In chapter 2, Brooks really starts taking aim at the notion that science and faith are direct competitors in terms of explaining how life came to be. He says, and I would certainly agree with this, that atheists tend to really try to lay claim to ‘reason’ - meaning, there is a notion that is embedded in culture that ‘intelligent’ people tend to flock towards science, and that it is ‘cute’ to cling to faith, but that there really isn’t any explanatory power in faith in terms of how the world and the universe came into being.
Side note, there is a great documentary called “Is Genesis History” that I would recommend watching, it is really good, and it punches holes in this idea some as well.
The reality is that science hasn’t (and I believe can’t) answered all of the questions we have about creation and the universe. In fact, as time has gone on, big holes have been punched in the widely accepted evolution narrative. I would go so far as to say that it is deteriorating in many ways, whereas history is daily being made and discovered in the world of Christian faith.
But, besides that...one thing that I think is SO important, and that Brooks may get to in the coming chapters, is that we ground our faith on the right thing. We can chase these arguments down into various rabbit holes, and that’s fun and all...but we have to keep the main thing the main thing. What is THE main thing? We profess to believe that a man named Jesus came to this earth about 2000 years ago, that He lived a blameless life, that He was falsely executed as a criminal, that He was placed into a tomb and 3 days later was seen walking around in living form by hundreds of people. We believe that this proved that He was who He said He was...the Son of God. That’s what we believe. So, as fun as it is to play with this creation stuff, we have to remember that THAT is the main thing. And science has had an incredibly difficult time refuting that...it has had no luck. The best arguments science has produced against THAT narrative is like the turtle analogy from yesterday, basically, “Well, we know the turtle was alive (ie, we know Jesus came and went), and we can’t deny that he is now sitting atop the fence post (ie, and we have a hard time refuting that people saw him after His death), but we are going to assume that something other than the obvious happened (ie, we are going to try to come up with ways to refute whether or not Jesus was ever actually dead, or that someone was pretending to be Him and tricked everyone, or everyone who saw Jesus was hallucinating, etc.)...we can’t deny the turtle was on the fence post and we can’t deny that Jesus came back, but we CAN come up with various explanations that don’t involved someone putting the turtle on the fence post or Jesus actually being the Son of God. And heck, if you give people long enough (like 2000 years), they will come up with some creative solutions to this puzzle.
Bottom line - our faith isn’t blind faith...there are elements that can’t be seen, sure, but there are plenty of rational, historical, and scientific elements as well. And, besides that, is it really reasonable to assume that all reasonable people are atheists and that all religious people are fools? That’s a very egotistical position for an atheist to take.
Just because we don’t fully understand how something works doesn’t mean there isn’t a creator.
Science isn’t opposed to God.