Articles
No Science without God
No Science without God
God not only created the world, He sustains it with universal, unchanging natural laws like gravity, laws of thermodynamics, and laws of physics. God asked Job, “Have you ever in your life commanded the morning, and caused the dawn to know its place?” (Job 38:12). The sun rises in the east because God designed it that way! It’s predictable because His laws of nature do not change from day to day. This principle is often referred to as “the uniformity of nature.” Since God designed gravity to keep us grounded and the sun to rise in the east, we have no concern that tomorrow we’ll float away or that the sun will come up on the other side of the world. It’s this certainty that the future conditions of our universe will be like the past that enables us to do science. Without that certainty, we couldn’t use science to make predictions about how the world works.
For instance, if I observe a man walking his dog by the coffee shop every day at 7:30 a.m. for a month, it may seem reasonable to predict he’ll do the same thing tomorrow. However, there are too many variables to trust that prediction. He could sleep in, he could go out of town, the dog could get sick, he could get sick, he could change his schedule, he could move, and the list goes on. I can’t say with much certainty whether he’ll be there tomorrow at 7:30 because I have no idea what the conditions will be like for him tomorrow. Scientists, however, can predict with much more certainty because of the constant uniformity of nature. Such constancy gives them justification for believing the future conditions will be like the past.
In the worldview that removes God, however, there is no ultimate justification that those laws won’t change tomorrow. Without God, there are just as many variables to account for in making scientific predictions as the man with his dog. If the universe came from nothing and everything we see today is a result of billions of years of unintelligent, unguided, purposeless chemical reactions, then what justification is there to believe in the uniformity of nature? In the atheistic worldview, even “laws” like gravity, laws of physics and thermodynamics are the result of random evolutionary (changing) processes, so who’s to say they won’t keep changing? Even Steven Hawking, one of the smartest men on the planet, takes gravity for granted as if it were an eternal law. In his book “The Grand Design” he said, “Because there is such a law as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Hawking believes gravity is constant, unchanging, universal, eternal, immaterial, and responsible for creating the world! Sounds a lot like God doesn’t it? It should because gravity was designed by a constant, unchanging, universal, eternal, immaterial (spiritual) Being. But the atheistic worldview can’t account for universal, unchanging, immaterial laws; neither for their creation nor for their constant uniformity. Without God science is rendered useless.
