In the beginning (Genesis 1:1a) - Science and Faith

Without question, the Bible is the most remarkable book in the world.  It has outsold,  and continues to outsell every other book in existence. It's also the most controversial, and no more so than in the so called clash between Science and faith.  I was saying last day we have not arrived in terms of how to understand and interpret it. On the other hand, because of the god like reverence in which some regard science, I need to say that science has not arrived either.

The church is often cited as being the least progressive when it comes to accepting the results of science.  But the book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn,  chronicles that is not just the church that's resistant to change, but humanity in general,  and the scientific community in particular. Specifically,  favourite and widely accepted scientific theories resist change, and the debates are not always honest. The ancient Greeks hide the fact that the square root of two is not a rational number of the form p/q!  It contradicted the then current “theory of everything!”

A more recent Scientific revolution that needed to take place concerns whether the universe had a beginning. A hundred years ago the “steady state theory” was widely accepted. It postulated that the universe had always existed, that there was no beginning and so no need of a creator. The overthrow of this theory was widely resisted by the scientific community, including by Einstein, even thought the theory of relativity predicted the opposite. It was the redshift in the wavelength of light, revealed by the Hubble telescope,  that finally convinced him in the sixties.

The red shift in light is similar to the Doppler effect in sound,  when it’s source is moving away from you. This is experienced as the siren change in pitch, as an ambulance moves past you. The red shift allowed scientists to deduce that the universe is expanding. It ultimately lead to the theory of the big bang.  But please note that theory,  if true - not saying it’s not,  is only a description of what they think happened, not an explanation.

Much of modern science essentially  throws out the possibility that the universe had an external cause.  Naturalism, for example,  asserts that eventually we will be able to explain everything by natural means.  Most of the time this makes perfect sense.  However, if the universe had a beginning, something  must have cause it.  And rejection of a cause external to it,  and separate from it,  boils down to  “In the beginning, nothing created everything that is out of nothing.”  At this point naturalism is nothing but a pure unsubstantiated and unbelievable statement of faith,  though this is vehemently denied.

Father, we're all biased, and we all operate out of our own understanding of reality, an understanding that is shaped by a multitude of things. Lord if You are really there, and I believe Your are, it is something of an inconvenient truth.  We seem to have this ability to rationalize what we don't want to believe. In other words we “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1:18).  But we don't know what we don't know,  and the ratio of what we know to that of what can be known is of the order of infinity! But we do need to know we have not believed cunningly devised fables. Thank You again Lord for Your promised that we will find You when we search with all of our hearts (Jeremiah 29:13), in Jesus Name Amen