According to the current secularist worldview the only sure epistemological foundation (basis for knowing) is science. At some point in the last hundred or so years through popular culture, education, and media, science replaced religion in the modern imagination as the governing authority of how we’re to run our lives. But something unexpected has happened on the way to the coronation of King Science.

It has long been been assumed by secular, educated Western cultural elites that growing scientific knowledge would one day make religion superfluous. Science would supposedly tell us everything we need to know, and once we knew everything God would no longer be necessary to explain what can’t be explained. Scientific knowledge, however, is increasingly leading us in just the opposite direction. On both the micro and macro level, from the tiniest nano particle, to the existence of the universe itself, the amazing explosion of scientific knowledge is leading to very uncomfortable, for the secularist, metaphysical questions.

A great example comes from an article at Real Clear Science with a title of hubristic humility: “We’ll Never Know For Sure How Everything Began.” First, the hubris. Such a statement assumes divinely unaided human reason and effort can discover an explanation of how everything, all of reality, came to be. The humility: ain’t gonna happen. The great fear of the secularist is the bogeyman called the God of the gaps, or using God to explain our gaps in scientific knowledge; if we put God where our knowledge ends then religion will end up perverting the pristine nature of the scientific enterprise. So most scientists, like the ones quoted in the article, refuse to go anywhere near, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

The reason for their reluctance to admit the obvious (that the universe didn’t create itself) is the unexamined assumption (and secularists rarely, if ever, examine their own assumptions) that religious (or metaphysical) and scientific knowledge are mutually exclusive; we can only trust scientific knowledge to tell us true things about reality. But scientific knowledge can only take us so far, and once you get to those limits you get . . . mystery, but mystery needn’t be mysterious. In biblical terminology, mystery is something that has yet to be revealed, not something that is inherently inscrutable.

The key assumption (all human beings must assume things because we’re finite) of biblical religion is found in that word revealed. Christianity is a reveletory religion. Unlike other religions that have human beings at their center as creatures who seek God and meaning and such, Christianity is a wholly revealed religion. God is not to be found at the end of a syllogism, or what we find at the end of our searching because sinful, fallen creatures do not seek God. Rather, like Adam and Eve, they hide from him. Fortunately, he comes seeking us, and we are found by him. Big difference. I won’t get into any theology here, but Christians of almost every theological bent believe it is God who reveals himself to us one way or other, or we would be forever lost.

The uncomfortable fact facing secularists in the 21st century is that science is revealing to us a nature only an almighty, omniscient being could create. Of course they deny this, and claim a purposeless process can give creative power to chance, but it’s proving an increasingly difficult sell.

On the macro level is the question of origins, and a question science is not able to answer, ever, as the author of the article begrudgingly has to admit. He speculates that the desire to uncover our ultimate origins may be “pointless, a selfish side effect of our innate human need for a coherent narrative of existence.” So he blames human beings for what is obviously a perfectly natural desire. Everyone wants to know their origins, where and who they came from. Why do adopted children often go through so much trouble to find out who their biological parents are, and where they were born? Because it’s part of us. Why are family origin and genealogy websites so popular? Because we naturally want to know where we come from!

That this drive inside of us would point to our ultimately supernatural origins is not something the secularist will contemplate, which is why it never seems to occur to the author of this piece. His epistemology is rooted in science, and that’s as far as he’s prepared to go. Since no answer from science is forthcoming, he blames a vice called selfishness for our desire to know our ultimate origins, as if selfishness has any meaning in a purely material universe. Who says it’s bad? The dirt? Because that’s all we are, then, is lucky dirt. But science, much to the secularists’ chagrin, is showing us that we are far more than lucky direct; we are creatures of an almighty, all knowing, insanely creative sovereign God, ultimately revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

 

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