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Jubilee Science and Faith course reaches relatively large number of Muslims
The Science and Faith course celebrated its first anniversary on September 5, 2024. About one-fifth to one-quarter of the students are Muslim. Participants come from more than sixty countries and often have a scientific background.
The Science and Faith course is part of the Search4Truth brand, launched by GlobalRize to reach people with scientific interests. In the first year, over 4,700 people enrolled in the course, more than a quarter of whom started the course under the guidance of a mentor. The five mentors who guide the students are all scientists.
Chris Kruse, one of the mentors and also a professor emeritus of pharmaceutical research at the University of Amsterdam, developed the course. He based it on the course he taught for years in churches and youth groups. “With that course, I reached 6,500 people in eight years. But online we reach many more people – over 4,700 in one year, already.”
Online, he also reaches other audiences: “I estimate that about 20 to 25 percent have a Muslim background.” Interaction with these students is very respectful. “Christians have a lot in common with Muslims: like us, they believe in a Creator. They have real reverence for God; we could learn something from them in that respect. They often present quotes from the Quran.
For my part, I try to convey the richness of the Bible and God as Creator as much as possible. Each lesson ends with a Bible text, so the students really get to contemplate something from the Bible. But that God created everything through His Son, the Word, and that the Holy Spirit is fully involved in creation, is not something they are eager to go along with!”
Quite a few of the students are scientists themselves or work/study in an academic environment. “Sometimes they are searching for guidance on how to be a Christian and feel they’re being pushed onto the defensive by atheist colleagues and their belief in the evolution theory. The students feel supported by the course and strengthened in their convictions,” Kruse says. “We have students of all ages. I mentored an elderly woman from South Africa who took the course so she could speak to her grandchildren. A nurse from Canada always gave wonderful answers; she said she had gained much from the course. In her job, she had to deal with questions about the origin of life. The course enabled her to become impressed by how beautiful creation is put together, again, and that science emphasizes the very indescribable beauty of it.”
Co-mentor Arie Sonneveld finds it a challenge that some of the people who enroll, answer using ChatGPT, or quickly drop out. But those who do engage with serious commitment, grow from lesson to lesson in understanding the relationship between faith and science. “That continues to motivate me to keep going,” he says. Those who are really concerned with the big questions run into the contradiction, apparent or not, between horizontal and materialistic science versus spiritual and vertically oriented faith. Sonneveld: “The beauty of it is that in twelve lessons, they become enormously impressed with the wisdom of the Bible around the who, what and why of creation, whereas science offers only fallible knowledge about how things change in the vast cosmos in accordance with universal laws.”
One of Sonneveld’s students, Felix from Africa, articulated at the end of the course how it helped him:
“The course shows the complexity of life, which is really amazing. It was fascinating to discover that the theory of evolution is debatable, and I was amazed to find that the divine Designer is the most plausible explanation for the existence of the universe. What really struck me was how our spiritual nature came about. I feel that this course has helped me see the greatness of God in what He created. I now know that the God I believe in, is a God of the vast universe. I now understand that science is part of what it means to be a Christian, provided you are careful with it.”
Have you become interested in taking the course yourself? Register now!
Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash