Imagine your plane is coming in for a landing and the pilot comes on to announce, ‘ladies and gentlemen, please be assured that everything is going smoothly. I am letting God guide our plane. It’s in His hands now.” Most of us would rather know that the pilot was using his instruments to guide the plane to a safe landing. Even the devout among us would hope so.
We live increasingly in a more secular environment where we trust the things of the world to alleviate our problems and create our progress.
As we understand more and more about how the universe operates we have a tendency to place less of our confidence in the sovereign God who governs this universe and some folk come to doubt more and more that there is even a pilot at the wheel of this ship we call the universe.
But I believe that God is thrilled that we study his creation. That’s really what science is, you know, the study of God’s handiwork. We don’t need less of God. What we need is more gratitude to God and reliance upon God to show us the way into the future. We need not be afraid of science closing some gaps in belief. We need to be grateful that God has shown us how to progress and find answers that were once unknown.
But know this- God is the God of the downtrodden, the outcasts, the ‘sinners’, and the lost. So if our science helps us to help them then progress is of use to our Lord’s purpose but if science becomes our god to satisfy our own needs and neglect the most needful then God will surely judge us.
Science and faith go together. We can trust the latest technologies and guide our plane smoothly to the ground, and at the same time love the God who makes it all possible, the God whose intimacy in our lives can never be mechanized or secularized.