Science, Creation & Evolutionsomething to think aboutI borrowed this post from another board. It is something to think about If we table the debate on whether Genesis is literal or allegorical, and look at the big bang theory strictly from the standpoint of the search for truth, we can see the immediate shortcomings. In the search for truth, the study of how things work, how they came to be what they are, can be useful. However, they tend to become the end for which one studies rather than the means to an end, as they ought to be. Science can theorize on the beginning of things by describing a Big Bang. The pushing back of speculation into black holes and multiple universes only makes the timetable longer.
The problem is that these studies do not, and cannot, claim to answer far more important questions: Why is there anything at all instead of nothing? What is the purpose (if there is any) of it all? These are questions which are the proper domain of the seeker of spiritual truth.
What can the man who seeks ultimate truth determine though his own kind of investigation?
If we consider the universe, we find that everything within it bears this mark: that it exists but that it need not have existed. Nothing within the universe is the explanation of its own existence. Its existence is contingent on something else. A valley exists because runoff from melting snow went that way. That mark can be seen upon everything in the universe. Each thing possesses existence, and can pass on existence, but did not originate its existence.
Now, it is imposssible to conceive of a universe in which nothing exists except receivers of existence. If nothing exists other than receivers of existence, how does anything exist at all? We are driven to see that everything in our experience, all the contingent beings, could not exist at all unless there is also a being which differs from them by possessing existence in its own right. It does not have to receive existence; it simply has existence. It is not contingent: it simply is. That being is God.
The question remains, as it does for any contingent being: why does He exist, what accounts for His existence? The reason for His existence, since it is not in anything else, must be in Himself. There is something in His nature that commands existence. God's nature is to exist. God is existence.
Thus we have arrived at the name that God revealed to Moses: I AM. The Existent One.
Philosophy, assured of correctness by the inerrant witness of Divine Revelation, asks the important questions. The problem with science is that it thinks that its questions are the ultimate questions. They are good questions, but they need to be kept in their proper place. That is all.
Justin
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