A Parable of a Ruler
Once upon a time there was a ruler, a wooden measuring stick. This ruler was carefully wrought by an ingenius woodworker, whose shop was filled with his meticulous creations. The old artisan built everything himself, the building, the tools, and the fruniture. The day he made the ruler, he set it down on the counter and left to the city for supplies.
Magically, the ruler awoke and came to life. This was a strange experience, to be sudenly conscious and alive, and the ruler looked around in astonishment and confusion at the shop, and immediately began searching for answers. How did he get here? Who was he? Where was he?
Being a ruler, of course, he immediately began to go about the shop measuring everything, and observing, seeking to understand his situation. As he did, he began to notice that everything in the shop seemed to have certain things in common. All of the handles on the tools were of the same basic shape and the same size. All of the furniture had a common theme. He was amazed to find that everything in the shop matched exactly with some increment on his graduated side. Everything had a length, width, height, or diameter that corresponded to one of the numbered lines along the length of his body. There were mathematical relationships among all of the things in the shop.
Before long, he had devised elaborate equations to describe the relationships between all of the lengths and widths, and diameters in the shop. These equations explained everything, he thought, even himself. He fit into the equations.
“So that is it,” he thought, “this is why I am here.”
Is the Existence of God a Scientific Question?
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.
