When talking with people who have dismissed faith, as we know it in Christ, I find that they have boxed themselves into a world that is very small. When tragedy occurs: death, sickness, or grief, they have nowhere to go except into despair. Life in a materialistic box is a dark and confining existence. I shared with such a person John Bunyan’s description in his classic work, Pilgrim’s Progress, of falling into the hands of Giant Despair, who confines Pilgrim and his friend Hopeful into the dungeon of Doubting Castle. He admitted that it described his condition accurately.

Science does not have to be in conflict with reasonable faith. Faith goes beyond what science can prove. Even the scientist has a theory which has to be tested before it can be accepted as fact. Science acts on faith when it tests hypotheses. The spirit of exploration and experimentation is akin to the exercise of faith. Failure to consider new knowledge would be obscurantist, the unwillingness to be open to innovation and discovery. The world is a much bigger reality than we can comprehend. There is so much we do not know. It would be wise for us to be humble in the light of our ignorance. No one can prove what happened at the beginning of the world. None of us was there to take minutes. Therefore we should be open to the mystery of the origins of life. That mystery may well include its cause, the Author of all things.

Bede Griffith, once wrote, “Scientific materialism in the modern world is the precise counterpart of pagan idolatry in the ancient world; it is the substitution of appearance for reality. For science as such is only concerned for phenomena, that is, with things as they appear to the senses: its function is to account for the appearance of things. But of the reality which underlies the appearance, of the real nature of things, science can give us no knowledge at all. We only begin to awake to reality when we realize that the material world, the world of space and time, as it appears to our senses, is nothing but a sign and a symbol of a mystery which transcends it.”

Dr Donald Mackay of Keele University called this way of thinking, “nothing buttery”! It is a form of reductionism, reducing the world, or our understanding of it, to the categories of our understanding. Such small mindedness reduces men and women, who are made just a “little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned with glory and honor” (Psalm to biological specimens who live in a little box and know nothing of the rest of creation. The Scriptures will have none of this. For “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what was seen was not made out of what was visible.” (Hebrews 11:1,2)