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O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane [and] vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace [be] with thee. Amen. - I Timothy 6:20-21

The Greek word for “falsely so called” in I Timothy 6:20 is pseudōnymos.

Or to put it another way, the claim “oppositions of science” is false.

Or to put it another way, faith and reason are complimentary – but reason cannot substitute for faith.

Or to put it another way, the physical Creation is a revelation of God the Father – the least of His revelations, by the way. But we will be held accountable for noticing it!

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. – Psalms 19:1-3

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: - Romans 1:20

God the Father has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ His only begotten Son, through the indwelling Holy Spirit, through His own words in Scripture and through Creation, both spiritual and physical.

Truly, from the ancient Greeks thinkers forward, the original context of science was philosophy. And especially with the philosopher Plato, that quest was to understand the “beyond” – or what we might call the mind of God.

Science wasn’t wrestled away into an independent discipline until much later. And only recently does man attempt to elevate the knowledge gained by the scientific method as more valuable, more certain, than anything else – most offensive to Christians, elevating it above the more important direct revelations of God the Father as outlined above.

It is as if some would reverse the order of God the Father’s revelations to physical Creation above all else. And should the person allow for any other insights, he might perhaps, just maybe, consider the other revelations.

That of course turns the order of wisdom on its head – context is lost – most importantly, the great hierarchy of being: God, Man, World (nature, the universe), Society.

It leads to strange ideologies such as equal rights for animals, infanticide which flows from that belief and more – such as a loss of personal culpability since the mind can only be an epiphenomenon of the physical brain – and epiphenomenons cannot cause anything to happen. There are many other such “received doctrines” which follow the worldview that “all that there is” is “matter in all its motions.”

But when one surveys the achievements of modern science in the classical meaning of “science” – then he knows that the assertion “opposition of science” is false per se. A Christian should never let science “get him down.”

Timothy explores that point using a variety of examples – and our next book, God and the Observer Problem will take it even further.

A few examples:

One cannot say something is random in the system when he doesn’t know what the system “is.” A series of numbers pulled from the extension of pi may appear to be random when they are actually highly determined. We do not know – and indeed, can never know, the full extent of dimensionality whether spatial or temporal.

Order cannot arise spontaneously in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system whether self-organizing complexity, cellular automata, etc. At the very minimum those guides include space, time, physical laws and constants.

All cosmologies – every one, whether big bang/inflationary, cyclic, ekpyrotic, multi-world, multi-verse, hesitating, etc. – rely on space/time for physical causation. That there was a beginning of real time is the most theological statement ever to come out of science. In the absence of space, things cannot exist. In the absence of time, events cannot occur. The only possible uncaused cause of space/time and therefore, physical causation – is God.

The metaphysical naturalists ‘bet the farm’ on matter which has not yet been created or observed by Fermilab and CERN despite several attempts. CERN will be trying again to find the illusive Higgs field/boson – so we’ll see. But even if they succeed, the Higgs only addresses ordinary matter which constitutes 5% of the critical density of the universe. The others are 25% dark matter (space/time indents such as the center of galaxies) and 70% dark energy (effectively space/time outdents such as the area between galaxies.) New theories suggest that particles in our four dimensions (3 space, 1 time) are massless and instead shadow momentum components of extra dimensional activity and/or are multiply imaged from as little as a single particle in a fifth time-like dimension.

We touched on the observer problem as another example but will explore it in depth in our next offering. In Timothy we used the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant to illustrate the point.

Man is a denizen of space/time – he is always part of his own observations and has a tendency to project himself onto whatever he observes. In the extreme, biologist Lanza suggests that physical Creation itself is the product of observation.

Notwithstanding Lanza’s speculations, only God is timeless and spaceless per se. Only He sees “all that there is” altogether all at once. Only He speaks Truth.

And so why should a person ever be intimidated by the declarations of anyone whose entire concept of “all that there is” is a reduction, a product of the imagination?

This is especially true with Christians.

We believe that Jesus Christ is God enfleshed, born of a virgin, died on a cross for our sins, resurrected and sits at the right hand of God the Father in heaven and will come again. We believe that while He was enfleshed, He walked on water, raised the dead, healed the sick and so on. We believe everything that was made was made by Him and for Him.

We believe all of this – why should we ever be troubled by the Lewontins and Dawkins who declare that miracles cannot happen, the soul/spirit is an illusion, that God does not exist?

Indeed, as I Timothy 6:20-21 suggests, we should dismiss the “oppositions of science” as false per se - because we know, each and every one of us personally, at least some part of the mind of Christ:

Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, [even] the hidden [wisdom], which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.

But God hath revealed [them] unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned.

But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. II Cor 2:6-16

Marantha, Jesus!