Faith is the essential means for knowledge of anything. Only through faith in the wisdom, power, holiness, goodness, and love of God do we ever truly understand things—that is, their purpose. Hope in the future is grounded in faith that history has a meaning that points to a righteous conclusion. True history corroborates faith in a Biblical creator as the impetus for the rise of the scientific method, since the founders of its chief disciplines, “Had faith in the possibility of science” (1).
All reductionist campaigns to discover a supposed set of elemental processes and laws of the universe have uncovered ever deeper levels of specified complexity. And with each such confirmation of intelligent design the best inference leads us to an Intelligent Designer upholding the universe. Now, as ever, it is most reasonable to accept what scripture reveals, “In him, all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
As C. S. Lewis concluded, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” (2).
Therefore according to Hebrews 11:3:
“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
Footnotes:
1. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925). Reprinted (New York: Mentor Books, 1948), p. 13.
2. C. S. Lewis, “They Asked For A Paper,” in Is Theology Poetry? (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1962), pp. 164-165.
3. All scripture quotations from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, 2001, by Crossway Bibles, Good News Publishers.