This morning at Worship, I talked a bit about some of the newer scientific evidence which seems to point towards a divine creator rather than away from one. These are important discoveries because they align scientific reality with biblical truth. Even though a lot of work remains to be done in the interconnection between these two worlds, the possibility of them making sense to each other is great news because what is real in one world should be real in the other.
For many years, science and faith lived in a philosophical stalemate. The former Harvard evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, called these separate worlds non-overlapping magesteria (how's that for a mouthful?). In this scheme of things science would take care of the physical world and religion the meta-physical world of morality and other spiritual issues. The only problem is that scientists often relegated the magesterium (realm) of religion to second-class citizenship. Science dealt in the "real" world of things that could be tasted and tested. If religious people wanted to reflect on religious things, well and good, but the "real" world was where the real action was.
The other problem is that truth is truth, no matter where it is found. You may not be able to run experiments proving God's presence, but if He really did create the world, then His fingerprints should be all over it. Fortunately those fingerprints have been showing up with greater regularity over the last Century. The state of science at the beginning of the 20th Century was such that God was all but excluded from the equation. Many scientists today, most notably Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, continue to exclude Him. However, discoveries throughout the 20th Century have turned up fingerprints all over the place.
For one thing, astronomical discoveries have pretty much proven that the universe had a definite beginning. This discovery was a shock to even Albert Einstein, who with most other physicists had assumed the eternal existence of the universe. The discovery of a beginning means that there had to be someone to begin things and that someone was marvelously intelligent because he managed to get things going with just the right balance. Over the past 50 years scientists have discovered about 98 constants in the make up of the universe, which if even a fraction of a fraction off, would have resulted in a world hostile to the formation of life.The acknowledgement of these finely-balanced constants is called the fine-tuning of the universe.
In the area of biology, we have come to understand that life as we know it as even more complex than we had ever imagined. The discovery of DNA demonstrated to us the language of life, a straightforward coding responsible for all the complexities of life. Just think, the entire instruction manual for a human being can fit into an ultra-microscopic space. Bill Gates, eat your heart out!
Now, there are people who believe we got to this level of sophistication through random mutations over a long period of time, but that's a little like believing that an explosion in a print shop could give us the Encyclopedia Britannica provided there was enough time to get all the letters straight. For insightful discussions of these issues try visiting Reasons to Believe or The BioLogos Foundation. These two websites give contrasting reflections on God's fingerprints in the physical world, but they both address the issue.
Finally, a note about why this is so important. Understanding God as Creator goes far beyond just trying to prove the Bible is right. If God is Creator, then there are serious implications as to how we live. If He created it all, then he owns it all, which means that it is simply on loan for us to take care of, not for us to do just what we want with it. Generally, in our world today people mostly think their lives are in their own hands, to do with as they please as long as they don't seem to hurt anyone else in the process. But if God really is Creator, His interests must be taken into account.
In another vein, if God went to all the trouble of designing and creating life, He must have a purpose for it. And it is up to us to try to discover and honor that purpose-- in our own lives and in our care for the world. We cannot settle on the notion that we are random acts of a random process. We have a purpose and we owe it to our Creator to live into that purpose.
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