The Strand Study Bible
II PETER
2109
Written From Babylon (Rome)
I want to quote from a book that I don’t recommend. It is by a brilliant physicist, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner. It is called The God Particle . And although the title sounds very appealing, the good information is all in the first paragraph. The rest of it is just a case for the building of the SSC, the Super Conducting-Super Collider, which we now know is not going to be built. Therefore the book is a bit of a Rip Van-Winkle sort of experience! But the first paragraph is wonderful; it’s a great summary of what I have said so far: “In the very beginning, there was a void, a curious form of vacuum, a nothingness containing no space, no time, nomatter, no light, no sound. Yet the laws of nature were in place and this curious vacuumheld potential. Astory logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe andunfortunately there are no data for the very beginnings—none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billion of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the big bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up—we are in the realmof philosophy. OnlyGod knows what happened at the very beginning.” That is all that Lederman has to say about God—in the first paragraph—and that’s the end of it. The thing that has made Hawking’s book ( A Brief History of Time - 1984) so popular is that he is talking about God from beginning to end. 8
Dr. John Polkinghorne, a particle physicist and professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University for twenty-five years, quit his post in 1979 to become an Anglican priest (talk about mixing science with faith). In his book, One World, The Interaction of Science and Theology , Polkinghorne discusses the wonder of creation, as paraphrased by Ravi Zacharias:
When you reflect on creation and reflect on this world it is so fascinating, so intricate, and so marvelous and so tightly knit in its design. If you were to go into the early days of the formation of the universe the expansion and contraction rates have to be so precise, the margin of error must be so small, it would be the equivalent of taking aim on a square inch target at the other end of the universe twenty billion light years away and hitting it head on-bulls eye! 9
Michael Polanyi, one of the 20th century’s great scientific philosophers, who disturbed the ivied halls of academia in 1958 by declaring: “The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the frescoes of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origin of the universe than the representation of the world as a chance collocation of atoms.” 10 Now unlike most of the self-serving dogmatic intellectuals that make up our academia today, Stephen Hawking ( Lk 11:51 ), arguably the most famous living physicist in history (although admittedly agnostic), at least concedes to the remote possibility of there being a Supreme Being. He noted in A Brief History of Time : The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started –it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. 11 Great men of science are humble men because they best know the frailties and limitations of finite men. It is the small man, the second-rate scholar and scientist, who struts in arrogant conceit, who parades his learning to impress the uninitiated, who is intolerant and dogmatic in his pronouncements. These are well characterized by Quintilian, a Roman teacher of oratory at the time of Paul, who says: ‘The less ability man has, the more he tries to swell himself out as those of short stature exalt themselves on tiptoes, and the weak use most threats. 12 A great number of our problems are theoretical. They come from places where people spin theories absolutely remote from human life. But if we go out into the world and tell a man of the Lord Jesus Christ, and get that man to ask, “What must I do to be saved?” we shall very soon get verification of the Word of God; and when we have that, we shall not need much, if any, further testimony to its inspiration. 13
Alfred M. Rehwinkel in The Flood notes:
NOTE – W.H. Griffith Thomas in How We Got Our Bible notes:
THE ADAGE IS TRUE: Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you can think ( Eccl 1:13 ) 1 Jacobsen, Henry. The War We Can’t Lose , USA, Victor Books, 1972. Print. 2 Johnson, Phillip E. Defeating Darwinism , Downers Grove, IL, InterVarsity Press. 1997. Print. 3 Smith, George H. Atheism: The Case Against God , NY, NY, Prometheus Books. 1979. Print. 4 Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion . NY, NY, Houghton Mifflin Co. 2006. Print. 5 Taylor, Daniel. Letters to My Children , Saint Paul, MN, Bog Walk Press, 2005. Print. 6 D’Souza, Dinesh. What’s So Great About Christianity , Washington, DC, Regnery, 2007. Print.
7 Smith, William M. Bible History of World Government . Westfield, IN: Union Bible Seminary, Inc. 1940-1955. Print. 8 Schaefer III, Dr. Henry F. “ Stephen Hawking , The Big Bang, and God .” leaderu. 1994.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker