What do we know, and what do we not know
- Grady McMurtry
- April 04, 2020
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Are there areas where science has made no progress? Scientists make all sorts of claims to know about the causes of things, like how plants make oxygen. But, at the foundational level, we really know nothing at all!
I sometimes ask if anyone in the audience can tell me what gravity is. Not how it behaves - that two masses move toward each other - but, what is it? I know that Sir Isaac Newton was able to write a formula to accurately describe the force of gravity, but what is it? Why do the earth and moon attract one another? What causes this effect?
No one has ever given me a satisfactory answer. No one has ever told me why planets attract each other or how. We simply reduce our joint ignorance to a word - gravity. Nor can we duplicate gravity, we can only observe it occurring and give it a name.
Yet in the Bible God writes about gravity and He gives us a pretty good definition for it, even if we really don't know what it is or how to duplicate it.
In the Book of Job, verse 26:7, it says, "He stretches out the north over empty space, and hangs the earth on nothing." The Hebrew word translated "nothing" is blimah. This word means "invisible bands of attraction". Frankly, I cant think of a better definition for gravity than "invisible bands of attraction".
A similar situation arises when scientists try to tell you that they know about electromagnetic fields and electrons. We do not know what an electron is. We do not know why an electron causes a magnetic field when it moves from one place to another. We can not tell you what a magnetic field is either. Nor can we make an electron.
We know that atoms exist but we can not explain why they stay together, when, by all we know, they should fly apart. We hear about the "weak" force and the "strong" force within atoms; we can blow up cities be using them; but we still do not know what causes these forces nor can we duplicate them.
We see organic compounds, like people, who are alive and can produce copies of themselves. But, we can not explain why other organic compounds, like oil, are not alive and do not make copies of themselves.
We know a lot about life, but we do not know what it is. We know a lot about life, but we can not duplicate it. We can make cars and houses, but we can not make them live.
We live our lives on a daily basis, but we cannot give them purpose. Science has made no progress in these foundational areas, but a Christian Biblical World View provides us with all the answers.
There is one and only one religion which can answer these questions. Only Biblical Christianity has never had any of its positions even dented by science. Only Biblical Christianity has in fact had all of its positions supported by science.
Only Biblical Christianity provides the answers to all the important questions. The answers may be summarized by these two great statements: "In the beginning God..." and "In Jesus Christ all things consist (that is hold together or are sustained) ..."
The Church has had to deal with evolutionary thought processes from the very beginning of the Church. Paul had to deal with Greek evolutionists when he took his mission trip to Athens in Acts 17:16+. There he had to preach a knowledge of the Creator before he could effectively preach the message of the resurrection of His Son. In Romans 1:16+ Paul wrote the single greatest summary for the argument for the existence of God ever written - a scientific treatise.
Paul would eventually pass his position on down to his "son" in the faith, Timothy. Since evolutionary thought was prevalent throughout the ancient world, Paul would write to Timothy in I Timothy 6:20-21:
"O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you, avoiding worldly and empty chatter and the opposing arguments of what is falsely called science - which some have professed and thus gone astray from the faith. Grace be with you."