A gracEmail subscriber bemoans the fact that many scientists today are hostile to biblical faith, and that many Christians concede too much to science.
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The English word “science” comes from the Latin word meaning “to know.” Since empirical knowledge comes through the senses, the proper task of science is to observe repeatable natural phenomena and to draw inductive conclusions concerning the processes observed. Some, in the name of science, have gone far beyond that to make pronouncements concerning ultimate origins which no human being observed. That is not science at all. Rather than learning from what it observes, this philosophy looks for what it assumes. It does not report what is repeatable and demonstrable. It constructs a faith and a world-view concerning unique events and processes unobserved by any human eye.
We believers understand that God created all that exists (Gen. 1:1; Heb. 11:3), that the physical universe once was formless and empty (Gen. 1:2), and that God, by the power of his word, proceeded progressively to “form” it (separate light from darkness, separate waters above and below the firmament, separate dry land from sea) and then to “fill” what he had “formed” — sun, moon and stars in the heavens; birds in the sky; fish in the sea; plants, animals and people on the dry land (Gen. 1:3ff). In Old Testament times, this was seen as nothing less than the Creator’s triumph over Tiamat (the Hebrew word translated “deep” in Genesis 1:2 is a form of this name), the mythological goddess of Chaos.
The Bible tells us that physical matter did not occur accidentally or by random chance but that it was created by God. God also made human beings, in his own image, so that our origin was both purposeful and personal. The fact that you were formed over a period of nine months from a zygote too small to see does not diminish the fact that you are God’s special creation. The Bible does not attempt to describe in physical terms the processes by which God formed Adam from dust, or Eve from Adam’s rib.
Let us say all that the Bible says on this subject or any other — without compromise and with conviction. But when we have said all that God clearly reveals, let us not put additional words in his mouth. Today, as in the time of Moses, there remain many “secret things” which as yet belong only to God himself (Deut. 29:29).