Logos: God’s Two Books — Study Resources

“All things bright and beau­ti­ful, the Lord God made them all!” 

Nature is like a book to be read. And along with most people across West­ern his­tory, I sus­pect this book was authored by God, just like the Bible. God’s two books, Scrip­ture and Nature, hand in hand.

But times have changed. 

As Galileo said, “God’s first book is about how to get to heaven, not how the heav­ens go”. From the 16^th cen­tury on, Sci­ence became the tool of choice to under­stand God’s second book of nature. How do plan­ets orbit? Why do nerves twitch? What makes the sun hot? How do rep­tiles repro­duce? Got ques­tions? Go to sci­ence.

This isn’t about “evol­u­tion” versus “creation”. 

For most theo­lo­gians, the jury is out. Per­haps God super­vised some form of “evol­u­tion” to bring the world about. The deep­est issue is not pro­cess, but prin­cipal cause. As I study the book of nature, does it point to an imper­sonal cause, or a per­sonal designer? Can all that is be explained by purely nat­ural mechanism?

…a big bang, plan­ets coales­cing, con­tin­ents drift­ing, life gen­er­at­ing, and com­plex­ity increas­ing as we jour­ney from microbe to man. Or does the book of nature point toward the kind of Designer described in Gen­esis? Can a mod­ern, sci­entific per­son really believe that “God forms us”, without being “ignor­ant, stu­pid, insane or wicked”?

How do God’s two books relate? Can Sci­ence and Scrip­ture integrate?