[A brief thought on faith, science, and meaning I excerpted and adapted from my book, Creation and Last Things.]
Mark Twain once quipped,
There are two types of people—those who divide people into two types and everyone else.
With Twain in
mind, I am still willing to say that there are two basic approaches to our
existence: life either bursts with
meaning or is meaningless.
And yet, on
certain days which of us does not resonate with certain scientists who, having
cut themselves off from the Designer, find an ultimately purposeless creation?
Harvard astronomer Margaret Geller believes that it is pointless to mention
purpose for the universe:
Why should it have a point? What point? It’s just a physical system, what point is there?
And yet, on certain days which of us does not resonate with certain scientists who, having cut themselves off from the Designer, find an ultimately purposeless creation? Certainly, not all scientists express this (at least vaguely) nihilist conclusion about the world. I remember a graduate seminar on with David Cole, a biochemist at U.C. Berkeley. He showed
us pictures of polymers and exclaimed—“Aren’t these beautiful! Look at the
wonder of God’s creation!” I had never thought of polymers that way. (Actually,
I had never looked at them that closely.) Like David Cole, many scientists, in discovering
God’s design, find ample reason to praise the Designer. In fact, science and theology in the past century have pointed toward an
amazing convergence. Consider, for example, Francis Collins, head of the NIH, who commented, "I find that studying the natural world is an opportunity to observe the majesty, the elegance, the intricacy of God's creation."
God has brought
this world into existence. Both the act of doing so and the product are
creation. Like a writer, God invented and created the world, and in doing so,
stepped back to the let the characters “speak for themselves.” The created
order remains different from God. On the other hand, the work bears the imprint
of its Artist. And so I will thread two analogies though this book: writing a
play and improvising with a jazz combo. I will save how God and Miles Davis can
be compared for the moment and move instead to the analogy of writing. Speaking
the world into existence has been used as an image for creation since the
Hebrew Scriptures. As Psalm 33:9 declares, “He spoke and it came to be.” Words
require no pre-existing material and point to the sovereignty of the Writer of
the drama. Thankfully, we know the ending, and it is all good. From an
undergraduate education in French literature, I recall that a comedy is
defined, not by its use of humor (although there may be some), but by its
ending. A comedy ends with resolution, with good ultimately in triumph over
evil. And so in God’s comedy, good wins out. In the meantime, the real joy will
be discovering our part in this cosmic comedy.
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