Reasons for the Bible: Science Works
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I love science. I always have. I was the kid who checked out science textbooks from the library because I had already read through the one from class. That kid grew up into a pastor who believes the Bible is true. God created the earth in six days and created humans just as they are now (though without sin). Moreover, I think those views are 100 percent compatible.
But so did the fathers of science. Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and Sir Isaac Newton all operated from a Christian worldview. They understood the world to be created by God and to operate in a rational and predictable way. A rational mind created a rational world where we can use our own rational minds to understand.
That’s exactly why science works. If the world is the result of random chance, we should expect the world to operate by random chance. If the world is the result of an intelligent, rational mind, we can expect the world to operate in an intelligent rational way.
That’s what makes the Higgs boson so remarkable. The Standard Model for particle physics was first theorized in 1967. The work of theoretical physicists predicted how the fabric of the entire universe operated in one large, complicated formula. Over the next decades, every part of their theory was confirmed except the Higgs boson, which would give mass to matter. In the summer of 2013, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, accumulated enough evidence to accept the existence of the Higgs boson, affirming the Standard Mode.
The Standard Model is elegant, complicated and nuanced. To live in a universe so precisely balanced seems to require a rational creator. To live in a universe whose workings required thousands of years of work from humanity’s smartest members seems to require an unfathomably intelligent creator.
Science is humanity’s never-ending quest to understand what God has created. That’s why I love science.
It doesn’t help that some of humanity’s less intelligent members have attempted to thwart the efforts of our best and brightest. Several of the fathers of modern science suffered persecution from the church — people and organizations who claimed to speak for God. In reality, they were more interested in their own power. Not only did they hate science, but they also failed to read the Bible properly, honestly, or at all.
The Bible reveals that the earth is suspended in space over nothing (Job 26:7). It understands each star as unique in composition and brilliance (1 Corinthians 15:41). The Bible understands the bottom of the ocean as containing trenches, mountains and springs (2 Samuel 22:16; Jonah 2:6; Job 38:16; Genesis 7:11). The Bible predicts the discovery of the Big Bang Theory in Genesis 1:3-5 and 14-19. Just like the much rejected creation account claims, modern science accepts that light existed before stars. Before germs were understood, the Bible prescribed washing with running water rather than standing water (Leviticus 15:13). The Bible even seems to understand the purpose of blood when it says, “The life of a creature is in the blood” (Leviticus 17:11).
There is really only instance the Bible clearly and explicitly contradicts what we understand as science in the modern era in a way that is not open to any kind of interpretation: the origin of the universe and of humans. Recently, the scientific community has adopted the consensus that the universe began spontaneously and that humans evolved by happenstance as a marvelous accident. The reason for this divergence, however, has less to do with science and more to do with ideology. At some point, humanity stopped looking at science as a way to worship God with our minds and to know him better. Instead, we began to do science to escape God and to explain the universe without him.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a leading advocate for science in popular culture, in his reboot of “Cosmos,” an educational TV series about science first produced by Carl Sagan, Tyson paints science as being repeatedly stifled by dependence on God rather than as God being the very reason science works. He claims the aphorism, “Only God knows” has been an excuse not to pursue scientific answers rather than an observation of fact. However, I say that it is simply acknowledging what is true, God’s knowledge exceeds our own. This fact should drive us to continue to learn, as it did for generations of scientists. When the pursuit science becomes an attempt to expel God rather than exalt him, of course it will diverge from what the Bible teaches.
At the end of the day, the primary goal of the Bible is not to reveal natural truth, but supernatural truth. We do not need help understanding the natural world the same way we are completely dependent upon God for understanding the supernatural world. But the Bible does not contradict natural truth, either. In many ways, the Bible preceded science in revealing natural truth.
Jesus once asked Nicodemus, “I have spoken to you of earthly things and you do not believe; how then will you believe if I speak of heavenly things?” (John 3:12). If we can trust what the Bible says about natural things, we should both trust it for supernatural things and seek all the more earnestly to understand the natural world God has created because, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world” (Psalm 19:1-4).