The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. (Psalm 19:1-2)
The present-day contention that rational truth is confined exclusively to the realm of natural causes…explained only by scientific investigation…thereby leading to the conclusion that the philosophy of naturalism is the one and only acceptable way of viewing reality, is brilliantly subtle but entirely vacuous.
The Spirit-born Christian scientist…using the purest scientific methodology…can investigate a particular area of natural phenomenon and discover entirely naturalistic causations, while privately giving his or her Intelligent Designer God the credit for His ingenuity and craftsmanship, without ever leaving their fidelity to empirical facts or setting aside their personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
The atheist scientist, on the opposite extreme, can use the same techniques to investigate the same phenomenon, and discover the exact same naturalistic causations…yet interpret their new findings as an increase in our knowledge of the natural world…thereby creating a corresponding reduction in the need for God’s existence and agency in the affairs of nature and mankind.
Yet the raw, empirical information content about heat, or the behavior of gases, or the properties of water, or of mass, momentum, and energy, of mountain building through plate tectonics, the internal composition of stars, the behavior of atomic particles, or the complexity found within DNA…discovered through careful scientific investigation…are the same.
The vast difference in the interpretation of the facts at the broad, worldview level are not based upon what the empirical scientific evidence itself is saying independently, because the information in its purest form remains neutrally silent regarding philosophy.
The observable, measurable, quantifiable facts of natural phenomenon amenable to us in the physical sciences…are open to interpretation and can be selectively placed in more than one optional, exclusivistic, worldview.
For the atheist scientist, especially since the 1859 publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the steady and rapid advance in our knowledge of the natural world has morphed into an irrational zero-sum game…as if each new understanding of some physical phenomenon in nature equates to further liberation from the influence of a supernatural Creator God.
But the Spirit-born, Christian scientist exploring nature through scientific investigation is not looking for reasons to push God away, but instead sees the complex, integrated information and the precise craftsmanship that went into each newly understood phenomenon of nature…and glorifies God for its designed naturalistic function, the orderliness and intelligibility underlying nature, and our mental capacity to be able to unravel these mysteries in succession one at a time.
The secularly biased notion that science only looks for naturalistic explanations for physical phenomenon in the natural world is actually now inadequate and over-simplistic by about three decades.
Information has now been recognized and added to the short list…of matter and energy…as the major components amenable to study in our quest to understand ultimate reality, purpose, and meaning in the universe.
Information, like gravity, is an important component that currently falls outside the domain of the unifying “theory of everything” being sought-after in the field of physics.
The classic example given to describe the fundamental distance between information and physical matter is the analogy to the front page of any major daily newspaper. The physics and chemistry of “how” ink bonds to paper does not explain…because it cannot explain from the realm of the physical sciences…the “why” component of the individual daily arrangement of the ink to produce intelligible information expressed, in the case of the New York Times, in the English language.
The ink does not arrange itself…does not self-assemble…into intelligible English letters conveying information. Human intelligent design is the causation of this meaningful communication of information.
The information given on the front page of the newspaper can therefore be said to transcend above the basic physics and chemistry explanation at the mechanical level of ink bonding to paper.
Similarly, the complex and highly specified information given in human designed computer software programs transcends above, and cannot be reduced down to or explained by, the basic mechanics of the ones and zeroes of computer binary language code as the cause for its intelligently designed function.
This same quality of coherently integrated, highly specified information can now be seen, studied, and analyzed…in terms of its source of origin and its relationship to the micro-molecule DNA…in the body-plan lifestyle habits of hundreds of billions of distinct plants, trees, bacteria, fungi, insects, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals in the living world.
In this brief section on the validity of pronouncements made about science as being the only reliable tool to define the rational boundary-lines around truth and knowledge, the curious thing about this contention…coming from the field of logic…is that it deconstructs itself…that it does not stand-up under the weight of its own requirements.
The statement that science alone can produce truth does not itself derive from empirical scientific investigation.
The statement does not therefore meet its own internal test for veracity. “Science alone produces truth” is an opinion about science…not an axiom derived through science. The statement is rendered invalid for truth content…by virtue of not meeting the high standard imposed by the statement itself…of not being scientifically derived.
The Cross in the Christian Life 