Thought for the day

When it is said that God is the ground of nature’s existence and order, God is not being used to fill a gap in a scientific explanation that concerns the connections between members of the universe. Rather to speak of God as the ground of nature’s existence and order is to address questions concerning the existence of the universe itself and why it has the particular set of members and connections it has. Because these questions are about the universe as a whole, they are beyond the limits of scientific explanations.

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Christianity does not claim that the order of the universe is such that we ought to infer that nature is designed. However great or little its complexity, nature’s order is intended by God. Since Darwin’s theory of natural selection more or less explained how very complex forms of life arise from much simpler forms, we have not been inclined to move toward the idea of design, however great the complexity is. But scientific procedures and assumptions which do not regard nature’s order as intended, do not contradict the Christian claim that the order of the universe is intended by God. It is the Lordship of God over nature, not nature’s complexity, which is the basis of the claim. God as the source of nature’s order gives us no specific information about the relation between its members.

Diogenes Allen

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