty percent left due to a lack of belief because of science, lack of evidence, logic, common sense. Ouch. For reference, the next highest percentage was 20% who left because they opposed organized religion in general.

Barna Research Group did their own study in 2018 and asked 13 to 18-year-old kids what the biggest barriers are to being a Christian.⁹ Thirty-nine percent responded that they believe science refutes too much of the Bible or I don’t believe in fairy tales. Again, these answers together represented the highest percentage. They also asked these kids what their most negative perception about the Church was. By now you can probably guess the number one answer. The Church seems to reject much of what science tells us about the world.

This is no side issue, folks. This is the issue. Satan is a master of deception, and no one can dispute the results of his strategy. Go out and preach Christ crucified. Go tell it on the mountain that Jesus died for the sins of mankind. Yes, the Holy Spirit will work amazing things through you and bring people to Christ, but a growing number will just look at you with a demeaning stare. They are smart enough to know that science disproves the Bible and discerning enough to realize that, if that’s true, Christianity is a hollow, baseless religion just like the thousands of other religions and belief systems that are out there. If our holy book is wrong from the very beginning, why even bother looking at the rest of it?

The fact is that if we choose to ignore this battlefield or not fully engage in it, then we do so at the expense of our Lord’s kingdom. As the Apostle Paul says, we ought to demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor 10:5).¹⁰ Any attempt by our enemy to preemptively harden the hearts of our young people with deceptive science must be dealt with seriously and effectively.

I want to keep going with a few more studies because they also help us figure out how to deal with this challenge. Author Larry Taunton did his own study in 2013 and published the results in his book Listening to Young Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity.¹¹ As in the other studies, the kids polled had previously attended church and were now atheist. Here though, Taunton didn’t just ask them why they stopped believing but when. The story you typically hear today is that kids do just fine going to church with their families while they are living at home, and then it’s this big shock that they’ve lost their faith and stopped worshipping after they head off to college. The scapegoat usually ends up being their evil, anti-Christian professors; however, Taunton found it was the ages of 14 to 17 that were the most decisive in the lives of these kids. That’s late middle school through high school! He also found that the internet factored heavily into their conversion to atheism and that they actually respected pastors who took the Bible and its history seriously. Betsy Cooper followed this up in 2016 with a study that concluded 79% of young adults who are religiously unaffiliated made that choice in their adolescent and teen years.¹² And Ken Ham even found back in 2009 that some church youth are already lost in their hearts and minds as far back as elementary school!¹³

The message is clear. Our kids who fall away do so much earlier than we think. And just because they go with us to church does not mean that they are really engaged in their faith or buying into what they hear each Sunday.

Now the results of those studies are pretty sobering, but let me share the results of a survey done by the organization Creation Ministries International. In 2016 they went around conducting interviews with college students at various campuses and found "unequivocally that the majority of young people who were not exposed to creation teaching in their youth now embrace evolution and no longer attend church.¹⁴ Yet, every student we spoke to who was equipped with answers as a young person still retains their Christian convictions, in spite of the evolutionary teaching they received in higher education. Better still, every single student we spoke to who affirmed biblical creation still attends church regularly [emphasis added]."

What else is there to say? Our kids need to be exposed to a substantive defense of biblical creation, and the sooner the better! We must not shrink away from this. I strongly believe that, at worst, we should have good answers ready for these kids and, at best, their questions should be answered before they even ask them. Such topics should proactively be discussed within youth groups and Bible studies. The research plainly shows that a huge percentage of our kids will fall away from the Church because it doesn’t jibe with accepted science. Eternal souls hang in the balance, my friends!

Remember when you were a teenager? That period of time between just having fun as a kid and being mature enough to actually be comfortable in your own skin? That in-between time span is rife with worry, self-doubt, and self-consciousness, and, having been a high school teacher for 13 years now, I can tell you that some of the most outwardly confident kids harbor the most intense self-doubt. Many church-going young people just aren’t comfortable asking their pastor questions on the big bang and evolution. Of course there are exceptions. Some kids will overcome their inner awkwardness and ask their pastor what the deal is, but I daresay that for every exception there are at least nine who get their answers elsewhere.

And where do you suppose the other nine turn for these answers? The same place you probably look for answers to questions these days. Google. And what do you suppose Google says? I was curious about this over the summer, so I typed in a few questions and took screenshots of the answers I got (Fig. 2 and 3).

(Fig. 2 and 3 – Hathaway, C.)

That first one really got me. I couldn’t even finish the sentence before the book Why Evolution Is True came up! Now let’s not allow the significance of this to escape us. What is the underlying message our young people get when they see this? Google is basically telling them, Look, we know where you’re going with this. Of course evolution is true; just check out this sophisticated book by a world-renowned doctor of biology. The point is that when kids use their phones to get answers to these questions, they will always get naturalistic results similar to those in the screenshots I took.

Further, note how when I asked, How old is the earth? I didn’t even have to press the search button before the answer popped up. And, once again, look at what’s happening subliminally here. See how all these answers appear so sure of themselves? They all look so professional, so precise, and most importantly, without a hint of there being any other reasonable answer worth mentioning.

And so why is this all important? No shocker here, but every new generation spends more and more time on their phones. And when you live in a social media world where an alternative to evolution and the big bang isn’t even worth mentioning, it’s only a matter of time before that starts to affect you. It’s only a matter of time before you start asking those big questions and find that believing the history of the Bible is only for nut jobs and religious fanatics. And once you cross that threshold, it’s only a matter of time before you begin questioning other aspects of your faith. "Was Jesus really God’s son? Do you really believe he was raised from the dead?"

Think I’m overreacting? It saddens me to share the results of this final study with you. Josh McDowell was curious just how Christian our self-identified Christian youth really are, and so he conducted a survey of only Christian teens.¹⁵ Results showed that 63% of teenaged Christians don’t believe that Jesus is the Son of the one true God (that’s almost two out of three!) and 51% don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Moreover, 68% don’t believe that the Holy Spirit is real, and only 33% say the Church will play a part in their lives when they leave home. These numbers should make us weep aloud. Worse yet, this survey was done in 2006. That was a long time ago already, and as you can imagine, the numbers aren’t getting any better.

And yet while these numbers are discouraging, while they can make us feel helpless about the future, we must realize they will never change the past. They will never change the victory that has been won for us through our Savior, Jesus Christ. A man who, through his humanity, was united and connected to mankind, capable of being tempted, capable of suffering, and capable of identifying with us. And God who, through his deity, was capable of taking the punishment for each and every sin that has been and ever will be committed, capable of living a perfect life, capable of resisting every temptation from Satan himself.

And we know Jesus’ sacrifice was sufficient. If the story ended at the cross, at Jesus’ death, then we would have known it was not enough, that Jesus’ work was in vain. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins (1 Cor 15:17).¹⁶ But he was raised from the dead! We are saved!

God loved us so much, in spite of mankind consistently spitting in his face since the beginning of time, that he sent Jesus to earth on a rescue mission to save us, and that mission was successful. He died for all of humanity, not for any one nation, race, or people, and has made perfectly clear that our path to heaven only goes through him. That path does not go through good works (as it does for all other religions), as though our goal is to sneak into heaven by trying to make sure our good outweighs our bad. We contribute nothing to our own salvation. It’s not about what we do; it’s about putting our full faith and trust in what Jesus did, and if our faith is right and true, those good works