Resources

Summit Lecture Series

The Foundations of Modern Science
Wishing to address the notion that religion and science are like oil and water, Dr. Michael Buratovich of Spring Arbor University takes a look at the history of modern science and how it developed. Calling into question the motives of scientists who have propagated the “oil-and-water” idea, he asserts that science as we know it would not exist without the Christian worldview. He then jumps into a journey through the years of all the minds behind the concepts we follow today, including men like Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Francis Bacon, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, noting the frameworks within which they studied the world. He then describes how many aspects of Christianity and science are in “lock-step” with each other, with scientific practice being grounded in the ideological framework of Christianity. He proposes that this explains why science flourished in the Christian west and floundered in the pantheistic East and concludes by reminding students to consider a career in science in order to bring it back to its roots.

Global Warming
Dr. E. Calvin Beisner of the Cornwall Alliance for Environmental Stewardship speaks about the highly publicized and (seemingly) widely accepted Global Warming Movement. Having studied the topic for the last 15 to 20 years, Dr. Beisner comes armed with myriad facts and research about earth’s natural cycles, humankind’s contribution to these cycles, and a more realistic approach to our future. In the first segment, he addresses the scientists and so-called “science” behind the Movement, while also providing students with a breakdown of the earth’s atmosphere, how it regulates temperature, how the sun affects these temperatures, and a perspective of how much (or little) man’s activity actually changes the atmosphere’s composition. He also demonstrates how the evidence and data support the idea that recent and foreseeable climate change is well within the bounds of natural variability, is largely natural in cause, and isn’t likely to produce catastrophic effects. He concludes that while human contribution to global warming is real, it is minimal and unnoticeable by any living being.

Christianity and Scientific Naturalism
J.P. Moreland discusses the worldview of Naturalism. Moreland discusses claims of reality and claims of knowledge, and speaks on the naturalist's belief that the only thing that is real is the physical universe. Moreland goes on to discuss naturalists’ claim of knowledge and the claim that the only way a person can know something is through the proof of science — empiricism. All things have to be explained by the laws of nature. Naturalism is the view that science is the entire search for knowledge. Moreland exposes fallacies in naturalistic thinking, and uses examples in nature to argue that science cannot explain all things in the universe.

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