WiW: Creation Science

I’m taking a systematic theology class at my church, and we have a fair bit of reading each week. Like most of my (non-internet) reading, my systematic theology reading is generally done on the lam, in snatches here and there between activities or in the bath.

This habit of squeezing reading into every available moment does wonders for getting me through vast quantities of material in relatively short amounts of time–but it means that I rarely have opportunity to annotate like I would prefer to do.

But chapter 15 of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology forces me to annotate, even if it means dripping water on the pages or getting through less material per session due to digging around in my purse for a pen.

Chapter 15 is about creation–a topic I have decided interest in (and opinions about.)

Chapter 15 includes items like this:

Derek Kidner notes that Scripture stands “against every tendency to empty human history of meaning…in presenting the tremendous acts of creation as a mere curtain-raiser to the drama that slowly unfolds through the length of the Bible. The prologue is over in a page; there are a thousand to follow.”

By contrast, Kidner notes that the modern scientific account of the universe, true though it may be, “overwhelms us with statistics that reduce our apparent significance to a vanishing-point. Not the prologue, but the human story itself, is now the single page in a thousand, and the whole terrestrial volume is lost among uncatalogued millions.”

Scripture gives us the perspective on human significance that God intends us to have.

I appreciate Grudem’s (and Kidner’s) recognition of the emphasis God places on humanity in the creation of the world–but I respectfully submit that neither Grudem nor Kidner have adequate understanding of what creation says about the role of humanity.

Far from intimating that humanity is small and insignificant in light of the enormity of the cosmos, modern day physics and cosmology suggests exactly the opposite. The “anthropic principle”, first presented by Brandon Carter in 1973 and since attested to by abundant research, posits that the universe exists in precisely the way it would have to exist for humanity to exist.

As Patrick Glynn puts it in God: The Evidence (which I am currently reading):

“…the anthropic principle says that all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common–these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life.

In essence, the anthropic principle came down to the observation that all the myriad laws of physics were fine-tuned from the beginning of the universe for the creation of man–that the universe we inhabit appeared to be expressly designed for the emergence of human beings.”

Contrary to Kidner’s intimation of what modern science says about humanity in light of the universe, the anthropic principle says that the vastness of the universe (from the speed of the universe’s expansion to the constant governing gravity to the exact temperature of stars) exists so that humanity might exist.

Physics and astronomy, for all its looking at the inanimate universe, says an awful lot about the importance of humanity.

A quote from There is a God by Antony Flew (once the world’s most famous atheist, who became a theist prior to his death) further illustrates this point (I paraphrase the first bit, which takes over a page in the book, before quoting directly in the indented section below):

“Imagine entering a hotel room on your next vacation. The CD player is playing a track from your favorite recording. The print over the bed is identical to the one over the fireplace in your home. The room is scented with your favorite fragrance. The minibar is stocked with your favorite beverages and snacks. The book on the desk is the next volume by your favorite author. All the grooming products in the bathroom are the brands you prefer. The TV is tuned to your favorite station.

“…You would certainly be inclined to believe that someone knew you were coming.

That vacation scenario is a clumsy, limited parallel to the so-called fine-tuning argument…. “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture,” write physicist Freeman Dyson, “The more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”…

Let’s take the most basic laws of physics. It has been calculated that if the value of even one of the fundamental constants–the speed of light or the mass of an electron, for instance–had been to the slightest degree different, then no planet capable…of human life could have formed.”

In other words, the one who created the universe’s laws created them with humanity in mind.

Absolutely incredible.

I suggest a different hypothesis for why God had creation take one page of Scripture while the rest of the pages are occupied by the human story.

Perhaps God saw no need to repeat himself multiple times. Why would he need to explicate every aspect of the creation when he has designed the universe such that we can observe his acts of creation and see in them his activity?

While I greatly respect Grudem, I feel that he, like many others, has fallen into the error of thinking that the Bible and the physical universe are at odds with one another, when they are in fact in perfect agreement (since the God who cannot lie was the author of both).

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Don’t forget to take a look at Barbara H’s meme “The Week in Words”, where bloggers collect quotes they’ve read throughout the week.