A recent outreach conversation with Kenny, a construction
engineer, focused on the relationship between science and religion.
Kenny told me he grew up with religious belief but now is
filled with doubts because of science.
As we talked I realized he has been allowing science to define God, to
put limitations on his understanding of God, as if God is beholden to the same
physical laws He himself created.
But if God were limited by science, He wouldn’t be God.
God doesn’t owe his existence to science, but the very
opposite is true. As “the systematic
study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation
and experiment”, science owes its very existence to a Creator who put order in
the universe. It is the ability to be
above and beyond and outside that created order that distinguishes the Creator
from the creation.
If we apply the limitations of science to the Bible,
miracles aren’t possible. God isn’t
possible. Man becomes god at worst, or god
becomes an idol, a product of man’s imagination, at best.
Reducing religion to make it fit within the limitations of
science and logic makes it nothing more than a sort of magic, reducing God to a
genie in a bottle subject to our human whims and bidding, a god who stays in
his place and serves us when needed. A
god we can be comfortable with.
But there is another way to arrive at truth in addition to the
limitations of science. It is God’s way,
the way of revelation.
Rather than man relying solely on discovering truth through
science and logic, God reveals truths that science and logic could never
discover. Truths about our origins, our
history, our present relationship with God, and our destiny.
“But where can wisdom
be found? Where does understanding
dwell? No mortal comprehends its worth;
it cannot be found in the land of the living.
The deep says, “It is not in me”; the sea says, “It is not with
me.” It cannot be bought with the finest
gold, nor can its price be weighed out in silver…
…God understands the
way to it and he alone knows where it dwells, for he views the ends of the
earth and sees everything under the heavens.
When he established the force of the wind and measured out the waters,
when he made a decree for the rain and a path for the thunderstorm, then he
looked at wisdom and appraised it; he confirmed it and tested it. And he said to the human race, “The fear of
the Lord—that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.” Job 28
Where does God reveal that wisdom, the wisdom that goes
beyond science and logic? As humans, we
collect our knowledge in libraries of books and more recently, the internet,
though it is often hard to sort out fact and fiction.
God, too, has a library of books, books that
contain some knowledge, yes, and a whole lot of wisdom. That library is called the Bible, and I encouraged Kenny to
go back and spend some time in it.
Check out my conversation with Kenny HERE
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