WLC Reacts! to Ricky Gervais on Why He Trusts Science

Dr. William Lane Craig responds to an exchange between Ricky Gervais and Stephen Colbert on trusting in science vs. religion.

STEPHEN COLBERT: You are just believing Stephen Hawking and that’s a matter of faith in his abilities. You don’t know it yourself. You are accepting that because someone told you.

RICKY GERVAIS: Yeah, well, but science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction and any holy book and any other fiction and destroyed it, in a thousand years time that wouldn't come back just as it was. Whereas, if we took every science book, every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they'd all be back because all the same tests would be the same result.

STEPHEN COLBERT: That's good. That's really good.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I do have tremendous respect for science, and that's where I've really devoted a great deal of time and energy to try to understand the scientific perspective on the world. But I think Gervais is painting with too broad of a brush here. There really isn't any such thing as “science” or “religion” to which these could be contrasted. Rather, when you look at science, it also develops. Aristotelian physics was very different than Newtonian physics and that's very different than relativistic physics. And the physics that we have today is based upon two incompatible theories: quantum theory and relativity theory, and as yet no one knows how to reconcile these. So there's definite change and progress over time in the scientific discovery of the world. But when you talk about, for example, the Bible, because the Bible is a book of history, if you destroyed a historical work so that all memory of the past was lost, well of course you wouldn't expect that to repeat itself. History is not cyclical. If you destroyed all knowledge of the historical past (and I mean even archaeologically) then you wouldn't expect that to come back. But that doesn't mean it's unreliable or that we don't have credible knowledge of the past. With respect to the New Testament, he just begs the question by calling it fictional. The Gospels do not belong to the literary genre of fiction. I'm sorry, they don't. They belong to the genre of ancient biography which has a strong historical interest. The Gospels have been shown to be historically credible sources for the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. So, granted, if you destroyed all of these historical records you wouldn't have any knowledge of the past of what went on. That would be in contrast with science. But that doesn't mean that there isn't therefore historical knowledge just as there is scientific knowledge. There are different kinds of knowledge and different methods for getting at that knowledge. And with respect to the historical claims of Christianity, these are historically well-founded and are accessible to us today. In fact, ironically we're probably better positioned to know the historical reliability of these documents today than people have been for thousands of years who, during the Middle Ages and before, didn't have the historical critical method and the tools that we do for doing modern historiography. So with the progress of time we're actually better positioned to know the historical reliability of these texts than previous generations were.