Cheri Fields
Have you ever wished the Bible had just mentioned some detail about an account or issue you have questions about? I know I have often wanted to know a little (or a lot) more about some topic I find confusing or fascinating!
But there are huge areas of silence in God’s Word. Let’s think about why he would do something so potentially frustrating.
Taking our Bibles to Church
Remember how short a time we have had smart phones or even PCs? Within a single lifetime we have gone from needing a whole shelf of books to just a handheld tablet to access information about the Bible, original languages, archaeology, etc.
And it’s only been less than 600 years we have had a form of printing to make personal copies of the Bible available to the average person. For most of history, books had to be hand-copied onto expensive materials. They were huge, carefully guarded treasures.
According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: 2 Peter 1:3
Now, think about this with the questions you wish Jesus had included in his Word. For thousands of years scribes would have been required to painstakingly ink those extra words onto extra materials for your benefit. And you aren’t asking the same questions the person next to you in church is contemplating.
Multiply this out millions of times—just for the inquisitive of God’s children—and you have a recipe for a monstrosity of a sacred text. I often tell my children we would have to take a library cart with us to church if God had included everything we wanted to know.
And this is before considering how long it would take to read through the entire Bible in a year!
How this connects to creation science
Biblical creationists are hardly a monolithic group. Before Darwin, modern science was dominated by people who assumed God was Creator and worked on understanding his universe by observation. They had all kinds of differing opinions and theories. New equipment and new observations opened up new areas of thinking all the time.
Today is no different.
Although many skeptics want to say the very fact that we have accepted a source of ultimate truth means we are forced to become hardened in our thinking, the opposite is true.
If they are willing to stop and think, the skeptic understands this. Any person who decides the principles of mathematics and repeatability no longer function, has to likewise give up all scientific understanding and hope of progress. It is the unwavering confidence in the laws of physics that makes science a real world experience.
So it is with us. Biblical creationists just add in the awareness that there is an Author of the laws of physics and that Author gave us the true framework for the unobservable past.
But, if you have read the first handful of chapters in Genesis, you know these accounts of our past are only sketched out for us in the lightest strokes. There are a few things we can be utterly confident of, but there are so many more areas left open to us!
If you ever listen in on the conversation between two biblical creationists, you will soon discover they hold varying opinions and beliefs on how the Bible’s accounts play out. You can see this particularly strongly in our views on how Day 4 of Creation Week could have occurred. There are no less than five major models for what this may have looked like, and each is different enough to show they are hardly parroting a single idea!
God enjoys our interaction with his world
Do you know who the first scientist was? Before Adam was more than a few hours old, God assigned him to categorize and classify (name) animals he was presented with. This is a large field of scientific inquiry today. Adam and Eve were also blessed with both responsibility over and permission to bring the earth under their control. Many fields of science, from medicine to engineering to farming, are focused on this primordial command.
When I present my puzzles to God, asking him why he didn’t give us more information on some area connected with science, I typically am impressed by his response of, “Well, I left this for you guys to figure out!” What a delight it must be for Jesus when we develop a more powerful telescope and discover galaxies he’s been holding in place since the Beginning.
It is a right, yes a duty, to search in cautious manner for the numbers, sizes, and weights, the norms for everything [God] has created. For He himself has let man take part in the knowledge of these things … For these secrets are not of the kind whose research should be forbidden; rather they are set before our eyes like a mirror so that by examining them we observe to some extent the goodness and wisdom of the Creator. ~Johannes Kepler
This reminds me of a complaint from an angry atheist about plate tectonics. Although he hates God and creationists, he requires us to woodenly follow the Bible. Plate tectonics is not in the Bible, so creationists have no business with it. Creationary scientists along with evolutionary scientists have made discoveries and inventions (such as the laws of motion, telescopes, the MRI, medical treatments, and much more), and that is where this article applies.
And since when did we expect people who reject the Logos to be logical? 😀
I love whenever Christians point out the fact that the modern scientific era only came into being because of the fertile environment of Bible believing society. God is the one who makes the universe intelligible and is happy to have us study his handiwork!