Recently, I stumbled down a YouTube rabbit hole, and found myself listening to hours of lectures by the mathematician and scholar John Lennox, who teaches at Oxford and lectures frequently on the existence of God, the proof of the resurrection, and other such topics. In the middle of one of his lectures, he made a powerful observation, which I feel compelled to share… because if I don’t share it now, I will most certainly forget where I learned it, and will probably paraphrase it later thinking it was my own clever idea. Here’s what Lennox said…
To argue that a person seeking to understand the origins of the universe must choose between “believing in the laws of science” or “believing in God” is like looking at an automobile, wondering about its origins, and being told that you must choose between “believing in the assembly line” or believing in “Henry Ford.”
In other words: Embrace the power of “and.”
God made all things. God made the things (stars, moons, people, etc) AND He made the mechanisms that govern those things (energy, gravity, consciousness, etc).
The Catholic priest Jorge Lemaître, who was also a mathematician and cosmological theorist, is credited as being the father of the “Big Bang theory.” In a letter to Albert Einstein, he famously said “your writings suggest there was once a day without a yesterday.” Later in life, he was challenged with the question “how can you be a scientist and a believer in God,” as though a person must choose one or the other. His answer was “there are two roads that lead to truth. I choose to travel them both.”
This is not me advocating for a belief in the big bang theory. Instead, I’m just saying faith in God does not mean a rejection of the evidence abundant in the cosmos. On the contrary, the cosmos declares the glory of God (Psalm 19:1)! Don’t throw away your telescope. Gaze into it and marvel at the vastness of the universe. Be in awe. God spoke it into being. The more you learn of it, the more incredible the Creator is proven to be.
~Matthew