What if the divide between God and science weren’t as great at it seems? What if the entire conflict between these two worlds is a false narrative, entirely?
What if God makes sense?
In his book, “Finding God in the Waves,” author Mike McHargue, details the weakening, fall, and resurrection of his faith as a man of science. But he doesn’t argue for the existence of God from the position of scripture, alone. He sees God in the natural universe, and has come to realize that science and theology are not so separate as he once imagined.
When some new fact comes to light that seems to disprove a scriptural assertion, we’re often fooled into thinking we have only two choices. The first choice in this false binary is the decision not to trust our senses and methods of discovery, and to rely only on scripture for our entire truth. This is the choice that creates what the rest of the world often sees as a “fundamentalist”.
And boy, does this assertion have problems. Say, for example, that we can empirically verify that our planet is billions of years old. Say, also, that scripture concludes that the Earth is actually only ten thousand years old. The person who makes this first choice ignores the empirical evidence, and assumes the figure of ten thousand years.
But that doesn’t make sense. Why would God create a world that appears older than it is? And if we cannot trust our senses, or even our reality, can we really trust the pile of paper and ink and leather that sits before us and calls itself scripture? Wouldn’t everything be in question?
The opposite choice is just as problematic. Do we immediately give up faith because we cannot measure a miracle or weigh God? Do we know what existed before the Big Bang? Do we know what lies beyond the edges of our universe or where consciousness arises from? Do we know how life arose in a universe that seems to be otherwise entirely devoid of it and, what’s more, hostile to it?
No. We do not. McHargue writes of the Singularity—the point, at the beginning of time, before the one exploded into the many, when, as McHargue writes, “space-time was so compressed that matter and energy were the same thing, and the four fundamental forces of physics were just one unified field or force. There was no light and no dark, no separation of space, matter, or energy…Everything was one, a single-field energy-space thing with the potential to create everything.”
Does this not sound like the possibility of a God?
Now, for the third option—the one that breaks this false binary. When a fact arises that challenges your faith, one that contradicts scripture, it is our interpretation of that scripture that needs to be addressed.
Why?
Because all truth belongs to God.
To go back to our example, if we verify that the Earth is billions of years old, that is reality. The Earth was made when it was made. This is truth, revealed through our science. And if scripture contradicts this? Perhaps we need to look at new ways of reading those problematic passages. After all, each verse of the Bible is steeped in literary, cultural, and temporal contexts, just waiting to be deeply understood.