Pastoral Letters

Men’s Wisdom Can Never Triumph over God’s Truth

April 18, 2021 Author:Elder Liu Kerh Li
The church started studying the book of Genesis last week for our Adult Sunday School. In the first lesson, pastor explained to the class about its author, Moses, and his objective in writing the book. Moses wrote the book of Genesis to persuade the Israelites at the time, after leaving Egypt and were heading towards the Promised Land, to obey God’s commandments. Then they will experience God’s wholesome blessings. Moses raised several points to persuade the Israelites into obeying God, One of them was to pen down how God created the heaven and the earth and mankind (Chapters 1 and 2). This was to help the Israelites understand that the God in whom they believe is the Lord of everything. When modern men read the two chapters of Genesis, they would unconsciously regard them as a textbook case for creationism. This was not what Moses had intended, although it does provide an important theory for the origin of the universal and its lifeform. The argument here sets a world view on creationism, and becomes an intersection of the Bible and science. Christians who believe in the Bible would be able to learn that God is the creator of all things in the universe through Genesis. Those who do not believe in the Bible would shrug it off as nothing but mere superstition and is unscientific. This is what most atheists think. They uses science to criticise the Bible. But what is “science”? Maybe we could help to clarify the word “science”. “Science” is a set of ways to find the truth. First, it is a good method, but only when it is applied within certain boundaries. It involves repeated observations of a phenomenon. With these observations we derive a model. We then test this model to see if it could explain all the past observations and predict the future with accuracy.

An example would be our weather forecast. Meteorologists would observe the changes in humidity, pressure, wind direction, cloud layer movements every time it rains. From the repeated observations, they derived a model. This model would be used to predict the likelihood the next time it rains. As the observation data and analyses increase, so does the accuracy of the prediction. This is an example of how “science” is useful.  But the beginning of the universe happened only once, and so does the beginning of all species. “Science” could not be utilised to prove the theory of evolution and creationism. Second, the model built by “science” is not the truth. It only a means to explain the truth. The same goes to the weather forecast model: a sudden downpour could happen despite the weather forecast of a sunny day. Meteorologists are constantly refining the weather forecast model to improve its accuracy in predicting the day’s weather. Therefore, scientific theories are not absolute. There would always be room for improvements and amendments. Strictly speaking, those who profess to believe in “science” cannot say that they know 100% the truth or they have the truth. They can only say they try to get nearer to the truth.

Growing up in an era where science is held in high regards, Christians could also fall into the trap of using science to criticise the Bible. Sometimes, we could be saying that certain events in the Bible are not compatible with science. We might even attempt to explain miracles using scientific phenomena.  We are not disagreeing with science. Rather, we need to remember that science has its limitations and are only human theories. When we look into the book of Genesis, we mentioned that the earth is probably about 6,000 years old, and not billions of years old as believed by some (not all) astronomists. It also appears to be younger than some fossils. How do we explain this observations? Is there an error in the Bible? Or did we misinterpret the Bible? Or are there errors in the dating method that scientists use? Because God is never wrong (“Let God be true” [Romans 3:4]), and we believe that the Bible is the word of God. (“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” [2 Timothy 3:16-17]). Therefore, God’s word has no room for error. We also ensure that we use the right principles to interpreting the Bible. This ensures that we did not misinterpret the Bible. Hence the problem of the discrepancy between the Bible and science must lie with the latter. Indeed, if we were to investigate further, we would discover that dating methods in the scientific world have their limitations, errors and could be based on unproven assumptions.

Men’s wisdom will never surpass God’s truth. The Lord give us humble hearts to learn God’s word. The truth from the Bible provides us a reliable guide. “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth (John 17:17).