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What is Science?

Updated: Dec 18, 2022

We have been discussing the Big Bang description of the beginning of the Universe in the last few posts. It implies that the Universe has a beginning, that makes it more likely to have been created. The Big Bang description gives some support to the kind of creation that the Bible describes, which is that the creation is out of nothingness. Furthermore, if the Universe was created through the Big Bang description, then its creator is probably personal. The Creator cannot be just a set of impersonal physical principles.


But wait! Are we going to build up our faith in God by looking at Science?


I think Science can help us understand the Creator to some extent, but certainly not all of it. An important question that we need to understand first and foremost is:


What is Science?


To me, Science is a sincere act of human beings to study how nature works. It is always a work in progress. As such, Science never claims to be a collection of “truth”.


Scientists try their very best to understand nature. They formulate what they find in the language of Mathematics. When the physical principles that they propose work in all their experiments, they tell the world that these are the physical principles that “work so far”! Would they claim that those physical principles are the truth? Absolutely not, because Science is always a work in progress. It is never finished! Who knows if someone will carry out an ingenious experiment tomorrow that breaks the physical principles we find today? Will scientists be upset if that really happen? Not at all! They will be totally excited and overjoy!


Let’s step back and ask why people are able to discover physical principles in the Universe. I think there are two reasons, and both of them are closely tied to the Creator. Firstly, there actually are physical principles that govern nature. Everything happens in the Universe in accordance with these principles. The Creator of the Universe is a rational being, and as a consequent, He set up the physical principles for the Universe to follow. Secondly, we as human beings are created as rational beings in likeness of the Creator. I think it is a great gift from the Creator that we can exercise our rational thinking to understand nature as well as to live our daily life in the most reasonable way.


When I think about the Creator, I try my best to think in the most rational terms, and that includes using the data that I heard about in science. I love science, but I know there is no magic in science. It is just part of my reasoning. There are lots of genius who help building up scientific knowledge, but at the same time we should understand that science never claims itself to be the “truth”.



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