Scientific Knowledge and the Nature of God

This week I read an article on Livescience.com [1] that suggests that scientists would eventually understand everything and, by that fact, there would be no room for God.  To put this into a historical perspective, supernatural powers have been invoked as the cause for anything that could not be answered.  Two thousand years ago, God was responsible for just about everything: for the weather, the quality of the harvests, for plagues, good health, and for winning or losing battles.  Even into modern times, a common perception was that God was a grandfatherly figure living in Heaven who meted out rewards and punishment.  As human knowledge increased and science proceeded to explain many of the mysteries of existence, God’s role in everyday life diminished.

Today, scientists are making new discoveries that continue to diminish the mystery.  Astronomers with the power of the Hubbell Telescope and other modern tools probe to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang and continue to add to the understanding of the workings of the universe.  Physicists recently discovered the Higgs Boson, the final missing particle in the Standard Model, the model which describes the building blocks for matter and the fabric of the universe.  Yet, as Natalie Wolchover reports in the referenced article, physicists can describe the universe going all the way back to an infinitesimal fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but can’t describe the state of the Universe at the zero point or, for that matter, what existed before the zero point.  Physicists are attempting to create models in the hopes of answering that very question, and current physical theories already allow for an infinite number of universes, together which comprise the multiverse.

The phenomenon of life continues to be a great mystery.  Despite their modern understanding, no one has been able to create life in a test tube from inanimate matter.  Likewise, there is no universally accepted theory for the emergence of the very first life forms from non-living matter.  That by no means suggests that biologists won’t unlock that mystery in the future.  Even if biologists determine how life emerged and, for that matter, learn how to create life in the laboratory, there will still be deeper mysteries to investigate.  Even if physicists come up with a universally accepted theory for how the Big Bang happened and what the state of affairs was before the birthing event of the Universe, there will still be unanswerable questions, two major ones being “where did the multiverse come from?” and “why are we here?”

I have no doubt that scientists will continue to unravel these mysteries.  And every time a major discovery is made in science, new mysteries are encountered.  I do not believe that their journey of discovery will rule out the existence of God.  To put this into perspective: before Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, the world was believed to be flat, the Sun, Moon, and Stars revolved around the earth, and God in Heaven was “up there” in the sky.  Learning that the world was round and was no longer the center of the Universe did not disprove the existence of a Higher Power.  As scientists continue to learn how amazing the Universe is and how amazing the phenomenon of life is, it speaks of how immense reality is.  It makes the answers to the existential questions grander.  Even one who doubts the existence of a Higher Power can look at the Universe, the order of natural law, our remarkable planet, and the spark of life on that planet, grasping the true miracle of our existence.

Reference: http://news.yahoo.com/science-someday-rule-possibility-god-115945479.html

 

Photo credit: Hershel Observatory via Wikimedia Commons