Has Science Buried God?
The implications of this question are immense to us all. Society, if it is to exist without anarchy, depends on individuals behaving with integrity. We teach our children to do what is right on the instinctive basis that there is ultimately a right and wrong. Society’s laws are based on the concept of ‘natural law’, which again assumes there is a right and wrong. Science works on the premise that there are scientific laws that are valid and that our world is not random.
Jeremy Rifkin, who has rejected a personal, moral, creator God, and wants to replace him with an impersonal, amoral science, wrote the following statement about our culture:
“This is evolution. We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behaviour conform to a set of pre-existing cosmic rules. It is our creation now. We make the rules. We establish the parameters of reality. We create the world and because we do, we no longer have to justify our behaviour. We are now the architects of the universe. We are responsible, nothing outside ourselves. We are the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever.”
With such thinking there is no absolute authority and we are left with the problem, “Who can we trust to make the rules?” When our children say to us, “Why should I be honest and kind, why shouldn’t I be selfish, lie and steal?” what should we say? There is no longer a real answer. Without God there can be no absolute morality, no-one else can give us this.
The atheist William Provine wrote in ‘The Scientist’:
“No moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life.”
Yet science itself points to the existence of a God who is intimately involved with his creation. That we cannot see him or weigh him does not mean that he doesn’t exist, just that he is outside our scientific methods of investigation, unless of course he chose to be definable in the form of Jesus.
Much that is real cannot be defined and this includes love, beauty, courage and integrity and truth. We value ‘information’- our society thrives on it - but this cannot be weighed. If you take some floppy discs and wipe off all the information, their weight will remain the same. You can only see the effects of information.
We can clearly see the marks of a creator in our world even though we cannot now see the God who made it. In biological systems information is usually carried by DNA which itself is remarkable. If a 2 mm pinhead were made of DNA it could accommodate all the information contained in a pile of books 500 times higher that the distance to the moon. It is by far the highest density of information known. All information requires an intelligent sender. Information cannot originate in random statistical processes. There is no point having information unless there is also an effective material for storage and an efficient system for interpretation and action. All biological systems have all of these. Where else could these have come from if not from a designer God?
At a recent public lecture in Letchworth Dr John Lennox MA PhD DSc of Green College Oxford argued that to recognise God as our creator, however or whenever creation occurred, is fundamental to how we view the purpose of our lives. The big question is whether God has also revealed to us what this purpose is? There is so much evidence that Jesus is the answer to our needs so why don’t most people want to find the answers to life?
A professor was asked by a student, “What is the point of life?” He replied, “The point of life is to discover the point of life and then to make that the point of your life.”
BVP
