God loves an enquiring mind

In the past few weeks, and in the next few weeks, you won’t be able to avoid mention in the media of Charles Darwin, in particular, and of the apparent conflict between Science on the one hand and faith on the other. In that context, I thought I’d start off by telling you about the Darwin Awards, “honouring those who improve the species, by accidentally removing themselves from it.”

(13 January 2008, Florida) A 37-year-old man was killed trying to cross the Manasota Key drawbridge on his motorcycle. Wearing only swim trunks and sneakers, the man was seen racing at high speed towards the gap as the bridge began to open. Bridge designers had anticipated such lunacy and invented the crossing guard. The closing gates swept him off his Suzuki and over the side of the bridge, into the water and out of the gene pool. By a twist of fate, the motorcycle continued up the ramp and made it across to the other side!

(February 1998) Matthew and his friends were sliding down a Mammoth Mountain ski run on a foam pad at 3am, when he crashed into a lift tower and died. His makeshift sledge of yellow foam had been stolen from the legs of a lift tower on Stump Alley. The cushion is meant to protect skiers who hit the tower, and the tower Matthew ran into was the one from which he had created his sledge. There's a moral in there somewhere.

You’ll be glad to know that we intend to wade into the convoluted territory of science and faith in the next few weeks. Tonight is meant to be a kind of introduction to the series on science and faith. It will be only a kind of introduction, because it will be entirely my own opinion on the topic. So, you have every right to completely ignore absolutely everything I’m about to say. Though don’t you dare sleep through my talk. I find snoring off-putting.

Those who subscribe to the notion of a conflict between science and faith tend to express it in one of two ways. Atheists of a certain kind will argue that all faith is ignorance and stupidity, a wilful blindness to the facts as unearthed by science. Faith breeds prejudice and suspicion, and must lead inevitably to violence. Humanity will only be better off if all faith is eradicated.

Believers of a certain kind will argue that all science is vanity and foolishness, a trifling with the awesomeness and mystery of God and of His creation. Science will inevitably lead to moral decay and licentiousness, and the eventual destruction of humanity. Science is of the devil, a source of pride and human arrogance. One day, scientists will be punished by God for their presumption.

These positions are as misguided as the apparent conflict between science and faith that they proclaim. Of course, that is just my humble opinion, but in this case I’m right and they are wrong.

Let me then take you on a journey through the Bible to explore what it has to say about the topic of science. And, despite what Dawkins or the hard-line creationists may think, the Bible has rather a lot to say about science. True, the word science never once appears in the Bible. But, the term science comes from the Latin “scientia”, which means “knowledge” or “knowing”. And there is a great deal in the Bible about knowledge.

A first mention of knowledge or scientia appears in that most hotly disputed narrative, the story of first man and first woman, colloquially translated by Martin Luther as Adam and Eve. I find that deliciously ironic when considering the amount of ink that has been spilled by both hard-core atheists and creationists on that single story.

You’ll find it chapter 2 of the book of Genesis. Let me read you the passage in question. It nestles rather unobtrusively in the middle of the story of God creating the first woman. In verses 19 to 20 of Chapter 2, it says the following:

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
Genesis 2, 19 – 20

I want to draw your attention particularly to the fact that the first man was asked by God to name the animals and birds. You see, to name something is the beginning of gaining knowledge of it. To give a name to something, an object or an animal, is to make it stand out, to highlight its difference from other things that surround it. That act of giving something a name is the first step towards understanding what that thing is. Naming is the beginning of science.

Let me give you a worldly example. The first words a child learns are words that give the names for things and for people. One of the first things my son could say was aeroplane. Words that describe actions or emotions come much later. The same applies to adults. We call things UFOs, unidentified flying objects, even though we have no idea what they are. But giving them a name makes us feel better about them.

Thus, the first thing the first man does, the very first human action that is recorded in Genesis, is the very scientific action of classifying all the animals and birds into distinct groups by giving them each their own name. Much of science, including the kind of science that investigates the Big Bang, is really just a more sophisticated and mathematical version of the same process.

That means that God started the whole process of scientific discovery. After all, he brings all the animals to first man to see what he’ll name them. Not because God couldn’t have done it himself, but because God wanted first man to gain knowledge about them.

Of course, that is merely the beginning of God’s approval of knowledge and of inquiring minds. Much later, a man called Solomon becomes king of Israel. And Solomon makes the following interesting request of God. He asks:

“Give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours?"
2 Chronicles 1: 10

God’s response is telling. He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, don’t bother your pretty little head with all that knowledge stuff. All you need to know is to obey my every command’. He doesn’t even say, ‘You know what, Solomon, it’s great you want to understand stuff and have knowledge and all that, but, you know, it’s all much too complex for you, really. My ways are not your ways and all that. Just leave the understanding and knowing to me and get on with obeying my commands’.
No.

God says the following instead:

God said to Solomon, "Since this is your heart's desire and you have not asked for wealth, riches or honour, nor for the death of your enemies, and since you have not asked for a long life but for wisdom and knowledge to govern my people over whom I have made you king, therefore wisdom and knowledge will be given you. And I will also give you wealth, riches and honour, such as no king who was before you ever had and none after you will have."
2 Chronicles 1: 11 – 12

Not only does God give Solomon knowledge and wisdom, he is so impressed with Solomon for asking for it that he rewards him with riches and honour beyond anything any other king of Israel ever achieved.

Ah, but Erik, some of you may object, surely the kind of wisdom and knowledge that Solomon speaks about here is knowledge of God and of his law, not knowledge of the world, right? It’s good theological and religious knowledge, not dodgy scientific knowledge of quarks and gluons and whatnot.

If you’re really quick on your feet, you could even point out that in the book of Proverbs, Solomon seems to say exactly that, when he points out the following:

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.
Proverbs 1: 7

I have two responses for you.

First, Solomon quite specifically says that the beginning of knowledge is fear of the Lord. That is where knowledge starts out. That is not where knowledge ends.

Second, the kind of knowledge that Solomon asked for, and that God rewarded him for, was not in the first instance religious or theological. He asked for knowledge to govern the people, in the right way. Only once Solomon has gained that knowledge, practical political and social knowledge about governing a kingdom, does he become aware of the fact that behind it lies a deeper form of knowledge, the fear of the Lord.

Third, Solomon was a botanist, biologist, anthropologist and architect.

Now, the fear of the Lord that Solomon speaks of here is not the kind of fear that we usually understand, the quaking in our boots in terror. It means instead to accept God’s ultimate power and authority over everything, ourselves as much as the world that surround us. I spoke about this last year, when I pointed out that all human knowledge finds its meaning and its basis in the truth that the world and everything in it belongs to God.

Is there a difference then between faith and science? Yes, there is, one that can also be described in terms of a difference between knowledge and wisdom, defined precisely by the fear of God properly understood. Let me explain.
In simple terms, science without faith describes how the world that surrounds us came about. It identifies causes, it works out how things work and how they might have ended up in the shape they are in. In other words, science tends to look backwards. A scientist sees something, an object or an event, and tries to find out how it came to be.

To use an image, a scientist will see a kettle boil and will try to understand what happened to the water in the kettle in order to make it boil. The more it discovers, by the way, the more incredible and astonishing the fact of our existence becomes. It is just such a staggeringly unlikely thing that there should be anything at all, never mind creatures like us.

Now, the kettle doesn’t just boil because it is heated up by electricity. It boils because a human being wants a cup of tea that is hot. But that cup of tea is in the future, it isn’t here yet.

So, there is not just a cause for the things we see around us, something that happened in the past and that made things appear. There is also a purpose to these things. They exist because they are intended to bring about other things in the future that don’t exist yet and that we can’t yet see. And that future, that purpose, is the territory of faith. That purpose, if it exists at all, is anchored in God. It can’t be seen yet in the physical world that surrounds us, but it will eventually break into that reality and reveal itself.

Let me summarise how faith differs from science, in my view. Science tends to look at what is and what happened in the past to make things the way they are now. Science deals with what I would call knowledge. Faith looks ahead at what will be or may be, and believes that there is a purpose that will eventually be accomplished. Faith has to do with what I call wisdom. Wisdom is to seek to understand the purpose of existence, the purpose of us being here at all.

In that way, science and faith are actually complimentary. If we want to understand the world properly, we need both. We need to understand what happened before that brings about the world that surrounds us now, but we also need to look ahead, to seek to understand what the purpose might be of our existence, to understand where we should go, rather than where we might go.

To end off, let me leave you with a warning taken from another book written by Solomon, also collected in the Bible, a book called Ecclesiastes. In it, he says the following:

I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. …
I thought to myself, "Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge." Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes 1: 12 – 18

Now, this is the wisest man of his time speaking here, a man so wise that his fame travelled far beyond his kingdom. And he argues that all wisdom in the end is a chasing after the wind. I don’t think that Solomon meant to say that everything is meaningless. He did mean to say that our knowledge and wisdom really doesn’t add up to all that much.

On the one hand, we may burn with the passion to know more, to understand better, to pierce the secrets of the universe. But, in the end, those secrets will always surpass us. Our knowledge will remain, for our lives at least, infinitely smaller than the universe that we live in.

On the other, whatever knowledge we may amass in our lives means very little. Not because it isn’t worth knowing, but because what we seek is not an answer but a relationship. You see, the bit about first naming the animals is wedged in-between God saying, “It is not good for man to be alone” and then discovering that there was no suitable companion for first man amongst the animals he named.

Why are the animals unsuitable as companions? Well, they are not equals. In the moment that first man names them, they become his inferiors, they become objects that he knows about.

By contrast, when first woman appears on the scene, first man has no name for her. That is because she is his equal – she is totally different, but his equal. She can answer him. She will remain, always, just that little bit mysterious to him.
Together, first man and first woman then discover a little of that much greater and eternal mystery that is God, who we can relate to, but never fully understand. It is only in relationship with someone, a suitable companion who is our equal, and the eternal mystery that is God, that fulfilment becomes possible.