When
Science and
Faith Collide

Somebody asks you how you even know there is a God. You cannot hand him God in a bucket, so you point at what is in front of him. Look at this place. The order of it. A calf that has never been taught a thing in its life gets up wet and finds the udder. Seed goes in dirt and comes up corn, every year, the same way.

And notice which direction everything runs when you leave it alone. The barn does not build itself back. The fence does not tighten up over the winter. Rust does not turn into paint. Left to itself, every single thing on this place runs down, comes apart, and goes back to dirt. That is not an argument somebody made up. That is just Tuesday.

Here is the one that gets me. We are smart. We have put men on the moon and built machines that talk back to you. We can copy life, patch it, splice it, even grow a piece of it in a dish. But not one man in the history of the world has ever made a living thing out of nothing. We can mimic it. We cannot make it.

The man who tells you he does not believe in God is not worshipping nothing. There is no such animal. He has a god. He just has not called it by its name yet, and that is the most useful thing you can know about him.

For most men it is one of four. Self, and he is the one he answers to. Money, and he will tell you he is just being responsible. Time, and he guards it tighter than any dollar he ever spent. Or knowledge, and being the smartest man in the room is the thing he could not live without. Every one of those will take your Sunday, your wallet and your worry, which is exactly what worship is.

Paul says it flat. They swapped the truth of God for a lie, and they bowed down and served the created thing instead of the Creator. Do not read that and think only of the atheist. Read it and think about last week. The created thing gets served in the church house too, and a man can sing every word and still be bowing to something he made.

Here is the collision, and I am not going to talk around it. Science says billions of years. Your Bible says about six thousand. Both of those cannot be right, and anybody who tells you there is no disagreement there is being soft with you.

So what does a working man do? He does not have to win that fight to keep his faith, and that is the part nobody tells you. I am not an idiot. I have read some of it. But when it comes down to a choice between what God wrote down and what a man figured out, I trust the Bible over another man’s opinion. That is not me refusing to think. That is me deciding ahead of time who gets the last word, so I am not renegotiating it every time a headline comes out.

Two weeks ago we sat in Colossians 2 and I gave you three warnings. The second one was this verse. Paul is not warning you about science. He is warning you about smooth talk, the kind that sounds so reasonable it walks you off your own place a step at a time and you never notice you left.

Now let me say the other half, because I am not against science and neither is God. Science can do a lot for you. Archeology puts a spade in the ground and turns up his story, city by city. Physics reads the rules of the place and testifies to a Rule-maker. Cosmology looks out as far as it can see and comes back and tells you how big he is. None of that is the enemy.

But here is where it runs out of road. There is no instrument anywhere that can weigh love. Nobody ever put laughter on a scale. No man has measured joy, or peace, or the life that does not end. The things you would die for, the things you actually built your whole life around, not one of them will fit under a microscope.

So Paul tells you where to keep your eyes. Not on the part you can see, because that part is already going. On the part you cannot see, because that is the part that lasts. That takes faith, and it always did, and it takes exactly the same faith from the scientist as it does from the cowboy.

Then who made God? Do not think on that one too hard or you will get the hibbie jibbies. But it deserves a real answer, so here it is. Nobody made him. The rule was never that everything needs a maker. The rule is that everything that BEGAN needs a maker. God never began.

And notice what that does to the argument. The other fellow needs something eternal too. He has to have something that was always there, or nothing ever gets started. He just wants that something to be dirt instead of a Mind. So the question was never whether something is eternal. The only question is which one.

Moses is the man who wrote it down best, and he wrote it as a prayer. Before the mountains were ever born, before you shaped the earth and the world, from forever back to forever ahead, you are God. God was already there before there was a there. Put the three together now. Does God exist? Order, life, and a world running down, and nobody has an excuse. Science and faith collide? Science can point at him, it can never prove him, and I trust the Bible over another man’s opinion. Who made God? Nobody, because only things that begin need a maker.