Seeing God In Science
When I came to know the Lord at 16, all my young questions about science had not been answered. But I encountered a profound beauty in believers whom I’d come to love. My eyes were opened to see a new, more beautiful “dimension” than I thought was possible. I call it dimension, because I don’t know what else to call it. I stepped into a whole new world where God was all over the place.
Verses like this explained to me what I was experiencing “..so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light;” –1 Peter 2:9. This expression, “marvelous light” explained my experience with the Lord perfectly; Life with Him was amazing to me. I was without God in the world, but after this, He was very real to me. ( Ephesians 2:12)
My beginning months as a believer involved having a deep desire to understand the Bible. I read all of it in four months and a quite beloved youth pastor help me with all my questions. My hunger was to be close to the Lord, but I went up and down a bit the first 2 years as a believer.
My journey with science and God began when I was 19 at my university in California, UCSD. It was a walk in awe taking my Biology classes as a Biology major. Everything I learned pointed to the incredible reality of God.
Over the next ten years, I had a voracious appetite to understand God in relation to the way living things work. I spent extensive time in all the arguments for God as the Creator, but I was concurrently always on a mind-bending journey learning more deeply how living things really worked.
The road was intense and more complex than I dreamed it could be. Through it, I slowly deepened in understanding how beyond-belief the technology is in all branches of Biology.
It daily became a journey of, “Oh God! This staggers me… Living things are operating in a beyond-Star Wars technology.” The more I learned, the more it shocked me.
I’d often find myself reduced to tears, “Lord, I am overwhelmed by what I am learning. You are completely unbelievably true. You do see me every moment. You do know my every thought, my every circumstance– and you actually do love me with a love that I cannot begin to grasp.
Life gets hard at times for everyone, and my life hit some tough spots. As I walked through my valleys, I never doubted God’s reality for a second. Living things, whether plants, animals, people’s bodies or insects–or whatever–screamed at me the reality of God, as did His Word. Like Paul, I “knew in whom I’d believed.”
The reality of God wasn’t anything I ever questioned. The trick for me was to remain fully confident in God working in my own life… of Him being for me, of Him knowing EVERYTHING I was dealing with and believing He’d come through in the million things of life. I knew this, and as I stood on the reality of it more and more–even when circumstances seemed to say the opposite– the more God came through for me to show me how real He could be in the affairs of this life. It was all about “walking by faith and not by sight” and God coming through.
As I walked on with the Lord, two things became hugely evident. One is that God is intensely real and has power, love, beauty and intelligence beyond anything people think. And, second, that heaven is real and breathtakingly wonderful.
All this began a huge journey in wanting to help all people know the God of Creation– whether kids, young adults, parents, politicians or the greatest scientists.
I learned, too, that God really does come through…He brings Unexpected beauty over and over and over…and sometimes what He does is so off-the-charts-wonderful that the best verse in the Bible that describes it is Psalms 126:1-3, ”We were like those who dream…Our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with joyful shouting. The Lord has done great things for us; we are glad.”
The phrase “like those who dream” is amazing. It’s having God do such wonderful things for you that you can hardly believe it–such great things that you want to shout.
But as for you…
I don’t know where you are In your journey in understanding the world around you, but I can tell you it’s an adventure that will completely, unbelievably astonish you. You’ll find that God is exceedingly more powerful and more beautiful (if I can use that word) and more involved in your life than you ever hoped.
Hang in the Biological sciences for a while, until your faith is like an iron pillar. Then dig into Geology and Astronomy, learning from reliable sources. You’ll find that all these will cause some unbelievable moments of “My Lord and My God!”They will all become powerful signs of God’s reality. And you’ll find that tiny things–like a drive into the wilds or a hike in the mountains–will greatly strengthen your faith as you see God’s signature in all the realms of science.
“Therefore we are always confident, although we know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.” - 2 Corinthians 5:7
“So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” - 2 Corinthians 4:18