The Wind in His Fists

In a recent Time magazine interview, atheist Richard Dawkins proclaimed:

“The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”

Is God’s existence really a scientific question? The answer is no. The Bible depicts a God who created an orderly universe, one that he actively causes to run according to fixed “laws.” The laws of science describe God’s activity in the world. They do not constrain it. As God proclaimed to Job, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth a constellation in its season, and guide the Bear with her satellites? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, or fix their rule over the earth (Job 38: 31–33).”

A modern Job might reply, “As a matter of fact, I do know the laws of the heavens. Science can predict eclipses and meteor showers and the transit of Mercury!” But can you fix their rule? Or do you know who does? This was part of the riddle of Agur: “Who has ascended into heaven and descended? Who has gathered the wind in His fists (Proverbs 30:4a)?”

God is He in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17) and in whom “we live and move and exist (Acts 17: 28a)” The world that is described by the Scriptures is well suited to a paradigm like modern science that assumes the orderlines and constancy of natural law. In fact, modern science was birthed in Christendom and its philosophical atmosphere. But now it turns and says that because the universe is so orderly, therefore there is no God. The modern atheist says that the ordeliness of the world implies that the world can act on its own. Atoms act according to fixed laws, and they act on their own. They have their own power to cause events. The fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force, gravity, and the two nuclear forces, exist on their own and have the power to cause events. But these are leaps of logic. The universe is orderly, but it does not follow that it is so of its own accord. The cause and effect structure of the universe does not imply that the entities of the universe have their own power to act.

Science can never distinguish between a universe caused by God and one that has its own power to act according to fixed laws. The existence of a creator God is not a scientific question. Now, whether science can speak to the question of the truth of the Bible is another story, and one for another day.