A Note on God and Science

To many, God and science are like oil and water. They just don’t mix. To many atheist or agnostic scientists, religion has nothing to offer to the explanation of cosmology. They see religious information as mere stories and myths. The answers, they believe, lie in science. I believe they both have their place.

If you drew a big circle on a whiteboard, you could label it “truth” and it would contain all truth, all knowledge. You could then draw a smaller circle inside it and label it “knowable truth.” That is, truth that can be discovered by human effort. How big this circle would be in relation to the larger circle is unknowable. The “truth” circle is known by God. The “knowable truth” circle contains all those things God has made available to man to know. That is where science comes in. Science is a tool to explore the “knowable truth” circle. Its use is limited to that circle. What lies beyond that circle is supernatural to us and by definition outside the purview of science. A strict scientist cannot consider anything supernatural.

It’s like a blind man who discovers the world through touch, taste, and sound. He can feel things, smell them, and taste them.  If presented an elephant he would run his hands over it’s skin and feel the size and texture. As he continued to explore, he would discover legs, a trunk, ears, etc. His nose would also pickup the scent of the elephant. He could in this manner learn much about the elephant but without vision he could never know its color and what that elephant “looked” like in his mind, may not be a truly accurate representation of the elephant. He would need sight, in addition to his other senses, to truly know the elephant. Now imagine a world where everyone was born blind. Everything they learned came through the use of those non-visual senses. Overtime they might consider their way of exploration as science and come to believe that over time they could discover all there is to know this way. To someone who had sight, we would recognize that while their methods could indeed teach them much, they could not know everything. If suddenly given sight, they would realize they had only known part of the truth.

God has revealed some “unknowable” things to us through revelation in the Bible. These are things we could never have discovered on our own. When science tries to discover the origins of the universe, it runs into the limit of the knowable. In trying to discover the ultimate origin of the universe, they keep hitting their heads into a brick wall. They are looking for answers they will never find. Their theories are increasingly strained and still leave an unanswerable question. Namely, how did our universe come from nothing? Some have tried to dodge this question by saying time did not exist until the universe came into being thus there is no “before.” Therefore, they reason, it is pointless to consider anything “before” they universe existed. They think this eliminates the search for an answer to where did the universe come from.

No matter how you slice it, in the end, something had to be self-existent and outside of time and space. I believe that something is God. In saying that, I don’t mean “god” as in a higher power or an undefined force. I mean the God of the Bible. The God who revealed Himself in the person of Jesus Christ. The God who transcends both time and space and that which lies outside of it. Science might postulate that matter was somehow self-existent and possessed inherent properties that we call the laws of physics. I think if scientists could look outside our circle, they would find God looking back. Fortunately, we don’t have to see outside the circle to know God. He occupies all of both circles and has made Himself known to us.