by: Vern Sheridan Poythress
All scientists—including agnostics and atheists—believe in God. They have to in order to do their work. It seems outrageous to include the agnostics and atheists. But by their actions people sometimes show that in a sense they believe in things that they profess not to believe. Bakht, a Vedantic Hindu philosopher, may say that the world is an illusion. But he does not casually walk into the street in front of an oncoming bus. Sue, a radical relativist, may say that there is no truth. But she travels calmly at 30,000 feet on a plane whose safe
flight depends on the unchangeable truths of aerodynamics and structural mechanics.
The situation looks different if we refuse to confine God to “the gaps.” According to the Bible, he is involved in those areas where science does best, namely areas involving regular and predictable events, areas involving repeating patterns and sometimes exact mathematical descriptions. In Gen 8:22 God promises,
While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease. (ESV)4
This general promise concerning earthly regularities is supplemented by many particular examples:
You make darkness, and it is night,
when all the beasts of the forest creep about. (Ps 104:20)
You cause the grass to grow for the livestock
and plants for man to cultivate,
that he may bring forth food from the earth. (Ps 104:14)
He sends out his command to the earth;
his word runs swiftly.
He gives snow like wool;
he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.
He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs;
who can stand before his cold?
He sends out his word, and melts them;
he makes his wind blow and the waters flow. (Ps 147:15-18)
The regularities that scientists describe are the regularities of God’s own commitments and his actions. By his word to Noah, he commits himself to govern the seasons. By his word he governs snow, frost, and hail. Scientists describe the regularities in God’s word governing the world. So-called natural law is really the law of God or word of God, imperfectly and approximately described by human investigators.
Now, the work of science depends constantly on the fact that there are regularities in the world. Without the regularities, there would ultimately be nothing to study. Scientists depend not only on regularities with which they are already familiar, such as the regular behavior of measuring apparatus, but also on the postulate that still more regularities are to be found in the areas that they will investigate. Scientists must maintain hope of finding further regularities, or they would give up their newest explorations.
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