The ideological divide between scientific materialists and Christian theists starts with the fact that the biblical God hasnot made His personal location amenable to scientific discovery…through a solely materialistic pursuit within the realm of matter and energy.
For Christians this ideological divide is by the deliberate intention of God…God being a Spirit Mind.
The God of the Bible has not allowed His personhood to be reduced down to the level of being merely one of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, or mathematics. He is not a part of the orderliness and intelligibility of the natural world that we can only make an impersonal connection with at best, intellectually with our minds but not personally with our hearts.
The God of the Bible is the brilliantly insightful composer of the biblical narrative stories of faith from Abraham through Paul. He is not the deistic god who created the universe then removed Himself to a safely detached and non-participative distance from His creation.
We can clearly see the awe, wonder, and beauty displayed in the natural world, which for Christian theists must be an accurate reflection of God’s character, intelligence, and personality. And we have the innate capacity to admire the organized complexity in nature phenomenally apparent to the ancient Greek philosophers…and even more so today through the discoveries of modern science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
But all of these remarkable physical things cannot really tell us who God is as a person, a fact of reality which God understands better than we do.
Having instead bypassed a physical revelation of His personhood (other than the incarnation and life of Jesus Christ the Son of God for about 33 years in the first third of the first-century A.D. in Israel), God went straight to the heart-of-the-matter by inventing biblical-quality journeys of faith as the means by which we can enter into individualized mission-plans for our lives.
This approach has the elevated goals of highly specified purpose, meaning, and direction…but most importantly along the way also getting to know God personally (Gen. 12:1-3, 37:5-11; Ex. 3:2-12; Jud. 6:11-16; 1Sam. 16:12-13; Jer. 1:4-6; Lk. 1:28-33; Mk. 1:16-17; Acts 9:3-16).
In a few of my other Christian books I ask the question: Why didn’t God the Father, Jesus Christ the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit take full advantage of the most opportune time to have the risen Jesus walk down the center of Main Street in Jerusalem and straight into the Temple sanctuary, on Tuesday or Wednesday of the first week following His resurrection?
In clear view of everyone, God could have made the definitively empirical statement that Jesus is the Messiah and divine Son of God, and to worship only Him as settled fact and not of faith.
But upon reflection, the Creator God of the entire universe has the capacity to make His true identity empirically known at any time during human history…in any number of clearly obvious and indisputable ways, repeatable on a daily basis if He wanted to.
Also in some of my other Christians books, I introduce the related concept in the Bible of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief. This is a very subtle, fine-tuned, and long-standing reality that could only come from the mind of God, having no other plausible source of origin coming out of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
There is no conceivable motivation for imaginative inspiration for the delicate balance between belief and unbelief to be invented within the storylines of human fictional mythology.
Yet the faith element of biblical Judaism and Christianity that produces the unique religious context for the development of a personal relationship with God, creates this dynamic of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, that has been set-up and fine-tuned to exist for over four thousand years.
This is a spiritual engineering feat that shouts-out for the most fundamental brilliance of the real living God who can differentiate between the high value of a personal relationship, contrasted with the lower counterfeit of a mere physically factual revelation. This feat of spiritual engineering leaves in-place our humanistic ability to push God away to the safe distance of being a detached, deistic god…of having no potential “interference” or impact upon the way we want to run our lives.
The humanism of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking would like to confine God to the category of an impersonal being that we acknowledge as existing through the hubris of our scientific investigation of matter and energy…and leave it there.
Relegated to being mere head-knowledge about a harmless God we can safely set-aside, this eliminates the risk of His performing the proper role and function as God, that He might insist upon radically altering the terms of our self-sovereign control over the course and direction of our lives.
But it would be the pinnacle of brilliant insight if the Creator God of the living and non-living natural world, in order to create the precise context within which to correctly introduce Himself to mankind, did this by initiating personal relationships.
In the Spirit…God introduces Himself to people through the biblical invention of God-composed journey of faith life-scripts (Gen. 12:1-3) made possible through redemptive salvation by grace through faith and not by “the works of the law” (Rom. 4:3, 16; Acts 15:11).
The God of the Bible is currently not physically present in a corporal body. He is not in a material form at a specific location on earth or in the universe. Hedoes not live at an address and does not have a zip code. God is therefore not findable by scientific materialists searching through the microscopic world of atoms, protons, and electrons all the way up to viewing through a telescope the vast expanse of the galactic cosmos.
This “negative” finding crosses over the ideological divide into fodder for atheistic unbelief…as the prime evidence that God is non-existent.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1)
“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” (Heb. 11:6)
Some professional scientists assert through their atheistic worldview that the universe is without ultimate purpose or meaning. The modern irony here is that their chosen career of science itself is saturated with purpose.
The mission-plan proposed by the philosopher Francis Bacon…a contemporary of Shakespeare…to simplify the scientific method by stripping away purpose from the study of matter and energy alone, is itself a mission-statement having a clearly delineated purpose.
In this new Age of Information, modern science has identified complex, highly specified, and coherently integrated systems of information everywhere we look in the living and non-living natural world. This has essentially overtaken and passed-up any reasonably believable explanation for the origin of these complex systems of information coming from a purely materialistic mechanism.
There is no such thing as “straight science” that is entirely divorced from the abstract and intangible nature of information.
The ground rules of scientific investigation are material, but they include the abstraction of immaterial information in order to produce meaning, in order to put meat on the bare bones of scientific discoveries and knowledge.
I am arguing here for the recognition of the immaterial transcendence of the mind…of abstract information…in the exercise of the analysis and judgment integral within scientific research.
The thing to comprehend here within the delicate balance between belief and unbelief is that when applied to the human scientific enterprise, the initial set-up of a research program, the collection of data, and the analysis and conclusions after the research is completed…is laced and infused with the abstract thinking of information. This is expressed through the communication mediums of words, drawings, photographs, and numerical equations.
These research programs are not confined exclusively to the discovery of raw data alone, but necessarily involve the scientifically undefinable essences of good faith, integrity, honesty, and trust guiding the accuracy of the research and the reporting of its findings.
This suite of additional moral and philosophical elements creates a much broader overall product than just the raw evidentiary facts alone.
From the perspective of the delicate balance between belief and unbelief, science is rife with faith and trust integral and inseparable from its initial logic in crafting a research program, making observations, and then inferring conclusions and theories from the data.
In this sense, information and evidence are inseparable in the scientific method.
Scientific materialists…atheists…want “evidence” for God…but information is evidence.
Scientific materialists want to insist on a faith-stopper by asserting that matter and energy are the only real means by which we can generate truth.
Phillip E. Johnson makes the salient point in his public talks[1] that once the paradigm of materialism is established as the working model for scientific investigation, then critics of macroevolution are admonished to stay within the confines of the study of matter and energy only, to “pony up” with fact-based evidence that pushes only the materialistic database of information forward.
This insistence upon naturalistic materialism only…disallows taking stock of the current evidence and then drawing contrary conclusions as to the truth or falsity of the evidence for macroevolution…on the merits of the evidence.
The method of falsification of hypotheses is historically scientific for everything other than the atheistic materialism of macroevolution.
Insisting upon naturalistic materialism as the working model for scientific investigation is pure philosophical subterfuge.
As has been said in several places in this book, Intelligent Design is a skeletal explanatory framework on equal standing with scientific materialism…both viewpoints crafting explanatory storylines connecting the exact same data points of information.
Atheists Insist that professional scientists who are Christians “pony up” with more arguments in favor of naturalistic materialism in order to do acceptable science. This exhibits a prejudicial bias that is in the worst sense unscientific.
For scientific materialists…it is: “Play by our rules of materialism or don’t play at all. If you theists want to question macroevolution…do it solely through the means of matter and energy, and leave aside logic, argumentation, and reasoning. Take our word on the authority of scientism that God does not exist until we tell you otherwise.”
Scientific materialists say: “In science, we study matter and energy…and that’s the end of it.”
But this is not true.
Science is infused with abstract and conceptually intangible information, of raw factual data and beginning theoretical assumptions and philosophically derived conclusions, all of which are open to evaluation and analysis by any number of perspectives and viewpoints.
The vast amount of complex, specified, and coherently integrated systems of information in the natural world…as a whole taken as evidence…can reach the conclusion that these systems of information point to the need for intelligent agency to explain their origin.
But this is an inference from the data that is clearly a non-materialistic conclusion.
“I AM THAT I AM” (Ex. 3:14; Isa. 43:11-15; Jn.8:58)
One brilliant argument coming from Christian apologists in this area of discovering the identity of God as being a separate issue from the evidence for His existence is that the four faces of American Presidents accurately and unmistakably depicted on Mount Rushmore are easily and immediately attributed to a sculptor rather than the erosion of wind and rain.[2]
Yet the question of who the sculptor is or was does not have any bearing upon the evidentiary impression of intelligent design in the creation of Mount Rushmore.
From the book Pondering Our Creation: Christian Essays on Science and Faith.
[1] Grand Metaphysical Story of Science–Phillip E. Johnson, April 21, 2012 by Izzy Invasion, on You Tube.
[2] 20161030 The Oldest Yahweh Inscription 2 Kings Joel Kramer, published on Oct. 30, 2016, by Lighthouse Church-Twin Falls on You Tube…at Joel Kramer Archaeologist.
The Cross in the Christian Life 