Online:
- From the President: Why Do I Believe in Jesus?
From the editor
Emily Post would likely recommend that it’s best to relegate polite dinner conversation to safe topics like the weather or your grandson’s latest soccer game and to stay far, far away from more controversial issues like climate change, creation and evolution, and whether it was right for the Cincinnati Zoo staff to kill the gorilla Harambe.
But The Lutheran Witness is no Emily Post.
In this issue, our authors tackle science, theology and where the two intersect. From the distinctive features of Earth to the necessity of the sun, from overpopulation to human genes, they explain how Christians can and ought to use science and reason in their proper places: in service to Scripture.
They also explain what happens when people turn from caring for creation to worshipping it, even as they dissect the Big Bang theory and discuss whether or not science makes God redundant.
Some of the topics are substantial, making them all the more important to understand because, as Dr. John Warwick Montgomery explains, “A secular world desperately needs thinking, rational Christians.” So dig in! Discover something you didn’t know about God’s creation. Learn what genes and fossil fuels teach about your Creator. The guests at your next dinner party will thank you.
Adriane Heins, Managing Editor
The Lutheran Witness
I need to provide two points of information: 1) the devil is the same three-trick creature he’s always been (see Luke 4.1-13, 1 Jn 2.16), and 2) The Big Bang Theory was initially a aspersion like ‘Lutheran’. It is misleading to have The Big Bang theory and evolution in the same sentence. Many physicists and mathematicians, as well as LW readers may be unaware of Georges Lemaître Associate RAS, who was a Belgian priest, cosmologist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. According to Wikipedia, Lemaître himself described his theory as “the Cosmic Egg exploding at the moment of the creation”; it became better known as the “Big Bang theory,” a pejorative term coined during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast by the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Lemaître developed this idea in a report published in Nature two years before Hubble. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and is supposed to have said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”
From King Solomon to Copernicus, Pascal, Kepler, Dom Perignon, the geneticist Abbot Gregor Johann Mendel, Katherine Johnson to today, scientists of faith have found no conflict between science and faith. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Eph 2.10
The ten articles in the March 2017 Lutheran Witness, each on one or more topics of science or reason with application by Christians, had an average text length of approximately one page.
This is really not sufficient to provide needed scientific details and implications for Christians. Furthermore no references or links (other than to the CTCR’s “In Christ All Things Hold Together”) were provided for the reader to find additional information.
Assuming the general Lutheran Witness readership is above an 8th grade Catechism Class comprehension level, it may have been better to reduce the number of topics and allow longer and more informative articles on each of the topics for the readership. It would also allow additional references or links to be included for readers who are interesting in pursuing a topic further.
Thank you, LW, for the March issue! I’ve been feeling anxious and suffocated by everything I’m seeing, hearing and reading re “world issues” today. Every article spoke to these concerns and gave me peace and reassurance in my faith and beliefs. Breathing easier again.