God, Order In Creation, and Science - Joshua Xie

Our speaker today was Jose Philip who spoke to us about the topic science and religion. Stanley L. Jaki believed that Christian theism is the reason why he aspires to be a good scientist. I have always felt that since God is the creator of the heavens and the earth, the study of the things He created should he us appreciate Him even more and I am driven by that fact that so many amazing things exist because they bear testimony to just how great He is (general revelation haha). 

I really liked the way he broke down the way of scientific reasoning into a type of philosophy that it was based on. In today's education, I feel that we are unfortunately brought to the point where there is just too much information floating around. We have learnt to bypass certain basic reasoning, assuming that they are true, so that we can "move on to the more important things" such as what is going to be tested in the examination. Mostly, we are only taught very limited content subjects such as economics, literature, science, mathematics etc. 

Being very heavy in content, most of us feel smart being able to cram mass amount of information into our brain, unaware that we might be blind-sided by our own thinking. It is almost as if we built the very box that box us in. For example, basic assumptions are: 1) everything is real, 2) there is order 3) there is correspondence between observation and reality. The assumption of “there is order” is really an important aspect of how science progresses, and “order” is the very thing that God created in the beginning. 

It is because there is order that we are able to observe patterns, scientists are able to create experiments to test hypothesis. This to me was really enlightening. It was an aspect of creation, which I knew but did not think further about the implication, or its significance. Putting it all together was really mind blowing and I was really getting excited! But when I think about the many smart people, whom God gave brilliant minds to, are still rejecting based on their own “cleverness”, it is really sad. All I can say is that only by His Grace our eyes are opened to the reality of Him being present. When one realizes how lost we would have been without His revelation and grace, it humbles me and allows me to appreciate what it means that only by the work of the Holy Spirit, do we truly see. 

"The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit." (1 Cor. 2:14)

But bearing in mind that even the brightest might succumb to their pride in knowledge, the arguments that we make are also points for our own self-reflection.

Joshua Xie