God: Omnipotent Creator and Author of Cosmic Order

I am a geologist by training. I have a PhD in geoscience and over 40 years of experience looking at sedimentary rocks (siliciclastics, not carbonates!) all over the world. I suppose that makes me a scientist. I am not a physicist (that is, a real scientist), a chemist, a biologist, an astronomer, or a cosmologist. I am also a Christian who knows Jehovah (Yahweh, God) as an intimate, personal, and powerful presence in my life; who moves, works, and speaks to  me throughout the day and night. I find no contradiction between my science (as I have said before in another post I reject ‘creationism’ and a young Earth model) and my faith in Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. These two sets of beliefs (science and faith) represent two dimensions of my life, which are both real, that overlap and intersect, but do not contradict one another. Science, if it is really science, must deal exclusively with the material world. Apart from that subset of reality, science, if it is real science, has no authority. Science, as a methodology, will never be able to pass judgement on the existence of the Holy Spirit, for example, because the Holy Spirit is not material. That does not mean it is not real. It just means science can’t measure or describe the Holy Spirit and so can’t deny it’s existence.

Conversely, faith or religion cannot do science based on non-scientific texts, like the Bible. Christians get into as much intellectual trouble as scientists who claim God does not exist, when we make scientific claims about, for example, the age of the Earth, based on ancient texts that we probably aren’t even reading correctly.

None of this means that there aren’t, in my opinion, specific principles in science that point to God’s presence and role in creation. Three areas come to my mind. First, God as creator. The Universe didn’t come from nothing or nowhere. Someone created the world around us, and that creator could not be part of the creation because, well, how can you create yourself? This self-evident observation presents a real problem for quantum physics (I wrote about this is a previous post on science, theology, and faith), which claims that a ‘thing’, like the Universe, only has reality if it is observed. Who is the observer unless someone outside of the Universe? Second, in the Judeo-Christian tradition based on Scripture (for example, Psalm 139) God is omnipotent — that is, everywhere at the same time. There is a principle in quantum physics call entanglement theory that sounds, to me anyway, a lot like an omnipotent God. And third, it doesn’t take a PhD to notice that the world, at lease where it is working properly as it was created to do, is ordered and organized. There is a law in science called the Second Law of Thermodynamics that explains the cause of much of the order around us. Actually, the principle is Non-Equlibrium Thermodynamics, and in reading the New Testament it seems to me that Jesus describes that theory remarkably well.

I want to explore these ideas in the next set of posts. I will try to present the science accurately, but my objective is not to use science to ‘prove’ God exists or to use faith to somehow show that science is wrong. I just want to call your attention to some interesting similarities and apparent coincidences between what science believes is true and what people of faith, particularly the Judeo-Christian faith, have believed for millenia. You can call what I will write ‘science-fiction’. That is ok with me. But see if these ideas get you thinking about science and God in new ways.

Blessings,

John