Monday, July 2, 2007

Day Four and Faith

Genesis 1:14-19 (ESV)
And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, [15] and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth." And it was so. [16] And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. [17] And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, [18] to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. [19] And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.


Day four gives us a very interesting phenomenon, one that current scientific explanations concerning life would never give credence to. What we are given through revelation is the creation of the sun and moon and stars after He has created plant life. In other words, we have plants created and growing on the third day without the benefit of sunlight! This is an amazing thing, one which biologists would scoff at. If you have a basic knowledge of life science, you should know that, at least with green plants, sunlight is necessary for them to grow, flower and produce seed and fruit. As far as we know, it has always been that way.

However, what we need to understand is the meaning of that little phrase, "as far as we know." It means that we only know anything at all up to a certain point. Scientific knowledge is always limited knowledge, and one of the hallmarks of science is that what we know is always open to revision. Time and time again we have seen this to be true in any number of ways, and any truly honest scientist will admit this as a fact. In the case of the origins of the universe, we reach our limit of scientific knowledge far quicker than most scientists in this area would admit. That doesn't mean that there are not a lot of theories running around, some masquerading as facts, the most prominent among them being Darwinism. It is in these areas where science actually begins to engage in something that religion is more famous for, as exercise in faith.

The truth is this: we all have to engage in exercising faith no matter what we believe to be true. That is true of the most rigorous scientific experimentation, as well as interpreting the Bible. We have to have a basic level of faith that certain things are true. We have to believe that what we are seeing and observing in an experiment is true. We have to trust that the instruments we use are accurate and that what they are recording is actually happening. We have to have faith that past experiments have not been tainted by human error.

This is not to say that our knowledge of how plants grow and live is incorrect. It is to say that this really tells us nothing about how plants came into being in the first place! Just the same is true about origins in general. Most scientific interpretations of how the universe originated rely on present-day observations to interpret what happened in the very remote past. We need to understand this is a faith statement, because no human being was there to observe and record the events of the origin of the universe.

In the same way, we must accept by faith that what God reveals is true. After all, He was there! He was the One creating and sustaining in the order he tells us in the Scripture. The obvious question one might have is, "How do we know that this writing in the Bible, or even just the book of Genesis, is really from God?" I won't go into that in detail yet. For now, I will ask that you have faith [;). We can be far more sure than most people know that God did reveal this to us, and thus we can trust the truth of these words.

Your Joyfully Loquacious Believer,
LEE