728b
Some of you already know what I’m talking about. For those who don’t, the title is a reference to the song “Our God, He is Alive”, which for whatever typographical reasons, was squeezed into the canonical Church-of-Christ song book with the number “728b”. It boldly proclaims the existence of God and trust we place in him:
There is, beyond the azure blue
A God, concealed from human sight
He tinted skies with heavenly hue,
and framed the world with his great might.
Chorus
There is a God,
He is alive.
In him we live,
and we survive.
From dust our God
created man.
He is our God,
the great I AM.
There was, a long long time ago,
a God whose voice the prophets heard.
He is the God that we should know,
Who speaks from his inspired word.
Secure, is life from mortal mind
God holds the germ within his hand
Though men may search, they cannot find
For God alone does understand.
I grew up singing the song quite a lot, and I’ve always kind of liked it. But as I sang it again on a recent Sunday, I heard the third verse with fresh ears, and realized that the theology it articulates is absolutely disastrous.
The basic assertion is that God is great because He understands how cells work, and humans don’t. In “science and religion” circles, this is known as a “god of the gaps”. That is, we’ve got quite a lot of understanding from science, but it has major holes. We don’t know brains function, or what causes consciousness, or how cells do half of the things they do. So those unknown regions are the domains in which God works.
The problem with this is that science has been incredibly successful at filling in gaps, and every time a gap gets filled, God gets squeezed out. Every time science gets a little bigger and better, God is made a little smaller. Science is therefore the enemy of God, working to destroy the mysterious realms in which He operates. This understanding of God and science has caused Christians to become skeptical and hostile toward scientists, and vice versa.
This is a particularly poignant conflict for myself and many of my Christian friends at Stanford. As PhD students, the explicit goal of our work is to fill in some of those holes in the human understanding of the world. I have friends who work in biology, who spend their days seeking to understand the biochemical processes that make our bodies alive. And while they complain that their work is slow and tedious, they are making progress. Life is not at all “secure from mortal mind” in the sense the song suggests.
Let’s take a step back and try again. Paul writes to the church in Colosse:
For by [Christ] all things were created: things in heaven and things on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or power or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Colossians 1:16
If God is the creator of the universe, who spoke the laws of physics and brought all that we observe into existence; if he is the one who continues to hold the universe together by the force of his will; if all truth, scientific or otherwise, reflects the glory of the one who cannot lie – then scientific discovery enhances God’s glory rather than diminishing it. God isn’t working only in the parts of the world we can’t explain with science; he’s also working in the parts we can explain.
I don’t have to be afraid of science making God smaller or pushing him out. Instead, I join a legion of devout scientists, too many to list, who throughout history have viewed their work not as a conflicting with their faith, nor as irrelevant to it, but as an actual means of worshiping and glorifying God.
So let’s rewrite that third verse. Any suggestions?
