Imagine an art historian whose life work is to study Picasso paintings.\u00a0 She analyses the minute flecks of paint on each work, to determine their composition.\u00a0 She also goes to conferences where people divide the paintings into different eras, and tries to see if her results can be related to their discoveries.<\/p>\n
However, she doesn’t believe Picasso actually existed.\u00a0 Nor do most of her colleagues.\u00a0 A few of them do, but it is considered somewhat gauche<\/em> to mention it in talks or official publications.<\/p>\n It’s a bit like this whenever a scientist doesn’t believe in God.\u00a0 The work may have technical expertise, even brilliance, but it misses the forest for the trees.\u00a0 It is blind to the biggest, most important result of all.<\/p>\n I don’t mean to imply that Atheism is as implausible as Picasso-denial would be.\u00a0 The philosophical arguments for the existence of God require careful contemplation, and some thoughtful individuals have resisted them as (in their opinion) fallacious.\u00a0 Indeed, most scientists don’t give the question careful thought at all.\u00a0 But as somebody who is<\/em> convinced God exists, the final outcome still seems (regardless of how understandable it may be) a little bit comic or absurd.\u00a0 You may not believe in God, but you carefully study his laws and decrees.\u00a0 Look up from your work, contemplate the ocean or hills, and ask your heart where all this beauty came from!<\/p>\n There is yet another respect in which God haunts Science, as its inspiration and origin.\u00a0 We can also look at the scientist as a human being.\u00a0 Without the human mind, Nature would of course still exist, but Science (which is just the careful study of Nature by beings with minds) would not.<\/p>\n Jews and Christians believe that all human beings \u2014 no exceptions! \u2014 are created in the image of God.\u00a0 It is because we have a likeness to the Creator, that we are capable of both Science (understanding God’s creation) and Art (making our own creations).\u00a0 So scientists who don’t believe in God aren’t just blind to what’s in front of them, they are also blind to their own true self, to the spiritual power that enables them to work on a calculation or a measurement.\u00a0 But, their work still reflects God’s glory, even though they don’t recognize it.<\/p>\n Now God is invisible.\u00a0 As the Creator, God precedes Nature and transcends it.\u00a0 Divinity has no physical form, and the human mind cannot comprehend it.\u00a0 To make a graven image of any animal or person, and worship that<\/em> as if it were divine, is regarded in the Bible as idolatry, a serious sin.\u00a0 Yet this same book insists from its very first chapter that God created men and women in his own image!<\/p>\n The human animal may be a rather Picasso-esque, surreal representation of the uncreated, bodiless, singular Power that set the stars in the sky and binds quarks into nuclei; yet it is the representation that is given to us, as a handle to reach out and touch the divine.\u00a0 We are not God, but we are like<\/em> God; and by serving our neighbor we also serve the one who made him.<\/p>\n And although none of us yet fully live up to our potential as icons or paintings of God, we have the promise that the Master Artist is working on us, striving forcefully to mold us into that perfect image (if only we allow ourselves to be worked on).\u00a0 We are all broken in many ways, and that definitely includes me!\u00a0 But the same God who patiently waited billions of years to make our world \u2014 who brought forth the evolution of single cells, sponges, fish, dinosaurs, and (in these last days) birds \u2014 is also working to redeem each of us, and the human family as a whole.\u00a0 That is why Christ came to earth, on a daring rescue mission: to put us back in touch with the source of the whole universe.<\/p>\n This is far more exciting and interesting than the shallow sentiments that most moderns try to console themselves with.\u00a0 As St. Dorothy Sayers observed, “There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy, nothing so sane and so thrilling.”\u00a0 In that respect it is, again, like the best moments of scientific discovery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine an art historian whose life work is to study Picasso paintings.\u00a0 She analyses the minute flecks of paint on each work, to determine their composition.\u00a0 She also goes to conferences where people divide the paintings into different eras, and … Continue reading