SCIENCE AND THE CASE FOR GOD (PART 2)

(Please scroll down to first read part 1 on this post)

I do not usually go online to see the reader comments about articles in the newspaper (see previous post), but I did for this one. The article may have set some sort of record for responses. There were well over four thousand replies from readers, both favorable and critical of the author’s point of view.

I did not read so many of the comments, but it was interesting to get the gist of what the readers were thinking. I even wrote my own response, something I almost never do. But I did so because I felt that I had to respond to a sentiment of several readers who expressed an opinion concerning what they saw as scientific bias. They said that having the belief that there is a God is contrary to the scientific pursuit of knowledge.

In the words of one of the readers, belief in God “Slams the door shut on real (scientific) exploration because the conclusion precedes the research and actual evidence.”

This is what many people believe. They think that if someone believes in a Creator God, it must mean that they are not interested in finding out about the origins of life and of creation. After all, these people think, if one believes that all was created by God, there is no real reason to understand how it all came about.

I had to disagree. In my way of thinking, the fact that there is a designer in no way inhibits our desire to know and to understand the origins of life. Quite the contrary, I should think that it would increase our desire to know

If we understand that there is a grand design and plan to the universe, and that all of this did not just come about by random chance, then we understand that it is possible to know. The more we come to understand the design, the more we will understand the workings of the design. And of course, the more we will come to know the Designer.

In addition, this desire to know and to discover is the essence of the human spirit. We see it in almost every walk of life. The exploration of the world itself would have been impossible without this desire. Without it, it would have been too foolhardy, too reckless and too difficult to leave the safe shores of a continent to set out on flimsy boats to search the seemingly limitless expanse of ocean.

And if one believes that there is a design and a reason to it all, this belief does not decrease that desire to know, but rather only increases it. We daily try to solve puzzles and mysteries, along with a host of other exercises just because we are endowed with this quest for knowledge to know the design.

For instance, we do not do crossword puzzles believing that

they are merely random white squares placed in an arbitrary fashion, into which we try to put some letters with the hopes that, in the end, it will all make sense.

On the contrary, we try to figure out what should go in the squares precisely because there is a design and a designer to the puzzle. We use the clues given to us to try and solve the mystery.

That, I think, is the true human spirit. The true human spirit is the desire to know the design of our world and of our universe. Knowing that there is a design and a designer makes it possible for us to believe that we can begin to unravel the mystery. They are not just a series of senseless and random occurrences, but steps put in place by a Designer, a Creator.

In my way of thinking, the true scientific quest will not lead us away from God. Rather, the more we come to understand our universe, past and present, the more it should lead us to God.