Sci Fi

Can we believe in Science and God? Of course we can! People do it every day, scientists and theologians alike. But many don't. Take Sam Harris, for example. I showed the last 2:30 of a video of him talking about religion in worship today. Here's what came next in the message:



Harris is arguing against what’s called “the God of the gaps”. Historically, when we haven’t understood how something could happen we say God must have done it. Now science is filling in the gaps. We didn’t understand how life could emerge from nonlife, so we said God did it. We didn’t understand how the universe could be created from nothing, so we said God did it. Now we know better, so Harris says we don’t need God.


Robert Green Ingersoll agreed. In a book titled Orthodoxy, Ingersoll said, “This century will be called Darwin’s century. He was one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of
Charles Darwin on the one hand and the name of every theologian who ever lived on the other, and from that name has come more light to the world than from all of those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity.”

Like Harris, Ingersoll is saying that science will fill all the gaps in our knowledge and we will gradually see that we have no need for God. But Ingersoll said it first. His book predicting the end of faith was published in 1880. I still know some orthodox Christians who are pretty good thinkers. And some pretty good thinkers who aren’t entirely orthodox, but who we would all
consider to be Christians. One of those good thinkers was C.S. Lewis. Lewis was born ten years after Orthodoxy was published. He was an atheist for many years before coming to faith. After
converting, he became an impressive defender of Christianity and a pretty decent philosopher. One of the important lessons he left us is the idea of “chronological snobbery.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the fact that we know more now than we used to doesn’t mean we are always right today. After all, today is tomorrow’s yesterday. If we were wrong then, we can be wrong now...


Religion only loses the argument to science when we pit them against each other. The purpose
of God and faith is not to explain the gaps in knowledge. It was a mistake to ever postulate a “God of the gaps.” Faith in God gives us purpose and meaning and right and wrong – things that are entirely different than what science exists to do.

I believe in the Bible. I believe Jesus when he says in John 8:32 that the truth will set you
free. I believe that is most important when speaking of spiritual truths, but I believe it in regard to all truth. As people of faith we don’t have to be afraid of truth no matter what form it takes.
Today, physics’ greatest challenge is to take every force and every particle that exists and
combine then into what’s called a “theory of everything.” One of the leading candidates for that theory of everything is called string theory. It says that underneath every particle and force are infinitesimally small strings that vibrate in different ways forming everything we know. In it’s latest versions, string theory says the universe has 11 or even 12 dimensions of space and time.
Michio Kaku, one of the pioneers in the field, describes the particles around us as notes played on the strings, physics as the laws of harmony that you can write on the strings, chemistry as the melody, and the universe around us as the symphony of vibrating strings. We and everything around us are, in a sense, cosmic music.

It is an elegant, beautiful theory. But in the end, who cares? What difference does it make? We
may have a theory of everything, but why does anything matter? Music is beautiful only in the eye of the composer and the beholder. Without a composer, music is never written. Without a beholder, music doesn’t matter. If physics and chemistry or the harmony and melody that the notes of matter are written on, if creation itself is a great symphony, then God is the composer, the one who makes the music possible. Our worship of God is our giving thanks to the one who makes the music possible and the life of a saint is a virtuoso performance of the notes we’ve been given to play. May we enjoy the music with each day that God gives us.