Science Reveals God's Creation

We’ve all heard it: science and faith are at odds, they are antithetical to each other, and they have irreconcilable differences that will always keep them apart.

At least that’s the way modern science has approached the question, especially since the Enlightenment.

Let’s take Christianity and the Bible. Science points out that the six days of creation in Genesis cannot be true and holds up its own equations for a 14 billion-year-old universe. It’s not important that the only thing common between the two approaches is the use of numbers. Reading Genesis within the context of the original Hebrew and the fact that elsewhere we are told that, to the Lord, the day is like 1000 years, and that the Hebrew word representing the word, “thousand” actually means “an indeterminate length of time”.

Six indeterminate periods of time, say 2.3 billion years each, and you get your timeframe. Of course, we all know that if God wanted to create the universe in six 24-hour days, six seconds, or instantly, who are we to quibble?

After that unfortunate dustup with Galileo, the Church came to its senses, accepting science as a strong method of revealing God’s creation.

So, it isn’t our fault.

Since the Enlightenment, on the other hand, science has grown materialistic, claiming that only matter exists and that all knowledge is accessible only through scientific means. Of course, science can’t explain platonic love or altruism. Nothing in the lab can predict self-sacrifice. Science’s self-imposed limits are profound.

In the “Dark Ages,” science floundered, but the church kept it alive through the likes of Copernicus, and the Dominican Friar, Albert Magnus, the father of the natural sciences.

Throughout history, Catholics have made extraordinary contributions to science – Blaise Paschal and Gregor Mendel, a priest, and the father of modern genetics. Closer to our own time, Georges LeMaître, a Catholic priest, discovered The Big Bang Theory and Stephen Barr, writes on faith’s use of science. The Vatican Observatories are among the most prominent in the world because the Church truly wants to know.

I once had a conversation with the atheistic physicist and I brought up months in your Georges LeMaître. He replied he found that his Catholic colleagues were very good at compartmentalizing. I told him that what he thought was true, only that Catholic scientists have one big compartment labeled “God”.

Still, science cannot prove God so therefore the pure materialists reject him. I write novels and none of my characters can prove me so I think I understand.

Proof of God cannot be done scientifically, that’s because he is not material. One cannot prove altruism using math. The proof of God, for those who need it, lay in metaphysics and logic.

It’s easy for us, however to prove the desperate limitations of materialism – what mathematician, for example, has ever conjured a flower on his white board?