In his
wonderful book, Your God is Too Small, J.B. Phillips imagines an
occasion (which I cannot perfectly reconstruct) where a teacher asks his
classroom of teens whether or not God understands nuclear physics. After
the students retorted with a quick “no!” they suddenly laughed at their answer
in the recognition that if God exists at all He must understand literally
everything.
There are
a host of indicators that the God of the Bible also encourages our understanding
of the things that He has made. I have repeatedly referred to Romans
1:18-20 as a pointer to the importance God places on our honest and careful
exploration of the natural order. Contrary to popular opinion, nowhere in
all of Scripture are people ever commanded to diminish nature in favor of
belief in God. We are instead called to affirm God’s transcendent
(meaning to stand outside and above) superintendence over and above nature.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:21 (“Test all things”) the Apostle Paul lays foundation
for the legitimacy and importance of the scientific method in the exploration
of our world. It is widely acknowledged that it was a specifically Christian world
view that provided impetus for the disciplined (as opposed to hit-and-miss)
exploration of the natural order that we now call the scientific enterprise.
For further study on these matters consider University of Washington Sociology
Professor, Rodney Stark’s book, For
the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts,
and the End of Slavery. (Princeton, 2003), ch.2.
Clearly
God fully understands every single aspect of His creation (Psalm 19:1f).
In my previous blog I highlighted the truth that His Word found in the Holy
Bible anticipated two profound realities of Big Bang cosmology by over
twenty-five centuries, including firstly the absolute beginning of the universe
out of nothing, and secondly, the fact that the universe is continuously
expanding ever since that beginning.
It is also
immediately clear, however, that when we turn to the first chapters of the
“Book of Genesis,” we are not reading a scientific textbook. Mathematical
formulas are nowhere to be found. Nothing anywhere reads like “Scientific
American” magazine. The modes of expression in the first chapters of
Genesis in particular are of a phenomenal
nature (e.g. “the sun rises in the east”), as opposed to being analytical (e.g. “the earth rotates
around the sun”) in nature. For these reasons critics habitually dismiss
as worthless the text of Genesis for being primitive, pre-scientific mythology.
In an upcoming blog I will make the case that, to the contrary, it was the Book
of Genesis and not science that first repudiated mythology by replacing the
so-called gods of nature with, I repeat, the Transcendent, Almighty, and
Omniscient God.
To be continued...
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