Reforming Science

I would like to offer a definition of what is commonly referred to as a law of nature, or at least a perspective on its meaning and significance. One of my primary motivations for doing science is a fascination with the fact that we can describe things that happen in God’s creation with mathematical equations. Many secular scientists have acknowledged the same fascination, often with the accompanying observation that they really have no explanation for why this should be the case. A common view of these regularities among Christians seems to be that God built the laws of nature into creation at the beginning of time, and that creation is more or less constrained to follow them under normal circumstances. From this perspective, supernatural intervention by the Creator is in a very real sense unnatural, even alien; He chooses at times to break the laws of nature by performing a miracle (which He is of course free to do since He is the one who created them in the first place). I see at least two difficulties with this view. The first is that it presents a view of a God that is essentially diestic for a large portion of our daily experience. When He isn’t supernaturally intervening, the creation is simply running along in the manner in which He wound it up, following the formulas He built into it at the beginning. The second is that it makes the laws of nature an abstraction, as if they had an existence of their own apart from God’s relationship with His creation. But law is necessarily personal - it is a command that is given to be obeyed or disobeyed. Law is meaningless outside of the context of the relationship between law-giver and law-receiver. So a definition that seems to capture some of these ideas would be that “a law of nature is a manifestation of the obedience of creation to God’s sustaining Word”. Using the language of obedience not only highlights the personal nature of the “laws” of nature, it also lines up with the language Scripture uses to describe the relationship between God and His creation. It should be emphasized that creation is always operating in obedience to God’s sustaining Word; the regularities we observe are just a particular example of that fact. As Doug Wilson has pointed out, the wind and the waves were obeying Christ before He commanded them to be still. From this perspective, God isn’t breaking the laws of physics when He performs a miracle; He’s simply speaking a unique command to His creation. The sun goes around the earth because that’s what God is constantly telling it to do; once He told it to stop for awhile, and so it did. This isn’t an attempt to lessen the wonder of miraculous events, but rather to increase our wonder at the events that are occurring around us all the time. And the wonder at being able to find patterns in nature should be directed towards the One in Whom we live and move and have our being.

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This is meant to be a blog about how to do science as a Christian. I have been studying physics (and to a lesser extent astronomy) for about seven years now, and throughout have thought a great deal about the implications of the Christian faith for science. In addition to the essentials of the Christian faith, there are two particular beliefs that have driven a lot of my thinking, which I may as well be clear about at the outset. The first is that the Christian faith applies to everything, or to paraphrase Kuyper, there is not a square centimeter (astronomers use cgs units) of our human existence over which Christ does not cry “Mine!”. While I haven’t thought through all of the exegetical issues, I tend towards an optimistic view of eschatology, and one of the primary driving forces for my study of science has been my belief that doing science as a faithful Christian matters for the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. Discipling the nations includes teaching them how to do science. The second has to do with what the reformed affectionately refer to as the antithesis: when God cursed the serpent in the garden, He put enmity between his seed and the seed of the woman, Christ. This enmity runs throughout the Biblical story, and while Christ crushed Satan’s head when He rose from the dead, the antithesis will remain until all His enemies have their necks under His feet. One of the implications of this for science, or any other human endeavor, is that we shouldn’t expect the nations (or ourselves, for that matter) to naturally do it in a way that honors Christ. Nor should we expect Christ to honor the efforts of those who are at enmity with Him. Christ as the Saviour of the world includes Christ as the Saviour of science. I hope to say more about this stuff in later posts, but I see these as essential starting points for a Christian view of science.

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