The debate between the proponents of a purely natural approach to science and the advocates of a super-natural approach to faith continues in our day, and is taking on a new form of aggressiveness by secular atheists, who insist that religion of all kinds is an ancient delusion of superstitious minds, now rendered obsolete by the increasing scope of scientific knowledge.
Many in the scientific community have concluded that mankind's advancements in knowledge of the intricacies of the universe, from the galactic level down to the sub-atomic level, have made a religious explanation of reality unnecessary and antiquated. Religious answers, they contend, were for unenlightened days when men needed a way to explain the mysteries of their world; why the wind blows, the sun rises and falls, the seasons come and go. As if some caveman once uttered around a prehistoric campfire, "Maybe there's a great Power making this fire happen!" And it just went from there.
This whole view of the origins of religious belief appears to rest on the assumption that "God" is a product of the human mind's desire to understand our world; fine for a time, but now we know better. But what if God is really there, and not just a figment of our collective imaginations? What if the reason our universe is so orderly and predictable that we can study it is that God made it that way, rather than because it evolved by mere chance and time? And how would such a thought of God happen in the mind of a creature that by the dumbest of luck evolved from the ooze? We have no evidence that such "delusions" are taking place in any other life forms on our planet, do we?
If God is there, would we expect to know about Him without His first making Himself known to His creatures? And, if He was to do that, there would have to be at least one type of creature capable of receiving His communication; creatures with a real mind, not just instinct and the capacity to remember stimuli. And as for interpreting the evidence of non-verbal clues to His existence, the Bible tells us that we have the ability to deduce God's existence from the universe He made. And, with such ability to interpret the creation, men are said to be "without excuse" for their failure to interpret the evidence rightly.
So, if ancient men realized a creation must have a Creator, it's what would be expected. After all, physicists have never seen subatomic particles, and yet they deduce their presence from experimental observations of that invisible world. It is therefore not wrong to think that we are able to deduce God's "invisible attributes" from His creation. Certainly we cannot take God into a laboratory, nor should we expect to be able to observe Him by natural senses, but if God is really there, why would anyone expect His presence to be susceptible to discovery by merely natural methods? Would He not have to take the first step toward us?
A man skeptical of the claims of religion vs. scientific discovery ended an article in which he attempted to defend his proposition that science has made God obsolete. Yet he did so in a way that, contrary to his intentions, actually supports the point I am making, i.e., that we should not expect to think up the idea of God unless He actually is there and has first communicated to us. Says Michael Shermer, "Science traffics in the natural, not the supernatural. The only God that science could discover would be a natural being, an entity that exists in space and time and is constrained by the laws of nature. A supernatural God would be so wholly Other that no science could know Him." No science, that is, except the divinely enabled knowledge that comes by faith in what God, who is indeed there, has revealed.
No comments:
Post a Comment