Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Psalm 19:1-3 | Date: January 30, 2022 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Our Father, we thank you again for your word and the wonderful revelation of yourself in it. We ask that you will help us this morning to see more clearly and to appreciate more fully your self-revelation in the created order as well. We pray that you’ll guide us through your word in that and give us a greater sense of the glory of God in creation. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

All right, I’d like to start this morning with Psalm 19, a familiar psalm. We have just begun the brief part of the series now dealing with creation and evolution and various surrounding kinds of issues. We’re not dealing with evolution specifically yet. Last time we gave a broad overview of the Bible on creation, Genesis 1 and 2, as they are used and understood and interpreted in the rest of scripture. Today I’d like to take just a broad subject, and here I come close to stepping out of my field, but I think we have enough in the Bible to speak to it, and that is the subject of creation and the scientific endeavor. I am not a scientist, but I think the Bible speaks to this question clearly enough that we can say some things that are important as we try to focus more narrowly, finally, on the question of evolution in a couple of weeks.

Creation and the Scientific Endeavor

Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the ends of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them, and there is nothing hidden from its heat.”

All right, you’re familiar with this song. These opening verses speak of what we call general revelation, where God speaks, but he speaks by means of the created order. In verse one, “Heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” Remember in the Psalms, the basic working of poetry in Hebrew is parallelism. It’s not rhyme, it’s not rhythm, it’s parallelism. You have usually two lines that are in parallel with one another. The first line: “the heavens declare the glory of God.” Second line: “the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” So it’s generally a synonymous parallel. Generally, line two says the same as line one, but there is a difference. Line two specifies more clearly: the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims it is his work that he has done.

So he’s simply, David here—it’s a Davidic psalm—he’s simply reasoning backwards from the created order and saying the created order, if you look at it, tells you God made it. In fact, it tells you not only that God made it, it proclaims the glory of God, and it proclaims it is his handiwork. So there’s nothing that does not bear the stamp of createdness. Everything that is, is created, and therefore, it tells us, made by God.

There’s a famous line from Herman Bavinck, a 19th-century Reformed theologian. He says, according to the Bible, the entire universe is a creation, and therefore a revelation of God. Well, that’s basically what David is saying here. Creation does not just testify that God is, so that you have a general awareness that God is, but what he’s saying here is that the creation proclaims the glory of God. Now glory—excuse me—glory is not quite an attribute of God. Glory is more like the sum total of God’s attributes; put all of his perfections together and speak of him, and that is his glory. Something like that is the idea of the word glory. And his point here is that the created order shouts of the greatness of its maker. The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky proclaims his handiwork. Someone made this. It has all the marks of createdness, and therefore in turn it declares the greatness of the one who made it.

So that’s what, verse one, that’s what creation says. It screams the glory of God. Verse two now, when does this message come to us? “Day to day it pours out speech, night to night it reveals knowledge,” so it’s constant. There’s this constant declaration of God’s greatness in the created order. So verse one, the created order proclaims the greatness of its maker. Verse two, it does it all the time. It does it constantly: day, day, day, night, night, day, night, day, night, all the time. It’s proclaiming the greatness of the one who made it.

Verse three, what language does it speak? “There’s no speech. Nor are there words. His voice is not heard.” So the language is the language of nature itself. It’s kind of like a universal language, but it’s wordless. It’s not a spoken language at all. It’s a nonverbal language, but yet there it is proclaiming the greatness of God.

Verses four to six, who hears it? If verse three says it’s not really a verbal language, the next question is who hears it? Verse four: “their voice goes out through all the earth, their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom leaving its chamber, like a strong man, runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens, its circuit to the end of them, and there’s nothing hidden from its heat.” So the sun shines everywhere, everyone feels its heat, and that’s the proclamation of God’s glory in the created order. It goes everywhere and everyone feels it and everyone senses it.

Every man and woman created hears this, what is being proclaimed in the created order, understands it; there’s something in us that responds to it, there’s something in us that recognizes intuitively that all of this screams “created.” And it tells us then something of the greatness of the one who made it. So the point here in these verses is that God’s self-revelation in a created order is wordless, but it is understandable, it’s perpetual, and it’s universal. Everyone hears it, everyone understands it. There’s no voice, but everyone hears it. There are no words, but everyone understands it.

General Revelation

That’s verses one to six. Now, we call this—theologians like to grab these big concepts and give them a name—we call this general revelation. It’s not special revelation in the sense that God speaks to an individual or he speaks in words. We’ll talk some about that later, maybe. But it’s general revelation: God making himself known universally to all people, perpetually, but yet non-verbally, in a general way, speaking a wordless language through the created order.

Now for David here, verses one to six, that’s a point of marvel. And David is reflecting on the creation—that we have this uncreated order, this one universal language, relentlessly testifying of the greatness of God. Now, the atheists can deny it. The evolutionists might attempt to explain it away. But David is saying, there it is, just the same. Always proclaiming the greatness of God. Always proclaiming the greatness of God. There it is, perpetually, relentlessly proclaiming the greatness of God.

Yes? “Do you think that that is partly an explanation for why all civilizations throughout all of history—”

Absolutely, it’s part of it. And actually, there have been some fascinating studies that have been done to try to boil down and discern exactly what is it that all of the religions of the world have in common. And there are some fascinating results of a study like that. There’s always a recognition of the greatness of the “beyond” and the greatness of the deity who made it. And even the recognition of an afterlife and justice and things like that crop up in it. But yeah, there’s this—and there’s more to God’s general revelation than just what you see with the eye. Part of God’s general revelation is the image of God in us, and so there’s this intuitive awareness of it, which enables us to read the created order on the outside as well.

So yeah, this is general revelation, and I think it’s a good name for it. Some theologians like to come up with better ideas and things to talk about, but that, I think, is a good handle for it. And I think because David says this here—that it’s relentless, it’s perpetual, everyone sees it, you can’t escape it—I think that’s part of what informs his statement in Psalm 55, I think it is, also in Psalm 14: “the fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” There are many reasons a man would be foolish to deny God. One is his eternal destiny is at stake. He’s God’s creature whether he acknowledges it or not. But part of what makes a man a fool to deny the existence of God is that he’s denying the obvious. He’s having to suppress something that he sees and understands. He’s turning against his own mind, his own heart, and his own realizations. And that’s what David’s point here is. We have this relentless testimony of God in the created order.

There’s a famous story that comes from the French Revolution, which I think is fascinating. It shows a wonderful understanding of some Christian man during that time. We don’t know his name. But they were atheistic soldiers who had gathered together a bunch of peasant Christians and the soldiers tell them, “We will pull down your steeples and all of your churches, and you will have no more reminders of your old superstitions.” And some humble peasant had the sense to say, “You may do that, but you can’t pull down the stars.” And it reflects exactly what David is saying here. You can’t erase God. You can’t erase his self-witness. It’s perpetual, it’s universal. You might try to stifle it in your own heart, but you have to, because there it is, perpetually giving witness to God.

Well, then, the creative order, in all of its design—whether you look at it with a telescope or a microscope—the created order, with all of its design, screams “created.” Someone had to make this. If you were to walk along the road, oh, let’s say outside of a junkyard after a tornado, and come across a wristwatch and pick it up, you would not conclude that, “Oh, isn’t that wonderful? A tornado put together a watch.” You just don’t do that. You see the intricacies of it, you see the design, and intuitively, instantly recognize someone made this. As David is saying here, the greatness, the grandeur, the intricacies, all that is involved in the created order with its balance, with its glories and grandeur and bigness, and all of its systems interworking with one another—all of it perpetually telling us somebody made this. And what a great somebody it must be.

Romans 1 picks this up, of course, in a famous way. The glory of the maker is evident in the created order, and so that wicked men, in order to escape it, have to suppress it. But again, Paul’s point there, Romans 1, is the same as here in Psalm 19: that the greatness of the created order, the majesty of it, as well as the intricacies of the organisms and the design of it all, proclaims that there had to be someone who made this and what a great maker he is. So even within the human psyche itself, there’s this awareness of God that intuitively recognizes it in the created order. And we’ve come across this idea before that, made in the image of God, it’s inescapable that we have, on the one hand, a sense of God. You remember the big words, the Latin sensus divinitatis. There’s an awareness of God. There’s also that semen religionis, the seed of religion. So it’s not only recognized that God is, but there’s this inward, intuitive sense that we’re responsible to him. We’re responsible to worship. We’re responsible to obey. There’s this intuitively, and it’s augmented then from the created order.

The Scientific Endeavor

So creation itself is a divine revelation. Again, in all of its grandeur, its majesty, its design, its intricacies, its ordering, its systems, in all that involves the created order, it is showing God’s fingerprints, as it were, on it: a maker. This is designed. Someone made this. And what does it say of the maker to have such a great product? So creation is divine revelation. Now I do all of that to bring it down to our subject. All of that, in turn, defines what is the scientific endeavor.

The scientific endeavor is just, if we put it in simplest terms, is just an uncovering and a discovering of what God made. Or we could put it this way: the scientific endeavor is simply a discovering and explaining of what God said when he said, “Let there be.” And when he said, “Let it be this way,” and “Let it be this way.” The scientific endeavor is simply trying to uncover that, to discover it, to explain it, and to see how it works. And this is exactly what explains the Christian origins of science. It was originally Christians who had their minds set on uncovering the greatness of God in the created order which speaks of him and lets them learn what it says about God.

What that says at the outset then, so far as the Christian is concerned with regard to science—you often hear that terminology like the conflict between God and science, or faith and science. I’m going to have to clarify some of those terms in a second, but what we ought to see first of all is that the Bible and science, or faith and science, or theology and science are not enemies. They’re friends. God has spoken in the created order. He does so with certain clarity. He does so with authority. And a Christian ought to be at the forefront of trying to understand what it is God has said in his creation.

So again, and I want you to see this, that when you read through Genesis 1, and God said, “Let there be light.” And God said, “Let it be this way.” And God said, “Let this be.” And then God says, “Let it be this way.” And then God says, “Let there be this.” And he says, “Let that be this way.” That is the foundations of the scientific endeavor: to understand what it is God made. God has ordered his universe for his purpose in history, and he made it accordingly.

So, for example, if you want to look at it, it’s a verse you know very well, Genesis 1:14: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years.'” Let me read it one more time. “God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years.'” So here we have God creating the world, but he’s creating it with a purpose and he creates it to function in such a way that it will serve his purpose.

Now scientists have, particularly Christians in the work of science, have tried to spell this out in detail. And it’s fascinating to see how they do that. And in fact, in a few weeks, we’ll see some videos where some professional scientists will do that. But just briefly, things like the sun is at the precise distance from the earth so as not to annihilate life and allows to sustain life. The moon is at the exact distance from the earth so as to allow the tides to roll back and forth and not overrun the earth. The earth is exactly at the right tilt in order to allow for the seasons so that they don’t become so extreme, and the seasons themselves are not so extreme to annihilate life. The Earth’s atmosphere is just exactly right. A little less oxygen, we would not be able to breathe. A little bit more oxygen, plant life would burn up. It is fascinating to see how they will tell us if we had just this degree of more oxygen, life would be impossible.

In all of this, we see God creating the universe for his purposes and for it to function accordingly. And we see that in verses like Genesis 1:14: “God said, ‘Let there be lights in the heavens and let them be for seasons and for days and for nights, let them function this way.'” And so you have at the very beginning the establishing of the created order so that it functions according to God’s plan. We call these, in Genesis 1:14, “let there be lights in the heavens, let them separate the day from the night, let them be for signs and for seasons, for days and for years”—we call these the regularities of nature.

Now to the biblical writer, when we see these regularities of nature—day, night, day, night, day, night, seasons, seasons come and go, all at predictable intervals: day, night, years, seasons; water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit (that may vary at other elevations and things, but there are mathematical explanations for that, scientific analysis for that as well)—all of these regularities, these patterns that you see in nature, to the biblical writers, these are patterns that God spoke into being when he said, “Let there be” and “Let it be this way” and “Let it be that way.” This is the created order established by God.

Now, to the scientists, these are—we call them laws. Laws of planetary motion, laws of gravity, and so on. We have these laws that we look at. And to observe those laws, to discover them, to explain them, to reduce them to mathematical equations, to explore those laws is simply to discover and to articulate what it is God said when he said, “Let it be this way and let it be that way.” This was, in fact, a marvel to Albert Einstein, who claimed to be an atheist, but he marveled at this point: that the created order could be discovered in this way of reducing it all to mathematical formulas and seeing the laws—what we call laws of nature—to see behind it some brilliant mind, he said, or some brilliant spirit that put all this in place. How do we explain that? And that’s David’s marvel in Psalm 19 that we said.

And so, in fact, the entire scientific endeavor depends on the observable uniformity of nature. We have these patterns. We have these regularities. Without them, there would be no science. There would be no scientific endeavor. It would all be random. But because there are these regularities and these patterns, scientists then have something to investigate. There’s a design. There’s an order. There’s a regular pattern. There’s orderliness to it. There’s a structure. There are systems and designs in place. Sun comes up every morning, predictable times. The seasons come at every season at predictable times. There’s the constancy of gravity. There’s the freezing point and the boiling point. And there are all of these patterns and regularities in a created order. And we see them all then in these what we call “laws.”

In the constancy of it, the consistency of it, there’s a well-orderedness of it. And in the scientific endeavor, what scientists are doing then is—this is what’s called scientific induction—just pull it all together, observe it all, and see what it is then that God has said when he put it into being. In fact, we’ll see in a minute that calling them “laws” implies a lawgiver who defined this law, who issued this law. And what we want to say with David is that it simply is a reflection of the will and the mind of the creator.

Now, without those regularities, without those patterns, dependable patterns, regularities in nature, there is no science. There is no scientific endeavor. There’s nothing to study. It would all be random. And this again is the origins of modern science. Now, as I say, this is not my field. I think the Bible speaks to this plainly enough to say what we’ve said. The best book that I can recommend on this broad subject of it is by Vern Poythress down at Westminster. He’s one of the most widely learned, most deeply learned men that I know—doctorates in theology and mathematics and things like that. And he has maintained through his teaching New Testament at Westminster, maintained his involvement and interest in scientific studies and things like that all along through the years. And one of his books, a fascinating book, is called Redeeming Science.

And in chapter one of his book, he explores how scientific laws reflect God. And he begins with some, I think, some interesting observations, but then he narrows it to something, I think, even more forceful. And his point here is that though many scientists may claim that they are atheists, the whole scientific endeavor, Vern pushes, the whole scientific endeavor presupposes the theism that atheistic scientists will deny. And so the atheistic scientists can claim there is no God, and Vern wants to push back at them and say that you cannot account for science, you cannot account for the scientific endeavor, apart from those theistic presuppositions. You can do science, you can do it, but you can’t account for that science apart from the theism that you’re denying.

And so he starts in with some things. Everywhere, these laws of nature are everywhere present. They are constant, always. So they are omnipresent, and they are immutable. These laws are immaterial and invisible. You don’t see them, but you see their effects. What does that sound like? These laws are truthful, absolutely truthful, and infallibly, they are laws. Their law of gravity is true whether you believe it or not. Jump out a building, you’ll find out the law of gravity is true. You’ll find out also that God exists. These laws are powerful. The whole universe conforms to them. They’re never violated. They can’t be. They’re omnipotent. These laws are both transcendent—beyond, transcendent—and immanent—in. So these laws are both transcendent and immanent. They transcend the world by exercising power over it, conforming everything to it, but they’re also immanent in the world in that they touch and hold their dominion even in the smallest particles of all of creation.

And here’s where I think it gets more forceful. These laws of science are personal. These laws of science are personal. Law implies lawgiver, “law of nature.” Laws of nature appear to be personal as well. And what he means by that is that these laws are rational. Well, that’s the sine qua non of the scientific law. They’re rational. It’s something you can understand. You can reduce it to mathematical equations and formulas and so on. There’s a rationality to the laws. How do you account for that? Rocks are not rational. Trees are not rational. Not even the animals are rational in that sense. Rationality of the laws—that’s an attribute of personhood.

These laws can be articulated. They can be expressed. They can be communicated. They can be understood. And he says, not just are these rational thoughts, but they’re capable of symbolic communication. There are the mathematical formulas. The original law, we don’t know that it was written. It evidently was not. We’ve not heard it spoken when God said, “Let there be” and “let it be this way.” We didn’t hear that. But for it to be a law, it must be expressible in language. And in fact, these laws of science, these laws of nature are. They’re translatable to human language. We can describe them. We can represent their restrictions. We can give their qualifications. We can give definition. And all of that—that’s not the activity of rocks or trees or animals. It reflects personhood, rationality.

All of that, and Vern pushes this in just wonderful ways, all of that just screams “creator.” All the laws of this ordered creation are simply God speaking. God telling us what he said when he put it in order in the first place. And that’s what ultimately what David has in mind in Psalm 19: “the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky shows it’s his handiwork.” So in other words, the whole scientific endeavor is simply a pursuit of thinking God’s thoughts after him. I think it’s a good way to put it. The scientific endeavor is in a pursuit of thinking God’s thoughts after him. Vern Poythress, P-O-Y-T-H-R-E-S-S. Here’s another book that I gave Isaac a year or two ago called Redeeming Mathematics. Fascinating study, too. Beyond me, but fascinating.

Yes? “So you want to explain this, right? So one of the other things that in the industry I work in, and then even like home gardening, if you think about it with seeds, right, when you’re growing stuff, you can take scientific laws but there’s a point where they just can’t explain why that seed turns into a tree, right? Yeah. Or why in an environment where you’re going to make like a vaccine or something like that, why that biological grows, right? So it’s really neat sometimes I find to see all that they understand and then they get to this point where they can’t explain it and you look in history and okay, there’s stuff that you know in history we just didn’t know yet we couldn’t explain, like whether things revolve around the earth or vice versa. But it’s almost like it’s getting down to a granulation where it’s like: Nope, this is just.”

Yeah. This is what we’re left to say. Either we don’t know or it’s a reflection of the designer. He made it that way. And that’s what we want to say—is that we have an explanation for that. Yeah, Frank.

“I know that many times the Christian heart sometimes feels hopeless when it comes to what we’re seeing around us in the world. But if you go back into Genesis, it’s riddled with accounts of hatred towards God. And I think what you have to see is that they didn’t have all that science and information back then. The people today who still hate God have now a larger tool bag of information to go at you and say, ‘Now here are all these reasons why there is no God.’ And if you have, for example, in education, a teacher that is a really good presenter or somebody that can be very persuasive, it’s easy to move the mind of a novice in believing their hatred. Now, on the flip side, it’s also a little easier for us with the science to convince that there is a God. But ultimately, you can look at Hitler who convinced an entire culture that the Jews were not full men. They’re only three-quarter human and convinced them to kill Jews. So, if you have somebody that persuasive, you can create a hatred of God, which we’ve seen throughout life, throughout the history of man. But ultimately, God saves man. So our strength is in that God will choose to elect you to be part of his kingdom, and we gently need to go about that by witnessing without being harsh, but using our knowledge base to help guide them in that. So we have to battle that hatred. It’s been like that ever since the beginning of time.”

And the atheists have the advantage in one sense, and that is, it is the natural heart of every man to suppress the truth and to—we’re alienated from God naturally until there’s that enlightenment that you’re talking about. But still there’s—and this is where I want to go next—the Christian apologist wants to press all of this, and that’s really where I’ve been going with all of this, and he wants to say, there is no accounting for the scientific endeavor apart from what we’ve been looking at here this morning. This is God at work. This is a reflection of his mind and his design. And there’s no accounting for what you do as a scientist apart from it. Now you can do your work as a scientist, but you cannot account for it apart from these presuppositions.

Some of you are familiar with, I think, with the famous debate between Greg Bahnsen and, I think it was, Robert Stein from the University of California, Berkeley, I think, something like that. Greg Bahnsen was actually a friend of Greg’s, right? Pastor Greg. Greg Bahnsen was one of the leaders in the thinking of what we call Van Tillian presuppositionalism—that you can’t account for your work apart from theistic presuppositions. And the debate is famous because Bahnsen was just ruthless with his atheistic professor, just ruthless with him, and wouldn’t let him go. And it was pretty clear, I think, to all who had the upper hand in the debate. He’s expecting to deal with evidences and things like that, and Bahnsen just went to the root of the matter: “So you can’t account for keeping your checkbook apart from the presuppositions that I hold. You’re borrowing from me every time you do it. And every time you involve yourself in your scientific work, you’re borrowing from my presuppositions to do it. You can do the science, but you can’t account for it on naturalistic grounds.”

So contemporary scientists can deny God, and they can deny that He exists, but they can’t explain how they do their work. Where do these laws come from? Yeah, Pastor Gordon.

“Greg, Dr. Bahnsen said to the opponent, he says—he started out by saying, ‘The fact that you showed up here on time to debate me means I won the debate.'”

Oh, he was ruthless. It’s a fascinating debate. It’s available here and there. It was just a fascinating debate. But yeah, they want to push this—that you can’t explain the work that you do from it. So how do you explain these laws? How do you explain the rationality of these laws that you work with? How do you explain the laws of reason, the laws of logic that are so fundamental to your work in investigating these laws and in explaining them? How do you explain where this logic comes from? How do you discover it? How do you account for the work that you do as a scientist? And ultimately, the answer has to come back to it as a reflection of the mind of God in making what he made. Pastor Boyd.

“When we talk to the unbeliever, he finally gets to the place where he says, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He’s pushed it as far as he wants to. I think we need to say to him, ‘That’s not true.'”

That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, I think that’s an implication of Romans 1, verse 18: they suppress the truth. And there are degrees of the ability to suppress it, but that’s what you have to do. You have to suppress it. Because there it is, relentlessly testifying of the God who made it.

There’s an interesting expression that atheistic scientists and evolutionists have used in the last generation or so—it has come up. They speak of the “God of the gaps.” And they’re talking about Christians now, who looking at the world around them want to throw God in where they can’t explain it. Can’t explain what happened? That must be God. Can’t explain what happened? That must be God who does it. “Now we’ve come along,” they will say, “and we’ve explained this, and so you don’t need God there. And we’ve explained that, and you don’t need God there. We’ve explained origins now with evolution, so you don’t need God there.” But all you’re doing is throwing in God where you need him, as they call him pejoratively, the “God of the gaps.”

Some of you may have heard of John Lennox. He’s an Oxford professor, a Christian man, a former atheist who has become a believer. And he addresses that—well, he addresses it in several of the books that he’s written—but one is he addresses that and he says, the problem with this God of the gaps is that it’s not the part that we don’t understand where we need God. That’s not the problem. The problem is the parts that we do understand point us to God. That’s the problem. He said the context—and that’s the, again, he points this out—that’s the context of the origins of modern science. And he writes this: “Of course I reject atheism because I believe Christianity to be true. But I also reject it because I’m a scientist. How could I be impressed with a worldview that undermines the very rationality we need to do science?”

This was a problem that Darwin himself had. If all of what is can be explained in terms of chemical and biological function, then how do I rely on my mind? Is that just so much functioning of gray matter? And if that’s all it is, how can I depend on it? And that was something that troubled Darwin himself.

Two Volumes of Divine Revelation

Now, to push this a little bit further—and I think we’ll deal with this more in the morning message as well; it coincides with it somewhat. In Psalm 19 here, you have two volumes of divine revelation. Verses 1 to 6, you have God speaking in general revelation in the created order. We don’t have time to go through it, but in verses 7 and following, you have God speaking in special revelation in his word, and he speaks of the value of that. And what we should note as Christians in all of this discussion is that in both of those volumes, in General Revelation and in Special Revelation, God speaks. And in both of those volumes, God speaks infallibly. Truthfully. In general revelation and in special revelation, just as truthful, just as authoritative, all of truth is God’s truth. There’s a consistency of general revelation and special revelation. It coheres together. We expect that because it comes from the same God. Where general revelation speaks clearly, we’re happy to follow that, and we should follow David and praise God in it as a matter of praise. Science and faith are not opposed.

But two things here, and this is very important. Number one, science and general revelation are not the same thing. Now, you knew that. But these two are conflated too often, and we need to keep the distinction in mind. Science and general revelation are not the same thing. Or I can put it this way: science and scientists are not the same thing. No scientist is omniscient. No scientist is infallible. Scientists are always searching. Their findings are always tentative. You remember we saw this a couple of years ago when I interviewed a scientist and a philosopher in our series a couple of years ago who talked about the electron. “We are sure, we are sure we understand now the nature of the electron. It’s called the quantum theory.” Before that, there was the Bohr theory. Before that, there was the Thompson theory. And before that, there was another theory. And all of that within five or six massive paradigm changes in our understanding of the electron, all within the last 75 years or so. Findings of science are always changing, they’re tentative, looking for better ways to understand, and so we treat science with respect, we’re thankful for it—we’ll talk about that more in the morning message—but we’re always aware of human fallibility.

That brings to the next point, and that is that where science and the Bible conflict, where scientists and their findings conflict with the Bible, one interpretation of the data, or the other, is wrong. Either the scientist is interpreting the data of general revelation incorrectly, or the biblical interpreter, the theologian, is interpreting the biblical data wrongly. We’ve seen that happen in history. Calvin believed that the world was flat. It was a scandal that Galileo would say otherwise. We had to readjust that. It’s possible that either side has been demonstrated in history. Either side can be mistaken in interpreting the data. That’s the problem. It’s not that the Bible and science are in conflict. The problem is that interpreters are fallible.

And that brings me to my second observation. These two volumes, General Revelation and Special Revelation, do not speak with equal clarity. Both are infallible. Both are truthful. They do not speak with equal clarity. Special revelation is called “special revelation” for a reason. It’s more clear. And so what we say then is that the Bible is the final authority. Where the Bible speaks clearly, we can be confident. The Bible is infallible. We are not. Our interpretations can be wrong. We need to be humble in that. At the end of the day, we have to see that the Bible speaks more clearly than any scientist interpreting general revelation.

One more thing then quickly, and this is, I think, a good end at Spurgeon on Psalm 19: “In his earliest days, the psalmist, while keeping his father’s flock, had devoted himself to the study of God’s two great books, Nature and Scripture. And he had so thoroughly entered into the spirit of these two only volumes in his library that he was able, with a devout criticism, to compare and contrast them, magnifying the excellency of the author as seen in both. How foolish and wicked are those who, instead of accepting the two sacred tomes and delighting to behold the same divine hand in each, spend all their wits in endeavoring to find discrepancies and contradictions. We may rest assured that the ‘true vestiges of creation,’ quote-unquote, will never contradict Genesis, nor will a correct cosmos be found at variance with the narrative of Moses. He is wisest who reads both the world book and the word book as two volumes of the same work and feels concerning them, ‘My father wrote them both.'”

All right, I think we’re out of time. We have to go. There’s no time for questions. You’re dismissed.