The Necessity of Science
The pursuit of science originated generally in the Christian West mainly by men who believed in the God of the Bible during the enlightenment and reformation periods. The approach to science developed as these men studied the creation as a means “to think God’s thoughts after Him.” It was a religious pursuit as much as it was a quest for knowledge. They felt the more they could learn about the creation and how it works the more they could learn about God and have a deeper relationship with Him. They understood the law of logic of cause and effect, that simply stated is, “every effect must have a cause.” They understood that the creation is an effect and God is the Cause. Thomas Aquinas referred to Him as the Necessity.
In this day in time science has become the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Much of the scientific pursuit of knowledge is done based on the assumption that there is no God and the universe is all there is. Science, for many, has become, in a sense, their religion. Man, in their minds, has achieved the highest level of intelligence as the superior being and science is one of those things that has made it possible for man to rise higher and higher as the ultimate expression of the evolutionary process. Man has arisen to the level of the supreme being.
These people who will not allow God to get a foot in the door of their scientific pursuits have a huge problem. Science requires a necessity. Something their atheistic worldview has no way of providing. Their understanding of how the universe began with some kind of chaotic explosion that had no purpose but through random chance, happenstance, improbable events, over billions of years is how we are now here. What that tells us is their worldview has no philosophical basis to pursue scientific investigation. Why? Because science, to be trusted in what it discovers through the scientific method, requires laws of nature to be unchanging and predictable. Chaos and random chance do not provide a reason to believe what science has taught us can be depended on to always be true. If the cause of the universe is a random explosion then chaos is all there should be with no guiding forces to make its existence possible.
The creation worldview provides the necessary unchanging Cause of the creation that makes science possible. That is why He in Genesis 1:28 could command Adam and Eve to, “…to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” What was He saying there? Learn how it works and bring it under your control. He could give this challenge because He knew He had created in such a way that as man learned the unchanging laws of nature he would be able to bring it under his control. Atheist, in denying the existence of God while doing their science, do so while rejecting the very reason why they can do science in the first place, God the Necessity. Just believe God’s word.