Scientific Investigation for Truth – Part Two

Nehemiah 9:5-6 “May your glorious name be praised! May it be exalted above all blessing and praise! You alone are the Lord. You made the skies and the heavens and all the stars. You made the earth and the seas and everything in them. You preserve them all, and the angels of heaven worship you.”

In the last post, we saw that Psalm 19:1-2 stated, “the heavens declared the glory of God, the shies proclaim the work of His hand.” American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, and atheistic science popularizer Carl Sagan wrote: “Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws”. Note the substitution from “God of nature” to “Nature is god”. 

Deuteronomy 32:6 “Is this the way you repay the Lord, you foolish and senseless people? Isn’t He your Father who created you? Has He not made you and established you?”

Focus on the Family’s “Truth Project” host, Dr. Del Tackett declares that Sagan was right in saying that “gazing at the cosmos stirs us”. A mountain sky at night stirs us to awesome marvel at what a mighty Creator God we serve. A deep wonder of the grandeur that God has made; not a random, chaotic universe that happened by chance, but of physical laws and order within amazing complexity and design. Is God’s handiwork difficult to see? Is it hidden or obscured somehow? No, it has been made plain to us. Man has a tendency to look at that which is made plain and ignore it. We have to go out of our way to deny the Creator of creation.

Psalm 104:24 “How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures."

Dr. Tackett asks: “Where did the cosmos come from?” If the cosmos has always existed (without a beginning and eternal), based on the second law of thermodynamics, all the energy would have run out and it should be dead. Observations do not fit. If the cosmos has a beginning, what existed before it” Where did the matter which makes up the cosmos com from? Without God, in the beginning was “nothing.” The metaphysical questions are: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is anything in motion rather than everything still? Why is there order rather than chaos? Why is there life rather than deadness? Everything points back to a beginning. There is a cosmological constant that reveals the glory of God as transcendent Creator. Godless philosophy takes great faith. When you look “inside the box” at everything and it’s complexity, godless evolution cannot be answered … not even with time (millions of years). Sagan stated: “We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads, but to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.” The problem is, if the truth leads to a transcendent Creator God, then they reject, deny and ignore Him.

Jeremiah 32:17 “O Sovereign Lord! You made the heavens and earth by your strong hand and powerful arm. Nothing is too hard for you!”

Science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experimentation. Science and philosophy are therefore closely linked because both are attempting to develop truth claims about reality. But secular science today has moved back into a philosophical realm from inside the box … beginning with the presumption “God is not”. German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) stated, “The chief aim of all investigation of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God.”  Dr. Stephen Meyer explains that “the earliest scientists, whether Newton, Boyle Kepler, Galileo or other scientists were very strongly committed to the idea of the existence of God and to Christianity in many cases. They were, moreover, convinced the universe bore evidence of design and it was therefore intelligible to the human intellect. In fact, the idea of design was one of the inspirations of the scientific revolution because of the conviction that we could study nature and make sense of it derived from the idea that it was the product of a rational intellect and if a rational intellect has created nature, had given it it’s so called laws, then it becomes possible for us to make sense of the order.” If all that is “in the box” is random, then there is no reason to study it for “patterns.” How can unguided random chance produce “information”? Let’s look at the reality of the facts more on the next post.

“Great is God our Lord, great is His power and there is no end to His wisdom. Praise Him you heavens, glorify Him, sun and moon and you planets. For out of Him and through Him, and in Him are all things..... We know, oh, so little. To Him be the praise, the honor and the glory from eternity to eternity.” - Johannes Kepler

In Christ, Brian