The Unnecessary War: Faith & Science | Pastor Tim Moore

"Deconstruction without reconstruction will always leave you in destruction." — Pastor Tim Moore

Some topics feel too dangerous to bring into a church setting. The relationship between faith and science is one of them. For many people it represents a genuine crisis point, a place where what they were taught and what they later discovered seemed to pull in opposite directions with no clear way to hold both together.

Pastor Tim Moore knows that tension firsthand. He was not approaching this topic as an outside observer when he stepped in to teach during The Tree Church's Reconstruct series. He was speaking from his own story.

Tim grew up in church. He attended Christian school for most of his childhood. He went to Bible college and became a pastor. And somewhere along the way, he found himself sitting with questions that the faith environment he had grown up in did not seem to have room for. Questions about science. Questions about the age of the earth. Questions about how what he was observing in the world around him fit with what he had been taught the Bible said.

For about ten years, he has been working through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction in his own life. Not as someone who walked away from faith, but as someone who wanted a faith strong enough to actually stand on. And it is from that place that he addressed The Tree Church community on the intersection of faith and science.

Tim opens his message by introducing two broad worldviews that sit at the center of this conversation. He is careful to note that these are large categories and that real life is always more nuanced. But understanding them helps explain where the tension comes from.

The first is a theistic worldview. At its core this is the belief that there is a God, a creator, a first cause behind everything that exists. When someone holds a theistic worldview they look at the world around them and see order. The laws of nature. The complexity of the human body. The precision of the cosmos. And when they see order, they infer design. Design points to a designer. And a designer implies intention, purpose, and meaning.

The second is a materialistic worldview. This is the belief that the physical world is all there is. There is nothing outside of the universe. There is nothing supernatural. Everything that exists is the result of natural processes, and whatever meaning life has is meaning that each person assigns for themselves. When someone with this worldview is asked how everything got here, the honest answer is that they do not fully know. The best available explanation involves chance, natural forces, and a great deal of time.

Tim points out something important about these two worldviews. Both can be true at the same time. But they cannot both be right. They are making competing claims about the fundamental nature of reality.

What Pastor Tim wants the congregation to understand is that this divide has not always existed. There was a time when scientists and theologians largely worked together, observing the world and finding that what they saw confirmed what they read.

He points to passages like Psalm 104:5 and Ecclesiastes 1:4-5 as examples of how ancient readers understood the world. The earth was stable. The sun moved across the sky. Both scripture and basic observation seemed to agree. The geocentric model, the idea that the earth sat at the center and everything else moved around it, made sense to both scientists and people of faith.

Then came Nicolaus Copernicus. A mathematician, an astronomer, and a man of deep personal faith, Copernicus studied the heavenly bodies and began to notice that the math did not add up. The numbers kept pointing toward a different conclusion. The earth was not the center. It was moving around the sun.

He knew what this would mean. He released his most famous work, On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, practically on his deathbed in 1543. He had waited because he understood that challenging the prevailing interpretation of scripture, even with careful mathematical evidence, was going to cause a problem.

It did. When Galileo and Johannes Kepler built on Copernicus's work in the following century, the conflict with the Catholic Church became direct and serious. Galileo's work was placed on the forbidden book list. It stayed there for nearly 200 years. It was not until 1822 that the church formally accepted what these scientists had demonstrated.

Pastor Tim describes this moment as a flash point in human history. It was the moment when a divide that had not previously existed began to take shape. And what most people do not realize, he notes, is that the scientific revolution that followed was largely started by people of faith. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all believed in God. They were not trying to undermine scripture. They were trying to understand creation.

Rather than presenting the conversation as a simple choice between belief and science, Pastor Tim walks the congregation through a spectrum of creation views. He places them on a continuum running from strongly theistic on one end to strongly materialistic on the other.

Young Earth Creationism holds that God created everything in six consecutive 24-hour days based on a particular reading of Genesis 1 and 2. It calculates the age of the earth using the genealogical record in Genesis and rejects scientific evidence that points to a much older universe.

Old Earth Creationism accepts the scientific dating of the earth at approximately 4.54 billion years old but holds that God was the creator behind it all. It approaches the word translated as day in the Hebrew text of Genesis and notes that it carries multiple meanings, one of which refers to a long period of time rather than a single 24-hour period.

Intelligent Design takes a different approach altogether. Its proponents engage directly with scientific evidence and use it to point toward the existence of an intelligent designer. They do not rely on scripture to make their case. They work within the language and methodology of science to argue that the order and complexity of the universe points to intentional design.

The Literary Framework view holds that Genesis 1 was never meant to be a detailed scientific account of how creation happened. It was meant to answer who created and why, not how. On the question of how, proponents of this view are largely comfortable with whatever science concludes.

Evolutionary Creationism, sometimes called theistic evolution, holds that God created through the mechanism of evolution. God was not absent from the process but actively involved in bringing about his intended purposes through it.

Scientific Materialism sits at the far end of the spectrum. It holds that there is no God, that science is the only source of truth, and that evolution is sufficient to explain what exists. Pastor Tim notes that this is a philosophical position, not simply a scientific one. It involves a prior commitment to a particular conclusion regardless of where the evidence points.

Having laid out the full spectrum, Pastor Tim makes an observation that is both simple and clarifying. The conflict between faith and science does not live across the whole spectrum. It lives at the edges.

Young Earth Creationism and Scientific Materialism are both positions that require rejecting large portions of what the other side has observed and concluded. Everything in between, the four views that occupy the middle of the spectrum, represents space where science and scripture can actually coexist. Where a person can hold to both without having to pretend that one does not exist.

Pastor Tim goes further. He does not just argue for compatibility. He argues that without both science and scripture, something important is missed. He draws on the theologian Augustine, who spoke of God revealing himself through two books. The book of scripture and the book of nature. Both are genuine revelation. Both tell us something true about who God is.

To ignore the book of nature, Pastor Tim argues, is to miss the glory of God. He reads from Psalm 19:1-4, where the psalmist declares that the heavens pour forth speech day after day, that they reveal knowledge night after night, that their voice goes out into all the earth without a single word being spoken. Creation itself is communicating something about its creator.

Pastor Tim speaks from genuine wonder here. The more he has learned about the natural world, the more in awe of God he has become. He reflects on the power required for something to exist rather than nothing. The eternality implied by the fact that someone outside of time had to initiate time itself. The intelligence evident in the complexity of DNA, which surpasses anything human beings have ever programmed. The creativity on display in a world that contains somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 species of beetles alone.

All of that, he notes, can be known without ever opening a Bible.

But to ignore the book of scripture is to miss the person and the purpose of God. This is the other side of the argument, and Pastor Tim holds it just as firmly.

Scripture is not simply a record of ancient ideas about God. It is the account of God actively revealing himself to human beings. God appearing to Abraham. God speaking to the prophets. God walking in the garden with Adam and Eve. God performing miracles that archaeology has repeatedly upheld. And ultimately, God sending his son Jesus into the world, not because he had to, but because he cares about the people he created.

Pastor Tim speaks personally here. He has seen God heal. He has seen God restore. He has seen God provide in ways that have no natural explanation. The laws of nature began somewhere, he says, and the God who created them can also suspend them when he chooses.

The mountain of evidence surrounding Jesus, his life, his teachings, his death, his burial, and his resurrection, exists so that people can know that God is real. Pastor Tim does not want to miss that. And that, he says, is exactly why he refuses to be pushed to either extreme.

Pastor Tim closes with an illustration that is almost disarmingly simple. If you see a tea kettle whistling, how do you make sense of it? A scientist would explain the process of heat transfer, molecular movement, evaporation, and steam pressure. Someone else would say the kettle is boiling because they were thirsty and wanted tea. Both answers are right. They are just answering different questions.

Science asks what, when, where, and how. Scripture asks who and why. When those two frameworks are confused, conflict follows. When they are understood as answering different questions, something else becomes possible.

For some people in the room, Pastor Tim acknowledges, this way of thinking could be genuinely freeing. They have been wrestling. They have been carrying a weight that they did not know how to put down. For others, depending on where they land on the spectrum, it might feel unsettling. Pastor Tim is not trying to disturb anyone's convictions. He is trying to open a door.

The hardest part of deconstruction and reconstruction, he says, is being willing to take the things you have always been told and actually wrestle with them. To study them. To open your heart and say honestly, God, I trust you more than I trust an interpretation I have been given. Help me discover what is real.

When Pastor Tim has done that, the burden has lifted. And his faith has grown stronger.

If this message stirred something in you and you are looking for a church community in central Ohio, The Tree Church would love to have you. With two campuses in Lancaster, Ohio and Logan, Ohio, there is a place for you to belong, ask hard questions, and grow in your faith alongside others who are on the same journey.

Sunday services are held at both locations at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM. Whether you are new to faith, returning after time away, or simply looking for a church in Lancaster or a church in Logan that takes the hard questions seriously, the doors are open and you are welcome.